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| Mark Zuckerberg |
Can Facebook gain redemption for the 2016 sin of being Russia’s go-to site in its effort to manipulate the US presidential election?
CEO Mark Zuckerberg is giving it a shot. He’s worried about the potential for civil unrest in US in the event that it takes days or weeks for mailed-in ballots to be counted and certified.
Democrats fear a Doomsday scenario in which Donald Trump declares victory on Election Night before the mailed ballots are counted.
At that point, it could appear that the president won re-election in a landslide based on the in-person vote. That’s because 66 percent of Republicans plan to vote at their polling place, while 47 percent of Democrats plan to mail it in, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Zuckerberg outlined Facebook’s plan to counter the chaos via a Sept. 3 blog.
“It's important that we prepare for this possibility in advance and understand that there could be a period of intense claims and counter-claims as the final results are counted. This could be a very heated period, so we're preparing the following policies to help in the days and weeks after voting ends.”
He said Facebook will assure users there is nothing illegitimate about not having a result on election night.
The site will attach a label to educate people that official results do not just come from any campaign that tries to declare victory.
He also warns Team Trump that Facebook will label any content that seeks to delegitimize the outcome of the election or make claims that mail-in votes are fraudulent.
Good luck, Mark. America’s democracy is counting on you.
WPP CEO Mark Read has updated the “Never trust anyone over 30” hippie slogan of the 1960s for today’s digital age.
During an Aug. 27 call with analysts, he said: “We have a very broad range of skills and if you look at our people—the average age of someone who works at WPP is less than 30—they don’t hark back to the 1980s, luckily.”
Actually, Read was unlucky. His unfortunate remark triggered outrage and charges of ageism at WPP.
He apologized on Aug. 30 via Twitter:
“I was recently asked if our teams have the right balance of skills between TV and digital. I believe they do but was wrong to use age to try to make a point. People over 40 can do great digital marketing just as people under 30 can make great TV ads.”
What about people over 50? Read is 53.
A majority (55 percent) of Americans say relations between Black and white people are either very or somewhat bad, according to a Gallup poll.
That’s up from 47 percent when president Trump took office and 28 percent when Barack Obama became president.
Positive ratings of racial relations dropped during the past 18 months among whites (down eight points to 46 percent) and Blacks (down four points to 36 percent).
Gallup conducted the poll from June 8 to July 24, which was after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and before the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha.
There is a silver lining in the poll. Nearly six-in-ten (59 percent) believe there are better days ahead for Black and white relations.
The Council for Biotechnology Information, a PR front group formed by agrichemical companies to allay people’s concerns about genetically modified crops, has quietly disbanded, according to the US Right to Know, non-profit investigative site.
Backed by DuPont, Bayer, BASF, Syngenta and Dow AgroSciences, the group dissolved at the end of 2019 and transferred its assets to CropLife International in Belgium.
CBI spent $28M in PR from 2014-2019 with half of it going to Ketchum for running GMO Answers, according to USRTK. GMO Answers presented content from “independent experts,” many of which had ties to the pesticide industry.
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