Comments by "Jason Dashney" (@jasondashney) on "Mark Zuckerberg Answers to Facebook's Moderation of Controversial Content" video.

  1. I didn’t want Joe to hammer on the guy but he could’ve done more, like asking him how the hell he thinks that an unbiassed fact checking group can be headed up by someone who was Deputy Prime Minister. That’s literally as politically partisan as it gets.
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  2. Excuse me, this is the Internet. There is no place for pragmatic rationality here. I expect inflammatory comments, dammit! Seriously though, the most telling thing for me in this whole interview is when he said that he purposely downplays political controversy. I think he has so many people who are homogenously ideologically driven around him that he truly isn’t aware of the real world damage he’s doing. This interview made me believe he is more naïve than evil. When it was over he seems so relieved as in “holy shit, that went as well as my wildest expectations and I can walk away not feeling like I said something that is going to open up a can of worms for me”. In the end I think you are bang on. He’s not a bad guy, he just doesn’t understand how dangerous what he’s doing is. I really wish Joel would’ve pressed him on the independent fact checkers because I had excerpts from the current Alberta healthcare act and they were labelled as partly false information. Literal extracts, and my headline was something that was directly in there. Joe should’ve pressed him on these people and especially the fact that Mark said that the head of it was a former deputy Prime Minister. He was the head of a major political party in a G7 nation. That’s literally is politically partisan as it gets. And there have been other people Highup in that organization that have photos with their arm around Hillary Clinton. These are not objective people. That’s the only thing I wish Joe would’ve asked for some clarification on. As I am writing this, I’m taking back a bit of what I say about Mark because there’s no way you can appoint people like that and still believe that they are objective. Perhaps he has drunk his own Kool-Aid. I don’t know. He seems like a nice normal guy but his actions strongly indicate the opposite. They also banned to the political will of authoritarian regimes and they do stuff that the average person really wouldn’t like, like what they do with our information. I guess he’s just a master in justifying these things to himself. I think he believes that the ends justify the means and that he’s doing it in the name of good. I don’t believe he has evil in his heart, but he has a ton of naivety that really really hurts people.
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  3. The whole FBI thing was so gross. Mark says he was warned there would be “Russian disinformation“ but then doesn’t admit a big mea culpa when something does emerge and it happens to go against the sitting president who was attacking the FBI. Nothing else came out and I can’t believe Mark doesn’t see how he was used as a political tool. The former press secretary directly said that the federal government will “suggest“ things for Facebook to look into. Things they don’t like. That’s not independent by any stretch of the imagination. Not by any definition. And the fact checking organization was run by somebody who was the head of a major party in a G7 nation. I didn’t have to Google the guy to figure out he wouldn’t of been a conservative. I would’ve bet my entire bank account on what theoretically should’ve been a 50% chance bet.
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