Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Facebook United States Politics

Elizabeth Warren Mocks Facebook's Ad Policy By Lying About Mark Zuckerberg (cnn.com) 269

"A fresh series of Facebook ads this week by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren seeks to put the social media giant on the defensive -- by telling a lie," writes CNN.

An anonymous reader quotes their report: The ads, which began running widely on Thursday, start with a bold but obvious falsehood: That Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have endorsed President Trump's reelection campaign.

"You're probably shocked," reads the ad, which has already reached tens of thousands of viewers nationwide. "And you might be thinking, 'how could this possibly be true?' Well, it's not."

The ad's own admission of a lie seeks to draw attention to a controversial Facebook policy Warren has spent days criticizing. Under the policy, Facebook exempts ads by politicians from third-party fact-checking... In a statement Friday responding to Warren's ad, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said the company believes political speech should be protected. "If Senator Warren wants to say things she knows to be untrue, we believe Facebook should not be in the position of censoring that speech," the Stone said...

Warren has become one of Facebook's key antagonists after first calling for it and other Silicon Valley giants -- such as Amazon, Google and Apple -- to be broken up. But her rift with Facebook deepened after leaked audio published by The Verge revealed Zuckerberg fretting about the potential consequences of a Warren presidency. "If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge," Zuckerberg is heard saying at a companywide meeting. "And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don't want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. ... But look, at the end of the day, if someone's going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight."

Warren responded via Twitter, "What would really 'suck' is if we don't fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy."

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Elizabeth Warren Mocks Facebook's Ad Policy By Lying About Mark Zuckerberg

Comments Filter:
  • Must be The Rock's little brother...

  • No complaint here (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12, 2019 @09:46AM (#59299516)

    Don't care which party it comes from, the more pressure that can be put on those unwiped asses (Zuck and Sandberg), the better.

    The further this topic is dragged into the sunlight, the clearer the line between advertising, editorials and news will become. Joe Sixpack (understandably) doesn't appreciate what's going on, we all need a deeper discussion to figure it out.

    And as a byproduct it may even shine more light on their anti-privacy practices out too.

    • Hol up... Zuckerberg is only a problem if you willingly give him your information so he can sell it. Politicians own you whether you agree to participate in their bullshit or not. It just goes to show how insane things have gotten for people to cheer on a greater evil attacking a smaller evil.

      I am going to laugh if Zuckerberg manages to make warren look a fool, considering the fact that Warren is already willing to make herself look on, it should not be too hard if Zuckerberg actually tries.

      Both of these

    • I am not sure how much pressure this puts on Zuck.

      I suspect that he is a closet Trump supporter. So accusing him of being a Trump supporter isn't a big deal to him.

  • popcorn (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Saturday October 12, 2019 @09:49AM (#59299520) Journal

    Elizabeth Warren vs Mark Zuckerberg

    It'll be interesting watching the Slashdot Patriots try to work this one out. But whatever you think of Senator Warren, this was a pretty clever response to Zuckerberg's unwillingness to address Facebook's use for spreading misinformation. And whatever you think of Mark Zuckerberg, you know damn well Facebook should be broken up.

    • Re:popcorn (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dallas May ( 4891515 ) on Saturday October 12, 2019 @10:05AM (#59299546)

      What would a broken up Facebook look like?

      • Re:popcorn (Score:4, Insightful)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Saturday October 12, 2019 @11:22AM (#59299752) Homepage Journal

        Ideally it would look like a hole where Facebook used to be.

      • What would a broken up Facebook look like?

        In an ideal world, your "social network page" would work just like your email: you can host your account at any party (or just do it yourself), and an open and standardized protocol ensures all those separate social mini-sites work together.

        The broken up Facebook would simply be a collection of hosting companies that take care of storing your particular page. You don't like one? You just move to another...

      • by Chromal ( 56550 )
        "Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site. We can’t connect to the server at www.facebook.com. If that address is correct, here are three other things you can try: Try again later. Check your network connection. If you are connected but behind a firewall, check that Firefox has permission to access the Web. [try again]"
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by PopeRatzo ( 965947 )

        What would a broken up Facebook look like?

        Like a platform with an open, extensible protocol. Or, like a publisher who takes responsibility for what it publishes. One or the other, but this "neither fish nor fowl" notion that they can be whatever they want to be and violate anyone's privacy whenever it wants and track you everywhere you go even when you're not on Facebook is not what it would look like.

        Does that clear things up for you?

    • Facebook can make it hard to find your news. THey have been caught hiding negative stories on themselves.

    • If you had more than one brain cell, you'd realize we don't care. Let them tear themselves apart. Whoever wins, well at least one bad one lost. And that's one less to worry about later.
      • If you had more than one brain cell, you'd realize we don't care. Let them tear themselves apart.

        It seems you have a whole lot to say about things you don't care about. I think you protest too much, Rooster.

        • It seems you have a whole lot to say about things you don't care about. I think you protest too much, Rooster.

          He's smart enough to abandon battles when it's obvious he's lost on all levels (can't even get a reaction out of the target) so it looks to me like he's posting just enough... to get paid.

          • Oh drinky, if only you had a clue... Class warfare and envy is all you have to fall back upon!
            • Do you get extra for non sequiturs, or are those pro bono?

              • Depends upon how many I post. Uncle Vlad loves it when we post lots of off-topic things on Slashdot, as everyone in Ukraine knows it's the center of World Politics. At least that's what Hunter told us at the last board meeting as we figured out how much more money to steal from the UN...
        • Seriously - we don't care who loses, and we'd prefer if both lose. But in this battle, one will lose, the other will be weakened. How is that a bad thing?
  • revealed Zuckerberg fretting

    Gee -- a CEO reflecting on the potential future environment of his company. How revolutionary!

    Warren responded

    And their opponent responds, also thinking about the future. Why it's like they're trying to have a dialog by speaking AT each other. (Listening? That's just for the little people of no influence.)

    But they can't have a real conversation because they're actually representing ideas, AND the issues are too complex to resolve -- resolve?? HA! Try simply iterating them instead -- in a single, or even a thousand

  • by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Saturday October 12, 2019 @09:53AM (#59299528)
    "Maybe you are right, which is why we are going to start beta testing the policy you propose by banning you for lying about us."
  • Defence (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Livius ( 318358 )

    Is that really putting Facebook on the defensive? You can argue it's not a perfect policy, but as long as Facebook treats all candidates equally she doesn't have a legitimate objection.

    She's just trying to provoke Facebook, and Facebook wins by simply ignoring her. Then all Warren is left with is:
    1. Warren has freely and deliberately lied and by admitting it has no possibility of denying that she's lied. We know politicians always lie but they typically don't take pride in it.
    2. Warren has explicitly ack

    • You can argue it's not a perfect policy, but as long as Facebook treats all candidates equally she doesn't have a legitimate objection.

      She certainly does. If she's not willing to lie and play dirty, that puts her at a disadvantage over those who couldn't care less about lying. I don't vote for candidates who lie, for example.

      She's actually gone out of her way to make herself look less honest than Trump.

      You gotta be either a potted plant or in a coma to believe this.
  • I really like how Warren is hitting her stride right now.

  • She's awesome (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 12, 2019 @10:10AM (#59299562)

    She's been focused the whole time on planning and passing helpful legislation while everyone else is running like chickens with heads cut off.

    She's avoided all of the partisan bashing, bullying, and mudslinging. Every time I hear her speak she's taken the high road. Every time she explains herself it's well thought out and considerate.

    Every time someone disagrees with her, she wants to hear more and work to take that viewpoint into account. She treats everyone like they're on the same level and nobody is better or worse than anyone else.

    I hope she makes it, she's got my vote.

    • > She's avoided all of the partisan bashing, bullying,
      > and mudslinging.

      Except against those of us who make our living working with computers. I soured on Warren immediately when she hopped on that tired old hipper-than-thou "nerds/geeks/dot-commers/techies are the devil and ruining everything" bandwagon. I like my career choice and look forward to continuing in that career for quite a while thank-you-very-much. And if that makes too uncool for Warren, too fucking bad.

      That said, in this case she is

  • by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt AT nerdflat DOT com> on Saturday October 12, 2019 @10:15AM (#59299576) Journal

    While it opened with a false statement, even before the end of the ad, you were aware that it was deliberately contrived to be so, in order to highlight problems with the Facebook not censoring untrue statements.

    So the message of the ad, in its entirety, is not really untrue at all. It is an acknowledgement of truth (that facebook's policy is such that it does not censor political speech, regardless of its veracity), and an illustration through the use of what amounts to a hypothetical example to try and show how that might otherwise pose a problem (their example is made hypothetical by explicitly stating before the end of the ad that the statement in question was not true). By deflating its own case to that of just a hypothetical example, I believe that it fails to drive home its own point.

  • Warren makes an especially good point here. The "press" as it used to be called, holds a privileged position because it played an especially vital role as the court of public opinion. It was in the pages of early newspapers that politics were argued. Freedom of the press, the old saying goes, belonged to the guy who owned one--a printing press. That printing press has been replaced by social media.

    The lame-ass, complacent fucks who run the journalism business (I feel qualified to say this because I worked f

  • I'm a little disappointed that it isn't more inflammatory though. Maybe something like "Trump and Zuckerberg caught in threesome with a sheep, click here to learn more!"

  • Seems like fucking with people, but is it really lying if they tell you outright that it's a device? Seems more like it's trolling to inform. It's still deceptive, but on the political scale, not particularly.

  • Someone finally has the courage to stand up and mock Facebook! /sarcasm

    I do agree with her on this point, but this really does fall under the category of easly low-hanging fruit. Everyone already hates on Facebook; yet most people keep right on using it.

  • If she wants FB truth tests, quite a few of her plans will fail. Or she's going to have to add lots of "if and only if I suspend the constitution" fine print.
  • This line: "fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy"

    Does this woman believe that Facebook is another branch of the armed forces like the Marines and the Air Force? Or does she honestly think that this corporation can 'vote' in a ballot box?

    It is a corporation. It exists to make money. It makes that money by giving people a steaming cesspool of stupidity where everybody thinks their stupidass idea and thought matters. It doesn't get much more democratic than that. Everybody is equal. Her big

    • This line: "fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy"
      Does this woman believe that Facebook is another branch of the armed forces like the Marines and the Air Force? Or does she honestly think that this corporation can 'vote' in a ballot box?

      It is every citizen's responsibility to protect our democracy, whether they work for facebook or not. If you don't help to protect it, you don't deserve it. And our military hasn't fought to protect democracy since WWII. The only thing that makes Facebook possible in the first place is our government. Without it there would be no internet, and no first amendment.

      • by skogs ( 628589 )

        I think you need to visit the middle east and see how they feel about your freedom there. Dress yourself up in a flag and see how many other people are going to defend your right to be an idiot.

        Al Gore did not create the internet. Without reasonable PEOPLE there would be no first amendment. Those same reasonable PEOPLE that gave you the first amendment, also gave you the second expressly to make sure the government wasn't giving and taking everything from you.

        • I think you need to visit the middle east and see how they feel about your freedom there.

          I don't go there specifically because they don't feel about it the way I feel about it.

          Al Gore did not create the internet.

          Read this and weep [umich.edu].

          Without reasonable PEOPLE there would be no first amendment.

          Without someone protecting your "rights", they aren't rights at all. They're ideals, and meaningless ones at that.

          Those same reasonable PEOPLE that gave you the first amendment, also gave you the second expressly to make sure the government wasn't giving and taking everything from you.

          Um, yeah. Which puts the onus on you and me to defend democracy. Thanks for supporting my point, I guess, even if you veered way off course.

          • by skogs ( 628589 )

            I support your idea 9000% on the people defending democracy. I agree that blood pays for those rights. Honestly only frustrated by the assertion that the military doesn't fight to protect it, and that Al Gore is anything but a politician. He schmoozed....a lot....that doesn't make him an engineer or a visionary. Lets just say he was involved...like the public affairs department is involved. They create nothing. They just talk about it a lot...sometimes incorrectly.

            • Honestly only frustrated by the assertion that the military doesn't fight to protect it,

              I find it frustrating, too, but they fight for corporate profits. Service members may well believe that they fight for freedom, but they are wrong.

              and that Al Gore is anything but a politician. He schmoozed....a lot....that doesn't make him an engineer or a visionary. Lets just say he was involved...like the public affairs department is involved. They create nothing. They just talk about it a lot...sometimes incorrectly.

              The people who created the ARPAnet tell us that Al Gore was instrumental in making it the Internet. I'm going to respect that.

Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis. It makes sense, when you don't think about it.

Working...