Facebook, Google Pour Big Money into Lobbying Congress While Blacklisting Conservatives
By Sean Moran
Facebook and Google increasingly influence Congress as the social media giants censor conservative and alternative voices, dominate the Internet, and violate Americans’ privacy.
Facebook announced on Thursday that they have banned several conservative personalities such as Infowars host Alex Jones, Infowars contributor and YouTube personality Paul Joseph Watson, journalist and activist Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulus. The social media giant also banned Louis Farrakhan from its platforms.
Facebook said that they banned these personalities because they were “dangerous.”
Amid calls for greater regulation of social media companies’ potential anticompetitive behavior, censorship of conservative and alternative voices, and privacy violations, Facebook and Google have remained at the top of Open Secret’s database of top spenders lobbying Congress.
So far in 2019, Facebook spent $3,400,000 and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, $3,530,00 in lobbying Congress. Alphabet also ranked as the eighth total highest spender in lobbying in 2018, spending $21,740,000, while Facebook spent $12,620,000.
Facebook’s influence has continued to rise over the years. In the early years of President Barack Obama, Facebook spent below one million dollars in 2008 and 2009. From 2011 to 2018, Facebook’s lobbying spending skyrocketed and reached historic highs in 2018, when they spent $12.6 million.
In 2019, Facebook lobbied heavily on H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, a Democrat bill which would restore the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission (FCC) net neutrality regulations, which arose as the result of Google’s heavy lobbying of the Obama administration. In 2019, Google also lobbied on the Save the Internet Act.
In 2018, one of Facebook’s bills on which they lobbied Congress was H.R. 2520, the Browser Act, sponsored by then Rep. and now Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), which would require social media companies such as Facebook and Google to obtain explicit permission from users for collecting their private data. The Browser Act would also stipulate that these social media companies cannot deny services to users who do not opt-in to these companies’ collection of their private data. In 2017, the Browser Act was the most important issue on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Blackburn said that her legislation would establish one set of rules that would balance the relationship between ISPs and Facebook and Google. The legislation would also prevent the social media giants from unfairly profiting off of Americans’ private data without their explicit consent.
“We need one set of rules for the entire internet ecosystem with the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] as the cop on the beat,” said Senator Blackburn. “The FTC has the flexibility to keep up with changes in technology and its principal mission is consumer protection. The BROWSER Act will enable consumers to make more educated decisions regarding the nature of their relationship with tech companies.”
In contrast, Alphabet’s most prominent issues in Congress in 2019 and 2018 related to labor and antitrust, as well as telecommunications and technology.
Facebook and Google’s dominance on the Internet has become increasingly apparent as Google has approximately 90 percent of web search traffic, whereas in digital advertising, Google and Facebook amount to nearly two-thirds of American digital ad spending, with Amazon at a “distant third” at under nine percent.
In 2018, Google lobbied Congress fourteen separate times on multiple pieces of legislation that would have increased liability for companies that enabled sex trafficking.
Facebook and Google’s influence in Congress extends to its trade group, the Internet Association. In the fourth quarter of 2018, the Internet Association spent $840,000. In total, the social media giants spent $2.6 million in 2018 for lobbying. In 2019, the association has spent $690,000 so far. Over the last two years, the Internet Association has focused on the Save the Internet Act as well as on legislation that would increase edge providers’ liability for hosting content that enables sex trafficking.
Facebook and Google influence political elections as well. During the 2018 election cycle, Alphabet donated:
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$223,269 to former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s (D-TX) Senate campaign to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a prominent critic of Silicon Valley censorship.
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$149,741 to Rep. Jacky Rosen’s Senate campaign (D-NV) to unseat Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV).
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$135,625 to Rep. Josh Harder’s congressional campaign.
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$124,508 to former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp’s unsuccessful re-election campaign.
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$97, 364 to former Sen. Claire McCaskill’s failed re-election campaign.
During the 2018 midterm elections, Facebook donated:
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$75,005 to O’Rourke’s Senate campaign.
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$37,954 to Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) 2017 special Senate election against former Alabama judge Roy Moore.
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$34,534 to Heitkamp’s Senate election.
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$31,326 to McCaskill’s Senate campaign.
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$29,387 to Rosen’s successful campaign to unseat Heller.
As Facebook and Google and other social media giants continue to increasingly censor and blacklist conservative and alternative voices, more and more conservative voices have called for addressing the social media giants’ dominance of the Internet. Facebook and Google’s influence in Congress also relates to political confrontations; during a hearing in December 2018, the then-ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee delivered a sharp rebuke of Republican accusations of Google’s political bias affecting its search engines, even though Google was his top donor.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in April, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said he envisions three potential remedies for big tech’s violation of free speech and dominance on the Internet.
Cruz’s three solutions include:
- Amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
- Antitrust measures to address big tech’s dominant status on the Internet.
- Addressing potential cases of fraud and deception.
“No one wants to see the federal government regulating what is allowed to be said, but there are at least three potential remedies that can be considered by Congress or the administration or both,” Cruz said.
Barr Launches Wide-Ranging Probe Into 2016 FBI Spying
By Tyler Durden
Attorney General William Barr told the Senate Judiciary Panel this week that he has assembled a team at the Justice Department to probe whether the spying conducted by the FBI against the Trump campaign in 2016 was improper, reports Bloomberg.
Barr suggested that he would focus on former senior leaders at the FBI and Justice Department.
“To the extent there was overreach, what we have to be concerned about is a few people at the top getting it into their heads that they know better than the American people,” said Barr.
Barr will also review whether the infamous Steele dossier – a collection of salacious and unverified claims against Donald Trump, assembled by a former British spy and paid for by the Clinton campaign – was fabricated by the Russian government to trick the FBI and other US agencies. (Will Barr investigate whether Steele made the whole thing up for his client, Fusion GPS?)
“We now know that he was being falsely accused,” Barr said of Trump. “We have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon.”
Mueller’s report didn’t say there were false accusations against Trump. It said the evidence of cooperation between the campaign and Russia “was not sufficient to support criminal charges.” Investigators were unable to get a complete picture of the activities of some relevant people, the special counsel found.
Although Barr’s review has only begun, it’s helping to fuel a narrative long embraced by Trump and some of his Republican supporters: that the Russia investigation was politically motivated and concocted from false allegations in order to spy on Trump’s campaign and ultimately undermine his presidency. –Bloomberg
As Bloomberg notes, Barr’s review could receive a boost by a Thursday New York Times article acknowledging that the FBI sent a ‘honeypot’ spy to London in 2016 to pose as a research assistant and gather intelligence from Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos over possible Trump campaign links to Russia.
The Trump re-election campaign immediately seized on the Times report as evidence that improper spying did occur. “As President Trump has said, it is high time to investigate the investigators,” said Trump campaign manager, Brad Parscale in a statement.
During Barr’s Wednesday testimony, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) told Barr “It appears to me that the Obama administration, Justice Department and FBI decided to place their bets on Hillary Clinton and focus their efforts” when it came to investigating the Trump campaign.
Depending on what Barr finds, his review of the Russia probe could give Trump ammunition to defend himself in continuing congressional inquiries — and in a potential impeachment for obstructing justice. Barr told senators that Trump’s actions can’t be seen as obstruction if he was exercising his constitutional authority as president to put an end to an illegitimate investigation.
Barr’s efforts follow two years of work by a group of House Republicans who have been conducting dozens of interviews regarding the FBI’s and Justice Department’s conduct in the early stages of investigation of Trump and his campaign. –Bloomberg
On Thursday, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) issued a criminal referral for Nellie Ohr – a former Fusion GPS contractor who passed anti-Trump research to her husband, then the #4 official at the DOJ.
On Thursday, Meadows said that Barr’s “willingness to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation is the first step in putting the questionable practices of the past behind us,” and that the AG’s “tenacity is sure to be rewarded.”
The FBI opened its counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign after a self-professed member of the Clinton Foundation, Joseph Mifsud, fed Papadopoulos the rumor that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton. That rumor would be coaxed out of the former Trump aide by another Clinton-connected individual – Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who would notify authorities of Papadopoulos’ admission, officially launching the investigation.
Barr says he wants to get to the bottom of it.
His review will examine the above chain of events that set the investigation into motion, and whether any US agencies were engaged in spying on or investigating the Trump campaign before the probe was officially launched.
Barr said he’s working with FBI Director Christopher Wray “to reconstruct exactly what went down.” He said he has “people in the department helping me review the activities over the summer of 2016.”
Notably, Barr said his aides will be “working very closely” with the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz.
Horowitz is conducting his own investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation and whether there were abuses when the FBI obtained a secret warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in October 2016 to spy on another foreign policy adviser to the campaign, Carter Page. –Bloomberg
Barr will also investigate when the DOJ and FBI knew that the Democratic Party and Clinton was Steele.
More subterfuge, or is this really happening?
NYT Chief WH Correspondent: Here’s The Real Reason Obama Didn’t Address Russian Meddling In 2016
“…if I speak out more, he’ll just say it’s rigged…”
In his recently updated and expanded book on former President Obama, “Obama: The Call Of History,” The New York Times’ Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker addresses several hot-button topics, including why Obama failed to adequately address Russian meddling ahead of the 2016 election and his response to “buffoonish showman” Donald Trump shocking the world by defeating Hillary Clinton, a response that involved “multiple emotional stages.”
In one of the sections of the book highlighted by The Daily Mail Friday, Baker peels back the curtain on why Obama was so weak in his response to Russian meddling ahead of the election in 2016 — something for which Trump has hammered Obama amid all the Robert Mueller-debunked “collusion” allegations.
“Anything the Russians did concerning the 2016 Election was done while Obama was President. He was told about it and did nothing! Most importantly, the vote was not affected,” Trump tweeted last month.
The reason Obama didn’t act more decisively and rebuke Russia more directly, says Baker is that he feared that it might “escalate” the Russian interference campaign. This cautious approach, Baker suggests, flows out of Obama’s “don’t do stupid sh**” foreign policy philosophy, an approach for which Obama has been criticized in the past.
But fearing the escalation of the campaign wasn’t the only reason Obama didn’t act more forcefully, says Baker: Obama reportedly once admitted that “if I speak out more, he’ll just say it’s rigged.”
According to Baker, in one meeting Obama — who was convinced like most of the political establishment that Clinton was going to win — said confidently that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “backed the wrong horse” by supposedly helping Trump’s campaign.
As the Daily Mail notes, it was only after the election, which Trump won in stunning fashion, that Obama finally took action against the Russians as punishment for the meddling his administration had known about for months. Obama’s decision to expel a bunch of Russian diplomats conveniently fed into the “collusion” narrative that had already gotten rolling and which the election’s loser, Clinton, helped promote.
The Daily Mail also draws attention to another juicy passage in the book which reveals new details about Obama’s response to Trump’s upset victory over the woman who was supposed to protect Obama’s legacy.
Accoring to Baker, Obama watched the Marvel film “Dr. Strange” on election night with Michelle and Valerie Jarrett. At one point, Baker writes, Obama received an update on his phone and said, “Huh. Results in Florida are looking kind of strange.”
While Michelle went to sleep early, Obama stayed up and witnessed Trump’s devastating defeat of Clinton, which Baker suggests Obama found unthinkable because he thought there was “no way Americans would turn on him.”
According to Baker, Obama phoned Clinton at 1 a.m. and advised her to concede quickly, advice she didn’t take. In response, she supposedly said, “I’m sorry for letting you down.”
Obama and his team, Baker says, did in fact feel that Clinton had let them down. “To Obama and his team … the real blame lay squarely with Clinton. She was the one who could not translate his strong record and healthy economy into a winning message.”
Related: BOMBSHELL: Ukraine Embassy Says DNC Operative Reached Out For Dirt On Trump In 2016, Report Says
Washington Post Scrubs Headline Calling Louis Farrakhan ‘Far-Right’
By Justin Caruso
UPDATE 5:23 PM EST: The Washington Post has added a correction to the post in question — after this article was published. The paper held off on a correction on its site for nearly two hours after acknowledging the error on Twitter. The headline on Breitbart’s story has been updated to reflect this change.
The Washington Post described Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “far-right” Thursday, then scrubbed the error from the article’s headline and text without acknowledging the edit.
The far-left newspaper’s coverage of Facebook’s latest move to ban controversial and anti-establishment figures linked Farrakhan with conservative activists, originally posting the headline “Facebook bans far-right leaders including Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos for being ‘dangerous.’”
The false label was also included in the first line of author Elizabeth Dwoskin’s article.
The publication’s official Twitter account posted the same headline with this false information. In a followup tweet, the Post said, “We have deleted this tweet because it incorrectly included Louis Farrakhan, who has espoused anti-Semitic views, in a list of far-right leaders. Facebook banned extremist figures including Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos for being ‘dangerous.’”
However, the paper has not acknowledged any error on the article page itself — or told readers that its editors altered the headline, lead paragraph, and URL after publication.
Despite the stealth correction, the article has received the endorsement of NewsGuard, a Microsoft partner that marks news sources as reliable or not in a web browser extension — even on a cached version of the article with the false “far-right” label still included in the URL.
“This website adheres to all nine of NewsGuard’s standards of credibility and transparency,” a pop-up reads when users mouse over the green checkmark next to the Post‘s name. Among those criteria: “Regularly corrects or clarifies errors.”
NewsGuard similarly defended a stealth edit from corporate media in February, saying that the New York Times did not run afoul of its policy by altering a headline without acknowledging the update.
Another article published in The Atlantic about the Facebook bans used the headline “Instagram and Facebook Ban Far-Right Extremists,” with a photo of Farrakhan in the featured image. As of this writing, it has not been corrected.
Farrakhan, who has praised Adolf Hitler and promotes an anti-Semitic and black nationalist worldview, has a number of well-documented relationships with Democratic lawmakers.
Former president Barack Obama posed for a photo with Farrakhan, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) have long associatedwith the hateful preacher.
Last October, Farrakhan said during an address that he was not an “antisemite” but an “anti-Termite.”
“So when they talk about Farrakhan, call me a hater, you know they do, call me an antisemite–stop it! I’m anti-termite! I don’t know nothing about hating somebody because of their religious preference,” he said
White House rips Mueller report in newly obtained DOJ letter
Published on May 2, 2019
NYT Confirms Hunter Biden Was Paid by Ukrainians While Father Was VP
By Rebecca Mansour
Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was paid for his work as a board member a Ukrainian oligarch-owned energy company while his father was vice president, the New York Times confirms.
According to the Times, Hunter Biden was paid “as much as $50,000 per month in some months” as a board member of Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm owned by a member of the Ukrainian oligarchy.
Vice President Biden was heavily involved in mediating U.S. policy towards the Ukraine. When a Ukrainian prosecutor launched a corruption investigation into the energy company Hunter Biden was board member of, Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to the country if the Ukrainian government did not fire the prosecutor. As John Solomon of The Hill reported, Biden’s threat would have thrown the former Soviet republic into insolvency at a time when Ukraine was fending off threats from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
In a speech last year before the Council on Foreign Relations, the former vice president bragged about his successful use of these strong-arm tactics to get the prosecutor fired, saying that he told the Ukrainians, “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.” Biden then boasted, “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”
Kenneth Vogel and Iuliia Mendel report at the Times:
It was a foreign policy role Joseph R. Biden Jr. enthusiastically embraced during his vice presidency: browbeating Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt government to clean up its act. And one of his most memorable performances came on a trip to Kiev in March 2016, when he threatened to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if Ukraine’s leaders did not dismiss the country’s top prosecutor, who had been accused of turning a blind eye to corruption in his own office and among the political elite.
The pressure campaign worked. The prosecutor general, long a target of criticism from other Western nations and international lenders, was soon voted out by the Ukrainian Parliament.
Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s younger son, who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.
Hunter Biden was a Yale-educated lawyer who had served on the boards of Amtrak and a number of nonprofit organizations and think tanks, but lacked any experience in Ukraine and just months earlier had been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine. He would be paid as much as $50,000 per month in some months for his work for the company, Burisma Holdings.
The current Ukrainian general prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, has reopened the corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, The Hill reports.
Hunter Biden’s involvement with the Ukrainian energy firm and his sweetheart deals with China’s communist regime while his father was vice president were exposed in Peter Schweizer’s bestselling book Secret Empires.
In an interview last month on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight, Schweizer explained, “Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point-person on policy towards Ukraine. He steered $1.8 billion in aid to that government and while he was doing so, his son got a sweetheart deal with this energy company that — we’ve been able to trace over just a 14-month period — paid $3.1 million into an account where Hunter Biden was getting paid.”
“Suffice to say, Hunter Biden has no background in Ukraine,” Schweizer noted. “He has no background in energy policy. There’s really no legitimate explanation as to why he got this deal with this energy company, other than the fact his father was responsible for doling out money in Ukraine itself.”
“It’s a huge problem,” Schweizer added. “And it goes to this question of corruption and potential payoffs and bribes that these foreign entities were making to the Bidens in exchange for hopefully getting favorable treatment.”
AG Barr: “I Can’t Fathom” Why Obama Admin Did Not Tell Trump Campaign About FBI Investigation
Published on May 1, 2019
Attorney General William Barr told Sen. John Cornyn that “I can’t fathom” why the Obama administration did not tell the Trump campaign about the FBI investigation into Russian interference in 2016 during his hearing on the Mueller Report before the Senate Judiciary Committee on 5/1/19. Be sure to like, subscribe, and comment below to share your thoughts on the video.
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