Left-Wing Group Protests Zuckerberg with Cardboard Cutouts, Calls for More Censorship

Global advocacy group Avaaz has set up 100 cardboard cutouts of Mark Zuckerberg on the Capitol lawn, calling for Facebook to further censor itself.

Avaaz said in a statement that it is calling on embattled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to “ban all bots, alert the public any and every time users see fake or disinformation, fund fact checkers around the world, and submit to an independent audit to review the scale and scope of fake news.”

After “consultations with regulators, experts and social media executives,” Avaaz presented its “Four Solutions to Fix Facebook” and provided a spokesperson for interviews. In a moment that was either painfully appropriate or deeply ironic, the protest itself was streamed for about half-an-hour through Facebook itself. The tweeting began earlier.

This afternoon, Zuckerberg himself will stand before both the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees to address the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the veritable avalanche of privacy issues that continue to surround the company.

On Monday, Facebook began the deployment of a tool that will allow Facebook users to check to see if their data was harvested by Cambridge Analytica. For many, that is far too little and far too late. The company has already been forced to admit that beyond the 87 million affected by that single group, all two billion of its users have been vulnerable to the same data harvesting.

And while Zuckerberg stands before these committees to face the proverbial music, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have been hit with a class action lawsuit. The way the winds are blowing, it will be only the first of many.