From the New York Times:
Black Lawmakers Hold a Particular Grievance With Facebook: Racial ExploitationOf course, this is totally different from the New York Times’s biggest individual stockholder being Carlos Slim, who can afford to bail out the NYT because he and the President of Mexico were best buds in 1990 when President Salinas sold him Mexico’s government phone monopoly for very little other than a promise to donate $25 million to the ruling party’s 1994 campaign.By YAMICHE ALCINDOR OCT. 14, 2017
WASHINGTON — For more than an hour, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s high-profile chief operating officer, sheepishly pledged to “do better” — over and over — as stern-faced members of the Congressional Black Caucus grilled her on Thursday about Russian ads aimed at exploiting racial divisions during last year’s election.
For black lawmakers, it was a chance to vent — at the outrage they felt toward Russian intelligence and its efforts to foment racial unrest in the country; at the frustration they felt toward three separate congressional investigations into Russian interference that have plodded on and yielded little; and at Facebook itself, which has been long on promises and short on action.…
But the grievance of black lawmakers is a particular one: As black activists tried last year to focus attention on police brutality, unfair treatment before the law, inequality and white supremacy, social media giants like Facebook were being commandeered by Russian intelligence agents to turn white voters against them. …And nearly a year after the election, black lawmakers say, little is being done to reverse the damage. Russia studied and exploited the “fault lines of racial tension,” said Representative Yvette D. Clarke, Democrat of New York, and multiple investigations into Russia’s actions and the Trump’s campaign possible involvement have thus far offered no safeguards to stop Moscow’s efforts….
But her answers fueled the anger of some black lawmakers who said for years that they have been pushing Facebook to add a black person to its all-white board of directors and to diversify its staff. Several members have also written letters to Facebook and other companies demanding answers related to the presidential election.Facebook has a stock market capitalization of $497,000,000,000 and how big a taste of that half-trillion dollars have they ever cut the Congressional Black Congressional Caucus in for? Is it too much to ask for just a taste of that half-tril?On Thursday, the company’s chief diversity officer, Maxine Williams, said in the meeting that Facebook had recently hired a record number of minority employees, and Ms. Sandberg promised that the company planned to add a black person to its board.