In a story by Wired a couple of days ago, there was mention that one of the original investors in Facebook was Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire. Most billionaires in Russia are Friends of Putin or they don’t stay billionaires very long. Wired tracked down some of the business relationships in Russia and made a good start on the links between Moscow and the billionaires involved. It is a story worth reading if you follow the kinds of manipulation of public opinion Russia is trying to exploit.
But, it is also a crack in some of the smoothing over Mark Zuckerberg has been doing in Washington. Why didn’t the connection between Facebook’s funding come up during the hearings? What was Mail.RU doing in Facebook with their app, which had access to user data, an access that was continued by Zuckerberg even after he knew it was going to come up one day? Why didn’t the connection to sales of data to Huawei come up? Was Congress so concerned about Cambridge Analytica that is lost site of the other connections Facebook had? They were so wound up about the potential use of data for the Trump Campaign that they overlooked the much more serious aspects of a major player like Facebook giving data on users to Russian and Chinese companies.
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