9 ms·

Early Facebook Employees Regret the Monster They Created

120 points by alecco 9y ago

avar 9y ago
"Half the world is cracking up in laughter. The United States doesn’t just interfere in elections. It overthrows governments it doesn’t like, institutes military dictatorships. Simply in the case of Russia alone—it’s the least of it—the U.S. government, under Clinton, intervened quite blatantly and openly, then tried to conceal it, to get their man Yeltsin in, in all sorts of ways. So, this, as I say, it’s considered—it’s turning the United States, again, into a laughingstock in the world." --Noam Chomsky[1]. 1. https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/chomsky_half_the_world_is_laughing https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/chomsky_half_the_world...
ghostcluster 9y ago
This article keeps ridiculously pushing the false narrative that Facebook and "the Russians" are responsible for the outcome of the 2016 election. The amount of placed advertisments on Facebook from shadowy Russian sources was miniscule and had nothing to do with the massive rallies of people and the media coverage of the Trump campaign. $100,000 of ad buys on Facebook swung the election and caused this horror? It is such a dishonest narrative. I thought it would be a story about the wider cultural effects of social media and Facebook, but it was more partisan conspiracy theories. I'm disapointed in Vanity Fair for running this type of piece.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  You’re doing exactly what the cloistered FB articles in the article are doing... just taking it as an assumption that the story is false and that you are under attack. How do you know this? FWIW, I do agree that the wider cultural impact of Facebook is more important than any specific instance of foreign meddling, but that’s not the subject of the article. The article is about the people at Facebook, and if the Russian interference is what they are focusing on, even if they’re wrong, then that is what the article will mention. There are plenty of stories about the social impact of Facebook if that’s the subject matter you want.
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    I am not. Facebook released numbers about their political ads and they don't stack up in any way with the kind of narrative Vanity Fair is trying to spin. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/facebook-russian-political-ads.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/facebook-russi... $100,000 in Facebook ads versus billions in advertising spending from the DNC and RNC? http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/10/hillary-clinton-breaks-president-obamas-2012-spend/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/10/hillary-clin... It is a manufactured conspiracy theory.
    - pavlov 9y ago
      Campaign ads paid by a foreign actor are illegal in the United States regardless of how much money exchanged hands. Given the resources available to these state actors, isn’t it possible that the easily tracked $100k spend is the tip of an iceberg?
      - ghostcluster 9y ago
        > Given the resources available to these state actors, isn’t it possible that the easily tracked $100k spend is the tip of an iceberg? No. That would be a conspiracy theory. And beyond the miniscule amount in ad spending, you also have to accept that a small number of political ads on Facebook swung the election in the States that Clinton lost.
        _jal 9y ago
        How are you so certain that new information won't come out about this? What do you base that on? If there's one constant in the investigations, it is the steady drip of new facts. In fact, it is self-assured reactions like the above that have destroyed a lot of people's credibility on the topic.
        leereeves 9y ago
        Anything might be revealed in the future. Someone might prove that Trump was brainwashed and programmed by Russia, or that Hillary ordered the murder of Seth Rich. That's just speculation. We can only base rational discussion on the information available to us now.
- bedhead 9y ago
  The right has Obama birth certificate conspiracies, the left has Russian election conspiracies. Different sides of the same stupid coin.
  - alehul 9y ago
    True. The difference in scope, however, is critical. One was rather irrelevant, while the other will result in more distant relations with our Cold War rival, serious witch-hunting, and most importantly: further polarization of the U.S. political climate.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - macintux 9y ago
      You don't think the "you don't belong here" undertones (both of Mr. Obama personally and blacks in general) weren't polarizing? "You lie!" was such a telling moment.
      - macintux 9y ago
        And perhaps more pernicious than the disrespect to the man while in office is the way it has tainted everything he did. Obamacare, modeled after a Republican health care reform, must be repealed; the Iran deal must be torn up; hell, they didn't even let him put a Supreme Court Justice on the bench. The GOP basically decided that Kenyan-born interloper was illegitimate and thus everything he did was too.
        akhilcacharya 9y ago
        And then they elected the guy that made those claims popular again! Remember, birtherism was relegated to the fringe (basically just Orly Taitz) until Trump revived it in 2011 and nearly started beating Romney in the polls. Sure enough, the same thing happened when he called Mexicans and illegal immigrants rapists and murderers. People are fooling themselves if they think a big part of Trumps ascendancy isn’t pure racial animus.
- ihsw2 9y ago
  The left has needed a scapegoat since election night. It has ranged from: * Bernie Sanders (second pick for Democrat candidate) * James Comey (former FBI Director) * Huma Abedin (deputy chief of staff for Clinton Campaign) * Russian hackers * Vladimir Putin (President of Russia) * Wikileaks (ie: more Russian hackers) * the Benghazi Committee * the "Basket of Deplorables" (ie: white America) * white women (ie: 53% of white women voted for Trump) * white men (ie: universally reviled by progressive supremacists everywhere) It seems the Democratic Party will never recover as it is more fragmented than ever, with ailing Nancy Pelosi and out-of-touch NYC urbanite Chuck Schumer being the only notable Democrats as of late. All they can do is respond with righteous indignation rather than form a coherent party platform, especially given extremists of all flavors left-of-center being unable to form anything beyond a rickety coalition under shredded banner of "Democrat." Self-reflection and soul-searching is totally beyond the left's comprehension. Clinton was just an awful candidate and the shrieking of the liberal media -- from WaPo to CNN to has-been celebrities -- was (and continues to be) tasteless. Whether Clinton's campaign was ever more than "shame on everybody that won't vote for me, also it's a woman's turn now" is irrelevant because that was the only message that got out there. I would love to see a candidate campaign on, specifically, "tolerance, shared responsibility, and mutual respect." The Democratic Party has truly abandoned tolerance, shared responsibility, and mutual respect, and returning to it would go a long way to bridging the ever-widening gap between Democrats and Republicans.
  - rorykoehler 9y ago
    The "left" being the centre right Democratic party?
    - sbmassey 9y ago
      Understand "left" as a political marketing strategy rather than a political ideology, and referring to the Democrats as left wing will make sense to you again.
      - craftyguy 9y ago
        Wow, I guess both parties do have something in common afterall: they're both political marketing machines and less about political idealogy.
- makomk 9y ago
  Not only were the amount of ads bought miniscule, Russia simply wouldn't have the ability to target them nearly as well as the Trump campaign could. While there was a conspiracy theory going around on social media that Russia had used hacked copies of the electoral registrations to micro-target voters, it was ridiculous - political campaigns have official access to that data and have to spend huge amounts of volunteer time collecting enough info to do even basic targeting because it simply doesn't exist otherwise. (Which is why a newer conspiracy theory says the Trump campaign gave them the targeting info.)
  - creaghpatr 9y ago
    Exactly, like most conspiracy theories they will continue to retrofit the narrative to match the evidence, no matter how weak the connection, then they'll just fill in the gaps with imagination. Takes about 10 seconds for any digital marketer to look at the spend and reach and call bs. Unless of course they have some ominous fantasy of this 'only being the tip of the iceberg'
- Chathamization 9y ago
  I think the focus on "fake news" is in part a deflection from the mainstream media's own poor coverage of the 2016 race. For instance, all of the coverage the week before the election was about how Comey's bombshell letter upended the race - yet in the end, that letter turned out to be nothing. It's a little unsettling to see the media do a terrible job, scream "look over their!", and then try to present themselves as the great defenders of American democracy.
- weirdstuff 9y ago
  Totally agree; it was too obvious after the upset Trump victory when the Dems immediately started going down the list of scapegoats – especially Russia. I really don't think Russia's influence comes close to domestic influence, especially after looking at the billions spent by the U.S. campaigns. And I've been very disappointed in U.S. mainstream press for repeating these partisan talking points with very little objective analysis. They complain about RT meddling in our election but our own consolidated media has opened the door to all of this IMO.
Buttes 9y ago
>People who know Zuckerberg think he’s losing touch with what it’s like to suffer real loss, and that he’s on his way to becoming a modern-day Howard Hughes This is a prettyyyyyy unflattering comparison
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  It's also pretty denigrating of Hughes. Hughes set aviation records, made major Hollywood films (as an outsider), designed really impressive planes and ran a diverse and massive empire before he was 45. Howard Hughes became that shell they are referring to because he broke most of the bones in his body in a plane crash, barely survived, got addicted to painkillers, and had an undiagnosed mental disorder. Zuckerberg just has a bad case of affluenza, always has.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Zuckerberg created one of the largest multinational corporations from scratch, has data on billions of people, and is one of the richest people on the planet. Implying that he hasn't done much in his lifetime is pretty disingenuous. Sure, he was lucky, but you can't be a bumbling idiot and gain that kind of power.
0x445442 9y ago
Good Lord can't these media outlets accept reality. HRC lost, deal with it. In almost no way is the left's frustration over a Trump presidency different or more justified than the right's was over the Obama presidency. My advice to the left and their media fronts; quit screaming "RUSSIANS" and develop a platform that works for the fly over states and not just the coasts.
- 1_2__4 9y ago
  Maybe this isn’t an appropriate comment for HN.
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    It might help to explain why you find this NSFHN. That's not a complaint, just a request for clarity.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      I answered below the sibling comment.
  - 0x445442 9y ago
    Oh, I'm sure it's not. In the same way Demore's comments weren't appropriate for Google.
  - TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
    I'd also be interested in understanding why you think it's not appropriate for HN. Many others share GP's view that the whole Russia thing is potentially overblown. Personally, I'm still rather skeptical of the whole matter, considering I haven't been presented with sufficiently strong evidence to make me agree that it played a large role in the 2016 election.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      > I'd also be interested in understanding why you think it's not appropriate for HN. Because this kind of comment usually incites a debate that is below the intellectual standards of HN. This is not a statement about the comment's merit. Just a few days ago, there was a submission about how the US and Israel are leaving UNESCO. I was initially disappointed to see it being flagged off the front page because I was hoping for some insightful commentary on this development, but 90% of comments was arguing about whether there is a Jewish world conspiracy going on. That's why political stories and comments are very often flagged or downvoted to death.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
"Like many C.E.O.s, Zuckerberg does run the risk of being aloof. In particular, Zuckerberg has few friends outside of Facebook. Beyond the time he spends with his wife and young children, he does very little that doesn’t, in some way, point back to his work at the company he runs. This sort of discipline becomes problematic when you learn that some of the people who surround Zuckerberg on a daily basis—the vast majority being current Facebook employees—seem to think (like Zuckerberg) that most of the Russian involvement in the election is overblown and that the company is being used as a scapegoat for a dysfunctional country..." Ironic. Washington DC has the exact same problem: isolated, life in a bubble, mono-vision, etc. Blaming FB and only FB is an oversimplification, to say the least, but it's a great spin that protects the elites (from their responsibility for the build up to Nov 2016 and all that has come to light since).
tyingq 9y ago
I use, and like PHP, despite the various warts. However, I assumed the headline was going to lead to a story about their regrets around PHP, HHVM, Hack, etc.
- porfirium 9y ago
  https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406 https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Ah, didn't know some source was leaked. Assuming it's sarcasm, at least someone seemed to be aware of the issues.... // Holy shit, is this the cleanest fucking frontend file you've ever seen?!
chiefofgxbxl 9y ago
I assumed the story would be a critical oversight of Facebook as a whole, from employees' perspective. There are fundamental issues with any social media platform these days that goes beyond this particular case of foreign intervention. How have filter bubbles changed our political landscape? How has the obsession for "likes" and "shares" incentivized certain speech over others? Has it diminished the variety of opinions? How do we create a platform that encourages people to step outside their comfort zone and learn things they may initially disagree with? How do we get people of differing opinions, who in our current world demonize each other, to sit down and share their stories and listen to? Is it even possible to build a popular platform that fights against our innate biases, like selection bias, confirmation bias, etc.? Be the alleged Russian involvement as it may, I think that the above questions are far more damaging to the long term political stability in this country.
corysama 9y ago
This backs up a story I heard from a FB employee recently. That there is a FB office full of people who are so upset with themselves now that they've realized FB's negative influence on politics that they are holding what he terms "weekly self-flagellation meetings" to go over how bad it is. The good news is that they are very motivated to redeem themselves to the world. They just haven't yet figured out effective ways to do so.
- alehul 9y ago
  Facebook employees desiring to impact elections is the stuff of nightmares, and would have a much more severe impact than any potential inference, if true, had.
- sjg007 9y ago
  I don't think they should worry so much... there are plenty of people who post crazy political things already. Just look at the comments on any article anywhere remotely political. There really are only two real solutions: 1. Paid political ads should be marked as such. 2. Remove fake accounts / bots. That still can't prevent paid shills...
malloreon 9y ago
If these people truly regretted the millions they made through the growth of facebook's monstrosity and the part they played in it, they'd put their time and money where their anonymous quotes are and be working to break it apart.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
rgbrenner 9y ago
"how Russia used it during the election to elect Trump" "while the ads may have only reached a small group of people, Trump won the electoral college by a small number of votes, too." Russia interfered (and we should definitely do something about that)... but Clinton ran a badly managed campaign, and that's why she lost. First major party nominee to never step foot in Wisconsin since 1972? Clinton [0] SEIU says to Clinton campaign that they are moving their staff to Michigan toward the end of the campaign (like they wanted to from the beginning).. Clinton's response: turn the bus around and go back to Iowa[1] Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not “scientifically” significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back.[1] I mean come on... how can she expect to win Wisconsin when she never even stepped foot in the state? 0. http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/hillary-clinton-hoping-to-win-wisconsin-without-setting-foot-in/article_b39afbf6-c85c-5cba-becd-addfa03f841a.html http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/hil... 1. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michigan-hillary-clinton-trump-232547 http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michigan-hillary-clint...
- smcl 9y ago
  Yep exactly - an awful candidate with an awful campaign. The lack of campaigning in key states like Wisconsin. The nauseating cult of personality around her. Dismissing the Bernie Sanders voters as "Bernie Bros" (despite the large number of young women who supported him). The tone-deaf "America is already great" slogan which existed in complete ignorance of the poor. Her awkward inability to appear like a human being (google "I'm just chillin' in cedar rapids!" and cringe). Her inability to come out in favour of a $15 minimum wage. The fact that the Clinton family are scandal-ridden even before the emails, and so obviously in the pocket of big business. We could go on all day. In my opinion Trump is far worse, but it seems that many Democrat voters didn't "defect" and vote Republican (GOP votes were pretty steady from '08, '12 and '16) ... they just didn't turn out for Hillary. I don't blame them. What an awful choice to be forced to make - Trump or Hillary.
dude01 9y ago
Does everyone know that HN is big enough that organizations/corporations/governments pay people to come here to influence the discussions? No way we can have a civil discussion here on this topic because of that interference. Using the label "conspiracy theory" is a good example of disrupting a discussion.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  It's also just a side effect of the voting system. Once the population gets big enough, people vote based on whether or not they agree with the poster instead of whether or not the post advanced the conversation. Over time, those downvoted stop replying due to a perception that they're part of the out-group, and an echo chamber forms. To prevent this, this site really needs to work hard to maintain an interesting, thought-provoking culture that welcomes dissenting opinions as long as they're well wrote and not overly emotional.
  - dude01 9y ago
    I agree with what you said, and I agree with what I said. :-) It's funny how technical discussions are much better here, and anything touching politics is terrible. Kind of reminds me of how you can hear good debates on sports radio, but not politics.
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      Humans get weird when emotion becomes involved. Technical discussions usually have binary, definite solutions, while political opinions stem from culture and emotion, and usually don't have a definite solution. Then when people get stressed or feel attacked, they retreat into a tribal us-vs-them mentality that amplifies itself on the internet. Plus I do highly suspect that there is significant astroturfing with political issues as well, but because that line of thinking accomplishes nothing but makes me ignore opposing political opinions(which is bad!) I try to avoid that mode of thinking.
      - dude01 9y ago
convery 9y ago
The whole narrative about the Russian hacking is so strange. Someone from Russia, government or citizens, bought 100K worth of advertising; meanwhile the candidate spent upwards of 1.3 Billion on their campaign. Yet those 100K were what got one of the most disliked persons in the world elected. It's just silly.
indubitable 9y ago
This article reads like it was written before details about the ads were leaked. The "vast majority" of "Russian ads" did not mention the election, voting, or any particular candidate. That effectively means that any ad, purchased by a poorly defined "Russian" individual, that discussed LGBT issues was counted as a hit. If that same standard of "meddling" were applied to all countries in the world, I suspect that $100k of spend from Russian users would be the butt of a joke. And I say Russian "users" because there were "more than 3,000" ads spending a total of "at least $100,000". That's an average of $33 per ad. The ads also supported both sides of the issues mentioned, some were expressing support of groups like Black Lives Matter. I see no justifiable reason, given the present evidence, to frame this as some giant Russian conspiracy. Washington Post discussion of the leaks framing this information, nonetheless, in favor of a Russian conspiracy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-operatives-used-facebook-ads-to-exploit-divisions-over-black-political-activism-and-muslims/2017/09/25/4a011242-a21b-11e7-ade1-76d061d56efa_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-o... Something related to that article as well is this one is that I think people for whom these stories confirm their biases (e.g. the Russian conspiracy is true) should try to read only the facts. There are indeed lots of facts within these articles, but they're constantly buried within extremely suggestive and extremely unsupported rhetoric. For instance in Washington Post article, they state that "$100,000 worth of Facebook ads could have been viewed hundreds of millions of times." Let's think about that for a minute. In the election both parties spent about $6 billion on advertising and of course most all of it targeting the US. Going on with that figure from the Washingon Post that $6 billion could have resulted in tens of trillions of views. To put that another way, that would be each and every man, woman, and child in America seeing 30,000 ads at the minimum. And that minimum is multiplicative as I assumed "hundreds of millions of views" = exactly 100 million views. That is clearly in no way a reasonable suggestion, yet that's the sort of thinking it takes to support the views implicitly expressed within this article.
ecommerceguy 9y ago
Seems some Facebook employees can't but help themselves... "Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News" https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006 https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...
pavlakoos 9y ago
I general I admire Zuckerberg's work, achievements and philanthropy, but his VR pursuit terrifies me. "One billion people in VR" - his goal for the next few years - is nothing else than what we've seen in Matrix the Movie. Does anyone want it to happen? Really?
- mysterydip 9y ago
  I moved for work last year and now live 7 hours from all the roots I had growing up. Until personal teleportation exists and I can be with my extended family and friends in the evenings and weekends while at work during the week, VR seems like the next closest thing. I get that there’s plenty of cons to VR, especially one controlled by facebook. But the draw here is similar to that of social media to begin with for me anyway, to reconnect with people lost by distance.
lamacase 9y ago
How does the author think Zuckerberg's VR Avatar resembles clippy the paperclip?
Girlang 9y ago
Clinton's people swallowed a lot of fake news about Trump, too. Clinton loyalists think that no informed or intelligent person could have possibly not voted for her.
starchild_3001 9y ago
Pretty idiotic article. Blaming Facebook for Trump’s election is like blaming freedom or internet for the same.

120 points by alecco 9y ago

avar 9y ago

"Half the world is cracking up in laughter. The United States doesn’t just interfere in elections. It overthrows governments it doesn’t like, institutes military dictatorships. Simply in the case of Russia alone—it’s the least of it—the U.S. government, under Clinton, intervened quite blatantly and openly, then tried to conceal it, to get their man Yeltsin in, in all sorts of ways. So, this, as I say, it’s considered—it’s turning the United States, again, into a laughingstock in the world." --Noam Chomsky[1]. 1. https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/chomsky_half_the_world_is_laughing https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/chomsky_half_the_world...

ghostcluster 9y ago

This article keeps ridiculously pushing the false narrative that Facebook and "the Russians" are responsible for the outcome of the 2016 election. The amount of placed advertisments on Facebook from shadowy Russian sources was miniscule and had nothing to do with the massive rallies of people and the media coverage of the Trump campaign. $100,000 of ad buys on Facebook swung the election and caused this horror? It is such a dishonest narrative. I thought it would be a story about the wider cultural effects of social media and Facebook, but it was more partisan conspiracy theories. I'm disapointed in Vanity Fair for running this type of piece.

Analemma_ 9y ago
You’re doing exactly what the cloistered FB articles in the article are doing... just taking it as an assumption that the story is false and that you are under attack. How do you know this? FWIW, I do agree that the wider cultural impact of Facebook is more important than any specific instance of foreign meddling, but that’s not the subject of the article. The article is about the people at Facebook, and if the Russian interference is what they are focusing on, even if they’re wrong, then that is what the article will mention. There are plenty of stories about the social impact of Facebook if that’s the subject matter you want.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  I am not. Facebook released numbers about their political ads and they don't stack up in any way with the kind of narrative Vanity Fair is trying to spin. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/facebook-russian-political-ads.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/facebook-russi... $100,000 in Facebook ads versus billions in advertising spending from the DNC and RNC? http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/10/hillary-clinton-breaks-president-obamas-2012-spend/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/10/hillary-clin... It is a manufactured conspiracy theory.
  - pavlov 9y ago
    Campaign ads paid by a foreign actor are illegal in the United States regardless of how much money exchanged hands. Given the resources available to these state actors, isn’t it possible that the easily tracked $100k spend is the tip of an iceberg?
    - ghostcluster 9y ago
      > Given the resources available to these state actors, isn’t it possible that the easily tracked $100k spend is the tip of an iceberg? No. That would be a conspiracy theory. And beyond the miniscule amount in ad spending, you also have to accept that a small number of political ads on Facebook swung the election in the States that Clinton lost.
      - _jal 9y ago
        How are you so certain that new information won't come out about this? What do you base that on? If there's one constant in the investigations, it is the steady drip of new facts. In fact, it is self-assured reactions like the above that have destroyed a lot of people's credibility on the topic.
        leereeves 9y ago
        Anything might be revealed in the future. Someone might prove that Trump was brainwashed and programmed by Russia, or that Hillary ordered the murder of Seth Rich. That's just speculation. We can only base rational discussion on the information available to us now.
bedhead 9y ago
The right has Obama birth certificate conspiracies, the left has Russian election conspiracies. Different sides of the same stupid coin.
- alehul 9y ago
  True. The difference in scope, however, is critical. One was rather irrelevant, while the other will result in more distant relations with our Cold War rival, serious witch-hunting, and most importantly: further polarization of the U.S. political climate.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - macintux 9y ago
    You don't think the "you don't belong here" undertones (both of Mr. Obama personally and blacks in general) weren't polarizing? "You lie!" was such a telling moment.
    - macintux 9y ago
      And perhaps more pernicious than the disrespect to the man while in office is the way it has tainted everything he did. Obamacare, modeled after a Republican health care reform, must be repealed; the Iran deal must be torn up; hell, they didn't even let him put a Supreme Court Justice on the bench. The GOP basically decided that Kenyan-born interloper was illegitimate and thus everything he did was too.
      - akhilcacharya 9y ago
        And then they elected the guy that made those claims popular again! Remember, birtherism was relegated to the fringe (basically just Orly Taitz) until Trump revived it in 2011 and nearly started beating Romney in the polls. Sure enough, the same thing happened when he called Mexicans and illegal immigrants rapists and murderers. People are fooling themselves if they think a big part of Trumps ascendancy isn’t pure racial animus.
ihsw2 9y ago
The left has needed a scapegoat since election night. It has ranged from: * Bernie Sanders (second pick for Democrat candidate) * James Comey (former FBI Director) * Huma Abedin (deputy chief of staff for Clinton Campaign) * Russian hackers * Vladimir Putin (President of Russia) * Wikileaks (ie: more Russian hackers) * the Benghazi Committee * the "Basket of Deplorables" (ie: white America) * white women (ie: 53% of white women voted for Trump) * white men (ie: universally reviled by progressive supremacists everywhere) It seems the Democratic Party will never recover as it is more fragmented than ever, with ailing Nancy Pelosi and out-of-touch NYC urbanite Chuck Schumer being the only notable Democrats as of late. All they can do is respond with righteous indignation rather than form a coherent party platform, especially given extremists of all flavors left-of-center being unable to form anything beyond a rickety coalition under shredded banner of "Democrat." Self-reflection and soul-searching is totally beyond the left's comprehension. Clinton was just an awful candidate and the shrieking of the liberal media -- from WaPo to CNN to has-been celebrities -- was (and continues to be) tasteless. Whether Clinton's campaign was ever more than "shame on everybody that won't vote for me, also it's a woman's turn now" is irrelevant because that was the only message that got out there. I would love to see a candidate campaign on, specifically, "tolerance, shared responsibility, and mutual respect." The Democratic Party has truly abandoned tolerance, shared responsibility, and mutual respect, and returning to it would go a long way to bridging the ever-widening gap between Democrats and Republicans.
- rorykoehler 9y ago
  The "left" being the centre right Democratic party?
  - sbmassey 9y ago
    Understand "left" as a political marketing strategy rather than a political ideology, and referring to the Democrats as left wing will make sense to you again.
    - craftyguy 9y ago
      Wow, I guess both parties do have something in common afterall: they're both political marketing machines and less about political idealogy.
makomk 9y ago
Not only were the amount of ads bought miniscule, Russia simply wouldn't have the ability to target them nearly as well as the Trump campaign could. While there was a conspiracy theory going around on social media that Russia had used hacked copies of the electoral registrations to micro-target voters, it was ridiculous - political campaigns have official access to that data and have to spend huge amounts of volunteer time collecting enough info to do even basic targeting because it simply doesn't exist otherwise. (Which is why a newer conspiracy theory says the Trump campaign gave them the targeting info.)
- creaghpatr 9y ago
  Exactly, like most conspiracy theories they will continue to retrofit the narrative to match the evidence, no matter how weak the connection, then they'll just fill in the gaps with imagination. Takes about 10 seconds for any digital marketer to look at the spend and reach and call bs. Unless of course they have some ominous fantasy of this 'only being the tip of the iceberg'
Chathamization 9y ago
I think the focus on "fake news" is in part a deflection from the mainstream media's own poor coverage of the 2016 race. For instance, all of the coverage the week before the election was about how Comey's bombshell letter upended the race - yet in the end, that letter turned out to be nothing. It's a little unsettling to see the media do a terrible job, scream "look over their!", and then try to present themselves as the great defenders of American democracy.
weirdstuff 9y ago
Totally agree; it was too obvious after the upset Trump victory when the Dems immediately started going down the list of scapegoats – especially Russia. I really don't think Russia's influence comes close to domestic influence, especially after looking at the billions spent by the U.S. campaigns. And I've been very disappointed in U.S. mainstream press for repeating these partisan talking points with very little objective analysis. They complain about RT meddling in our election but our own consolidated media has opened the door to all of this IMO.

Buttes 9y ago

>People who know Zuckerberg think he’s losing touch with what it’s like to suffer real loss, and that he’s on his way to becoming a modern-day Howard Hughes This is a prettyyyyyy unflattering comparison

aaron-lebo 9y ago
It's also pretty denigrating of Hughes. Hughes set aviation records, made major Hollywood films (as an outsider), designed really impressive planes and ran a diverse and massive empire before he was 45. Howard Hughes became that shell they are referring to because he broke most of the bones in his body in a plane crash, barely survived, got addicted to painkillers, and had an undiagnosed mental disorder. Zuckerberg just has a bad case of affluenza, always has.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  Zuckerberg created one of the largest multinational corporations from scratch, has data on billions of people, and is one of the richest people on the planet. Implying that he hasn't done much in his lifetime is pretty disingenuous. Sure, he was lucky, but you can't be a bumbling idiot and gain that kind of power.

0x445442 9y ago

Good Lord can't these media outlets accept reality. HRC lost, deal with it. In almost no way is the left's frustration over a Trump presidency different or more justified than the right's was over the Obama presidency. My advice to the left and their media fronts; quit screaming "RUSSIANS" and develop a platform that works for the fly over states and not just the coasts.

1_2__4 9y ago
Maybe this isn’t an appropriate comment for HN.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  It might help to explain why you find this NSFHN. That's not a complaint, just a request for clarity.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    I answered below the sibling comment.
- 0x445442 9y ago
  Oh, I'm sure it's not. In the same way Demore's comments weren't appropriate for Google.
- TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
  I'd also be interested in understanding why you think it's not appropriate for HN. Many others share GP's view that the whole Russia thing is potentially overblown. Personally, I'm still rather skeptical of the whole matter, considering I haven't been presented with sufficiently strong evidence to make me agree that it played a large role in the 2016 election.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    > I'd also be interested in understanding why you think it's not appropriate for HN. Because this kind of comment usually incites a debate that is below the intellectual standards of HN. This is not a statement about the comment's merit. Just a few days ago, there was a submission about how the US and Israel are leaving UNESCO. I was initially disappointed to see it being flagged off the front page because I was hoping for some insightful commentary on this development, but 90% of comments was arguing about whether there is a Jewish world conspiracy going on. That's why political stories and comments are very often flagged or downvoted to death.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

"Like many C.E.O.s, Zuckerberg does run the risk of being aloof. In particular, Zuckerberg has few friends outside of Facebook. Beyond the time he spends with his wife and young children, he does very little that doesn’t, in some way, point back to his work at the company he runs. This sort of discipline becomes problematic when you learn that some of the people who surround Zuckerberg on a daily basis—the vast majority being current Facebook employees—seem to think (like Zuckerberg) that most of the Russian involvement in the election is overblown and that the company is being used as a scapegoat for a dysfunctional country..." Ironic. Washington DC has the exact same problem: isolated, life in a bubble, mono-vision, etc. Blaming FB and only FB is an oversimplification, to say the least, but it's a great spin that protects the elites (from their responsibility for the build up to Nov 2016 and all that has come to light since).

tyingq 9y ago

I use, and like PHP, despite the various warts. However, I assumed the headline was going to lead to a story about their regrets around PHP, HHVM, Hack, etc.

porfirium 9y ago
https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406 https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406
- tyingq 9y ago
  Ah, didn't know some source was leaked. Assuming it's sarcasm, at least someone seemed to be aware of the issues.... // Holy shit, is this the cleanest fucking frontend file you've ever seen?!

chiefofgxbxl 9y ago

I assumed the story would be a critical oversight of Facebook as a whole, from employees' perspective. There are fundamental issues with any social media platform these days that goes beyond this particular case of foreign intervention. How have filter bubbles changed our political landscape? How has the obsession for "likes" and "shares" incentivized certain speech over others? Has it diminished the variety of opinions? How do we create a platform that encourages people to step outside their comfort zone and learn things they may initially disagree with? How do we get people of differing opinions, who in our current world demonize each other, to sit down and share their stories and listen to? Is it even possible to build a popular platform that fights against our innate biases, like selection bias, confirmation bias, etc.? Be the alleged Russian involvement as it may, I think that the above questions are far more damaging to the long term political stability in this country.

corysama 9y ago

This backs up a story I heard from a FB employee recently. That there is a FB office full of people who are so upset with themselves now that they've realized FB's negative influence on politics that they are holding what he terms "weekly self-flagellation meetings" to go over how bad it is. The good news is that they are very motivated to redeem themselves to the world. They just haven't yet figured out effective ways to do so.

alehul 9y ago
Facebook employees desiring to impact elections is the stuff of nightmares, and would have a much more severe impact than any potential inference, if true, had.
sjg007 9y ago
I don't think they should worry so much... there are plenty of people who post crazy political things already. Just look at the comments on any article anywhere remotely political. There really are only two real solutions: 1. Paid political ads should be marked as such. 2. Remove fake accounts / bots. That still can't prevent paid shills...

malloreon 9y ago

If these people truly regretted the millions they made through the growth of facebook's monstrosity and the part they played in it, they'd put their time and money where their anonymous quotes are and be working to break it apart.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

rgbrenner 9y ago

"how Russia used it during the election to elect Trump" "while the ads may have only reached a small group of people, Trump won the electoral college by a small number of votes, too." Russia interfered (and we should definitely do something about that)... but Clinton ran a badly managed campaign, and that's why she lost. First major party nominee to never step foot in Wisconsin since 1972? Clinton [0] SEIU says to Clinton campaign that they are moving their staff to Michigan toward the end of the campaign (like they wanted to from the beginning).. Clinton's response: turn the bus around and go back to Iowa[1] Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not “scientifically” significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back.[1] I mean come on... how can she expect to win Wisconsin when she never even stepped foot in the state? 0. http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/hillary-clinton-hoping-to-win-wisconsin-without-setting-foot-in/article_b39afbf6-c85c-5cba-becd-addfa03f841a.html http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/hil... 1. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michigan-hillary-clinton-trump-232547 http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michigan-hillary-clint...

smcl 9y ago
Yep exactly - an awful candidate with an awful campaign. The lack of campaigning in key states like Wisconsin. The nauseating cult of personality around her. Dismissing the Bernie Sanders voters as "Bernie Bros" (despite the large number of young women who supported him). The tone-deaf "America is already great" slogan which existed in complete ignorance of the poor. Her awkward inability to appear like a human being (google "I'm just chillin' in cedar rapids!" and cringe). Her inability to come out in favour of a $15 minimum wage. The fact that the Clinton family are scandal-ridden even before the emails, and so obviously in the pocket of big business. We could go on all day. In my opinion Trump is far worse, but it seems that many Democrat voters didn't "defect" and vote Republican (GOP votes were pretty steady from '08, '12 and '16) ... they just didn't turn out for Hillary. I don't blame them. What an awful choice to be forced to make - Trump or Hillary.

dude01 9y ago

Does everyone know that HN is big enough that organizations/corporations/governments pay people to come here to influence the discussions? No way we can have a civil discussion here on this topic because of that interference. Using the label "conspiracy theory" is a good example of disrupting a discussion.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
It's also just a side effect of the voting system. Once the population gets big enough, people vote based on whether or not they agree with the poster instead of whether or not the post advanced the conversation. Over time, those downvoted stop replying due to a perception that they're part of the out-group, and an echo chamber forms. To prevent this, this site really needs to work hard to maintain an interesting, thought-provoking culture that welcomes dissenting opinions as long as they're well wrote and not overly emotional.
- dude01 9y ago
  I agree with what you said, and I agree with what I said. :-) It's funny how technical discussions are much better here, and anything touching politics is terrible. Kind of reminds me of how you can hear good debates on sports radio, but not politics.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Humans get weird when emotion becomes involved. Technical discussions usually have binary, definite solutions, while political opinions stem from culture and emotion, and usually don't have a definite solution. Then when people get stressed or feel attacked, they retreat into a tribal us-vs-them mentality that amplifies itself on the internet. Plus I do highly suspect that there is significant astroturfing with political issues as well, but because that line of thinking accomplishes nothing but makes me ignore opposing political opinions(which is bad!) I try to avoid that mode of thinking.
    - dude01 9y ago

convery 9y ago

The whole narrative about the Russian hacking is so strange. Someone from Russia, government or citizens, bought 100K worth of advertising; meanwhile the candidate spent upwards of 1.3 Billion on their campaign. Yet those 100K were what got one of the most disliked persons in the world elected. It's just silly.

indubitable 9y ago

This article reads like it was written before details about the ads were leaked. The "vast majority" of "Russian ads" did not mention the election, voting, or any particular candidate. That effectively means that any ad, purchased by a poorly defined "Russian" individual, that discussed LGBT issues was counted as a hit. If that same standard of "meddling" were applied to all countries in the world, I suspect that $100k of spend from Russian users would be the butt of a joke. And I say Russian "users" because there were "more than 3,000" ads spending a total of "at least $100,000". That's an average of $33 per ad. The ads also supported both sides of the issues mentioned, some were expressing support of groups like Black Lives Matter. I see no justifiable reason, given the present evidence, to frame this as some giant Russian conspiracy. Washington Post discussion of the leaks framing this information, nonetheless, in favor of a Russian conspiracy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-operatives-used-facebook-ads-to-exploit-divisions-over-black-political-activism-and-muslims/2017/09/25/4a011242-a21b-11e7-ade1-76d061d56efa_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-o... Something related to that article as well is this one is that I think people for whom these stories confirm their biases (e.g. the Russian conspiracy is true) should try to read only the facts. There are indeed lots of facts within these articles, but they're constantly buried within extremely suggestive and extremely unsupported rhetoric. For instance in Washington Post article, they state that "$100,000 worth of Facebook ads could have been viewed hundreds of millions of times." Let's think about that for a minute. In the election both parties spent about $6 billion on advertising and of course most all of it targeting the US. Going on with that figure from the Washingon Post that $6 billion could have resulted in tens of trillions of views. To put that another way, that would be each and every man, woman, and child in America seeing 30,000 ads at the minimum. And that minimum is multiplicative as I assumed "hundreds of millions of views" = exactly 100 million views. That is clearly in no way a reasonable suggestion, yet that's the sort of thinking it takes to support the views implicitly expressed within this article.

ecommerceguy 9y ago

Seems some Facebook employees can't but help themselves... "Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News" https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006 https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...

pavlakoos 9y ago

I general I admire Zuckerberg's work, achievements and philanthropy, but his VR pursuit terrifies me. "One billion people in VR" - his goal for the next few years - is nothing else than what we've seen in Matrix the Movie. Does anyone want it to happen? Really?

mysterydip 9y ago
I moved for work last year and now live 7 hours from all the roots I had growing up. Until personal teleportation exists and I can be with my extended family and friends in the evenings and weekends while at work during the week, VR seems like the next closest thing. I get that there’s plenty of cons to VR, especially one controlled by facebook. But the draw here is similar to that of social media to begin with for me anyway, to reconnect with people lost by distance.

lamacase 9y ago

How does the author think Zuckerberg's VR Avatar resembles clippy the paperclip?

Girlang 9y ago

Clinton's people swallowed a lot of fake news about Trump, too. Clinton loyalists think that no informed or intelligent person could have possibly not voted for her.

starchild_3001 9y ago

Pretty idiotic article. Blaming Facebook for Trump’s election is like blaming freedom or internet for the same.