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What happened when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came face to face with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg

Carole Cadwalladr


The New York politician has exposed the firm’s shameless disregard for the truth


Sat 26 Oct 2019 14.00 EDT

 Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the House finance committee hearing with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on 23 October 2019. Photograph: Erin Scott/Reuters

I

t was 1am the night before we published the Cambridge Analytica files in March last year and I got an urgent message from my fellow reporter, Emma Graham-Harrison. Facebook, which that day had sent us a letter threatening legal action if we published, had issued a press release saying it had kicked Cambridge Analytica off its platform.

It was a last-gasp attempt to get ahead of a story that Facebook knew was set to break. But it was too late. We worked through the night, brought forward our publishing time, and then the story was out there.

If this seems like ancient history, it isn’t. Because last week Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the US Congress’s House financial services committee to talk about Facebook’s plans for its Libra cryptocurrency and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman for New York’s 14th district, got five minutes to grill him.

“Mr Zuckerberg, I think you of all people can appreciate using a person’s past behaviour in order to determine, make decisions or predict people’s future behaviour, and in order for us to make decisions about Libra I think we need to kind of dig into your past behaviour and Facebook’s past behaviour with respect to our democracy. Mr Zuckerberg, what year and month did you personally become aware of Cambridge Analytica?”

 

The fact is that the Cambridge Analytica data scandal is far from over. In some ways, it’s only just beginning

Watching it on a small screen on my phone, I was on the edge of my seat. This was the question that I and a small group of super-nerds, which includes MPs such as Damian Collins and Ian Lucas, have been banging on about for more than a year. Because Zuckerberg last testified to Congress in April 2018 but so many more facts have come to light since. Facts that cast serious doubts over that testimony. Doubts that have opened up a serious question: did he lie on oath to Congress?

This is what Ocasio-Cortez was trying to dig into. “I’m not sure of the exact time,” said Zuckerberg. “But it was probably around the time when it became public, I think it was around March of 2018, I could be wrong.”

The problem for Zuckerberg is not that this defies common sense, though it does. It’s that it opens up a whole new world of trouble for Facebook. To understand why, you need to go back to the four days that followed Facebook’s legal threat to us and then its middle-of-the-night press release. Four days in which Facebook’s stock market value plummeted more than $100bn and the company went into lockdown. When Zuckerberg finally emerged, a story was in place. The problem for him is that this has steadily been unravelling ever since.

In July this year, a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation revealed that employees knew that Cambridge Analytica, described as a “sketchy” business, had been “scraping” Facebook data in 2015, before even the Guardian’s first report.

What about Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg? Ocasio-Cortez asked. When did she know? What about board member Peter Thiel? Zuckerberg drew a blank. His memory banks had nothing.

“This was the largest data scandal with respect to your company that had catastrophic impacts with regard to 2016… and you don’t know?” asked Ocasio-Cortez.

“Congresswoman, we discussed it when we were aware of what happened.”

The evidence continues to mount. And the answers Zuckerberg gave Ocasio-Cortez only invite further questions. The fact is that the Cambridge Analytica data scandal is far from over. In some ways, it’s only just beginning. It’s not the crime, as the saying goes, it’s the cover-up. And that continues.

Because we know Facebook lied. The SEC investigation says that. To us at the Observer, in fact “… when asked by reporters in 2017 about its investigation into the Cambridge Analytica matter, Facebook falsely claimed the company found no evidence of wrongdoing”.

On 7 November, I will give evidence to the international grand committee of parliamentarians from nine countries who have banded together to try to get answers from Facebook. But Zuckerberg has again refused to give evidence to the representatives of countries numbering more than half a billion people.

We have to recognise that Facebook is a foreign company that operates beyond the reach of our laws and should be nowhere near our elections.

I was in Tirana at a conference of data privacy commissioners from around the world when Ocasio-Cortez was grilling Zuckerberg. John Edwards, the commissioner for New Zealand, which since the Christchurch massacre has been taking the fight to the tech giants, likened it to “bringing a pocket knife not to a gunfight but to a nuclear explosion”.

We know our elections are unsafe. And until Facebook can prove it has fixed that, microtargeted political advertising based on unknown data from unknown sources should simply be banned.

 

We know Facebook’s platform was used to subvert and undermine elections in the US, the UK and multiple other countries

We are at an extraordinary crossroads. We have sufficient information to know that Facebook’s platform was used to subvert and undermine elections in the US, the UK and many other countries. But we pretend to be helpless to prevent it happening again. We’re not. We’re simply hamstrung by a government and an opposition that have chosen to ignore it. Ocasio-Cortez’s bold questions don’t just show Zuckerberg up but Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn also.

Our elections are not safe. And this month Facebook took the decision to make them even more unsafe. Just over a week after Zuckerberg held a closed-door meeting with Donald Trump, we discovered he’d changed Facebook’s policy to allow posts by politicians or parties containing “deceptive, false or misleading content”. It’s an extraordinary decision championed by Zuckerberg in a speech in which he said: “I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.”

Facebook’s global head of policy, Nick Clegg, who once railed against the “blatant lies” told in the European referendum, has now sanctioned their use in all political adverts in all elections in all countries across the world.

We’re not helpless. Ocasio-Cortez shows us that. We are just being betrayed by our government and our opposition. “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” is a traditional approach to journalism. We in Britain should be asking: why are these lying politicians not taking action over this lying company that is allowing lying politicians to lie to me?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/26/what-happened-when-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-came-face-to-face-with-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg

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 S
ea ice on the ocean surrounding Antarctica. Photograph: Ted Scambos/A

The real reason some scientists downplay the risks of climate change

Climate deniers often accuse scientists of exaggerating the threats associated with the climate crisis, but if anything they’re often too conservative


Dale Jamieson, Michael Oppenheimer and Naomi Oreskes

Fri 25 Oct 2019 03.00 EDT

A

lthough the results of climate research have been consistent for decades, climate scientists have struggled to convey the gravity of the situation to laypeople outside their field. If anything, the wider public only recently seems to have awakened to the threat of the climate crisis. Why?

In our new book, Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy, we attempted to illuminate how scientists make the judgments they do. In particular, we wanted to know how scientists respond to the pressures, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, that arise when they know that their conclusions will be disseminated beyond the research community – in short, how scientists are affected when they know the world is watching.

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We explored these questions with respect to assessments of acid rain, ozone depletion and sea level rise predictions from the west Antarctic ice sheet.

While climate skeptics and deniers often accuse scientists of exaggerating the threats associated with the climate crisis, the available evidence suggests the opposite. By and large, scientists have either been right in their assessments, or have been unduly conservative. We noticed a clear pattern of underestimation of certain key climate indicators, and therefore underestimation of the threat of climate disruption. When new observations of the climate system have provided more or better data, or permitted us to re-evaluate earlier conclusions, the findings for ice extent, sea level rise and ocean temperature have generally been worse than previously thought.

One of the factors that appears to contribute to this trend of underestimation is the perceived need for consensus, or what we call “univocality”: the felt need to speak in a single voice.

Many scientists worry that if they publicly air their disagreement, government officials will conflate their differences of opinion with ignorance and use this as justification for inaction.

Others worry that even if policy-makers want to act, they will find it difficult to do so if scientists fail to send an unambiguous message. Therefore, scientists actively seek to find their common ground, and to focus on those areas of agreement. In some cases, where there are irreconciliable differences of opinion, scientists may say nothing, giving the erroneous impression that nothing is known.

How does the pressure for univocality lead to underestimation? Consider a case in which most scientists think that the correct answer to a question is in the range one to 10, but some believe that it could be as high as 100. In this case, everyone will agree that it is at least one to 10, but not everyone will agree that it could be as high as 100. Therefore, the area of agreement is one to 10, and this will be reported as the consensus view. Wherever there is a range of possible outcomes that includes a long, high-end tail of probability, the area of overlap will lie at or near the low end.

We are not suggesting that every example of under-estimation is caused by the factors we observed in our work, nor that the demand for consensus always leads to underestimation. But we found that this pattern occurred in all of the cases that we studied. We also found that the institutional aspects of assessment, including who the authors are and how they are chosen, how the substance is divided into chapters, and guidance emphasizing consensus, also generally tilt in favor of scientific conservatism.

Knowing this, what do we do?

To scientists, we suggest that you should not view consensus as a goal. Consensus is an emergent property, something that may come forth as the result of scientific work, discussion and debate. When that occurs, it is important to articulate the consensus as clearly and specifically as possible. But where there are substantive differences of opinion, they should be acknowledged and the reasons for them explained. Scientific communities should also be open to experimenting with alternative models for making and expressing group judgments, and to learning more about how policy makers actually interpret the findings that result. Such approaches may contribute to assessments being more useful tools as we face the reality of adapting to the climate crisis and the disruptions that will occur.

For political leaders and business people, we think it is important for you to know that it is extremely unlikely that scientists are exaggerating the threat of the climate crisis. It is far more likely that things are worse than scientists have said. We have already seen that the impacts of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are unfolding more rapidly than scientists predicted. There is a high likelihood that they will continue to do so, and that the IPCC estimates – that emissions must be rapidly reduced, if not entirely eliminated, by 2050 – may well be optimistic. The fact that this conclusion is hard to swallow does not make it untrue.

And for ordinary citizens, it is important to recognize that scientists have done their job. It is now up to us to force our leaders to act upon what we know, before it is too late.

• Dale Jamieson, Michael Oppenheimer and Naomi Oreskes are authors of Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy. This piece is largely excerpted from that book

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/25/the-real-reason-some-scientists-downplay-the-risks-of-climate-change

Inside Mark Zuckerberg's private meetings with conservative pundits

Inside Mark Zuckerberg's private meetings with conservative pundits

The lengthy, off-the-record gatherings were held at one of the Facebook founder’s homes in California. They come as the social-media giant fends off accusations of liberal bias.

By NATASHA BERTRAND and DANIEL LIPPMAN

10/14/2019 12:53 PM EDT

Updated: 10/14/2019 05:41 PM EDT

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hosting informal talks and small, off-the-record dinners with conservative journalists, commentators and at least one Republican lawmaker in recent months to talk about issues like free speech and discuss partnerships.

The dinners, which began in July, are part of Zuckerberg’s broader effort to cultivate friends on the right amid outrage by President Donald Trump and his allies over alleged “bias” against conservatives at Facebook and other major social media companies. "I’m under no illusions that he’s a conservative but I think he does care about some of our concerns,” said one person familiar with the gatherings, which multiple sources have confirmed.

News of the outreach is likely to further fuel suspicions on the left that Zuckerberg is trying to appease the White House and stay out of Trump’s crosshairs. The president threatened to sue Facebook and Google in June and has in the past pressured the Justice Department to take action against his perceived foes.

“The discussion in Silicon Valley is that Zuckerberg is very concerned about the Justice Department, under Bill Barr, bringing an enforcement action to break up the company,” said one cybersecurity researcher and former government official based in Silicon Valley. “So the fear is that Zuckerberg is trying to appease the Trump administration by not cracking down on right-wing propaganda.”

Facebook has been criticized in recent days, including by Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, for its ad policy, which exempts politicians from third-party fact-checking and arguably facilitates the spread of disinformation.

Elizabeth Warren

✔@ewarren

· Oct 12, 2019

Facebook changed their ads policy to allow politicians to run ads with known lies—explicitly turning the platform into a disinformation-for-profit machine. This week, we decided to see just how far it goes.

Elizabeth Warren

✔@ewarren

We intentionally made a Facebook ad with false claims and submitted it to Facebook’s ad platform to see if it’d be approved. It got approved quickly and the ad is now running on Facebook. Take a look:

42.7K

4:01 PM - Oct 12, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

13.7K people are talking about this

When asked about the gatherings, a senior Trump administration official said “the White House is looking for meaningful steps from Facebook on a number of fronts,” including “competition, free speech for everybody including conservatives, and privacy.”

“Nominal outreach won’t cut it,” the official added.

As part of the series, Zuckerberg met earlier this year with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who insinuated that Facebook had become a monopoly during a congressional hearing last year; Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has fingered Zuckerberg as contributing to “the death of free speech in America”; and conservative radio talk host Hugh Hewitt, who has cautioned against a DOJ enforcement action but has called for a “new regulatory regime” to minimize “big tech bias” against conservatives.

CNN commentator Mary Katharine Ham, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, AEI fellow and former Washington Free Beacon editor Matt Continetti, Town Hall editor and Fox News contributor Guy Benson, and Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell have also attended the dinners, according to the person familiar with the gatherings. Washington Examiner chief political correspondent and Fox News contributor Byron York also confirmed his attendance but declined to disclose the contents of the dinner because there was a prior agreement that it was off-the-record.

A spokesman for Graham confirmed that the South Carolina senator has spoken with Zuckerberg. Carlson, Continetti, Benson, Bozell and Hewitt declined to comment. Ham and Shapiro did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Facebook, noting Zuckerberg's recent meetings in Washington with Democrats, said in a statement, “For years, Mark Zuckerberg has met with elected officials and thought leaders all across the political spectrum.”

Each dinner has been hosted at one of Zuckerberg’s homes in California, and at least one lasted around two-and-a-half to three hours. The conversations center around “free expression, unfair treatment of conservatives, the appeals process for real or perceived unfair treatment, fact checking, partnerships, and privacy,” the source familiar with the meetings said.

"My perception of him was more positive than I anticipated,” this person added, referring to Zuckerberg. “He was receptive and thoughtful.”

“I’ve always thought that he wanted to make things right by conservatives,” said another person familiar with the dinners. “I think he’s been genuine in hoping that might happen. Sometimes I think the headwinds are so strong in Palo Alto that I don’t think even he can succeed.”

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has engaged in similar outreach to conservatives in an attempt to gain their trust, and hosted a private dinner in Washington, D.C. with GOP political operatives and commentators in July 2018, according to the Washington Post.

Facebook changed its policies following Russia’s election interference in 2016 in an attempt to halt the spread of false news and foreign-bought ads. But the company has also been working to minimize and correct the appearance of bias in those policies ever since it was reported that the company’s employees may have suppressed stories from right-leaning publications and authors in its “Trending Topics” section.

As part of those efforts, the company launched a yearlong “conservative bias audit” in 2018, which was conducted by former Sen. Jon Kyl and a team from his law firm Covington and Burling.

Kyl interviewed 133 conservative lawmakers and groups for the audit, which ended in August and resulted in changes to its advertising policies. It’s unclear whether the Zuckerberg dinners are another facet of that project.

Allegations that Facebook censors conservatives, however, have gone largely unsubstantiated—conservative publications including Fox, Breitbart, and Shapiro’s Daily Wire were among the top publishers on Facebook as of this past May, according to data from the social media tracking firm Newswhip.

Trump’s 2016 campaign also took advantage of Facebook’s offer to embed employees, who acted as political operatives and provided critical support to the campaign’s social media operations, according to a study released in November 2017. (Hillary Clinton’s campaign declined a similar offer.)

Facebook’s critics on the left have argued that the company is overcorrecting and trying to curry favor with the Trump administration as it faces increasing scrutiny over its sloppy privacy practices and potential monopoly in social media. “Facebook made a grave mistake in allowing external political actors to direct an assessment of company policy and practices,” Henry Fernandez, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said after the “conservative bias” audit was completed in August.

The ongoing talks between Zuckerberg and prominent conservatives have attracted the attention of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which conducts oversight on issues related to telecommunications and consumer protection and is “aware” of allegations that conservatives “are trying to work the refs” ahead of 2020, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The committee’s Democrats sent a previously unreported letter to Facebook in June, after a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went viral on the platform, asking what the company was doing to address “the spreading of political disinformation by real accounts.”

“We are concerned that you and your company are not taking these occurrences seriously and are grossly unprepared for the 2020 election,” they wrote. “Specifically, we are concerned that there may be a potential conflict of interest between Facebook’s bottom line and immediately addressing political disinformation on your platform.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/14/facebook-zuckerberg-conservatives-private-meetings-046663