Are Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Sandberg Qualified to Screen ‘News’?

When it comes to anything involving public participation, you’ll have evolution good and bad, and you will have to adapt.

Facebook is a social medium and with that comes fact, rumor, and innuendo and to think you can clean that up without adverse affects, you’d have to be Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook announced Friday that the company has discovered and dismantled a network of fake accounts that have been rising on the site over the last six months. The result of that purge has caused tremendous damage to one news outlet’s Facebook page in particular — USA Today.
— Daily Caller, 4/14/17

Facebook is a private company and can do whatever it wants, but when it comes to policing the distribution of fact versus fiction on a social media website, that’s a tall order and the motivation is not truly known. For example in response to the political whining of the losers, do you really think Facebook would be undertaking this “purge” of #FakeNews had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 presidential election or is this simply a response to the Russians-affected-our-democratic-process recitation? Maybe, because we all know the thin-skinned Hillary may have demanded any reminders of her dubious past also regulated and/or purged.

And besides the fact he’s made billions of dollars off a website, just who is Mark Zuckerberg to be the new gatekeeper of accurate information disseminated to the public?

Mark Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is the chairman, chief executive officer, and co-founder of Facebook. His net worth is estimated to be US$58.6 billion as of March 2017, ranking him the fifth richest person in the world.

Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard University dormitory room on February 4, 2004. He was assisted by his college roommates and fellow Harvard students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The group then introduced Facebook to other college campuses. Facebook expanded rapidly, reaching one billion users by 2012. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg was involved in various legal disputes brought by others in the group, who claimed a share of the company based upon their involvement during the development phase of Facebook.

In no place in the Harvard dropout’s bio does it show anything that proves Zuckerberg’s qualifications to pick out a fake news story from the real deal. The same goes for his second in command at Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg.

Sheryl Sandberg is an American technology executive, activist, and author. She is the chief operating officer of Facebook and founder of Leanin.org (also known as the Lean In Foundation). In June 2012, she was elected to the board of directors by the existing board members, becoming the first woman to serve on Facebook’s board. Before she joined Facebook as its COO, Sandberg was vice president of global online sales and operations at Google, and was involved in launching Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org. Before Google, Sandberg served as chief of staff for United States Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg have liberal agendas that are at odds with the rise of anti-globalists around the world.

Facebook says it has targeted 30,000 fake accounts linked to France ahead of the country’s presidential election, as part of a worldwide effort against misinformation. The company said on Thursday it was trying to “reduce the spread of material generated through inauthentic activity, including spam, misinformation, or other deceptive content that is often shared by creators of fake accounts”.
— Stuff (NZ), 4/15/17

Are these accounts really “fake” or are they sharing information that advocates for a candidate the left desperately deems an enemy to the political views of people who are technically unqualified to reach such conclusions, and think about the arrogance involved here.

For years, people walk through supermarket check-out aisles and glance at the latest edition of the National Enquirer with all the sensational headlines that grab the eye. Most people have the ability to determine rather quickly what is real news and what is humorous bullshit. Then again, there are times the Enquirer gets it right (to the detriment of Democrats) and actually won a Pulitzer for a story the liberal Democrat media decided the public didn’t need to know.

There are topics that appear to be profitable to a Facebook that has the money to ward off potential moral and legal jeopardy.

Facebook is at risk of a criminal prosecution in Britain for refusing to remove potentially illegal terrorist and child pornography content despite being told it was on the site, The Times can reveal. The social media company failed to take down dozens of images and videos that were “flagged” to its moderators, including one showing an Islamic State beheading, several violent paedophilic cartoons, a video of an apparent sexual assault on a child and propaganda posters glorifying recent terrorist attacks in London and Egypt. Instead of removing the content, moderators said that the posts did not breach the site’s “community standards”.
— The Times (UK), 4/13/17

Again, Facebook is a private company and can do whatever they want with their product, regardless of how it affects their consumers. As typical with the arrogance of the leftist elite, Zuckerberg and Sandberg may believe their consumers will just conform and deal with whatever dictates and/or repercussions ensue.

Only time will tell.