SUMMARY: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday that the company will add 3,000 more workers to monitor live video after problems with hate speech and violence, including murder and suicide. Hari Sreenivasan talks to Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times about the ever-growing scope of the social media network and the company's responsibility.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now questions about the ever-growing scope of Facebook's empire and social network, and whether the company is embracing enough responsibility for its reach.
Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that they will add 3,000 more people to monitor live video, after problems with violence and hate speech.
Hari Sreenivasan takes it from there.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):The decision comes after a series of cases where people shared live video of murder and suicide, recent examples, a murder in Cleveland last month that was posted live on Facebook, and a man in Thailand posted video of him murdering his 11-month-old daughter. It wasn't removed for 24 hours.
Once Facebook makes these announced hires, there will be 7,500 employees to monitor thousands of hours of videos uploaded constantly.
Farhad Manjoo is a tech columnist for The New York Times who has been closely covering Facebook. He joins me now to talk about this issue and other questions facing the company.
Farhad, so let's first — today's news, how significant is this?
FARHAD MANJOO, The New York Times: I think it's significant.
I mean, it's a significant sort of step up in their ability to monitor these videos, and it should help. The way it works is, there's lots of videos going on, on Facebook all the time. If somebody sees something that looks bad, that looks like it may be criminal or some other, you know, terrible thing, they flag it, and the flagged videos go to these reviewers.
And just having more of these reviewers should make the whole process faster. So, it should help. I mean, I think the question is why it took them a year to do this.
SUMMARY: Founded in 2011, South Sudan is the world's newest country; but for much of its statehood, it has been engulfed in civil war. The violence has killed tens of thousands and displaced more than two million people. A report released on Monday by rights group The Sentry accuses South Sudanese political leaders of making a fortune off the conflict. The NewsHour's P.J. Tobia reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):South Sudan is the world's newest country, gaining independence from Sudan in 2011.
But, two years later, civil war broke out in the small East African nation. Though a peace agreement was signed in 2015, sporadic fighting continues. Millions have been displaced, while rival leaders fight for power and the country's oil and mineral wealth.
A two-year-long investigation into those leaders and their allies revealed billions have been looted from the country.
NewsHour producer P.J. Tobia has our story
And a warning: Some viewers may find some of the imagery disturbing.
P.J. TOBIA, NewsHour producer:Small, poor and dangerous, the U.N. has called South Sudan one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world.
Fighters loyal to the president, Salva Kiir, have been battling those backing former Vice President Riek Machar for most of the last four years. Caught in the crossfire are Sudan's impoverished civilians. More than two million South Sudanese have been displaced by the fighting. Tens of thousands have been killed.
The U.N. found that, in just six months last year, 1,300 women were raped by fighters in one South Sudanese state alone. A report released today by The Sentry, a rights group in Washington, accuses the leaders who've orchestrated this brutality of making billions off the conflict. Actor George Clooney wrote the foreword to the report. “Hotel Rwanda” star Don Cheadle also works with The Sentry. Both were at the National Press Club this morning to talk about the investigation.
GEORGE CLOONEY, Co-Founder, “The Sentry”: This is pretty explosive stuff. We're talking about the president and the ousted vice president, along with all of their generals, that we're able to prove without any question that not only are they committing these crimes which they have already been accused of, but that they're profiting off of it.
P.J. TOBIA: The report outlines how South Sudan's political leaders, generals and their families have used the chaos of war to generate vast sums of wealth. They have built mansions across the world, from Uganda and Kenya to Australia.
That young woman flashing the peace sign from the sunroof of a BMW? She's the daughter of a former general, a former general whose state salary was never more than 45,000 U.S. dollars.
This man is the stepson of another South Sudanese general. He calls himself the young tycoon. His Facebook photos show a life of privilege unimaginable to most South Sudanese. Here, he narrates a tour of a presidential suite at a luxury hotel in Las Vegas.
JOHN PRENDERGAST, Enough Project: So, it's like a mafia in some ways. A mafia has taken over the state.
P.J. TOBIA: John Prendergast is the director of the Enough Project, a rights group that oversees The Sentry group.
JOHN PRENDERGAST: The mafia we see in the movies, that is shooting a few people. In South Sudan, tens of thousands of people have died in this war, with horrific atrocities, mass rape, child soldier recruitment, all the worst of the worst of the human rights abuses that we hear about globally. And this is how they stay in power.
Judith Johnson of Stacyville, Iowa, doesn’t get out much anymore.
Legally blind and living on a small Social Security pension, the 72-year-old used to go to church once a week. She stopped out of fear that her new walker would snag on the railroad tracks she had to cross to get there.
But Johnson, whose tiny apartment is decorated with crucifixes, still believes it’s her duty to help those less fortunate.
So when telemarketers call on behalf of cancer patients, homeless veterans or disabled firefighters, the retired secretary finds it hard to say no.
That penchant for giving made Johnson the target of America’s billion-dollar charity fundraising industry.
In one recent year, callers persuaded her to write 25 checks to 11 different charities.
The repeated calls were no fluke.
Each one can be traced back to a single source – Associated Community Services, a Michigan-based company that is one of the nation’s largest charity telemarketing firms.
After Johnson gave to one charity, the firm put her on a list that got her bombarded with calls for nearly a dozen more company clients. Telemarketers sometimes called several times a day.
Johnson told one phone solicitor she couldn’t afford to give to a charity called Children with Hair Loss.
“She said, ‘You’re going to let this poor little child be bald-headed when they’re only 4 years old?’ ” Johnson recalled. “I really felt bad for the children, so I think I gave her around $10.”
Unbeknownst to Johnson, about $1.75 of that donation made it to the charity. The telemarketing firm pocketed the rest.
Johnson’s story is just like that of millions of Americans who give once over the phone only to find themselves flooded with calls for more causes.
To track how this happens, the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting scrutinized how a single company, Associated Community Services, operated in one state that has amassed a treasure trove of data.
Reporters interviewed 10 current and former employees and examined internal company documents subpoenaed by the Iowa attorney general. Iowa regulators used the records, which provide a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the charity industry, to build a case against the firm. Earlier this year, a judge in Iowa ordered Associated Community Services to stop soliciting in that state until it fully complied with a subpoena. The telemarketer is appealing the ruling.
In interviews, phone solicitors described the tactics they used to persuade donors to give. Along with the records, which include details about every Iowa donor who gave 10 times or more, their descriptions reveal a deliberate strategy of targeting trusting donors and exploiting their generosity to fuel profits in the name of charity.
From March 2010 through June 2011, nearly 400 Iowans made 10 or more donations to the firm’s charity clients. Total number of donations from the frequent-donor group: more than 5,500, worth a combined $102,000.
Associated Community Services would hit up its most reliable givers dozens of times in a year, with no regard for their age or financial situation.
Calls came so often that nearly half of the repeat donors gave to two different charity clients in a single day.
In an email, company officials said they call people on their hot list randomly and do not purposefully call multiple times a day.
“If the stars aligned properly, it is possible that a potential donor phone number could be called for several charities in one day,” President Richard Cole wrote. “But this would be an unusual incident.”
Cole also said the company does not target the elderly and has no way of knowing the age or financial situation of the people they call.
But the Iowa attorney general found that most of the company’s prolific donors – those who gave 20 times or more – were 69 or older.
The top donor was a man in his 80s in Dubuque. In just over a year, he made 38 donations totaling $1,375 to 13 of the telemarketer’s charities.
Six times, he gave to two of the firm’s clients on the same day.
The Iowa data details one company’s operations in a state with roughly 3 million residents. But industry experts and the firm’s employees who worked the phones say it is representative of how Associated Community Services and many other telemarketers do business across the nation.
Industry experts said such practices are used primarily by telemarketing companies that do cold-calling and take a percentage of the donations raised, rather than a flat fee, for their service.
The vast majority of the nation’s 1.6 million nonprofits do not use telemarketing firms. Charities that hire these phone solicitors wind up with a fraction of what gets raised. Financial filings by clients represented by Associated Community Services show the firm and its related companies keep as much as 85 cents of every dollar donated. Once charities pay their own administrative costs – including rent and salaries – it often means pennies on the dollar make it to those in need.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): And to the sexual abuse scandal that is rocking Penn State University and its renowned football program.
Margaret Warner has our report.
FRANK NOONAN, Pennsylvania State Police: This is not a case about football. It's not a case about universities. It's a case about children who have had their innocence stolen from them and a culture that did nothing to stop it or prevent it from happening to others.
MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): As the Pennsylvania State Police commissioner told it today, that innocence was stolen by Jerry Sandusky, former longtime defensive coordinator for Penn State's Nittany Lions football team. He was arrested Saturday on 40 counts of child sexual abuse after a three-year grand jury investigation.
Two top Penn State administrators, Athletic Director Tim Curley and Senior Vice President Gary Schultz, were arraigned today on charges that they didn't report the abuse to authorities and that they lied to the grand jury.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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