Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg thinks Americans are “dumb f—-,” but he and his fiefdom were the wankers for yanking an iconic Vietnam War photo of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack, claiming the Pulitzer Prize-winning image that altered the course of combat ran afoul of the “global community standards” it abuses itself to influence users and rejigger history.
The world’s largest network eventually buckled under public pressure and restored “napalm girl,” but eating humble pie has become routine fare for socially unconscious Facebook.
In June the company apologized for taking down a pro-Israel post, after an Israeli politician complained about its double standards on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In May it apple-polished the damning claims of former employees that Facebook was a data-diddler, whose rookie journalists monkeyed around with free speech, killing trending conservative news, boosting traffic to sagging stories with a liberal bias, and crushing an open exchange of ideas, resulting in a Senate investigation.
In January the company ate crow for threatening to shut down a “Chicks on the Right” Facebook page because of an anti-Obama post.
Facebook has become its own occupational hazard:
Employees asked Mark Zuckerberg if they should “help prevent” a Donald Trump presidency, after their boss railed against “fearful voices calling for building walls,” in an apparent reference to Trump’s idea of barricading the U.S. and Mexico border.
Yet Zuckerberg bought four homes surrounding his own to keep out the riffraff.
The network also tried to influence the emotions of nearly 700,000 unsuspecting users for its 2012 “emotional contagion” study with Cornell University, exploiting the fine print in its data use policy to expose patrons to positive or negative content only — without their consent — for a pointless survey.
Facebook needs to stop steering the grapevine to promote its own agenda, so user Vinh Nguyen won’t have to ask in the “Help Community” section, “Why does Facebook remove pro-American pages, but not anti-American hate pages?”
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