It’s almost surprising how many people have forgotten how, shortly after the election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said you’d have to be “crazy” to think that Facebook’s platform – by helping to spread “fake news” – had helped sway the vote in favor of President Donald Trump.
Unfortunately, sanctimonious Democrats are impervious to basic logic when it comes to assessing the overall impact that $100,000 in ad buys had on the election (it's a drop in the bucket in terms of overall spending).
However, in yet another delicious irony tied to the “Russian collusion” narrative, CNN has reported that the top lawyer for the Hillary Clinton campaign had represented Facebook back in 2011 when it petitioned the FEC to grant it a waiver from federal elections laws requiring advertisers to disclose who purchased the ads.
Presumably, such rules would've made it more difficult for the purported Russia-linked agents to mask their affiliations.
Marc Elias, a partner at the D.C.-based Perkins Coie law firm, was part of a legal team that represented Facebook in 2011 as they fought against adding disclosures on political ads on their platform in front of the Federal Election Commission. That battle resulted in a split 3-3 vote on whether to grant the waiver, effectively allowing the company to display the ads without any disclaimers about who paid for them – a policy that Zuckerberg abandoned last week in favor of one that allows for “greater transparency” as he faced a firestorm of criticism from leftists who now apparently believe he’s to blame for the Trump presidency.
According to CNN, the FEC had previously awarded a similar dispensation to Google, which had made a similar request about political ads running on its platform.
The disclosure supports the notion that Zuckerberg's about-face on the effectiveness of Facebook's political ads was chiefly about avoiding regulations threatened by Sen. Mark Warner, not about the facts.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-28/clinton-lawyer-helped-facebook-avoid-adding-disclosures-political-ads?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+zerohedge%2Ffeed+%28zero+hedge+-+on+a+long+enough+timeline%2C+the+survival+rate+for+everyone+drops+to+zero%29
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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