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Sheryl Sandberg Is Said to Have Asked Facebook Staff to Research George Soros

nytimes.com

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Re: Sheryl Sandberg Is Said to Have Asked Facebook Staff to Research George Soros

#91

Post by isoskeles »

panarky wrote: post #74
mc32 wrote: post #2

>told subordinates to examine why Mr. Soros had criticized the tech companies and whether he stood to gain financially from the attacks. Well, he is an investor who has a history of causing financial damage to whole countries by betting against their currencies. So, it shouldn't be surprising FB would want to know what might be in store for them if he went nuclear on them. What is surprising is the odd bedfellows of…

When the NYT first published "Delay, Deny and Deflect" [1], Sandberg pretended she didn't know anything about it and promised to investigate. Later, she claimed the investigation turned up emails about Facebook's deceptive practices that "crossed her desk" [2], but made it sound like her involvement was peripheral and incidental. Naturally, now we learn those were all lies, and she was personally involved the entire…

> Facebook cannot be trusted to fix Facebook.

It's okay, that game is already lost. The headline is "Sheryl Sandberg..." We've moved on from Facebook being the object of the scandal to Sheryl Sandberg. I'm sorry it worked out this way, but as you point out yourself, she lied, which is really very super quite bad.

Seriously though, Facebook is bad for reasons that have very little to do with bickering with George Soros or lies and more to do with its actual effect on human relationships and identity. As a person who doesn't care about a lot of things, I can't find it in my heart to get upset about Sheryl Sandberg telling lies. I don't find the moralizing over it to be genuine, given all of the things happening in the world, and even given Facebook's effect on culture-at-large, Sheryl Sandberg lying (which I don't even 100% believe) is so low on the list.

Let me bring Hitler in as an example. And I'm not going to compare you to Hitler. No, I am going to compare Sheryl Sandberg to Hitler, but I am writing in her favor (kind of), so I feel like this is fair to do and not in the spirit of whatever that internet law about bringing up Hitler is.

Let's say Hitler led Nazi Germany to systematically exterminate millions of people (he did). Now, let's say he lied about it. People said, "Hey Hitler, are you killing millions of people?" And he said, "No, I am absolutely not doing that." Time passes and, one day, we come to find out Adolf Hitler did, in fact, lead Nazi Germany to kill millions of people. Imagine waking up in 1944, visiting Hacker News, reading some headlines, and spitting out your coffee because, come to find out, Hitler lied and also btw he killed a few million people. And for weeks, headline after headline, Hitler lied, Hitler is a liar.

All I am saying is, can we get some content from NYT on how Facebook is genuinely bad that doesn't have to do with their PR lies? Because I don't care about what their PR is doing or saying. I also don't care if Sandberg's career is ruined, I just don't see how any of this is relevant to anyone's interests other than something like Two Minutes Hate.

Re: Sheryl Sandberg Is Said to Have Asked Facebook Staff to Research George Soros

#92

Post by jacquesm »

dstroot wrote: post #8

She did what I would have done if someone was attacked my company for no obvious reason - I’d want to know if they stood to gain and how. Obviously when someone holds a short position and bashed a company it’s pretty transparent. That’s a big reason why Tesla was in the news so much the last 12 months. It’s when FB went on the offensive and started attacking Soros with “factually questionable” information that they c…

That's fine. But she lied about the whole thing which is not. It's a far cry from 'some emails crossed my desk' to 'I directed the research be done'.

Re: Sheryl Sandberg Is Said to Have Asked Facebook Staff to Research George Soros

#93

Post by natch »

isoskeles wrote: post #89
natch wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She did previously deny knowing about the PR company doing the oppo research on Soros... generally when there's a denial at a high level and then contradictory evidence comes out, it's newsworthy. It's not airtight evidence that she lied, just more of a glaring red flag that a closer look might be warranted.

Who cares if she lied?

Shareholders. They often prefer having confidence that the statements of executives can be relied on.

Re: Sheryl Sandberg Is Said to Have Asked Facebook Staff to Research George Soros

#94

Post by mc32 »

natch wrote: post #93
isoskeles wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares if she lied?

Shareholders. They often prefer having confidence that the statements of executives can be relied on.

Glenn Greenwald would say the NYT has had several big lies and omissions, should a news org be held to a high bar perhaps?

Re: Sheryl Sandberg Is Said to Have Asked Facebook Staff to Research George Soros

#95

Post by astronautjones »

thisisit wrote: post #76
briandear wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bank of Thailand: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-george-soros-broke-the-b... Soros wasn’t alone, but the hedges funds certainly helped crush Thailand in 1997, triggering the Asian financial crisis. It’s not a stretch to suggest that his massive funding of political groups in countries in which he has bet against the currency is connected.

Thanks for the reference. It was an interesting read: Yet Soros wasn't the biggest single speculator to hold a position against the currency. Julian Robertson's Tiger Fund had three times the exposure of Soros with almost $3 billion bet against the baht. If anything, Julian Robertson would have been more motivated to engineer Thailand's decline. It seems there were only rumors that Soros had anything to do with it, a…

> It seems there were only rumors that Soros had anything to do with it, all the while someone else was more profitable than him. And given that he was already famous for the GBP trade why not blame him?

because it's a conservative, anti-semitic trope. he is the ur-villian, the mega boss after people tire of you complaining about the clintons. it's been this way for twenty years

Re: Sheryl Sandberg Is Said to Have Asked Facebook Staff to Research George Soros

#96

Post by natch »

mc32 wrote: post #94
natch wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shareholders. They often prefer having confidence that the statements of executives can be relied on.

Glenn Greenwald would say the NYT has had several big lies and omissions, should a news org be held to a high bar perhaps?

That’s another topic, and they are. We’re talking about an executive of a public company and the NYT isn’t the only one pointing out the problems, which are real.

Re: Sheryl Sandberg Is Said to Have Asked Facebook Staff to Research George Soros

#97

Post by askafriend »

docbrown wrote: post #77
rdlecler1 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think a lot of poorly managed companies even get to a $1b valuation. Easy to be an armchair quarterback. One could argue that it’s been one of the beat managed companies and like most companies it faces ups and downs.

>I don’t think a lot of poorly managed companies even get to a $1b valuation. I think any product can become valuable depending on how you market it to your targeted users. FB is said to be somewhere you can go to be with friends and family; share memories, no matter where you are. If we’re going to ignore all of the ads and data mining going on behind the scenes, it’s easy to say that FB is doing a good for society.…

> I think any product can become valuable depending on how you market it to your targeted users.

Alright, not to be rude but this is a dead giveaway that you've never built a business or product before and you don't know what you're talking about.

I hate to call you out like this...I understand the sentiment you're trying to express, but any entrepreneur or product leader who looks at your comment will immediately know that it has no legs in reality.

This is not how any of this works.

Your follow-up is also a completely different argument than the one you initially presented.

Re: Sheryl Sandberg Is Said to Have Asked Facebook Staff to Research George Soros

#98

Post by PavlovsCat »

askafriend wrote: post #37
natch wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which outrage are you referring to? I didn't see any in the article. It seemed pretty even keeled.

I'm referring more to the outrage around the article, not necessarily the article itself.

Refer to it by link or quote. You shouldn't refer to something in sum when you didn't address a single actual piece of it.
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