2020
“There is no panacea for the information crisis — no simple bill or regulation that will alone cure its noxious society-wide impacts,” said the letter, which was signed by Accountable Tech, Greenpeace, the Center for American Progress, and others. “We must instead fight it with government-wide strategies.”
Victoria Vinall Between the lines: Organizers, which include Accountable Tech, MapLight and Avaaz, say the goal of the effort was to figure out what's doable in an administration with a lot on its plate — understanding that tech priorities may not be first in line.
Victoria Vinall It’s a tremendous honor to join the Onward Together family, and to have the opportunity to work alongside such a dynamic coalition of leaders in the fight for a more just future.
Zach Praiss The lawsuits filed today send a strong message to Facebook that their era of impunity is coming to an end. For years, Facebook has exploited its gatekeeper status to further entrench its monopoly power.
Zach Praiss On Thursday, Accountable Tech co-founder Jesse Lehrich called Zients a “talented problem-solver” but said Facebook’s role in spreading anti-vaccine misinformation could not be ignored. “Facebook must be held accountable for amplifying misinformation that has undermined our pandemic response and sown baseless distrust in vaccines,” Lehrich said. “In order to guard against conflicts of interest, Mr. Zients should immediately divest of the significant equity he earned in Facebook from his service on the Board and commit to hiring an online misinformation expert to handle his team’s engagement with major social media platforms.”
Victoria Vinall Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of nonprofit Accountable Tech, which is critical of social-media companies, said Mr. Zients’s time on Facebook’s board raises concerns because of the way some users have turned to the platform to spread conspiracy theories about vaccines and the coronavirus.
Victoria Vinall While Jeff Zients is rightfully renowned as a talented problem-solver, his recent service on Facebook’s Board of Directors raises serious concerns about how he’ll navigate his role as the incoming administration’s COVID-19 czar.
Zach Praiss “If Facebook and Google are truly incapable of reviewing and safely running Georgia Senate ads without opening the floodgates of paid disinformation across their platforms, it’s a damning indictment of their own business model,” said Nicole Gill, executive director of tech policy advocacy group Accountable Tech, said in a statement. “These companies are already failing to curb the viral spread of conspiracy theories designed to delegitimize our elections. As has always been the case, deceptive organic content — boosted by toxic algorithms – continues to drive social media’s disinformation crisis; not paid content. Preventing campaigns from running ads to inform Georgians about how and why to participate in these critical runoff elections is actively harmful to democracy.”
Victoria Vinall If Facebook and Google are truly incapable of reviewing and safely running Georgia Senate ads without opening the floodgates of paid disinformation across their platforms, it’s a damning indictment of their own business model.
Zach Praiss It’s infuriating to see Facebook’s ineptitude and aversion to transparency once again inflict avoidable damage during the final stretch of an election.
Zach Praiss Platforms must do more to address these harms before users are exposed, and they have the tools to do it. Facebook and Twitter already use proactive detection and enforcement, combining AI and human review to preempt other violations.
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Zach Praiss And the trend is set to continue: Accountable Tech, which as its name suggests is trying to hold Big Tech companies accountable, will broadcast an ad slamming Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It will air during the final presidential debate on Thursday night.
Victoria Vinall A new video is set to air on TV that night targeting the Facebook founder. The organization behind the clip, Accountable Tech, is spending $250,000 on the ad buy. The ad starts with a clip of Zuckerberg talking to CNN Money. "I really just care about building something that my girls are going to grow up and be proud of me for," he says.
Victoria Vinall Today, Accountable Tech is launching a new $250,000 ad buy calling out Facebook for facilitating the spread of misinformation and hate with real-world consequences.
Zach Praiss Accountable Tech, a nonprofit run by a former Hillary Clinton campaign spokesperson and the former executive director of Tax March, hopes to focus that attention with an ad spot during Wednesday's debate on, according to CNN. The ad, embedded above, focuses on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg's noted failures to live up to its and his stated goals.
Victoria Vinall A television ad attacking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for his company’s handling of hate and misinformation will air during Wednesday’s vice presidential debate coverage, the group behind the ad — Accountable Tech — tells CNN Business.
Victoria Vinall A new ad from Accountable Tech, a nonprofit group that includes former Facebook employees, former election officials and members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, uses Zuckerberg’s own remarks to highlight what the group sees as failures at Facebook to protect the country from dangerous disinformation and violent criminals.
Victoria Vinall “Their announcement acknowledged several important truths — that enforcement at the individual post level cannot counter hate and disinformation; that content need not explicitly support violence to bring about real-world harms; and that without aggressive deterrence, these platforms will continue to serve as critical organizing and recruitment tools for extremist movements,” said Accountable Tech’s co-founder Jesse Lehrich in a statement.
Victoria Vinall 79%. That’s the percentage of respondents who said social media companies should do more to protect democracy, according to a recent Accountable Tech/GQR Research poll. The poll also found that 62% of respondents are not confident in social media companies’ ability to prevent election misinformation from influencing the November election, with 42% saying they have no confidence in Facebook specifically.
Victoria Vinall Facebook Groups pose a singular threat to this election season. They’ve become hidden breeding grounds for disinformation campaigns and organizing platforms for extremists. And Facebook’s AI actively grows these dangerous networks by promoting them to vulnerable users.
Zach Praiss The survey, commissioned by Accountable Tech, questioned 1,000 registered voters in early September.
Zach Praiss Nearly three years after Mark Zuckerberg set into motion plans for a so-called ‘Supreme Court’ – and after months of sustained pressure for the Oversight Board to grapple with urgent Facebook debacles around the globe – board members have embarked on a press tour about their impending launch.
Zach Praiss A new Election Integrity Roadmap released by the nonprofit group Accountable Tech shows that a different path is possible. Created in conjunction with leading technologists, civil rights leaders, and disinformation experts, the Roadmap outlines tangible steps that platforms can take to defend the integrity of the November elections.
Zach Praiss Accountable Tech launched a comprehensive Election Integrity Roadmap for social media platforms as they navigate an election season fraught with unprecedented challenges.
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Zach Praiss Today, Accountable Tech released a new report examining how Facebook’s algorithms operated during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the wake of George Floyd’s killing – and found they played a toxic role at each of these inflection points.
Zach Praiss Facebook says it brings the world closer together, but its own research shows it divides us.
Zach Praiss President Trump’s posts this morning should be a blaring red siren for social media platforms, whose woefully inadequate election misinformation policies continue to undermine the integrity of our democracy.
Zach Praiss Jesse Lehrich, the co-founder of the nonprofit Accountable Tech, which is pushing Facebook to tighten its rules on harmful speech, warned that by doing nothing social media companies could exacerbate the problem of misinformation online.
Zach Praiss Big Tech companies serve as information and market gatekeepers, but they have consistently abused that status to maximize profits at the expense of the public good. As today’s hearing made clear, their monopoly-like power begets more anti-competitive behavior and removes the incentives to act responsibly.
Zach Praiss On July 24th, a coalition of nine progressive groups, including Demand Justice, Freedom From Facebook and Google, and Accountable Tech, released a statement calling on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to recuse himself from a case involving Facebook due to his close friendship with the company’s vice president of public policy, Joel Kaplan.
Zach Praiss According to new exclusive polling conducted by GQR, Americans overwhelmingly agree that social media companies should do more to combat online hate and misinformation, that Big Tech companies have too much power, and that the Stop Hate For Profit campaign is demanding much-need reforms.
Zach Praiss As Facebook faces sharp scrutiny and a growing advertising boycott amid the coronavirus pandemic, racial justice movement and impending November election, a new poll of 1,000 registered voters nationwide from Accountable Tech and GQR Research conducted July 15-19 finds that American voters have turned against Facebook, believing the company does more harm than good and broadly disapproving of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the power he wields.
Zach Praiss “A new policy-focused nonprofit that emerged from the recent wave of big tech scrutiny is calling for members of Facebook’s Oversight Board to either step up or step down,” TechCrunch reports on the group Accountable Tech.
Zach Praiss A broad coalition of civil rights, free press, environmental, and tech accountability groups has released an open letter to the U.S.-based members of the Facebook Oversight Board urging them to resign in protest unless they are empowered to swiftly address the platform’s facilitation of voter suppression and climate denialism.
Zach Praiss Amid growing outrage over Facebook’s refusal to crack down on hate and disinformation, Accountable Tech launched a multi-pronged campaign Tuesday targeting their toothless Oversight Board.
Zach Praiss An American non-profit has started an online ad campaign to try to force the Oversight Board to speak up.
Zach Praiss Accountable Tech, a progressive nonprofit, launched a campaign Tuesday to persuade the members of Facebook's independent oversight board to demand more authority over content decisions.
Zach Praiss Nicole Gill, executive director of Accountable Tech, joins to discuss how the new group plans to fight misinformation on social media platforms.
Zach Praiss Jesse Lehrich, the co-founder of Accountable Tech, a new nonprofit group pushing Facebook to tighten controls on its platform, suggested that the two men have a tacit nonaggression pact. “Trump can rage at Big Tech and Mark can say he’s disgusted by Trump’s posts, but at the end of the day the status quo serves both of their interests,” Mr. Lehrich said.
Zach Praiss On the one hand, it’s encouraging to see Mark Zuckerberg preview a seemingly robust effort to help Americans vote in November – and that progress is a testament to the relentless advocacy from Facebook employees, civil rights activists, and many others who have made their voices difficult to ignore in recent weeks.
Zach Praiss Accountable Tech launched a five-figure ad buy Tuesday aimed specifically at reaching Facebook employees on their own platform, as more and more boldly express their outrage over the path being charted by the company’s leadership.
Zach Praiss The targeted ads went live today on Facebook and come from newly launched Accountable Tech, which is spending "five figures" on the effort, Axios has learned. The campaign follows yesterday's employee walkout and rising internal dissent over Facebook's handling of President Trump's tweets.
Zach Praiss It’s encouraging to see Twitter continue to uphold its standards and provide transparency about the actions they are taking, and their warning labels provide important context without amounting to censorship.
Zach Praiss Jesse Lehrich, a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton, announced that he was teaming with Nicole Gill, another liberal activist, to form Accountable Tech, an advocacy group aimed at pressuring tech companies to fight “the proliferation of online misinformation, deception, and manipulation.”
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Big Tech companies are some of the most powerful and profitable companies in history, presenting new threats to the safety of communities and the health of democracy. We’re taking them on through legislation, regulation and direct advocacy.