Diamond and Silk’s Facebook censorship claim is a hoax

By JUDD LEGUM via think progress

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg came to Washington and testified, for the first time, in front of two Congressional committees. It provided a unique opportunity for senators and House members to ask the person controlling the world’s largest social network about critical issues involving foreign interference in democratic functions, data privacy, and transparency.

Instead, many of the Republicans focused on Diamond and Silk.

Diamond and Silk are the stage names of two African-American women, Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, who support Trump. They appeared at Trump rallies, are frequent guest on Fox News, and have a large presence on social media, including Facebook.

Beginning in September, Diamond and Silk began claiming that there was “bias censorship and discrimination against [the] D&S brand page.” Their claim was that their page was being discriminated against because of their political views and, as a result, they were reaching fewer people.

ThinkProgress has examined Facebook data about their page and its performance, and the numbers clearly show this claim is totally without merit.

Still, Republicans in Congress latched onto their claim of censorship and focused a significant amount of time questioning Zuckerberg about it.

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Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), claimed that Facebook had “blocked Trump supporters Diamond and Silk’s page, with 1.2 million Facebook followers.” Cruz told Zuckerberg that Diamond and Silk’s experience was proof that Facebook had engaged “in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship.”

“Why is Facebook censoring conservative bloggers such as Diamond and Silk?” Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) asked the next day. “Diamond and Silk is not terrorism,” Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), scolded.

Some of the controversy stemmed from a communication that Diamond and Silk received from Facebook that described their content as “unsafe.” Facebook said the message was sent in error and did not reflect their policies.

But what about the underlying claim that Diamond and Silk are being censored by Facebook because of their political views? It’s not even remotely true.

Data from Crowdtangle, a social media analytics platform owned by Facebook, show that total interactions on Diamond and Silk’s Facebook page were steady. The “total interactions” metric covers the total number of reactions, comments, and shares of content posted to the page. Diamond and Silk’s Facebook page actually received more total interactions in March 2018 (1,088,000), when they were supposedly being censored, than in March 2017 (1,060,000). Diamond and Silk received more interactions in January 2018 (1,328,000), when they began complaining about censorship, than in any month the previous year.

CROWDTANGLE DATA

Things get even more stark when you compare Diamond and Silk’s total interactions to liberal-leaning pages that also frequently post video content. From March 2017 to March 2018, the total interactions on the Rachel Maddow Show page, went from 3.3 million to 1.6 million. Rachel Maddow hosts the most widely watched cable news show in America, and her page has 2.6 million fans to Diamond and Silk’s 1.2 million. Over the same time period, on the Facebook page of The Young Turks, perhaps the most popular independent provider of liberal videos online, total interactions declined from 2.3 million to 760,000. Meanwhile, interactions on Mic’s Facebook page, a left-leaning publisher with 3.8 million Facebook fans, plummeted from 8.9 million to 475,000.

CROWDTANGLE DATA

Digging deeper into the data, if you isolate only the videos posted to Diamond and Silk’s page — excluding links and other kinds of status updates — their reach did go down. But the decline was still less pronounced than similar liberal-leaning pages.

Over the last year, views of original videos posted to Rachel Maddow’s Facebook page have declined from 6 million to 1.2 million. Diamond and Silk’s video views have declined from 4.1 million to 1.8 million.

In other words, Diamond and Silk videos now get more video views on Facebook than Rachel Maddow, even though Maddow’s show has a much larger page and is the most popular cable news program in the country.

A spokesperson for Facebook told ThinkProgress that the company regrets the way it communicated with Diamond and Silk, particularly the email in which they were told their content was “unsafe.” The Facebook spokesperson added that changes to Facebook’s monetization policies, implemented in September 2017, were not properly communicated to Diamond and Silk and may have added to the confusion.

Facebook’s spokesperson, however, categorically denied that any page, including Diamond and Silk, was targeted or penalized due to their political beliefs. Rather, any changes to their page performance over the last few months were not targeted at them, but the result of broader shifts across Facebook.

Indeed, many pages, including liberal pages, have suffered large declines because Facebook has reduced the distribution of videos and other content published by pages in favor of content from “friends and family.”

Diamond and Silk, however, have seen their total interactions increase slightly because the reach of their video content has more than replaced status updates that include links.

The data shows there is absolutely no case to be made that Facebook is censoring Diamond and Silk’s page. Their content is actually performing significantly better than providers of liberal political video. Yet their claims, made without any data, have been widely repeated: by members of Congress and the media alike.

It plays into a broader narrative that Facebook favors liberal media over conservatives. This, like the Diamond and Silk narrative, is false.

An analysis of the top 25 publishers features numerous right-wing outlets, including Fox News, the New York Post, and Breitbart. It also includes far-right publishers, like WesternJournal.com, that have little presence outside of Facebook. A look at the reporters who generate the most engagement on Facebook found that 5 of the top 12 work for the far-right Daily Wire.

Diamond and Silk did not return a request for comment.

The truth about Ford’s decision to cancel a plant in Mexico

“We didn’t cut a deal with Trump,” the CEO said. “We did it for our business.”

Ford CEO Mark Fields announcing its new plans on Tuesday. CREDIT: AP Photo/Carlos Osorio

On Tuesday, Ford announced that it would scrap plans to build a new factory in Mexico, and instead will invest $700 million in upgrades to an existing plant in Michigan. The company plans to create 700 jobs in the state in its quest to build more electric and self-driving cars.

The next morning, President-elect Donald Trump tweeted his thanks to the company.

He also appeared to take credit for the move in an earlier tweet.

Some in the media were quick to link Trump’s rhetoric about outsourcing to the company’s decision. “Chided by Trump, Ford scraps Mexico factory, adds Michigan jobs,” read a headline on Reuters, pointing to his earlier tweet criticizing GM for importing cars from Mexico — even though most of the cars in question are made in the U.S.

But Trump had very little to do with what happened.

Ford’s CEO, Mark Fields, was very clear about that point on Tuesday. “We didn’t cut a deal with Trump,” he said while talking about the decision on CNN. “We did it for our business.” He told Fox Business that the same decision would have been made even if Trump hadn’t won the election. And company sources indicated that there were no negotiations between Trump and the company ahead of the announcement; Fields called Trump to tell him about the announcement on Tuesday morning after it had been made.

Instead, Fields indicated that he expects to get incentives from Michigan to expand its plant in Flat Rock.

Meanwhile, increasing jobs to make electric vehicles in Michigan rather than Mexico makes far more business sense for Ford. As Danielle Paquette reported at the Washington Post, the engineers who design the cars in Dearborn will be much closer to those producing them, which will make the process easier. It also fits with the industry trend toward keeping innovation and cars that require more skills and computer literacy in the U.S.

The Focus, on the other hand, is still going to be produced in Mexico, just at an existing plant, not a new one. The company had already been publicabout the fact that it will no longer produce small cars in the United States thanks to declining sales and was therefore shifting the Focus to Mexico.

It was equally clear that the change didn’t endanger U.S. jobs because workers would be shifted to producing other vehicles, such as S.U.V.s and trucks, that sell better in this country. A new contract with the United Auto Workers also preserved the jobs in question.

Ford’s move to produce small cars in Mexico originally sparked Trump’s ire on the campaign trail. He called it an “absolute disgrace,” saying, “We shouldn’t allow it to happen. They’ll make their cars, they’ll employ thousands of people, not from this country, and they’ll sell their car across the border.” Trump had even promised that, if elected, he would levy large tariffs on the Ford vehicles produced in Mexico and imported to the United States.

Yet Ford’s Focus plans are not going to change.

While Fields said his decision this week was “a vote of confidence” in Trump’s policies and proposals, many companies appear to be eager to curry favor with the administration in this way in order to press for business-friendly tax and regulation reform. A number of companies have given Trump credit he couldn’t realistically claim for job expansions in a quest to stay out of his line of fire on Twitter and to press the case for their agendas, from tax cuts to leniency on mega mergers.

That doesn’t mean Fields is on board with everything Trump has discussed. Fields told BuzzFeed News that he will push the administration to keep the country’s “deep integration” with Mexico when it begins debating a revamp of NAFTA.

Wendy Davis Drops an Atomic Truth Bomb on Desperate Sexist Republicans

By: Sarah Jones/politicususa

This is so embarrassing for Republicans, who’ve taken to attacking Democratic State Senator Wendy Davis (TX) on whether or not she was technically divorced at the age of 19 when living alone in a trailer with her daughter.

Apparently the Texas Republicans haven’t met Wendy Davis yet. Wendy Davis is a fighter for all people, and she isn’t about to let a few cheap shots at her family or her personal struggles take her down. State Senator Wendy Davis issued a statement today, saying in part, “The truth is that at age 19, I was a teenage mother living alone with my daughter in a trailer and struggling to keep us afloat on my way to a divorce… I am proud of where I came from and I am proud of what I’ve been able to achieve through hard work and perseverance. And I guarantee you that anyone who tries to say otherwise hasn’t walked a day in my shoes.”

Conservatives were claiming that Davis lied about her status at the age of 19 because she wasn’t technically divorced yet and thus couldn’t possibly be a single mother (don’t ask), but as Iexplained earlier, before the divorce one gets the separation and before the separation, one gets the unraveling of the relationship which often impacts the living situation. Then there is the time spent after filing for divorce. Welcome to reality.

But since Republicans don’t seem to live in reality, Senator Davis felt compelled to offer her biography to clear things up:

Wendy Davis Early Biography

- Wendy Davis’ parents separated for the final time when she was 11, and they were divorced by the time she was 13 years old. Even though the divorce settlement called for child support, Wendy’s father was not able to provide significant income for the family.

- Wendy and her siblings were raised primarily by her mother, who had attended school only into the ninth grade, and whose own father had only a sixth grade education.

- Wendy’s mother worked at a Braum’s ice cream store to support the family. Wendy started working at age 14 to join her siblings in the support of the family.

- Despite the financial struggles at home, Wendy was a good student and attempted to attend to college after graduating high school. She was unable, however, to make ends meet economically, and left believing that a college education was just not available to her.

- Wendy left home at 17, married when she was 18 and had her first daughter Amber when she was 19. She and her husband lived in a trailer, and Wendy continued to live there with Amber after they were separated. As a single mother at age 19, she often struggled to make ends meet. Wendy filed for divorce when she was 20 and she and Amber lived for a short time with her mother. The divorce became final when she was 21.

- After learning about flexible class options from a Tarrant County College brochure, Wendy discovered that she could get back into college. She moved into an apartment with Amber and began attending classes while working multiple jobs.

- Tarrant County College gave her a gateway to higher education. She excelled in classes as she worked hard. She did well enough to get into Texas Christian University, which she attended with the help of financial aid and scholarships.

- While working at her father’s dinner theater during college, Wendy met and later married Jeff Davis, a Fort Worth attorney. While married to Jeff Davis, Wendy had her second daughter Dru and continued to excel academically. She graduated first in her class from TCU. Wendy applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School. As Wendy has said before, Jeff helped her fulfill her dream of attending Harvard by cashing in a 401k and later they took out loans.

- While at Harvard, Wendy and Jeff arranged her schedule and that of her daughters, Amber and Dru, so that they could be together often. The girls lived in Boston during Wendy’s first year. In subsequent semesters, Wendy commuted weekly and Wendy’s mother played a daily caretaking role to assist the family.

- Following her graduation from Harvard, Wendy came home to Texas, completed a judicial clerkship, worked as a successful attorney at the law firm Haynes and Boone and later worked as an officer in their family’s title company.

- Ultimately, Wendy’s marriage to Jeff failed. The couple separated and shared custody of Dru who was still a minor. Dru lived in the family home with Jeff. After sometimes contentious proceedings, the divorce from Jeff became final and the two parents shared custody of their daughters Amber and Dru. Wendy was constantly present and sharing in the support and raising of her daughters as they grew up, attended college and have taken on jobs of their own.

- Wendy and her daughters remain very close. She and Jeff Davis have a healthy and respectful relationship based on their mutual love of their daughters.

In their efforts to avoid discussing policy, Republicans went for the jugular attacking Wendy Davis, her family, her history as a single mother, her time spent in a trailer, and the relationship between her and her now ex husband. They did this based on the idea that she could not be a single mother if she were technically still married, even if she were living alone with her daughter.

This is patently absurd and pathetic.

Republicans have done nothing but embarrass themselves, especially now that Wendy Davis has set the record straight with a truth bomb.