The fox guarding the chicken coop

Facebook is arguably the very worst organization to lead the charge against "fake news" than any organization not called "The Onion", as Techdirt concluded long before Mark Zuckerberg's latest George Soros-funded crusade:

Facebook is generally seen as a key multiplier in this false force of non-news, which is probably what led the social media giant to declare war on fake news sites a year or so back. So how'd that go? Well, the results as analyzed over at Buzzfeed seems to suggest that Facebook has either lost this war it declared or is losing it badly enough that it might as well give it up.

To gauge Facebook’s progress in its fight, BuzzFeed News examined data across thousands of posts published to the fake news sites’ Facebook pages, and found decidedly mixed results. While average engagements (likes + shares + comments) per post fell from 972.7 in January 2015 to 434.78 in December 2015, they jumped to 827.8 in January 2016 and a whopping 1,304.7 in February. 

Some of the posts on the fake news sites’ pages went extremely viral many months after Facebook announced its crackdown. In August, for instance, an Empire News story reporting that Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sustained serious injuries in prison received more than 240,000 likes, 43,000 shares, and 28,000 comments on its Facebook page. The incident was pure fiction, but still spread like wildfire on the platform. An even less believable September post about a fatal gang war sparked by the “Blood” moon was shared over 22,000 times from the Facebook page of Huzlers, another fake news site.

So, how did this war go so wrong for Facebook? Well, to start, it relied heavily on user-submitted notifications that a link or site was a fake news site. Sounds great, as aggregating feedback has worked quite well in other arenas. For this, however, it was doomed from the start. The purpose of fake news sites is, after all, to fool people, and fooled people are obviously not reporting the links as fake. Even when a reader manages to determine eventually that a link was a fake news post at a later time, perhaps after sharing it and having comments proving it false, how many of those people then take steps to report the link? Not enough, clearly, as the fake news scourge marches on.

Another layer of the problem appears to be the faith and trust the general public puts into some famous people they are following, who have also been fooled with startling regularity. Take D.L. Hughley, for example. The comedian, whose page is liked by more than 1.7 million people, showed up twice in the Huzlers logs. One fictitious Huzlers story he posted, about Magic Johnson donating blood, garnered more than 10,000 shares from his page. Hughley, who did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment, also shared four National Report links in 2015. 

Radio stations also frequently post fake news. The Florida-based 93XFM was one of a number of radio stations BuzzFeed News discovered sharing Huzlers posts in 2015. Asked about one April post linking to a Huzlers story about a woman smoking PCP and chewing off her boyfriend’s penis, a 93XFM DJ named Sadie explained that fact-checking Facebook posts isn’t exactly a high priority.

So, it's not the dark and ever-dangerous Alt-Right that is to blame for fake news, but celebrities and Facebook itself. Moreover, Facebook isn't even reliable when it comes to reporting its own internal metrics to advertisers, as it has been caught exaggerating its own traffic numbers for the FOURTH time. Or, as Facebook would prefer you see it, accidentally making mistakes that just coincidentally happened to favor its own financial interests again for the fourth straight time.

Facebook Inc. built a colossal business based on measuring something older advertising methods cannot: the granular details about people. Two months ago, the company copped to a flaw in that measurement. Then Facebook did it again. And again.

On Friday, Facebook revealed faulty metrics with Instant Articles, its mobile publishing system, the fourth disclosure of a measurement error since September. The admission sharpened calls for more independent organizations to monitor the performance of digital advertising. And some large firms that buy a lot of ads said they will more closely scrutinize their spending on the social networking giant and could shift marketing dollars elsewhere....

In September, Facebook shared its first measurement error: inflated viewership numbers for its video ads, a relatively new product. Two months later, the company disclosed additional metric errors along with new tools for third-party measurement companies, including ComScore and Nielsen, to track its system more closely.

Problems persisted. Earlier this month, a report in Marketing Land, an industry publication, spotted a discrepancy between Facebook's internal metrics on how articles where shared and public measurements. Facebook confirmed the error. "That shouldn't happen," said Brian Wieser, senior analyst, Pivotal Research Group. "If anyone was concerned that Facebook's self-audit was not sufficient enough, they just proved it."

I don't know why anyone is surprised that Facebook is trafficking heavily in false information on every side. Look at who runs it. Once a con artist, always a con artist. That's been Zuckerberg's motif from the start.

Facebook scraping call data from Android phones

Facebook's privacy violations are considerably worse than most people imagined:

This past week, a New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site. While scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years' worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.

This experience has been shared by a number of other Facebook users who spoke with Ars, as well as independently by us—my own Facebook data archive, I found, contained call-log data for a certain Android device I used in 2015 and 2016, along with SMS and MMS message metadata.

In response to an email inquiry by Ars about this data gathering, a Facebook spokesperson replied, "The most important part of apps and services that help you make connections is to make it easy to find the people you want to connect with. So, the first time you sign in on your phone to a messaging or social app, it's a widely used practice to begin by uploading your phone contacts."

The spokesperson pointed out that contact uploading is optional and installation of the application explicitly requests permission to access contacts. And users can delete contact data from their profiles using a tool accessible via Web browser.

Facebook uses phone-contact data as part of its friend recommendation algorithm. And in recent versions of the Messenger application for Android and Facebook Lite devices, a more explicit request is made to users for access to call logs and SMS logs on Android and Facebook Lite devices. But even if users didn't give that permission to Messenger, they may have given it inadvertently for years through Facebook's mobile apps—because of the way Android has handled permissions for accessing call logs in the past.

If you granted permission to read contacts during Facebook's installation on Android a few versions ago—specifically before Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)—that permission also granted Facebook access to call and message logs by default. The permission structure was changed in the Android API in version 16. But Android applications could bypass this change if they were written to earlier versions of the API, so Facebook API could continue to gain access to call and SMS data by specifying an earlier Android SDK version. Google deprecated version 4.0 of the Android API in October 2017—the point at which the latest call metadata in Facebook users' data was found. Apple iOS has never allowed silent access to call data.

I'm not at all surprised by this sort of thing. I expect even worse violations will be uncovered. It's why I removed What's App from my phone the day that I heard Facebook acquired them. Facebook simply doesn't understand or accept normal human concerns as legitimate, because it is run by an autistic alien robot whose "hello, fellow humans" act is about as convincing as the average 36-year old Pakistani immigrant claiming to be a Syrian child refugee.

Facebook: failure or fraud?

It's fascinating to see that after all the ways that Big Social is spying on everyone, what has the media in an uproar is the belated realization that a sword can always cut two ways. They didn't mind when they knew it was the Obama, Hillary, and the SJW-converged corporations that were data-mining, but now that they realize the Right - and in particular, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump - can and have done exactly the same thing, they suddenly have reservations about the wisdom of letting organizations have access to that level of data.

Facebook is facing an existential test, and its leadership is failing to address it.

Good leaders admit mistakes, apologize quickly, show up where they're needed and show their belief in the company by keeping skin in the game.

Facebook executives, in contrast, react to negative news with spin and attempts to bury it. Throughout the last year, every time bad news has broken, executives have downplayed its significance. Look at its public statements last year about how many people had seen Russian-bought election ads — first it was 10 million, then it was 126 million.

Top execs dodged Congress when it was asking questions about Russian interference. They are selling their shares at a record clip.

The actions of Facebook execs now recall how execs at Nokia and Blackberry reacted after the iPhone emerged. Their revenues kept growing for a couple years -- and they dismissed the threats. By the time users started leaving in droves, it was too late.

There's no outside attacker bringing Facebook down. It's a circular firing squad that stems from the company's fundamental business model of collecting data from users, and using that data to sell targeted ads. For years, users went along with the bargain. But after almost a year of constant negative publicity, their patience may be waning.

Facebook did not initially respond to questions or a request for comment from CNBC.

Here is a less generous theory. We know that Facebook was being propped up by the CIA from the start. But the CIA is now under the control of the God-Emperor. Which means that a) Facebook's dirty laundry is more likely to come out, and, b) Facebook is not going to be financially propped up the way it has been from the very beginning.

Which, of course, raises the interesting question about whether it ever was a viable business at all. Or even a legal one.

Facebook may face more legal trouble than you might think in the wake of Cambridge Analytica's large-scale data harvesting. Former US officials David Vladeck and Jessica Rich have told the Washington Post that Facebook's data sharing may violate the FTC consent decree requiring that it both ask for permission before sharing data and report any authorized access. The "Thisisyourdigitallife" app at the heart of the affair asked for permission from those who directly used it, but not the millions of Facebook friends whose data was taken in the process.

If the FTC did find violations, Facebook could be on the hook for some very hefty fines -- albeit fines that aren't likely to be as hefty as possible. The decree asks for fines as large as $40,000 per person, but that would amount to roughly $2 trillion. Regulators like the FTC historically push for fines they know companies can pay, which would suggest fines that are 'just' in the billion-dollar range. Given that there are already multiple American and European investigations underway, any financial penalty would be just one piece of a larger puzzle.

Would you not just love to see Facebook hit with a $2 trillion fine?

Facebook is not your friend

Facebook has transformed itself into Big Brother. If you're on it, it's time to get off the platform:

Facebook began a Europe-wide campaign on Monday to thwart extremist posts on social media, after German politicians in particular raised concerns about a rise in xenophobic comments linked to an influx of refugees.

The U.S.-based group launched its "Initiative for Civil Courage Online" in Berlin, pledging over 1 million euros (1 million pounds) to support non-governmental organisations in their efforts to counter racist and xenophobic posts.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said hate speech "has no place in our society", including in the Internet.

Facebook's ground rules forbid bullying, harassment and threatening language, but critics say it does not enforce them properly. On Friday, the firm said it had hired a unit of the publisher Bertelsmann to monitor and delete racist posts on its platform in Germany.

One of the first things Facebook has apparently done, as part of this campaign "to counter racist and xenophobic posts", is to expel over 1,000 members of the Facebook group "#GamerGate & #NotYourShield". The 2,300-member Facebook group #GG  was also shut down yesterday.

Some have said that it was a group mod who was responsible; I'm not on Facebook and I wasn't a member of those groups, so I don't know. All I know is from an email sent by a member of both groups who was expelled from the first one.

Regardless, it is important to understand that Facebook is not your friend. Facebook is your enemy and it is the enemy of Western civilization. So stop supporting it. Stop using it.

UPDATE: Facebook has also repeatedly removed the video of a 15-year-old German girl who expressed her fears of those who have invaded her country on the grounds of xenophobia:

Hello, you can read the newspapers but this video is about the real situation in Germany. I would like to tell everyone about this on Youtube and Facebook. I am almost 16. I would like everyone to know what is going on, what I am authentically feeling at this moment.

And I am so scared everywhere. For example, if my family and I go out together, or if I see a movie with my friends. Usually I stay at home, but sometimes I stay out until 6 pm in winter, and it is so scary. It is just very hard to live day-to-day life as a woman.

I just want to say that I am not a racist. But one day, a terrible thing happened at the supermarket. I ran all the way home. I was so frightened for my life. There’s no other way to describe it.

My aunt and her friend have said you have to grow up. Why should we, children, have to grow up in such fear? It’s not just me, my friends too. You can see on Facebook, a 17 year old attacked, a 15 year old attacked, two 12-year olds attacked, so many. It is really so sad that this is happening … because of YOU PEOPLE. :(

Forget Facebook

It's all Idka now. As the Brainstormers know, we've been trying out a new Swedish Facebook alternative called Idka. It has a lot of advantages over Facebook, particularly because they don't use your data, sell your data, or invade your privacy. Better yet, they let you control your groups and organizations very strictly. It's got chat too.

We've already got an Arkhaven organization there which we're using in a quasi-Dropbox capacity and I've set up an ELOE group there as well, so if you're not interested in having Mark Zuckerberg sell the pictures of your cousin's children to sketchy companies in Turkey and Indonesia, I would strongly suggest getting off Facebook and giving Idka a whirl. You can find me there as well, and if you would like an invite to the ELOE group, let me know on Idka.

Just to be clear, I have no interest in Idka nor do I have anything to do with it, it's just a new tech company with a better (if occasionally esoteric) interface and a lack of interest in exploiting user data like a Muslim rape gang exploiting a drug-addicted 14-year-old British girl without a father in Rotherham.

In the long run, Facebook wants to make its product even more immersive and personal than it is now. It wants people to buy video chatting and personal assistant devices for their homes, and plans to announce those products this spring, say people familiar with the matter. It wants users to dive into Facebook-developed virtual worlds. It wants them to use Facebook Messenger to communicate with businesses, and to store their credit-card data on the app so they can use it to make payments to friends.

Employees have begun to worry that the company won’t be able to achieve its biggest goals if users decide that Facebook isn’t trustworthy enough to hold their data. At the meeting on Tuesday, the mood was especially grim. One employee told a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter that the only time he’d felt as uncomfortable at work, or as responsible for the world’s problems, was the day Donald Trump won the presidency.

It looks like Mark Zuckerberg is about to learn the difference between influence and power.

Lawmakers are demanding to hear directly from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg on the growing controversy over the misuse of its data by Trump-linked Cambridge Analytica, as the social network confronts its most serious political crisis ever in Washington.

"I want to know why this happened, and what’s the extent of the damage, and how they’re going to fix it moving forward," Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said Tuesday when asked about the briefings. Facebook executives, she added, "aren’t coming yet, but they better come."

What Senator Klobuchar doesn't understand is that Facebook's business model, indeed, its entire existence, depends upon being able to violate her privacy concerns. And so much for trying to direct the selected outrage and Steve Bannon and the Trump campaign.

Facebook users are waking up to just how much private information they have handed over to third-party apps. Users are sharing their shock on Twitter at discovering that thousands of software plugins for Facebook have been gathering their data. Some of the better known apps that may be connected to your profile include those of popular sites like Amazon, Buzzfeed, Expedia, Etsy, Instagram, Spotify and Tinder.

Facebook tracks non-users

They might as well go ahead and shut Facebook down now, given the latest revelations and those that are still to come. The number of laws that Zuckerberg's company has broken must be in the triple digits by now:

Facebook's problems just keep accumulating, drip by drip—or more like splash by splash. It’s now been discovered that Facebook not only collects and uses the personal data of its members but also collects the data of those who never signed up for Facebook.

So if you're one of those who blames Facebook users for allowing their personal data to be compromised, don't be so smug. Facebook may be sharing your personal data as well.

Daniel Kahn Gillmor, senior staff technologist at the ACLU, discovered that, although he never joined Facebook or any other social network, Facebook has a detailed profile on him.

Facebook obtains information from those not on Facebook in two different ways: from other Facebook users and by tracking people who visit other other sites on the web.

I can't believe Trump hasn't taken this opportunity to booster his popularity by coming out hard against Big Social yet. He must be occupied with something even more important....

Define truth, fellow humans

Jean-Louis Gassée concludes that the Zuckerbot thinks human beings are suboptimally cognitive bio-machines with an inability to penetrate falsehoods perpetrated by advanced forms of bio-machine processing:

Carefully reading and re-reading Zuckerberg’s words puts me ill at ease. Of course, simply complaining that Facebook’s CEO sounds well-rehearsed won’t do. He’s a pro at managing a major crisis. Persphinctery statements are part of the fare (from the NYT interview):

“Privacy issues have always been incredibly important to people. One of our biggest responsibilities is to protect data.”

But we quickly get to the misrepresentations.

“… someone’s data gets passed to someone who the rules of the system shouldn’t have allowed it to, that’s rightfully a big issue and deserves to be a big uproar.”

Here, Zuckerberg glosses over the pivotal fact that researcher Aleksandr Kogan accessed data in a manner that was fully compatible with Facebook’s own rules (see below). It appears that the rule-breaking started after he put his mitts on the data and made a deal with Cambridge Analytica.

Next, we’re treated to the resolute statements. Facebook now realizes what transpired and will make sure it won’t happen in the future:

“So the actions here that we’re going to do involve first, dramatically reducing the amount of data that developers have access to, so that apps and developers can’t do what Kogan did here. The most important actions there we actually took three or four years ago, in 2014. But when we examined the systems this week, there were certainly other things we felt we should lock down, too.”

Three rich sentences, here. And a problem with each one…

First, an admission that Facebook’s own rules allowed developers overly-broad access to our personal data. Thanks to Ben Thompson, we have a picture of the bewildering breadth of user data developers had access to:

(Thompson’s Stratechery Newsletter is a valuable source of insights, of useful agreements and disagreements.)

Of course, developers have to request the user’s permission to make use of their data — even for something as seemingly “innocent” as a game or psychological quiz — but this isn’t properly informed consent. Facebook users aren’t legal eagles trained in the parsing of deliberately obscure sentences and networks of references and footnotes.

Second, Mark Zuckerberg claims that it wasn’t until 2014 that the company became aware of Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of Facebook’s Open Graph (introduced in 2010). This, to be polite, strains credulity. Facebook is a surveillance machine, its business is knowing what’s happening on its network, on its social graph. More damning is the evidence that Facebook was warned about app permissions abuses in 2011:

“… in August 2011 [European privacy campaigner and lawyer Max] Schrems filed a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission exactly flagging the app permissions data sinkhole (Ireland being the focal point for the complaint because that’s where Facebook’s European HQ is based).”

Finally, Zuckerberg tells us that upon closer examination Facebook realizes that it still has problematic data leaks that need to be attended to (“So we’re going ahead and doing that” he reassures us).

The message is clear: Zuckerberg thinks we’re idiots. How are we to believe Facebook didn’t know — and derived benefits — from the widespread abuse of user data by its developers. We just became aware of the Cambridge Analytica cockroach…how many more are under the sink? In more lawyerly terms: “What did you know, and when did you know it?”

Once more, sociosexual analysis provides useful insight. Remember, the Zuckerbot is not merely a Gamma, it is a Super King Gamma Emulation. And what do Gammas always believe? That their ludicrously transparent deceptions are impenetrable, of course.

Meanwhile, one of the Zuckerbot's human assistants has let the sociopathic cat out of the bag:

On June 18, 2016, one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s most trusted lieutenants circulated an extraordinary memo weighing the costs of the company’s relentless quest for growth.

“We connect people. Period. That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it,” VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth wrote.

“So we connect more people,” he wrote in another section of the memo. “That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies.

“Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.”

Zuckerbot doesn't care at all about its "fellow humans". And it's simply grotesque parody when it tries to pretend it does.

The technocultural war

Milo explains how Facebook-Instagram-Whatsapp has joined with the governments around the world in an unholy alliance to create a global Big Brother:

It’s not just Facebook we’re talking about. They own WhatsApp and they own Instagram. And WhatsApp and Instagram are two of the companies that are winning the short messaging war–that are winning the war for Millennial attention and for Millennial users. Twitter lost that war. Twitter only really appeals to media people: people like you and people like me. We want to kind of keep in touch with our peers. And then some of our fans who are, like, really really keen might sign up for a Twitter account just to see our witty sayings or whatever clever lines we toss off on the way to the train station in the morning. But primarily, Twitter has lost that war. Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp–these are the networks that have billions of users. These are the networks that are getting young users, and Facebook owns two of those three.

The other thing to bear in mind is that Facebook so far has a really really bad track record when it comes to free speech. And not just a bad track record censoring different political opinions like Twitter does. Facebook’s moves are even more sinister, in a way. Facebook has teamed up with governments to censor certain political opinions that the incumbent party doesn’t like. In Germany, for instance, Facebook has teamed up with Angela Merkel to censor reasonable, respectable, mainstream concern about mass Muslim immigration–or just about mass immigration in general–and has started removing this stuff and classifying it as “hate speech.” It is effectively slandering its own users saying that their perfectly reasonable points of view constitute “hate speech” and that they’re not going to be allowed on Facebook, and Facebook has promised the German government that this stuff will be removed within 24 hours. That is outright Orwellian. That is outright terrifying.

Facebook is pure ideological evil. Don't use it. Don't support it. We will have alternatives, they are in the works and they are on the way, but they are going to take time to develop and they are going to need your support.

But we don't need to be worried. We need to be resolute. We can beat them. We will beat them at their game, even though they have the money power on their side. Because the money power is not merely creaking, it is cracking, and we are the side in harmony with truth and reality.

The pendulum always swings back. Never forget that. And the harder they work to restrain it and hold it fixed to one side, the more vicious and unstoppable the return of the pendulum will be.

Sperg designs brave new world

Unsurprisingly, it fails to account for how normal human beings prefer to live their lives:

In 2008, I found myself speaking with the big boss himself, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I was in the second year of my Ph.D. research on Facebook at Curtin University. And I had questions.

Why did Facebook make everyone be the same for all of their contacts? Was Facebook going to add features that would make managing this easier?

To my surprise, Zuckerberg told me that he had designed the site to be that way on purpose. And, he added, it was "lying" to behave differently in different social situations.

Up until this point, I had assumed Facebook's socially awkward design was unintentional. It was simply the result of computer nerds designing for the rest of humanity, without realising it was not how people actually want to interact.

The realisation that Facebook's context collapse was intentional not only changed the whole direction of my research but provides the key to understanding why Facebook may not be so great for your mental health.

The eventual collapse of Facebook is going to be positively epic. The entire operation is simply another attempt to fit the square peg of human behavior into the round hole of Mark Zuckerberg's imaginary world.

The significance of this revelation, which is not exactly a surprise to those of us who have noticed Zuckerberg's bizarre behavior, is that Facebook is going to make increasingly bad decisions based on its inherently false assumptions about people.

The tech crackdown is weakness

As well as an opportunity to foxnews the f------- at Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, and the other social media giants.

This year, the world’s largest social network will see a decline among teen users in the U.S., according to a forecast by EMarketer. It’s the first time the research company has predicted a fall in Facebook usage for any age group.

EMarketer predicts 14.5 million people from the ages of 12 to 17 will use Facebook in 2017, a drop of 3.4 percent from the prior year. Teens are migrating instead to Snap Inc.’s Snapchat and Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Facebook owns, the research company said Monday in a statement.

Facebook has continued to grow around the world, with more than 2 billion users this year, but younger people are finding it less compelling, said Oscar Orozco, a forecasting analyst at EMarketer.

The Facebook/Twitter business model is an intrinsically fraudulent one, propped up by debt and ideology. Which means, of course, that their decline will be unexpectedly fast once it begins. And it is coming soon. Twitter has already ceased to grow. Facebook will follow suit soon. All they will succeed in doing is fracturing and further decentralizing the Internet, which will serve us, not them.

The reason they are cracking down hard now is that they realize their window of opportunity to do so is closing. This is why there is no reason to panic when another deplatforming happens. All that a deplatforming accomplishes is to ensure that a new platform will come into being to replace it.

Remember, there was a time not all that long ago when SJW fans of John Scalzi bragged that his blog traffic was vastly bigger than mine. Now that mine is more than 5x his, he switched to bragging about his 111,329 followers and 178 million annual Twitter impressions... and I am now on pace to equal or exceed his 2016 monthly average of 14.8 million Twitter impressions this month.

The world is a dynamic place. It will knock you down, but when you get up again, hardened by the experience, the experience only makes you that much more formidable.

That being said, the next anti-Right tech strike will be more systematic and multiplatform. I expect that if I am targeted, my accounts will be vanished from Twitter, Blogger, and Gmail simultaneously,  (I don't really use Facebook or Paypal) which is why I am already set up with more reliable alternatives for literally every social media and payment platform, and have arranged for direct email access to every VFM, Book Club, and Daily Meme Wars member. If you want to make sure that you're immediately alerted and provided with the alternatives, I recommend signing up for either the Book Club or if you don't mind daily emails, the Daily Meme Wars.

Quit Facebook

I've never been enthusiastic about Facebook. I hated the clunky interface from the start, saw little point in endlessly exchanging pictures and updates with acquaintances, and only set up an account there because it was required as part of a design job I had to do. I never used it - although since I linked my Twitter account to it, many thought I did - and I was content to leave it after Andrew Marston brought it to the attention of the Facebook police and got it deleted under the "real names" policy.

That being said, if I was on Facebook today, I would delete my account due to the way it is now waging open war against nationalists and American gun rights.

Facebook is banning private sales of guns on its flagship social network and its Instagram photo-sharing service, a move meant to clamp down on unlicensed gun transactions.

Facebook already prohibits people from offering marijuana, pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs for sale, and the company said on Friday that it was updating its policy to include guns. The ban applies to private, person-to-person sales of guns. Licensed gun dealers and gun clubs can still maintain Facebook pages and post on Instagram.

The time to choose your social media side is coming. Don't support the enemy. Delete your account. It's obvious that all the big social media companies are, at the very least, SJW-friendly, but some like Amazon and Google, and even Twitter, are still playing reasonably fair. Remember, Milo was only unverified by Twitter; he wasn't banned. Amazon took down John Scalzi Is A Rapist: Why SJWs Always Lie In Bed Waiting For His Gentle Touch; A Pretty, Pretty Girl Dreams of Her Beloved One While Pondering Gender Identity, Social Justice, and Body Dysmorphia.due to the legally-questionable title but the same book is still for sale on Amazon under its new name, John Scalzi Banned This Book But He Can Never Ban My Burning Love.

Others, like Facebook, Goodreads, and Wikipedia, are not so much tilting the playing field as refusing to let the Right even enter it. So don't support them. You don't have to. You really don't.

The futility of social media bans

I'm not surprised that the well-publicized social media bans aren't harming Alex Jones. The truth is that social media doesn't actually matter all that much for those who already have a strong base of supporters. It's the content that matters much more than the medium.

Some of the nation’s largest technology and social media companies have tried to stop Alex Jones and his conspiracy theories. But in a digital world, their attempts seem to have barely slowed him down.

After YouTube, Facebook and others this week removed content by Jones and his website, the InfoWars leader, talk show host and Austin resident fired back, accusing the companies of censorship and urging his audience to fight back against what he called an “unprecedented attack.”

Meanwhile, Jones’ website and other online platforms have remained popular destinations.

InfoWars continues to see more than 1 million page visits per day and has trended upward this month, according to Amazon’s Alexa website traffic report, which also said InfoWars averages more than 25 million page views per month.

Being banned from Twitter last year and having links to my blog blocked by Twitter and Facebook haven't had any serious effect on my blog either. Last year at this time, the monthly traffic average for VP alone was 2,500,791. Now it is 2,604,358, which represents 4.1 percent annual growth.

Given the massive Twitter audiences that Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec have developed - I had 33k when I was banned - it's likely that the bans have somewhat slowed the growth of the blog and Voxiversity. But they obviously haven't stopped it, which I suspect is one reason why the tech media giants have only engaged in fairly limited banning in response to the demands of their SJWs, who would prefer to ban everyone who is a Republican, who ever voted for a Republican, or is to the Right of Che Guevara.

These bans are a very delicate balancing game for the social media giants. They already know we have built a few alternative platforms and have the ability to build more. And they are very well aware that there is a tipping point somewhere at which too many bans will trigger a snowball effect that will more than decimate their user bases. After all, both Facebook and Twitter are already in decline.

CNBC describes the drop at Facebook as “severe” and goes on to round out its list this way: “The five websites receiving the most traffic in the US in the last several years have been Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Amazon, in that order. However, Facebook has seen a severe decline in monthly page visits, from 8.5 billion to 4.7 billion in the last two years, according to the study. Although Facebook’s app traffic has grown, it is not enough to make up for that loss, the study said.”

Delete your Facebook account NOW

Forget the thought policing. Forget the Infowars ban. Facebook is going to get a LOT worse very soon.

The social-media giant has asked large U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about their customers, including card transactions and checking-account balances, as part of an effort to offer new services to users.

Facebook increasingly wants to be a platform where people buy and sell goods and services, besides connecting with friends. The company over the past year asked JPMorgan Chase JPM 0.03% & Co., Wells Fargo WFC 0.10% & Co., Citigroup Inc. C 0.01% and U.S. Bancorp USB 0.04% to discuss potential offerings it could host for bank customers on Facebook Messenger, said people familiar with the matter.

At this point, if you're still on Facebook, you're not merely putting your children's privacy at risk and aiding and abetting your would-be destroyer, you're downright stupid. I've never been banned from Facebook, I used it sparingly at best, and I got rid of my account anyhow. The ability to indirectly exchange pictures with your extended family or cyberstalk your high school boyfriend just isn't worth it.

If you need to have group communications, get on Idka. If you want more conventional social media, try Oneway. Or go radio dark if that suits you. But regardless, at the very least, deactivate your Facebook account and encourage your friends and family to do the same. It's not going to get better.

Facebook is in SERIOUS trouble

It turns out that the Obama campaign did the same thing that Cambridge Analytica did... only with Facebook's full knowledge and approval:

A former Obama campaign official is claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do — because they were supportive of the campaign.

That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the [Facebook-based app] gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”

The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button. More than 600,000 supporters followed through with more than 5 million contacts, asking their friends to register to vote, give money, vote or look at a video designed to change their mind.

Let's see... 5 million times $40,000 is $200 billion in potential FTC fines. Another $200 billion on top of the $2 trillion they might already owe.

No, don't go

Breaking up with Facebook is harder than breaking up with a real live individual:

According to journalist Sarah Kessler from FastCompany, leaving Facebook can be a long-winded and difficult process. After struggling to find the Delete Account option, which she eventually found by searching Google, she was met with photos of a selection of her Facebook friends with an automated message about how much they'd miss her if she left.

She was then asked to tell Facebook the reasons why she was leaving, which she said was due to privacy concerns, before Facebook tried to persuade her to stay by explaining more about how the site handles private data.

Facebook warned her that by deleting her account she'd lose all of her photos and posts, before trying to convince her to stay by telling her she could deactivate her account for as long as she liked, and then just login to reactivate.

By deactivating, everything on her profile would stay where it is but would become hidden in case she wanted to return to the site.

I wonder how long it will take before Facebook starts actively stalking people?  I never log into my account there and it was constantly pleading at me to pay it attention until I finally spammed its email.

Facebook is dying

This is anecdotal, but I have the impression that Facebook is rapidly going the way of MySpace. As you know, I am also a regular blogger at the Black Gate, which began receiving a substantial amount of traffic from Facebook about two years ago.

However, looking at the pattern of the traffic received over the course of the year, I began to notice that the amount of traffic received from Facebook was declining. Consider the following numbers as percentages of the Facebook-derived January traffic.

Jan 11 100.0
Apr 11 69.3
Jul 11 45.7
Oct 11 63.5
Dec 11 26.5 (est.)

Now, one might reasonably suspect that this is due to a seasonal pattern, except for the fact that the December 2010 traffic was 112.0... with 35 percent less overall traffic than is presently indicated for December 2011. Since Black Gate's traffic has been growing steadily throughout the year, this means Facebook-derived traffic as a percentage of all traffic has fallen even more drastically than it appears in the direct 112:26.5 year-on-year comparison.

I was never a Facebook enthusiast, but I really don't use it anymore. It would seem to appear that I am not the only one.

This is what corporate cancer looks like

From the inside of an SJW-converged corporation:

A former senior Facebook engineer who wrote a memo earlier this year decrying the social media giant's "political monoculture" told Fox News on Tuesday night that the company has a "vocal minority" intent on implementing "social justice policies across our mission."

Brian Amerige, whose last day at Facebook was Friday, told Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight" that "you can't have conversations about ... anything that's a tenet of the social justice ideology, effectively, without being attacked personally." He added that the company's recent policy cracking down on so-called hate speech was a particularly sensitive topic.

"You can't even have conversations about that policy inside the company without having your character attacked -- and I've experienced this personally -- without being called a sexist or a racist or a transphobe or an Islamophobe," said Amerige.

Amerige drew national attention in August when he penned an internal memo, "We Have a Problem With Political Diversity." The memo, which was later leaked to The New York Times, stated that Facebook employees "claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology."

On Tuesday, Amerige said that Facebook executives had taken his concerns seriously and had worked with him to improve the hate speech policy. However, he said rank-and-file, left-leaning employees did not share his concerns.

"The real concerning thing that’s happening here is that even though this is a minority of employees in the company, unfortunately, I’m not sure that Facebook leadership knows how to push back against them," Amerige said. "They're unbelievably belligerent, demanding and hostile not just toward other employees, but toward Facebook leadership directly."

On a much smaller scale, this is exactly what happened to Bleeding Cool after they ran the interview with me. It's what happened to Google with regards to the James Damore incident and the subsequent aftermath. If a corporation's executives do not systematically weed out their SJW infestation, the SJWs will eventually transform their influence into effective control of the corporation, even when they don't hold the executive positions themselves.

And once SJWs metastasize inside a corporation and they take over HR or the corporate board, the corporation is doomed.

Smells like tortious interference

Soros and David Brock appear to be behind the recent social media takedowns:

A confidential, 49-page memo for defeating Trump by working with the major social-media platforms to eliminate “right wing propaganda and fake news” was presented in January 2017  by Media Matters founder David Brock at a retreat in Florida with about 100 donors, the Washington Free Beacon reported at the time.

On Monday, the Gateway Pundit blog noted the memo’s relationship with recent moves by Silicon Valley tech giants to “shadow ban” conservative political candidates and pundits and remove content.

The Free Beacon obtained a copy of the memo, “Democracy Matters: Strategic Plan for Action,” by attending the retreat.

The memo spells out a four-year agenda that deployed Media Matters along with American Bridge, Shareblue and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to attack Trump and Republicans. The strategies are impeachment, expanding Media Matters’ mission to combat “government misinformation,” ensuring Democratic control of the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections, filing lawsuits against the Trump administration, monetizing political advocacy, using a “digital attacker” to delegitimize Trump’s presidency and damage Republicans, and partnering with Facebook to combat “fake news.”

Quashing ‘fake news’ with ‘mathematical precision’

The Free Beacon in its January 2017 story said Brock sought to raise $40 million in 2017 for his organizations.

The document claims Media Matters and far-left groups have “access to raw data from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites” so they can “systemically monitor and analyze this unfiltered data.”

“The earlier we can identify a fake news story, the more effectively we can quash it,” the memo states. “With this new technology at our fingertips, researchers monitoring news in real time will be able to identify the origins of a lie with mathematical precision, creating an early warning system for fake news and disinformation.”

Media Matters met with Facebook, which boasts some 2 billion members worldwide, to discuss how to crack down on fake news, according to the memo.

The social media giant was provided with “a detailed map of the constellation of right-wing Facebook pages that had been the biggest purveyors of fake news.”

Brock’s memo also says Media Matters gave Google “the information necessary to identify 40 of the worst fake new sites” so they could be banned from Google’s advertising network.

The Gateway Pundit pointed out that in 2016, Google carried out that plan on the Gateway Pundit blog and other conservative sites, including Breitbart, the Drudge Report, Infowars, Zero Hedge and Conservative Treehouse.

Facebook, meanwhile has changed its newsfeed algorithm, ostensibly to combat “fake news,” causing a precipitous decline in traffic for many conservative sites.

Relying on the left-wing big social platforms is inherently fragile. Get off Twitter and Facebook, get on Oneway for public stuff and Idka for private groups. Edit Infogalactic instead of Wikipedia. Getting anti-fragile is the key to future success. I'd rather have 10k followers on BitChute than 100k on YouTube, but a 20k email list would be better than either.

The spirit of privacy

Facebook's newfound commitment to data protection and privacy is mostly theoretical:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that new data privacy laws will only apply “in spirit” to more than three quarters of the company’s users.

Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will force the social network to comply with strict rules about the privacy of its European users. But Mr Zuckerberg failed to commit to rolling out the protections globally.

“We’re still nailing down details on this, but it should directionally be, in spirit, the whole thing,” Mr Zuckerberg said on Tuesday. With only 17 per cent of its 2.2 billion users residing within Europe, the vast majority of Facebook's users will not benefit from the new rules.

But on the plus side, they've already scanned all your messages anyhow:

Facebook Inc. scans the links and images that people send each other on Facebook Messenger, and reads chats when they’re flagged to moderators, making sure the content abides by the company’s rules. If it doesn’t, it gets blocked or taken down.

The company confirmed the practice after an interview published earlier this week with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg raised questions about Messenger’s practices and privacy. Zuckerberg told Vox’s Ezra Klein a story about receiving a phone call related to ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Facebook had detected people trying to send sensational messages through the Messenger app, he said.

“In that case, our systems detect what’s going on,” Zuckerberg said. “We stop those messages from going through.”

Of course, it's not as if Google isn't doing exactly the same thing with Gmail and Microsoft isn't doing the same thing with Skype. If it's on the Internet, someone other than the intended target is reading it. Count on it.

Facebook alternatives

Barron's contemplates them.

The proverbial sky seems to be falling on Facebook (FB), with founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg agreeing to finally answer questions from Congress in the coming weeks.

Lawmakers will be pushing Zuckerberg about the company's privacy controversy, but the issues go deeper for Facebook. The fallout from the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting episode has exposed Facebook to two risks that aren't getting much attention: One is the possibility, slight as it might be, that Facebook is newly vulnerable to competition. The other very real risk is Facebook's ability to retain and recruit top talent in hypercompetitive Silicon Valley. The biggest names in the Valley routinely poach workers from one another.

First, those plucky competitors. I need not look further than my email folder. Idka, an advertising-free social network, on Wednesday announced its subscription-based platform would be free to new users through October 2018. The company, which has vowed not to sell or share user data, claims a 50% increase in new users and an 800% increase in website visits in the past week.

I wonder where all those new users came from.... Seriously, though, if you're not on Idka yet, give it a whirl. We're going to establish a new Voxiversity group there later this week.