Facebook has rebranded itself “Meta,” the company said on Thursday, in a rebrand that focuses on its ambitions building the “metaverse,” a shared virtual environment that it bets will be the next big societal cancer… er, computing platform.
Elizabeth Culliford and Sheila Dang for Reuters:
The name change comes as the world’s largest social media company battles criticisms from lawmakers and regulators over its market power, algorithmic decisions and the policing of abuses on its platforms.
The metaverse, a term first coined in a dystopian novel three decades ago and now attracting buzz in Silicon Valley, refers broadly to the idea of a shared virtual environment which can be accessed by people using different devices.
The company, which has invested heavily in augmented and virtual reality, said the change would bring together its different apps and technologies under one new brand. It said it would not change its corporate structure.
The company will also stop using the Oculus branding for its VR headsets, instead calling them “Meta” products.
This year, the company created a product team focused on the metaverse and it recently announced plans to hire 10,000 employees in Europe over the next five years to work on the effort.
The name change amounts to slapping a fresh coat of paint on a defaced brand name, says Rebecca Biestman, chief marketing officer of Reputation.com.
“It’s dystopian, the worst of all names. If we don’t trust them in the real world, why would we in the virtual world?” Kirsten Martin, professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, told MarketWatch.
“Seriously? Facebook is trying to distract journalists and policy makers from the whistleblower’s evidence of irresponsible management decisions and potentially criminal behavior,” venture capitalist Roger McNamee, author of “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe,” told MarketWatch. “If they change the organizational structure, it will be to protect Mark Zuckerberg from accountability for the harms committed by his company under his leadership.”
MacDailyNews Take: Hold the “World Peace,” which is not a name befitting a societal cancer.
(Yes, we know World Peace‘s surname is “Metta” with two t’s.) Facebook Meta has nothing whatsoever to do with world peace; quite the contrary.
Or perhaps Zuckerberg’s lockstep minions misspelled “Meat,” after how he views and treats his customers?
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SSNs
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don’t know why.
Zuckerberg: They “trust me”
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
(Instant messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg during Facebook’s early days, reported by Business Insider in May 2010.)
All of these “social media” platforms – Twitter, Parler, Facebook – are cancers on society. They are clearly eating society from the inside out. There’s something unsavory within human nature that “digital distance” amplifies to the point of disgust.
If you quit these cancers you will quickly realize what they are and what they do. You will be happier and healthier to have excised them from your life.
We haven’t had personal Twitter or Facebook accounts for many years now. And very happily so. — MacDailyNews, January 9, 2021
Facebook is to privacy as Chernobyl is to nuclear power. — MacDailyNews, February 3, 2021
If you trust Mark Zuckerberg to be the keeper of your photos, contacts, political views, religious beliefs, etc., you’re batshit insane. — MacDailyNews, May 23, 2018
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A douchebag by any other name…
Please don’t refer to GoeB like that, it’s not nice
What’s with the droopy eyes logo? Looks creepy to me
From a company that I dumped about 10 yrs ago because of privacy issues and simply to preserve my valuable time.
I want nothing to do with Meta, Beta, or the money (Diem) that FB births going forward. Diem is the most dystopian offer that could come out of this company. A simple and scary parallel is the CCPs scoring system that’s augmented with CBDC (central bank digi currencies).
Money, the medium that (true hard money) preserves indi sovereignty and the sacrifice of your time. Imagine how FB will “protect” users with Diem. They’ve done an admirable job of protecting The People from “harmful” information. The govt would like to work with FB on this offering…I’m sure
O L I G A R C H Y
How Facebook’s Zuckerberg spent $419 million to get Biden elected
During the 2020 election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars to turn out likely Democratic voters. But this wasn’t traditional political spending. He funded a targeted, private takeover of government election operations by nominally nonpartisan — but demonstrably ideological — nonprofit organizations.
Analysis conducted by our team demonstrates this money significantly increased Joe Biden’s vote margin in key swing states. In places like Georgia, where Biden won by 12,000 votes, and Arizona, where he won by 10,000, the spending likely put him over the top.
This unprecedented merger of public election offices with private resources and personnel is an acute threat to our republic and should be the focus of electoral reform efforts moving forward.
The 2020 election wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes.
The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) passed a staggering $419.5 million of Zuckerberg’s money into local government elections offices, and it came with strings attached. Every CTCL and CEIR grant spelled out in great detail the conditions under which the grant money was to be used.
This is not a matter of Democrats outspending Republicans. Private funding of election administration was virtually unknown in the American political system before the 2020 election.
Big CTCL and CEIR money had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, lobbying or other expenses that are related to increasingly expensive modern elections. It had to do with financing the infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by left-wing activists and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods and data-sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive outreach campaigns in areas heavy with Democratic voters.
For instance, CTCL/CEIR funded self-described “vote navigators” in Wisconsin to “assist voters, potentially at their front doors, to answer questions, assist in ballot curing … and witness absentee ballot signatures,” and a temporary staffing agency affiliated with Stacey Abrams called Happy Faces counting the votes amid the election night chaos in Fulton County, Georgia.
CTCL demanded the promotion of universal mail-in voting through suspending election laws, extending deadlines that favored mail-in over in-person voting, greatly expanding opportunities for “ballot curing,” expensive bulk mailings, and other lavish “community outreach” programs that were directed by private activists.
CTCL drove the proliferation of unmonitored private drop boxes (which created major chain-of-custody issues) and opportunities for novel forms of “mail-in ballot electioneering,” allowed for the submission of numerous questionable post-election-day ballots, and created opportunities for illegal ballot harvesting.
CTCL greatly increased funding for temporary staffing and poll workers, which supported the infiltration of election offices by paid Democratic Party activists, coordinated through a complex web of left-leaning nonprofit organizations, social media platforms and social media election influencers.
The amount of additional money these groups poured into elections offices in Democrat-voting areas was truly staggering. To put it in perspective, federal and state matching funds for COVID-19-related election expenses in 2020 totaled $479.5 million.
The CTCL and CEIR money totaled $419.5 million.
These two private nonprofits were responsible for an 85 percent increase in total additional election funding — and that largesse was concentrated in a relatively small number of heavily Democratic municipalities.
Although CTCL and CEIR are chartered as nonpartisan 501(c)(3) corporations, our research suggests the spending that took place in 2020 was highly partisan in its distribution and its effects.
Of the 25 grants CTCL provided to cities and counties in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia that were $1 million or larger, 23 went to areas Biden won in 2020. One of the two counties won by Donald Trump, Brown County, Wisconsin, received about $1.1 million — less than 1.2 percent of the $87.5 million that CTCL provided to these top 25 recipients.
But even in Brown County, Wisconsin, where heavily Democrat Green Bay is located, the funding disparities are glaring. The Wisconsin legislature provided roughly $7 per voter to the city of Green Bay to manage its 2020 elections. Rural counties in Wisconsin received approximately $4 per voter.
The CTCL funds boosted Democratic-voting Green Bay resources to $47 per voter, while most rural areas still had the same $4 per voter. Similar funding disparities occurred near Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Flint, Mich., Dallas, Houston and other cities that received tens of millions of dollars of CTCL money.
Preliminary analysis shows this partisan targeting of CTCL funding was repeated in battleground states across the country.
Funding and managing elections has always been a government function, not a private one, and for good reason. Private organizations are not subject to the rules for public employees and institutions — they are not required to hold public hearings, cannot be monitored via open-records requests and other mechanisms of administrative and financial transparency, are not subject to the normal checks and balances of the governmental process and are not accountable to voters if the public disapproves of their actions.
The practical effect of these massive, privately manipulated election-office funding disparities was to create a “shadow” election system with a built-in structural bias that systematically favored Democratic voters over Republican voters. The massive influx of funds essentially created a high-powered, concierge-like get-out-the-vote effort for Biden that took place inside the election system, rather than attempting to influence it from the outside.
We call this the injection of structural bias into the 2020 election, and our analysis shows it likely generated enough additional votes for Biden to secure an Electoral College victory in 2020.
Our preliminary results in Georgia and Wisconsin suggest a similar impact on Biden’s vote margin from CTCL spending. And spending in those states was likely large enough and targeted enough to have shifted them into Biden’s column.
This research and analysis project will culminate in the creation of a counterfactual electoral map based on the combined results of our state-by-state analysis. It will reflect how the election results would have looked after the last legal ballot was counted if CTCL and CEIR did not spend their $419.5 million in 2020.
We have good reason to anticipate that the results of our work will show that CTCL and CEIR involvement in the 2020 election gave rise to an election that, while free, was not fair. The 2020 election wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought with money poured through legal loopholes.
— William Doyle, Ph.D.
That’s how a lifelong government failure turned dementia patient teamed with a cackling token ho who slept her way into office got the most votes, by far, in American history:
OLIGARCHY is right.
Let’s make one Dakota, one Carolina, combine Wyoming with Idaho and Montana, make DC and Puerto Rico States.
Acres don’t vote, people do.
What you want is unconstitutional. If you want it, take the states that will follow you and form your own Republic and Constitution, and leave the sacred US Constitution alone
yer not very brite, ar ya?
People don’t vote, Dominion voting machines vote! Along with illegals and dead people, and those at non-existent addresses, etc.
You haven’t proven squat, only crazy, and had a year to do it.
All this winning.
White House bought by Zuckerberg
Nearly a year has passed since the 2020 election, yet there has not been a clear, satisfactory answer to the central mystery: How did a dull, declining Joe Biden manage to get more than 81 million votes and win the presidency?
After all, Biden spent most of the pandemic-laced campaign in his Delaware basement and his appearances were marked by sparse crowds and signs he had lost more than a step. Yet he flipped five states Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, including Georgia and Arizona, and racked up 306 electoral votes to Donald Trump’s 232.
Trump offers his own answer, of course, declaring incessantly that the election was stolen. His efforts to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to block certification of results and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have made his arguments out of bounds for most Americans.
Numerous courts rejected claims made by Trump lawyers involving manipulation of voting machines, bags of secret ballots emerging and other kinds of alleged fraud.
But rejecting Trump’s claims is one thing, solving the riddle of Biden’s triumph is another. Lacking any other explanation, two-thirds of Republicans still believe “the election was rigged and stolen from Trump,” while only 18 percent believe “Joe Biden won fair and square,” according to a recent Yahoo News/YouGov survey. It found that 28 percent of independent voters agree Biden’s victory is illegitimate.
Such wide suspicions are corrosive, which makes the findings of a new book all the more important.
In “Rigged,” author Mollie Hemingway lays out what amounts to a fascinating alternative to the “stolen” charge. She presents a strong case that the $419 million that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ostensibly spent to get out the vote was actually used by Democrat activists to infiltrate local election operations and take over jobs government workers were supposed to do.
Hemingway, a senior editor at The Federalist and a Fox commentator, shows how two Zuckerberg nonprofits used their unprecedented deep pockets to line up left-wing groups in key cities that in turn hired poll workers, collected absentee ballots and cured those with errors.
In Green Bay, Wis., the Democratic mayor outsourced the planning and managing of the election to these activists. Hemingway cites an e-mail from the mayor’s chief of staff saying, “I am taking all of my cues” from one of the Zuckerberg groups.
The city clerk, nominally in charge of the election, was reportedly unhappy with the changes, went on leave shortly before election day and soon resigned.
As Hemingway puts it in excerpts published by The Post, “It was a genius plan. And because no one ever imagined that a coordinated operation could pull off the privatization of the election system, no laws were built to combat it.”
Texas researcher William Doyle crunched the numbers showing how the nonprofits concentrated in areas Biden won, often spending three or four times as much money per voter as they spent in districts Trump won.
“The 2020 election wasn’t stolen,” Doyle concluded. “It was likely bought by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes.”
He also tracks the Zuckerberg groups’ promotion of universal mail-in voting, the push for unlocked and unwatched drop boxes and extended deadlines.
The pandemic played a major role in many ways, with health fears leading most states to loosen safeguards. But in swing states, left-wing groups outraged by Trump’s 2016 upset of Clinton started plotting early for 2020 and were able to piggyback on the pandemic fears to go even further.
In Pennsylvania, activists had done an end-run around the sleepy Republican Legislature by suing to eliminate protections and getting a Democratic governor to sign a consent decree. A Democratic-heavy state Supreme Court approved it.
In Georgia, a Republican governor signed a consent decree on signatures pushed by Democratic activist Stacey Abrams.
The US Supreme Court made noises about the Constitution’s delegation of power on state elections to legislatures, but never made a major ruling.
Coming on top of how Zuckerberg’s Facebook suppressed The Post’s report on Hunter Biden, Hemingway’s book deserves wide attention, especially from Trump and the GOP.
Although her findings do not mean there was no voter fraud, she offers a more substantive and documented explanation than the “stolen” argument, which remains a political dead-end outside of Trump’s core Republican base.
Party leaders hoping to take back Congress in next year’s midterms would do well to understand the details of how Dems pulled off swing-state victories for Biden.
In some ways, the breakthrough recalls the big leaps in the use of technology Barack Obama’s campaign featured in 2008. In both cases, the intense collection of granular data, combined with armies of young people using it, won the day by turning out targeted voters.
As Hemingway notes, the 2020 effort also broke new ground in having activists replace government workers for election jobs, which made the use of data more efficient. One measure is that the 159 million votes cast represent nearly 67 percent of the eligible population, making the turnout percentage the highest in 120 years, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Although Trump doesn’t have trouble raising money, his campaigns did not feature strong ground games. Both of his races were built around his personality and rallies, which drew enormous crowds. He won more than 74 million votes last year, an increase of 10 million over his 2016 tally, and he sounds very much like a 2024 candidate.
But Biden’s victory exposed the limits of his approach, and now we have a good picture of how Dems did it.
Tellingly, Republicans are furious at what Hemingway uncovered and promise investigations and legislation.
All well and good, but chances they will succeed before the midterms are almost nil. For example, the GOP-led Legislature in Wisconsin passed a bill banning private funding of state operations, but the Democratic governor vetoed it.
So until further notice, Zuck’s Bucks remain the coin of the political realm.
— Michael Goodwin, October 16, 2021
Pisses you off when people vote huh?
Again, People don’t vote, Dominion voting machines vote! Along with illegals and dead people, and those at non-existent addresses, etc.
And yet votes don’t count.
The people who count the votes count…
And Trumpies definitely can’t count.
The Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) knowingly and intentionally violated the State’s election laws and instructed subordinate election officials to do the same, according to the Racine County Sheriff, Christopher Schmaling. In a shocking press conference on Thursday, law enforcement officials from the Racine County Sheriff’s Office laid out their case of election fraud in Racine during the 2020 election. The investigation focused on abuse of voters confined to nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Investigators discovered that Wisconsin Election Officials expressly discussed that their proposed conduct for the 2020 election would violate state law, and yet they decided to do it anyway. They memorialized their decision in a letter they wrote and disseminated to every single county clerk’s office in Wisconsin.
Sheriff Schamling stated that officials indicated that they “needed the flexibility to violate the law,” and that they needed to “instruct county clerks to break the law.” Despite the blatant absurdity of the statements, the express illegality of their activities, and the fact that they were all being recorded on their Zoom meeting, election officials went ahead and violated the law anyway. The sheriff’s office played the video from the Zoom meeting of the commissioners discussing their need to break the law and instruct others to do the same. Couple that with the confirmed activities that actually occurred during the 2020 election, and Sheriff Schamling has a very compelling case of election fraud.
Specifically, the letter from WEC instructed county officials to not allow Special Voting Deputies into nursing homes. These individuals are trained professionals responsible for ensuring the rights of the nursing home residents. They’re also responsible to ensure the elders are not abused for their voting privileges and that no ballot harvesting or other illegal activity takes place. WEC decided that due to COVID, it was too dangerous for these individuals to enter the facility, despite the fact that Wisconsin state law requires them to be a part of the process. By requiring county clerks to exclude these deputies from the election process, WEC committed election fraud.
State leaders and nursing home administrators thought it was safe enough for the fish tank maintenance worker to enter the facility, Door Dash delivery drivers, vending machine workers, elevator repairmen, bird cage cleaner, and copy machine vendor, but it was too dangerous to allow Special Voting Deputies inside to ensure that no abuses of the rights to the elderly were taking place. It’s a preposterous position to take, but it’s the position WEC took. It’s also a violation of Wisconsin Statute 6.875.
The sheriff and his sergeant told multiple horrific stories of victimizing the elderly for the purpose of stealing their vote. On multiple occasions, election workers cast ballots on behalf of incapacitated residents of the nursing home. Those residents who were not lucid had ballots cast on their behalf if they were simply capable of pointing to the ballot. Election workers then interpreted that point as an affirmative vote for a specific candidate. Multiple family members of nursing home residents attended the press event to voice their concern that their loved ones were manipulated for their vote. Some of the complaints stated that election workers cast ballots on behalf of incapacitated residents in accordance with how they “voted last election,” despite the fact the resident was not cognizant, nor capable to consenting to the vote.
Sheriff Schmaling stated that they believe this happened in most of the nursing homes in the state, but that they would enforce the law as it pertained to those in Racine County. There were 11 nursing homes in Racine and all are believed to have suffered the similar abuse. There are 72 counties in Wisconsin making for hundreds of nursing homes subject to this abuse, and hundreds of ballots were used in each of the nursing homes. Based on just nursing home abuses and election fraud, there could be as many as 50,000 – 100,000 fraudulent ballots cast in Wisconsin during the 2020 election. Biden supposedly won the state by 20,682. This is more than enough fraud to have changed the outcome of the election.
The Wisconsin Election Commission orchestrated a criminal and fraudulent election. The sheriff has said that he is referring the crimes to the Racine District Attorney, Patricia Hanson. Hanson is an elected Republican and will be called upon to prosecute these crimes. At the same time, the Wisconsin legislature has more than enough evidence to show that the results certified in 2020 are fraudulent and must be decertified. It’s incumbent upon the Republican state legislature to stand by the laws they pass and not allow criminal activity to overrule law and order. The Wisconsin State Legislature is primed to decertify their election. Will they?
This is a computer site, not a place for political rants. Why do you conservatives thing anything will change by trying to convert the non-believers here? So odd. Don’t you have anything better do to? Go over to a Fox news forum or something.
…and convert the believers at Fox?
It’s much more fun at MSNBC, CNN, ABCBNBS….
Short for metastasis?
Sounds like Meh.
Meta grizzly end?
Sandwiched right between Ortho and Para. What a relief they did not name themselves GIGA.
Meta retardation 🤪
Need some Metamucil to get Facebook out of your system
About a quarter cup of castor oil would work better for this purpose!
They should have renamed to Merda instead.
Meta Lotta Trouble
I guess I don’t mind the vision. I just don’t want a thoroughly untrustworthy company behind it.
He’s putting lipstick on a pig. Nothing more, nothing less.
As anyone who is familiar with “Snow Crash” knows, Stephenson wrote that based upon Steve Job’s vision of what the digital realm would look like. Facebook is far from that vision, which would be the real deal. They can go crawl back under their rock…nothing to see here, in a BS name change.
Same old snakes.
Like many other people, I’ve grown weary of general social media’s physical (and often identity) disconnect, through which the ugliest of comments can be and too often are made without consequence for the aggressor. What I find indispensable about social media in general, however, is that it has enabled far greater information freedom than that allowed by what had been a rigidly gatekept news and information virtual monopoly held by the pre-2000 electronic and print mainstream news-media.
Besides the Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests, I seriously doubt that Greta Thunberg’s pre-pandemic formidable climate change movement, for example, would’ve been able to regularly form on such a congruently colossal scale if not in large part for the widely accessible posting and messaging systems of Facebook.
While I don’t know his opinion of social media, in an interview with the online National Observer (posted Feb.12, 2019) Noam Chomsky noted that while the mainstream news-media does publish stories about man-made global warming, “It’s as if … there’s a kind of a tunnel vision — the science reporters are occasionally saying ‘look, this is a catastrophe,’ but then the regular [non-environmental pro-fossil fuel] coverage simply disregards it.”
And contrary to prominent conservative proclamations, I’ve found that social media ‘moderators’ silence progressive voices as much as, if not more than, conservative opinions.
I see Facebook is wanting to win again, so they changed their name to META: Make Everything Trump Again!
A common yet questionable refrain prevails among capitalist nation governments and corporate circles: Best business practices, including what’s best for consumers, are best decided by business decision-makers.
This was most recently proven false with Facebook prioritising the expansion of its already huge profit margin over the health of its younger users. It was proven false when long-term care-homes (in Canada and the U.S.) put profit maximisation before their residents’ well-being, neglect that resulted in needlessly numerous COVID-19 deaths. And proven most false when the pharmaceutical industry knowingly pushed its new, very addictive opiate painkiller.
Big business mentality and, by extension, collective society allow the well-being of human beings to be decided by corporate profit-margin measures. And our governments mostly dare not intervene, perhaps because they fear being labelled anti-business by our avidly capitalist culture.
Sadly, maximizing profits by risking the health or lives of product consumers will likely always be a significant part of the big business beast’s nature. But that does not mean that we should give in to it. Rather, it should be a call to society, and especially our elected leaders, that the economy and jobs be there foremostly for people, not for corporate profit’s sake.