28 ms·

Facebook crisis grows as new whistleblower and leaked documents emerge

257 points by mindracer 5y ago

FinanceAnon 5y ago
I think that the media is overusing the term "whistleblower". There are many of wrong things happening at big companies (FB, Google, Amazon) and you are not really a whistleblower by bringing this up. Media labelling those people as "whistleblowers" feels like encouraging conformity in a place that needs changing. But I guess they get more clicks when they put "whistleblower" in the headline.
- bertil 5y ago
  The reason they are using it might be for legal reasons: many employees sign an NDA and it seems like they would be breaching that contract by sharing those. The Whistleblower status was meant when breaking laws like Official Secrets Act, so a meaningfully different concern as you mention, but by presenting leakers that way, the press is framing them in a protective light. I believe that the official status of whistleblower is only in certain circumstances (the institution is knowingly breaking the law or “mismanagement, gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety”) and I’m not sure who decides whether someone applies—presumably the judge in one of the subsequent cases, which comes much later and therefore expose the person leaking information to a substantial legal risk in the meantime. I suspect that the press is trying to encourage more leaks by avoiding headlines about how previous leakers ended up in hot waters.
  - pharmakom 5y ago
    This distinction is what makes the Julian Assange case so interesting. For whatever reason, the press didn’t frame their stories in a protective way.
    - diegoperini 5y ago
      Assange is a competitor of the press that wrote about him.
    - bertil 5y ago
      I’m not sure that Assange broke any laws: most apply to government employees and contractors (he’s never been either) and in general only to citizens and residents of that country (same); international laws are rare, and I can’t think of any related to espionage. The press tries to redact private information that is not relevant for their stories out of compassion (and it’s universally seen as a good thing) but it’s not always clear that they have a legal duty to do so. The one case that I know is illegal _in the US_ is to reveal the name of a CIA agent, but a most other information revealed by Wikileaks falls under fairly standard First amendement rights. Assange wasn’t a whistleblower: he found an alternative way to protect whistleblowers by hiding their identity, including voluntarily ignoring it himself. A lot of Americans are dismissive of the idea that US laws doesn't apply to non-residents, but there’s plenty of examples that will show how absurd it is. Turkey bans saying anything bad about Ataturk: if you did, would you feel like you broke the law? No, because you don’t live there. It might reduce your holiday options but I get the feeling that Assange was never the DisneyWorld kind of guy.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Leparamour 5y ago
So much scripted drama while everybody involved is on the same page and wants and regulation and more censorship of FB: Facebook wants regulation for itself to kick the ladder down for future competitors, the current "whistleblowers" want it for FB because of personal idelogical leanings toward modern identity politics, the legacy media corporations want regulation applied to FB hoping that it will somehow save the former's outdated business model and the Biden administration wants it in order to manufacture consent in the face of falling popularity ratings and to keep those pesky allegations of election fraud down (except for their own allegations against the opponent).
- luegen 5y ago
  It's fishy indeed: https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/21/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-us-intelligence/ https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/21/facebook-whistleblower-fr...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - erdo 5y ago
    Who is this news org, why should we trust them? A cursory look at their content suggests we shouldn't. It's easy, all you need to do is spot the term "Russiagate", in this case the "gate" is being used to suggest that Russian influence in American politics is a fake news story (which it definitely isn't, see Muller report)
    - sm4rk0 5y ago
      American politics and MSM are fake news.
    - sm4rk0 5y ago
      If you don't want to see the truth, you wouldn't see it even if it was waving in front of your eyes.
    - cyber_kinetist 5y ago
jazzyjackson 5y ago
Really I haven’t seen any crisis despite the newspapers printing “the end is nigh” facebook is as full of bots and personality quizzes as it ever was, it doesn’t need whistleblowers to make it irrelevant If I was any more cynical I’d bet that the whistleblowing is a ruse — if so, whomsoever leaks the data revealing the conspiracy could become the first meta-whistleblower, blowing the whistle on fake whistleblowing!
- tacuo 5y ago
  Facebook will collapse or atleast break up because smart people inside are realizing there is no fix. When you scale up to levels no one else has, you hit problems no on else has seen. It takes a while to realize the size itself is part of the problem. Sort of like the East India Company. Scale is great until there is a serious mutiny.
  - seanosaur 5y ago
    > Facebook will collapse or atleast break up because smart people inside are realizing there is no fix. I think you may be underestimating the amount of hubris within Facebook, especially in the c-suite.
- blitzar 5y ago
  Maybe facebook are sick of being all about the boomers and bots all shilling crazy conspiracies. What better way to pivot than to clean out house while grabbing a bit of attention. Perhaps these whistleblowers are a symptom of internal conflict and factions at war over where they go.
uap 5y ago
Limited hangout disinformation whistleblower from FB counterintelligence would be a great way to weaponize the current "FB hatred" of the mass public to control the narrative to fit FB agenda. Would such a tactic be beyond their capacity or morality to achieve?
lostinquebec 5y ago
I wonder how https://vimeo.com/636460268 https://vimeo.com/636460268 matches up to this? Tyler Cowen seems to have a slightly more sane response to a lot of this.
- mathattack 5y ago
  Tyler Cowan is a very high standard to expect anyone to match.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
The conflation of 'the political left's perception of reality' with 'the truth' is outrageous, and nothing more than an attempt to censor views that conflict with the political left's agenda, which corresponds with polls showing registered Democrats are increasingly gravitating toward authoritarianism: https://rumble.com/vnwyhz-the-mountain-of-data-showing-how-authoritarian-democrats-have-become.html https://rumble.com/vnwyhz-the-mountain-of-data-showing-how-a...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jb1991 5y ago
> In one alleged incident, Tucker Bounds, a Facebook communications official, dismissed concerns about the platform’s role in 2016 election manipulation. “It will be a flash in the pan,” Bounds said, according to the affidavit, as reported by the Post. “Some legislators will get pissy. And then in a few weeks they will move on to something else. Meanwhile, we are printing money in the basement, and we are fine.” Sounds like a really positive environment to work in. Lots of solid, meaningful contributions to the planet.
- bertil 5y ago
  It’s very likely that some employees were worried either for their employment or their stock grants. It’s easy to dismiss most tech workers as financially comfortable but some make commitments (buying a house being the obvious large one) based on the current value of their heavily Facebook-loaded portfolio. There’s been a lot of things said about the 2016 elections, mostly about the company’s responsibility and possible actions to take; picking an extract of one answer isn’t always representative of that conversation. “We don’t expect meaningful financial impact for employees” is a reasonable answer to a legitimate employee question about what will happened to them personally but not a good summary of how the company talked about this.
- garbagetime 5y ago
  You posted one quotation in which a Facebook employee shared his analysis of a situation. I'm not sure what that quotation showed about Facebook's work environment. And really it's just one short quotation from a single employee.
  - almeria 5y ago
    You posted one quotation in which a Facebook employee shared his analysis of a situation Not "an employee", but an apparently very senior "communications official". I'm not sure what that quotation showed about Facebook's work environment. For starters: a management culture that is profoundly cynical, and completely devoid of principle.
- yostrovs 5y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
It would be great if folks could think beyond questioning the business model in terms of what (controversial content) increases user attention and think about questioning the model itself: using the internet to sell attention. There is nothing that demands the internet must be used this way. The big tech companies like to combat the possibility of any such thinking by invoking people's fear of change. Something like "The internet would not be as you know it today if advertising decreased." The reader is supposed to think, "Oh my gosh, what a scary thought." However the internet as we know it today is not necessarily the best the internet could be. That should be obvious. Tech employees are having a crisis of conscience. Tech companies and their investors want everyone to presume the way things are now is the best possible outcome. That is because they know they have a money printing machine (see, e.g., Tucker Bounds quote) so long as the internet remains open for unregulated advertising. They will keep advancing this idea that the internet would suck without unregulated ads, but there is no evidence that is true. No one can predict the future. Tech company spokespersons try to paint a picture of a possible future where web users would have to pay for using websites. There is nothing that indicates that would be the outcome. Tech companies do not control the internet. They do not own the internet. Tech companies might die without advertising, but websites might flourish. Both commercial and non-commercial. People might find relief from excessive screen time. The mom and pop retailer or SMB/SME are not going to charge customers to use their websites. Users will continue to pay access fees to ISPs. "The tech industry" !== the internet. It uses the internet to advance its own interests (these may be aligned somewhat to those of advertisers, but they often conflict with the interests of users). Tech companies must use the internet for advertising or face an existential crisis. That is not true for users. We can use the internet for whatever we want. We pay for it. Generally, advertisers do not pay our internet access fees. We pay for access to a network that tech companies usurp to sap our attention for a fee, paid by advertisers. We do not get a cut of those payments. The whole system is incredibly one-sided and should be questioned. It is far from ideal.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  Almost there! It’s like capitalism, without proper antitrust regulation, creates growth expectations such that even the most popular products will eventually plateau, but revenue growth is still expected, so how do you raise additional revenue? You sell access to your user base in the form of ads. The one-sidedness is entirely the point: you do not possess your own agency in this transaction as the company who makes the product you’re using literally believes they own your attention. All you can do is start ignoring the product.
jpster 5y ago
Given all the concerns that FB is a threat to democracy, it’s fascinating to look back at 2008’s glowing praise for Barack Obama’s use of social media to propel him to the presidency [1]. And without Twitter there would be no Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Whose ascension is a huge win for American democracy. It is so easy to paint social media as the bad guy, when meanwhile it has been responsible for some of the most transformative global popular movements in recent times. E.g. Arab Spring I feel we don’t talk enough about the rotten underlying dynamics that make the US society so vulnerable to Russian interference, demagogues, and conspiracy theories. Social media is weaponizing these awful dynamics, but it’s feeling like so much “blame the messenger”. FB has literally been asking to be regulated for years now. (And yes, cynically, it’s also smart to get the government to help you dig your moat.) But I’d be surprised if new sm rules alone are the answer to the societal rot and division, precarity and poor education that defines so much of American culture. _ 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.htm...
- pjc50 5y ago
  > transformative global popular movements in recent times. E.g. Arab Spring This illustrates the benefits and the hazards nicely; open comms can give you a revolution, but it's not sufficient to produce a functioning democracy. Egypt in particular speedran the transition back to totalitarianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood_in_Egypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood_in_Egypt > ollowing the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, it first had great success. It launched a civic political party—the Freedom and Justice Party—to contest elections, which it described as having "the same mission and goals, but different roles" than the Brotherhood,[8] and agreeing to honor all Egypt's international agreements.[9] The party won almost half the seats in the 2011–12 parliamentary elections, and its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won the June 2012 presidential election.[10] However President Mohammad Morsi was overthrown after mass protests within a year[11] and a crackdown ensued that some have called more damaging to the movement than any "in eight decades".[12] Hundreds of members were killed, and hundreds—including Morsi and most of the Brotherhood's leadership—were imprisoned. Among the general Egyptian population, a "huge hostility" was felt towards the MB.[13] In September 2013, an Egyptian court banned the Brotherhood and its associations,[14] and ordered that its assets be seized;[15] and in December the military-backed interim government declared the movement a terrorist group following the bombing of security directorate building in Mansoura The people got democracy back briefly, and the first party they elected was an even more repressive Islamist government that had to be overthrown again.
user3939382 5y ago
I agree with Jimmy Dore —- real whistleblowers are imprisoned and hunted (Snowden, Assange). This is a fake whistleblower. “I’m blowing the whistle that Facebook didn’t censor enough!” The government wants to transfer the massive power to shape speech (by blocking posts and adding clever little Orwellian “misinformation” tags) from SV to itself directly.
- onionisafruit 5y ago
  A real whistleblower will draw the wrath of the people they expose. That doesn’t always take the form of being imprisoned and hinted. Sometimes the stakes are much lower.
Tycho 5y ago
Haven’t looked into the details of this supposed crisis, but I’m guessing that the outrage is from the free press over the unjustified suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in order to influence a democratic election. Am I right?
- SheddingPattern 5y ago
  No
- perl4ever 5y ago
  If there was a story, why do you call it "the Hunter Biden laptop story"? I mean, why does everybody call it that, rather than referring to it by the dastardly deeds that were revealed? I just keep forgetting.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    Compare and contrast with "Deflategate". Everybody knows basically what that was. Deflated footballs. People don't go around saying "the Tom Brady cell phone story". You don't have to be initiated into esoteric knowledge to understand.
  - Tycho 5y ago
    It's a bit like how everyone refers to the "Panama Papers" or the "Pandora Papers" - the laptop contained a trove of information on damning activities, any one of which would have been newsworthy in its own right and relevant to the public's judgement of a presidential candidate.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      I believe in some countries there were major politicians taken down, and I bet you a dollar the media and public referred to the reasons with more specificity.
      - Tycho 5y ago
Jiro 5y ago
We've seen how in the 2020 election, social media worked to prevent Trump from winning. So of course, most of the emphasis on Facebook being biased will be on the 2016 election. In the 2020 election, well, Facebook tried to be a good guy by suppressing the right, but was stymied by the evil forces of Trump and by their own unwillingness to stop the right by enough. It would be great if more oversight of Facebook would lead to Facebook just not interfering in politics at all and maybe giving up on "engagement", but that's not what the government and "whistleblowers" are trying to do. It's a power struggle to make sure that the right people make Facebook political in the right way.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I don't really know how this is surprising or a crisis. I assumed this was going on. I mean Facebook is full of genius level intellects and only an idiot could miss the garbage that shows up in 99% of the feeds on Facebook (political/pandemic conspiracy and made up memes). There is literally no way they weren't discussing it internally. Now everyone is pearl clutching? That period was over a decade ago, if not longer. The US government isn't going to do anything about this except hold more hearing where old white men think about how this affects the tubes the young folks are using these days. Maybe the European governments will accomplish something.
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257 points by mindracer 5y ago

I think that the media is overusing the term "whistleblower". There are many of wrong things happening at big companies (FB, Google, Amazon) and you are not really a whistleblower by bringing this up. Media labelling those people as "whistleblowers" feels like encouraging conformity in a place that needs changing. But I guess they get more clicks when they put "whistleblower" in the headline.

bertil 5y ago
The reason they are using it might be for legal reasons: many employees sign an NDA and it seems like they would be breaching that contract by sharing those. The Whistleblower status was meant when breaking laws like Official Secrets Act, so a meaningfully different concern as you mention, but by presenting leakers that way, the press is framing them in a protective light. I believe that the official status of whistleblower is only in certain circumstances (the institution is knowingly breaking the law or “mismanagement, gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety”) and I’m not sure who decides whether someone applies—presumably the judge in one of the subsequent cases, which comes much later and therefore expose the person leaking information to a substantial legal risk in the meantime. I suspect that the press is trying to encourage more leaks by avoiding headlines about how previous leakers ended up in hot waters.
- pharmakom 5y ago
  This distinction is what makes the Julian Assange case so interesting. For whatever reason, the press didn’t frame their stories in a protective way.
  - diegoperini 5y ago
    Assange is a competitor of the press that wrote about him.
  - bertil 5y ago
    I’m not sure that Assange broke any laws: most apply to government employees and contractors (he’s never been either) and in general only to citizens and residents of that country (same); international laws are rare, and I can’t think of any related to espionage. The press tries to redact private information that is not relevant for their stories out of compassion (and it’s universally seen as a good thing) but it’s not always clear that they have a legal duty to do so. The one case that I know is illegal _in the US_ is to reveal the name of a CIA agent, but a most other information revealed by Wikileaks falls under fairly standard First amendement rights. Assange wasn’t a whistleblower: he found an alternative way to protect whistleblowers by hiding their identity, including voluntarily ignoring it himself. A lot of Americans are dismissive of the idea that US laws doesn't apply to non-residents, but there’s plenty of examples that will show how absurd it is. Turkey bans saying anything bad about Ataturk: if you did, would you feel like you broke the law? No, because you don’t live there. It might reduce your holiday options but I get the feeling that Assange was never the DisneyWorld kind of guy.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Leparamour 5y ago

So much scripted drama while everybody involved is on the same page and wants and regulation and more censorship of FB: Facebook wants regulation for itself to kick the ladder down for future competitors, the current "whistleblowers" want it for FB because of personal idelogical leanings toward modern identity politics, the legacy media corporations want regulation applied to FB hoping that it will somehow save the former's outdated business model and the Biden administration wants it in order to manufacture consent in the face of falling popularity ratings and to keep those pesky allegations of election fraud down (except for their own allegations against the opponent).

luegen 5y ago
It's fishy indeed: https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/21/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-us-intelligence/ https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/21/facebook-whistleblower-fr...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- erdo 5y ago
  Who is this news org, why should we trust them? A cursory look at their content suggests we shouldn't. It's easy, all you need to do is spot the term "Russiagate", in this case the "gate" is being used to suggest that Russian influence in American politics is a fake news story (which it definitely isn't, see Muller report)
  - sm4rk0 5y ago
    American politics and MSM are fake news.
  - sm4rk0 5y ago
    If you don't want to see the truth, you wouldn't see it even if it was waving in front of your eyes.
  - cyber_kinetist 5y ago

jazzyjackson 5y ago

Really I haven’t seen any crisis despite the newspapers printing “the end is nigh” facebook is as full of bots and personality quizzes as it ever was, it doesn’t need whistleblowers to make it irrelevant If I was any more cynical I’d bet that the whistleblowing is a ruse — if so, whomsoever leaks the data revealing the conspiracy could become the first meta-whistleblower, blowing the whistle on fake whistleblowing!

tacuo 5y ago
Facebook will collapse or atleast break up because smart people inside are realizing there is no fix. When you scale up to levels no one else has, you hit problems no on else has seen. It takes a while to realize the size itself is part of the problem. Sort of like the East India Company. Scale is great until there is a serious mutiny.
- seanosaur 5y ago
  > Facebook will collapse or atleast break up because smart people inside are realizing there is no fix. I think you may be underestimating the amount of hubris within Facebook, especially in the c-suite.
blitzar 5y ago
Maybe facebook are sick of being all about the boomers and bots all shilling crazy conspiracies. What better way to pivot than to clean out house while grabbing a bit of attention. Perhaps these whistleblowers are a symptom of internal conflict and factions at war over where they go.

uap 5y ago

Limited hangout disinformation whistleblower from FB counterintelligence would be a great way to weaponize the current "FB hatred" of the mass public to control the narrative to fit FB agenda. Would such a tactic be beyond their capacity or morality to achieve?

lostinquebec 5y ago

I wonder how https://vimeo.com/636460268 https://vimeo.com/636460268 matches up to this? Tyler Cowen seems to have a slightly more sane response to a lot of this.

mathattack 5y ago
Tyler Cowan is a very high standard to expect anyone to match.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

The conflation of 'the political left's perception of reality' with 'the truth' is outrageous, and nothing more than an attempt to censor views that conflict with the political left's agenda, which corresponds with polls showing registered Democrats are increasingly gravitating toward authoritarianism: https://rumble.com/vnwyhz-the-mountain-of-data-showing-how-authoritarian-democrats-have-become.html https://rumble.com/vnwyhz-the-mountain-of-data-showing-how-a...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jb1991 5y ago

> In one alleged incident, Tucker Bounds, a Facebook communications official, dismissed concerns about the platform’s role in 2016 election manipulation. “It will be a flash in the pan,” Bounds said, according to the affidavit, as reported by the Post. “Some legislators will get pissy. And then in a few weeks they will move on to something else. Meanwhile, we are printing money in the basement, and we are fine.” Sounds like a really positive environment to work in. Lots of solid, meaningful contributions to the planet.

bertil 5y ago
It’s very likely that some employees were worried either for their employment or their stock grants. It’s easy to dismiss most tech workers as financially comfortable but some make commitments (buying a house being the obvious large one) based on the current value of their heavily Facebook-loaded portfolio. There’s been a lot of things said about the 2016 elections, mostly about the company’s responsibility and possible actions to take; picking an extract of one answer isn’t always representative of that conversation. “We don’t expect meaningful financial impact for employees” is a reasonable answer to a legitimate employee question about what will happened to them personally but not a good summary of how the company talked about this.
garbagetime 5y ago
You posted one quotation in which a Facebook employee shared his analysis of a situation. I'm not sure what that quotation showed about Facebook's work environment. And really it's just one short quotation from a single employee.
- almeria 5y ago
  You posted one quotation in which a Facebook employee shared his analysis of a situation Not "an employee", but an apparently very senior "communications official". I'm not sure what that quotation showed about Facebook's work environment. For starters: a management culture that is profoundly cynical, and completely devoid of principle.
yostrovs 5y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

It would be great if folks could think beyond questioning the business model in terms of what (controversial content) increases user attention and think about questioning the model itself: using the internet to sell attention. There is nothing that demands the internet must be used this way. The big tech companies like to combat the possibility of any such thinking by invoking people's fear of change. Something like "The internet would not be as you know it today if advertising decreased." The reader is supposed to think, "Oh my gosh, what a scary thought." However the internet as we know it today is not necessarily the best the internet could be. That should be obvious. Tech employees are having a crisis of conscience. Tech companies and their investors want everyone to presume the way things are now is the best possible outcome. That is because they know they have a money printing machine (see, e.g., Tucker Bounds quote) so long as the internet remains open for unregulated advertising. They will keep advancing this idea that the internet would suck without unregulated ads, but there is no evidence that is true. No one can predict the future. Tech company spokespersons try to paint a picture of a possible future where web users would have to pay for using websites. There is nothing that indicates that would be the outcome. Tech companies do not control the internet. They do not own the internet. Tech companies might die without advertising, but websites might flourish. Both commercial and non-commercial. People might find relief from excessive screen time. The mom and pop retailer or SMB/SME are not going to charge customers to use their websites. Users will continue to pay access fees to ISPs. "The tech industry" !== the internet. It uses the internet to advance its own interests (these may be aligned somewhat to those of advertisers, but they often conflict with the interests of users). Tech companies must use the internet for advertising or face an existential crisis. That is not true for users. We can use the internet for whatever we want. We pay for it. Generally, advertisers do not pay our internet access fees. We pay for access to a network that tech companies usurp to sap our attention for a fee, paid by advertisers. We do not get a cut of those payments. The whole system is incredibly one-sided and should be questioned. It is far from ideal.

wayoutthere 5y ago
Almost there! It’s like capitalism, without proper antitrust regulation, creates growth expectations such that even the most popular products will eventually plateau, but revenue growth is still expected, so how do you raise additional revenue? You sell access to your user base in the form of ads. The one-sidedness is entirely the point: you do not possess your own agency in this transaction as the company who makes the product you’re using literally believes they own your attention. All you can do is start ignoring the product.

jpster 5y ago

Given all the concerns that FB is a threat to democracy, it’s fascinating to look back at 2008’s glowing praise for Barack Obama’s use of social media to propel him to the presidency [1]. And without Twitter there would be no Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Whose ascension is a huge win for American democracy. It is so easy to paint social media as the bad guy, when meanwhile it has been responsible for some of the most transformative global popular movements in recent times. E.g. Arab Spring I feel we don’t talk enough about the rotten underlying dynamics that make the US society so vulnerable to Russian interference, demagogues, and conspiracy theories. Social media is weaponizing these awful dynamics, but it’s feeling like so much “blame the messenger”. FB has literally been asking to be regulated for years now. (And yes, cynically, it’s also smart to get the government to help you dig your moat.) But I’d be surprised if new sm rules alone are the answer to the societal rot and division, precarity and poor education that defines so much of American culture. _ 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.htm...

pjc50 5y ago
> transformative global popular movements in recent times. E.g. Arab Spring This illustrates the benefits and the hazards nicely; open comms can give you a revolution, but it's not sufficient to produce a functioning democracy. Egypt in particular speedran the transition back to totalitarianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood_in_Egypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood_in_Egypt > ollowing the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, it first had great success. It launched a civic political party—the Freedom and Justice Party—to contest elections, which it described as having "the same mission and goals, but different roles" than the Brotherhood,[8] and agreeing to honor all Egypt's international agreements.[9] The party won almost half the seats in the 2011–12 parliamentary elections, and its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won the June 2012 presidential election.[10] However President Mohammad Morsi was overthrown after mass protests within a year[11] and a crackdown ensued that some have called more damaging to the movement than any "in eight decades".[12] Hundreds of members were killed, and hundreds—including Morsi and most of the Brotherhood's leadership—were imprisoned. Among the general Egyptian population, a "huge hostility" was felt towards the MB.[13] In September 2013, an Egyptian court banned the Brotherhood and its associations,[14] and ordered that its assets be seized;[15] and in December the military-backed interim government declared the movement a terrorist group following the bombing of security directorate building in Mansoura The people got democracy back briefly, and the first party they elected was an even more repressive Islamist government that had to be overthrown again.

user3939382 5y ago

I agree with Jimmy Dore —- real whistleblowers are imprisoned and hunted (Snowden, Assange). This is a fake whistleblower. “I’m blowing the whistle that Facebook didn’t censor enough!” The government wants to transfer the massive power to shape speech (by blocking posts and adding clever little Orwellian “misinformation” tags) from SV to itself directly.

onionisafruit 5y ago
A real whistleblower will draw the wrath of the people they expose. That doesn’t always take the form of being imprisoned and hinted. Sometimes the stakes are much lower.

Tycho 5y ago

Haven’t looked into the details of this supposed crisis, but I’m guessing that the outrage is from the free press over the unjustified suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in order to influence a democratic election. Am I right?

SheddingPattern 5y ago
No
perl4ever 5y ago
If there was a story, why do you call it "the Hunter Biden laptop story"? I mean, why does everybody call it that, rather than referring to it by the dastardly deeds that were revealed? I just keep forgetting.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  Compare and contrast with "Deflategate". Everybody knows basically what that was. Deflated footballs. People don't go around saying "the Tom Brady cell phone story". You don't have to be initiated into esoteric knowledge to understand.
- Tycho 5y ago
  It's a bit like how everyone refers to the "Panama Papers" or the "Pandora Papers" - the laptop contained a trove of information on damning activities, any one of which would have been newsworthy in its own right and relevant to the public's judgement of a presidential candidate.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    I believe in some countries there were major politicians taken down, and I bet you a dollar the media and public referred to the reasons with more specificity.
    - Tycho 5y ago

Jiro 5y ago

We've seen how in the 2020 election, social media worked to prevent Trump from winning. So of course, most of the emphasis on Facebook being biased will be on the 2016 election. In the 2020 election, well, Facebook tried to be a good guy by suppressing the right, but was stymied by the evil forces of Trump and by their own unwillingness to stop the right by enough. It would be great if more oversight of Facebook would lead to Facebook just not interfering in politics at all and maybe giving up on "engagement", but that's not what the government and "whistleblowers" are trying to do. It's a power struggle to make sure that the right people make Facebook political in the right way.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

I don't really know how this is surprising or a crisis. I assumed this was going on. I mean Facebook is full of genius level intellects and only an idiot could miss the garbage that shows up in 99% of the feeds on Facebook (political/pandemic conspiracy and made up memes). There is literally no way they weren't discussing it internally. Now everyone is pearl clutching? That period was over a decade ago, if not longer. The US government isn't going to do anything about this except hold more hearing where old white men think about how this affects the tubes the young folks are using these days. Maybe the European governments will accomplish something.

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