No wonder Zuckerberg doesn't want Facebook to deal with dishonest political ads or to follow Twitter's lead by banning them altogether. His employees may not be directly involved in making them, but certainly have been helpful in their deployment.
James Barnes, a Facebook employee who was dispatched to work closely with the campaign, told me Parscale’s political inexperience made him open to experimenting with the platform’s new tools.
Data mining, stealth text campaigns, media hit jobs, and an all out war on reality...
But in the Trump era, an important shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today’s most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether. “Journalistic integrity is dead,” Boyle declared in a 2017 speech at the Heritage Foundation. “There is no such thing anymore. So everything is about weaponization of information.”
It’s a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better. “A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times last year. “There are casualties in war.”
It's all out there, humming along. I am about halfway through the article and need to take a break before finishing it, but my one takeaway from this so far is that the Democratic party candidates, presidential in particular, need to steel themselves to deal with this head on.
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