Time to “Unfriend” Meta in Your Investment Portfolio
Rubin Wealth Advisors, in conjunction with American Conservative Values Fund has identified the ten worst companies for political conservatives (or patriots) to invest in.
Investors can’t completely avoid placing their funds into all woke companies, but they can avoid investing in the worst offenders.
Announcing “Rubin’s Bottom 10”
Let’s get to #3
If you are an American who believes strongly in First Principles, private property rights, and the U.S. constitution, you are not likely to be getting a “friend request” from Meta Platforms Inc., aka Facebook, (NASDAQ) anytime soon. The social media monster and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, have made no attempts in their outright hatred for traditional American ideals. In fact, Zuckerberg went so far as openly spend money to destroy them during the 2020 election.
While Facebook is the “face” of the recently rebranded Meta, several other companies, including Instagram and WhatsApp, also fall under its umbrella. With Facebook being one of the earliest entrants into the world of unsocial social media and being one of the few survivors, its power, combined with its satellites, is significant. Many conservatives came to rely on Facebook as a way to share their message at a very low marginal cost, only to have the platform turn on them and pull the rug out from underneath.
The stories of conservative political candidates having their Facebook platforms silenced or demonetized goes back as far as at least 2018, when they began silencing primary candidates who were running on an agenda that included support for the policies of then-President Donald Trump. One such candidate was Californian Erin Cruz, who was running for a U.S. House of Representatives seat in that state. Numerous other candidates reported similar instances of censorship for doing nothing more than promoting their platform and trying to engage voters.
Facebook’s “fact-checking” (also used on Instagram and WhatsApp) are guilty of the same sort of not-so-arbitrary abuses as they routinely target candidates, media, and everyday citizens for posting information contrary to their preferred globalist, collectivist narrative. The highly respected digital daily publication Human Events was a victim of such a practice in 2021 when Facebook placed them in “Facebook Jail” for three stories deemed to be factually inaccurate. All were proven to be on target.
Facebook uses what they call “independent fact-checkers” to decide what content can and can’t be posted. Their partner in this is the International Fact-Checkers Network, who, when you visit their website, is led by a board of team left members, some of whom are from recognized names like the Washington Post, others who are from unknown organizations of dubious origin, and funding. One of the fact-checking entities is a group known as Science Feedback, a group whose feedback in censoring a post by highly-respected Reason Magazine back in 2021 led to Facebook having to acknowledge a fact-checking error in the fact-checking. While that incident was highly publicized, most such instances go unnoticed because the victim is simply not big enough to fight back.
A similar approach is taken with the advertising and promotion of rallies and special events hosted by conservatives who dare to use the term “patriotic” in their materials. In the early summer of 2020, the Red White n’ Blue’s tour promotion for a July 4th weekend event featured patriotic imagery was repeatedly censored by Facebook, with anyone posting the digital flier finding it taken down or having their account suspended.
The suppression of the July 4th event is consistent with other various reports of anti-American activities at Meta. In 2016, Facebook’s employees were accused of suppressing conservative articles in Facebook’s newsfeed “trending” section, which has since been discontinued. Specifically, the platform prevented stories about CPAC from going into the newsfeed through its “news curators” contractors. Facebook denied that it happened.
For those concerned about personal security, there have been numerous stories over time about Facebook’s either careless or deliberate disregard for user privacy. In 2018, Facebook became embroiled in a scandal when the British firm Cambridge Analytica sold user data to the Trump campaign. The controversy focused on how Cambridge Analytica obtained Facebook user data without user consent and made money off selling the acquired user data.
While Washington has done little to curtail Facebook’s power (many politicians inside the ruling class benefit from their activities), it has not escaped notice. Hearings have been held where comrade Zuckerberg has been forced to testify, but he is so confident in his absolute power that he encouraged Congress to regulate him! That’s a man who knows he controls the system!
It isn’t just me who has a bad attitude regarding Meta. In 2019, a report by former Sen. Jon Kyl and Covington & Burling LLP found that conservatives distrust Facebook due to:
- Ad labeling requirements (which potentially jeopardized non-profit status due to “political” labels)
- General ad policies (which said no ‘shocking and sensational content.’ used to prohibit pro-life ads until the policy was changed)
- Lack of page transparency about “false” ratings from the platform.
- Lack of conservative viewpoint diversity in the company,
slow ad-approval process. - lack of an oversight board to overlook appeals and decisions
- Lack of transparency about algorithms and content on users’ feeds.
With all of that noted, nothing that Meta has done on any of its three main platforms compares to the interference of Zuckerberg in the 2020 election. Using his organization Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), Zuckerberg poured $350 million into the 2020 election to “help ensure that Americans could vote during the height of the pandemic.” Much of CTCL’s money found its way into strategic areas in swing states that magically swung to Joe Biden long after polls were closed on election day. The movie 2000 Mules did a fantastic job of making the case for election tampering.
To bring this home for me, one of my former marketing folks, whose role was to organize and optimize our Facebook advertising, expressed continued frustration at Facebook’s ongoing advertising censorship. Whenever he submitted an ad to Facebook that contained the words patriotic, Trump, or politically conservative our ad submission would be declined due to community standard violations. He would speak to his Facebook advertising sales rep, who said he would take care of it. Never happened. The only fix was to remove the “offending” words from the ad submission.
As mentioned in a prior piece in this series, Nike was a very early adopter of woke- corporate policies. While Nike may have helped launch the curve, Meta and its various entities have been an inflection point along its path. While it is a great place for grandparents in Boca Raton to view pictures of their grandchildren in Seattle, it is not a great place from which to view photos of your investment account statements.
“Dislike” Meta in your portfolio and then “Unfriend” them for good.
This article originally appeared on The Rubin Report and has been published here with permission.
Rubin Wealth Advisors
American Conservative Value Fund
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