RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mark Zuckerberg famously started Facebook out of a Harvard dorm room in 2004, but his social network now boasts more than two billion users world-wide. Facebook hasn’t matured as fast as it has grown, and its recent troubles show that it will need to exercise more control over content and privacy. Or politicians may do it instead.

Facebook is facing a public reckoning after two newspapers reported that data on 50 million users was improperly shared with a firm working for the Trump campaign. The outrage is overwrought, but perhaps inevitable given that Facebook has promoted itself as a guardian of consumer privacy.

In 2014 the company supported a Senate bill to limit the National Security Agency’s access to electronic data, arguing that it was more trustworthy than the government. Last year Facebook joined other tech companies to oppose Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s rescission of Obama-era privacy rules for broadband providers that didn’t apply to them.

The Internet Association argued that companies like Facebook and Google “have more limited visibility into online practices and consumer information” than broadband providers that are “in a position to develop highly detailed and comprehensive profiles of their customers—and to do so in a manner that may be completely invisible.” Facebook’s alleged data breach has exposed this conceit.

Facebook makes most of its $16 billion in annual profit from harvesting data on users. In 2007 the company decided to start selling personalized ads to fuel its growth. To boost user engagement and generate more ad revenue, Facebook encouraged third-party apps such as inane personality quizzes like “Which Disney Princess Are You?”

Brennan admitted his charge that the Russians were blackmailing Trump was pure speculation. But that didn’t stop him or anyone else from spreading the smear.

The question was a reasonable one, but the answer was not. When the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe program asked why President Trump had congratulated Russian president Vladimir Putin on being reelected, former CIA director John Brennan pulled no punches. In answering the leading question that implied Trump may be afraid of Putin, Brennan said, “The Russians may have something on him personally.” The Russians, he said, “have had long experience of Mr. Trump, and may have things they could expose.”

Coming from just another foe of Trump — which Brennan, an Obama loyalist, certainly is — the assertion could be dismissed as just a partisan cheap shot. But coming as it did from a career intelligence officer who served for four years as the head of the American intelligence establishment, this had to be more than a baseless conjecture.

Except it wasn’t.

By the end of the day, Brennan admitted his wild charge was not based on any actual information or intelligence revealed to him during the course of his duties but just a willingness to assume the worst about Trump. In a written response to questions from the New York Times, he said, “I do not know if the Russians have something on Donald Trump that they could use as blackmail.”

In a world in which journalists treated unfounded assumptions as just that, rather than headline news, Brennan’s charges would have been dismissed. But though the Times knew the accusation was baseless by the time it published its article on the subject, the paper buried the lead. The headline on the story was “Ex-Chief of the C.I.A. Suggests Putin May Have Compromising Information on Trump.” Brennan’s walking back of his charge didn’t appear until the eleventh paragraph of the story.

Washington in 2016 saw one of most audacious dirty tricks in political history: the Donald Trump -Russia collusion claim. Now it’s happening again—same partisans, same media; new conspiracy, new victims, including the National Rifle Association.

Remember how the Trump-Russia trick played? Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired opposition-research firm Fusion GPS to compile a dossier of salacious Trump allegations. The Fusion team delivered it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then, when briefing reporters, cited the bureau’s interest to establish the document’s credibility. To this day the accusations in the dossier have not been corroborated.

To pull this off, Clinton partisans needed government officials willing to entertain wild claims and media willing to propagate them. Both still exist in abundance, as we now witness a new conspiracy theory elevated into news.

Starting in February 2017, media outlets began issuing stories about a Russian central banker named Alexander Torshin and a Russian gun-rights activist named Maria Butina. Most broadly claimed the duo had been cozying up to U.S. conservatives; they specifically noted that they had an interest in the NRA. What was weird was that so many journalists were simultaneously doing this story—among them Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, the self-described “old friend” of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, who was also among the first to write about the dossier—at Mr. Simpson’s pitch.

This January, the House Intelligence Committee released its transcript of Mr. Simpson’s November testimony, in which he regaled incredulous committee Republicans with a wild new tale—of how the Russians had “infiltrated the NRA.” Fusion GPS had “spent a lot of time investigating” a “Mafia leader named Alexander Torshin” and a “suspicious” and “big Trump fan,” Maria Butina. Mr. Simpson provided zero detail to back up this claim—no names, dates, money transfers or specific actions.

But never mind. The day Mr. Simpson’s conspiracy-laden transcript was due to go public, McClatchy ran this headline: “FBI investigating whether Russian money went to NRA to help Trump.” The story cited only two unnamed “sources familiar with the matter.” The article admitted it “could not be learned” whether the FBI had any evidence involving the NRA, but it nonetheless went on at length about the group. A flurry of articles from other news organizations followed, while Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden fired off letters demanding the NRA account for itself. House Democrats jumped in, with Rep. Adam Schiff positing “an effort by Russia to create a back channel or assist the Trump campaign through the NRA.” Another flurry of articles. All still based on nothing but Mr. Simpson’s infiltration claim. CONTINUE AT SITE

Facebook is grappling with the fallout from its alleged role in permitting the London-based data firm Cambridge Analytica to gain access to data from profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users for political purposes. The Facebook data reportedly was mined for data by an app called “thisisyourdigitallife,” presumably for an academic research project. The app was created by Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic at Cambridge University, and his company Global Science Research. The data was then transferred by the researcher to Cambridge Analytica, which worked for the Trump presidential campaign and was backed by Steve Bannon and the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer. Cambridge Analytica claims that the Facebook data it gathered from the app was not used for the 2016 Trump presidential election campaign. Facebook claims that its user profile data was provided to Cambridge Analytica without its knowledge. Facebook also claims that it shut the app down in 2015.

There are reports the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating whether Facebook violated terms of a 2011 consent decree in connection with the transfer of user data to Cambridge Analytica. A spokesperson for the FTC would neither confirm nor deny whether it was launching such an investigation.

Members of Congress and United Kingdom lawmakers have called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain Facebook’s actions and his company’s connections with Cambridge Analytica. The hit to Facebook’s reputation and the potential for increased government regulation on both sides of the Atlantic are taking its toll. Facebook’s stock value has taken a nosedive as a result.

On the political front, President Trump’s enemies are busy exploiting the connection between Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign, and by implication the purported misuse of Facebook sourced data for improper partisan purposes. As the Russian-Trump campaign collusion narrative begins to fade due to lack of evidence, the Trump-hating media has latched on to a new Deus ex Machina behind Donald Trump’s improbable victory in a continuing effort to delegitimize his presidency.

One of the many conceits of the digital age is that so-called platforms are a new invention. In some respects they are. Built with computer code, powered by microchips and operated in the cloud, these digital building blocks did not exist until relatively recently. But in other respects, platforms are simply large aggregations of people coming together to search information online, shop or connect with friends.

Compare today’s platforms to the American Constitution: a large aggregation of citizens organized on the principle of self-government. As a work of design, the Constitution is a brilliant piece of architecture, an intellectual foundation that has stood the test of time. If James Madison were a software developer in a Harvard dorm room and not a Virginia planter, we might say he was a better coder than Mark Zuckerberg. The Constitution understands human nature. Facebook , dangerously at times, does not.

In designing the Constitution, Madison managed to appeal to people’s better angels while at the same time calculating man’s capacity to harm and behave badly. Facebook’s designers, on the other hand, appear to have assumed the best about people. They apparently expected users to connect with friends only in benign ways. While the site features plenty of baby and puppy photos, it has also become a place where ISIS brags about beheadings and Russians peddling misinformation seek to undermine the institutions of a free society.CONTINUE AT SITE

Prominent on-air news and opinion hosts at Fox News are going at it tooth and nail, as ailing 86-year-old Rupert Murdoch moves to hand the reins of the network to his liberal son Lachlan. In early February, I got wind of an internal war bubbling below the surface at Fox News. The combatants included several prominent on-air personalities, and there were growing signs that they were gearing up to engage in a serious battle with one another. The conflict pitted representatives of the daytime hard news department against several stars who are faces of the channel during prime time, when opinion-themed shows dominate. Like many Americans in the workplace, beliefs in different opposing ideologies were pushing these people apart. Adding fuel to the fire in the highly competitive hothouse environment of cable television news were jealousy and resentment.

Finally, this past week, the battle went public. It involved three top Fox News personalities: Shepard Smith, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham.

Opening skirmishes in this long simmering conflict began last year, when veteran left-of-center Fox News hosts Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace were the first on-air talent to publicly throw down the gauntlet. Both of them are highly valued and well paid linchpins of the hard news side of the Fox News Channel. Last year, Shepard Smith, 54, the channel’s lead news anchor and host of the 3 P.M. E.T. hour-long news show Shepard Smith Reporting, outed himself as a critic of President Donald Trump. Also in his sights were other prominent Fox News personnel who had defended Trump, including the channel’s senior judicial analyst, former judge Andrew Napolitano. As the Washington Post reported in a swooning profile of Smith on March 22, 2017, “Andrew Napolitano had validated the unfounded claim that President Barack Obama had recruited British agents to bug Trump Tower during the campaign.” “Smith stepped in to say otherwise.” On air, the Post article noted, Smith issued a shot across the bow when he said:

The media always rewards its leakers.

The late pundit Robert Novak used to say that government officials can choose to be either “a source or a target.” In other words, leak information to reporters and you can count on flattering coverage and protection from them. An added bonus to leaking, as former Intelligence Director Jim Clapper discovered, is that the network to which you are leaking will turn you into a paid contributor. According to Congressman Jim Jordan, speaking to Fox News, “Clapper was actually the guy leaking information” to CNN about the presidential briefing on the Steele dossier that served as the pretext for the media feeding frenzy over possible Russian blackmail of Trump.

One can only laugh at the utter fraudulence of CNN: it pads its panels with government officials who leak to it, then presents them to its audience as “nonpartisan” experts commenting on the aftershocks of the very stories they leaked.

Trump’s intuition about a politicized intelligence community is confirmed daily by the rantings of its former members who treat the studios of television news like a retirement center. Eager to get in on this act, NBC recently hired former CIA director John Brennan, who also ingratiated himself to reporters through leaks. On his Twitter account, he describes himself as “nonpartisan” and NBC supports that con by letting him comment on the investigation his partisan manipulation of intelligence instigated.

Almost all of the principals responsible for the Russian farce are confirmed liars and leakers. They said Trump Tower wasn’t the target of spying. It was. They said a FISA warrant wasn’t issued. It was. They said Trump officials weren’t unmasked. They were. They said (as even the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman acknowledged) Hillary didn’t finance the Steele dossier. She did.