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Elon Musk Offers To Buy And Then Delete Facebook




Musk showed the investors in the room an animated video that detailed his plans for Facebook. The video shows a SpaceX Falcon rocket blasting off into the sky. At one point the two solid boosters fall off and glide on a precise path down to the landing pad. Both rockets land perfectly square, and one ends up resting gently on a big red button labeled “DELETE.”

Read more at: https://alternative-science.com/technology/elon-musk-facebook

Cambridge Analytica: the outrage is the real story
M.J. Gilroy-Ware 29 March 2018

The bitter pill many refuse to swallow shows the difference between the world we think we’re in, and the one we really inhabit.


Every so often, moments come along when what seemed like a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory is confirmed as true, and people are forced to say goodbye to the world they thought they lived in and adjust to the one they really lived in all along.

Widespread outrage in response to recent disclosure of new details about Cambridge Analytica has all the appearance of such a moment. These types of events have become more common recently: whether it is a new wave of terrorist attacks on European soil, preventable tragedies such as the Grenfell Tower disaster, major electoral outcomes such as the British vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s victory, or technology whistleblowing events such as this one, the pace at which we are continually having to re-adjust to the world we actually live in seems alarmingly high, and yet all were predictable.

No doubt, it is a dismaying picture that confronts us: British company SCL Group, operating under the brand name Cambridge Analytica with the supervision of Steve Bannon, obtained data collected from Facebook by Cambridge University academic Alexandr Kogan, and used systems built by data scientist and whistleblower-to-be Chris Wylie to train its microtargeting algorithms to nudge scores of already-angry voters towards electing Donald Trump and leaving the European Union – a set of experiments largely bankrolled by US hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, 90% owner of Cambridge Analytica.

Public reaction to this complex picture has been reminiscent of the last time there was widespread outrage about social media in political life – the revelations made by Edward Snowden in June 2013. And it’s almost uncanny timing that just as that social media-related whistleblowing scandal was made public and the world was meeting Snowden for the first time, Chris Wylie was beginning his employment with SCL Group and the next outrage was being quietly set in motion.

What many people came face to face with in that moment was that social media were not the innocent frivolity we thought they were, lest Facebook’s more-than-$100bn initial public offering on the NASDAQ hadn’t already told us this.

It turned out that some of the very same powerful entities that have long structured the world – in this case the state security agencies that underpin some of the world’s governments – were intimately connected to our innocuous social media tomfoolery. When you told Facebook you liked Ed Sheeran, or checked in to let your friends know that you were at the London Zoo penguin enclosure, GCHQ and the NSA will know as well, if they are interested. In the minds of populations across the world, social media has changed irrevocably.

Or did it? We carried on using social media en masse – in fact our use of them increased. Writing in London Review of Books in August 2017, shortly after Facebook crossed its 2 billion user threshold, John Lanchester observed that it was not only the number of users that was increasing, but the degree of engagement: “In the far distant days of October 2012, when Facebook hit one billion users, 55 per cent of them were using it every day. At two billion, 66 per cent are.” We are always resistant in these moments of readjustment, and this time will be no exception.

The limits of consent

A common, if contrary, response from some quarters when Snowden’s leak was in the news was: why is it that we are happy for Facebook to know our whereabouts, but freak out when governments have the same information? One answer might be consent: it’s ok for Facebook to have our data precisely because we choose to give it to them, unlike with the security services. And that’s a question and answer that we might apply directly to the present case of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook data.

But there’s a serious flaw in this logic. Our relationship with Facebook was never a straightforward one in which we simply entrust them with our data, and they keep it safe like some kindly uncle taking care of a bag of sweeties. If Facebook was ever that way, it was a long time ago when only a few Harvard students knew what it was, but even then Mark Zuckerberg was referring to fellow-students as “dumb fucks” for being so naïve. It is helpful to remember this naïveté now, because it is a persistent feature of social media’s power.

The Cambridge Analytica story isn’t only about social media. It’s got bribery, honey traps, corruption and many other concerning elements that long precede the anthropomorphised bunny rabbit gifs and food porn of social media. Once again, besides the shock revelation that seemingly democratic votes are vulnerable to well-organised propaganda efforts, the surprise seems to be that these more recognisable elements of white-collar deviancy have turned out to be in cahoots with the digital technologies we have come to trust, and intimately integrate into our own lives.



But what did we really think would happen when the worst aspects of Silicon Valley, a cynical Etonian establishment, reactionary Anglo-American nationalism and hedge-fund capital found each other? As Mark Fisher once said, “Many of what we call ‘conspiracies’ are the ruling class showing class solidarity.”

Perhaps a more important question to ask is: why do we carry on being shocked when social media’s centrality in our attention and emotional lives doesn’t go well for us?

For some reason, technology companies and their products are treated differently to other corporations and their products. When we deal with Coca-Cola Company, Phillip Morris or MacDonalds, we have an idea of whom we’re dealing with. At least when you’re buying a Coca-Cola you know it can melt your teeth (never mind all the other things sugar does to the body), and when you buy cigarettes that they are likely to give you lung cancer. Nobody thinks Big Macs are good for them.

The last few decades show a clear story of how we prized these facts out of the grasp of the corporations that wanted them concealed or de-emphasised, and adjusted our expectations accordingly. But somehow large numbers of people have continued to think that when they use Facebook their situation as a consumer is materially better. As Aral Balkan, Shoshanna Zuboff and others have highlighted, it isn’t better – it’s actually worse.

Facebook’s entire product is manipulation; the exploitation of its users’ emotional reactions by those with something to push. That is how it makes nearly $200k profit per quarter per employee, more than any other technology company.

When Facebook’s customers were the Coca-Colas, MacDonalds and Unilevers of the world, nobody appeared to mind as long as they could carry on mindlessly scrolling through a stream of emotionally stimulating media as a means of distracting themselves from the hopeless emptiness of Anglo-American late capitalism.

But when the inevitable happened and the same system was used to influence political change by people who had already been doing so by other means for 25 years, suddenly #DeleteFacebook is such a mainstream idea that BBC Radio 4 is asking people ­– ironically via its Facebook page – whether they intend carrying it out.

The Cambridge Analytica story is no more a shock than Facebook allowing its advertisers to sell things – including housing – only to white people is a shock. It’s no more a shock than the fact that according to the UN, Facebook had a “determining role” in spreading hatred against the heavily persecuted Rohingya people of Rakhine state in Myanmar either. These things are only a shock if you’re unaware of what technology, capital, and a complete lack of ethics produce when, inevitably, they combine.

When the majority isn’t right

There is one person however, who should rightly be congratulated in this moment, for whom the only shock is probably that the world finally listened: Observer reporter Carole Cadwalladr. Again and again her tenacious reporting has been the bitter pill many refused to swallow that showed the difference between the world we think we’re in, and the one we really inhabit. It is in this space that genuine democracy is most vulnerable, and yet ironically, the lesson from her reporting is that a majority of wishful thinkers are not always right.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/marcus-gilroy-ware/cambridge-analytica-outrage-is-real-story

Hatch: "How do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?"
Zuckerberg: "Senator, we run ads" *smiles*
Hatch: "I see. That's great." https://t.co/1PQ3joAtC8

— Daniella Diaz (@DaniellaMicaela) 10. април 2018.

UPDATE: Facebook shares close with biggest daily percent gain since April 28, 2016 https://t.co/Sx4JgwW7N7

— Reuters Business (@ReutersBiz) 10. април 2018.

ontheotherhand wrote:

lalinea wrote:
A u cemu je tu problem? Javi kad izmislis server koji radi na nista.

Pa besplatni rad je problem između ostalog. Posetioci obavljaju vrlo realan rad koji nije plaćen a zavijen je u formu zabave, slobodnog vremena i sl., a bez tog rada miliona ljudi, te kompanije ne bi mogle da funkcnionišu i imale bi market velju od $0.

Oh wow my deleted Facebook Zip file contains info on every single phone cellphone call and text I made for about a year- cool totally not creepy.

— Mat Johnson (@mat_johnson) 23. март 2018.

Download your Facebook account .zip off their site, unzip it, then go to the HTML folder, open the contact_info.htm file. See records of who you've talked to on your cell—not with the app, just on your regular cellphone—and for how long. https://t.co/l9BDEJu3Hx

— Mat Johnson (@mat_johnson) 23. март 2018.

lalinea wrote:Ne znam kakvo je bilo to predlagano resenje, ali me interesuje npr da li bi bilo scalable na danasnje razmere/kompleksnost interneta, da li bi funkcionisalo u zabitima sveta gde nema kartica i ostalog elektronskog placanja, tj da li bi na neki nacin ogranicilo pristup internetu? Svet je bio mnogo drugaciji 90tih...

Ne znam koje je trenutno bolje resenje od ovoga sto imamo (plus bolja regulacija privatnosti, tj da nema sherovanja sa third party apps, veca transparentnost oko svrhe koriscenja specificnih podataka i slicno), ali ja ne bih volela da vidim 'resenje' koje pola danasnjih korisnika ostavi bez interneta...

Gargantua wrote:Za mene se priča oko FB ne vrti oko reklamiranja i korišćenja x vrsta podataka koje korisnici sami unesu na FB, nego recimo oko ovoga:

Niko nije "zvao preko FB aplikacije" (ovde se ne misli na FB Messenger), ne postoji nikakav razlog da FB aplikacija može/treba da prati tu vrstu aktivnosti telefona koja nema veze sa samom aplikacijom i njenim korišćenjem.

xie saike wrote:naravno, mogu da reklamiraju sta i koga hoce, ko ih jebe, ali ovo je djubrovski maksimalno. mogu da razumem ranije povezanost sa sms porukama jer su tako isle obavestenja neka i sl, ali ovo sa pozivima je govnarstvo. 

i inace, obicno je taj ko mi reklamom na fb ili yt prekine nesto zanimljivo sto tamo pratim zavrsio sa mnom kao musterijom.

The Senate Is Afraid to Govern. That’s Great News for Facebook.
David Dayen

April 11 2018, 4:36 a.m.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, had a simple question. “Who is your biggest competitor?” he asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at his congressional testimony on Tuesday.

Zuckerberg’s first stab at an answer was to list categories of competition, without giving a specific name of a direct rival. He then retreated to a talking point his minders equipped him with, noting that the average American uses eight different apps — including email — to communicate with people, skipping over the detail that Facebook Inc. has, so far, bought two of the biggest, Instagram and WhatsApp; copied the work of another, Snapchat; and actively seeks to buy out whatever upstart threatens its position.

Zuckerberg’s invocation of email as a possible competitor to Facebook did not satisfy Graham, so he clarified the question.


“If I buy a Ford, and it doesn’t work well and I don’t like it, I can buy a Chevy,” Graham continued. “If I’m upset with Facebook, what’s the equivalent product I can go sign up for?”

By this point, it was a rhetorical question. “You don’t feel like you have a monopoly?” Graham wondered.

“It certainly doesn’t feel that way to me,” Zuckerberg said. Spectators in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room broke into laughter. It was a moment in which the emperor stood naked and exposed.

Graham almost certainly shares with most of his fellow senators a certain lack of facility with the intricacies of Facebook’s technical processes. During Zuckerberg’s first-ever congressional testimony, tech reporters on Twitter mercilessly mocked Senate questioners, lamenting that no politician can possibly respond properly to the rampant data privacy, discrimination, and election violations on the Facebook platform if they don’t know how the internet works.

These reporters are wrong. Graham — who, until recently, famously communicated almost exclusively by text on a flip phone — might only know Facebook from when his staff takes a picture of him and posts it. But he knew enough to discern the core problem with Facebook — or, if you’re Facebook, the core advantage: The social media giant has no competition, is too big to manage, and traps users in a devil’s bargain of being subjected to surveillance if they want to connect with friends and relatives online. And moreover, he understood the relationship between a private company and the federal government in a way his colleagues, and even those tech reporters, didn’t.

“I think we’re going to have to lead here,” Graham told reporters afterward. “If we are counting on Facebook regulating itself, we’re going to fail. … I am a Republican. I don’t like regulating things unless you have to, but to me, you’ve got a very large organization without any real competition.”

Here's the Graham-Zuckerberg monopoly exchange https://t.co/JlpNeGMILc
— Brian Ries (@moneyries) April 10, 2018

This willingness, against interest and impulse, to do the job of a policymaker was sorely absent throughout Tuesday’s testimony, which involved both the judiciary and commerce committees, as well as nearly half the members of the Senate. Far too many senators framed the problems with Facebook — almost unilaterally agreed, on both sides of the aisle, to be pernicious and requiring some action — as something for Zuckerberg to fix, and then tell Congress about later.

Could Congress have a better understanding of technology issues? Sure, and if former Rep. Newt Gingrich didn’t eliminate the Office of Technology Assessment in 1995, things would be different. But we don’t need senators who are computer scientists.

The Senate didn’t have a granular knowledge of the banking system when it passed the Securities and Exchange Act, and it didn’t fully recognize every facet of the health care provider and insurance system when it established Medicare and Medicaid. We need senators who are interested in governing. Because if they’re not, we end up with a private government ruled by a boy king making consequential decisions that affect billions of people around the world — and then ritually apologizing each time he screws up.

Let’s dispense with the absurdity that Zuckerberg “did well” at this hearing. He was evasive and noncommittal, as Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., was finally compelled to point out. In addition to failing to name Facebook’s competitors — a forgivable omission, given that there are none — Zuckerberg refused to say whether Facebook tracks browser activity and activity across different devices, even when the user has logged off the site. (It does.)

He couldn’t say why Facebook decided not to notify users affected by the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting in 2015, only waiting until Tuesday to do so. He couldn’t answer if there had ever been a hack of Facebook systems. He wouldn’t commit to whether Facebook supported an “opt-in” for data collection from users, as is being readied in Europe under its General Data Protection Regulation, saying that users in the United States have “different sensibilities.”

Zuckerberg said that Facebook doesn’t allow fake profiles, contradicted by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who literally found two fake profiles of himself the day of the hearing. Zuckerberg alleged that users prefer “relevant” ads — by which he means ads targeting users based on Facebook’s surveillance — impossibly speaking on behalf of hundreds of millions of people (and ignoring the millions of people who feel creeped out by ads that are too on-the-nose). He wrongly stated that Cambridge Analytica was banned from Facebook after the company became aware of the data harvesting; it turns out the firm popped up as an advertiser months later. He claimed users can port their data to other social networks, which is not really true since they wouldn’t be able to contact their friends, the whole point of interoperability. He was super-proud of stating that Facebook doesn’t “sell” its data to third parties — it allows third parties to use any slice of it for a price, making whether the data is “sold” a distinction without a difference.


He claimed that Palantir Technologies, the surveillance company chaired by Facebook board member Peter Thiel, didn’t have access to Facebook data; a former Palantir employee said the company did. He waved away suggestions that Facebook couldn’t manage the millions of examples of discriminatory advertising tactics and hate speech and deceptions that happen on the site daily, saying that unspecified “AI tools” would fix things later. When asked questions to which he said he didn’t know the answer, Zuckerberg habitually said he would get senators the information later.

Under any normal circumstances, this would have been seen as a disaster for Zuckerberg and Facebook. But Facebook stock jumped nearly 5 percent on the day of the hearing, including while he was in the not-so-hot booster seat. And that’s because the Senate made it very clear that Facebook would be given every opportunity to continue governing itself, with barely any recognition that its power in the marketplace and business model of mass surveillance means that any serious fix changes the fundamental nature of what makes Facebook the profit center it is now.


The trend of senators disclaiming their power began in the opening statements. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., told Zuckerberg, “If you and other social media companies do not get your act in order, none of us are going to have any privacy anymore.” This is a ridiculous sentence for a government official to utter. It’s not up to a social media company to govern privacy. It’s up to Congress. Nelson added, “If Facebook cannot fix the privacy violations, we are going to have to.” In Congress-speak that means, “We don’t want to legislate anything here, so help us out and clean this up so we don’t have constituents yelling at us.”

In other words, Nelson stood the entire relationship between the government and the governed on its head. This is not unusual; it in fact defines the past 40 years of U.S. politics. But it’s somewhat rare to see it so overtly on display.

It only grew worse. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked who else might be harvesting data from Facebook users. Zuckerberg said his team is investigating and it would let Congress know. That Zuckerberg would deliver his “don’t call us, we’ll call you” routine to Grassley, known as the Senate’s most dogged investigator, is a glimpse into the true power dynamic at work.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, openly asked for Zuckerberg’s assistance in writing regulations on tech platforms. Neither the chair, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, nor the ranking member, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., of the antitrust subcommittee in the Senate asked about Facebook’s monopoly or market power.

A couple of senators did make Zuckerberg at least uncomfortable. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., opened by asking Zuckerberg what hotel he stayed in the night before. When Zuckerberg balked at answering, Durbin pointed out that this was the crux of the problem.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., a former vice president of the long-departed web video company RealNetworks, caused Zuckerberg to squirm with questions about Palantir, in a clear attempt to reference Facebook board member Thiel. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., heard enough to state plainly that Facebook violated its 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission around data privacy.

But the senator most emblematic of the framing of the hearing was Dan Sullivan, a Republican from Alaska. He started by correctly noting how much power Facebook has, sharing with Google almost 70 percent of digital advertising, earning $40 billion in revenue. “When companies become big and powerful … what typically happens from this body is there’s an instinct to either regulate or break up,” Sullivan said.

Zuckerberg actually had a ready answer for that line of questioning: His cheat sheet, leaked after the hearing, stated that he would have talked about how U.S. tech companies were a key asset to prevent Chinese dominance, and that “consumers have lots of choices over how they spend their time” — in other words, positioning Facebook as not a monopoly because you can also eat and shower and play softball. But Zuckerberg didn’t need to go there, because Sullivan suddenly became a political commentator rather than someone with lawmaking authority:

One of my worries on regulation, again, with a company of your size. You’re saying, hey, we might be interested in being regulated, but regulations can also cement the dominant power. You have a lot of lobbyists. Every lobbyist in town is involved in some way or the other. … Do you think that that’s a risk, given your influence, that if we regulate, we’re going to regulate you into a position of cemented authority. … Isn’t that the normal inclination of a company: I’m going to hire the best guys in town. You wouldn’t do that?

This is a viable statement for an observer of politics to make, but not really for someone who has the ability to write legislation and ignore lobbyists’ wishes. Yet Sullivan cannot imagine that world. Nor could most of his colleagues. And after senators on the two committees questioning Zuckerberg received $604,000 in campaign contributions from Facebook over the past decade, it makes sense that they tend to ignore their own power.

Behind the scenes, there are baby steps toward some actual regulatory regime for Facebook. But unless politicians realize they are allowed to make laws rather than be the kind of passive mall cops who’ve ushered us into this age of monopoly, we’ll still be in the same place years from now.