New Whistleblower: Facebook Exempted Breitbart from Censure

[Kid Berwyn]

A new whistleblower reportedly claimed Facebook exempted right-wing outlet Breitbart from certain rules because it didn't want to 'start a fight with Steve Bannon'

Katie Canales
Business Insider, Fri, October 22, 2021

* Facebook "whitelisted" Breitbart to avoid angering Republicans, a new whistleblower told The Washington Post.

* When an employee questioned the move, an exec reportedly said "do you want to start a fight with Steve Bannon?"

* Facebook has long been ensnared in a political war over how it moderates users and content.

Another whistleblower has come forward with claims against Facebook, according to The Washington Post.

The anonymous former employee told the outlet that Facebook's Public Policy team - helmed by the company's now-vice president of global public policy, Joel Kaplan - defended "whitelisting" the right-wing news outlet Breitbart, run at the time by former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon.

"Whitelisting" refers to exempting certain elite, high-profile figures online from rules that apply to ordinary users. When Facebook defended "whitelisting" Brietbart, an employee questioned the move, the whistleblower told The Post.

Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/whistleblower-reportedly-claimed-facebook-exempted-203602205.html



(For those new to the subject) Why’s this matter?

Facebook And Steve Bannon Hacked The Media. And They Won’t Stop.

Unless we build something better.

MONIKA BAUERLEIN
Mother Jones, OCTOBER 31, 2020

Let’s talk about Steve Bannon—I’d like to say “one last time” but who are we kidding? Regardless of the election outcome, we know that America’s political and media ecosystem has been inexorably changed by a racist novel-loving, dual collar-wearing media entrepreneur from Norfolk, Virginia. And if you thought the Bannon story was over after he got booted from the White House, or after he got pushed out of Breitbart News, or after his arrest by Postal Service agents this summer—you were wrong. Like a bad penny, Bannon keeps coming back, and in the closing weeks of this high-stakes election, he has been hauling out all of his old tricks to accomplish one simple goal: Sow chaos and confusion about Joe Biden, by any means necessary.

It was Bannon who shopped dubious material, supposedly off a Hunter Biden laptop, to the New York Post and other news outlets. It was people in Bannon’s circles who have been desperately trying to “pizzagate” Biden with baseless rumors. It is Bannon and Rudy Giuliani who, as my colleagues David Corn and Dan Friedman have comprehensively reported, keep pushing ever thinner and more loathsome allegations to every right-wing outlet site around. And while mainstream media are not being hoodwinked as much as they were in the past, it doesn’t matter as much anymore because it’s easier—and more profitable—than ever to pump propaganda directly into America’s political bloodstream.

What made Bannon so effective over the years is the reengineering of our news ecosystem by tech platforms, most notably Facebook. If Bannon helped make Trump, Facebook helped make Bannon. And even if Bannon were to end up behind bars, and Trump were to be booted out of the Oval, we’ll be living in the world they created for a long, long time.

Snip…

But we misunderstood what Zuckerberg meant when he said “news.” He wasn’t talking about journalism, or any verified account of facts. He was talking about content—any content, of any quality. And, given that Facebook was laser-focused on growth, and growth was fueled by sharing, and sharing was fueled by emotion, he was in particular talking about content that riled you up. Content that made you love, but also content that made you hate.

What many of us didn’t know—but Steve Bannon did—was that content that makes you hate is easy to produce, and very clickable and shareable. And so, Breitbart turned the volume up to 11. It launched a vertical literally called “Black Crime.” It gave bylines to extremists and white nationalists. It became, as Bannon would tell Mother Jones as Trump’s 2016 campaign roared ahead, “the platform for the alt-right.”

Continues…

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/facebook-bannon-trump/

And that’s how fascism got popularized.

[dalton99a]

1. Everything went according to plan

[Kid Berwyn]

2. The Secret Meeting Between Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Donald Trump

Author Max Chafkin reveals alleged details about the 2019 meeting of Thiel, Zuckerberg, Trump, and Kushner.

The Daily Beast
Updated Oct. 22, 2021 11:53AM ET

Peter Thiel scares a lot of people. He’s the tech billionaire who was able to shutter Gawker and he holds a lot of influence in Silicon Valley and politics, and the intersection of the two.

On the latest episode of The New Abnormal, author Max Chafkin, whose upcoming book The Contrarian is all about Thiel, tells Molly Jong-Fast that “if there’s a Trump political party or a Trump faction, Thiel wants to be the Koch brothers to that faction.”

That’s because Thiel allegedly got richer than he already was during the Trump presidency. And that leads us to the secret meeting that he attended with then-President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and Mark Zuckerberg in response to Zuck and Facebook coming under fire for manipulated ads whose targets included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as for supposedly suppressing conservative content—despite analytics proving otherwise.

The meeting is not news, but Chafkin shares some details that haven’t been in the news.

“Thiel told a friend, [and] according to the friend, Zuckerberg and Jared Kushner basically reached an accommodation…”

Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-secret-meeting-between-mark-zuckerberg-peter-thiel-donald-trump-and-jared-kushner?ref=scroll

Thank you, dalton999a! The billionaires don’t care if Dim Donnie Drumpf is an unstable NAZI moron. They get richer, which is all what matters to them.

[dalton99a]

3. +1. Not many people know that Thiel was Zuckerberg's first major investor

They share the same ethos of amoral opportunism and rapacious greed

[Kid Berwyn]

4. The billionaire censor for the GQP.

Plus the data the better to control us with.