Tag: Mark Zuckerberg

Commentary: The Data Mining of America’s Kids Should Be a National Scandal

RealClearWire

As U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland sat down for his first hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, denying a conflict of interest in his decision to investigate parents for “domestic terrorism,” there is a mother in the quiet suburb of Annandale, N.J., who found his answers lacking. And she has questions she wants asked at Garland’s hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee this Wednesday.

On a recent Saturday night, Caroline Licwinko, a mother of three, a law school student and the coach to her daughter’s cheerleading squad, sat in front of her laptop and tapped three words into an internet search engine: “Panorama. Survey. Results.”

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Facebook Is Under Government Investigation over Leaked Documents

Minnesota Sun Staff

Facebook is being investigated over leaked company documents and allegations by a former employee, according to financial filings.

The company’s 10-Q form filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday mentions that Facebook is “subject to government investigations and requests” seemingly related to documents leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen that detail tech giant’s business practices and internal research.

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Facebook-Linked Grants Backed Democrats in Pennsylvania in 2020

Minnesota Sun Staff

A new report reveals that multiple private grants tied to the Big Tech giant Facebook overwhelmingly backed Democratic candidates and counties in the state of Pennsylvania in 2020, as reported by the New York Post.

The report by the publication Broad + Liberty (BL) reveals that one such grant, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), spent more money on turning out registered voters in Democrat-majority counties than Republican-majority counties. In addition to the increased push for voter turnout, these counties were given a jumpstart on this grant and information on how to apply by state officials.

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Attorney General Garland Denies Knowledge of Claims that Zuckerberg ‘Bought’ 2020 Election

Peter D'Abrosca

During Wednesday’s hours-long grilling of Attorney General Merrick Garland by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, which mainly focused on the events of January 6 and Garland’s directive to investigate parents who speak School Board meetings, one critical question went almost unnoticed. 

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05) questioned Garland about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $400 million spending spree during the 2020 election. The money was allocated through Zuckerberg-funded non-profits the Center for Tech and Civic Life, described by Influence Watch as an “organization [that] pushes for left-of-center voting policies and election administration,” and the Center for Election Innovation and Research. 

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Facebook Reportedly Plans to Change Its Name

Minnesota Sun Staff

Facebook is reportedly planning on rebranding and is set to announce a new company name next week, according to The Verge.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg intends to announce the new name at the Facebook Connect conference on Oct. 28, a source familiar with the matter told The Verge. The rebrand is reportedly an attempt by Zuckerberg to shift public perception of the company as a social media platform to a technology conglomerate with several different products beyond the Facebook social network.

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Zuckerberg Responds to Whistleblower, Says Claims ‘Don’t Make Any Sense’

Admin

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg broke his silence on Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen late Tuesday, rebutting several of her allegations in a Facebook post.

“At the most basic level, I think most of us just don’t recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to Facebook employees posted to his account. “Many of the claims don’t make any sense.”

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‘Totalitarian Tyranny’: Parents Groups Slam Attorney General Garland for Turning FBI on Their Activism

Minnesota Sun Staff

Parents who protest public school policies on race, gender and COVID-19 are crying foul after Attorney General Merrick Garland promised to “discourage” and prosecute “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against school boards, administrators, teachers and staff.

His “mobilization of [the] FBI against parents is consistent with the complete weaponization of the federal government against ideological opponents,” Rhode Island mother Nicole Solas, who is waging a public records battle with her school district over race-related curriculum, told Just the News.

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Facebook Suspends ‘Instagram Kids’ Following Investigation Into Platform’s Effect on Teens

Minnesota Sun Staff

Facebook has paused development of a version of its image-sharing platform Instagram specifically geared towards children, the company announced Monday.

The tech giant decided to suspend work on the project in order to “work with parents, experts, policymakers and regulators,” and “demonstrate the value and importance of this project for younger teens online today,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, wrote in a statement Monday.

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Phill Kline to Michael Patrick Leahy: ‘Zuckerberg Money Paid for the People Who Boarded Up the Windows and Kicked America Out’

Julie Carr

Thursday morning on First Principles, host Phill Kline welcomed The Star News Network’s CEO, Michael Patrick Leahy to the phone lines to discuss the influence of Zuckerberg’s money on the 2020 election and altered state election laws.

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Facebook Reportedly Considers Creating an Election Commission, Just in Time for Midterms

Minnesota Sun Staff

Facebook is considering creating a commission to advise the tech giant on election-related issues including misinformation, The New York Times reported.

The tech company reportedly contacted several academics and policy experts to draft plans for a commission that will advise Facebook on electoral matters and potentially decide policies related to political misinformation and advertising, several people familiar with the plans told The New York Times. Facebook plans to announce the commission in the next few months to be prepared for the 2022 midterms, the Times reported.

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Commentary: Election Rules Have to Mean Something

RealClearWire

The rule of law must be respected for liberty to be protected.  Changing the rules to achieve a desired outcome undermines both, and when this is done in the administration of elections, democracy itself is imperiled.

Unfortunately, the left shows no compunction about wielding power for partisan advantage, especially when it comes to election administration. They’ve even gone so far as to create new rules to suit their purposes, regardless of whether they possess the authority to do so.

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CloutHub Founder Jeff Brain Reacts to Trump’s Big Tech Lawsuit

Peter D'Abrosca
Jeff Brain

The founder of CloutHub, a free speech social media network, has responded to former President Donald J. Trump’s class action lawsuit against several Silicon Valley titans, which the forty-fifth president announced Wednesday. 

“I am pleased that President Trump is fighting back against Big Tech corporations after enduring months of blatant injustices,” Jeff Brain said in press release. “His lawsuit is based on the infringement of his fundamental free speech rights that powerful companies such as Facebook and Twitter imposed based on their own political bias; a bias that has no place with such important keepers of our national public square online.”

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Facebook Becomes Fifth Tech Company Worth More Than $1 Trillion

Minnesota Sun Staff

Facebook’s market capitalization, or total dollar value, closed above $1 trillion for the first time ever Monday, making it the fifth U.S. company to reach such size.

Facebook exceeded the $1 trillion mark after a year in which the company experienced massive user and earnings growth, CNBC reported. Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon – all fellow Big Tech companies – are the only other U.S. companies that have also surpassed $1 trillion in market capitalization, according to Axios.

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Commentary: Zuckerberg’s Millions Paid for Progressives to Work with 2020 Vote Officials Nationwide

RealClearWire

In the months leading up to November’s election, voting officials in major cities and counties worked with a progressive group funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and its allies to create ballots, strategically target voters and develop “cure” letters in situations where mail-in ballots were in danger of being tossed out.

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Memos Hint Zuckerberg to Continue Big Spending on Georgia Election Workers, Infrastructure

Minnesota Sun Staff

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s multimillion dollar investment in the 2020 presidential election process may extend into this year or beyond, at least if Fulton County is any measure.

Georgia’s largest county, which encompasses the blue-leaning city of Atlanta, received more than $6.3 million in private grants from the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to conduct elections during the 2020 pandemic, but recently reported it did not use all the money last year.

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Emails Show Involvement of Multiple Private Groups in Key Swing-State Cities During 2020 Election

Minnesota Sun Staff

Newly revealed emails show what appears to be an intensive effort by multiple private advocacy groups to manage numerous aspects of the 2020 election in several swing-state cities key to Biden’s 2020 election victory, shedding further light on the role private initiatives and private funding played in potentially influencing the outcome of that race.

The emails, obtained by the election integrity group the Amistad Project, show exchanges between city officials in several Wisconsin cities and members of the Center for Tech and Civil Life, a left-leaning election advocacy organization based out of Chicago.

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Minnesota Voters Want Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s Election Money Investigated

Minnesota Sun Staff

Alpha News recently reported that eight Minnesota voters petitioned the Minnesota Supreme Court with claims that Minnesota didn’t follow election laws in 2020. As part of their legal effort, these voters are requesting access to data involving Facebook CEO and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s financial influence on how the 2020 election was conducted.

It has been widely reported that Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan gave $350 million to a nonprofit, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), that re-granted the funds to thousands of local election officials around the country. From the get-go, even before the election, these donations were controversial.

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Amistad Project Asks Michigan Supreme Court to Preserve Evidence of Election Irregularities

Jason M. Reynolds

The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society said it filed a lawsuit on Thanksgiving asking the Michigan Supreme Court to physically secure all evidence of irregularities in the 2020 election and declare the results invalid on the basis of alleged unlawful conduct by state and local officials.

“In numerous instances, state and local officials brazenly violated election laws in order to advance a partisan political agenda,” said Phill Kline, Director of The Amistad Project. “The pattern of lawlessness was so pervasive and widespread that it deprived the people of Michigan of a free and fair election, throwing the integrity of the entire process into question.”

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Amistad Project’s Georgia Lawsuit Targets 200K Ballot Deficit Caused by Improper Counting of Ballots

Jason M. Reynolds

The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, saying fraudulent votes cast were 15 times greater than the margin separating Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

The organization said in a press release that it filed the lawsuit Tuesday, because well over 100,000 illegal votes were improperly counted, while tens of thousands of legal votes were not counted.

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Zuckerberg: FBI Warned Us to Be on the Lookout For a ‘Hack and Leak’ Op with ‘Trove of Docs’ Before the Election

Minnesota Sun Staff

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress Wednesday that the FBI warned him months ago that Facebook should be on “heightened alert” about “hack and leak operations” that could be part of a foreign disinformation campaign in the final weeks before the 2020 election.

The Facebook honcho made the remarks during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing where he testified alongside Google’s Sundar Pichai and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

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Holocaust Denial Posts Banned on Another Social Media Platform

Minnesota Sun Staff

Twitter will begin removing posts containing Holocaust denial, a Twitter spokeswoman told Bloomberg News just days after Facebook also implemented a policy banning posts that deny the Holocaust. 

“We strongly condemn anti-semitism, and hateful conduct has absolutely no place on our service,” the spokeswoman told Bloomberg News in a statement. “We also have a robust ‘glorification of violence’ policy in place and take action against content that glorifies or praises historical acts of violence and genocide, including the Holocaust.”

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Commentary: Big Tech Is Breaking Campaign Finance Laws Openly Campaigning on Behalf of Democrats

Minnesota Sun Staff

A mayoral candidate in Texas was arrested October 8 and charged with 84 counts of mail application ballot fraud; Zul Mohamed, running for mayor of Carrollton, forged nearly one hundred voter registration applications. “At the time of arrest, Mohamed was in the process of stuffing envelopes with additional mail ballot applications for neighboring Dallas County,” law enforcement officials reported. He also was charged with 25 counts of “unlawful possession of an official mail in ballot” and faces up to 20 years in prison.

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Zuckerberg Was the Only Tech CEO to Unequivocally Say China Is Stealing American Technology

Minnesota Sun Staff

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was the only tech executive at Wednesday’s antitrust hearing who unequivocally said China is stealing technology from American companies.

“I think it’s well documented that the Chinese government steals technology from American companies,” the 36-year-old Silicon Valley executive said after Rep. Greg Steube asked him if China is stealing from U.S. technology companies. The Florida Republican posed the same question to CEOs Tim Cook of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Sundar Pichai of Google.

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Spotlight on Four Big Tech CEOs Testifying in Competition Probe

The Associated Press

They command corporations with gold-plated brands, millions or even billions of customers, and a combined value greater than the entire German economy. One of them is the world’s richest individual; another is the fourth-ranked billionaire. Their industry has transformed society, linked people around the globe, mined and commercialized users’ personal data, and infuriated critics on both the left and right over speech.

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Zuckerberg Mocks Conspiracy Theory Suggesting He Forged a Secret Deal with Trump as ‘Pretty Ridiculous’

Minnesota Sun Staff

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed speculation that he and President Donald Trump have come to an understanding in an interview published Monday.

“I’ve heard this speculation, too, so let me be clear: There’s no deal of any kind,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with Axios published Monday.

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Project Veritas Exposes Rampant Anti-Conservative Bias of Facebook’s Content Moderators: ‘I Am Going to Delete Them for Terrorism’

Anthony Gockowski

A shocking new undercover video from Project Veritas exposes the rampant anti-conservative bias of Facebook’s content moderators, the employees who are responsible for deciding what posts are censored.

Zach McElroy, a former Facebook employee who worked as a content moderator in Tampa, Florida, told Project Veritas that he’s willing to testify before Congress about Facebook’s bias against Trump supporters and conservative causes.

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Commentary: Big Tech, Privacy, and Power

Minnesota Sun Staff

The ground is shifting quickly beneath our feet when it comes to tech, privacy, and power. And, although tech companies, their advocates, and even some policymakers, would like us to imagine these issues are cut and dried, they are not.

In their book The Sovereign Individual, published on the eve of the year 2000, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg attempt to grapple with the forthcoming technological changes that the new millennium inevitably would bring. “As technology revolutionizes the tools we use,” they wrote, “it also antiquates our laws, reshapes our morals, and alters our perceptions.”

This is the dynamic that has been unfolding slowly over the last 20 years, as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have transformed how we engage with communications, culture, commerce, and one another.

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Facebook Takes Down Anti-Quarantine Protest Posts That ‘Defy’ Social Distancing Guidelines

Minnesota Sun Staff

Facebook is not allowing anti-quarantine protesters to use the site to organize demonstrations in states that have enacted strict social distancing measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

The social media giant has already removed promotions for anti-quarantine events in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska in cooperation with those state governments.

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Hillary Clinton Reveals How She Pressured Facebook to Spike a ‘Doctored’ Video of Pelosi

Minnesota Sun Staff

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has authoritarian views on misinformation and likely intends on reelecting President Donald Trump.

“Google took it off YouTube … so I contacted Facebook,” Clinton told The Atlantic in a report published Saturday.

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Facebook’s Zuckerberg Grilled in US Congress on Digital Currency, Privacy, Elections

Minnesota Sun Staff

WASHINGTON – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg conceded on Wednesday that the company’s planned digital currency Libra was a “risky project,” but sought to reassure skeptical U.S. lawmakers that it could lower the cost of electronic payments and open up the global financial system to more people.

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Commentary: ‘High-Skilled Immigrants Act’ Is a Sop to Big Tech

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Rachael Brovard   In a rare moment of bipartisanship last week, Democrats and Republicans joined hands to make a small, but fundamental change to our immigration system. Not to provide critically needed updates or wholesale reforms, but, rather, to toss a sop to the billionaires of Big Tech. Thanks…

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Facebook Is Promoting ISIS Propaganda, Whistleblower Says

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Chris White   Facebook is promoting Islamic State propaganda, a whistleblower alleges in a complaint Thursday to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The social media company is likely violating securities laws prohibiting companies from misleading shareholders and the public, according to a petition filed by the National Whistleblower Center…

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Facebook’s Co-Founder Calls for Government to Break Up Zuckerberg’s Empire

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Chris White   Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes thrashed CEO Mark Zuckerberg Thursday and called on the federal government to break up enormous sections of the massive social media company. “The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech,” Hughes wrote in a New York Times…

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Commentary: The Dawn Of Corporate Totalitarianism

Minnesota Sun Staff

by George Rasley   In a dystopian future envisioned by some of science fiction’s greatest authors, mankind is ruled not by elected leaders or by warlords who came to power through victory in battle. Instead, humans have become the virtual slaves of soulless totalitarian corporations that vie with each other for…

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Facebook ‘Unintentionally’ Uploaded Email Contacts of 1.5 Million Users

Minnesota Sun Staff

Facebook Inc said on Wednesday it may have “unintentionally uploaded” email contacts of 1.5 million new users since May 2016, in what seems to be the latest privacy-related issue faced by the social media company. In March, Facebook had stopped offering email password verification as an option for people who…

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US Housing Department Charges Facebook With Housing Discrimination

Minnesota Sun Staff

Facebook was charged with discrimination by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development because of its ad-targeting system. HUD said Thursday Facebook is allowing advertisers to exclude people based on their neighborhood by drawing a red line around those neighborhoods on a map and giving advertisers the option of…

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Facebook Accused Of Massively Inflating Video Viewership and the Impact on Newsrooms Was Devastating

Admin

by Grace Carr   A number of plaintiffs filed a formal complaint Tuesday, alleging Facebook knew about problematic measurement tactics of video viewership and did nothing to address the problem for at least a year. Tuesday’s complaint comes after a 2016 lawsuit against the company that alleges it engaged in…

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How Censorship by Facebook Reinforces This Writer’s Point on Liberals’ Intolerance

Admin

by Mike Gonzalez   Less than a third of the way into his upcoming book on nationalism, Israeli philosopher and scholar Yoram Hazony warns about the growing censorship constricting debate in Western societies when the opinion in question runs counter to the views of politically correct liberalism. Facebook wasted no time…

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Commentary: Time To Make Facebook Pay For Its Lies

Admin

by George Rasley   Conservatives who have suffered discrimination from tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook will derive a little bit of pleasure from recent disclosures the company made in a small courtroom in Redwood City, California. According to reporting in the UK’s Guardian, Facebook has long had the same public response when questioned about its disruption of…

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