Hillary Clinton today warned of the danger from "fake news" and the outright rejection of facts that are deemed by some as inconvenient.
Appearing at the Television Critics Assn. on Jan. 17, the former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State said: "You can choose not to vaccinate your children but there are facts. You can choose not to believe in climate change, but there are facts. And somehow we’ve got to shoulder that responsibility not only at a political leadership level but literally at the citizen, activist, concerned human being level.”
She said it's hard to maintain American democracy if citizens can't agree on basic facts.
Taking a swipe at president Trump, she recalled a time when the Washington political scene wasn't in full 24/7 pantsuits on fire mode. “It wasn’t so long ago that we actually had a President that we didn’t have to worry every morning when we woke up about what was going to happen that day, or what crazy tweet would threaten war or some other awful outcome,” she said.
Clinton spoke at the Hollywood group's winter press to plug "Hillary," a four-part documentary on Hulu about her political career.
Joe Biden isn't a fan of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his social platform. He has a pretty good idea about how to curtail its clout.
The former VP told the New York Times editorial board that he wants to trash Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That measure says online platforms aren't responsible for what runs on their sites.
That's sacrilegious to Zuckerberg and his allies, who maintain that junking Section 230 would destroy free expression on the Internet.
Biden would probably call that "malarkey" and demand that Facebook own up to what gets posted on the site. After all, Facebook is more than just a little Internet outfit.
Biden told the Times Facebook "is propagating falsehoods they know to be false, and we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy." He wants Facebook to suffer the same civic penalties that the New York Times would, if it decided to run stories that it knew were false.
He did credit Zuckerberg for taking down a 30-second ad in October from an independent political action committee that accused Biden of blackmailing Ukrainian officials.
His campaign had sent a letter to Facebook saying the ad contained "transparently false allegations, prominently debunked by every major media outlet in the country over recent weeks" and asked that it be taken down.
Team Biden viewed its demand as "a most basic test" for Facebook.
Zuckerberg passed that one. Let's see how he does on the next exam.
While finding the right solution to a problem is still important, the work that differentiates effective communications leaders is problem-finding—identifying the real risk before it becomes visible, reputational or irreversible.
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