Introduction: Recorded on 7/4/2010–Independence Day–this program contemplates how independent our innovative technology really makes us. Conceptualized as a “liberating” technology, Facebook (and by extension other social networking sites) exposes its clients to potential widespread dissemination of sensitive personal information.
Analyzing the individuals and elements involved with Facebook, the program should give potential users of the network pause to reflect. Do you really want these folks handling your most sensitive data?
Beginning with the background of Peter Andreas Thiel, the broadcast analyzes the background and political philosophy and activism of this primary backer of Facebook. Son of a chemical engineer an apparent employee of a successor firm to the I.G. cartel, Thiel’s residences include stints in South Africa and Namibia, both locations of Underground Reich activity.
Underlying this examination is the fundamental question of the family’s possible membership in the Underground Reich. (In order to gain a working understanding of the argument presented in these programs, listeners should familiarize themselves with Paul Manning’s Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile. Dominating the successor firms to the I.G. and embracing the diverse elements of the postwar Nazi diaspora, the network Manning describes is to be found throughout the elements discussed in FTR #718.
Over the years, Thiel has manifested a far-right/libertarian political philosophy. In addition to spawning a conservative political review while at Stanford and authoring a conservative tome The Diversity Myth, he has networked with a neo-conservative organization The Vanguard.Org.
Another Facebook luminary is the grandson and namesake of Roelof (Pik) Botha, former foreign minister of South Africa. Although one certainly can’t judge the younger Botha by his grandfather’s politics, one should also weigh the possibility that they may constitute a trans-generational nexus of power, not unlike that looked at in connection with the Bush family in the Russ Baker interviews (FTR #‘s 711–716.)
Also looming large in Facebook’s background is a CIA venture capital firm, In-Q-tel.
Of paramount importance in considering the Facebook milieu is the fact that much of what is going on on the tech frontier is being dominated by a small group of people–dubbed the PayPal Mafia by wags–who are the Thiel/Botha milieu.
Program Highlights Include: “Pik” Botha’s close relationship with Third Reich alumnus Franz Richter; review of the death of the U.N. administrator for Namibia (controlled by the apartheid regime of South Africa) on Pan Am 103; review of “Pik” Botha’s escape from death on Pan Am 103; Peter Thiel’s belief in the Peak Oil philosophy; review of the fascist overtones and history of Peak Oil.
1. The program’s title asks the implicit question: with its exposure of vast amounts of personal data and under the control of, or associated with, some apparently dark individuals and institutions, is Facebook a “virtual panopticon.”
Panopticon is a type of prison:
The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the incarcerated being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.”[1]
Bentham himself described the Panopticon as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.
2. Beginning with the background of Peter Andreas Thiel, the broadcast analyzes the background and political philosophy and activism of this primary backer of Facebook. Son of a chemical engineer an apparent employee of a successor firm to the I.G. cartel, Thiel’s residences include stints in South Africa and Namibia, both locations of Underground Reich activity.
Underlying this examination is the fundamental question of the family’s possible membership in the Underground Reich. (In order to gain a working understanding of the argument presented in these programs, listeners should familiarize themselves with Paul Manning’s Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile. Dominating the successor firms to the I.G. and embracing the diverse elements of the postwar Nazi diaspora, the network Manning describes is to be found throughout the elements discussed in FTR #718.)
. . . It’s hard to say when Peter Andreas Thiel first decided that one person could outsmart the crowd. Born in Frankfurt in 1967, Thiel bounced among seven elementary schools — from California, to Namibia, to Ohio, to South Africa — as his father, Klaus, a chemical engineer, worked around the world.
Klaus; his wife, Susanne; Thiel; and Thiel’s younger brother, Patrick, eventually settled in Foster City, California, north of Silicon Valley. . . .
3. Thiel worked for Sullivan & Cromwell and Credit Suisse Group after leaving law school. One of America’s premier white-shoe law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell has profound connections to the fascist international, handling the business affairs of families such as the Bushes and the Bin Ladens.
. . . After collecting his law degree, Thiel clerked for U.S. Federal Circuit Judge Larry Edmondson in Atlanta and then joined Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York. He lasted seven months and three days before quitting out of boredom, he says.
He jumped to CS Financial Products, a unit of what’s now Credit Suisse Group, where he traded derivatives and currency options for a little more than a year. Then he went home to California, raised $1 million from his friends and family and started his first macro fund, Thiel Capital Management. . . .
4. Thiel subscribes to the Peak Oil philosophy, which has strong fascist underpinnings and overtones.
. . . Thiel is a proponent of a geologic theory known as peak oil, which holds that global oil production is now at or near its apex. Among his picks was Calgary-based EnCana Corp., which wrings oil from the tar sands of Canada. EnCana stock rose 54 percent in 2005. . . .
5. Over the years, Thiel has manifested a far-right/libertarian political philosophy. In addition to spawning a conservative political review while at Stanford and authoring a conservative tome The Diversity Myth, he has networked with a neo-conservative organization The Vanguard.Org.
In addition, a CIA technology subsidiary is deeply involved with the Facebook milieu.
Although it can be taken for granted that the intelligence community will centrally position itself with regard to any and all technological developments, the fact that intelligence services are involved with an organization that collects and organizes vast amounts of personal data should not be overlooked.
Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don’t mind being bombarded by adverts for the world’s biggest brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing of the past.
Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners (more on him later). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when Harvard students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thiel now reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook’s current valuation of $15bn, would be worth more than $1bn. There is much debate on who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoever they were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.
Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine recently called him “one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country”. He has made money by betting on rising oil prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled “The PayPal Mafia” by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. He has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury when losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness, saying: “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”
But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the “multiculture” led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review — motto: Fiat Lux (“Let there be light”). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself “way libertarian”.
The Vanguard is run by one Rod D Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatly admires. On the site, Thiel says: “Rod is one of our nation’s leading minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He possesses a more complete understanding of America than most executives have of their own businesses.”
This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision for the world: “TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us.” Their aim is to promote policies that will “reshape America and the globe”. TheVanguard describes its politics as “Reaganite/Thatcherite”. The chairman’s message says: “Today we’ll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons they never imagined.”
So, Thiel’s politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes’ famous characterisation of life as “nasty, brutish and short”, and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: “For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe.”
Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries — and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.
Thiel’s philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel’s virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel’s intellectual soirees. What you don’t hear about in Thiel’s philosophy, by the way, are old-fashioned real-world concepts such as art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth.
The internet is immensely appealing to neocons such as Thiel because it promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business, freedom from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike. The internet opens up a world of free trade and laissez-faire expansion. Thiel also seems to approve of offshore tax havens, and claims that 40% of the world’s wealth resides in places such as Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands, Monaco and Barbados. I think it’s fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against tax. He also likes the globalisation of digital culture because it makes the banking overlords hard to attack: “You can’t have a workers’ revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu,” he says.
If life in the past was nasty, brutish and short, then in the future Thiel wants to make it much longer, and to this end he has also invested in a firm that is exploring life-extension technologies. He has pledged £3.5m to a Cambridge-based gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey, who is searching for the key to immortality. Thiel is also on the board of advisers of something called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. From its fantastical website, the following: “The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies ... heading in this direction ... Artificial Intelligence ... direct brain-computer interfaces ... genetic engineering ... different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.”
So by his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls “nature”, and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any richer.
The third board member of Facebook is Jim Breyer. He is a partner in the venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12.7m into Facebook in April 2005. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Now these are the people who are really making things happen in America, because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like. Facebook’s most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock’s senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What’s In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which “identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions”.
The US defence department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier. “We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries,” defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. “We need to make the leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation efforts.” In-Q-Tel’s first chairman was Gilman Louie, who served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer. Another key figure in the In-Q-Tel team is Anita K Jones, former director of defence research and engineering for the US department of defence, and — with Breyer — board member of BBN Technologies. When she left the US department of defence, Senator Chuck Robb paid her the following tribute: “She brought the technology and operational military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century.” . . . .
“With Friends Like These . . .” by Tim Hodgkinson; guardian.co.uk; 1/14/2008.
6. More about the CIA link to Facebook:
. . . . Facebook’s first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome ‘The Diversity Myth’, he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.
The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company’s key areas of expertise are in “data mining technologies”.
Breyer also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet.
Dr Anita Jones joined the firm, which included Gilman Louie. She had also served on the In-Q-Tel’s board, and had been director of Defence Research and Engineering for the US Department of Defence.
She was also an adviser to the Secretary of Defence and overseeing the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for high-tech, high-end development. . . .
“Facebook–the CIA Conspiracy” by Matt Greenop; The New Zealand Herald; 8/8/2007.
7. Another Facebook luminary is the grandson of Roelof (Pik) Botha, former foreign minister of South Africa. Although one certainly can’t judge the younger Botha by his grandfather’s politics, one should also weigh the possibility that they may constitute a trans-generational nexus of power, not unlike that looked at in connection with the Bush family in the Russ Baker interviews (FTR #‘s 711–716.)
. . . Roelof Botha has been a venture capitalist for three years, and he dreams of putting up the early money for a Google-scale success that is adored on Wall Street and feared by rivals. But Botha, 33, is one of the hottest dealmakers in Silicon Valley for taking the opposite tack: selling out.
Botha joined Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s elite venture capital firms, in 2003; he had helped run the PayPal online outfit. In February 2005 two PayPal pals of his started a video Weblet called YouTube. Botha put up $8.5 million in Sequoia cash for a 30% stake. In November Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Sequoia will reap a 65-fold return, catapulting Botha onto the Forbes Midas List of top tech dealmakers; he ranks 23rd . . . .
. . . Botha was born and bred in South Africa, the grandson of Roelof (Pik) Botha, a foreign minister (1977–94) in the apartheid government who supported the release of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and later served in his government (1994–96). . . .
“The Art of Selling Out” by Erika Brown; Forbes; 2/12/2007.
8. As discussed in AFA #35, Pik Botha apparently had prior notification of the impending bombing of Pan Am 103. He switched his reservations at the last minute, avoiding the lethal fate of the U.N. administrator for Namibia, who died on the flight.
There are indications that the Broederbond–epicenter of South African fascism–also went underground after the official fall of the apartheid regime. This “Underground Broederbond”, in turn, is affiliated with the Underground Reich.
His support for Nelson Mandela notwithstanding, Grandpa Botha’s political orientation can be gleaned from his support for associate Franz Richter, an alumnus of the Third Reich. (Botha was very close to Richter.)
. . . Franz Richter, who was murdered this week in a robbery near his game ranch outside Johannesburg at the age of 80, was one of the pioneers of game tourism in South Africa. Richter, who was born in Romania on October 27 1927, was an orphan by the age of five. As a youth in communist-run Romania, all he dreamt about was having a full stomach. That and Africa. When he was 15, he made his way to Germany where he was promptly drafted into the Hitler Youth and forced to fight in the German army. . . .
9. Beyond Facebook, per se, it is important to contemplate the concentration of power within the tech world, with a small number of individuals (“the PayPal Mafia”) controlling much of what is taking place.
. . . Thiel won big with PayPal. Eight months later, in October 2002, EBay agreed to buy the company for $1.5 billion. The PayPal crew cashed-in and moved on. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim founded video-sharing Web site YouTube Inc. and sold it to Google Inc. in October for $1.65 billion. Levchin went off and founded Slide, a photo-sharing site.
Executive Vice President Reid Hoffman founded Linked-In Corp., a business networking site. Vice President Jeremy Stoppelman created Yelp, a site that helps people find restaurants, shops and other businesses in their area. . . .
Outstanding program! Emory is an informational tour de force!
Thank you for putting the truth “in our face”! Now we know whom we are dealing with.
dave emory is the reason im donating to WFMU
@David Almanza: I would’ve done the same thing, but my PayPal hasn’t been verified yet. =(
But when I can, though, you betcha it’ll be one heck of a charity fundraiser, I can guarantee you that much. Dave has done so much to wake people up over the past 30 years. Let’s try to help him keep it going if and when we can. ;-)
I saw this and thought it was relevant to this earlier post. It seems that Julian Assange agrees that social media sites are being exploited by intel. agencies.
http://rt.com/news/wikileaks-revelations-assange-interview/
There’s an interesting bit of info regarding the Arab Spring in this piece about the CIA setting up an entire division to monitor Facebook and twitter (part of the Open Source initiative set up by John Negroponte). The steady meme of “the US intelligence community was completely caught by surprise by the Arab Spring” is apparently contested by the intelligence community itself: http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/the-cia-is-following-twitter-facebook.php
The CIA Is Following Twitter, Facebook
Carl Franzen November 4, 2011, 7:30 PM
Many around the Web reacted with alarm to an exclusive report published Friday by the the Associated Press that the Central Intelligence Agency has a whole center dedicated to monitoring Twitter, Facebook and other media, even old school print newspapers and TV stations, to obtain intelligence on international issues.
The Open Source Center has been active since the middle of the Bush Administration, well before Twitter launched in 2006. In fact, it was established in 2005 under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (then John Negroponte) in response to the 9/11 Commission’s call for more focus on foreign counterintelligence.
...
Still, the center’s analysis work reportedly ends up in the President’s daily intelligence briefing more often than not.
And the center’s director Doug Naquin, said that through its monitoring, analysts employed there managed to foresee the January uprising against Mubarak’s government in Egypt, although he conceded they weren’t sure exactly when it would take place.
That in-and-of itself is an eye-popping admission given that in February, the AP reported that President Obama was “disappointed with the intelligence community” for failing to predict the revolution and apparently said as much in a candid message to National Intelligence Director James Clapper.
Congressmen on the intelligence committees in the House and Senate even reached across the aisle to join forces in their criticism of the inability of U.S. intelligence agencies to see the Arab Spring coming.
Around the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted we’d be sitting here talking about the end of the Mubarak presidency at the time that this all started,” as Ynet News reported.
...
”
Of course, as set forth in the admittedly exhaustive series that began with discussion of WikiLeaks and morphed into coverage of the Arab Spring, the GOP/Bush/transnational corporate/Underground Reich faction of the intelligence community and State Department appears to have been behind it.
Reference John Loftus’s analysis in FTR #731 for discussion of the two factions in the CIA and State Department.
The factions that have come to power don’t appear to be particularly “moderate”–unless one considers the Muslim Brotherhood to be moderate.
@Dave: Sadly, it is started to look like the Tahrir Square movement may have indeed been manipulated from the very start. Only question is, why abandon their old friend Gaddafi?
@Pterrafractyl: Not surprising. The Underground Reich and the other members of the criminal Establishment have always been leery of social media and have constantly tried to take advantage of them from the start.....could Peter Thiel have been one of their useful idiots, as it were? He was one of the early financiers of Facebook, if I recall correctly.
http://penumbralreport.com/2012/01/08/the-ever-expanding-digital-panopticon-dhs-releases-report-on-social-media-spying-program/
The Ever Expanding Digital Panopticon: DHS Releases Report On Social Media Spying Program
Excerpt:
” ...In the final analysis we are left with a government surveillance program which covers every user anywhere on the internet which is collecting, storing and analyzing information on a very long and elastic set of terms which can be changed at a moment’s notice. It is this all- powerful, but obscured ability to conduct such surveillance on a population’s legal activities which is the hallmark of the digital panopticon. And, it is this capability coupled with the NDAA with its fear-inducing “indefinite detention” provisions aimed at citizens for unclear violations of the law which has the potential to bring about the true aim of any panopticon: self-regulated behavior based upon an uncertain punishment for potentially undesirable activity. The result of such developments will be citizens becoming hesitant to exercise their right of free speech for fear that they will end up in a government database somewhere — or worse...”
http://openid.net/2011/01/08/internet-identity-system-said-readied-by-obama/
Internet Identity System Said Readied by Obama Administration
2011-01-07 05:00:01.9 GMT
By James Sterngold
Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) — The Obama administration plans to announce today plans for an Internet identity system that will limit fraud and streamline online transactions, leading to a surge in Web commerce, officials said.
While the White House has spearheaded development of the framework for secure online identities, the system led by the U.S. Commerce Department will be voluntary and maintained by
private companies, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement.
A group representing companies including Verizon
Communications Inc., Google Inc., PayPal Inc., Symantec Corp. and AT&T Inc. has supported the program, called the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, or NSTIC.
“This is going to cause a huge shift in consumer use of the Internet,” said John Clippinger, co-director of the Law Lab at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “There’s going to be a huge bump and a huge increase in the amount and kind of data retailers are going to have.”
Most companies have separate systems for signing on to e‑mail accounts or conducting secure online transactions, requiring that users memorize multiple passwords and repeat steps. Under the new program, consumers would sign in just once and be able to move among other websites, eliminating the
inconvenience that causes consumers to drop many transactions.
Fewer Passwords
For example, once the system is in place, Google would be able to join a trusted framework that has adopted the rules and guidelines established by the Commerce Department. From that point, someone who logged into a Google e‑mail account would be
able to conduct other business including banking or shopping with other members of the group without having to provide additional information or verification.
Bruce McConnell, a senior counselor for national protection at the Department of Homeland Security, said NSTIC may lead to a big reduction in the size of Internet help desks, which spend much of their time assisting users who have forgotten their
passwords. Because the systems would be more secure, he said, it may also result in many transactions that are now done on paper, from pharmaceutical to real estate purchases, to be done online faster and cheaper.
A draft paper outlining NSTIC was released for comment by the White House in June.
‘Who Do You Trust?’
“NSTIC could go a long way toward advancing one of the fundamental challenges of the Internet today, which is — Who do you trust?” said Don Thibeau, chairman of the Open Identity Exchange, an industry group based in San Ramon, California, representing companies that support development of the new
framework.
“What is holding back the growth of e‑commerce is not technology, it’s policy. This gives us the rules, the policies that we need to really move forward.”
The new system will probably hasten the death of
traditional passwords, Clippinger said. Instead, users may rely on devices such as smartcards with embedded chips, tokens that generate random codes or biometric devices.
“Passwords will disappear,” said Clippinger. “They’re
buggy whips. The old privacy and security conventions don’t work. You need a new architecture.”
Secure, Efficient
Development of a more advanced security system began in August 2004, when President George W. Bush issued a Homeland Security Presidential Directive that required all federal= employees be given smartcards with multiple uses, such as gaining access to buildings, signing on to government websites and insuring that only people with proper clearances would have access to restricted documents. The system was intended to be more secure and more efficient.
The Obama administration advanced the process when it issued its “Cyberspace Policy Review” in 2009. One of the 10 priorities was the security identification system. The federal government is facilitating what it calls a “foundational” system in two ways. It is developing the framework for the identification plan, and it will make a large
number of government agencies, services and products available through the secure system, from tax returns to reserving campsites at national parks.
“Innovation is one of the key aspects here,” said Ari
Schwartz, a senior adviser for Internet policy at the Department of Commerce. “There’s so much that could be done if we could trust transactions more.”
Schwartz said use of the system, once companies voluntarily choose to participate, may spur a range of efficiencies and e‑commerce similar to the way ATM machines transformed banking, opening the way to a growing number of services little by little.
Privacy Concerns
Civil libertarians have expressed concern that the system may not protect privacy as well as the government is promising.
“If the concept were implemented in a perfect way it would be very good,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for privacy and technology at the New York-based American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s a convenience. But having a single point of failure may not be good for protecting privacy. The devil’s really in the details.” He said the ACLU would “vehemently oppose” anything that resembled a national ID card.
Aaron Brauer-Rieke, a fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, a civil liberties group, said it was important that the system would be operated by private companies, not the government. He said he was concerned about
how the data on consumer online transactions would be used.
“New identity systems will allow moving from one site to another with less friction and open up data flows, but might also enable new kinds of targeted advertising,” he said. “We have to make sure privacy doesn’t get lost in this.”
Schwartz and McConnell said the new system wouldn’t be a national identity card and that companies, not the government, would manage the data being passed online.
“There will not be a single data base for this information,” McConnell said.
Just FYI:
Yes Grover, it’s just like what the Nazis did:
It begins:
[...] our last post, we noted that, in addition to Peter Thiel, the CEO of Palantir (Thiel associate Alex Karp) had German roots. The available [...]
It is what it is. Dave Emory is on the money.
One of the things rarely mentioned in The Scorpion and the Frog: The water is boiling too. The frog has desensitization issues:
In addition to being a creepy reminder of the creeping surveillance capacity that technology inherently facilitates, part of what’s going to make the roll out of this kind of technology interesting to watch is that the sound matching algorithms are probably going to have to yield “fuzzy” matches, at best, since the application is designed to run passively in a noisy environment with lots of random noises and conversations overlaying the music or tv shows playing in the background. And with multiple seasons for 160 television stations getting stored as the audio database, users’ everyday random conversations that might get picked up by the app are going to be matched against a pretty massive database of conversational audio content. It raises the question of whether or not that database is going to be small enough to store on individual phones and tablets or if it’s going to be sending all that hashed audio content back to Facebook in real-time where it gets matched. This was this statement from Facebook:
That sure sounds like the plan is for the audio content to get “coded” on the phone and sent to Facebook for real-time analysis. That’s service! A creepy service, but service!
So how often will people get “false positives” where they’re inadvertently creating a “close enough” hit to a segment of some random TV show? It seems like it might happen every once in a while and it raises the possibility of a rather neat new type of survey: if users click a little “this isn’t what I was listening to or watching” button every time the app makes a “matching” mistake it could be a method of sampling the extent to which life imitates art in everyday conversations a whole new way. Kinda neat, eh?
That said, we really don’t need fancy new ways of surveilling every last bit of our lives in order to measure how life is imitating art these days. Direct observation is enough.
@Pterrafractyl–
This underscores one of the major themes of the Eddie the Friendly Spook series–it’s the tech companies that people should fear, with regard to privacy.
NSA doesn’t care about the insignificant details of people’s turgid little lives.
They are military and don’t move up pay grades by finding out what music people listen to, or whether they fart in their cubicles at work.
Facebook, Google and others are vacuuming up EVERY available piece of information about everybody.
That information is one of their major capital assets, and they market it to other corporations.
People have bought in on this, frankly, and shouldn’t complain.
After all, a scorpion is ALWAYS a scorpion, n’est pas?
Best,
Dave
i@Dave: Here’s a recent interview of tech titan Mark Andreesen that really captures the dysfunctional way the topic of NSA surveillance programs issue tends to get treated by the tech industry. It’s basically Mission Impossible time:
Yes, when asked about the progress made on this issue by the White House, Marc Andreesen talks about a growing sentiment in the US tech sector that enormous damage is being done to the US tech industry’s overseas markets every time a new Snowden shoe drops. But when the question is asked, “Okay, how is the American government getting in front of this?”, the answer is that the view on in the Valley is the the White House has hung the NSA out to dry. What?! So the White House was supposed to suddenly relieve the global public concern over NSA surveillance capabilities and fully back the NSA simultaneously, while presumably maintaining the robust growth of the military-digital-complex so as not to worry Silicon Valley too much. How was that supposed to happen?
And when asked what the tech companies can do to address the Snowden fallout, the answer Andreesen gives is a vague mention of how technology has enabled changing power dynamics between governments, businesses. and individuals (yep). Nothing about strengthening regulations on profiting from private sector spying. Nothing about, say, a Silicon Valley PAC that lobbies against the growth of a global Military Digital Complex and promotes severe restrictions on the sale of advanced hacking tools to governments. It’s just a deer in the headlights answer that’s become typical of what we can expect from the tech sector itself on this issue.
It’s a big reason why we should expect very little meaningful progress on this issue for the foreseeable future: Silicon Valley’s leaders clearly have no interest in any privacy solutions that harm profits and that means they want the impossible. It also means that the likeliest “solution” we’re going to eventually see is the same “solution” that seems to get applied to every problem in DC these days: further privatization, whereever possible.
Surprise!
Is that manic depression you have? No, it’s just my Facebook Guinea Pig Syndrome acting up again:
Since this kind of research is entirely legal, you have to wonder how many of the other major (or minor) sites that provide tailored content are conducting experiments like this. You also have to wonder what kind of damage could be done to a society if this kind of research was applied to to something like TV content. It could get pretty scary.
Dailey Mail UK:
August 21, 2016, James Wilkinson
Fugitive ‘Facebook founder’ says he’s alive and well but ‘running for his life’ from CIA because of its secret involvement in the social media site
— Paul Ceglia says the CIA wants to kill him because he knows too much
— He says its venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, had a hand in Facebook
— Ceglia sued Mark Zuckerberg for 84 per cent of Facebook in 2010
— But in 2012 he was put on house arrest for allegedly doctoring evidence
— He and his family vanished in 2015; he has only just been heard from now
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3747202/Paul-Ceglia-supposed-Facebook-founder-disappeared-2015-says-s-running-CIA-want-kill-knowledge-involved-social-media-site.html
Bloomberg, August 16, 2016
Facebook Fugitive ‘Alive and Well and Living on the Air’
by Bob Van Voris
In his e‑mails, Ceglia, 43, said he was forced to flee due to a “very credible” threat that he would be arrested on new charges, jailed and killed before trial. The reason he was marked for death, he said, was fear that the trial would expose the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel, in Facebook.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016–08-16/facebook-fugitive-alive-and-well-and-living-on-the-air
The origiinal Bloomberg article was published July 12, 2010 by Bob Van Voris
New York Man Claims 84% of Facebook, Gets Order Blocking Assets
“The day of Ceglia’s filing, without notice to Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, Acting New York Supreme Court Justice Thomas P. Brown signed an order blocking Zuckerberg and Facebook “from transferring, selling, assigning any assets, stocks, bonds, owned, possessed and/or controlled by the defendants,” at least until a hearing set for July 9.”
The case is Ceglia v. Zuckerberg, 10-CV-00569, U.S. District Court, Western District of New York (Buffalo).
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010–07-13/new-york-man-claims-84-of-facebook-gets-court-order-restricting-assets
Here’s a reminder that Facebook’s privacy invasions aren’t limited to tracking every last click you make on Facebook’s websites. It also includes tracking your visit to any other webpage that happens to have a Facebook “like” button (or agrees to allow a special Facebook tracking pixel on their site) even when you’re logged off from Facebook. And then there’s Facebook’s purchase of every major third-party database available to create one of the most detail personal profiles of you in existence. So when Facebook delivers an eerily topical ad that makes you wonder if the website is spying on you, keep in mind that it is indeed spying on you but it’s not alone in doing so. It’s a group effort:
“On top of that, Facebook offers marketers the option to target ads according to data compiled by firms like Experian, Acxiom and Epsilon, which have historically fueled mailing lists and other sorts of offline efforts. These firms build their profiles over a period of years, gathering data from government and public records, consumer contests, warranties and surveys, and private commercial sources — like loyalty card purchase histories or magazine subscription lists. Whatever they gather from those searches can also be fed into a model to draw further conclusions, like whether you’re likely to be an investor or buy organic for your kids.”
That’s right, Facebook is creating one of the most advanced models of each of us individuals that’s probably ever been created. Maybe Google is competing with them in that department but that’s about it. That should be super helpful.
And keep in mind that while it may be true that Facebook doesn’t actually need to use your smartphone’s microphone to spy on your private conversations...
...doesn’t mean that Facebook isn’t spying on your through your smartphone’s microphone. Spying on you to be extra helpful, of course.
Also keep in mind that when you read...
...you’re going to have to avoid using a lot more than just Facebook. Especially now that Facebook has decided to advertise to (and presumably track and profile) all internet users, whether they use Facebook or not:
“To date, Facebook has only showed ads across its Audience Network to Facebook users, targeted based on information the company has collected about its users’ tastes and behaviors. Now Facebook plans to collect information about all Internet users, through “like” buttons and other pieces of code present on Web pages across the Internet. It will then use the information it collects to target ads to non-Facebook users.”
Those “Like” buttons are probably going to get a lot more hated. But as we saw above, the actual information Facebook collects on you comes from a lot more than just internet activity. So while non-Facebook users will be able to opt-out of “interest-based” advertising from Facebook, that presumably doesn’t mean they’ll be able to opt-out of the actual tracking with both online and offline tracking methods. And now that Facebook is going to try to be serving targeted ads to everyone, including non-Facebook users, that also means that Facebook has an even bigger financial incentive to collect as much information as possible, from all possible data sources online and offline, on everyone too.
Granted, Facebook (and Google and the other personal data collection behemoths) were almost certainly trying to track everyone anyway. It’s just going to be a little more profitable to track everyone now. Maybe a lot more.
Facebook has been developing new artificial intelligence (AI) technology to classify pictures on your Facebook page:
http://www.nextgov.com/big-data/2017/02/facebook-quietly-used-ai-solve-problem-searching-through-your-photos/135118/?oref=ng-HPriver
By Dave Gershgorn
Quartz
February 2, 2017
Facebook Quietly Used AI to Solve Problem of Searching Through Your Photos
For the past few months, Facebook has secretly been rolling out a new feature to U.S. users: the ability to search photos by what’s depicted in them, rather than by captions or tags.
The idea itself isn’t new: Google Photos had this feature built in when it launched in 2015. But on Facebook, the update solves a longstanding organization problem. It means finally being able to find that picture of your friend’s dog from 2013, or the selfie your mom posted from Mount Rushmore in 2009… without 20 minutes of scrolling.
To make photos searchable, Facebook analyzes every single image uploaded to the site, generating rough descriptions of each one. This data is publicly available—there’s even a Chrome extension that will show you what Facebook’s artificial intelligence thinks is in each picture—and the descriptions can also be read out loud for Facebook users who are vision-impaired.
For now, the image descriptions are vague, but expect them to get a lot more precise. Today’s announcement specified the AI can identify the color and type of clothes a person is wearing, as well as famous locations and landmarks, objects, animals and scenes (garden, beach, etc.) Facebook’s head of AI research, Yann LeCun, told reporters the same functionality would eventually come for videos, too.
Facebook has in the past championed plans to make all of its visual content searchable—especially Facebook Live. At the company’s 2016 developer conference, head of applied machine learning Joaquin Quiñonero Candela said one day AI would watch every Live video happening around the world. If users wanted to watch someone snowboarding in real time, they would just type “snowboarding” into Facebook’s search bar. On-demand viewing would take on a whole new meaning.
There are privacy considerations, however. Being able to search photos for specific clothing or religious place of worship, for example, could make it easy to target Facebook users based on religious belief. Photo search also extends Facebook’s knowledge of users beyond what they like and share, to what they actually do in real life. That could allow for far more specific targeting for advertisers. As with everything on Facebook, features have their cost—your data.
This next article by Dan Froomkin of Washington Monthly, April 19, 2021, is titled “Is Facebook Buying Off The New York Times?” subtitled “Under the cover of launching a little-known feature, the social media giant has been funneling money to America’s biggest news organizations—and hanging the rest of the press out to dry.” Is about how Facebook is picking preferred media sources to highlight their message and quietly gain influence over the newspapers content through their economic influence. It effectively makes small independent journalists unable to compete economically and the evidence is that it allies with fear mongering, conspiracies and inaccurate information. Facebook News also may a bias towards authoritarian news sources. Facebook is participating in a sophisticated media blitz as part being the top corporation spending on federal lobbying and advertising in Washington DC to influence Policy makers. Under the cover of launching a feature called Facebook News, Facebook has been funneling money to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Bloomberg, and other select paid partners since late 2019 and only a naïve person can believe that this economic influence will, in the long run, not result in biased and favorable coverage of Facebook. This is a cost affective way to spend their lobbying and image management budget by leveraging and ultimately influencing news reporting in a consolidating industry.
These messages communicate crisis situation and and the highly one sided message of regulation avoidance. As an aside regulations are written in advance to prevent uncertainty of standards that are determined years later when litigation is settled. So the mantra of fewer regulations sounds good to persons who do not understand how our system works. But that is a separate note.
The publisher and chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. made a fatefully risky decision when he installed the Facebook executive Rebecca Van Dyck, Facebook’s head of consumer and brand marketing on his 12-member board of directors in 2015. She now runs marketing for Facebook’s augmented and virtual reality labs.
Facebook has tweaked its algorithms after the November 2020 election to favor authoritative news sources in the News Feed, it switched back—presumably to boost engagement, to placate right-wing publishers, or both. In Australia, the biggest recipient by far of Facebook’s largesse will be Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns most of the country’s newspapers. News Corp also heavily lobbied for the new legislation. Facebook didn’t pay the country’s smaller outlets.
The article concludes with a quote from Doug Reynolds, the managing partner for the West Virginia newspapers suing Facebook and Google for damages, told me, “If the future of this industry is that we’re dependent on their goodwill, then we don’t have an independent press anymore.”
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/04/19/is-facebook-buying-off-the-new-york-times/
Here is the entire article:
Over the past two decades, as Big Tech has boomed, news organizations have been going bust. Between 2004 and 2019, one in every four U.S. newspapers shut down, and almost all the rest cut staff, for a total of 36,000 jobs lost between 2008 and 2019 alone. Local newspapers have been particularly devastated, making it ever more difficult for people to know what is happening in their communities.
Many factors contributed to this economic collapse, but none more so than the cornering of the digital advertising market by the duopoly of Facebook and Google. Facebook’s threat to a free press—and, by extension, to democracy—is especially pernicious. The social media company is financially asphyxiating the news industry even as it gives oxygen to conspiracy theories and lies. As a result of its many roles in degrading our democracy, it faces mounting scrutiny by politicians and regulators.
Facebook has responded to the negative attention by creating a highly sophisticated public relations effort, which includes becoming the number one corporate spender on federal lobbying and engaging in a massive advertising blitz aimed at the D.C. policy audience. Less well known, and potentially far more dangerous, is a secretive, multimillion-dollar-a-year payout scheme aimed at the most influential news outlets in America. Under the cover of launching a feature called Facebook News, Facebook has been funneling money to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Bloomberg, and other select paid partners since late 2019.
Participating in Facebook News doesn’t appear to deliver many new readers to outlets; the feature is very difficult to find, and it is not integrated into individuals’ newsfeeds. What Facebook News does deliver—though to only a handful of high-profile news organizations of its choosing—is serious amounts of cash. The exact terms of these deals remain secret, because Facebook insisted on nondisclosure and the news organizations agreed. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agreements were worth as much as $3 million a year, and a Facebook spokesperson told me that number is “not too far off at all.” But in at least one instance, the numbers are evidently much larger. In an interview last month, former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said the Times is getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year—“very much so.”
Facebook has responded to negative attention by creating a highly sophisticated public relations effort, which includes becoming the number one corporate spender on federal lobbying and engaging in a massive advertising blitz aimed at the D.C. policy audience.
For The New York Times, whose net income was $100 million in 2020, getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year with essentially no associated cost is significant. And once news outlets take any amount of money from Facebook, it becomes difficult for them to let it go, notes Mathew Ingram, chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review. “It creates a hole in your balance sheet. You’re kind of beholden to them.” It’s not exactly payola, Ingram told me, searching for the right metaphor. Nor is it a protection racket. “It’s like you’re a kept person,” he said. “You’re Facebook’s mistress.”
There’s no evidence that the deal directly affects coverage in either the news or editorial departments. Before the Facebook News deal, the Times famously published an op-ed titled “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook,” by Chris Hughes, a cofounder of Facebook turned critic. And since the deal, columns from Tim Wu and Kara Swisher, among others, have been similarly critical. In December, the editorial board welcomed a lawsuit calling for Facebook to be broken up.
And Facebook and Google money is, admittedly, all over journalism already. Virtually every major media nonprofit receives direct or indirect funding from Silicon Valley, including this one. When the Monthly gets grants from do-good organizations like NewsMatch, some of the funds originate with Facebook.
But these three points are beyond dispute.
First, the deals are a serious breach of traditional ethics. In the pre-internet days, independent newspapers wouldn’t have considered accepting gifts or sweetheart deals from entities they covered, under any circumstance. The Washington Post under the editor Leonard Downie Jr., for instance, wouldn’t even accept grants from nonprofits to underwrite reporting projects, for fear of losing the appearance of independence. Facebook, which took in $86 billion in revenue last year, is a hugely controversial behemoth having profound, highly newsworthy, and negative effects on society. Accepting money from them creates a conflict of interest.
Even for trusted news organizations whose audiences believe they can’t be bought outright, “it might come across as hypocrisy to heavily criticize an industry while also collaborating with them,” says Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Agreeing to keep the terms of the deal confidential is also a mistake, Nielsen told me. “This sort of opacity I don’t think builds trust.”
Second, these deals help Facebook maintain the public appearance of legitimacy. Journalists, critics, and congressional investigators have amply documented how Facebook has become a vector of disinformation and hate speech that routinely invades our privacy and undermines our democracy. For The New York Times and other pillars of American journalism to effectively partner with Facebook creates the impression that Facebook is a normal, legitimate business rather than a monopolistic rogue corporation.
Finally, these agreements undermine industry-wide efforts that would help the smaller, ethnic, and local news organizations that are most desperately in need of help. One such effort would allow the industry to bargain collectively with Facebook and other tech giants by withholding content from the platforms unless they received a fair price for it. But for that to work, small newsrooms would need the biggest and most influential companies to sign on. With those organizations receiving millions of dollars from Facebook through their own side deals, the smaller publications could be left stranded and defenseless.
If Facebook’s intent were to save American journalism, it would be making generous offers to smaller, local news organizations that do original reporting, Damon Kiesow, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, told me. By contrast, Facebook News “doesn’t really help anyone in the industry except for the small select group of outlets that get paid,” he said. “These efforts are all flavored with a strong dose of crisis communication and regulation avoidance.”
If any major figure in the American media was going to say no to Mark Zuckerberg, it was Mark Thompson.
For most of his eight-year tenure as chief executive officer of the New York Times Company, Thompson was one of the industry’s most thoughtful, eloquent, and persuasive critics of Facebook and the danger it presents to journalism’s business models and essential role in a democracy.
“It makes my blood run cold, the idea of Facebook as a publisher,” he said at a June 2018 event convened by the Open Markets Institute. At a panel sponsored by the Tow Center later that month, he described that same affect when Zuckerberg “starts talking about how he thinks about community, and about what we trust.” Zuckerberg, he said, has a “terrifyingly naive perspective on news.”
During the OMI event, Thompson warned darkly about the “sinister” prospect “that Facebook’s catalog of missteps with data and extreme and hateful content” will lead it to try to “set itself up as the digital world’s editor in chief, prioritizing and presumably downgrading and rejecting content on a survey- and data-driven assessment of whether the provider of the content is ‘broadly trusted’ or not.”
In an exclusive interview, former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said the Times is getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year in payouts from Facebook—“very much so.”
Here was actual humility from the CEO of the paper of record: “Democracy depends in part on unbounded competition between different journalistic perspectives and the clash of different judgments and opinions,” he said. “History suggests that mainstream news organizations frequently get it right, but also that, not infrequently, it is the outliers who should be listened to.”
And he knew what needed to be done. An essential preliminary step was for Facebook and others to “engage with the collective industry bodies of the news business to arrive at shared principles both on the presentation and choice of news content, and on its monetization.” He called for “consistency and comparability in the treatment of news providers.”
This was not the language of shakedown. It was an impassioned and impressive philosophical argument about the survival of news—and democracy.
But then, all of a sudden, The New York Times and Facebook were making deals together. In October 2019, Facebook announced the launch of Facebook News, with The New York Times as a marquee paid partner, getting prime placement in a new vertical designated for “trusted” news sources.’
What changed for Thompson between June 2018 and October 2019, such that the idea of Facebook picking which “trusted” news sources to pay went from sinister to “Sign here”?
“We always reserved our rights to do what we needed to do for our own business and to continue to fund our journalism in the interim,” Thompson insisted in a phone interview in March. “I’m a sort of pragmatist,” he said. “I don’t really see this as a conflict of interest or an issue of principle, it’s the real world.” He rejected the depiction of the payments as a gift or a payoff. “As far as I’m concerned, we were paid by a platform for access to our content.” Facebook, of course, does not pay The New York Times for access to its content when it is shared on regular newsfeeds.
And Thompson said that while he still thinks it would be sinister for Facebook to be making its own editorial decisions on a story-by-story basis, “Facebook making it easier for people to identify The New York Times and making it easier to access The New York Times is a good thing.”
What about his devotion to collective rather than individual action? It remains—in theory. “As it happens, I’m still very much in favor of broader agreements,” he told me. “Ideally,” he continued, such payments would be “not just available . . . to the handful of big players but broadly, in particular to local and regional journalism.”
So taking the deal wasn’t a betrayal of his principles, Thompson insisted. “I still fundamentally believe everything I said.” With any collective agreement years away at best, he said, “I don’t accept that our reaching it made it harder for the other publishers to get it—on the contrary . . . I don’t think you’ve got any evidence that a refusal to engage . . . would have helped them at all.” It actually sets a good precedent, he suggested. “It’s brilliant to have got a big digital platform to pay for the use of our content.”
But organizations that are favored by Facebook will obviously have different incentives going forward than those that are not. Unfavored outlets, if begging doesn’t work, may want to play hardball with Facebook to get their due—while the Timesand others will inevitably have qualms before blowing a hole in their budgets.
The Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha declined to address a long list of questions about the specifics of the relationship with Facebook, responding instead with general comments. “Quality journalism is expensive to produce and we believe quality publishers should be fairly compensated for creating valuable journalism,” she wrote in an email. The Times “does not disclose licensing and advertising terms,” she wrote, and “our licensing agreement with Facebook has no impact on our newsroom.”
Once news outlets take any amount of money from Facebook, it becomes difficult for them to let it go, notes Mathew Ingram, chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review. “It creates a hole in your balance sheet.
Thompson stepped down as CEO in July 2020 and was replaced by his protégé, Meredith Kopit Levien, who may be even more committed to the deal than Thompson was. A few months after she took over, Levien expressed enthusiasm that Facebook had promised to create a space “for a particular level of quality news providers,” to pay the Times “a fair amount,” and to “feed your funnel.”
The Facebook News deal isn’t Facebook’s only, or first, inroad at the Times. The company already had a seat at the table—literally. The publisher and chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. installed the Facebook executive Rebecca Van Dyck on his 12-member board of directors in 2015. Van Dyck, who was Facebook’s global head of consumer and brand marketing at the time, now runs marketing for Facebook’s augmented and virtual reality labs.
Indeed, the Facebook News bounty might even be dwarfed by the undisclosed sum that Facebook is pouring into the Times’s new augmented reality efforts. The newsroom’s new “AR Lab,” a collaboration between Facebook and the Times, builds augmented reality filters and camera effects distributed on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram.
There are likely even more ties the public doesn’t know about. BuzzFeed News recently discovered that the Times columnist David Brooks had written a pro-Facebook blog post while on salary for a nonprofit partially funded by Facebook and hadn’t disclosed it to his current Times bosses or the readers.
Thompson would have been very much alone among his U.S. peers had he resisted Facebook’s inducements. He was also hardly the most enthusiastic Facebook partner—that would be News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson, who, after years of vituperative attacks on Big Tech, was grinning at Zuckerberg’s side at the Facebook News launch event and announcing a “new dawn” for journalists.
The rollout was undeniably a huge win for Facebook public relations. The Times story was headlined “Facebook Calls Truce With Publishers as It Unveils Facebook News.” What few negative headlines ensued were related to Facebook’s decision to include Breitbart, the far-right website known for spreading white-supremacist disinformation, among its cadre of “trusted” news sources—although, in Breitbart’s case, an unpaid one.
Months later, Joshua Benton, the director of the Neiman Journalism Lab, described the big downside: The Facebook News deal, he wrote, “lets them (1) pick the publishers they want to pay, (2) pick the amount of money they want to pay them, (3) get publishers to stop complaining, at least hopefully, and (4) get headlines like ‘Facebook Offers News Outlets Millions of Dollars a Year,’ in the hopes that they can stave off government regulation or taxation.” Facebook isn’t spending the money “because they think News Tab will be profitable,” Benton wrote. “It’s a way to solve a PR and policy problem.” The vaunted new product, he noted, consists of “a new tab buried so deep in Facebook’s interface you need a spelunker’s headlamp to find it.”
To collectively bargain with Facebook, small newsrooms will need the biggest ones to sign on. With those larger organizations receiving millions of dollars from the social media giant through side deals, the smaller publications could be left stranded and defenseless.
Facebook News only links to approved outlets, while in the actual News Feed, the algorithm spews out non-reputable clickbait based on what’s enticing the people, pages, and groups a user engages with the most. “The most notable thing about Facebook News is that it includes almost none of the stories that do well on the rest of Facebook,” observed the Nieman Journalism Lab editor Laura Hazard Owen.
Facebook is suspiciously evasive about how many people use Facebook News and how much traffic it generates for publishers, refusing to provide any indication of its scale at all. “We don’t have hard numbers,” the Facebook News spokesperson, Mari Melguizo, said when I asked for data on its performance. “It’s definitely grown and continues to grow. It is on an upward trajectory.”
Prior to Facebook News, the company had repeatedly proved to be an unreliable partner for news publishers. As Sarah Perez detailed for TechCrunch, the platform established an “Instant Articles” feature in 2015 that “restricted advertising, subscriptions and the recirculation modules publishers relied on” in exchange for a better user experience. It was a bad bargain, and, as a result, many outlets abandoned the feature.
Facebook promoted a “shift to video” in 2016, but inflated its video use metrics and then refused to pay publishers. This prompted layoffs at many companies, including Vox, Vice, and Mic. Shortly before Facebook News launched, Joanne Lipman, a former editor in chief of USA Today, warned her colleagues that they had “been at the beck and call of these behemoths” for too long.
“I think it’s a dangerous situation for news organizations to count on anything when it comes to Facebook,” the Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy says. To Kennedy, Facebook lost any pretense of morality when, having tweaked its algorithms after the November 2020 election to favor authoritative news sources in the News Feed, it switched back—presumably to boost engagement, to placate right-wing publishers, or both. “You pull all this together, and Facebook is just the worst possible partner,” Kennedy says.
The world watched an extraordinary exercise of Facebook’s massive power in February when it stymied an Australian government attempt to force it to pay to link to news. First, Facebook temporarily banned Australian news sites from its platform. Then it did an end run around the regulators by agreeing to arrange multimillion-dollar deals with major news providers—on its terms, not the government’s. Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, described it as “an agreement that will allow us to support the publishers we choose to.” In Australia, the biggest recipient by far of Facebook’s largesse will be Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns most of the country’s newspapers. News Corp also heavily lobbied for the new legislation. Facebook didn’t pay the country’s smaller outlets.
“In the end, Google & Facebook have a big bucket of baksheesh that will go to old proprietors and their shareholders,” Jeff Jarvis, the director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York, tweeted in February.
As Facebook News continued to roll out across the globe in 2020 and 2021, someone did finally tell Facebook no. The German media giant Axel Springer rejected Facebook’s offer, describing it as both unseemly and insufficiently lucrative: “We consider the efforts of several platforms to become news brands themselves while at the same time compensating some publishers with inappropriately low remuneration for their content as problematic,” a spokesperson said. The company is now holding out for the passage of new copyright laws in Europe that it hopes will create revenue-sharing agreements “in which all publishers can transparently participate and receive reasonable compensation.”
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Facebook’s need for allies in the press has taken on a particular urgency. In October 2020, a House judiciary subcommittee released a bold, agenda-setting report, alleging wide-ranging antitrust violations by Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. In December, the Federal Trade Commission and 46 state attorneys general, as well as the attorneys general for D.C. and Guam, brought an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the company is illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct.
Congress is currently holding hearings on the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2021, which would give news organizations of all shapes and sizes the ability to negotiate collectively with the big platforms. At a March 12 hearing, News Media Alliance CEO David Chavern noted that the larger media companies already have leverage with Facebook and others. “The ones most in need of collective action are small and community publishers, including most particularly publishers of color, who are suffering deeply in this broken marketplace for real quality journalism,” he said.
HD Media, which owns several West Virginia newspapers, filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Google and Facebook in January, seeking damages from the duopoly. The suit charges that Google’s monopolistic control of digital advertising, along with a secret deal with Facebook not to compete against it, had strangled their source of revenue.
In the long run, reformers say, it will be necessary to break up the giant platforms, end their stranglehold on advertising dollars, and ban algorithms that incite outrage or even violence. In the nearer term, however, some observers support the idea of an independent journalistic fund, financed by Big Tech but operating at arm’s length, that could reward news organizations according to the resources they put into their reporting and the value they contribute to their communities.
Some sort of trusted intermediary or collective agreement seems necessary, because it’s hard to see direct handouts as anything more than a corrupt stopgap measure—especially when they’re mostly given to the news organizations that need the money the least. As Doug Reynolds, the managing partner for the West Virginia newspapers suing Facebook and Google for damages, told me, “If the future of this industry is that we’re dependent on their goodwill, then we don’t have an independent press anymore.”
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Dan Froomkin
Dan Froomkin publishes independent political-media criticism at Press Watch (presswatchers.org). He has previously held senior editorial positions at the Intercept, HuffPost, and the Washington Post, where he also wrote the White House Watch column for six years. This article was produced in association with the Open Markets Institute’s Center for Journalism & Liberty.