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Facebook’s attempt to smear the whistleblower

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Re: Facebook’s attempt to smear the whistleblower

#121

Post by [deleted] »

mbesto wrote: post #95
iammisc wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snowden advocated in favor of the government following their own law (not spying on people without judicially issued warrants). This 'whistleblower' is asking the government to violate their own law (the first amendment) by banning individual speech on these platforms. EDIT: Honestly, I could care less about facebook. Although I think Mark Zuckerberg should be in jail (look at the allegations that his company knowing…

> This 'whistleblower' is asking the government to violate their own law (the first amendment) by banning individual speech on these platforms. I could be mistaken, but I don't think she is specifically advocating for that? I believe she is saying specific things should be regulated...mainly the ability to configure timelines, greater control on use by teens, etc.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook’s attempt to smear the whistleblower

#122

Post by _dw7s »

Reading hacker news comments today, I found out that:

1. this is fishy

2. she is a political operative for the dems

3. she has a liberal bias therefore this is all fishy and she cannot be trusted

4. she is rich and has some backing so she is definitely a political operative. This one is especially true because if she was poor Facebook would have been SLAPPed her already into shutting up. So there's no winning here.

5. (US) adults are responsible enough for the government to not have to regulate social media. Let's conveniently temporarily forget about the Rohingya minority.

6. Facebook is a net positive for civilization

7. nothing is actually whistleblown, we already knew all that. Therefore, we're ok with it and we should ignore this. Also see 1.

8. We're dealing with Schrödinger's censorship. Conservative voices are being censored on Facebook which is ran by 'libs' and at the same time they're not censored as the government (also libs) prepares to censor them. Or censor them more? Who knows anymore. TLDR they're going to be censored.

9. the staple of 'tech companies' is discussed all over the place as someone is talking to congress about its internal workings so the news is all over HN. Super fishy (see 1) so definitely a hit piece. If there was only one or two links it would probably be fine. But so many links may definitely be the hand of some lib political operative. Or not? Who knows? We're just saying that to muddy the waters. Big if true!

I think I'm going to be taking a break from forums in general. Either some Facebook friendly PR machine got activated or the collective mind has been poisoned by years and years of misinformation and generally sowing mistrust to the point of 'everything is a conspiracy and nothing is real'.

Re: Facebook’s attempt to smear the whistleblower

#123

Post by spfzero »

fireball_blaze wrote: post #2

"If the best Facebook can come up with is this disgusting attempt at character assassination, Haugen is telling God’s own truth. We should listen to her." A pretty powerful closing statement IMHO.

What she's telling, or not telling, is irrelevant, and indeed, partly because she has little experience at FB and not in a position that would make her privy to nefarious plots.

What is relevant, is the documents, which are not being released in full. Only after they are will we see the full picture, so anything happening before that is just manufactured narrative to serve someone's purpose.

Re: Facebook’s attempt to smear the whistleblower

#124

Post by adolph »

josephg wrote: post #44
adolph wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. At this point in the world we need not take anyone's word for what a corpus says or does not say. Either the data, query, and processing exist and are documented or they may as well be making things up. Public forkable repo or gtfo.

Facebook would fight tooth and nail to get those documents removed if they show up on GitHub. They’d win, too - since they own copyright.

A repo need not be in a US or any jurisdiction. If it is important enough to have legislative talking time, it is important enough to be made public for people to make their own decisions about it. By keeping it private this is all hat and no cattle.

Re: Facebook’s attempt to smear the whistleblower

#126

Post by adolph »

_3u10 wrote: post #118
glitchc wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they are all ad hominem attacks. She shared ~18000 documents. Doesn't matter who the messenger is at this point, it's all about the veracity of the documents themselves. Did Facebook deny creating those documents? No. Did they refute statements from those documents? No. Hence statements about the whistleblower are not relevant.

She hasn't shared these documents with the public. All we have to go on is her summary of them, and the documents NBC News has selectively deemed relevant. NBC news has only shared 7000 pages, I'd assume this is probably 10% of the documents. We're essentially being asked to judge facebook when the prosecution is withholding 90% of the evidence. edit: It appears the shared documents were from a previous leak, I can't…

> NBC news has only shared 7000 pages

Where are they shared?

Re: Facebook’s attempt to smear the whistleblower

#127

Post by adolph »

cherrycherry98 wrote: post #96
fleddr wrote: post #82

Not seeing any "character assassination" in any of the quotes. None of Facebook's defense lines, low quality as they may be, seem overly personal. For the record, I fully side with the whistleblower's claims. It's just that this article is very emotional, and could have been so much more. This is a fascinating quote the author failed to address fully: "Facebook PR: “Despite all this, we agree on one thing; it’s time…

Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing for regulation for years. He wants this for two reasons: 1. Abdicating responsibility so that when the public or politicians complain about Facebook hosting or not hosting some content he can say it's not his problem, he follows the law. 2. The second is for regulatory capture. Once a social network gets a stigma of being uncool, people move on to the next thing. His status and net wo…

> Abdicating responsibility

Is it avoidance or asking for a democratic process to provide guidance? For example, yes automakers did push for a lot of rulemaking that cemented the car's position in transportation and yes a rule about driving on the left or right side is better decided by the community of drivers represented by their government, not GM alone.

Re: Facebook’s attempt to smear the whistleblower

#128

Post by mthoms »

xqcgrek2 wrote: post #72

The smear here is actually against Facebook. The whistleblower is clearly being boosted by Democratic operatives [1] and appeared in front of Congress the day after 60 minutes. [1] Jen Psaki's former employer https://www.dailywire.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-leftis...

Wow. That was some hit piece. Nothing was spared — They even managed to "casually" reveal her sexuality. For some reason.

Absolutely disgusting. I can't believe intelligent people read, let alone cite, this Enquirer-level garbage.

Re: Facebook’s attempt to smear the whistleblower

#129

Post by true_religion »

cratermoon wrote: post #92
koboll wrote: post #61

Okay, so Facebook has said she - worked there for less than two years and had no direct reports - never attended some sort of key meeting - did not work on the subject matter in question ...and therefore, she lacks context which undermines some of her claims. Which of those is a matter of character, or a "disgusting" attack? They might be wrong, or they might be right but bringing up irrelevancies, but the writer is…

The goal is to divert discussion from the issue and make the discussion about her personality. The "disgusting" part is not what Facebook says about her (their folks clearly don't have much to smear Haugen with if this is the worst), it's that they don't want to address the allegations directly. The "smear" such as it is, falls flat, but it's reprehensible for Facebook's people to want to make the discussion about he…

If she were in a visible position where she'd have learned this information, the people in PR could easily look up what projects she was on them come up with a targeted response disclosing only those facts.

However, since she didn't work on anything relevant, they have to do research without any guidance.

It's Day 1. They can't come out and say "we don't know what she's talking about or where she got her data, so we can't refute it."

As PR, the worst thing for them to do is deny something only to be hit by factual evidence; they'd rather know all the evidence to begin with them try to put it in a good light or reveal a good reason for things being that way.

Re: Facebook’s attempt to smear the whistleblower

#130

Post by mthoms »

xqcgrek2 wrote: post #84
FFRefresh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice analysis. I'm certainly not suggesting that this is a coordinated campaign by FB without evidence to suggest it, but the net result of these viral news events could be FB getting the regulation that they want. If one did want to coordinate such a campaign, there's a certain society-wide informational/narrative vulnerability that makes such a campaign potentially attractive: -You have a public who loves latching…

It is certainly coordinated. Several of the parties involved are influential and have a PR record in Democratic politics. https://www.dailywire.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-leftis...

I hope you realize the irony of posting smears of a whistleblower to the comment section of an article that decries smearing whistleblowers.

Do you have anything to say about the substance of the revelations? Or just want to interject irrelevant BS about her personal life?

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