Dave Emory’s entire lifetime of work is available on a flash drive that can be obtained HERE [1]. The new drive is a 32-gigabyte drive that is current as of the programs and articles posted by early winter of 2017. The new drive (available for a tax-deductible contribution of $65.00 or more.) (The previous flash drive was current through the end of May of 2012.)
WFMU-FM is podcasting For The Record–You can subscribe to the podcast HERE [2].
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You can subscribe to the comments made on programs and posts–an excellent source of information in, and of, itself HERE [4].
This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment [5].
Introduction: In FTR #718 [6] (recorded on Independence Day weekend of 2010), we noted that the new social medium–Facebook-might very well be the opposite of the liberating, empowering entity many believed it to be.
On the contrary, we said–it received financial backing from the CIA [7], permits unprecedented gathering and databasing of users’ personal information, and might very well be a “panopticon”–a type of prison in which the interned can never see his or her jailers, but their keepers can see the interned at all times.
In particular, we noted the prominent position of major Facebook investor Peter Thiel [8] in “Mondo Zuckerberg.” Of German (and probable I.G. Farben) origins, we opined that Thiel was Underground Reich. Opposed to democracy because he feels it is inimical to wealth creation and doesn’t believe women should be allowed to vote, Thiel has now emerged as one of the most prominent of Donald Trump’s supporters, transition team creators and influential policy wonks.
Whereas we explored the “virtual panopticon” concept of Facebook with a question mark in 2010, we now feel affirmatively on the issue.
A very important story from New York magazine sets forth Facebook’s role [9] in the just-concluded election.
” . . . . Facebook’s size, reach, wealth, and power make it effectively the only one that matters. And, boy, does it matter. At the risk of being hyperbolic, I think there are few events over the last decade more significant than the social network’s wholesale acquisition of the traditional functions of news media (not to mention the political-party apparatus). Trump’s ascendancy is far from the first material consequence of Facebook’s conquering invasion of our social, cultural, and political lives, but it’s still a bracing reminder of the extent to which the social network is able to upend existing structure and transform society — and often not for the better. . . .
” . . . . Facebook’s enormous audience, and the mechanisms of distribution on which the site relies — i.e., the emotionally charged activity of sharing, and the show-me-more-like-this feedback loop of the news feed algorithm — makes it the only site to support a genuinely lucrative market in which shady publishers arbitrage traffic [10] by enticing people off of Facebook and onto ad-festooned websites, using stories that are alternately made up, incorrect, exaggerated beyond all relationship to truth, or all three. . . .
” . . . . And at the heart of the problem, anyway, is not the motivations of the hoaxers but the structure of social media itself. Tens of millions of people, invigorated by insurgent outsider candidates and anger at perceived political enemies, were served up or shared emotionally charged news stories about the candidates [11], because Facebook’s sorting algorithm understood from experience that they were seeking such stories. Many of those stories were lies, or ‘parodies,’ but their appearance and placement in a news feed were no different from those of any publisher with a commitment to, you know, not lying. As those people and their followers clicked on, shared, or otherwise engaged with those stories — which they did, because Trump drives engagement extremely bigly — they were served up even more of them. The engagement-driving feedback loop reached the heights of Facebook itself, which shared fake news to its front page on more than one occasion after firing the small team of editorial employees tasked with passing news judgment. . . .
” . . . . Something like 170 million people in North America use Facebook every day, a number that’s not only several orders of magnitude larger than even the most optimistic circulation reckonings of major news outlets but also about one-and-a-half times as many people as voted on Tuesday. Forty-four percent of all adults in the United States say they get news from Facebook [12] . . . ”
Symptomatic of Facebook’s filter of what its users see concerns the social medium’s recent non-coverage [13] of the women’s march:
” . . . . We don’t usually post on Pando at the weekend, but this is too topical and too shameful to wait until Monday. As you certainly know, today is the day of the Women’s March on Washington [14] in protest of Donald Trump. The main event is in DC, where something close to 500,000 protesters of all genders and ages have packed the streets — but there are also major protests in Chicago, New York and around the world. Including Antarctica [15].
You certainly know this because the protest march is the top story on every major news outlet, and because updates and photos from the event are flooding your Twitter and Facebook feeds.
And yet, here’s what Facebook’s trending news feed looked like at the height of the march…
[see image of Carr’s news feed [16]]
And here’s its trending politics feed…
[see image of trending politics fee [17]]
Notice anything missing?
Like, say, a half million women.
In case you think I’m seeing something different from the rest of the world, be assured I’m not….”
Facebook has changed [18] its algorithm, no longer factoring in “likes” and other personal preferences in determining its news feed.
This, however, does not bode as well as Facebook would like us to believe. Facebook has promoted, among others, Campbell Brown [19], to an important position in structuring its news feed: ” . . . . Brown has longstanding ties not just to the traditional news media, but also to conservative politics, although she describes herself as a political independent. She is a close personal friend of Betsy DeVos, the Republican megadonor who is Donald Trump’s nominee for Education Secretary [20], and is married to Dan Senor, a former top advisor to Mitt Romney who also served as spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. . . .
. . . . And alongside her mainstream media experience, Brown is familiar with the world of non-traditional news outlets springing up online. In 2014, she founded a nonprofit news site, The 74, which bills itself as nonpartisan but which critics have said functions as advocacy journalism, tilted in favor of charter schools and against teachers’ unions. The site was launched with money from donors including the foundation run by DeVos, Trump’s proposed Education Secretary. When the nomination was announced, Brown said she would recuse herself from The 74’s coverage of DeVos. . .”
Brown is joined by Tucker Bounds [21], a former John McCain adviser [22] and spokesman for the McCain/Palin campaign.
Exemplifying the terrifying possibilities of the virtual panopticon, we examine the nexus of Cambridge Analytica [23], its principal investors, Robert and Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon, a key member of the firm’s board of directors and a political guru to Rebekah. ” . . . . For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans. A spinoff of a British consulting company and sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism ‘psy ops’ work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes. Respondents — by now hundreds of thousands of us, mostly female and mostly young but enough male and older for the firm to make inferences about others with similar behaviors and demographics — get a free look at their Ocean scores. Cambridge Analytica also gets a look at their scores and, thanks to Facebook, gains access to their profiles and real names.
“Cambridge Analytica worked on the ‘Leave’ side of the Brexit campaign. In the United States it takes only Republicans as clients: Senator Ted Cruz in the primaries, Mr. Trump in the general election. Cambridge is reportedly backed by Robert Mercer [24], a hedge fund billionaire and a major Republican donor; a key board member is Stephen K. Bannon, the head of Breitbart News who became Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman and is set to be his chief strategist in the White House. . .
” . . . . Their [the Mercers] data firm, Cambridge Analytica, was hired by the Cruz campaign. They switched to support Trump shortly after he clinched the nomination, and he eventually hired Cambridge Analytica, as well. Their top political guru is Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart News chairman and White House chief strategist. They’re close, too, with Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who also has a senior role in the White House. They never speak to the press and hardly ever even release a public statement. Like Trump himself, they’ve flouted the standard playbook for how things are done in politics. . . .”
Bannon’s influence [25] on Rebekah Mercer is particularly strong: ” . . . Another of the Republican operatives described Bannon as the ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ to Rebekah Mercer, and a third was even more pointed: ‘Svengali.’ Bannon is ‘really, really, really influential’ with Mercer, said the former Breitbart employee. The Mercers, the former employee said, made their wishes known through Bannon, who would sometimes cite the company’s financial backers as a reason for Breitbart not to do a story. Bannon didn’t respond to a request for comment about this. . . .”
In turn, the influence [26] of Steve Bannon within the Facebook virtual panopticon is even more sinister considering Bannon’s political outlook: ” . . . . But, said the source, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about Bannon, ‘There are some things he’s only going to share with people who he’s tight with and who he trusts.’
Bannon’s readings tend to have one thing in common: the view that technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. And they tend to have a dark, apocalyptic tone that at times echoes Bannon’s own public remarks over the years—a sense that humanity is at a hinge point in history. . . .”
One of the influences on Bannon is Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, who has actually opened a backchannel advisory connection to the White House: ” . . . . Before he emerged on the political scene, an obscure Silicon Valley computer programmer with ties to Trump backer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel was explaining his behavior. Curtis Yarvin, the self-proclaimed ‘neoreactionary’ who blogs under the name ‘Mencius Moldbug,’ attracted a following in 2008 when he published a wordy treatise asserting, among other things, that ‘nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth.’ When the organizer of a computer science conference canceled Yarvin’s appearance following an outcry over his blogging under his nom de web, Bannon took note: Breitbart News decried the act of censorship in an article about the programmer-blogger’s dismissal.
Moldbug’s dense, discursive musings on history—‘What’s so bad about the Nazis?’ he asks in one 2008 post [27] that condemns the Holocaust but questions the moral superiority of the Allies—include a belief in the utility of spreading misinformation that now looks like a template for Trump’s approach to truth. ‘To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable [sic] demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army,’ he writes in a May 2008 post [28].‘It’s been a while since I posted anything really controversial and offensive here,’ he begins in a July 25, 2007, post [29] explaining why he associates democracy with ‘war, tyranny, destruction and poverty.’
Moldbug, who does not do interviews and could not be reached for this story, has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary, according to a source. Yarvin said he has never spoken with Bannon. . . .”
After discussing Facebook’s new AI technology [30] being employed to search users’ photos, the program concludes with the shift of Silicon Valley money [31] to the GOP.
Program Highlights Include:
- Review of Steve Bannon’s role on the NSC.
- Review of the martial law contingency plans drawn up by Oliver North during the Reagan administration, involving the deputizing of paramilitary right-wingers.
- Review of Erik Prince’s relationship to the Trump administration and Betsy De Vos, Trump’s education secretary.
1. A very important story from New York magazine sets forth Facebook’s role in the just-concluded election.
” . . . . Facebook’s size, reach, wealth, and power make it effectively the only one that matters. And, boy, does it matter. At the risk of being hyperbolic, I think there are few events over the last decade more significant than the social network’s wholesale acquisition of the traditional functions of news media (not to mention the political-party apparatus). Trump’s ascendancy is far from the first material consequence of Facebook’s conquering invasion of our social, cultural, and political lives, but it’s still a bracing reminder of the extent to which the social network is able to upend existing structure and transform society — and often not for the better. . . .
” . . . . Facebook’s enormous audience, and the mechanisms of distribution on which the site relies — i.e., the emotionally charged activity of sharing, and the show-me-more-like-this feedback loop of the news feed algorithm — makes it the only site to support a genuinely lucrative market in which shady publishers arbitrage traffic [10] by enticing people off of Facebook and onto ad-festooned websites, using stories that are alternately made up, incorrect, exaggerated beyond all relationship to truth, or all three. . . .
” . . . . And at the heart of the problem, anyway, is not the motivations of the hoaxers but the structure of social media itself. Tens of millions of people, invigorated by insurgent outsider candidates and anger at perceived political enemies, were served up or shared emotionally charged news stories about the candidates [11], because Facebook’s sorting algorithm understood from experience that they were seeking such stories. Many of those stories were lies, or ‘parodies,’ but their appearance and placement in a news feed were no different from those of any publisher with a commitment to, you know, not lying. As those people and their followers clicked on, shared, or otherwise engaged with those stories — which they did, because Trump drives engagement extremely bigly — they were served up even more of them. The engagement-driving feedback loop reached the heights of Facebook itself, which shared fake news to its front page on more than one occasion after firing the small team of editorial employees tasked with passing news judgment. . . .
” . . . . Something like 170 million people in North America use Facebook every day, a number that’s not only several orders of magnitude larger than even the most optimistic circulation reckonings of major news outlets but also about one-and-a-half times as many people as voted on Tuesday. Forty-four percent of all adults in the United States say they get news from Facebook [12] . . . ”
“Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook” by Max Read; New York Magazine; 11/09/2016. [9]
A close and — to pundits, journalists, and Democrats — unexpected victory like Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s is always overdetermined, and no one particular thing pushed Trump over the edge on Tuesday night. His chosen party’s lately increasing openness to explicit white nationalism, the still-recent global-scale failure of the liberal economic consensus, the apparently deep-seated misogyny and racism of the American electorate, Hillary Clinton’s multiple shortcomings as a candidate, or even the last-minute intervention of FBI director James Comey might each have been, on its own, sufficient to hand the election to a man who is, by any reckoning, a dangerous and unpredictable bigot.
Still, it can be clarifying to identify the conditions that allowed access to the highest levels of the political syste a man so far outside what was, until recently, the political mainstream that not a single former presidential candidate from his own party would endorse him. In this case, the condition was: Facebook.
To some extent I’m using “Facebook” here as a stand-in for the half-dozen large and influential message boards and social-media platforms where Americans now congregate to discuss politics, but Facebook’s size, reach, wealth, and power make it effectively the only one that matters. And, boy, does it matter. At the risk of being hyperbolic, I think there are few events over the last decade more significant than the social network’s wholesale acquisition of the traditional functions of news media (not to mention the political-party apparatus). Trump’s ascendancy is far from the first material consequence of Facebook’s conquering invasion of our social, cultural, and political lives, but it’s still a bracing reminder of the extent to which the social network is able to upend existing structure and transform society — and often not for the better.
The most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news. Fake news is not a problem unique to Facebook, but Facebook’s enormous audience, and the mechanisms of distribution on which the site relies — i.e., the emotionally charged activity of sharing, and the show-me-more-like-this feedback loop of the news feed algorithm — makes it the only site to support a genuinely lucrative market in which shady publishers arbitrage traffic [10] by enticing people off of Facebook and onto ad-festooned websites, using stories that are alternately made up, incorrect, exaggerated beyond all relationship to truth, or all three. (To really hammer home the cyberdystopia aspect of this: A significant number of the sites are run by Macedonian teenagers looking to make some scratch [32].)
All throughout the election, these fake stories, sometimes papered over with flimsy “parody site” disclosures somewhere in small type, circulated throughout Facebook: The Pope endorses Trump [11]. Hillary Clinton bought $137 million in illegal arms [33]. The Clintons bought a $200 million house in the Maldives [34]. Many got hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of shares, likes, and comments; enough people clicked through to the posts to generate significant profits for their creators. The valiant efforts of Snopes and other debunking organizations were insufficient; Facebook’s labyrinthine sharing and privacy settings mean that fact-checks get lost in the shuffle. Often, no one would even need to click on and read the story for the headline itself to become a widely distributed talking point, repeated elsewhere online, or, sometimes, in real life. (Here’s an in-the-wild sighting [35] of a man telling a woman that Clinton and her longtime aide Huma Abedin are lovers, based on “material that appeared to have been printed off the internet.”)
Profit motive, on the part of Macedonians or Americans, was not the only reason to share fake news, of course — there was an obvious ideological motivation to lie to or mislead potential voters — but the fake-news industry’s commitment to “engagement” above any particular political program has given it a terrifyingly nihilistic sheen that old-fashioned propagandists never displayed. (Say what you will about ratfuc king, dude, at least it’s an ethos.) And at the heart of the problem, anyway, is not the motivations of the hoaxers but the structure of social media itself. Tens of millions of people, invigorated by insurgent outsider candidates and anger at perceived political enemies, were served up or shared emotionally charged news stories about the candidates [11], because Facebook’s sorting algorithm understood from experience that they were seeking such stories. Many of those stories were lies, or “parodies,” but their appearance and placement in a news feed were no different from those of any publisher with a commitment to, you know, not lying. As those people and their followers clicked on, shared, or otherwise engaged with those stories — which they did, because Trump drives engagement extremely bigly — they were served up even more of them. The engagement-driving feedback loop reached the heights of Facebook itself, which shared fake news to its front page on more than one occasion after firing the small team of editorial employees tasked with passing news judgment. Flush with Trump’s uniquely passionate supporter base, Facebook’s vast, personalized sewer system has become clogged with toxic fatbergs [36].
And it is, truly, vast: Something like 170 million people in North America use Facebook every day, a number that’s not only several orders of magnitude larger than even the most optimistic circulation reckonings of major news outlets but also about one-and-a-half times as many people as voted on Tuesday. Forty-four percent of all adults in the United States say they get news from Facebook [12], and access to to an audience of that size would seem to demand some kind of civic responsibility — an obligation to ensure that a group of people more sizable than the American electorate is not being misled. But whether through a failure of resources, of ideology, or of imagination, Facebook has seemed both uninterested in and incapable of even acknowledging that it has become the most efficient distributor of misinformation in human history.
…
Facebook connected those supporters to each other and to the candidate, gave them platforms far beyond what even the largest Establishment media organizations might have imagined, and allowed them to effectively self-organize outside the party structure. Who needs a GOTV database when you have millions of voters worked into a frenzy by nine months of sharing impassioned lies on Facebook, encouraging each other to participate?
Even better, Facebook allowed Trump to directly combat the hugely negative media coverage directed at him, simply by giving his campaign and its supporters another host of channels to distribute counterprogramming. This, precisely, is why more good journalism would have been unlikely to change anyone’s mind: The Post and the Times no longer have a monopoly on information about a candidate. Endless reports of corruption, venality, misogyny, and incompetence merely settle in a Facebook feed next to a hundred other articles from pro-Trump sources (if they settle into a Trump supporter’s feed at all) disputing or ignoring the deeply reported claims, or, as is often the case, just making up new and different stories.
2. Paul Carr over at Pando had a rather troubling observation during the anti-Trump Woman’s March about Facebook’s coverage of the Million Woman March in its news feed. Specifically, his observation that he was unable to observe any news on Facebook about the historic march at all:
We don’t usually post on Pando at the weekend, but this is too topical and too shameful to wait until Monday.
As you certainly know, today is the day of the Women’s March on Washington [14] in protest of Donald Trump. The main event is in DC, where something close to 500,000 protesters of all genders and ages have packed the streets — but there are also major protests in Chicago, New York and around the world. Including Antarctica [15].
You certainly know this because the protest march is the top story on every major news outlet, and because updates and photos from the event are flooding your Twitter and Facebook feeds.
And yet, here’s what Facebook’s trending news feed looked like at the height of the march…
[see image of Carr’s news feed [16]]
And here’s its trending politics feed…
[see image of trending politics fee [17]]
Notice anything missing?Like, say, a half million women.
In case you think I’m seeing something different from the rest of the world, be assured I’m not….…
@paulbradleycarr [37] wow. just looked. very poor. i have one mention (for chicago march) under politics— Rachel Clarke (@rachelclarke) January 21, 2017 [38]
@rachelclarke [39]@paulbradleycarr [37] I don’t see any in top trends OR politics… and I’m in Chicago so I thought it might show up— Aesha (@heyitsaesh) January 21, 2017 [40]
…Facebook’s trending news feed really has obliterated the entire Women’s March in favor of stories about pastry chefs and professional wrestlers.
I’ve written plenty (most recently this [41]) about Facebook’s increasing coziness with Donald Trump, and there’s plenty more to be written about the growing unhappiness inside the company with the right-ward direction that senior management are taking in an attempt to please (/avoid conflict with) the incoming administration. Stay tuned.
For now, I’ve contacted Facebook to ask if the trending news feed is yet another example of that attempt, or if there’s some mystery glitch that has caused the voices of hundreds of thousands of women to be silenced in favor of stories that, by Facebook’s own numbers, only a thousand or so people are talking about. I’ll update this post if I hear back.
Update: A Facebook spokesperson responded to me on Tuesday afternoon, insisting that “some number” of the following terms “began trending on Saturday.”
#whyimarch
#WomensMarch
Women’s March on Boston
Women’s March on Los Angeles
Women’s March on Chicago
Sundance Women’s March
He was unable to provide supporting evidence for which of the terms trended when, and who might have seen them. “Trending is algorithmically driven based on conversations on the platform,” he explained.
I also asked whether it was accurate that Facebook is staffing up its policy team with right-wingers or others sympathetic to Donald Trump. The spokesperson declined to comment on the record.
Update II:
Facebook announces [42] it is “updating how topics are identified as trending on Facebook”
3. So was Facebook intentionally suppressing the Women’s March or is this is a case of an algorithmic hiccup that, for whatever reason, concluded that Paul Carr wouldn’t care about such things. Well, according to the article below, the number of people unable to find any trace of the Women’s March in their trending news feed wasn’t limited to Carr. But it also wasn’t limited to suppressing the Women’s March in trending news feeds either since others reported that they were seeing the Women’s March in their news feed but no mention of Trump’s inauguration. So while it’s unclear what cause the numerous reports of major stories not reaching some users’ news feeds but not other feed, it’s pretty clear that relying on Facebook for your news is probably bad news (which shouldn’t be news to anyone) [43]:
Some people are questioning why the Women’s March was absent from Facebook’s Trending news section on Jan. 21. Other users say they failed to see the Inauguration on the list the day prior.
Journalists and onlookers are seeking answers as to why Saturday’s Women’s March—fueled by some 3 million participants [44] in dozens of cities and towns worldwide—failed to appear on Facebook’s Trending topics list for some users during the height of the event.
According to Facebook [45], Trending news items are determined algorithmically based on engagement, timelines, location and Page like data. Those topics appear on the right-rail of the Facebook home screen and link to popular articles and posts that are relevant to each item. These articles generally line up with the top news stories of the day, as determined and reported on by more traditional news outlets.
But something puzzling happened on Jan. 21. Despite the Women’s March capturing mainstream and local media attention and spurring a flood of photos and commentary from those who marched, some users noted that the event was nowhere to be found within Facebook’s Trending topics list. For Pando reporter Paul Bradley Carr, it didn’t even appear [13] within the Political sub-section of Trending topics.
Other onlookers seem to have verified Carr’s finding; however, some people did see limited coverage (within the Political sub-section, for example). So far, Facebook has declined to comment, which has left room for rampant speculation as to whether this was a mere technological glitch or something more deliberate. Note: By Sunday evening Jan. 22, the march had made its way to my News Feed.
What’s also interesting is that many people reported not seeing the Inauguration as a Trending topic the day before. Scrolling through public commentary and screenshots [46] shared on Twitter, the situation gets even murkier. Some users saw the Women’s March trending but not the Inauguration. Others saw the opposite. The thing about a personalized “front page” is that absent a large pool of data, it’s tough to know what really went on behind the scenes.
So, why is what appears in Trending so important? As was oft-discussed during and after the last Election cycle, Americans are increasingly relying on social media as their leading source of news. A Pew study from 2015 [47] found that 40 percent of U.S. Facebook users primarily view it as a destination for news-gathering. Among users age 34 and younger, 60 percent say social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are “the most or an important way” to get news.
…
For critics of Trending and its influence on the political landscape, there are two issues at play. The first involves the alleged interference of human editors in what has been positioned as an algorithmic curation by Facebook. The second debate is more philosophical in nature, as it questions the so-called “bubbles” that an algorithmic editor naturally creates.
In fairness, right now there is limited data available to prove that the Women’s March was absent in a universal capacity. That said, anecdotally, it appears that many people who should have seen the march did not. Drawing some assumptions, it would have made sense that a tech reporter living in a major metropolitan area would be exposed to news of the march—perhaps even in an over-indexed capacity—given that it’s likely he or she would have known people participating.
Other journalists noted that it seemed strange for Twitter to be showing the march on its own curated news list, but not Facebook.
I think Twitter deserves the win for the coverage around Women’s March today. Facebook? Hmm…suspect w/no mention in trending topics.— Ken Yeung (@thekenyeung) January 22, 2017 [48]
In May 2016, Vox published an article [49] which claimed that “Facebook has more influence over Americans than any media company in history.” Whether curated content, such as what appears in Trending, has been skewed by users’ personal data or directionally manipulated by human editors, the net effect is significant: “So many people spend so much time on Facebook that even a small shift in the platform’s approach could have a big impact on what people read online,” says Vox’s Timothy B. Lee.
4. Now that Facebook announced that it’s totally changing its news feed algorithm so that everyone in the same region will see the same trending news it’s also a bit of a moot mystery going forward. Sure, it’s not an entirely moot mystery since it would still be nice to know if Facebook was somehow using its algorithm as an excuse to suppress very negative news for Trump. But at least it sounds like there will be new and different reasons for Facebook’s crappy news feeds going forward [18]:
An article in an online publication accusing Facebook of suppressing the Women’s March in its trending topics caused a little tempest on social media over the weekend. Facebook says it did not intentionally block any story and is revealing a new way [42] its trending-topics algorithm will now operate.
Paul Bradley Carr, writing for online outlet Pando [13], on Saturday posted what he said were screen shots of his Facebook pages at the height of the worldwide marches, which brought more than a million people into the streets around the globe to protest the agenda of the Trump administration.
Despite images and stories from the marches filling many people’s personal Facebook feeds and the day’s media coverage, Carr’s screenshots showed no signs of the march in Trending Topics — a feature supposed to reflect popular discussed topics.
And Carr says he discovered he was not the only one who didn’t see the Women’s March reflected on Trending Topics, accusing Facebook of trying to cozy up to the Trump administration. A very unscientific poll by this reporter found that among people in my Facebook and Twitter network most did see the Women’s March or something related trending on their page. However, a few did not.
According to Facebook, the Trending Topics — seen to the right of the main news feed on desktop and in search on mobile — are “based on a number of factors including engagement, timeliness, Pages you’ve liked and your location.” (Facebook pays NPR and other leading news organizations to produce live video streams.)
Facebook representatives told NPR that the reason why some people did not see the march as trending had to do with the algorithm behind the feature. Although it took into account major news events and what’s popular on the site, it also accounted for the preferences of each person. It’s possible that Carr’s algorithmic profile indicated he wouldn’t be interested in the Women’s March.
In addition, some people may have seen trending topics they didn’t realize were about the Women’s March. For example, Ashley Judd and Madonna were trending — both women gave speeches at the main march in Washington, D.C.
And, Facebook says, none of this will happen in the future.
As of Wednesday, the company has once again changed its trending algorithms. Personal preferences are now out of the equation. “Facebook will no longer be personalized based on someone’s interests,” Facebook says in a press release. “Everyone in the same region will see the same topics.” For now, a region is considered a country, so everyone in the U.S. should see the same topics.
The latest algorithm changes are part of Facebook’s ongoing effort to curtail the spread of fake news. Some fabricated stories show up in Trending Topics, despite often originating on sites with no history of visitors and getting no coverage from legitimate news media. It’s a lucrative business, explored by NPR in November [50], when we tracked down one notorious fake-news creator.
The new algorithm would make hoax articles less likely to trend because it will look at “the number of publishers that are posting articles on Facebook about the same topic,” accounting for coverage by multiple news outlets, Facebook says.
…
5. No more personalized reality bubbles for Facebook users. Now it’s regional reality bubbles. That’s progress! Maybe. It’s unclear. Especially since the new head of Facebook’s news division is a right-winger with close ties to Trump’s new education secretary [19]:
Campbell Brown, a former TV news anchor and education reform activist, has personal and professional links to Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Education Secretary.
Facebook has chosen Campbell Brown, a former television news anchor who worked most recently as an education reform activist, as its head of news partnerships, tasked with rebuilding relationships with news outlets in the wake of a wave of fake news stories [51] that dominated the site during the presidential election.
Brown has longstanding ties not just to the traditional news media, but also to conservative politics, although she describes herself as a political independent. She is a close personal friend of Betsy DeVos, the Republican megadonor who is Donald Trump’s nominee for Education Secretary [20], and is married to Dan Senor, a former top advisor to Mitt Romney who also served as spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
But she, and Senor, were central to the losing battle against Donald Trump inside the Republican Party. Last June, in a closed-door interview with Paul Ryan [52], she grilled the House Speaker on his decision to back Trump, asking him how he would justify his decision to a small child. She had earlier blamed the news media for aiding Trump’s rise. “He is not a politician. He is not a leader. He is a supreme narcissist,” wrote in December, 2015 [53], criticizing TV networks for their saturation coverage of the then-candidate. “You can deprive him of the one thing that keeps him going—airtime.”
At Facebook, she will work to navigate the social network’s sometimes fraught role as a central player in the news industry. She won’t, however, be making editorial or content-related decisions, such as deciding what stories get play on Facebook, the company said.
“Right now we are watching a massive transformation take place in the news business – both in the way people consume news and in the way reporters disseminate news,” Brown wrote in a Facebook post Friday. “Facebook is a major part of this transformation.”
…
In the wake of the election, Facebook has weathered criticism over its inability to stem a tide of fake political news stories. It has also scrambled to mend ties with conservative publications [54] after reports claimed its trending news team suppressed stories from conservative news outlets.
In her post-media career as an education activist, Brown founded an advocacy group, the Partnership for Educational Justice, whose donors she chose to keep secret, that frequently battles with teachers’ unions. And she has worked in favor of charter school expansion, a pet project of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
And alongside her mainstream media experience, Brown is familiar with the world of non-traditional news outlets springing up online. In 2014, she founded a nonprofit news site, The 74, which bills itself as nonpartisan but which critics have said functions as advocacy journalism, tilted in favor of charter schools and against teachers’ unions.
The site was launched with money from donors including the foundation run by DeVos, Trump’s proposed Education Secretary. When the nomination was announced, Brown said she would recuse herself from The 74’s coverage of DeVos.
Earlier this year, The 74 published an undercover sting video [55] made by conservative activist James O’Keefe, who posed undercover as a teacher and filmed union representatives advising him on how to handle a hypothetical assault of a child.
6. The guy just hired as the new Facebook Communications Director who will be focused on product communications, specifically on the news feed, is Tucker Bounds [21].
“Axios AM” by Mike Allen; Axios ; 1/16/2017. [21]
Good Monday morning! Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a perfect time to reflect on historic days for our country, as we head into Inauguration Week. It’s three days and a wake-up till President Trump.
…
Scoop … Facebook adds a well-known operative: Tucker Bounds — co-founder of Sidewire, the online conversation platform — is stepping away from his operational role and returning to Facebook, where he was director of corporate communications from 2011 to 2014. Tucker, who’ll keep his seat on the Sidewise board, starts Jan. 30 as Communications Director, focused on product communications, specifically on News Feed. . . .
7. Fun fact: those Facebook personality tests that allegedly let you learn things about what make you tick allows whoever set up that test learn what makes you tick too. Since it’s done through Facebook, they can identify your test results with your real identity. It’s a rather obvious fun fact.
Here’s a less obvious fun fact: if the Facebook personality test in question happens to report your “Ocean score” (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism), that means the test your taking was created by Cambridge Analytica, a company with one of Donald Trump’s billionaire sugar-daddies, Robert Mercer, as a major investor. And it’s Cambridge Analytica that gets to learn all those fun facts about your psychological profile too. And Steve Bannon sat on its board:
“The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz” by McKenzie Funk; The New York Times; 1/19/2017. [23]
Do you panic easily? Do you often feel blue? Do you have a sharp tongue? Do you get chores done right away? Do you believe in the importance of art?
If ever you’ve answered questions like these on one of the free personality quizzes floating around Facebook, you’ll have learned what’s known as your Ocean score: How you rate according to the big five psychological traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. You may also be responsible the next time America is shocked by an election upset.
For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans. A spinoff of a British consulting company and sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes. Respondents — by now hundreds of thousands of us, mostly female and mostly young but enough male and older for the firm to make inferences about others with similar behaviors and demographics — get a free look at their Ocean scores. Cambridge Analytica also gets a look at their scores and, thanks to Facebook, gains access to their profiles and real names.
Cambridge Analytica worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit campaign. In the United States it takes only Republicans as clients: Senator Ted Cruz in the primaries, Mr. Trump in the general election. Cambridge is reportedly backed by Robert Mercer [24], a hedge fund billionaire and a major Republican donor; a key board member is Stephen K. Bannon, the head of Breitbart News who became Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman and is set to be his chief strategist in the White House.
In the age of Facebook, it has become far easier for campaigners or marketers to combine our online personas with our offline selves, a process that was once controversial but is now so commonplace that there’s a term for it, “onboarding.” Cambridge Analytica says it has as many as 3,000 to 5,000 data points on each of us, be it voting histories or full-spectrum demographics — age, income, debt, hobbies, criminal histories, purchase histories, religious leanings, health concerns, gun ownership, car ownership, homeownership — from consumer-data giants.
No data point is very informative on its own, but profiling voters, says Cambridge Analytica, is like baking a cake. “It’s the sum of the ingredients,” its chief executive officer, Alexander Nix, told NBC News. Because the United States lacks European-style restrictions on second- or thirdhand use of our data, and because our freedom-of-information laws give data brokers broad access to the intimate records kept by local and state governments, our lives are open books even without social media or personality quizzes.
Ever since the advertising executive Lester Wunderman coined the term “direct marketing” in 1961, the ability to target specific consumers with ads — rather than blanketing the airwaves with mass appeals and hoping the right people will hear them — has been the marketer’s holy grail. What’s new is the efficiency with which individually tailored digital ads can be tested and matched to our personalities. Facebook is the microtargeter’s ultimate weapon.
The explosive growth of Facebook’s ad business has been overshadowed by its increasing role in how we get our news, real or fake. In July, the social network posted record earnings: quarterly sales were up 59 percent from the previous year, and profits almost tripled to $2.06 billion. While active users of Facebook — now 1.71 billion monthly active users — were up 15 percent, the real story was how much each individual user was worth. The company makes $3.82 a year from each global user, up from $2.76 a year ago, and an average of $14.34 per user in the United States, up from $9.30 a year ago. Much of this growth comes from the fact that advertisers not only have an enormous audience in Facebook but an audience they can slice into the tranches they hope to reach.
One recent advertising product on Facebook is the so-called “dark post”: A newsfeed message seen by no one aside from the users being targeted. With the help of Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Trump’s digital team used dark posts to serve different ads to different potential voters, aiming to push the exact right buttons for the exact right people at the exact right times.
Imagine the full capability of this kind of “psychographic” advertising. In future Republican campaigns, a pro-gun voter whose Ocean score ranks him high on neuroticism could see storm clouds and a threat: The Democrat wants to take his guns away. A separate pro-gun voter deemed agreeable and introverted might see an ad emphasizing tradition and community values, a father and son hunting together.
In this election, dark posts were used to try to suppress the African-American vote. According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads reminding certain selected black voters of Hillary Clinton’s infamous “super predator” line. It targeted Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with messages about the Clinton Foundation’s troubles in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Federal Election Commission rules are unclear when it comes to Facebook posts, but even if they do apply and the facts are skewed and the dog whistles loud, the already weakening power of social opprobrium is gone when no one else sees the ad you see — and no one else sees “I’m Donald Trump, and I approved this message.”
While Hillary Clinton spent more than $140 million on television spots, old-media experts scoffed at Trump’s lack of old-media ad buys. Instead, his campaign pumped its money into digital, especially Facebook. One day in August, it flooded the social network with 100,000 ad variations, so-called A/B testing on a biblical scale, surely more ads than could easily be vetted by human eyes for compliance with Facebook’s “community standards.”
…
On Monday, after a similar announcement from Google, Facebook said it would no longer allow fake-news websites to show ads, on their own sites, from Facebook’s ad network — a half-step that neither blocks what appears on your newsfeed nor affects how advertisers can microtarget users on the social network.
There are surely more changes to come. Mr. Zuckerberg is young, still skeptical that his radiant transparency machine could be anything but a force for good, rightly wary of policing what the world’s diverse citizens say and share on his network, so far mostly dismissive of Facebook’s role in the election. If Mr. Zuckerberg takes seriously his oft-stated commitments to diversity and openness, he must grapple honestly with the fact that Facebook is no longer just a social network. It’s an advertising medium that’s now dangerously easy to weaponize.
A Trump administration is unlikely to enforce transparency about who is targeted by dark posts and other hidden political ads — or to ensure that politicians take meaningful ownership of what the ads say. But Facebook can.
…
8. So what do we know about Robert Mercer, the man who first backed Ted Cruz in the 2016 race and then quickly switched to Trump? Well, there reportedly isn’t very much known about his politics…except that he’s a libertarian who backed Donald Trump after backing Ted Cruz. Which is pretty much all we need to know to know that he’s up to no good [25]:
The Mercers are enjoying more influence than ever with their candidate in the White House—but no one seems to know how they intend to use it.
She owns a cookie store. He loves model trains. They both hate the Clintons. And beyond that, not much is clear about the motivations of the Mercer father-daughter duo of Republican megadonors who have become two of the most powerful people in the country over the last 18 months.
Hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah were among the earliest and strongest backers of Donald Trump while other elite donors still disdained him. It turned out to be a good investment. But now, with their favored candidate freshly installed as president of the United States, it remains unclear what they believe, or what they hope their investment will yield.
The Mercers have been a quiet but constant presence in the background of Republican politics since the beginning of the 2016 cycle. They started the campaign as backers of Ted Cruz, pouring millions into one of the main super PACs supporting his candidacy. Their data firm, Cambridge Analytica, was hired by the Cruz campaign. They switched to support Trump shortly after he clinched the nomination, and he eventually hired Cambridge Analytica, as well. Their top political guru is Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart News chairman and White House chief strategist. They’re close, too, with Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who also has a senior role in the White House. They never speak to the press and hardly ever even release a public statement. Like Trump himself, they’ve flouted the standard playbook for how things are done in politics.
Clues to their policy preferences can be found in their family foundation’s pattern of giving. For example, they have given more than once to groups questioning climate-change science. But their donations have flown to groups all over the conservative political map, ranging from libertarian organizations to movement conservative groups to the Koch brothers’ Freedom Partners Action Fund to Breitbart. That scattershot approach suggests the family has some ideological flexibility.
No one seems to know what motivates the Mercers or what policies they want to see enacted, even people who have worked closely with them or for projects funded by them. While they’ve poured money into conservative causes, they’ve also invested in projects explicitly aimed at overturning the modern conservative movement, like Breitbart News, in which they reportedly [56] invested $10 million, and Trump himself. And the mystery of their ideological motivations is made all the more striking by their success in helping Trump reach the White House. A recent Wall Street Journal story [57] on the Mercers concluded: “It isn’t clear what specific policies or positions, if any, the Mercers are seeking for their support of Mr. Trump.”
“All I can take away is that they just want to be power players,” said a former Breitbart News staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a non-disclosure agreement. “I don’t know what their principles are. I don’t know how you switch from Ted Cruz to Donald Trump so quickly.”
“Most of these people I think I understand,” said a Republican operative who has been engaged on several Mercer-led efforts. (Like most people quoted in this story, the operative declined to be identified for fear of legal or professional consequences for speaking publicly about the Mercers.) “I don’t understand the Mercers.”
Rebekah Mercer “talks business. She talks data, she talks trends, she talks messaging,” said another Republican operative who has worked with the Mercers. “I have never really been in her presence where she’s talked policy.”
Asked to describe what’s motivating them, Bannon himself was vague.
“Really incredible folks,” Bannon said in an email. “Never ask for anything. Very middle class values as they came to their great wealth late in life.”
* * *
Robert Mercer got his start at IBM, working there for over 20 years. He went to Renaissance Technologies in 1993. It’s there that Mercer, already well into middle age, became wealthy. Renaissance, based in East Setauket, Long Island, includes three hedge funds managing over $25 billion in assets, as well as the mysterious Medallion Fund [58], an employees-only fund that has made its investors unimaginably rich. Mercer’s co-CEO is Jim Simons, a major donor to Democrats; one Republican operative with connections to the Mercers who spoke on condition of anonymity joked that the pair were trying to “hedge the political system.”
Rebekah, known as Bekah, is one of Bob and Diana Mercer’s three daughters. Along with her sisters Heather Sue and Jennifer (“Jenji”), she owns Ruby et Violette, a cookie store in New York (the cookies are now sold exclusively online). Rebekah, 43, is married to a French Morgan Stanley executive, Sylvain Mirochnikoff, with whom she has four children. Mercer did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Bob Mercer, 70, is an enigmatic figure who has a reputation for rarely speaking publicly. Nearly everyone spoken to for this story used some variation of the word “brilliant” to describe him. There’s a touch of eccentricity, too; “I know a couple things you can bond with Bob Mercer over is he hates the Federal Reserve and loves model trains,” said one Republican operative who has worked on Mercer-backed initiatives. (Mercer once sued [59] a model train manufacturer, alleging that he was overcharged for a model train set installed in Owl’s Nest, his expansive Long Island estate).
Whatever her actual beliefs, there’s one thing upon which people who have worked with Rebekah Mercer agree: She has a keen understanding of politics and likes to be involved in the day-to-day running of projects she’s involved in. Many donors like to play strategist, much to the annoyance of the actual strategists in their employ. But Mercer appears to be more successful at it than most.
“Almost all donors want to pretend they’re Karl Rove. They all want to play political mastermind,” said one of the Republican operatives who has worked on Mercer-funded projects. But “I would say that Rebekah is as smart at politics as you could be without ever having been at the grunt level.”
“Her political instincts were always on the money,” said Hogan Gidley, a former Mike Huckabee aide who served as spokesman for the Make America Number One PAC which became the Mercers’ pro-Trump vehicle during the general election. “We would be talking about how a certain ad should look or changes we should make to an ad, and she would just offer an idea that would just elicit instantaneous agreement. It wasn’t because they were largely funding the PAC, it was because she was right.”
Gidley said Mercer was on every conference call related to the super PAC’s operations. Even so, he didn’t get a clear sense of Mercer or her father’s ideology.
“They’re libertarians who understand that they might have to make compromises with social conservatives,” said one person in the non-profit world who is a recipient of multiple Mercer grants. “They’re just as at home at the Cato Institute as they would be at the Heritage Foundation on general issues.”
The Mercers, the non-profit activist said, appeared to have two goals this election cycle: “They’ve been fighting the Clintons forever, and they wanted to back the winning horse.”
That first goal has been clear for some time. The Mercers have for years had their hands in the cottage industry of anti-Clinton activity in and around the conservative movement. According to tax records from the Mercer Family Foundation, they gave nearly $3.6 million to Citizens United between 2012 and 2014, which sued for access to Clinton Foundation-related emails last year and whose president David Bossie also got a senior job on the Trump campaign. They’ve also invested in the Government Accountability Institute, which publishes the conservative author Peter Schweizer. Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash was an influential source of talking points for Trump allies during this election cycle, providing fodder for one of Trump’s early salvos against Clinton in a speech in June and regularly populating the pages of Breitbart. Bannon co-founded GAI with Schweizer; Rebekah Mercer has sat on the board.
The Mercers’ activities during the election cycle are among the clearest public evidence of how their beliefs, whatever they might be, translate into action.
At first, the Mercers went in for Cruz. They backed Keep the Promise 1, one of the main super PACs supporting Cruz, to the tune of $11 million. Like other campaigns with which the Mercers have been involved, including Trump’s, the Cruz campaign engaged the Mercers’s data firm Cambridge Analytica. Cruz campaign officials clashed with Cambridge over the particulars of the contract and lodged complaints about the product itself, according to multiple sources familiar with what happened; in one instance, the Cruz campaign was paying for a database system, RIPON, that had not been built yet, leading to a contentious argument. They also caught wind of work Cambridge had done for the Ben Carson campaign; working on more than one primary campaign is a no-no for vendors. Elsewhere in Mercer-world, there were other signs of trouble when it came to Cruz. In January, before the primaries had even begun, Breitbart News began attacking Cruz, insinuating that he was ineligible to be president because of his Canadian birth (a line also in heavy use by Trump at the time). Meanwhile, the Mercers were still publicly behind Cruz.
“Cambridge Analytica’s data science team had an excellent relationship with the Cruz campaign: we were part of the campaign starting from day one and all the way through the primaries and caucuses until the final day, and we continue to work with many of the principals from the campaign,” a spokesman for Cambridge Analytica said. On the work they had done for the Carson campaign, the spokesman said “Cambridge Analytica is large enough to work on more than one campaign at any given time, and we take FEC firewall regulations very seriously. We would not work with multiple clients if we did not have the scale to provide devoted resources to ensure full compliance with firewalling procedures.” And on RIPON, the Cambridge Analytica spokesman said “Ripon was being used by many senatorial and gubernatorial candidates in the 2014 mid-terms. Some bespoke modifications were requested by the Cruz campaign and we were of course happy to make those for them.”
The Breitbart stories were troubling to Cruz staff, who had seen Breitbart as an ally and who didn’t think they had any reason to doubt the Mercers’ loyalty.
What Cruz’s staff may not have taken into account was the behind-the-scenes influence of Steve Bannon.
“I don’t think [the Mercers are] as nationalistic as Steve,” said a Republican operative who has worked for the Mercers. “Steve is an unapologetic nationalist. I don’t think the Mercers are as much.” But “they share a real disdain for elitism. That’s what sort of binds them together.”
Another of the Republican operatives described Bannon as the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” to Rebekah Mercer, and a third was even more pointed: “Svengali.” Bannon is “really, really, really influential” with Mercer, said the former Breitbart employee. The Mercers, the former employee said, made their wishes known through Bannon, who would sometimes cite the company’s financial backers as a reason for Breitbart not to do a story. Bannon didn’t respond to a request for comment about this.
That highlights a third apparent goal, which became clearer over the course of the campaign: dismantling the establishment. . . .
9. Guess which major world leader is reportedly taking the advice of Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug, the pro-monarchy, pro-eugenics founder of the contemporary “Dark Enlightenment”? [60]
“What Steve Bannon Wants You to Read” by Eliana Johnson and Eli Stokols; Politico; 2/07/2017. [26]
President Trump’s strategic adviser is elevating a once-obscure network of political thinkers.
The first weeks of the Trump presidency have brought as much focus on the White House’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, as on the new president himself. But if Bannon has been the driving force behind the frenzy of activity in the White House, less attention has been paid to the network of political philosophers who have shaped his thinking and who now enjoy a direct line to the White House.
They are not mainstream thinkers, but their writings help to explain the commotion that has defined the Trump administration’s early days. They include a Lebanese-American author known for his theories about hard-to-predict events; an obscure Silicon Valley computer scientist whose online political tracts herald a “Dark Enlightenment”; and a former Wall Street executive who urged Donald Trump’s election in anonymous manifestos by likening the trajectory of the country to that of a hijacked airplane—and who now works for the National Security Council.
Bannon, described by one associate as “the most well-read person in Washington,” is known for recommending books to colleagues and friends, according to multiple people who have worked alongside him. He is a voracious reader who devours works of history and political theory “in like an hour,” said a former associate whom Bannon urged to read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. “He’s like the Rain Man of nationalism.”
But, said the source, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about Bannon, “There are some things he’s only going to share with people who he’s tight with and who he trusts.”
Bannon’s readings tend to have one thing in common: the view that technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. And they tend to have a dark, apocalyptic tone that at times echoes Bannon’s own public remarks over the years—a sense that humanity is at a hinge point in history. His ascendant presence in the West Wing is giving once-obscure intellectuals unexpected influence over the highest echelons of government.
Bannon’s 2015 documentary, “Generation Zero,” drew heavily on one of his favorite books, “The Fourth Turning” by William Strauss and Neil Howe. The book explains a theory of history unfolding in 80- to 100-year cycles, or “turnings,” the fourth and final stage of which is marked by periods of cataclysmic change in which the old order is destroyed and replaced—a current period that, in Bannon’s view, was sparked by the 2008 financial crisis and has now been manifested in part by the rise of Trump.
“The West is in trouble. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that, and Trump’s election was a sign of health,” said a White House aide who was not authorized to speak publicly. “It was a revolt against managerialism, a revolt against expert rule, a revolt against the administrative state. It opens the door to possibilities.”
All of these impulses are evident in the White House, as the new administration—led by Bannon and a cadre of like-minded aides—has set about administering a sort of ideological shock therapy in its first two weeks. A flurry of executive orders slashing regulation and restricting the influx of refugees bear the ideological markings of obscure intellectuals in both form and content. The circumvention of the bureaucracy is a hallmark of these thinkers, as is the necessity of restricting immigration.
Their thinking has a clear nationalist strain, and Bannon has considered hiring a staffer responsible for monitoring nationalist movements around the world, according to two sources familiar with the situation. French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen’s visit to Trump Tower in mid-January was his handiwork. Le Pen has devoted her political career to softening the image and broadening the appeal of the nationalist movement in France by marginalizing its most extremist members. Her views are typically nationalist: She is hostile to the European Union and free trade and opposes granting foreigners from outside the EU the right to vote in local elections. Bannon’s former employer, Breitbart News, has covered Le Pen obsessively [61], casting her as the French Trump.
***
Many political onlookers described Trump’s election as a “black swan” event: unexpected but enormously consequential. The term was popularized by Nassim Taleb, the best-selling author whose 2014 book Antifragile—which has been read and circulated by Bannon and his aides—reads like a user’s guide to the Trump insurgency.
It’s a broadside against big government, which Taleb faults for suppressing the randomness, volatility and stress that keep institutions and people healthy. “As with neurotically overprotective parents, those who are trying to help us are hurting us the most,” he writes. Taleb also offers a withering critique of global elites, whom he describes as a corrupt class of risk-averse insiders immune to the consequences of their actions: “We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members of the I.A.N.D (International Association of Name Droppers), and academics with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability. They game the system while citizens pay the price.”
It might as well have been the mission statement of the Trump campaign. Asked in a phone interview this week whether he’s had meetings with Bannon or his associates, Taleb said he could not comment. “Anything about private meetings would need to come from them,” he said, though he noted cryptically he’s had “coffee with friends.” He has been supportive of Trump but does not define himself as a supporter per se, though he said he would “be on the first train” to Washington were he invited to the White House.
“They look like the incarnation of ‘antifragile’ people,” Taleb said of the new administration. “The definition of ‘antifragile’ is having more upside than downside. For example, Obama had little upside because everyone thought he was brilliant and would solve the world’s problems, so when he didn’t it was disappointing. Trump has little downside because he’s already been so heavily criticized. He’s heavily vaccinated because of his checkered history. People have to understand: Trump did not run to be archbishop of Canterbury.”
Trump’s first two weeks in office have produced a dizzying blur of activity. But the president has also needlessly sparked controversy, arguing, for example, that his inauguration crowd was the biggest ever and that millions of people voted illegally in last November’s election, leaving even seasoned political observers befuddled.
Before he emerged on the political scene, an obscure Silicon Valley computer programmer with ties to Trump backer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel was explaining his behavior. Curtis Yarvin, the self-proclaimed “neoreactionary” who blogs under the name “Mencius Moldbug,” attracted a following in 2008 when he published a wordy treatise asserting, among other things, that “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth.” When the organizer of a computer science conference canceled Yarvin’s appearance following an outcry over his blogging under his nom de web, Bannon took note: Breitbart News decried the act of censorship in an article about the programmer-blogger’s dismissal.
Moldbug’s dense, discursive musings on history—“What’s so bad about the Nazis?” he asks in one 2008 post [27] that condemns the Holocaust but questions the moral superiority of the Allies—include a belief in the utility of spreading misinformation that now looks like a template for Trump’s approach to truth. “To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable [sic] demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army,” he writes in a May 2008 post [28].
In one January 2008 post [62], titled “How I stopped believing in democracy,” he decries the “Georgetownist worldview” of elites like the late diplomat George Kennan. Moldbug’s writings, coming amid the failure of the U.S. state-building project in Iraq, are hard to parse clearly and are open to multiple interpretations, but the author seems aware that his views are provocative. “It’s been a while since I posted anything really controversial and offensive here,” he begins in a July 25, 2007, post [29] explaining why he associates democracy with “war, tyranny, destruction and poverty.”
Moldbug, who does not do interviews and could not be reached for this story, has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary, according to a source. Yarvin said he has never spoken with Bannon. . . . .
***
If Taleb and Yarvin laid some of the theoretical groundwork for Trumpism, the most muscular and controversial case for electing him president—and the most unrelenting attack on Trump’s conservative critics—came from Michael Anton, a onetime conservative intellectual writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus.
Thanks to an entree from Thiel, Anton now sits on the National Security Council staff. Initial reports [63] indicated he would serve as a spokesman, but Anton is set to take on a policy role, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. A former speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani and George W. Bush’s National Security Council, Anton most recently worked as a managing director for BlackRock, the Wall Street investment firm.
…
10. Facebook has been developing new artificial intelligence (AI) technology to classify pictures on your Facebook page:
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.
11. Here’s something worth noting while sifting through the 2016 election aftermath: Silicon Valley’s long rightward shift became official in 2016. At least if you look at the corporate PACs of tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Sure, the employees tended to still favor donating to Democrats, although not as much as before (and not at all at Microsoft). But when it came to the corporate PACs Silicon Valley was seeing red. [31]
A new Oxfam study found that the just eight individuals – including tech titans Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison – own as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population [64]. So, you know, wealth inequality probably isn’t a super big priority for their super PACs.
“Silicon Valley Takes a Right Turn” by Thomas B. Edsall; The New York Times; 1/12/2017. [31]
In 2016, the corporate PACs associated with Microsoft [65], Facebook [66], Google [67] and Amazon [68] broke ranks with the traditional allegiance of the broad tech sector to the Democratic Party. All four donated more money to Republican Congressional candidates than they did to their Democratic opponents.
As these technology firms have become corporate behemoths, their concerns [69] over government regulatory policy have intensified — on issues including privacy [70], taxation [71], automation [72] and antitrust [73]. These are questions on which they appear to view Republicans as stronger allies than Democrats.
In 2016, the PACs of these four firms gave a total of $3.6 million to House and Senate candidates [74]. Of that, $2.1 million went to Republicans, and $1.5 million went to Democrats. These PACs did not contribute to presidential candidates.
The PACs stand apart from donations by employees in the technology [75] and internet [74] sectors. According to OpenSecrets, these employees gave $42.4 million to Democrats and $24.2 million to Republicans.
In the presidential race, tech employees (as opposed to corporate PACs) overwhelmingly favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Workers for internet firms [76], for example, gave her $6.3 million, and gave $59,622 to Trump. Employees of electronic manufacturing [77] firms donated $12.6 million to Clinton and $534,228 to Trump.
Most tech executives and employees remain supportive of Democrats, especially on social and cultural issues. The Republican tilt of the PACs at Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook suggests, however, that as these companies’ domains grow larger, their bottom-line interests are becoming increasingly aligned with the policies of the Republican Party.
In terms of political contributions, Microsoft has led the rightward charge. In 2008, the Microsoft PAC decisively favored Democrats, 60–40, according to data compiled [65] by the indispensable Center for Responsive Politics. By 2012, Republican candidates and committees had taken the lead, 54–46; and by 2016, the Microsoft PAC had become decisively Republican, 65–35.
In 2016, the Microsoft PAC gave $478,818 to Republican House candidates and $272,000 to Democratic House candidates. It gave $164,000 to Republican Senate candidates, and $75,000 to Democratic Senate candidates.
Microsoft employees [78]’ contributions followed a comparable pattern. In 2008 and 2012, Microsoft workers were solidly pro-Democratic, with 71 percent and 65 percent of their contributions going to party members. By 2016, the company’s work force had shifted gears. Democrats got 47 percent of their donations.
This was not small change. In 2016 Microsoft employees gave a total of $6.47 million.
A similar pattern is visible at Facebook.
The firm first became a noticeable player in the world of campaign finance in 2012 when employees and the company PAC together made contributions of $910,000. That year, Facebook employees backed Democrats over Republicans 64–35, while the company’s PAC tilted Republican, 53–46.
By 2016, when total Facebook contributions reached $3.8 million, the Democratic advantage in employee donations shrank to 51–47, while the PAC continued to favor Republicans, 56–44.
While the employees of the three other most valuable tech companies, Alphabet (Google), Amazon and Apple, remained Democratic in their giving in 2016, at the corporate level of Alphabet and Amazon — that is, at the level of their PACs — they have not.
Google’s PAC [67] gave 56 percent of its 2016 contributions to Republicans and 44 percent to Democrats. The Amazon PAC [68] followed a similar path, favoring Republicans over Democrats 52–48. (Apple does not have a PAC.)
Tech giants can no longer be described as insurgents challenging corporate America.
“By just about every measure worth collecting,” Farhad Manjoo [79] of The Times wrote in January 2016:
American consumer technology companies are getting larger, more entrenched in their own sectors, more powerful in new sectors and better insulated against surprising competition from upstarts.
These firms are now among the biggest of big business. In a 2016 USA Today ranking of the most valuable companies [80] worldwide, the top four were Alphabet, $554.8 billion; Apple, $529.3 billion; Microsoft, $425.4 billion; and Facebook, $333.6 billion. Those firms decisively beat out Berkshire Hathaway, Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson and General Electric.
In addition to tech companies’ concern about government policy on taxation, regulation and antitrust, there are other sources of conflict between tech firms and the Democratic Party. Gregory Ferenstein [81], a blogger who covers the tech industry, conducted a survey of 116 tech company founders for Fast Company in 2015. Using data from a poll conducted by the firm SurveyMonkey [82], Ferenstein compared the views [81] of tech founders with those of Democrats, in some cases, and the views of the general public, in others.
Among Ferenstein’s findings: a minority, 29 percent, of tech company founders described labor unions as “good,” compared to 73 percent of Democrats. Asked “is meritocracy naturally unequal?” tech founders overwhelmingly agreed.
Ferenstein went on:
One hundred percent of the smaller sample of founders to whom I presented this question said they believe that a truly meritocratic economy would be “mostly” or “somewhat” unequal. This is a key distinction: Opportunity is about maximizing people’s potential, which founders tend to believe is highly unequal. Founders may value citizen contributions to society, but they don’t think all citizens have the potential to contribute equally. When asked what percent of national income the top 10% would hold in such a scenario, a majority (67%) of founders believed that the richest individuals would control 50% or more of total income, while only 31% of the public believes such an outcome would occur in a meritocratic society.
One of the most interesting questions posed by Ferenstein speaks to middle and working class anxieties over global competition:
In international trade policy, some people believe the U.S. government should create laws that favor American business with policies that protect it from global competition, such as fees on imported goods or making it costly to hire cheaper labor in other countries (“outsourcing”). Others believe it would be better if there were less regulations and businesses were free to trade and compete without each country favoring their own industries. Which of these statements come closest to your belief?
There was a large difference between tech company officials, 73 percent of whom chose free trade and less regulation, while only 20 percent of Democrats supported those choices.
Ferenstein also found that tech founders are substantially more liberal on immigration policy than Democrats generally. 64 percent would increase total immigration levels, compared to 39 percent of Democrats. Tech executives are strong supporters [83] of increasing the number of highly trained immigrants through the HB1 visa program.
Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University who writes about demographic, social and economic trends, sees these differences as the source of deep conflict within the Democratic Party.
In a provocative August, 2015, column [84] in the Orange County Register, Kotkin wrote:
The disruptive force is largely Silicon Valley, a natural oligarchy that now funds a party teetering toward populism and even socialism. The fundamental contradictions, as Karl Marx would have noted, lie in the collision of interests between a group that has come to epitomize self-consciously progressive mega-wealth and a mass base which is increasingly concerned about downward mobility.
The tech elite, Kotkin writes, “far from deserting the Democratic Party, more likely will aim take to take it over.” Until very recently, the
conflict between populists and tech oligarchs has been muted, in large part due to common views on social issues like gay marriage and, to some extent, environmental protection. But as the social issues fade, having been “won” by progressives, the focus necessarily moves to economics, where the gap between these two factions is greatest.
Kotkin sees future partisan machination in cynical terms:
One can expect the oligarchs to seek out a modus vivendi with the populists. They could exchange a regime of higher taxes and regulation for ever-expanding crony capitalist opportunities and political protection. As the hegemons of today, Facebook and Google, not to mention Apple and Amazon, have an intense interest in protecting themselves, for example, from antitrust legislation. History is pretty clear: Heroic entrepreneurs of one decade often turn into the insider capitalists of the next.
In 2016, Donald Trump has produced an upheaval within the Republican Party that shifted attention away from the less explosive turmoil in Democratic ranks. . . .