Facebook is not the usual corporation by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe it has grown so quickly and so big that it can't have telephones or emails to ever be able to reach anyone. That access has all been totally and resolutely hidden, and I do understand the reasons for doing so. But if you get thrown into FB jail, and I have 39 times in 3 1/2 years, the "Appeal" process is absolutely meaningless~just be ultrapatient!

::::::::

Could Mitch Be the Real Root of the Censorship Problem?

In the past week, I have heard from 3 women Bernie Group administrators who are restricted from posting to any other groups than the one or ones they administer, and the restriction goes to March 28, for three months. How convenient! 3 months puts their release after the Super Tuesday elections!

What could be more obvious? I am sure this following charming puff piece below is sincere and well intended and probably parsed numerous times by numerous highly paid staff members, not just the one who ostensibly wrote it, out there on 1 Hacker Way in San Mateo, California. Please keep in mind all of that while you read their explanation, in the form of an Opinion in the largest paper in the first state to vote in the 2020 Democratic primaries.

>>>>

This sanguine little puff piece in---of all papers!---the Des Moines Register, deserves a realistic response from someone who knows part of the truth, and that is not so much that Fake News Ads popped up in 2016, a charge/suggestion I made back in 2016 repeatedly and was repeatedly ignored. Hundreds of such posts showed up in the Facebook group I started called Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Win in 2016 (now changed to 2020). I solved the problem by removing all of the Russians, Serbs, Macedonians, and Ukrainians from the group, and the entire problem abruptly and entirely stopped!

I Fedexed the entire board of directors letters about this and a few other matters~~~I mean personal letters in snail mail envelopes, and never got a single reply. Eventually, Mr. Zuckerberg was called before the US Senate partially on the same matters, and mostly of that I remember was him saying "I'll get back to you, Senator...."

Facebook is not the usual corporation, by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe it has grown so quickly and so big that it can't have telephones or emails to ever be able to reach anyone. That access has all been totally and resolutely hidden, and I do understand the reasons for doing so. But if you get thrown into FB jail, and I have 39 times in 3 1/2 years, the "Appeal" process is absolutely meaningless and never works. You just have to be patient until the restriction is up.

They end the puff piece with this:

wholesale improvements to how we approach election security.

I would trust the FBI to oversee "election security" a lot more than I ever would Facebook.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/caucus/2020/01/22/facebook-elections-have-changed-so-have-we-cybersecurity-disinformation-voting/4532528002/

It's not just combating disinformation. Efforts to suppress voting undermine our core values as a company, which is why we've expanded our policies and technical capabilities to further reduce this type of content on Facebook. In the 2018 midterms, we removed more than 45,000 pieces of misleading content aimed at suppressing voting and we proactively found more than 90% of this content before anyone reported it.

Across our elections security work, a key piece of our strategy is giving voters more information about what they are seeing and who is behind it. That means stronger verification for people that want to run political ads, forcing them to prove they're actually located within the country where they plan to run ads. We also provide unprecedented transparency into the ads that political campaigns are running, including who paid for them, where they ran, and information on who the ads reached. And we're increasing transparency around the people or groups who are running Facebook Pages or posting content trying to influence people's votes, so you can better decide what to read, trust, and share.

And although we've made the decision that a private company shouldn't keep voters from hearing what their politicians say, that doesn't mean anything goes in political advertising on Facebook. We rigorously enforce our rules that prohibit hate speech, violence, real world harm, voter suppression, and election interference. We've also partnered with 56 independent fact-checking organizations in 44 languages to give people even more information about what they are seeing. We also foster civic participation and prevent misinformation about when elections are being held through our "Election Day" reminders.

When Iowans go to caucus this year, they should do so knowing that Facebook has made wholesale improvements to how we approach election security. But you should also know that we're not resting on any progress and continue to find ways to improve. We remain committed to fighting election interference, increasing transparency, and giving more people more information about what they see online. Those trying to attack our democracy won't let up, and neither will we.

(Article changed on January 24, 2020 at 15:12)

Authors Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Authors Bio:

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev