Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

81–90 of 168 posts

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

#81
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…

The two part Frontline episode on PBS really illustrates your point. Facebook needs to take a stand.

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

#82
post #71
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 o…

Outside the now, well supported evidence of Russia's involvement in the hacking of the DNC emails we have massive donations to groups like the NRA, political campaigns and hiring people like Maria Butina to influence politicians. We've seen them try to meet with Trump's family in order to provide them with damaging information on Hillary clinton in exchange for dropping sanctions. We've also already had indictments of people within the Russian government that were apparently involved with the disinformation campaigns. With lots of information about their groups and US based organizations they used.

You have to ignore the information available to you to claim the extent of their interference wasn't broad.

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

#83
post #64
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…

> This extremely serious, and continuing, attack on the public seems to not really matter to any of the parties involved, only that they may get 'in trouble' or lose money... ??? Isn't that the modus operandi of every company. I'm just thinking in my head back through serious crises involving companies, and all of the ones I can recall have senior management concerned about the same thing. (Losing money, and getting…

>> This extremely serious, and continuing, attack on the public seems to not really matter to any of the parties involved, only that they may get 'in trouble' or lose money...

> ???

> Isn't that the modus operandi of every company.

Does that make it alright?

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

#84
post #71
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 o…

Some citations would help.

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

#85

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…

I get that you can be skeptical of the press but to claim that anecdotal or hearsay from friends is more trustworthy is really odd to me. This strikes me as an easy way to fall for false rumors. I'd rather put trust in the fact that there is plenty of people who would benefit from reporting about the inaccuracy of the claims of other journalists. We saw this with the Bloomberg story about purported Chinese attacks on hardware companies.

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

#86
post #41

I rendered my disapproval of Facebook by deleting it. That is the only action they care about.

They kept your shadow profile and are still tracking you, I guarantee it

The shadow profile is probably just as valuable as a real one when it comes to selling advertising.

And that's what matters. Everything else is just a cost of doing business.

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

#87
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 dilige…

> 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.

Yeah, I’m reading your previous comment, and I’m still not seeing it.

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

#88
This nugget made me want to laugh and cry at the same time:

"...if Facebook pulled down the Russians’ fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived: His own mother-in-law, Mr. Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls."

Yeah, great idea, Facebook. Let's protect the users from the outrage of having been deceived by... initiating a much bigger layer of deceit/coverup. That will totally work!

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

#89
post #71
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 o…

> Studies show it didn't change the outcome.

Nothing credible says that, or could say that. Counterfactuals of that nature are very hard and in an election that was decided by 70,000 total votes out of over 130,000,000 it's nearly impossible to assign causation.

> 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.

Nah, we know it was Russia. The CIA said so from the beginning (learned via signals intelligence), independent security firms all said the same (by attributing the C&C servers and link shorteners to other attacks known to be from Russia), and the DOJ laid out the full detail in the indictments. We even know who specifically was sitting at the keyboard (presumably via Dutch intel who had literal real-time video access). The Bill Binney nonsense about download speeds was immediately discredited -- and further discredited once it turned out that the Russians were using US-based proxy servers.

> 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.

They repeatedly expressed preferences for Trump, the divisions they were trying to cause were all for his benefit. They started targeting Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and then eventually moved on to anything that would harm HRC, such as propping up Bernie. The democrats obviously failed to win what should have been a very winnable election but to deny Russian influence at this point is to be deliberately obtuse.

If you have any doubt at all about the DNC hack, please just read the 'speaking indictment'. There's really no question at all: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4598902-DOJ-Russian-...

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

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

They’re friends that work there - software engineers.

The headcount issue was a friend saying they were trying to get more people on their team and the integrity teams had it easy because they could get more people easily.

There was also a lot of internal recruiting to get people working on the integrity teams.

Post reply on HN