Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has alluded to Mark Zuckerberg possessing what she calls “Trumpian” qualities matched with “authoritarian” views displayed via his stewardship of Facebook, an interview in the Atlantic magazine reveals.
Her analogy comes just 24-hours after it was alleged Facebook is helping to reelect President Trump in 2020 in exchange for protection, as billionaire George Soros claimed Thursday in Davos, Switzerland.
Clinton aired her own conspiracy theory in an exchange with Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, at an event hosted by Emerson Collective at the Sundance Film Festival. Reporter Adrienne Lafrance wrote of the exchange:
Listening to Clinton, I was struck by how remarkably similar her account was to something Zuckerberg had once told me. Facts, Zuckerberg had suggested, are best derived from foraging many opinions, ideally from the billions of humans who use his publishing platform, so that each individual might cherry-pick what to believe. (Cherry-pick is my word, not his.)
If journalism’s mantra is “Seek truth and report it,” Facebook’s might be “Seek opinions and react to them.” “It’s not about saying, Here’s one view; here’s the other side,” Zuckerberg had said when I’d asked him to reconcile the apparent contradiction between fact and opinion. “You should decide where you want to be.”
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I wrote at the time that Zuckerberg’s interpretation was unsatisfying for one thing, and Trumpian for another. When I asked Clinton today whether she too sees a Trumpian quality in Zuckerberg’s reasoning, she nodded. “It’s Trumpian,” she said. “It’s authoritarian.” (Facebook did not immediately provide a response to my request for comment from Zuckerberg.)
As Breitbart News reported, George Soros expressed similar notions of Facebook somehow being in collusion with Donald Trump ahead of the 2020 election.
“Facebook will work to re-elect Trump and Trump will protect Facebook. It makes me very concerned about the outcome of 2020,” he said during a private dinner hosted by his Open Society Foundations at the World Economic Forum.
The left-wing financier reportedly described Trump as “the ultimate narcissist” and a “con man” who wanted the world to “revolve around him.”
“When his fantasy of becoming president became a reality,” his ego grew significantly, Soros alleged, then added, “This has turned his narcissism into a malignant disease.”
However, a Facebook spokesperson called the accusations “just plain wrong.”
Soros’s Open Society Foundation’s website states it believes “the solutions to the national, regional, and global challenges we face demand the free exchange of ideas and thought, and that everyone should have a voice in shaping the policies that affect them.”
Despite his foundation’s commitment to the free exchange of ideas, Soros called the Trump administration “a danger to the world” at Davos in 2018, and also accused social media companies of encouraging addiction to their platforms.
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