RUTHFULLY YOURS

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said he made a “huge mistake” in not focusing more on potential abuse, as he and the social-media giant he founded continue to battle concerns about privacy and trust.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s most direct mea culpa to date came on the same day Facebook announced that data from as many as 87 million of its users may have been improperly shared with an analytics firm tied to the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump, a larger number than had been previously reported.

The disclosure comes as the company is stepping up its efforts to repair trust with regulators and the public in the wake of several controversies tied to the election. Mr. Zuckerberg’s remarks, made in a conference call with reporters, served as a trial run of sorts for his testimony on Capitol Hill next Wednesday, where the 33-year-old billionaire is expected to be grilled on how the company handles data related to its 1.4 billion daily users, globally.

On the conference call, Mr. Zuckerberg called Facebook “an idealistic and optimistic company“ that ”didn’t focus enough on preventing abuse.” He also said he made a “mistake” when he dismissed the threat of fake news as “crazy” shortly after the 2016 election.

“What is clear at this point is that it was too flippant,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.

When asked if the board had suggested he step down as chairman of the company, Mr. Zuckerberg replied, “Not that I am aware of.”

Mr. Zuckerberg reiterated previously announced figures that the company now employs more than 15,000 people dedicated to security, a number that will top 20,000 by the end of the year.

Facebook informed the public on Wednesday that the number of people whose data was compromised by the Cambridge Analytica breach is tens of millions larger than the company initially thought.

Hidden at the bottom of a statement on Facebook’s new data-security initiative was an admission that closer to 87 million people had their personal information illicitly shared. The number was first reported to be around 50 million.

A Cambridge University scientist improperly shared user information that he obtained from Facebook with data-analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked with Donald Trump’s campaign to target voters in 2016. When the data misuse reached Facebook’s radar in 2015, the company claims it secured, in a legal document, Cambridge Analytica’s word that it would delete all the data.

Cambridge Analytica has denied that it used the information during the 2016 campaign, and the scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, has said he was unaware he did anything wrong and feels he is being used as a scapegoat.

Facebook’s statement, written by Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer, outlined several changes aimed at tightening the platform’s privacy, and promised that more changes would be unveiled in the future.

One of the reforms is restricting apps’ access to information contained in calendar events and private groups. The company will also no longer let apps ask for access to “personal information such as religious or political views, relationship status and details, custom friends lists, education and work history, fitness activity, book reading activity, music listening activity, news reading, video watch activity, and games activity.”

The left-wing lynch mob that has been trying to destroy conservative commentator Laura Ingraham for her gentle mockery last week of David Hogg has already succeeded in frightening advertisers away from the host’s Fox News Channel show.

Since launching his career in big-money leftist televangelism weeks ago, Hogg has been spewing hatred and venomous lies about anyone who doesn’t toe the party line. His belligerent in-your-face activism has also been driving up sales of firearms and ammunition and boosting the membership rolls of groups like the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America.

Hogg has been especially focused on accusing his enemies of wanting children to die. “It just makes me think: What sick f**kers are out there that want to sell more guns, murder more children, and, honestly, just get reelected?” Hogg told The Outline. “What type of person are you, when you want to see more f**king money than children’s lives? What type of shitty person does that?”

Hogg has also called the NRA “child murderers,” NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch “disgusting,” and Republicans “sick f**kers.”

Hogg is a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Broward County, Fla., where former student Nikolas Cruz massacred 14 students and three school employees on Valentine’s Day.

Ingraham has blamed “mental illness” and “broken or damaged families” for the massacre, which is consistent with the evidence, given that Cruz has serious psychiatric problems and had a difficult upbringing, losing his sole remaining parent in the months before the attack. Others have pointed out the multiple failures at every level of government that kept Cruz out of the criminal justice system, as well as the left-wing Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) that helped to make the young man the mass murderer he is today.

Ingraham said a March 14 student walkout for gun control was not an “organic outpouring of youthful rage.” It was “nothing but a left-wing, anti-Trump diatribe.” This comment angered a lot of left-wingers.

CNN rather recently pushed its whole apple/banana nonsense whose theme was that it was real news. And pro-Trump outlets were fake news. But only the media is allowed to call others, “Fake news”. And so it threw the expected self-righteous tantrum when Sinclair did the same thing that CNN had been doing. But the public isn’t buying it. It knows fake news when it smells it.

More than 3-in-4 Americans believe that traditional major TV and newspaper media outlets report “fake news,” including 31% who believe this happens regularly and 46% who say it happens occasionally. The 77% who believe fake news reporting happens at least occasionally has increased significantly from 63% of the public who felt that way last year.

Just 25% say the term “fake news” applies only to stories where the facts are wrong. Most Americans (65%), on the other hand, say that “fake news” also applies to how news outlets make editorial decisions about what they choose to report.

That’s an accurate understanding. Distorted reporting is just as dishonest. The Sinclair/CNN case is a typical example. The media manufactures fake scandals by applying biased double standards. It embargoes certain major stories, like the photo of Barack Obama with Louis Farrakhan, while inflating anything and everything about President Trump into a major scandal.

Funny what happens when a Republican wins the White House. The media mob suddenly develops an interest in transparency and fiscal responsibility. This week—in a story that has been developing over several months—all eyes are on the Environmental Protection Agency.

For eight years, President Obama’s two EPA administrators—Lisa Jackson and Gina McCarthy—received very little scrutiny from major news organizations. Reporters and opinion writers overlooked their misconduct at the EPA: excessive travel costs; blatant disregard of congressional oversight and lying to Congress; deleted texts and phony email accounts; colluding with activists who sought to use the agency to impose their costly, ideological agenda.

When the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the agency’s Clean Power Plan in 2016 because it exceeded administrative authority—the first time the court blocked a major EPA rule—no one called for McCarthy’s resignation or even criticized her role in writing the bad regulation. The editorial boards at the New York Times and Washington Post didn’t demand that McCarthy step down after she apologized for the disastrous Gold King Mine spill in Colorado, where 3 million gallons of toxic sludge befouled a river system spanning three states.

When McCarthy defended her agency’s role in the Flint water crisis, the Washington Post described her as some sort of hero: “She stood up to often-furious questioning at a congressional hearing that included Republican calls for her resignation, asserting that under the law her agency had done all it could to protect Flint’s residents.”

Time and again, sympathetic scribes in the mainstream media gave the EPA chiefs a pass.

But that drastically changed on December 7, 2016, when Donald Trump nominated Scott Pruitt to be his EPA administrator. Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general, was an outspoken critic of the agency and sued the EPA several times in his role as the Sooner State’s top lawyer. His appointment was a Southern-styled boot-kick to the far-left scientific establishment and the environmental lobby, signaling an end to their unchecked power grip at the EPA.

“Missile defense needs to be part of the United States’ strategy” against North Korean nuclear threats, conceded even a February 11 New York Times editorial in an incoherent anti-missile defense rant. Yet the Times still derided vital missile defense efforts like Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD), a continuation of the leftist Gray Lady’s longstanding dangerous folly of opposition to protecting America’s homeland from nuclear attack.

The Times probably would have preferred that President Donald Trump had kept his initial Fiscal Year 2018 budget request with the missile defense spending levels of his predecessor, Barack Obama. However, growing North Korean nuclear threats prompted Trump and legislators to add $368 million to missile defense, reflecting a growing missile defense commitment noted on March 7 before Congress by undersecretary of defense John C. Rood. The Alaska- and California-based GMD is central to these missile defense efforts. As the Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS) notes, GMD “is currently the only U.S. missile defense system devoted to defending the U.S. homeland from long-range ballistic missile attacks.”

Nonetheless, the Times simply repeated decades-old sophistries about missile defense’s futility, something that “will never provide a foolproof, comprehensive shield against a nuclear adversary.” “After more than 30 years of research and more than $200 billion, the nation’s ballistic missile defense program remains riddled with flaws, even as the threat from North Korean missiles escalates,” the Times wrote. The Times cited a 2016 Pentagon report that supposedly “faulted” missile defenses (it actually describes GMD’s “limited capability to defend the U.S. Homeland”).

Mark Zuckberberg is expected to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next month about the harvesting of data on 50 million users during campaign season, but one member of the panel said the Facebook CEO and related documents should be under subpoena.

Facebook announced mid-month that it hired a forensic analysis firm to delve into Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm that worked on President Trump’s campaign, after reports that the company held onto user data that had been improperly harvested.

Paul Grewal, VP and deputy general counsel for Facebook, said in a statement posted Friday on the company’s website that Cambridge Analytica had been suspended from Facebook and they were “moving aggressively to determine the accuracy” of claims that the political data firm didn’t delete user info “contrary to the certifications we were given.”

In a detailed interview with the Guardian, Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who conceived the joining of political research and psychological targeting that started Cambridge Analytica (Steve Bannon was on the firm’s board), said Facebook lawyers didn’t reach out to him until August 2016 to demand that “illicitly obtained” data be deleted. “Literally all I had to do was tick a box and sign it and send it back, and that was it,” says Wylie. “Facebook made zero effort to get the data back.”

The UK and EU have launched investigations into Cambridge Analytica.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) invited Zuckerberg to testify at an April 10 on data privacy; Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have also been invited. Other committees have also requested a session with Zuckerberg.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who sits on the Judiciary Committee, told CNN today that “there ought to be subpoenas for him in case he changes his mind, for documents that Facebook has and for Cambridge Analytica and Aleksandr Kogan who are key, also, to knowing how this information on 50 million people was harvested and then abused, illegally juiced to mine and manipulate other data.”

Kogan is a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge who gathered users’ data through an app that promised to predict the Facebook user’s personality. Facebook says about 270,000 people downloaded the app and Kogan “violated our platform policies” by passing the collected data over to Cambridge Analytica.

Journalists are still struggling to put him away.

Hillary famously shouted during the throes of the campaign, “Why am I not up by 50 points?” No doubt the media feels similar rage as it pores over Trump’s latest job approval numbers, which have actually gone up since February, according to CNN: “42% approve of Trump, highest in 11 months.” The CNN correspondent, grudgingly reporting these numbers, chalked Trump’s staying power up to the “economy.”

But in a reversal of the Clintonian adage, it is not the economy, stupid, around CNN these days. It is the sex scandal. Womanizing pundits and louche-living hosts profess shock at Trump’s behavior. They act like it is all so incomprehensible to them. Jeffrey Toobin likes to crank up his wind machine about Trump’s lack of integrity, but not so long ago Toobin’s squalid personal life was tabloid fodder. He was cheating on his wife with former CNN correspondent Jeff Greenfield’s daughter, impregnated her, then (unsuccessfully) put pressure on her to get an abortion, according to the New York Daily News in 2010.

“Jeff and Casey [Greenfield] saw each other off and on over the years,” says one source. “She was married to someone else for two years. After her divorce, she started seeing Jeff again. He said he was going to leave his wife for her. But, by then, Casey had begun to distrust him. She suspected he had several other mistresses.”

In 2008, when Greenfield became pregnant, and when she told Toobin the news, he offered her “money if she’d have an abortion,” says a source. He also allegedly offered to pay for her to have another child later via a sperm donor.

“When Casey wouldn’t have an abortion, Jeff told her she was going to regret it, that she shouldn’t expect any help from him,” claims another source.

Greenfield underwent a risky DNA test while pregnant, but Toobin didn’t provide his sample and stopped talking to her, according to sources. On the day she gave birth, Greenfield e-mailed Toobin, inviting him to meet his son, Rory. A source says Toobin didn’t reply.