Zuckerberg went on to repeat part of the messaging of the PR firm, which is that the prominent philanthropist George Soros, who is Jewish, is pulling the strings of not-for-profit groups that have criticized Facebook, some of them under the banner of a campaign called “Freedom from Facebook”.

“The bottom line is the intention was not to attack an individual but to demonstrate that a group that was presenting itself as a grassroots effort was in fact funded by … was not in fact a spontaneous grassroots effort,” Zuckerberg said. “I have tremendous respect for George Soros.”

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/15/mark-zuckerberg-faceb...

 

George Soros tries to make himself pass as a fighter for the "left". He is not. He is a capitalist who uses the left to make cash. Here we go: Revolutions and unrest usually come from the "left". The right does not want to shake the status quo. Soros will foment unrest under the pretext of "social equity" though he really hates socialism. He will poopoo the countries where such unrests activate. Currencies will plummet. He will buy when the currencies are at bottom value. He will thus demonstrate that "stability" is around the corner. People will start to value the currencies. Soros will sell "high". He will be "charitable" to organisations that will foment "social" unrest in such countries. repeat process. Soros isn't a "leftie". He financed some of macron's campaign against the socialists in France. 

Soros is a clever CAPITALIST. He will support the Clintonites against Bernie Sanders, etc... His conscience is about CASH.

Journalists need to take some sort of Hippocratic oath pledging to tell no lies, otherwise we could end up with a war even more calamitous for humanity than Iraq.

As cited by American journalist Sharyl Attkisson in her excellent book 'The Smear', John H. Johnson, author of 'Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data you consume every day', divides fake news into five categories.

1. News that's entirely false.
2. News that's slanted and biased
3. Pure propaganda
4. Stories that misinterpret or misuse data
5. Imprecise or sloppy reporting.

It's interesting, as Attkisson says, that the "public ignition" of the 'Fake News movement' can be traced to September 13 2016 – the last eight weeks of the Clinton vs. Trump presidential campaign, with the announcement that a group named 'First Draft' were forming a partner network to tackle "malicious hoaxes and fake news reports."

Then, within days everyone is talking about 'fake news'. Which is strange, because if we go by Johnson's definition, fake news has been around for an awful long time.

By any objective standards, the most serious example of 'fake news' in recent years, in regards to its consequences, was the Iraqi WMDs hoax.

The neocon allegation that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs which could be assembled and launched within 45 minutes of an order being given, was disseminated, as a proven fact, by major media outlets in 2002-2003, and led to an illegal war in which up to one million people died. Not only that, the war led directly to the rise of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and greatly boosted the cause of global terrorism.

So why didn't we get an outcry against 'fake news' after this?

The answer is quite simple – the post-2016 'fake news' hysteria is itself fake. In true Orwellian style it's been pushed by some of the biggest purveyors of fake news.

What has happened is that those who promoted the WMDs hoax are unhappy that we have a much wider range of sources for our news today, and consequently are less likely to swallow, unthinkingly, their pro-war, establishment-friendly propaganda. They have sought to delegitimize these new competitors by branding their news 'fake'. It's just like a well-established chain of coffee shops seeking to diss their competitor by saying that the coffee they sell isn't real coffee. These are turf wars, with plenty of virtual signaling.

This does not mean of course that these 'new kids on the block' can't themselves be criticized and held up to scrutiny. If we look at points 2 and 3 of Johnson, 'news that's slanted and biased' and 'pure propaganda' then I think almost everyone does that today at some point. But the hypocrisy of those screeching 'Fake News' at others is off the scale.

While 'fake news' has always been around, there are reasons why the problem has got worse since the Millenium.

Firstly, look at the way print journalism has changed. I have at home a large collection of  British newspapers from forty years ago. The difference between papers in the 1970s and today is very noticeable. Factual news reporting, from on-the-spot foreign correspondents, with minimal 'comment' and editorialising was the norm. Today, it's the other way round, newspapers have become viewspapers. It wouldn't be such as problem if 'news' and 'comment' were clearly delineated – very often they are not.

Take the headline of The Sun, the day after the MH17 plane disaster. It read 'Putin's Missile'

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/444468-fake-news-global-stability/

 

Propaganda to butter the conservatives of the day isn't new. The Jews have been doing it for yonks with the "old testament". 4,000 years of bullshit venerated as gospel has not helped the human scientific development. 

 

Read from top... and yes:

 

Liberal financier George Soros sold off his stake in Facebook earlier this year, before the social media giant’s stocks tumbled drastically. Documents also show that Soros dumped some Netflix and Goldman Sachs shares.

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings show that the Soros Fund Management sold off all of its Facebook holdings, and cut back on holdings in Netflix and Goldman Sachs in the third quarter of 2018. All three have dropped drastically since September, with Netflix tumbling 29 percent, Facebook down 20 percent, and Goldman Sachs losing 15 percent.

The controversial billionaire’s hedge fund has had an up and down relationship with Facebook, reportedly selling off 300,000 shares in November 2017, then buying back in over the summer of 2018, even as Soros denounced social media as a “menace to society.”

Parallel to investing in Facebook, Soros was scaling back his holdings in Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. and Amazon, but beefing up his stock in Twitter, Spotify, Pandora, and the New York Times.

Just last week, the Times revealed that Facebook had hired a PR firm to go after its critics by linking them to Soros. Through his foundations, the Hungarian-born billionaire is actually funding several activist groups that have been critical of Facebook, but his defenders argue that calling him out on it is anti-Semitic.

Soros has built up his considerable fortune through short-selling and currency speculation, most famously pocketing $1 billion by shorting the British pound in 1992. Some of his profits have gone into funding a network of non-governmental organizations championing leftist causes in the US and across the world.

The government of his native Hungary has outlawed many of Soros’s operations, such as aid to illegal immigrants, prompting the Soros-funded Central European University to announce it was considering relocation to neighboring Austria.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/444584-soros-sold-facebook-stocks/

 

Double read from top. See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/11276

The head of billionaire George Soros’ foundation called for congressional oversight of Facebook, after the social media giant finally took some responsibility for hiring a PR firm to smear its critics as agents of Soros.

“So @facebook decides to drop a turkey on Thanksgiving eve, with admission that Definers was tasked by company leadership to target and smear George Soros because he publicly criticized their out of control business model. Sorry, but this needs independent, congressional oversight,” Open Society Foundations head Patrick Gaspard tweeted on Wednesday night.

Gaspard was responding to an admission by Facebook’s outgoing Head of Communications and Policy Elliot Schrage, who owned up top hiring a PR firm – Washington, DC-based Definers – to attack Facebook’s critics and label them agents of Soros, a billionaire and prominent liberal donor.

In a blog post, Schrage admitted that he tasked Definers with pushing the Soros angle, namely that the billionaire was funding the activist group ‘Freedom from Facebook.’

After learning that Soros did in fact fund some of the group’s members, Schrage said Definers “prepared documents and distributed these to the press to show that this was not simply a spontaneous grassroots movement.” Schrage maintained that Facebook did not ask Definers to create ‘fake news,’ despite a former employee telling NBC that Definers had its own “in-house fake news shop” to spread its message.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/444752-soros-congress-oversight-facebook/

 

 

Read from top...

The Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp unexpectedly blocked a channel belonging to the Spanish left-wing Podemos Party less than a week before the general election, sparking accusations of meddling.
The party's account was blocked on Monday following a political debate held the day before. Podemos Communications Secretary, Juanma del Olmo was the first to report the blocking.
"We have been operating normally for 15 days, sending messages and communicating with people who have asked us to register," he said later, adding that the channel was shut down on the last week of the election campaign "when people decide on their votes.”
According to Podemos, the party had as many as 50,000 registered followers on WhatsApp at the time the channel was blocked. "With just a few days before the election left, we will not be able to start anew if [the channel] is not restored," del Olmo warned. The party then approached the messaging service seeking a clarification but apparently did not receive a reply until Tuesday. 
Later, the company said in a brief statement to the media that the blocked account was violating its terms of use. "We apply the same implementation standards for all WhatsApp users worldwide. Our terms and services are explicit and do not allow mass messaging or third-party programs to automate messages," it said, as cited by El Pais.
Podemos argued that it used the same tools all other parties were using. "Why have they shut down only the account of Podemos and not those of other parties doing the same?" del Olmo asked in a Tweet, singling out the Spanish Socialists in particular.
The Socialist Party promptly rejected those allegations by telling El Pais that it mostly uses its WhatsApp channel "to answer questions of the people, who write to us and not to send mass messages." Podemos, meanwhile, accused the service owned by the US social media giant Facebook of directly intervening in the elections in Spain.
"This is discriminatory behavior, interference from a company in an electoral process, which … affects the quality of our democracy," the party said in a Twitter post.
WhatsApp did not comment on those accusations so far. The Podemos channel remained blocked as of April 24, four days before the elections scheduled on Sunday, April 28.

https://www.rt.com/news/457465-whatsapp-blocked-podemos-spain-elections/

Read from top.