Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 324 posts

Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok

#271

Post by ardit33 »

Melatonic wrote: post #255
kmlx wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook continues to be the single greatest threat to Western society outside of Russia. this statement is both hyperbolic and naive at the same time.

Hyperbolic for sure but I do not think it is naive at all. Facebook has proven many times over they are basically the Mafia of Silicon Valley and nothing they say should be trusted or taken at face value. That being said there are many other threats to western society and while many or most of those will exploit Facebook as much as they can for influence they will continue to exist should Facebook fall.

The Engineering wage raises during 2010-2014 are a huge part due to Facebook back then entering a biding war for talent, which google had to counter which raised comps for everyone. Also, after 2015 you had more companies hitting the fray (Uber, Airbnb, etc). If it wasn't for Facebook, the compensation industry wise would look something like MSFT's comp (pretty low in general).

So, for one thing, Meta / Facebook has been great at raising the comps for engineering in SV.

Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok

#272

Post by naravara »

spoonjim wrote: post #252
numair wrote: post #193

In 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…

LOL. The single greatest threat to Western society is Western society itself. Declining fertility, mass immigration at the border but brutally hard immigration for high skill workers, civil wars over pointless culture war issues, and the destruction of the social norms that once held us together. But go blame Facebook if you want.

Facebook is a major contributor to the pointless cultural war obsession and the erosion of pro-social norms though.

Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok

#273

Post by ModernMech »

KarlKemp wrote: post #260
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pl…

Facebook has consistently disappointed anyone working on any of these issues, from Islamic State recruitment to Myanmar's ethnic violence. Because young people in tech are generally thought to be smart and happy, i. e. Democrats, these failing have been interpreted as growing pains and various lapses in skill or judgement. The idea has, however, been catching on that Zuckerberg may just be a Greenwald-Democrat, i. e.…

I believe Zuckerberg never made it past the "I don't know why these dumb fucks trust me" phase of his psychological development. He's never fully grasped that the fact that people did in fact trust him means he has a responsibility rather than a mandate. Unfortunately every time Zuckerberg has abused his power, he never faces a single consequence, so he just keeps learning the wrong lesson again and again.

Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok

#274

Post by _3u10 »

alphabetting wrote: post #113
throwaway2474 wrote: post #77

Serious 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…

This is par for the course. Done by majority of big corps and nothing wrong with it imo. Stating TikTok is a danger isn't a stretch. The hyperventilating in this piece is hyped up by republican and FB angles but almost every big company is doing comms like this.

Some have even bought the entire newspaper to make sure it stays on message.

Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok

#275

Post by jollybean »

Spivak wrote: post #234
jollybean wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Facebook continues to be the single greatest threat to Western society outside of Russia" This is ridiculous hyperbole. And TikTok, as a Chinese company whereupon they can be compelled to do the bidding of the CCP at any time, in whatever terms, remains problematic. It doesn't matter what the 'founder' thinks.

Do you apply this logic to all companies not in the US? Do you worry that the American Honda Motor Company is a sleeper cell for Japanese state interests?

The CCP has very specific influence on companies in China, that has no parrallel elsewhere. Specifically they require companies to hire CCP members that have internal positions with oversight, the CCP will remove leaders as they see fit, require arbitrary censoring as they see fit.

This is obviously much more of a concern for companies in the information domain such as social media or finance, than others such as manufacturing.

Donald Trump for example, could not remove the Google founders by any means.

Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok

#276

Post by martingoodson »

bko wrote: post #265
bostonsre wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it hyperbolic and why is it naive? It was a tool used to influence elections in the United States, I can't think of any other entity that has had a larger negative impact on our society recently (maybe coronavirus?).

> It was a tool used to influence elections in the United States Are you talking about fake Russian accounts buying $100k worth of facebook ads in 2016? That constitutes 0.00625% of total spending (1.6 bn) on the 2016 election. Or are you talking about something else? https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/facebook-sold-100000-ads-fak...

The IRA Russian troll farm had 1000 employees in 2015. They used Facebook as a tool to influence elections in the United States.

This is very well documented https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

And I don’t know why the sister comment about Facebook being used to commit genocide in Myanmar was flagged and killed. This is also well documented by eg the NYT and the UN. It was also admitted by Facebook itself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...

Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok

#277

Post by snowwrestler »

temp8964 wrote: post #188
nmilo wrote: post #137

What 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…

Lots of comments to this miss the point. If another tech company uses a “Democrat strategy firm”, the report won’t mention it, or even put it in the title.

Every article about Mark Penn’s work for Microsoft mentioned that he was a Democratic strategist at the time.

Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok

#278

Post by bllguo »

boc wrote: post #269
throwaway4good wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many Chinese, the US has showed its true face in the past couple of years. Unfortunately this digs a lot deeper than Facebook. Facebook is guilty of poor management; involving themselves in partisan politics in order to get a competitor banned is an incredible stupid risk to take.

The US hasn't changed - it's always been a country of crazy people and smart people and zealots and honest, hard working folks. There's no such thing as our "true face" - American was populated by the radicals and risk-takers from other, older societies. We've always been a nation of slightly insane people.

Absurd, of course there is a "true face." Whether the country has stayed the same or not has nothing to do with it, this is a discussion about how the US is perceived internationally. We have been flooding the rest of the world with its messaging and cultural exports for decades. In many places, China included, people genuinely looked up to the US. That has changed meaningfully across the globe.

Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok

#279

Post by bastardoperator »

rchaud wrote: post #194
bastardoperator wrote: post #186

Gen-Z doesn't give a damn about Facebook, or Republicans.

Gen Z is the largest or second largest user group for Instagram, a wholly owned subsidiary of FB. Saying that X doesn't care about FB indicates ignorance of the simple fact that one is spending a lot of time reading what FB thinks you should be reading.

That's like saying Gen Z loves Office365 because they play XBox. It's just simply not the case. Facebook and Instagram are different products, Facebook is bleeding millions of users, and growth rates for Instagram are levelling out. These are just facts and it's mostly because Gen Z.

Re: Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok

#280

Post by edmundsauto »

ok123456 wrote: post #225
edmundsauto wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, totally agree! They usually aren’t the ones making the case that for Us citizens, it’s better to have data in the Us companies hands rather than Chinese.

I may have missed your overall point though - would you mind being explicit about it?

Post reply on HN