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Yeah, but many people would choose not to pursue a business that sells out a large numbers of people on ethical grounds. That doesn't even get into his corporat
by fweespeech 9y ago
Yeah, but many people would choose not to pursue a business that sells out a large numbers of people on ethical grounds. That doesn't even get into his corporate backstabbing and other acts.
Simply because he can exploit a large quantity of rubes to make money doesn't change the fact its not exactly an ethically sound choice.
> I do not know him personally, to answer your question, but it does appear to me that the rather superficial ramblings he offers in articles and blog posts and interviews are at least skewed to the idea that he can do some good in the world, even if his idea of good is perhaps different than yours.
Every "liberal" CEO does that and tries to make themselves sound generous and empathetic. It is good for their income, it is good for their corporate image, and its good for the professional prospects.
Even his charitable acts are largely grandiose tossing of money that frequently fails due to a lack of even basic research. He doesn't genuinely care and its pretty damn obvious when people who donate a couple grand put more effort into researching how well its used than he researched pretty much any of his charitable attempts.
Facebook is a company that _badly_ needs public good will to remain in operation because if people lose faith they'll abandon the network.
I genuinely do not understand how people fail to realize these sorts of things are a combination of ego, self-interest, and political leanings rather than genuine desire. If they were genuine desire, he would have retired from running Facebook like Bill Gates and focused on charity.
- 659087 9y agoI'll never understand what makes people take the focus-grouped, carefully worded speeches and statements of CEOs and politicians at face value, and then label those CEOs/politicians "good people" or "nice guys" based on that. It's obvious that critical thinking skills are severely lacking across most of society. It's the equivalent of believing a company is "run by comedians" because their marketing team injected some dull humor into an ad that played on TV, or believing an oil company is "environmentally friendly" because they published a picture of someone wearing their logo planting a tree.
- fweespeech 9y agoIt is quite scary that it works, even on people I'd normally expect to be more discerning. The flip side of that is they can't really hide when they fuck up.
- 659087 9y ago> The flip side of that is they can't really hide when they fuck up. That's what they employ social media "reputation management" teams for. You'll notice this entire thread we're commenting on was quietly deleted from the main post listing on HN after it started rising up the front page. Though, I'm guessing that was more HN mods doing someone a favor (or protecting the guy they want to see become president) than full-on reddit-style reputation management, where the entire thread is suddenly full of people who love whoever got caught with their pants down.
- sctb 9y agoModerators didn't touch this post. Its rank was affected by user flags and the overheated-discussion detector.