So Facebook filed its IPO papers, and the numbers are eye-popping.  The company appears to be worth about $100 billion, or a bit more than the GDP of Tunisia.  Others shade it a bit lower, but one thing is certain: it’s good to be Facebook.

Facebook is special because, in network economic terms, its product is a platform, and successful platforms are few and far between.  For all its bells and whistles and features and privacy policies, Facebook remains—at heart—a place that people hang out.  As the proprietor of a popular hangout, Facebook gets to write the rules guiding all the folks who think it’s a good place to pitch their businesses or to make some sales.  In network economic terms, these businesses operating inside Facebook’s business comprise an aftermarket.

In a very real sense then, Facebook operates as a private-sector regulator of a vibrant commercial marketplace—the Facebook aftermarket.  Vendors in this marketplace develop and launch “apps,” literally software applications that run atop the Facebook platform.  Facebook has a symbiotic—and asymmetric—relationship with these Facebook app companies (or FBapps).  The symbiosis is clear: the more people who like Facebook, the bigger the potential audience upon which each FBapp can draw; the better the FBapps, the more popular Facebook will become.  The asymmetry is equally clear: each individual FBapp needs Facebook more than Facebook needs it.

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It’s official.  Former Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY), who resigned in disgrace over a bizarre sexting scandal this past June, was NOT hacked.

Today, eight months after the congressman first claimed he was the victim of a hacking or a prank, the NY Daily News has broken the story that Anthony Weiner spent more than $13,000 in campaign funds to hire private investigators to track down a hacker that never existed.

Weiner paid T&M, a Manhattan-based firm, $13,290 for “legal services” in the fourth quarter of 2011, financial statements filed Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission reveal.

Sources told the Daily News, however, that Weiner hired T&M — a firm loaded with former NYPD sleuths — when he was in full spin mode over the controversy that eventually led to his resignation from the House.

[...]

Two sources familiar with Weiner’s downfall said the Queens pol told investigators the same story. T&M investigated — and learned Weiner had sent them on a fool’s errand.

“They did their job, and then it was time to sit down with lawyers,” another source said. “Self-denial, it dies a slow death.”

Surprised? No, neither were we.

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What started as a conversation on Facebook between two St.Louisans, Craig Schneider and Tom Appelbaum, sparked into the first “Welcome Home” Parade for U.S. troops after leaving operations in Iraq. Veterans and those supporting them traveled from all over the country to show their thanks and welcome them home.

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Facebook may give Barack Obama a slight edge this coming presidential election while creating a wide misperception about who’s actually pulling ahead in the Republican Party. A new partnership between Facebook and Politico announced last week will reveal users’ private messages if and when they relate to their feelings about a political candidate.

Liz Gannes of All Things D enlightens us about the new dual effort, reporting that:

It will consist of sentiment analysis reports and voting-age user surveys, accompanied by stories by Politico reporters. Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users’ private status messages and comments. While that may alarm some people, Facebook and Politico say the entire process is automated and no Facebook employees read the posts.

Rather, every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.

Apparently, the fact that “no Facebook employees read the posts” is supposed to assure us that the quotes are not being hand picked to prefer one candidate over another. After all, since the posts will be published worldwide it can’t possibly be referring to privacy (plus, the quotes are “anonymized” so they can’t be attributed to any particular Facebook user).

But here’s the thing.

Whether or not the quotes are actually being hand picked or being “fed through a sentiment analysis tool” (whatever that means) isn’t really that relevant because we all know that more young people than old use Facebook. That means that in all likelihood those candidates that appeal to younger voters (namely Barack Obama–surprise, surprise, Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent favorite) will be getting lots of play on the pages of Politico as the national favorite.

And here’s something else: Don’t be surprised if the Republican Party’s quirkiest candidate, Ron Paul, also comes out the GOP front runner. After all, it’s no secret that Paul’s young followers have been passionate about vocalizing their support perhaps hoping to convince Americans that Paul really is the front runner.

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The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a nightmarish piece of legislation moving the House Judiciary Committee currently which Hollywood is pushing hard for. The Tinsel Town lobbyists are in full press on Capitol Hill, doing all they can to get the legislation out of committee and up for a vote. The problem is, SOPA in no uncertain terms is a direct assault on a free internet.

One of the reasons many of us get our news and entertainment from the Net these days is because we find the legacy media lacking. We have turned our backs on old media because it has failed to serve us. We no longer have to tolerate obvious and unceasing news bias, or watch only boxed and packaged melodrama. We are now free to pursue news and entertainment where we like with the click of a mouse or a swipe of the Ipad.

Hollywood, and most of legacy media are unhappy about this and would prefer that we continue to listen to their propaganda and watch their terrible movies. I mean, how many sequels can these guys crank out? SOPA seeks to put we the media consumers back in line.

SOPA is being sold as a way to stop the piracy of movies and music from overseas sites, and this is a problem, but the bill goes much further than just addressing this issue.

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Please read Part 1 and Part 2.

Contrary to recent media reports, the Brazilian Blowout hair treatment is safe for use.

Oregon OSHA and Federal OSHA had already attacked Brazilian Blowout’s product, steering the media to focus on faulty aspects of their respective studies, and burying the truth  –  that the product does not release formaldehyde in amounts that exceed state or federal short-term or long-term exposure limits.

Enter Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D – 3 – OR).  Ontheissues.org labels him a “hard-core Liberal”, and you know what that means when it comes to anything involving chemicals or the environment.   Rep. Blumenauer sponsored nonsensical bills like HR 3311 that taxes drivers based on miles driven; a ludicrous bill to jump-start the funding of streetcars; a bill to establish under-the-radar death panels; a bill providing environmental education grants for outdoor experiences (huh?); and even one quashing free speech by attempting to ban a website promoting the perfectly safe Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump.

So Rep. Blumenauer reads about OSHA’s nonsense in the media and, because he’s a politician, doesn’t do his research, either.  Nor does he bother contacting the company to get their side of the story.   Instead, he grandstands by penning a letter to the Food and Drug Administration asking that they recall the product — a product already proven to meet OSHA standards!

I asked Rep. Blumenauer’s press secretary, Derek Schlickeisen, about this approach to policy.  His assertion was that politicians “can’t have a chemist on staff”, and thus rely on OSHA’s scientists to bring incidents like this to light.  When I mentioned that the company-funded study by Health Science Associates showed formaldehyde levels below OSHA standards, he inferred that the study held little weight because it was company funded.

Yet why is it that OSHA’s results are given any more credibility, especially when OSHA caused a panic based entirely on a faulty sample?  Are we to believe that OSHA scientists are somehow free of ideological bias?  Kermit McCarthy, one of the authors of the Oregon OSHA study, “likes” hard-core Liberal Sen. Ron Wyden according to his Facebook page.  Why isn’t his bias questioned?  If anything, a government worker is likely more biased than a private company to insert bias, because his very job depends on his work generating a result that permits the government to do something.  Otherwise, the agency’s existence, and the employee’s, have no purpose.

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From Asheville’s Citizen-Times:

City police have put a department employee under investigation following accusations she called Occupy Asheville protesters “nasty” in a Facebook post and complained they left “stinky belongings” on a sidewalk.

Police acknowledgment of the investigation Monday continued a string of developments tied to an Occupy Asheville demonstration last week.

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The Occupy Wall Street protesters say they’re demonstrating against capitalism. Sure they are…

In January of 2011, Facebook was valued at $50 Billion dollars.

In February of 2011, Twitter was valued at $10 Billion.

In March of 2011, YouTube was valued at $36 Billion and Google was valued at $190 Billion.

None of these companies would exist without capitalism, but the anti-capitalist leftists currently occupying Wall Street will never, ever protest these companies. They’re even organizing their protests through their websites.

Why is the left’s hatred of capitalism so selective? Google is a publicly traded corporation; its executives feed off the so-called profiteering of Wall Street just as deliberately as Goldman Sachs or any of their other boogeyman du jour. And if we’re talking how these corporations make profits, why doesn’t the left get asbent out of shape over Google and Facebook selling their personal information to marketers as they do with banks charging interest on loans? (more…)

From Politico:

Lawmakers are asking the FTC to investigate Facebook following reports that the social network has been collecting data even from users logged out of their profiles.

The concerns from Capitol Hill came Wednesday in a letter by Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), who have repeatedly questioned Facebook’s privacy practices.

The duo expressed deep concern with the findings of one Australian security blogger, who discovered this week Facebook was gathering data even from logged out users whenever they visited Web pages that feature the social network’s signature “Like” button.

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“There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.” – Linus van Pelt in “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”

Facebook has been great for me.  I’ve reconnected with many people I haven’t seen in years, made many new friends, and have found yet another method of procrastination.  The downside — or maybe it’s an upside — is that it’s revealed some very troubling things about the social media platform, and personal relationships.

I refer to the not-yet-codified protocol for political posts.

If a friend posts something political, you might reasonably assume that (absent prior agreements not to discuss politics), that dissenting views are welcome.  After all, this is your friend.  Friends can, and often do, disagree.  If your friend only wanted to hear views that concur with her own, then one might reasonably assume that she would announce this.

So imagine my surprise, and subsequent disappointment, that twelve Facebook friends have de-friended me because I dared disagree with their posts.  Now, in real-life, when I have disagreements with friends on matters of politics, we may yell and scream and jump up and down, but when all is said and done, we pat each other on the back and say, “I don’t agree with you, but I love you.  Let’s not discuss politics anymore”, and we have a beer.

But in cyberspace, there is a dual sociological phenomenon at work.  The first was posited by Dr. Stanley Milgram in his famous obedience experiment, which effectively showed that one is able to do something they might not normally do if they can do it anonymously.  While de-friending is not exactly an anonymous act, the fact that it can be done remotely, without warning, without hearing an appeal, demonstrates how cyberspace contributes to the dehumanization of mankind.   A de-friended friend is not a person.  They are nothing more than a button that can be pressed and — POOF — they’re gone.

Can you imagine a more cowardly act?  Before Facebook, before Email, if you got angry with a friend, you would actually have to have a conversation with them.

But now?  Poof!

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As I write this, my Android handset is flashing with Twitter updates. I have been engaging in a virtual “war” with a fellow user, who has accused me of being a conservative who wants to murder President Obama and his family ( his exact words). I have several tabs open in my internet browser: Facebook, Drudge Report, Google +. Each page is focused on something I care most about at this point in American political discourse: the economy, the GOP presidential debate, the constant barrage of ludicrous left-wing assumptions that the Tea Party is racist. Again, my phone alerts me that a new blog post has appeared on this very site, and I proceeded to read it. In fact, every little bit of my involvement in conservative politics was birthed from my deep connection to social media, and while I reside here in Dallas, it allows me to keep tabs on the Left, Washington politics, and the various conflicts worldwide.

But this article is not about me. It is about how social media seeks to engage those who have a desire to understand every shift in American politics, but don’t have the luxury of living in the political hotbed of Washington D.C. It does exactly that, but furthermore, it has altered our very perception of the political parties, world leaders, economic, foreign, and social policy, science, and history itself. Our means of communicating ideas has changed dramatically, allowing us to post 140 character statements of the things that matter to us, or create groups on Facebook to promote our beliefs and concerns, or even write lengthy essays on popular websites that push forth certain ideologies. Some would say that this doesn’t affect politics in any significant way, but when simple things, such as a video, have the ability to end corruption at the deepest levels, none can deny just how effective social media has become.

But as we accept just how invaluable social media is to our political discussion, we also must accept just how damaging it can be. While both the Left and the Right have turned to Twitter and Facebook to combat each other, the Left has used these tools more for accusing the Right of immense racism, homophobia, sexism, elitism, and terrorism, and less for espousing rationality and reason. Some even advocated lying for the purposes of winning political debate at one point or another. It isn’t hard to see just how erratic some liberals behave through social networking sites.

Even with the addition of Twitter and Facebook to the equation, blogging is the defined medium for expressing political views. Blogs are where the most impassioned debates on current events take place. Most blogs, such as the ones controlled by new media leaders like Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, Matt Drudge ( and of course this very site ran by our own Andrew Breitbart), have succeeded in presenting a new type of conservative thought, with a fair perspective on our ever shifting political scene. They hold no punches, and at times, are critical of people within our own movement. If only such civility were commonplace throughout the entirety of the blogosphere. Big name liberal sites like Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Talking Points Memo have used soaring rhetoric and violent language when talking about the things that conservatives care most about, and when discussing conservatives themselves.

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Brian Hall made an insightful observation about the growth and power of Google – one that is worth discussing.  Hall notes that Google has stopped innovating and is using its power to copy, emulate, bully, threaten and manipulate.  The news that Google was purchasing Motorola seems to bolster Hall’s analysis.

Hall wrote:

• Yelp gets popular? Copy their info; shove Yelp to the bottom of the page and put Google Places and reviews at the top.
• Groupon won’t sell? Spend billions from other businesses to destroy them.
• Twitter and Facebook innovate on search? Take their content, whine when they try and stop you then spend billions to prevent their growth and hopefully destroy them.
• Apple working on a touchscreen smartphone? Spend billions from another business and copy everything you can, down to swipes and apps.
• Need a smartphone operating system with Java. Take Java and use it for your own ends.
• Need a location mapping technology and Skyhook won’t sell? Spend billions from your monopoly profits and strongarm your partners and drive Skyhook out of business.
• Buy up the big travel search sites.
• Claim you are open source but share nothing related to what your business claims to be about — search, and nothing related to how you make your money — advertising
• Claim you are open and standards based but control who gets access to your smartphone operating system

Like all rich monopolists, they spend millions hiring high priced lobbyists and public relations teams inside the Beltway — for their direct benefit.

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If we are going to win this thing, this battle to retake our culture and our country, you are going to have to learn to love to fight.

This battle can’t be left to a few champions who do battle on the airwaves or on cable or on the Internet, or who just do their part tweeting and Facebooking.  While we Constitutional conservatives, Tea Partiers, or whatever we call ourselves have been punching above our weight – the merely crappy debt ceiling deal would have been an unholy abomination of a deal if not for the intransigence of our Congressional allies supported by our voices from outside the Beltway – the fact is that we need more warriors.  That’s you.

And to be a warrior you need to want to fight.  You need to need to fight.  I’m not talking about punching and kicking – though if someone wants to go there, hey, let’s rock.  This is spoken or written combat, whether the battlefield is a cocktail party or a Facebook page.  And it’s vital.  These are serious issues that are worth fighting over.   Our Founders didn’t think they were making a country for a bunch of simpering, goody-goody wimps who go all wobbly at a harsh word or a raised voice.  Democracy requires guts.  Nut up.

People whine about fighting, cry over “bickering,” stammer out clichés about “bipartisanship,” “compromise” and being “reasonable.”  Well, I reject bipartisanship, compromise and reasonability, and so must you.  I want to fight and to win; death or glory.  Compromise is for losers – half a turd is still 100% turd.  But enough about the debt ceiling bill.

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Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), the chairwoman of the subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, has opened hearings on the issue of privacy and the Internet. Not surprisingly the poster child for privacy violations — Google–came up often.

Google’s policy toward individual and personal privacy of its users can be summed up by comment of their CEO Eric Schmidt who said, “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” Unfortunately for consumers, it appears that Google cross that line – often.

Google’s history of privacy violations is long and often appears to be part company policy. Google has admitted it collected personal information and data for three years across the globe while its cars traveled through neighborhood snapping pictures for its Street View program. The cars also collected information from Wi-Fi’s from people’s homes.

Former House Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton initially called for hearings into Google’s Wi-Fi scandal. “[Google] made fairly significant verbal assurances that they would improve their behavior but apparently that’s all they did,” Barton said. “They really didn’t change their business model and it appears to me Google had adopted a model of saying one thing in Washington and doing another in their business practices. We might need to drop the ‘G’ from Google and just call them ‘Oogle’ because of what they appear to be doing,” he said.

If the Wi-Fi incident were the only instance where Google grabbed personal information from consumers, it might be excused but there appears to be a clear pattern of apathy towards personal privacy.

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The current issue of The Economist contains a must read special report on the future of the news industry. While there is little in the way of groundbreaking news developments in the report, The Economist’s series of articles provides a condensed overview of the current and future states of the news media; an article of interest to everyone here at BigGovernment.com.

“Bulletins from the Future” celebrates the emergence of “’crowdsourced’ journalism,” which has “turned the news industry upside down, making it more participatory, social, diverse and partisan.” In “How Newspapers are Faring: A Little Local Difficulty,” the writers point out that the decline of print media is mostly an American and Western European phenomenon and in “Reinventing the Newspaper” they examine the new business models that “are proliferating as news organizations search for novel sources of revenue.”

“The People Formerly Known as the Audience” looks at the rise of social media and the impact they have on the news business. “The Foxification of News” partly bemoans and partly celebrates the ideological compartmentalization of the news business.”

A few thoughts. The series makes several references to Arianna Huffington but none of the proprietor and editor of this site. This is unfortunate not because she’s a liberal and Andrew Breitbart and Mike Flynn are conservative/libertarians. Rather, failing to explore what Andrew and his team have accomplished in terms of breaking real stories represents a missed opportunity. Taking nothing away from Ms. Huffington’s tremendous accomplishment, her website is really a highly SEO-ed liberal celebrity site with some reporting, most of it horribly biased, some of it good. Andrew and Mike have moved the needle on key stories and have forced “real reporters” to follow their lead.

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Google has built an empire by collecting, storing and using the personal data of their users. Every email sent through Gmail; every document created with GoogleDocs; every purchase made with Google Wallet; every thing users do is stored on Google’s servers and used for whatever marketing purpose the company sees fit.

The model goes something like this: offer a “free” product and then just sit back and collect all the valuable data users turn over.  Next, store this data forever and finally use the aggregate and historical data to develop behavioral and preference models to sell to advertisers.

But the cache of data that Google has amassed is apparently not enough.  Now the company is seeking to get its hands on personal data from non-Google users and they want their current users to help to get it.  Some might call it crowd sourcing a data heist.

Google’s new product, Google +, is their effort to enter the social media space. Incredibly, they have built a tool to import all the personal information obtained from users’ Facebook accounts onto Google servers—where it will remain forever and be used just as Google uses other data streams.  Not just users’ own private information, rather all of the information on their Facebook accounts including names, addresses, phones numbers, interests, birthdays and websites of their friends.

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Weiner-mania: if the story weren’t so infuriating and sad – and such a damning commentary on our society – it would be laughable. Alas, here we stand at a moment in time when a sitting US congressman – a newly married, sitting US congressman – felt it was “okay” to take pictures of his erect penis and send them – unsolicited – to much younger females. And if that weren’t bad enough, we are led to believe that it is appropriate to have a “discussion” as to whether this idiot should resign or not. Of course he should resign! To believe otherwise is to engage in moral relativism and – contrary to what the Progressive Movement believes – that is a bad thing.

All one has to do to divine whether Congressman Weiner’s actions were as unacceptable as I feel they were, is to consider this singular point. If your daughter was to receive an unsolicited photograph of an erect penis from a man more than twice her age, a photo accompanied by salacious and suggestive comments, would that be acceptable to you? If you say yes then you have some terribly troubling issues that you should seek help with immediately.

The simple fact of the matter is that Mr. Weiner has both an ego and a low self-esteem problem. Obviously (and I am not a psycho-therapist, just a witness of the human condition), Mr. Weiner craves attention and validation. I find it ironic, yet disturbingly appropriate, that Mr. Weiner has chosen a profession that thrives on opinion polling. In the end, however, these personal foibles are owned by Mr. Weiner. But where they affect his personal life – and the lives of those related to him in both familial and professional manners, they also affect the lives of those who depend on Congress to do right by the electorate; the citizenry. To this end, We the People should also hold accountable those who elected Mr. Weiner to office.

Two moments in time lead me to insist that the country hold the voters of New York’s 9th District accountable for their vote to place Mr. Weiner in a position of power: the 17th Amendment and advancing federalism.

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From Peter Ingemi in The New York Post:

By now, you’ve heard about the Tweet picture sent from Weiner’s account to a young lady named Gennette Nicole Cordova. The congressman has insisted his accounts were “hacked.” Cordova, in a statement released late Sunday night (36 hours after the tweet in question), says, “The account that these tweets were sent from was familiar to me. This person had harassed me many times after the congressman followed me on Twitter.” She also said that her previous tweet, “I wonder what my boyfriend @repweiner is up to,” was a joke.

Such statements notwithstanding, those on the left trying to paint this as a conspiracy must deal with an array of odd elements that an increasingly tech-savvy public may find suspicious:

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Ever since we first broke this story on Big Government and Big Journalism, we’ve been cautious in our reporting, making every effort to present the facts of the story in a fair and accurate way. For example, in connection with our original report, we noted that Congressman Weiner claimed his Facebook account was hacked, and we withheld the name and identity of the woman who allegedly received the offending photo from Congressman Weiner’s account.

What we know is that a link to a lewd photo was published from a sitting Congressman’s Twitter account, directed at a female recipient, whom he was “following,” but visible to everyone. Two broad possibilities exist: (1) the Congressman’s Twitter account (and perhaps other accounts) were hacked, or (2) the Congressman or someone with authorized access to his Twitter account sent the photo.

From here, we think the story most immediately goes two places: forensic analysis to determine the veracity of Congressman Weiner’s hacking allegation, which certainly bears criminal implications; and investigation into the veracity of developing reports of young women among the relatively few people Congressman Weiner “followed” on Twitter and who now claim they had direct communications with him.

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