Someone @Lyft PR needs to be on this stat. I've hardly seen Lyft take any advantage of fuckups like these by Uber.
Some things are just too radioactive to touch.
Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists
101–110 of 373 posts
Re: Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists
#102You know what I find the most disturbing about this whole story?? "He also sits on a board that advises the Department of Defense"
Re: Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists
#103Attempting to blackmail the press if they challenge your company's PR? Specifically targeting parents' worst fears by threatening to reveal details of the location of their children? Openly rifling through the location metadata of another female journalist, a customer of theirs, without her consent? Implicitly saying they'll leak customer data of Uber customers who are journalists, the kind of thing that can potentia…
How do you opt out of airports?
Re: Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists
#104When Godaddy came out in support of SOPA, after a string of other obviously bad actions, I thought for sure it would harm their business. It didn't. Unfortunately I don't think this Uber story will be different. Most people don't take a stand on anything (unless it involves consuming even more fast food, like a Chick-fil-a "reverse boycott").
> When Godaddy came out in support of SOPA, after a string of other obviously bad actions, I thought for sure it would harm their business.
It hurt them enough to reverse their stance on SOPA in mere hours. Have you been to godaddy.com lately? "Internet freedom!" is actually one of the things they advertise on their page.
Now, I too was hoping in those days that the company would just die... and that's unlikely to happen to Uber as well, considering that dollar is kind and a lot has been given to Uber by so many investors. The best you can hope for is a massive firing of executives at the top, since that's where a lot of toxicity seems to be coming from.
Re: Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists
#105I can see how being assholes, intimidating the press, undermining rivals via dirty tricks, and other such behavior, can maximize shareholder value. So maybe we just have to accept that this is the new normal and we should all focus on how we can play dirty tricks on our competitors, how we can intimidate the journalists who have written bad stories on us or haven't covered us. Where does the strategy to use intimatio…
To be clear, I wrote the above in a sarcastic fashion to illustrate the downward spiral this would cause.
Re: Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists
#106The executive, Emil Michael, made the comments in a conversation he later said he believed was off the record. In a statement through Uber Monday evening, he said he regretted them and that they didn’t reflect his or the company’s views.
They "don't reflect his or the company's views?" How can they not be 100% reflective of his views? And how can we possibly take anything said by anyone at the executive level at Uber seriously at this point?
Re: Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists
#107Buzzfeed stories are normally penalized, but we take the penalty off for major stories. We've done that here. HN tends to frown on media controversy, but since this story seems destined to be above the line in any case, it may as well be the original source. We've demoted the other posts on the same story as duplicates.
This isn't a major story. It's an out-of-context clickbait dressed recount of a hypothetical story painted by a frustrated man at a private dinner. If there was a criminal suit filed along side the allegations made, perhaps you'd have a major story. This is just another in a long line of hit pieces that seem to have no basis in reality.
It's OK for frustrated people to threaten children now?
Re: Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists
#108Attempting to blackmail the press if they challenge your company's PR? Specifically targeting parents' worst fears by threatening to reveal details of the location of their children? Openly rifling through the location metadata of another female journalist, a customer of theirs, without her consent? Implicitly saying they'll leak customer data of Uber customers who are journalists, the kind of thing that can potentia…
They should probably fire Emil Michael or similar. The "spending 'a million dollars' to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. .... they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine" proposal is a bit out of order. The money to throw $1m around that kind of way comes from Google and like investors and they could object that they don't want to be…
To be fair, there's a big gap between saying how you could spend a million dollars and spending a million dollars.
But if someone who worked for me started talking about exacting revenge on enemies -- in a public forum or not -- I would definitely have a problem with that.
Re: Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists
#109Attempting to blackmail the press if they challenge your company's PR? Specifically targeting parents' worst fears by threatening to reveal details of the location of their children? Openly rifling through the location metadata of another female journalist, a customer of theirs, without her consent? Implicitly saying they'll leak customer data of Uber customers who are journalists, the kind of thing that can potentia…
They should probably fire Emil Michael or similar. The "spending 'a million dollars' to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. .... they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine" proposal is a bit out of order. The money to throw $1m around that kind of way comes from Google and like investors and they could object that they don't want to be…
And you have the love the sequence of events:
(1) First their senior business executive (Michael) not only floats his plan at very public venue, but mentions both the budget ($1M) and the number of researches (4) they were thinking of hiring.
(2) And then later, in damage control mode, the spokesperson (Hourdajian) tries to clean up by saying they've "never considered" doing opposition research -- despite Michael having just named both a specific budget they were thinking of allocating, and a specific number of researchers they were thinking of hiring.
Re: Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists
#110Attempting to blackmail the press if they challenge your company's PR? Specifically targeting parents' worst fears by threatening to reveal details of the location of their children? Openly rifling through the location metadata of another female journalist, a customer of theirs, without her consent? Implicitly saying they'll leak customer data of Uber customers who are journalists, the kind of thing that can potentia…
The threat against the children was vile and terrifying. The investors of Uber should be ashamed of themselves. Needless to say, a lot of Uber users are parents, and this news will definitely spread.