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Facebook's PR feels broken

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Re: Facebook's PR feels broken

#251

Post by kd5bjo »

Barrin92 wrote: post #243
edanm wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've not talked to Facebook employees personally but I've witnessed the same degree of delusion at other large tech companies. Some are straight-up like a cult with employees willing to defend just about anything their company does regardless of how hazardous it was. Which is even more baffling if one takes into consideration that these are usually salaried employees working there only for a few years with no perso…

> But it kind of bugs me that someone not having the same views is branded in such a way, as if somehow clearly you know the truth, so anyone who isn't automatically on your side must be delusional/evil in some way. That's not what I believe at all. I've had plenty of discussions in my life with people from all kinds of sectors and the tech industry, in particular, FAANG employees in my experience stand out in this w…

> Can you imagine any ordinary industry acting like this?

You mean proactively explaining to their workforce the reasoning behind actions likely to gain widespread attention in the press?

Yes; that's called treating your employees with respect. Everyone generally expects employees to have some level of insider knowledge, and it's polite to give your workers enough of a heads-up to not be blindsided by questions from friends and family.

The difference with Facebook and some other tech companies is that there's enough trust that employees are generally better informed about the strategic and competitive landscape the company is operating in, and that context can explain actions that may look nonsensical from the outside.

More industries should work like this, not less -- It's treating workers as people that can think for themselves instead of simply cogs in the machine.

Re: Facebook's PR feels broken

#252

Post by quanticle »

taurath wrote: post #132
smacktoward wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that the U.S. has this pesky thing called the First Amendment that makes restricting political speech difficult.

But don't forget, money is speech, and corporations are people. All of which is absolutely not in the first amendment.

Also remember that nonprofits, labor unions, and community groups are corporations too.

Corporate speech is just "speech for groups of people". Those groups may be for-profit corporations, or they may be nonprofit.

Re: Facebook's PR feels broken

#253

Post by quanticle »

cycomanic wrote: post #218
smacktoward wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that the U.S. has this pesky thing called the First Amendment that makes restricting political speech difficult.

Why do Americans always think that the freedom of speech is a exclusively American thing? All liberal democracies have similar concepts, they do put different limits on it (just like the US puts limits)

America has far fewer limits on freedom of speech than other democracies.

Hate speech law in the US is practically nonexistent. Libel is much more difficult case to argue. Restrictions on political speech are widely held to be unconstitutional.

Compare that with other democracies, such as the UK, Germany or India, and I think you'll find that the US does have significantly more freedom of speech than other democratic nations.

Re: Facebook's PR feels broken

#254

Post by pinkfoot »

quanticle wrote: post #253
cycomanic wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do Americans always think that the freedom of speech is a exclusively American thing? All liberal democracies have similar concepts, they do put different limits on it (just like the US puts limits)

America has far fewer limits on freedom of speech than other democracies. Hate speech law in the US is practically nonexistent. Libel is much more difficult case to argue. Restrictions on political speech are widely held to be unconstitutional. Compare that with other democracies, such as the UK, Germany or India, and I think you'll find that the US does have significantly more freedom of speech than other democratic…

Nope, it’s just that Americans are sufficiently politically homogenous that they don’t try to say the forbidden things.

Try, for example, to blog that your company should not trade with Israel whilst tendering for a federal contract.

(Just an example: I don’t have a dog in the actual fight).

Re: Facebook's PR feels broken

#255

Post by brohee »

kd5bjo wrote: post #232
Barrin92 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What makes you more qualified to judge whether the public perception was accurate as compared to someone who actually worked there - an "FB vet" in your own words? For starters, most of us here don't benefit financially from putting a positive spin on disasters at Facebook. As the Upton Sinclair saying goes, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.…

I was working at Facebook when the CA story broke, but not when the events happened. I was in a department far removed from any of the involved parties. I haven't worked for them for several years now, and I currently own no FB stock outside of broad-based index funds¹. As I recall, the sense of unfairness that was going around was rooted mostly in it feeling like old news. CA was the ghost of a bad policy that had a…

There may have been effort to stop it from happening again, but from the outside it seems there has been zero effort to mitigate the harm already done, I don't think Facebook contacted anyone to tell them their very personal data had been downloaded by a third party because one of their Facebook friend participated in some poll, and that they would now be targeted by very personalized political propaganda .

It was swept under the rug.

Re: Facebook's PR feels broken

#256

Post by humanrebar »

taurath wrote: post #249
humanrebar wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is not speech, but speaking publicly on a scale larger than a literal soap box on a street corner has never been free. Banning spending money to express oneself is banning expression just like banning paying for raw milk is banning raw milk. And groups do have voting rights. That's how Congress works. The U.S. is a republic.

Are you saying congress voting on legislation is akin to a corporation voting on members of Congress?

I'm saying that republics are voting as groups. By definition.

Not any arbitrary group gets to directly vote, no. But different groups do have rights: races, religions, genders, ethnicities, and, yes, groups of people with common values and interests.

Re: Facebook's PR feels broken

#257

Post by ogre_codes »

rhubarbquid wrote: post #109
ogre_codes wrote: post #44

One thing this piece really brings home to me is how unethical it is for media to sell sponsored content intermixed and indistinguishable from their own content. How do you trust a media outlet when their content is for sale? I know this practice pre-dates the internet, but it's hugely damaging to people's faith in the media. I think Facebooks' failure in PR is more a symptom of how far Facebook has slid down the eth…

It's almost like there's a reason the FTC requires disclosure of paid content...

In this specific case, it was clear Teen Vogue and Facebook were trying to do exactly that, and the fact that they pulled it suggests to me that omitting the "Sponsored Content" warning was part of the terms of the deal. I suspect this is extremely difficult to police and people get away with it all the time.

Re: Facebook's PR feels broken

#258

Post by jyrkesh »

gfodor wrote: post #168
manfredo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone who worked at Facebook for the better part of a decade responded that they felt the media coverage was unfair to Facebook. You were suprised by this response because from an outsider's perspective you felt that Facebook employees should be apologetic? What makes you more qualified to judge whether the public perception was accurate as compared to someone who actually worked there - an "FB vet" in your own wor…

The great irony to me is that Facebook does a lot of stuff people should be angry and scared about, but oddly enough the Cambridge Analytica situation, which broke this whole dam open, is not one of them, and is one where I think they are being treated unfairly. The reason it ends up being an issue is because of politics: it gives people an explanation and someone to blame for an election that did not play out accord…

Yeah, it's important to note that while my anecdote was from the "post-CA timeframe", they had also just had an exploit that resulted in mass harvesting of OAuth tokens[1].

And of course, a couple months later it came out that they were storing passwords in plaintext logs[2].

This wasn't just about CA. There was a class of problems that FB was facing, and the guy didn't acknowledge a single thing they could have done better.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/09/50-mi...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2019/03/21/705588364/facebook-stored-mil...

Re: Facebook's PR feels broken

#259

Post by artemisyna »

saagarjha wrote: post #214
duxup wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you help clarify what really happened?

From a factual perspective, it wasn't on the App Store. (It was distributed via an enterprise certificate, which I find to be even worse, since they are explicitly not supposed to be used in the manner that they were.)

Not going to comment on whether or not it was philosophically correct, but I will note that Google (not to mention dozens of other companies) were doing the exact same thing — just that they didn’t get called out for it until a few days after.

IMO, I wouldn’t be surprised if this happened this way cause Apple had decided to use FB as the fall for a PR media blitz. (In particular, Apple made the decision to “enforce on FB” basically the day after their “someone else can turn on your camera with FaceTime without you knowing” bug.)

Re: Facebook's PR feels broken

#260

Post by artemisyna »

duxup wrote: post #45
artemisyna wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that knows the person that originally tipped Apple off about the tracking... this is such a misinformed editorialization of what actually happened where I don't even know where to start.

Can you help clarify what really happened?

Among other things: lots of other companies (including Google) were doing the same thing, wasn’t an app for general distribution (the kid had already had his parents permission for using said app), order of magnitude a thousand people ever installed the thing.

Enforcement from Apple on FB basically came the day after they were hit with an embarrassing “Hackers can turn on your camera without you knowing it FaceTime” bug. This part is hearsay, but, IIRC, Apple only started enforcing on the dozens of other companies that were doing the same thing once legal action was threatened for uneven enforcement. (Meanwhile, the kid that I chatted with that reported things to Apple in the first place... definitely reported more than just FB.)

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