Friday, October 13, 2017 by Robert Jonathan
trump.news
Facebook revealed earlier this month that it is adding 1,000 new employees to its global ad team.
This is, in part, a response to the 3,000 ads purchased by a shadowy Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency in a $100,000 ad buy that was supposedly a way to meddle in 2016 U.S. election. Facebook has turned over those ads to Congress for the never-ending Russian investigation.
Facebook is also implementing a five-part strategy to root out what it considers improper ads through more transparency, tighter content restrictions and authentication, and establishing best practices across social media platforms. As part of this process, there will be further vetting of targeted ads by human reviewers. Once fully implemented, the changes will also allow users to see any ad from a given organization rather than just those ads targeted to the user, which is the case now. Any ads spreading hate or violence will be scrubbed.
According to TechCrunch, however, which reported on the 1,000 new hires, 56 percent of the ads that focused on polarizing issues were seen after the election, and 25 percent were never shown to anyone, so it seems to be a rather ineffective way interfere in U.S. electoral politics by a group affiliated with Russia or otherwise. Facebook claims, however, that about 10 million users saw the ads.
“Most of the ads appear to focus on divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum, touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights,” Facebook recalled in a very detailed explanation of its new policies, which you can read and draw your own conclusions.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also posted a long message about changes to the advertising policy.
In a discussion of the new advertising steps, Facebook reaffirmed its support for free speech in noting that it will continue to allow political and social content that some people will find objectionable.
Tech companies such as Facebook have a November 1 date on Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee about foreign interference in the 2016 election.
Preventing ad abuse seems like a worthy goal on its face, as it were, and hopefully it is being put into effect in good faith. Nonetheless, when a Silicon Valley gatekeeper announces a lofty quality control initiative, your BS detector might go off. Last year, for example, Facebook found itself in a scandal over censoring conservative-oriented news from its news feed. As part of the “solution,” it now relies on far-Left, third-party fact checkers to determine the difference between real and fake news.
Facebook (which some detractors refer to as Fakebook) also has a history of blocking pages that don’t conform to its progressive agenda, as Natural Newshas repeatedly chronicled.
Obama- and Hillary Clinton-supporting Big Social or Big Data, as the Silicon Valley giants are sometimes called, doesn’t have a particularly reassuring track record in this regard, and they will obviously be all-in for the Democrats in 2018 and 2020. Google-owned YouTube has already embarked on an aggressive program of demonetizing political videos it no longer considers advertiser-friendly, thus imposing a form of economic censorship. Many of those videos were produced by provocative conservatives, populist Trump supporters, or free-speech advocates in general.
As you might recall, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed in June 2016 that Google was actively engaged in trying to help Hillary Clinton become president. In a subsequently deleted video, SourceFed demonstrated that Google was allegedly manipulating auto-complete search results to bury negative information about Hillary Clinton.
Twitter has also been accused of suspending the accounts of Trump supporters and others on flimsy pretexts and shadow-banning tweets favorable to the president or that run counter to the Leftist, globalist worldview.
Natural News founding editor Mike Adams has already called for Facebook, Google, and Twitter to be regulated along the lines of a public utility as a method to prevent politically motivated censorship. (Related: Read more about the Big Social agenda at NewsFakes.com.)
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