Still looking more like the kid who pulled the fire alarm during assembly than the world’s eighth-richest man, Facebook’s 35-year-old founder and CEO fielded questions from lawmakers.
He was testifying about Libra. It’s Facebook’s bid to take over the global money system with a corporate version of a cryptocurrency.
Zuckerberg already wields enormous power over how Facebook’s 2.4 billion users think and act via the algorithms he uses to serve them news and information. (More on this below.)
And lawmakers are queasy about handing a Big Tech gazillionaire with serious trust issues control over the economy and money, too.
He claimed it was about heading off competition from China in the digital currency space… and bringing financial services to folks around the world who are currently without banking services.
But if you believe that The Zuck is motivated by patriotism or charity, I have a bridge to sell you.
As our tech expert, Jeff Brown, has made clear, Libra is all about boosting Zuckerberg’s power.
If he runs the world’s largest currency… as well as the world’s largest social network… his calculation is he’ll be too powerful to ever take down.
But it’s not Zuckerberg’s lies about Libra that have us reaching for our anti-nausea meds today…
It’s that he’s now trying to cast himself – and Facebook – as a champion of free speech. And as you’ll see today, it’s critical that you don’t fall for his B.S.
He gave a lecture titled “Standing for Voice and Free Expression.”
It referenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and the First Amendment.
And the Facebook chief kicked it off with a big, fat lie…
He claimed he started what eventually became Facebook to give students more freedom of expression during the Iraq War. By his telling…
When I was in college, our country had just gone to war in Iraq. The mood on campus was disbelief. […] I remember feeling that if more people had a voice to share their experiences, maybe things would have gone differently.
It’s a touching origin story. And its aim is to show Zuckerberg as a thoughtful leader.
But it’s fake news.
The original Facebook pulled photos of students from sorority houses at Harvard. Then it placed two photos next to each other and asked other students to choose which one was “hotter.”
He also told this whopper…
[T]he long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. […] I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.
As we’ve been showing you, Facebook has tremendous power over what you see and what you don’t on its platform.
Here at Legacy Research, we know this from firsthand experience.
Last year, Facebook, Google, and several other online media services put dozens of independent newsletter publishers – including us – on notice.
They said they were banning us from publishing on their platforms. And they told us they wouldn’t lift the ban unless we complied with their “guidelines.”
Not because we were saying anything illegal or untrue… but because they didn’t like the things we had to say.
Google, for example, got worked up by an essay by Legacy cofounder Bill Bonner titled “How the Feds Turned West Baltimore Into a Sh*thole.” Bill had committed the thought crime of claiming the feds were responsible for the decline of Baltimore. As he put it in that essay…
Today, everyone knows that Baltimore slums are hellholes of drugs, crime, and poverty. But how did they get that way?
Simple, the feds undermined the two most fundamental win-win deals that make civilization possible… work and family.
Last October, Facebook’s thought police purged the accounts and pages of 800 independent media outlets.
It even shut down business accounts related to these organizations.
They included a coffee company called Military Grade Coffee, which donates 10% of its profits to vets.
It’s run by Brian Kolfage. He’s a vet who lost both legs and his right arm in an attack on a U.S. airbase in Iraq. Military Grade Coffee is the primary source of income for Kolfage and his family.
His crime?
Kolfage was also the administrator of an independent news outlet called Right Wing News.
Everything you see on Facebook is determined entirely by an algorithm.
And that algorithm is skewing what 2.4 billion people around the world see and don’t see online.
Even worse, it’s a black box.
The only people who know exactly how it skews information are Mark Zuckerberg and a small cadre around him.
So if you’re one of the 1 in 2 American adults who get their news from Facebook… you’re really getting a version of the news that Facebook decides on.
Worse, Facebook does this while constantly spying on you and selling what it learns about you from your online behavior to the highest bidder.
It’s not a platform for freedom of expression, as Zuckerberg is claiming. It’s a global platform for behavior modification.
And if you use a Facebook platform, that includes you.
I’ve deleted my Facebook account. I don’t use Facebook-owned Instagram.
That sounds like a big step for a lot of folks. But I can’t tell you how happy it makes me feel not to be tangled up in social media all the time.
I don’t use Facebook-owned WhatsApp, either. I just use regular SMS messages instead. This has the dual benefit of getting me out of time-sucking WhatsApp group chats.
You may not be quite ready to do the same. But I can report that it’s liberating. And for me, at least, it’s better than simply sucking up Mark Zuckerberg’s B.S.
A final reminder that our master trader, Jeff Clark, is going to be kicking off his coaching event at 8 p.m. ET sharp tonight.
Regular readers will know what I’m talking about. But if you’re just tuning in for the first time… let me explain.
For the past 36 years, Jeff has helped all kinds of people retire rich using options.
But over the past 18 months, he’s started targeting a small group of stocks… and the results have been amazing.
Jeff live tested his strategy with his own money over 18 months. And over that time, he spotted stocks that went on to soar as high as 236%, 308%, and even 600% – in very little time, sometimes in just a few days.
That’s what this evening’s event is all about…
First, Jeff will introduce you to the small group of tiny stocks that could make you even more money than you could make trading options.
Then, he’ll unveil his system for trading them.
Next, he’ll reveal his three favorite trade setups – including names and tickers.
And finally, he’ll close out the event with an in-depth Q&A.
It’s going to be a terrific evening. And it’s a one-time-only event.
Just click here to add your name to the guest list.
Regards,
Chris Lowe
October 23, 2019
Dublin, Ireland