Tag Archives: Diane Feinstein

Only Its Investors Can “Reform” Facebook

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Who doesn’t love a good coincidence? Alfred Hitchcock used to say that you’re entitled to one coincidence per movie. After that you’re just being stupid. Well, Facebook just had its coincidence and would be wise not to try selling us another.

Barely 12 hours after a whistlebower goes on “60 Minutes” to pretty much reaffirm, with internal documents, what most of us have long known, the whole friggin’ Facebook system collapses, due, Facebook tells us, to some of its own boffins in its server cave flipping the wrong switch.

Riiiiight. (For the record, I do not think that story will hold up.)

Facebook hacked cartoon, Facebook unsecured personal data, privacy breached, Cambridge Analytica, social media cartoon, editorial cartoon by John Pritchett

After The Orange God King, Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz and maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene I don’t know if any public figure has less credibility right now than Mark Zuckerberg or any other top Facebook executive. Who believes anything he says?

Most likely Zuckerberg will be “invited” to appear again before some Congressional committee and explain how his (publicly-traded) company, which he dominates like few other CEOs, continued to let his Instagram platform provoke young girls into eating disorders and suicide while having research in hand to prove it was doing exactly that.

Given the tech sophistication of some of our most powerful elected officials — I’m thinking your Chuck Grassleys, Tommy Tubervilles, Diane Feinsteins and the like — I would not expecting a robust cross examination, no matter how good their staff preparation might be. And beyond a lack of functional understanding of algorithms and confusion in the face of slick Silicon Valley-speak, there’s the fact that in a fundamentally bought-off Congress, where Senate reelection campaigns are now pushing $60-$100 million, Facebook throws too much money around for anyone, Republican or Democrat, to push too hard for any “reform” that diminishes its revenue.

Bruce Plante Cartoon: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook | Columnists | tulsaworld.com

We long ago passed the point where Facebook could make a credible argument that it isn’t a publisher, like The New York Times, The Washington Post or the East Boogertown Sentinel, and therefore can’t be sued for spreading flagrant lies. Lies, you know, like how horse dewormer is a better bet for beating a pandemic than a vaccine that’s protected over 180 million without a single death attributed to an adverse reaction.

So I don’t see Capitol Hill, where Facebook served as a willing messaging vehicle for insurrectionist rioters, doing much if anything to truly reduce the now clear and definitive harm unregulated social media is doing to a gullible, unsophisticated world.

What might move the needle a bit isn’t any outrage over a system that provokes depression and suicide in young girls, and convinces none-too-bright average Joes to get off their barstools and attack the Capitol. What might … might … matter a lot more is if Facebook’s stock takes a slide and it’s investors decide that that is a bridge too far (i.e. farther than inducing suicide in children) and sues Zuckerberg/Facebook for insidious damage to their portfolios.

The head-spinning rationale that, like gun manufacturers, Facebook can’t be sued for the damage its products do, has never made sense. The “We’re not a publisher” dodge was never credible given Facebook’s obvious reach and impact on over nearly three billion users. (The Times and Post would kill for three billion sets of eyeballs every day.)

But in this moment Republicans won’t touch Facebook because the rampant fear-mongering, hysteria and misinformation it injects into the so-called conservative base, is a toxic accelerant for fanaticism as it tries to retain minority rule in the United States. (Waaay right-wing posts have been the most-trafficked sludge on Facebook for years.) Meanwhile, Democrats, who make regular hem-of-the-garment kissing pilgrimages to Silicon Valley for campaign cash are so convinced they’re going to lose it all — again — next fall they’re not about to make more than a few tut-tutting noises, wring their hands, clutch their pearls and hope someone else quickly replaces Zuckerberg as Sinister Robo-Nerd #1.

Should Mark Zuckerberg keep control of Facebook? | Financial Times

It’s unlikely I’ll be here when the clock turns over to Jan. 1, 2200. But my bet is that the Dawn and Reign of the Social Media Algorithm that we’re living through right now will be regarded as the single most deleterious influence on this era.

There Are People Who Know What The Russians Have Been Up To With Trump

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3I’m not so sure “no one knows” what’s going on with Trump and the Russians.

You hear something like that four or five times an hour as pundit-reporters compete to be the most flabbergasted by the latest tweet and revelation from TrumpWorld. But, if there is any credibility to Steve Bannon’s “deep state” paranoia, it strikes me as very-to-highly likely that within the gargantuan US intelligence apparatus there are people, and my guess is they would be senior career professionals, who have a real good idea of the games Trump has been playing with Russians, or to be more precise, games Russians have been playing with Trump.

Over just the past two weeks three separate pieces of reporting have etched a portrait of the Trump reality in clearer detail. None of them can be described as “sound bites.” You’ll need an hour to digest them all. Two have appeared in consecutive issues of the New Yorker and one is a series of posts by Josh Marshall for his site, Talking Points Memo.

“Trump, Putin and the New Cold War” by New Yorker editor David Remnick and two colleagues is a fascinating overview of the populist forces that first Putin and now Trump have very cynically exploited (and in Putin’s case sustained) to grab power. “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal” by the same magazine’s Adam Davidson uses a bizarre development deal in Baku, Azberbaijan to lay out a money-laundering operation involving comically corrupt Azerbaijani officials, Trump and … Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Over at Talking Points Memo, Marshall’s series, zeroing in on Trump’s long-standing, very close association with a strange fringe mob/wannabe spy character named Felix Sater and Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen. Begin, if you’re interested, with, “The Innocent Explanation, Part 1.”

To compress a very broad narrative to its essence, you have this: In the late ’90s and early ’00s Trump was effectively bankrupt and no American bank would do business with him. What he found were Russian oligarchs, newly and fabulously wealthy from mob-style “privatization” in the post-Soviet economy. That crowd needed ways to launder money, and a lot of it. They bought into Trump projects, often at absurdly inflated prices, enriching Trump as their cash got legitimized. As the pattern repeated itself, Trump and family become ever more beholden to their “business partners.”

Now, it is interesting from a media critic perspective to note how little anyone else in the press is playing with this Felix Sater keyhole to Trump’s empire. Sater, as Marshall reveals, not only served prison time for stabbing a guy, Joe Pesci-style, with the broken stem of a wine glass, but has established connections to New York mob families.

It is a long-standing fascination of mind at how the once enormously influential crime families of “Godfather” legend have all but entirely disappeared from media attention, as though they were never anything but a fiction. (Remember, until 1957 J. Edgar Hoover insisted organized crime did not exist in the United States.) The general explanation being that they all went “legitimate” at some point 25-30 years ago and there’s nothing more to see here.

I don’t think so. More likely is that the families figured ways to better launder their criminal earnings and are probably as wealthy today as they’ve ever been.

Whatever, this Felix Sater story is the extraordinarily rare instance when American organized crime reemerges in mainstream reporting. (The New York Times has reported on Sater, but to date has not pressed the connections Marshall has.) On the other hand Russian mobsters are a common subject of conversation. (It’s another form American exceptionalism, you see. We are the only culture in world history exempt from the scourge of organized criminality, and the corruption and violence that comes from it.)

Marshall acknowledges the normal viability of Occam’s Razor — (Definition: “Suppose there exist two explanations for an occurrence. In this case the simpler one is usually better. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation is.“)

Says Marshall, “The simplest explanation isn’t necessarily the right one. But in the spirit of Occam’s Razor, we should prefer it because it usually will be. To state the key point for clarity and emphasis, it is not the simplest explanation. It it is the simplest explanation which accounts for all the known facts. That distinction makes all the difference in the world.”

I could go on, but the reading list above lays all this out in compelling fashion.

My point, regarding the likelihood of senior people in the permanent government, (the part of the government Steve Bannon wants to “deconstruct”), knowing what all this Russia business is about also has a bit of Occam’s Razor to it.

Specifically, fabulously wealthy Russian oligarchs, essentially organized international criminals, many (but not all) aligned with Vladimir Putin (who is reputed to be one of the wealthiest people in the world thanks to his looting of the Russian economy), would be precisely the people enriching and enabling all sorts of nefarious activity all over the world, including here in the United States. They would therefore be primary targets for US (and allied) intelligence operations, intercepting their communications and monitoring their contacts and money flows.

If they weren’t/aren’t being regularly surveilled it would be an astonishing dereliction of duty on the part of our $80-$100 billion annual intelligence apparatus.

So … here’s the assumption. Senior intelligence people, knowing with very high confidence what Trump has been involved with for years, begin a series of strategic leaks to the media to prod judicial action. After all, enabling by ignoring quasi-to-overtly criminal association with foreign adversaries is diametrically opposed to what they signed up for.

And this is very serious stuff for whoever is leaking. They themselves are risking criminal prosecution. Which is why I find it hard to believe it’s just a few Bartleby the scrivener types buried in the bureaucracy. People like that have essentially no political cover. But further up the chain, where senior officials have personal relations with influential political leaders — from the likes of Diane Feinstein and John McCain and Lindsay Graham, etc. — such a risk becomes more tenable.

In summary, while the pundit press saying “we don’t know” is credible.

But that is not at all the same thing as saying, “No one knows.”