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

Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 168 posts

Re: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

#71

Post by fthssht »

Balgair wrote: post #52

This Times piece should be taken seriously by FB, it's shareholders, employees, and users. With good sourcing, this paints a very immature picture of the company, from leadership on down to the users. Though the article uses the Russian interference as the launching off point, in my reading, it seems that these attacks on our democracy are essentially waived off. That the most pressing issue for Zuck was not that the…

What is the extent of the Russian interference really though? Studies show it didn't change the outcome. We still don't really know who hacked the DNC, whether it was Russia as a hand selected group of people from intelligence agencies included was likely, or whether it was an insider as implied by Assange and security experts who looked at how fast the information was downloaded. We know Russia did take both sides on issues like black lives matter to "cause division" We know they created a "Buff Bernie" meme, but it really feels like a massive excuse by the Democrats for an embarrassing failure. The whole thing at this point has come to feel comical. Am I missing something or is this still all a bunch of nonsense strewn around for clicks and ratings?

Re: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

#72

Post by shard972 »

koops wrote: post #42
panarky wrote: post #19

Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticis…

Coordinated, inauthentic behavior?

Seems pretty authentic to me.

Re: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

#73

Post by fzeroracer »

astrange wrote: post #35
ilovecaching wrote: post #24

To me the negative press cycle involving Facebook and other advertising companies is more about the hidden war between the new age digital advertisers, and the former rulers of ads: the conventional news outlets. The news outlets will jump on any chance they can get to kill their competitors just like any other company. Without Facebook, they could become the sole source of news again, and reap the lost ad revenue th…

The purpose of propaganda is to make you feel that the smart choice is to not trust anything you hear.

Every time I hear someone claim 'I just don't trust the news in general' it makes me weep. Not only have we failed at imparting basic critical thinking for people to make informed decisions as to the validity of various news pieces, it also just confirms that as you mentioned the propagandists are winning.

If you claim all news sources are fake news, then the only winner in that race to the bottom are the ones making actual fake content.

Re: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

#74

Post by throwawaymath »

BeetleB wrote: post #70
throwawaymath wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. More than a quarter of Americans and half of "young people" have not reported anything about Facebook. In point of fact, a quarter of the 4,594 people surveyed by Pew Research between May 29 and June 11 report deleting the Facebook app.[1] Of those, half who qualify as young deleted the app. Stop getting your statistics from news. This kind of casual stats citing frustrates me beyond belief. Audit your sources. _…

>In point of fact, a quarter of the 4,594 people surveyed by Pew Research between May 29 and June 11 report deleting the Facebook app.[1] Of those, half who qualify as young deleted the app. For a population of 330 million, if you want a 95% confidence level and a 2% margin of error, you need only 2401 people in your sample. This is assuming the survey sampled appropriately (i.e. random selection methodology). It is…

Nice try. I'm well versed in the statistics but I'm not blindly criticizing the sample because it's small.

I'm criticizing exactly what you called out as an assumption - the methodology of the sample; namely that they survey's distribution matches the population distribution.

So thanks for the lesson in p values, but it has nothing to do with my point. I take issue with blindly citing sources without doing due diligence, especially when the survey was collected over a very small window of time across a population that most likely doesn't match Americans in toto.

Re: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

#75

Post by ilovecaching »

fzeroracer wrote: post #73
astrange wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of propaganda is to make you feel that the smart choice is to not trust anything you hear.

Every time I hear someone claim 'I just don't trust the news in general' it makes me weep. Not only have we failed at imparting basic critical thinking for people to make informed decisions as to the validity of various news pieces, it also just confirms that as you mentioned the propagandists are winning. If you claim all news sources are fake news, then the only winner in that race to the bottom are the ones making…

Trust != assumed validity. It simply means I do think critically and do my research before trusting non-primary sources of information.

And weep all you want, I'd rather people question the news then blindly accept everything they're fed on TV and in the papers. The news cycles have become extremely sensationalized.

Re: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

#76

Post by naravara »

IBM wrote: post #43
panarky wrote: post #19

Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticis…

A few months ago Bloomberg published a story which I'm 99% sure was directed by Facebook PR, in-line with their strategy being reported on in this story [1][2]. Also can any mods tell me why all my comments are dead? [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-08/is-apple-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17719607

Wow, first the embarrassment around that secret chips planted in our data-centers story and now this. It's going to be a long time before I take Bloomberg's tech industry coverage seriously again.

Re: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

#77

Post by thanatropism »

skeptic_69 wrote: post #45
thanatropism wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a small piece of a wider process, but Jaron Lanier is having such a global impact; probably much more than what Anglos imagine.

not just jaron lanier! there are multiple thinkers who are fellow travelrs. Cal newport, Tristan harris, Nicholas Carr...

I've been following Nicholas Carr for a while. It's just that Jaron Lanier specifically is making quite a splash in the "developing world". His message particularly resonate with our banana-republic election season online panics.

Re: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

#78

Post by wpietri »

bepotts wrote: post #21
tareqak wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider a significant drop in Facebook's European user base to be crisis [0]? [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-revenue-and-user-gr... - Facebook's user base is declining in Europe, and that ought to terrify its American bosses

Losing 2 to 4 million users out of 375 million users is hardly "significant". It's something to look out for of course, but trying to insinuate that Facebook is in trouble in Europe with those numbers is a stretch.

It's definitely significant for a company that a) has grown steadily since inception, and b) has a valuation based on continued growth. Facebook's stock is trading something like 35% below this year's peak, and this is part of why.

Re: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

#79

Post by headsoup »

gonehome wrote: post #57
Balgair wrote: post #52

This Times piece should be taken seriously by FB, it's shareholders, employees, and users. With good sourcing, this paints a very immature picture of the company, from leadership on down to the users. Though the article uses the Russian interference as the launching off point, in my reading, it seems that these attacks on our democracy are essentially waived off. That the most pressing issue for Zuck was not that the…

From people that work there they are hiring unlimited headcount to work on integrity teams - the goal of which is to stop the kind of manipulation that happened in the 2016 election. Given the decisions Facebook has made Zuck seems like a really good CEO and when FB makes something their focus they usually pull it off - fixing mobile, instagram moves against snapchat, etc. The impression I get from people that work t…

Are these people in the PR department?

Because FB's outward behaviour and actions don't seem to reflect your statements

And hiring 'unlimited headcount' is usually a sign of ticking a box and not actually understanding what needs to be done, i.e. "what do you mean it's still a problem, look at all the people we threw at this!"

Re: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

#80

Post by viburnum »

kakaorka wrote: post #9

Makes me think about the quote ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!’ Of course they don’t care about anything but profit and growth because it’s what makes them richer.

The leadership of Facebook has more money than they could ever enjoy. They do all this sleazy stuff because they enjoy being sleazy.
Post reply on HN