Cartoon

The Best People

Written by SK Ashby

(Cartoonist - Bruce Plante)

In other news, the inspector general of the Department of Education has launched an investigation of the department's decision to abandon large numbers of civil rights investigations that began under the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, emails between right wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi and Trump's longtime henchman Roger Stone show that they privately acknowledged that hackers were responsible for stealing Democratic emails before they publicly blamed slain DNC staffer Seth Rich for it.

In an August 2, 2016 email, made public Tuesday in draft court papers prepared by Mueller’s office, Corsi told Stone that “hackers” were behind the WikiLeaks releases. [...]

Corsi’s biggest push for the Seth Rich conspiracy theory came in his 2017 series for Alex Jones’ InfoWars, where Corsi worked as a Washington bureau chief.

Days earlier, Rich’s parents had pleaded with Corsi and his allies to stop claiming that their son’s unsolved July 2016 murder, which police believe was a botched robbery, was actually an assassination.

Finally, evidence filed in federal court by a third party app developer that's suing Facebook shows that Facebook effectively sold access to user data by demanding that companies buy a certain amount of advertising on the platform to maintain access to user data.

In an ongoing federal court case against Facebook, the plaintiffs claim that the social media giant doled out people’s data secretly and selectively in exchange for advertising purchases or other concessions, even as others were cut off, ruining their businesses. The case was brought by one such app, Six4Three, which claims its business was destroyed in 2015 by Facebook’s actions. [...]

In one of the exchanges from the filings, Facebook employees discussed shutting down access “in one-go to all apps that don’t spend … at least $250k a year to maintain access to the data,” according to the trove. The documents reference email exchanges regarding Facebook’s relations with several large commercial partners, including Lyft, Tinder, Amazon, Airbnb and the Royal Bank of Canada.

Facebook denies that it exchanged access to people’s data for commercial benefit.

I'm going to sleep until Monday. Have a good weekend.