Progressive Media Outlets—Including This One—Decry Facebook's Plan to Act as Gatekeeper of "Trustworthy" News

"Fake news is bad, Zuckerberg acting as the world's ultimate gatekeeper is bad, users deciding which news orgs are 'trustworthy' is bad, Facebook is bad."

Julia Conley, staff writer

Thursday, May 03, 2018

Common Dreams

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/05/03/progressive-media-outlets-including-one-decry-facebooks-plan-act-gatekeeper

Progressive and independent journalists are raising grave concerns this week about Facebook's plan to fashion itself as an arbiter of what news outlets should be deemed "trustworthy"—arguing that the social media giant's new proposal will punish non-corporate news sources and journalists offering left-leaning news analysis that it finds to be "polarizing."

Richard Kim, executive editor of The Nation magazine, was among those reacting critically to the social media giant's announcement on Monday:

So @facebook & Zuckerberg say they will rank news sites based on trustworthiness, with a goal to reduce "polarization" Depending on how it is implemented, could be disastrous for opinion journalism & the key role it plays in democracy. https://t.co/0tvB4m2CpW

— Richard Kim (@RichardKimNYC) May 2, 2018

In his keynote speech at Facebook's annual developer conference on Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the company has already begun surveying its two billion users about the news sources they recognize and rely on the most, to determine which media outlets are "broadly trusted." The results of the data-gathering will determine how widely news outlets are featured on user's news feeds.

"We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we're going to dial up the intensity of that over time," Zuckerberg told media executives after the speech. "We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground."

The CEO's meeting with the media included representatives from some of the largest news organizations in the country, including the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Atlantic Media, CNN, and News Corp., according to the Huffington Post.

It also follows months of criticism of Facebook after the alleged spread of misinformation on the platform during the 2016 presidential campaign.

"It's not useful if someone's just kind of repeating the same thing and attempting to polarize or drive people to the extremes," Zuckerberg explained to a crowd of developers regarding how the company has begun to decide which news sources are credible.

But while combating the spread of misinformation is a worthy cause, argued some critics, Zuckerberg—CEO of a powerful corporation and one of the world's wealthiest individuals—should not use survey results to support his role as a self-styled "gatekeeper" of trustworthy and untrustworthy news sources.

As Julianne Tveten wrote at In These Times last fall, Facebook began flagging so-called "fake news" after the election, along with other major tech companies like Google, which pledged in April 2017 to "surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content" in its search engine results, as Facebook is now doing with its news feed.

"These adjustments, however, haven't stifled propaganda. On the contrary, they may have stifled dissent," Tveten wrote, noting that left-leaning news sources have seen their readership plummet since the companies implemented those changes.

Common Dreams is one non-profit and progressive news outlet that has seen significant drops in traffic since Google and Facebook began changing algorithms and talking openly about their new attempts to control the kind of news content users see. According to internal data and Google Analytics, traffic to Common Dreams from Google searches fell by 34 percent after the powerful search giant unveiled its new search protocol in April 2017.

Monthly Visitors from Google, Compared to Historic Average, Before and After Google Search Protocol Change

"There's a lot we still don't understand about how we're being impacted by the kinds of changes these companies are making, but it's very unsettling to see this kind of power wielded by corporate interests who seem so detached from the mission of sites like ours and the role in general that progressive media and independent journalism play in this society," said Jon Queally, Common Dreams managing editor.

Other critics noted that while corporate outlets like MSNBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times will likely be proclaimed "broadly trusted" in Zuckerberg's data-collection endeavor, these "established" news sources have a rich and dubious history of misleading and damaging reporting.

Facebook's announcement comes as former Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and the Heritage Foundation are both working with the company to investigate whether it has harbored liberal biases and advise Facebook on "the best way to work with [conservative] groups moving forward," according to Axios.

While the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is also participating in an audit and working with Facebook to ensure that minority voices are represented on the platform, there was no indication that the impact on left-leaning independent media outlets was also being examined. 

As ThinkProgress reported on Wednesday, "Facebook's bias study, according to Facebook, will not include any liberals...Facebook did not answer questions from ThinkProgress about why liberals were excluded from the process or whether this incentivizes conservatives to continue to make false charges of bias."

The tech giant's decision to work hand-in-hand with right-wingers like Kyl, while failing to afford left-leaning sites a similar opportunity, exposes "how ill-equipped Facebook is to deal with modern conservatism," wrote Libby Watson at Splinter News.

After Gizmodo reported in 2016 on the suppression of conservative media outlets like Breitbart News in Facebook's "trending topics" feature, Watson wrote, the right latched on to the notion that the company was biased against right-wing reporting:

At Mark Zuckerberg's congressional testimony, Ted Cruz brought up the Gizmodo story and then proceeded to rattle off an insane laundry list of persecution fantasy grievances: They "shut down the Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page," blocked "two dozen Catholic pages," and, of course, banned [conservative video bloggers] Diamond and Silk. Imagine. The problem with this criticism is that there is a reason why Breitbart and Newsmax shouldn't feature in any "news" section: They’re not trustworthy or legitimate news sources...

Facebook is still, two years later, struggling to counter baseless and hysterical whining about censorship from the right, to the extent that it's now employing a conservative lobbyist to "investigate" claims of bias at the company.

"The conservative movement has done a remarkable job over the last half century to bellow and bully its way into having its most ridiculous and reality-divorced concerns taken seriously," Watson continued. "It lies about and distorts everything: about tax cuts, about Benghazi and [Hillary Clinton's] emails, about immigration, about healthcare, about Diamond and Silk. The further Facebook descends down the path of letting that screaming white face of faux outrage dictate how they run their platform, the harder it's going to be for them to get away from them."

Chile locked in dispute over who will draft new constitution

AP. November 13, 2019

SANTIAGO, Chile — Chilean politicians say they have to figure out how to draft a new constitution quickly following another night of violent protests in the South American nation.

Police said Wednesday they had documented 348 serious incidents, including looting and attacks on police stations, from Tuesday into the early morning.

Twenty people have died since mostly peaceful demonstrations about inequality and other issues broke out on Oct. 18. Chileans are demanding a range of reforms and an overhaul of their dictatorship-era constitution.

The sticking point is who drafts the new document. President Sebastián Piñera’s plan relies on current legislators but the opposition says citizens need more input. Members of the National Renewal Party, part of the ruling coalition, and the Christian Democratic Party agree “there isn’t much time” to reach an agreement.

How Chileans are reclaiming public areas, rebuilding amid unrest

Charis McGowan. Al Jazeera. November 13, 2019

Santiago, Chile - As the smell of tear gas lingered in the air, the remains of the previous night's barricades still blocking the roads, bookseller Daniel Gonzalez sat with dozens of other Chileans in Santiago's central park, Parque Forestal, on a recent Sunday afternoon.

"We are sharing opinions and ideas, as we don't want to go back to where we came from before," Gonzalez told Al Jazeera as he and his neighbours discussed a way forward in the country, which is experiencing its worst unrest in decades.

For three weeks, Chileans have taken to the streets, protesting against rising inequality and demanding the resignation of President Sebastian Pinera. More than 20 people have died in the unrest, including several killed by police or military officials. Looting, vandalism and arson have also caused billions of dollars of damage to businesses and crippled parts of the capital's public transport system.

Against this backdrop, however, small gatherings like the one in the Parque Forestal have popped up, with residents seeking to constructively build upon the unity seen on the streets.

Some of these meetings focus on set topics: From support groups on mental health and human rights, to lectures on political reforms. Gonzalez's group shared lunch and talked about general issues. They also planned workshops to analyse, understand and propose policies, to collect their ideas and submit them to local council members.

One of Gonzalez's neighbours, Pablo Venegas, said he believes that reclaiming public areas to create platforms of discussion is important.

"These spaces disappeared during the dictatorship," Venegas said, referring to the 17-year military dictatorship of Agusto Pinochet, which ended in 1990.

"Now, we have to take them back," he told Al Jazeera. "As a community, this is the time we need to come together and participate in these types of activities. This is an opportunity to rebuild."

The Parque Forestal group now has more than 100 members, who meet every Sunday. They also have a WhatsApp group used to alert each other of disturbances, and to announce plans to attend protests together.

While the Parque Forestal group deliberately formed to reflect and progress on the protests, other communities grew out of sheer necessity.

Patrols and carpools
Residents in the La Florida district of Santiago felt helpless as they watched the San Jose de Estrella metro burn for two consecutive nights last month.

The residents said the military, who had been deployed as part of a now-lifted state of emergency, failed to adequately respond to the fires.

"They weren't doing their job. We were left alone," said Alejandra Meza, a 48-year-old teacher who lives in the area.

Meza and her neighbours decided to take it upon themselves to guard the area.

They spent the first week of protests defying curfew and patrolling the streets at night to protect local shops from vandalism.

Having grown up during the Pinochet dictatorship, Meza said she was unsettled by the military presence and curfew obligation. She said she found security in the presence of her neighbours, who supported the protesters, despite the initial violence.

Even though the nightly patrols are no longer needed, Meza and her neighbours continue to meet.

"Without this movement, we wouldn't have achieved this," she said, adding that the neighbours never spoke to each other before the protests. "This is the best thing that's come out of it, we have become less individualistic and we are taking the time to care and look out for one another."

Meza said her community has already arranged a carpool to help those who are affected by the closure of the San Jose de Estrella metro station, which is not expected to reopen until next year.

Back in the city's centre, Gonzalez, the bookseller, walked a few blocks to set up his stall after the Parque Forestal meeting.

He crossed a busy junction with caution - all the traffic lights have been destroyed during the unrest. Broken glass and rubble from barricades have been swept into the curbs.

The street where he works is a central point for clashes between protesters and police, which has prevented him from working. He has only recently been able to set up his stall, but he must stay alert in case of further disturbances.

It has been a difficult time for Gonzalez, but he remains positive about the changes taking place.

"If the future generations do not have to live with the same problems that we have had, it will all be worth it," he said.

Xi Sees BRICS as Way to Boost China’s Presence in Latin America

EFE. November 12, 2019

BRASILIA – Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday before the start of the BRICS summit that he hopes the event will contribute to strengthening his country’s ties with Latin America and the Caribbean.

“We want to promote a relationship of mutual trust, a relationship for common development, together with all of Latin America and the Caribbean,” he said during a joint press conference with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, host of the gathering of the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS).

Brazil, Xi said, is the platform for the expansion of links between BRICS and the entire Latin American region.

Outcomes that benefit all parties are “always the objective” of Beijing’s international initiatives, he said, hailing the current “extraordinary” relations enjoyed by China and Brazil, which he described as “the principal emerging markets in today’s world.”

Bolsonaro pointed out that Xi’s attendance at the summit in Brasilia comes just weeks after his own visit to China, a nation with which his government “wants to expand and diversify relations.”

The far-right Brazilian leader, who took office in January, had seemed cool to the idea of BRICS during his campaign, insisting that Latin America’s largest economy should open itself to the world in a non-ideological, pragmatic way.

Brazil intends to treat China “with the due affection, respect and consideration,” Bolsonaro said, as both the Brazilian and Chinese people have “much to gain” from the bilateral relationship.

Xi and Bolsonaro oversaw the signing of accords on cooperation in the areas of services, investment, transportation and traditional medicine.

The two men were set to participate later Wednesday in the closing ceremony of a BRICS business conference, joined by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The formal meeting of the BRICS heads of government will take place Thursday. While the focus is expected to be on economic and trade issues, the leaders are also likely to discuss global political events.

China to Announce Billion-Dollar Investment in Brazilian Port of Sao Luis: Sources

Reuters. November 13, 2019

BRASILIA — China will make a billion-dollar investment in the Brazilian port of Sao Luis via China Communications Construction Company, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said on Wednesday.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the sources said the announcement will be made at the summit of leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the so-called BRICS group of emerging nations, who are meeting in the Brazilian capital for a two-day summit.

The deal will be part of the largest foreign direct investment into Brazil this year, one of the sources said, without revealing any figures.

Economy Minister Paulo Guedes said on Wednesday that Brazil is seeking closer integration with China, its largest trading partner, involving not only trade but also investments.

"We had a giant trade agenda, but not so much investment flows. (Now) investment flows are increasing too," one of the sources said.

A third source said the deal will be a "greenfield" operation, with the Chinese investment aimed at expanding the port and operations. It will not involve the purchase of a local company, but may involve equity stakes changing hands, the source said, also on condition of anonymity.

The cornerstone of the port of Sao Luis was laid in March last year. At the time, China's state-run news agency Xinhua reported that CCCC led the project with a 51% equity stake in the venture, alongside Brazil's WPR, construction group WTorre, and investment firm Lyon Capital.

Located in the northern state of Maranhao, the port of Sao Luis serves the central, northern and northeastern areas of Brazil, and is connected by the Norte-Sul/Carajas railway. According to one source, CCCC's investment will include spending on the railway.

Girl, 5, Is 6th Child Killed by Stray Bullet in Rio de Janeiro This Year

Ernesto Londoño and Lis Moriconi. New York Times. November 13, 2019

RIO DE JANEIRO — A 5-year-old girl who died Wednesday morning in Rio de Janeiro was the sixth child in the city slain this year after being struck by a stray bullet.

Ketellen Umbelino de Oliveira Gomes was walking to school with her mother on Tuesday when she was shot in the leg in the Realengo district of western Rio de Janeiro, according to police officials and witnesses.

Investigators believe she was caught in the crossfire of one of the gun battles waged routinely in the city by drug trafficking gangs vying for control of neighborhoods.

As her mother rushed her to a nearby clinic, Ketellen reportedly tried to comfort her.

“Even as she lay on the floor, she said: ‘Mom, don’t cry, don’t, Mom,’” a relative, Daise da Costa, told reporters.

The killing comes as police in Rio de Janeiro have intensified operations against drug gangs in the city, a crackdown that has left hundreds of people dead and scrambled turf wars among heavily armed gangs.

Since the beginning of the year, at least 21 children have been struck by stray bullets in Rio de Janeiro, according to Fogo Cruzado, or Crossfire, an organization that monitors violence in the city. Eleven of them were hit during police operations.

Ketellen is the youngest of the six fatal victims. The other five children killed this year ranged in age from 8 to 12.

Rio de Janeiro’s governor, Wilson Witzel, said he asked the police to carry out a “rigorous investigation of this crime and the others.”

Mr. Witzel, a former federal judge who has presidential aspirations and an acrimonious relationship with President Jair Bolsonaro, blamed the federal government for the bloodshed.

“Impeding the entry of drugs and weapons to the country is the responsibility of the federal government,” he said in a statement on Twitter. “The failure to combat, at the federal level, the trafficking of drugs and weapons, ends up fueling this insane war playing out in the states.”

Investigators believe the target of the shooting was another minor, Davi Gabriel Martins do Nascimento, 17, who was standing nearby. He was also fatally shot. Witnesses told police that two men walked out of a car around noon on Tuesday, took aim at the teenager and opened fire.

Ketellen underwent surgery overnight. She died Wednesday after losing too much blood.

Her father, Augusto de Oliveira, an unemployed painter, told reporters on Wednesday that the family was devastated.

“The feeling we’re left with is to go grab the jerk that did this and do the same thing to him,” he told reporters. “My daughter was only 5-years-old.”

Bloomberg and his fellow oligarchs lay down the law: Not a penny more in taxes

14 November 2019

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/14/pers-n14.html

Many of the billionaires who own America and consider it their fiefdom have rallied behind one of their own, Michael Bloomberg, who last week announced a potential run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Bloomberg, the three-time former mayor of New York and founder of Bloomberg News, is himself worth an estimated $53 billion, placing him ninth on the list of wealthiest Americans. He let it be known that he was taking steps to enter the race pending a final decision to run, reversing his announcement last March that he would not run because he believed former Vice President Joe Biden had a lock on the nomination.

The immediate developments that triggered his announcement were the rise in the polls of Elizabeth Warren at the expense of Biden, the right-winger favored by the Democratic Party establishment and Wall Street among the current field of candidates. Polls show Warren leading in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, while Biden has dropped into fourth place behind Buttigieg and Sanders.

The second event was Warren’s announcement November 1 of a six percent tax on wealth holdings above $1 billion as part of her “Medicare for All” plan. That tax is on top of a previous proposal to tax holdings above $50 million at two percent.

Neither of these taxes would be passed by either of the two big business parties, and Warren knows it. The same is true for Bernie Sanders and his similar plan to finance “Medicare for All” in part by increasing taxes on the rich. The two candidates are engaging in populist demagogy in order to divert growing working-class resistance and anti-capitalist sentiment behind the Democratic Party, where it can be dissipated and suppressed.

But the modern-day lords and ladies who inhabit the world of the super-rich are indignant over any possibility of having to give up a part of their fortune to pay for things such as health care, education, housing and a livable environment. And they are petrified at the prospect of popular anger against the staggering levels of social inequality erupting into revolutionary upheavals.

They do not fear Warren, a self-described “capitalist to my bones,” or Sanders, a long-standing Democratic Party operative, so much as the possibility of reform proposals encouraging social opposition. They want to block their candidacies so as to exclude the issue of social inequality from the 2020 election.

The levels of wealth wasted on this parasitic elite are almost beyond comprehension. Here is how economist Branko Milanovic put it in his 2016 book Global Inequality:

It is very difficult to comprehend what a number such as one billion really means. A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience of practically everybody on earth that the very quantity it implies is not easily understood—other than that it is a very large amount indeed... Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1 billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700 years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to blow your inheritance in the second case.

And yet, there are 607 people in the United States with a net worth of over a billion dollars.

Bloomberg, a liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion, gun control and the environment, is a vicious enemy of the working class. As New York mayor from 2002 to 2014, he attacked city workers, laid off thousands of teachers, cut social programs and presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class to Wall Street in the history of the city. He expanded the hated “stop and frisk” policy that encouraged police to brutalize working class youth.

Last January he denounced Warren’s proposal to tax wealth above $50 million as “probably unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s anti-socialist propaganda, he warned that seriously pursuing the plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity” and pointed to Venezuela as an example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”

Over the past several months, at least 16 billionaires have gone on record opposing proposals for a wealth tax. This chorus has grown more shrill since the release of Warren’s Medicare plan.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, declaring that “freedom and free enterprise are interchangeable,” complained on CNBC last week that Warren “vilifies successful people.”

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose personal fortune of $108 billion places him second in the US behind Jeff Bezos (whose Washington Post has run a string of editorials denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal and other proposed reforms), said last week, “I do think if you tax too much you do risk the capital formation, innovation, the US as the desirable place to do innovative companies.”

Billionaire Mark Cuban tweeted that Warren was “selling shiny objects to divert attention from reality” and accused her of “misleading” voters on the cost of her program.

Hedge fund owner Leon Cooperman, worth a “mere” $3.2 billion, appeared on CNBC and said, “I don’t need Elizabeth Warren or the government giving away my money. [Warren] and Bernie Sanders are presenting a lot of ideas to the public that are morally and socially bankrupt.” A few days later he announced his support for Bloomberg’s potential candidacy.

The New York Times, the voice of the Democratic Party establishment, has run a number of op-ed pieces denouncing Warren’s wealth tax proposal, including one by Wall Street financier Steven Rattner, who headed up Obama’s 2009 bailout of GM and Chrysler until he was forced off of the Auto Task Force because of corruption charges laid by the Securities and Exchange Commission. While he was on the panel, he imposed a 50 percent across-the-board cut on the pay of newly hired GM and Chrysler workers.

But for fawning toward the oligarchs, viciousness toward the working class and yearning for an authoritarian savior from social unrest, it is hard to beat this week’s column by the Times’ Thomas Friedman, headlined “Why I Like Mike.”

Calling for “celebrating and growing entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship,” he writes: “I want a Democratic candidate who is ready to promote all these goals, not one who tries to rile up the base by demonizing our most successful entrepreneurs… Increasingly the Democratic left sound hostile to that whole constituency of job-creators. They sound like an anti-business party… The Democrats also need a candidate who can project strength. When people are stressed and frightened, they want a strong leader.”

This is under conditions of record stock prices on Wall Street and ever rising levels of social inequality. A recent study by economist Gabriel Zucman showed that the richest 400 Americans now own more of the country’s wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution. The oligarchs’ share has tripled since the 1980s.

In their new book, The Triumph of Injustice, Zucman and Saez show that in 2018, for the first time in US history, the wealthiest households paid a lower tax rate—in federal, state and local taxes—than every other income group. Since 1980, the overall tax rate on the wealthy in America has been cut in half, dropping from 47 percent to 23 percent today.

The United States is not a democracy in any true sense. It is an oligarchic society, economically and politically dominated by a slim but fabulously wealthy elite.

The ferocious response of the oligarchs to the half-hearted proposals of Sanders and Warren to cut into their fortunes underscores the bankruptcy of their talk of enacting serious reforms within the framework of capitalism. The same goes for the pseudo-left organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America and Socialist Alternative that have jumped with both feet onto the Sanders bandwagon, and will no doubt shift over to Warren should she win the nomination.

There is no way to address the urgent problems of health care, education, housing, the environment and war without directly attacking the stranglehold over society exercised by the corporate-financial aristocracy. Their wealth must be expropriated and put toward the satisfaction of the social needs of the working class, the vast majority of the population.

The corporations and banks must be taken out of private hands and turned into publicly owned utilities under the democratic control of the working class, so that the production and distribution of goods can be rationally and humanely organized to meet human needs, not private profit.

This is a revolutionary task. The key to its achievement lies in the growing upsurge of class struggle in the US and internationally. This movement will expand, but it needs a conscious political leadership. Those who see the need for socialism should join the Socialist Equality Party and build that leadership.

Barry Grey