Tag: Mark Zuckerberg

Punching Fauci?

“This is just one of those things where things get taken out of context,” congressional candidate Hung Cao told WJLA in Arlington, Virginia, responding to his opponents TV ads, which charge that Cao said he “wants to punch Dr. Fauci in the face.”

Mr. Cao, a colorful fellow, came to America from war-torn Vietnam when he was just four. He graduated from the Naval Academy and served for 25 years — a combat veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

“[T]he real quote was ‘if there’s two people I could punch in the face and get away with it, it would be Mark Zuckerberg and Fauci,’” explained Cao. “I’m not advocating violence. All I’m saying is we are so frustrated with people — unelected officials — making decisions for this country like Mark Zuckerberg being able to ban people based on speech and Dr. Fauci shutting down businesses.”

Cao clarified that he is “all about law and order.”

His opponents “are also tying Cao to January 6th in television ads,” notes WJLA.

“You know where I was on January 6?” Cao asks. “I just landed from my last combat deployment in Afghanistan and my kids voted unanimously to open presents after I returned. So, that morning … we were actually opening Christmas presents,” he said. “I was trying to keep my eyes open with toothpicks, because I was so tired from the jetlag. And … to superimpose my face onto January 6, and then, not only that, Confederate flags as if I’m some sort of white supremacist.”

His word for that: insulting.

While attacked as an extremist, however, Cao has not shied away from defending parents — including homeschoolers, like he and wife — from the real extremists running our schools, and opposing President Biden’s COVID vaccine mandates that are kicking “heroes” out of the military “like trash.”

He even has a commercial where, as a former kick-boxing champion, he invited voters to join him in kicking Congress!

Sadly, as much as I want to, I cannot vote for Cao.

I’m in an adjacent district.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Asked to express the importance of “previous experience in government or politics,” Cao explained to Ballotpedia: “Career politicians are a cancer. Being a county supervisor or city mayor makes them no more qualified than a truck driver.”

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Illustration created with Craiyon

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Accountability ballot access First Amendment rights

Zuckerbuck Sucker Punch

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, elections, democracy

Who should fund our public elections?

Partisan billionaires?

Last election, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, “gave $419 million to two nonprofit organizations that disbursed grants in 2020 to more than 2,500 election departments,” reports The New York Times.

The idea was to help officials deal with holding an election during a pandemic. No laws were necessarily broken. Apparently, private individuals and groups can give money to government election offices — even “with strings attached.”

“Some conservatives see this largesse of ‘Zuckerbucks,’” informs a Wall Street Journal editorial, “as a clever plot to help Democrats win.” In fact, a Capital Research Center (CRC) analysis found the liberal non-profit “consistently gave bigger grants and more money per capita to counties that voted for Biden.”

“[A] deep dive into the available data shows that the funds were largely requested for get-out-the-vote efforts, influenced voter turnout in favor of Democrats, and may have impacted the results of the election in some states,” explains the Foundation for Government Accountability. “According to currently available information, less than one percent of the funds were actually spent on PPE nationwide.”

Can you imagine the outcry if a group with “conservative ties” funded by Charles Koch was giving grants to help Republican-rich jurisdictions rock the vote?

“[E]ven under the purest motives,” the Journal’s editorial offers, “private election funding is inappropriate and sows distrust.”

That’s why 16 states have since passed laws to restrict private funding of election programs.

Mr. Zuckerberg himself sees the danger in Zuckerbucks: “To be clear, I agree with those who say that government should have provided these funds, not private citizens.” Last week, he announced he would not be providing such funding in the 2022 elections.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture social media

F‑Book Goes Meta

Metaverse, Facebook, VR, virtual reality

When Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of Facebook’s parent company to “Meta,” months back, a lot of people found this funny.

But for some of us older folks, the name was more funny-peculiar than funny-ha-ha. We’re used to “meta” as in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics — the latter so-called because the book came “after the Physics.”

So what does Zuckerberg’s desire to take the lead in the “shared virtual reality” market (Meta’s confessed goal) have to do with “after” anything? After real reality, there’s meta-reality? Uh, OK.

I don’t think I’ll be an early adopter of that waste of time. I still have things to do.

But that’s old Facebook news. Now, ready yourself for today’s Facebook news: defending itself from John Stossel’s defamation lawsuit over a bad case of pseudo-fact-checking, Facebook has admitted that its fact-checking is, from a legal point of view, opinion.

“In referring to its frequent use of ‘fact-checker’ labels on posts,” explains The Patriot Post, “the conglomerate stated in its motion for dismissal, ‘The [fact-check] labels themselves are neither false nor defamatory; to the contrary, they constitute protected opinion.’”

Truth is, as the New York Post observes, the whole “fact-check industry is funded by liberal moguls such as George Soros, government-funded nonprofits and the tech giants themselves.”

Facebook is moving beyond reality fast. Meta-fast. When bad “fact-checking” is defended as mere opinion, reality refracts to the point of unintelligibility.

Maybe Facebook’s name should be changed to Fraudbook, for while opinion is protected speech, labeling one’s opinions “facts” under the rubric of “fact-checking” sure looks, if not like legal fraud, exactly, certainly fraud in common parlance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies property rights Regulating Protest too much government U.S. Constitution

That Something You Do

Congress, Facebook, hearings, control, regulations, Mark Zuckerberg, censorship, censor, regulate

Congress grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, last week, and as usual ended up roasting itself.

“Zuckerberg has already experienced the worst punishment of all,” quipped comedian Trevor Noah on The Daily Show. “He had to spend four hours explaining Facebook to senior citizens.”

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, retiring after his 42nd consecutive year in Washington, asked, “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”

“Senator,” Zuckerberg incredulously replied, “we run ads.”

Inc. magazine reported the obvious: “several of our elected leaders asked questions that were highly uninformed, or in some cases just plain weird.”

Uninformed. Weird. That’s them, alright.*

Still, the Washington establishment seems to seriously think these same congressmen ought to be re-writing privacy rules.

“Elected officials know the public wants them to do something to protect their privacy,” announced Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. “The question now turns to what is that something?”

“Americans are largely together on this issue,” Todd said, citing a recent poll where a similar “66 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Republicans say they want more control over the information companies have about them.”

But Democrats and Republicans are together on something else: Only 21 percent of Democrats and a tiny 14 percent of Republicans “trust the federal government” to act on the issue.

The senators, though obviously “confused about basic topics,” Emily Stewart wrote at Vox, “seem to agree they want to fix something about Facebook. They just have no idea what.”

Please Congress: DON’T “do something.” Don’t do that thing you do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Reason TV has a very funny video on the Zuckerberg hearing.

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Tags censor, censorship, Congress, control, Facebook, hearings, Mark Zuckerberg, regulate, regulations

Accountability folly general freedom media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

The Senator Intrudes

Sen. John Thune, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, fairness doctrine, censorship

We know that the media in general, and Silicon Valley, too, have strong anti-conservative biases — even if, in another sense, the Fourth Estate serves as almost the embodiment of one understanding of the conservative impulse: relentlessly upholding established institutions, against all attacks. The American media strongly defends the modern state; every program, it seems, is sacrosanct: the only thing wrong with Big, Intrusive Government is that it is not as Big and Intrusive as it should be.

This week, several ex-Facebook news curators alleged systemic “political bias” in how stories receive the top spot in Facebook’s Trending news section. So Sen. John Thune (R‑S.D.) intrudes. He wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in his official capacity on the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Communication. Thune says that if Facebook is, in effect, promoting stories by means of a hidden political agenda, this amounts to something like a public fraud, which lies within this committee’s purview.

I don’t see how. And I really would like such biases and pseudo-frauds to be dealt with by consumer pressure rather than government whip. And that should be without regard to the partisan stripe of the bias — or the whip.

Anthony L. Fisher, over at Reason, notes that the senator has a logic problem: he rests his case for government oversight of Facebook rules and consumer relations on the infamous “fairness doctrine,” which is not operative at this time, and which Thune has previously and repeatedly opposed.

And for good reason: the doctrine produced government-enforced muting of speech, not fairness.

But this all may mean almost nothing. I’d never even noticed Facebook’s Trending section.

Have you?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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