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Meet the Facebook Portal TV, a $149 video chatting device I wholeheartedly don’t recommend.   Chris Monroe/CNET When I first sat down to write this article, I struggled. A lot. Reviewing products is one of my main roles at CNET — and yet, I had no nuanced words for the Facebook Portal TV. “Don’t buy it” is all I could — and can — come up with. I ditched my own Facebook account earlier this year after covering the social media giant’s original Portal video-chat-centric smart displays last fall. Like so many other folks, I had read about Cambridge Analytica and the other ways the social media giant misused user data. But the headlines surrounding Facebook are still pretty bleak.Most recently, Facebook has been in the news for how it handles fact-checking of political ads. Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren protested with her own false ad. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin chimed in on Facebook’s policy on political ads in an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg published last Thursday in The New York Times. “Every square inch of that is a lie and it’s under your logo,” Sorkin wrote regarding a Trump campaign ad on Facebook aimed at 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden that contained misinformation. “That’s not defending free speech, Mark, that’s assaulting truth,” he added. Some have called for Facebook to join Twitter and stop displaying political ads, but Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg defended the decision to keep them on the site in a video posted to Twitter: “We believe in free expression, we believe in political speech and ads can be an important part of that,” said Sheryl Sandberg when asked why Facebook decided not to ban political ads pic.twitter.com/1RcW3D01Sz— Bloomberg TicToc (@tictoc) October 31, 2019 While “posts and ads from politicians are generally not subjected to fact-checking,” according to a Facebook support page, it relies on the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network to certify fact checkers for other site content. Check Your Fact, a subsidiary of Daily Caller, is one of those third-party fact checkers. Daily Caller has links to white supremacists. Facebook did not immediately respond to CNET’s request for comment.Facebook is also testing out Facebook News, a curated news service that includes conservative outlet Breitbart, sparking controversy. In short, there’s way too much going on with Facebook for me to recommend sticking its latest round of camera-equipped Portal devices in your home. That includes the $149 Facebook Portal TV. New territory99.9999% of the products I have trouble recommending have issues related to the products themselves that are hard to overlook. They don’t perform well. They cost too much. They have a weird app. Sometimes, it’s all of those things combined. Even when there are multiple issues with one product, there’s usually something that makes it recommendable to at least someone. I just can’t get there with the Facebook Portal TV. It’s a complete anomaly — a solidly performing, decently priced device that just isn’t suited for anyone because of the privacy concerns and increasingly alarming issues plaguing the social networking site. That said, here’s an overview of the tech
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