The Daily Wire, the right-wing website founded by pundit Ben Shapiro, is a cesspool of misogyny, bigotry, and misinformation. Its toxic content is also fantastically successful on Facebook, with each story reaching more people than any other major media outlet. A Popular Information investigation reveals some of this success is attributable to a clandestine network of 14 large Facebook pages that purport to be independent but exclusively promote content from The Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion.
Get fucked, Zuckerburg. Transcript here, and footage here: M.Z.: “Congresswoman, I think lying is bad. I think if you were to run an ad that had a lie, that would be bad. That’s different from it being — in our position, the right thing to prevent your constituents or people in an election from seeing that you had lied.” A.O.C.: “So you won’t take down lies or you will take down lies? It’s a pretty simple yes or no.” M.Z.: “Congresswoman, in most cases, in a democracy, I believe people should be able to see for themselves what politicians they may or may not vote for are saying and judge their character for themselves.” I agree with the NYT op-ed that we cannot trust the average citizen to think critically, question sources, veracity, etc. We've been doing an experiment on that for the last decade. The fact that 40% of America doesn't think Trump has committed a crime is conclusive proof. Regulate Facebook political adverts. Now. In very related news, I'm not on board with Michelle Obama's "They go low, we go high" philosophy any more. The only language these people understand is emotional, which is why it was so pathetic to see all the pearl clutching and hand wringing on the left about Trump being spontaneously booed and chanted at during Game 5 of the World Series. The calm, collected, logical style of messaging has failed. Give up. Get angry.A.O.C.: “Do you see a potential problem here with a complete lack of fact-checking on political advertisements?”
Just to catalog this moment in history, breitbart.com has an article in their #3 spot right now with the headline doxxing the (I kid you not) "likely whistleblower". That's where we are. A major right-wing media outlet distributing speculative information related to violation of federal whistleblower protection law. Encouraged by members of Congress central to the impeachment trial (Devin Nunes and his crew). And I can guarantee you that it's getting shared like a pandemic on F-book.
Something I haven’t seen talked about is the purported diverse values of these companies in hiring developers. Zuck breaks rules for conservatives and breaks bread with Shapiro, giving tacit approval to the idea that LGBT pride sucks as much as The Daily Caller’s corespondents think it does. How does it feel to be a gay Facebook employee? Does that bother them as much as I feel like it should? In any case, the juxtaposition is amusing in a sort of exhausting way
At the very least, it should make you suspicious of corporate pride stuff. I mean, it's cool that "people who support LGBT folks" is an advertising demographic nowadays, but it'd be nice if that meant material changes rather than companies just trying to make a buck off people being gay.
The problem is that our current world really makes you pick your battles on this one. I understand why it would suck to be a gay Facebook employee, for example, but why is that your fight versus, say, labor conditions in chip manufacturing plants? The point isn't that one matters more than the other necessarily, it's that we only have so many hours in the day, and we have to just ignore some problems sometimes.
No worries, and God knows I understand the frustration. And to be clear, my point wasn't that such frustration would be wrong, I was just positing a good reason why someone may be in the situation you describe and not be bent out of shape by the whole thing.