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Facebook Suffers Total Outage As Whistleblower is Revealed
Yesterday, Facebook and its associated social media sites including Instagram and WhatsApp went down for about six hours. The outage came at a time when news was circulating about a whistleblower who worked for Facebook revealing that the company put profits over public good by allowing misinformation, hate, and violence to spread on its platform. The whistleblower, 37-year-old Frances Haugen, released tens of thousands of pages of internal documents showing that Facebook knew about the company benefiting from these negative effects on society, but covered the whole thing up. Haugen told CBS’s “60 Minutes,” “the thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook, and Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.” Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp not working yesterday is supposedly unrelated to the bombshell report, but the timing is leaving many suspicious. Facebook’s Vice President of Infrastructure Santosh Janardhan said the outage was due to “configuration changes on the backbone routers.” But skeptics believe the sites were brought down specifically to prevent information about the leaked documents from spreading on its platform. If there is a connection it remains unproven, but perhaps there will be more to learn about these two stories and a possible link between them in the coming days.
Trump Interviewed by Real Interviewer, Goes Terribly
Donald Trump did an actual interview yesterday — not on Newsmax or OAN, but this time with Adam Shapiro from Yahoo Finance. Shapiro, unlike the interviewers Trump is used to dealing with, actually made a real attempt to get Trump to answer the questions that he asked and insisted on getting back to the topic at hand when the ex-president would wander off into other topics. He asked what it would take for Trump to defeat Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in a possible 2024 Republican primary matchup. Trump responded by saying, “I think most people would drop out. I think he would drop out. And if I faced him, I’d beat him like I would beat everyone else.” When Trump tried arguing the economy was spectacular under his administration, Shapiro pushed back by claiming Barack Obama’s job numbers were better: “the jobs created during your administration . . . the Bureau of Labor Statistics points out it was something like 6.4 million jobs and during the Obama administration it was 7 million jobs.” Trump replied by arguing that Obama’s economy “wasn’t terrible when I took over, but it wasn’t great. It was stagnant and slow.” It was a breath of fresh air for an interviewer to actually challenge the ex-POTUS on his talking points and we’ll have to see if Trump decides to open himself up to more of these as the 2022 and 2024 races draw nearer.
From yesterday’s show:
BREAKING: COVID "Pill" Cuts Risk of Death & Hospitalization 50%
The pharmaceutical company Merck has announced that a pill it has manufactured to fight COVID-19 has reduced hospitalizations and deaths by half. The drug company is trying to get its medication approved by US regulators and a decision from the Food and Drug Administration could come down over the next few weeks. The drug known as molnupiravir is supposed to be taken within five days of COVID symptoms to have full effect and comes with a lot of advantages, since it can be taken at home without the need for an IV or injection. Some anti-vaxxers are jumping on this news saying they knew a treatment would eventually come along and so there was no need for them to get vaccinated. Instead, this should be looked at as an additional layer of treatment on top of vaccination. Certainly the pill can be used to help the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike, but it’s by no means a replacement to the vaccine. Other conspiratorial folks will have the same distrust for molnupiravir as they do for the vaccines but at least these people could become convinced to take the drug if they become infected and are suffering from symptoms. At the very least, we now have yet another tool at our disposal for fighting COVID-19 and hopefully it can help us soon bring about an end to this now nineteen-month pandemic.
From yesterday’s show:
Rudy Giuliani Admits His "Evidence" Came from Social Media
Former New York City Mayor and ex-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani says that he got much of the information he used to “prosecute” allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election from social media. Giuliani admitted as part of a deposition on August 14th that he did not fact-check or interview the sources of the information he later propagated in court rooms and television interviews. The under-oath comments were made in connection to the defamation lawsuit brought forward against the former NYC mayor by Dominion Voting Systems. Giuliani said that he couldn’t remember whether he got the “evidence” about Dominion and its employee he accused, Eric Coomer, from Facebook or from another social media site. Rudy said in the deposition, “it’s not my job in a fast-moving case to go out and investigate every piece of evidence that’s given to me.” Giuliani claimed that he would have had to be a ‘terrible lawyer” to check his sources, saying “gee, let’s go find out if it’s untrue. I didn’t have the time to do that.” For all the things Rudy has lied about over the years, he actually does appear to be telling the truth here. It would be completely on brand for Giuliani to have found a few posts on social media about the election, not vetted them, and then presented them to the media and courts as actual evidence at the service of Donald Trump. While Rudy thought that would do wonders for his finances and career, it turned out to have done the complete opposite.
More on the show:
--James Cromwell, actor and activist, joins David to discuss many different things
--Facebook's Vice President for Trust and Security is interviewed on NPR by Ari Shapiro and appears completely shaken, unable to answer basic questions with any level of coherence
--A guide to the recently released Pandora Papers
--California will require all students age 12-17, even in private and charter schools, to be vaccinated against COVID-19
--A bizarre clip from Fox News shows host Martha MacCallum worried that children might grow up believing school lunch is free, which apparently would be terrible (in her opinion)
--Voicemail caller is ashamed to admit that she voted for Kyrsten Sinema in the Arizona Senate election
--On the Bonus Show: SCOTUS pivots to abortion, guns, and death penalty, Muhammad cartoonist killed in traffic collision, AOC pounces on Facebook about outage, much more...
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