What a Crapshow: The Cringeworthy Zuckerberg Hearing

These are the same doddering lumps of flesh that want to write gun control laws.

The Zuckerberg hearing is nothing if not eye-opening. Because today, we’re getting a pretty revealing look at the politicians who want the government to play a bigger role in the regulation of technology.

https://twitter.com/DaniellaMicaela/status/983788007990837248

And of course there’s more where that came from:

Sen. Graham: "Is Twitter the same as what you do?"
Mark Zuckerberg: "It overlaps with portions of what we do."
Graham: "You don't think you have a monopoly?"
MZ: "It certainly doesn't feel that way to me." https://t.co/CbFO899XlU pic.twitter.com/NLWj3AqFZN

— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 10, 2018

Senator Bill Nelson asks Zuckerberg if users can avoid that weird thing where you tell someone on Facebook you like chocolate and all of a sudden you start seeing ads for chocolate.

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) April 10, 2018

https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/983791543898255363

https://twitter.com/JoePerticone/status/983790844686864385

The only ones with enough brains and guts to confront Zuckerberg on his data mining and censorship were Ted Cruz and Ben Sasse.

Ted Cruz grilled Zuck over targeting conservatives:

“Does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?” Cruz asked. “Are you a First Amendment speaker expressing your views or are you a neutral public forum allowing everyone to speak?”

Zuckerberg responded saying that there is certain content that is not allowed — hate speech, terrorist content, nudity — and that they refer to themselves as “a platform for all ideas.”

The senator pressed again, saying that it is a “simple question” whether or not Facebook is “engaged in political speech which is (their) right under the First Amendment.”

The Facebook CEO said that though the company’s “goal is certainly not to engage in political speech,” he was “just trying to lay out how broadly I think about this.”

Cruz then told Zuckerberg that there are many Americans who are concerned about Facebook’s political bias in what they show on their platform.

……As Cruz pointed out, Facebook also had blocked a post from a Fox News reporter and “over two dozen” Catholic pages. Conservative commentators “Diamond and Silk” were deemed by Facebook to be “unsafe to the community.”

“This is actually a concern that I have, and that I try to root out at the company — is making sure that we don’t have any bias in the work that we do,” Zuckerberg responded. “I think it is a fair concern that people would at least wonder about.”

……“We do not generally ask people about their political orientation when they’re joining the company,” Zuckerberg replied, and would not speak to why Palmer Luckey — who supported a group that made anti-Hillary Clinton memes — was fired. “I can commit that it was not because of a political view.”

Last month, The Western Journal reported that conservative publishers have lost an average of nearly 14 percent of their traffic from Facebook after its most recent algorithm change.

Liberal publishers, on the other hand, gained about 2 percent more web traffic from Facebook than they were getting prior to the algorithm changes implemented in early February.

Zuck lied his ass off. He’s very well aware of what goes on with his website and who controls the free speech content.

Ben Sasse asked what, exactly, constitutes “hate speech” in Zuck’s mind:

Video: Amazing exchange where @BenSasse asks Mark Zuckerberg if "can you define hate speech" and, despite saying AI will be built to root out hate speech, Zuckerberg said "this is a really hard question" #ZuckerbergTestimony #TTT pic.twitter.com/Y1J8j86RCF

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) April 10, 2018

Sasse wiped the floor with him:

.@BenSasse: “I wouldn’t want you to leave here today and think there’s sort of a unified view in the Congress that you should be moving toward policing more and more and more speech.” pic.twitter.com/lp4UQ6kmED

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 10, 2018

“Do social media companies hire consulting firms to help them figure out how to get more dopamine feedback loops so that people don’t want to leave the platform?” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) asked Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg replied: “No, Senator. That’s not how we talk about this or how we set up our product teams.”

Zuckerberg’s statement appears to contradict a statement made by Chamath Palihapitiya, who previously served as Facebook’s vice president for user growth, during a talk last December at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Palihapitiya said he felt “tremendous guilt” over his work that led to the creation of tools that are “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” Palihapitiya continued. “No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.”

Video game designer Mark Kern tore into Zucks’ AI censorship plans:

As Twitchy reported, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress Tuesday that he thinks the company is 5 to 10 years away from developing artificial intelligence that will allow Facebook to catch “hate speech” before it’s posted — an idea that had many asking who exactly would define what constitutes hate speech.

Video game designer Mark Kern, who has worked on games such as World of Warcraft, was among those struck by the idea of AI policing speech before it was even posted to the service.

Exactly. That’s the plan of leftwingnut social media CEOs. Control the message, control the input, and control what a user can even type in a post. They’ll do it through AI tailored to their own jackbooted specifications. If you think Facebook is oppressive now, just wait. For those who are interested, Gab is an excellent free speech alternative. It’s free to join . I did.

Food for thought: