A media company publishing a negative article on Facebook is like Ford publishing a negative article on Tesla
Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok
221–230 of 324 posts
Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok
#222What is a "Republican strategy firm?" A consulting firm with the Republican party as one of their clients? What's the point of making "Republican" so prominent in the article? Is it just to use the negative connotation most WP readers have about the Republican party to malign Facebook a little more? It seems like we're just spectating an op-ed war, and discussing this article as if there's any meaning to it other tha…
>What is a "Republican strategy firm?" A consulting firm that advertises itself as being "born from political campaigns" and being "right of center." Both things on the second slide of their homepage.
>Stagwell, formerly The Stagwell Group, is a global marketing and communications group. Founded in 2015 by Mark Penn.
>Penn was a chief strategist and pollster in the Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential campaign
Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok
#223Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok
#224In case you think this is some esoteric issue involving kids’ stuff — keep in mind that the founder of TikTok was one of the most balanced voices within China, who argued that the country needed to engage with the West in a healthier manner. Zuckerberg et al and their incessant lobbying for that TikTok ban basically vaporized that guy’s pull within China, which eliminated a super-valuable asset for the West. So, yeah…
I won't pretend to know all of the details but this comes off as kind of conspiracy-theory.
Why is Zuckerberg the boogieman? He just wants to run his company well and get as many eyeballs on paid advertisements as possible... right? Why is there some notion that he wants to push either a liberal or conservative agenda internationally?
It's near impossible to moderate a billion people posting crap on a social media platform well enough to the point where you keep everybody happy. How does this make him "the single greatest threat to Western society outside of Russia"?
Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we can put aside our own ideology and national bias, the business model and tactics of ByteDance, Facebook or any other company in the ad-tech supported social media realm operates more-or-less with the same objectives and does the same things. Ideology is just the trash can we are all eating from.
It's not necessarily wise to put aside national bias. There are well informed, intelligent, honorable people who believe that Chinese hegemony would be a bad thing. In that lens, it would be perfectly consistent to want to prevent Western citizens from being influenced by the Chinese company/govt, while being OK with the same power in the hands of Western governments. IE, you would need to also assert that Western co…
There are well informed, intelligent, honorable people who believe that American hegemony has been bad thing.
Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being unable to find the best candidates because you have racial prejudices or prejudices towards anyone with prior employment at the F in FAANG are both bad for business. You have a massive systematic blind spot that will make your company less competitive relative to peers because you have a personal ax to grind. I might add that prior employment at Facebook is very positively correlated with engineering talent --…
> smaller labor force you are willing to hire and a lower quality one. The first part is true. The second is a leap, plenty of high quality talent actively chooses to not work at FB, or happens to not work there. By not selecting from the former FB pool I have not lowered the overall quality of my labor pool. I have increased the integrity standards though.
Given the nebulous notion of a set of high quality talent (assume quality is a scalar and they're the people above a given threshold), it's pretty clear that:
len(set(high quality talent) - set(ever employed at facebook)) Note that "refuses to work at facebook" doesn't select for engineering talent, while "ever employed at facebook" explicitly does, meaning the average talent in the set containing facebook employees is higher.
Given all this, you have to fill the roll (or why hire?) and you don't have infinite time (there is a cost associated with every day you've not filled the role relative to it being filled). Given those constraints, if you limit your pool due to prejudice the optimal outcome is for you to hire a lower quality person versus the situation if you were not prejudiced; if you hire the same quality person, it means you likely paid for it in another form, namely the cost associated with the role being unfilled longer.
Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
VW emissions scandal is small potatoes compared to what Facebook is doing to the world. Working for a war machine company (Lockheed, GD, etc) would be a much better analogy, and I think the question is a valid one for employees of those companies, too.
The VW emissions violations are 100% proven deceit among customers and governments, as nefarious programming in their vehicles is much harder to detect than say, an editorial funded by FB spreading rumors about a competitor where the reader can form their own opinion. Unethical, yea, but 'small potatoes' compared to VW.
Facebook is party to genocide and is actively working to end democracy. Lying on emissions reports is small potatoes compared to that, yes.
Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok
#228Silly clickbait title. Why not say Democrat Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign Democrat TikTok?
Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok
#229Serious question, for those with more experience than me “in the game” running big successful companies: are dirty tactics like this (and worse) par for the course and generally expected, and it’s sort of understood that the outsiders/general public are shielded from it? Or is it actually shocking? It often seems like there’s two “worlds” operating at the same time. In one, there’s outrage and indignation at this sor…
Many commenters here have pointed out this is the norm. I'll also point out that most companies fail, and many of the ones that don't fail are despised by their customers/users. What can we say of the companies that succeed and aren't despised? They typically don't do shit like this. The other problem with thinking "this is what everybody does" is there's the unstated "so keep your mouth shut and just go along with i…
I spent five years at Facebook, and it was probably the best place I've ever worked.
The people were fantastic (except a the ex G and Amazon folks who were a lot less fun to work with), the problems were fun and the culture and tools were phenomenal.
Granted, I don't agree with what they're doing in this article, but if you think they're the only big tech company that does this, I have a bunch of bridges to sell you ;)
Generally, large, publicly traded companies tend to behave like psychopaths, but personally I think FB held out a lot longer than most.
Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok
#230In case you think this is some esoteric issue involving kids’ stuff — keep in mind that the founder of TikTok was one of the most balanced voices within China, who argued that the country needed to engage with the West in a healthier manner. Zuckerberg et al and their incessant lobbying for that TikTok ban basically vaporized that guy’s pull within China, which eliminated a super-valuable asset for the West. So, yeah…
Trump (and Pompeo) destroys the liberal oriented ideology in China much more effectively than whatever Xi did.
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