Category: Facebook

"Corporate interests will say or do anything to preserve the broken status quo, including lie to families that overdue investments in child care, education, and climate change are somehow not in their interest."

Companies Vowing Climate Action Also Back Lobby Groups Trying to Kill Landmark Climate Bill
"Corporate interests will say or do anything to preserve the broken status quo, including lie to families that overdue investments in child care, education, and climate change are somehow not in their interest."

JULIA CONLEY

October 1, 2021

A new analysis out Friday makes clear the wide gap between corporations' stated commitments to fighting the climate crisis and the lengths they are currently going to in order to stop the passage of the biggest climate action spending package in U.S. history.
 
The research by the progressive advocacy group Accountable.US examined statements and pledges made in recent years by companies including American Airlines, Amazon, Apple, and Google regarding the corporations' plans to end carbon emissions, shift to fleets of electric vehicles, and take other steps to help combat the climate emergency.

"Let's be clear: Walmart, one of the biggest companies in America, says they support the climate initiatives in the Build Back Better Plan. But the company is actively fighting its passage."
—Accountable.US

 
Those stated commitments mean little, Accountable.US said, considering the companies' close ties with lobbying firms that are actively working to kill the Build Back Better Act, the spending package which would invest $3.5 trillion over 10 years to transition towards renewable energy and bolster the wellbeing of working Americans.
 
"Major corporations love to tell us how committed they are to addressing the climate crisis and building a sustainable future, but behind closed doors, they are funding the very industry trade groups that are fighting tooth and nail to stop the biggest climate change bill ever," Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, told The Guardian.
 
Microsoft, for example, said last year it would be carbon negative by 2030, emphasizing that "the scientific consensus is clear" about the human-caused climate emergency and the danger planet-heating carbon emissions pose to humanity.
 
The company also unveiled a plan to establish a $1 billion climate innovation fund "to accelerate the global development of carbon reduction, capture, and removal technologies."
 
The analysis by Accountable.US showed that despite Microsoft's claimed commitment to climate action, some of the company's executives are among the board members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the largest lobbying group in the United States—which has made no secret of its goal of tanking the Build Back Better plan, which progressives hope to pass through the filibuster-proof reconciliation process.
 
The Chamber said in August that it was prepared to "do everything we can to prevent this tax raising, job-killing reconciliation bill from becoming law."
 
On social media, Accountable.US pointed to other examples of large corporations whose stated concerns over the climate emergency are inconsistent with their involvement with powerful lobbying groups.
 
The group responded to a tweet from American Airlines on helping to "accelerate the technologies needed to reach net zero emissions" by pointing out that the aviation company is opposed to the reconciliation bill, which would invest in electric vehicle infrastructure, create millions of good-paying clean energy jobs, and reduce emissions from transportation, among other measures.

If we can make enough noise to break through the lobbyist facade, we can get these bills to the floor in the next few weeks, and we will win

A leading digital rights group on Wednesday kicked off a new campaign aimed at boosting federal legislation that would crack down on Big Tech monopolies.

"This and next week are do-or-die for the most significant antitrust reforms in a generation."

Fight for the Future's (FFF) "Antitrust Summer" campaign is betting that grassroots organizing can help win passage of S. 2992 and S. 2710, respectively the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) and the Open App Markets Act (OAMA).

"Powerful tech companies have gained way too much control over our lives. Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon drown us in ads, algorithmically amplify hate and extremism, copy and kill their competitors, and limit free speech," Fight for the Future said.

"But this isn't our destiny," the group continued. "The internet is capable of so much more. Big Tech monopolists get away with harming us and our democracy simply because they can."

“We can’t allow our free press to be captured by tech monopolies,” warned one advocate.

Press freedom and antitrust advocates on Friday derided both Facebook and corporate media beneficiaries of the tech titan's multimillion dollar spending spree following reporting that the company is rethinking its investments amid increasing regulatory pressures and a shift away from news partnerships.

"For years, Facebook has sucked advertising dollars away from newspapers and news magazines."

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook in recent years has annually paid an average of more than $15 million to The Washington Post, as well as $20 million to The New York Times, and over $10 million to the Journal. The Journal deal is part of a larger $20 million agreement.

"For years, Facebook has sucked advertising dollars away from newspapers and news magazines," Barry Lynn, executive director at the anti-monopoly watchdog group Open Markets, said in a statement.

"At the very moment the U.S. government began to seek solutions to this problem, Facebook cut murky, multimillion-dollars deal with America's most influential newspapers, apparently as part of an effort to halt regulation and continue to siphon off advertising dollars unhindered," he added.

According to "people familiar with the matter" interviewed by the Journal, it is not clear whether Facebook will continue its deals with media corporations as Meta, the social platform's parent company, shifts its investments from news to "products that attract creators" and the metaverse.

The Journal also cites Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's disappointment at "regulatory efforts around the world looking to force platforms like Facebook and Alphabet Inc.'s Google to pay publishers for any news content available on their platforms."

Facebook was so incensed by a 2021 Australian law compelling large online platforms to pay publishers for linking to local news stories that it temporarily imposed a blackout on Australian news outlets, a move condemned by groups including Access Now and Amnesty International.

Lynn said that "it's not entirely surprising, then, to learn Facebook wants to nix these payments, which clearly haven't delivered the protection from regulation that Facebook expected."

He continued:

It is surprising that the public is only now learning the details of Facebook's payoffs to America's biggest newspapers, three years after the fact. Facebook should absolutely pay for the news it shares on its platform. But the American people also need complete transparency about any and all agreements between the publishers who report the news and the tech giants we expect them to cover honestly and critically.

Open Markets Institute calls on news publishers to immediately disclose the amounts and terms of all their deals with Big Tech, including any renewed deals with Facebook and existing deals with Google. We can't allow our free press to be captured by tech monopolies. They already hold far too much power and pose dire threats to our democracy.

Open Markets also called on the Times, Post, and Journal to "work  constructively with Congress to ensure that the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act establishes a foundation for a truly fair marketplace designed to ensure robust advertising support for every newspaper in the United States, not only the few dominant players."

Introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) in February, the proposed legislation "creates a four-year safe harbor from antitrust laws for print, broadcast, or digital news companies to collectively negotiate with online content distributors (e.g., social media companies) regarding the terms on which the news companies' content may be distributed by online content distributors."

Google and Facebook have also come under fire for throttling traffic to progressive and other independent news sites, many of which are fighting to survive amid incessant corporate consolidation.

"This is a classic example of the rich get richer," Jody Brannon, director of the Center for Journalism & Liberty, a program of the Open Markets Institute, said in a statement. "Facebook collects most digital ad dollars from the reporting done by local journalists, so why can't smaller newsrooms reap even fractions of those millions to better cover their communities?"

The Journal report comes as the digital rights group Fight For the Future kicks off an "Antitrust Summer" campaign aimed at boosting federal legislation to crack down on Big Tech monopolies.

Changing their name doesn't change reality: Facebook is destroying our democracy and is the world's leading peddler of disinformation and hate.

Tech ethicists and branding professionals on Thursday said consumers should not be hoodwinked by Facebook's name change, which numerous observers compared to earlier efforts by tobacco and fossil fuel companies to distract attention from their societal harms.

"Don't be fooled. Nothing changes here. This is just a publicity stunt hatched by Facebook's PR department to deflect attention as Zuckerberg squirms."

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the Meta rechristening during Facebook Connect, the company's annual virtual and augmented reality conference, explaining that "we are a company that builds technology to connect people and the metaverse is the next frontier, just like social networking was when we got started."

"Some of you might be wondering why we're doing this right now," he added. "The answer is that I believe that we're put on this Earth to create. I believe that technology can make our lives better."

Many critics found Zuckerberg's explanation unconvincing at best and, at worst, disingenuous.

"Changing their name doesn't change reality: Facebook is destroying our democracy and is the world's leading peddler of disinformation and hate," the watchdog group Real Facebook Oversight Board said in a statement. "Their meaningless name change should not distract from the investigation, regulation, and real, independent oversight needed to hold Facebook accountable."

Vahid Razavi, founder of the advocacy group Ethics in Tech, told Common Dreams: "Don't be fooled. Nothing changes here. This is just a publicity stunt hatched by Facebook's PR department to deflect attention as Zuckerberg squirms" over the negative press from recent whistleblower revelations.

Former Facebook employees-turned whistleblowers say the company's profit-seeking algorithms—and its executives who know their insidious impacts—are responsible for the mass dissemination of harmful content, including hate speech and political, climate, and Covid-19 misinformation.

Profits Before People: The Facebook Papers Expose Tech Giant Greed

Jon Queally

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia and author of the book Antisocial Media, told Time that "the Facebook of today has never been the end game for Zuckerberg."

"He's always wanted his company to be the operating system of our lives that can socially engineer how we live and what we know," Vaidhyanathan continued, adding that the new name is "not going to change his vision for his company—he's never let anybody on the outside change his mind."

Zuckerberg, he said, "wants to take the dynamic of algorithmic guidance out of our phones and off of our computers and build that system into our lives and our consciousness, so our eyeglasses become our screens, and our hands become the mouse."

Some observers compared Facebook's attempt to rebrand itself to what they called similar efforts by Big Tobacco and fossil fuel corporations.

"It didn't do anything," Laurel Sutton, co-founder of the branding agency Catchword, told Time. "People still knew that Altria was Philip Morris and they didn't rehabilitate their reputation simply because they changed the name."

"There's no name that's going to rehabilitate the behavior that they've displayed so far," Sutton said of the social media giant. "Maybe put that time and energy into rehabilitating their morals and ethics and business decisions rather than just trying to slap a new name on something."