6 ms·

Facebook hired a full-time pollster to monitor Zuckerberg’s approval ratings

59 points by dsr12 9y ago

everdev 9y ago
The lines between politics and business continue to blur. Is there anything to prevent Facebook from fully funding a Zuckerberg campaign? I could see them arguing that it's a marketing expense as Trump went from household name to the object of everyone's attention during his run for President.
- nathantotten 9y ago
  Not my scope of expertise, but I believe corporations are prohibited from donating money directly to a candidate based on federal campaign laws. They could of course give money to an action committee, but there are lots of restrictions on coordination between the two. So I guess Facebook could fund his campaign via a PAC as long as Zuckerburg himself had nothing to do with the strategy. That would be an odd campaign. More likely Zuckerberg could fund the campaign himself via gifts or loans - this is what Trump did (not fully of course, but he did gift/loan some money).
  - uptown 9y ago
    "but there are lots of restrictions on coordination between the two" This hasn't been true or enforced. https://theintercept.com/2016/10/07/both-campaigns-enthusiastically-violate-ban-on-super-pac-coordination-watchdog-says/ https://theintercept.com/2016/10/07/both-campaigns-enthusias...
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  > The lines between politics and business continue to blur. welcome to the us of a.
  - nugi 9y ago
    Not limited to any single country. A few seem thus immune, but the facade always crumbles it time it seems.
ukulele 9y ago
This means there is an especially good chance that whatever you write and vote here will be eventually piped into Mark & Sheryl's eyes & ears. Time to unload those pent up opinions!
gressquel 9y ago
Seems like panic is starting to take hold. Unfortunately, neither this or the news feed update is gonna change the tide, its just too late. The transformation to Orkut/MySpace has already began and I am loving it. The social media experiment has failed, its become too big and caused too much psychological damage on individuals. I look forward to more and more niche communities :)
- aetherson 9y ago
  What evidence is there that Facebook in particular or social media in general is actually declining, rather than occasionally inspiring cranky articles?
  - apocalyptic0n3 9y ago
    There is a bit of evidence in that US and Canadian daily users declined for the first time last quarter. [1] [1]: https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-active-user-decline-us-canda-q4-earnings-2018 https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-act...
  - mantas 9y ago
    Regarding other social media, such functionality is longer seen as a perk by users. Interesting example may be Strava. They seem to be gravitating more towards "social" than "data crunching" kind of app. Nobody in my circles use it as "social" tool. People are not happy they're investing in bullshit functionality rather than fixing long-standing "data crunching" issues. Few mistakes here and there and people may start leaving for less "social" counterparts. There's little lockin in fitness apps anyway. Strava may be trying to steal a piece of Facebook's cake and solve lack of lockin. But IMO they're shooting themselves in a foot.
  - jvagner 9y ago
    Evidence? Perhaps too early for that, but the article notes the pollster publishing the results of a survey after he left Facebook and started his own company: "Among tech companies, 32 percent of Americans said Facebook is harmful. A separate survey, which placed Facebook among other large brands including Walmart, McDonald’s, and Marlboro, found that 27 percent said it is harmful." There was an old article about which companies people could abandon first, among companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon. I believe Facebook was pretty high on that list. If you look at what happened to a company like AOL (just typing that seemed weird) or even Myspace, it's quite easy to imagine Facebook fading hard, mostly because people WANT it to fade, or they lose interest. On my own side, I only keep it around to share photos of my kid with my close friends and family. Beyond that, among the FB friends I have from years of working in tech, very few of them ever post anything at all. There's a silent percentage of the demographic who basically use FB as an RSS reader. How valuable will that be over time?
zekevermillion 9y ago
Maybe this is just Mark falling victim to his own machine. Now he, too, has become obsessed with social media preening, and has to hire a professional to tell him what people think about his party pics.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  Remains to be seen if it's only another yes man or not
  - mcintyre1994 9y ago
    "McGinn declined to discuss the results of his polling at Facebook, saying nondisclosure agreements prevented him from doing so. But he said he decided to leave the company after only six months after coming to believe that Facebook had a negative effect on the world." I don't think he's a yes man.
nabla9 9y ago
This is just what Facebook does for Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg initiative is separate from Facebook and they have hired very high level campaign managers for Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, GWB (Ken Mehlman) to work for Zuckerberg.
- tomashertus 9y ago
  Seriusly? I can’t imagine him running for a president. What he is gonna do there?
  - java_script 9y ago
    Try in vain to prove to himself that his billions aren't just dumb luck and circumstance.
  - joncrane 9y ago
    It's just an ego thing. He wants to be "popular" in the same way politicians do. He wants to be at the top of the list of "most powerful people" that those magazines put out. He's probably super envious of Elon Musk.
    - SirFatty 9y ago
      Sounds like a Trump-type character flaw.
    - wallace_f 9y ago
      He has been making headlines regarding the possibility of running: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/15/mark-zuckerberg-could-be-running-for-president-in-2020.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/15/mark-zuckerberg-could-be-run... Why are people surprised he wants to run? >Zuck: I don't know why. They "trust me." Dumb fucks. Here he exhibits a defining characteristic of politicians. It's worth noting the difference with Zuckerburg is this: we all suddenly become concerned with our civil liberties when those of our own are directly assaulted: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/05/the-nunes-memo-and-katie-roiphe-article-show-how-concerns-for-due-process-and-civil-liberties-are-highly-selective-and-self-centered/ https://theintercept.com/2018/02/05/the-nunes-memo-and-katie...
trs80 9y ago
When I see Mark I feel queasy just looking at him. People don't like to have their privacy violated, even if it is a result of them willingly giving up their information.
- java_script 9y ago
  He's definitely somewhere in the uncanny valley.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
I will draw immense personal satisfaction from not voting for Mark in 2020.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
oldcynic 9y ago
I would perhaps be far less cynical about FB and Zuck if he, and other senior people, used FB as we're expected to. He seems, from what I've read, to deeply value his privacy whilst FB does everything possible to gain more clicks, time and tracking from us. FB isn't even much good for keeping up with friends and family any more! At least when Google was trying to push G+ there were many senior people actually just using it. You could actually have conversations with them! If he wants to gain stellar ratings then perhaps he should set his sights a little higher. Like a certain Mr Musk recently did. :)
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  I'm not sure we're in the same class of paparazzi-attention as those folks. So there's some excuse for more paranoia from them.
  - Slansitartop 9y ago
    > I'm not sure we're in the same class of paparazzi-attention as those folks. So there's some excuse for more paranoia from them. Yes, but that shouldn't matter when it comes to social media use. Paparazzi are about invading privacy, but social media posts are about voluntarily giving it up in order to share. I also believe Zuckerberg once characterized privacy as a kind of dishonesty.
JoshMnem 9y ago
I wish people would stop linking to AMP pages. They take about 8 seconds to load on non-mobile browsers with JS turned off.
- MiguelHudnandez 9y ago
  I don't think your experience is universal. For me, I got these results with the amp version [1]: javascript on: ~350kb / 24 requests javascript off: ~85kb / 4 requests Compare this to the full version [2]: javascript on: ~10.5mb / 125 requests javascript off: ~6.0mb / 24 requests [1] https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/2/6/16976328/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-pollster-tavis-mcginn-honest-data https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/2/6/16976328/face... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/16976328/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-pollster-tavis-mcginn-honest-data https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/16976328/facebook-mark-zuc...
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    Are you loading that in a browser? My browser reports 12 requests and 1.06 seconds for your first link, but it doesn't render anything for about 8 seconds. Clarification: block the JS files from loading from the CDN, like it's done with many privacy tools.
    - JoshMnem 9y ago
      It looks like there is an 8 second delay in the style element with the attribute `amp-boilerplate` that makes AMP pages extremely slow when 3rd party JavaScript is blocked (as it should be by default).
Bucephalus355 9y ago
What really concerns me about Mark Zuckerberg is his sister, Randi Zuckerberg. She has to be one of the least intelligent (for a Harvard grad), most entitled, narcissistic people I’ve ever seen. I felt bad writing that about her, but Randi Zuckerberg desperately wants to be famous and popular and keeps putting herself out there, hence her radio show and book. If you have a chance to look at her book, which is available for rock bottom prices on Amazon, it’s absolutely awful, full of cliches, and weirdly enough, lots of toilet humor. Randi Zuckerberg scares the hell out of me. EDIT: just saw this quote from the article. It’s almost Shakespearean in what a tragedy Facebook has become and sums up our era quite nicely: >“I didn’t feel proud to tell people I worked at Facebook.”
- whatshisface 9y ago
  >In 2011 Zuckerberg ['s sister] advocated for the abolition of anonymity on the Internet to protect children and young adults from cyber-bullying. Zuckerberg explained how anonymity is protective for perpetrators. (Wikipedia) I'm really surprised to see anyone advocating anything like that, but I guess it goes to show that Hackernews is actually a little ways out of the mainstream.
cJ0th 9y ago
This is one of the key shortcomings of Mr Zuckerberg. If he was actually willing to behave like a normal, vulnerable human being that lives and learns over time more people would start liking him (no pun intended). But no, he has to be awkward about everything even after all those years.
Slansitartop 9y ago
This post was killed as a dup, but where was the prior discussion?
- chalkandpaste 9y ago
  I think someone just wanted this thread shutdown...
- chalkandpaste 9y ago
  Technically it's here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16323168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16323168 But this is the only post that got comments.
kapauldo 9y ago
The ego on this guy.

59 points by dsr12 9y ago

The lines between politics and business continue to blur. Is there anything to prevent Facebook from fully funding a Zuckerberg campaign? I could see them arguing that it's a marketing expense as Trump went from household name to the object of everyone's attention during his run for President.

nathantotten 9y ago
Not my scope of expertise, but I believe corporations are prohibited from donating money directly to a candidate based on federal campaign laws. They could of course give money to an action committee, but there are lots of restrictions on coordination between the two. So I guess Facebook could fund his campaign via a PAC as long as Zuckerburg himself had nothing to do with the strategy. That would be an odd campaign. More likely Zuckerberg could fund the campaign himself via gifts or loans - this is what Trump did (not fully of course, but he did gift/loan some money).
- uptown 9y ago
  "but there are lots of restrictions on coordination between the two" This hasn't been true or enforced. https://theintercept.com/2016/10/07/both-campaigns-enthusiastically-violate-ban-on-super-pac-coordination-watchdog-says/ https://theintercept.com/2016/10/07/both-campaigns-enthusias...
adamnemecek 9y ago
> The lines between politics and business continue to blur. welcome to the us of a.
- nugi 9y ago
  Not limited to any single country. A few seem thus immune, but the facade always crumbles it time it seems.

ukulele 9y ago

This means there is an especially good chance that whatever you write and vote here will be eventually piped into Mark & Sheryl's eyes & ears. Time to unload those pent up opinions!

gressquel 9y ago

Seems like panic is starting to take hold. Unfortunately, neither this or the news feed update is gonna change the tide, its just too late. The transformation to Orkut/MySpace has already began and I am loving it. The social media experiment has failed, its become too big and caused too much psychological damage on individuals. I look forward to more and more niche communities :)

aetherson 9y ago
What evidence is there that Facebook in particular or social media in general is actually declining, rather than occasionally inspiring cranky articles?
- apocalyptic0n3 9y ago
  There is a bit of evidence in that US and Canadian daily users declined for the first time last quarter. [1] [1]: https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-active-user-decline-us-canda-q4-earnings-2018 https://www.recode.net/2018/1/31/16957122/facebook-daily-act...
- mantas 9y ago
  Regarding other social media, such functionality is longer seen as a perk by users. Interesting example may be Strava. They seem to be gravitating more towards "social" than "data crunching" kind of app. Nobody in my circles use it as "social" tool. People are not happy they're investing in bullshit functionality rather than fixing long-standing "data crunching" issues. Few mistakes here and there and people may start leaving for less "social" counterparts. There's little lockin in fitness apps anyway. Strava may be trying to steal a piece of Facebook's cake and solve lack of lockin. But IMO they're shooting themselves in a foot.
- jvagner 9y ago
  Evidence? Perhaps too early for that, but the article notes the pollster publishing the results of a survey after he left Facebook and started his own company: "Among tech companies, 32 percent of Americans said Facebook is harmful. A separate survey, which placed Facebook among other large brands including Walmart, McDonald’s, and Marlboro, found that 27 percent said it is harmful." There was an old article about which companies people could abandon first, among companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon. I believe Facebook was pretty high on that list. If you look at what happened to a company like AOL (just typing that seemed weird) or even Myspace, it's quite easy to imagine Facebook fading hard, mostly because people WANT it to fade, or they lose interest. On my own side, I only keep it around to share photos of my kid with my close friends and family. Beyond that, among the FB friends I have from years of working in tech, very few of them ever post anything at all. There's a silent percentage of the demographic who basically use FB as an RSS reader. How valuable will that be over time?

zekevermillion 9y ago

Maybe this is just Mark falling victim to his own machine. Now he, too, has become obsessed with social media preening, and has to hire a professional to tell him what people think about his party pics.

raverbashing 9y ago
Remains to be seen if it's only another yes man or not
- mcintyre1994 9y ago
  "McGinn declined to discuss the results of his polling at Facebook, saying nondisclosure agreements prevented him from doing so. But he said he decided to leave the company after only six months after coming to believe that Facebook had a negative effect on the world." I don't think he's a yes man.

nabla9 9y ago

This is just what Facebook does for Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg initiative is separate from Facebook and they have hired very high level campaign managers for Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, GWB (Ken Mehlman) to work for Zuckerberg.

tomashertus 9y ago
Seriusly? I can’t imagine him running for a president. What he is gonna do there?
- java_script 9y ago
  Try in vain to prove to himself that his billions aren't just dumb luck and circumstance.
- joncrane 9y ago
  It's just an ego thing. He wants to be "popular" in the same way politicians do. He wants to be at the top of the list of "most powerful people" that those magazines put out. He's probably super envious of Elon Musk.
  - SirFatty 9y ago
    Sounds like a Trump-type character flaw.
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    He has been making headlines regarding the possibility of running: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/15/mark-zuckerberg-could-be-running-for-president-in-2020.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/15/mark-zuckerberg-could-be-run... Why are people surprised he wants to run? >Zuck: I don't know why. They "trust me." Dumb fucks. Here he exhibits a defining characteristic of politicians. It's worth noting the difference with Zuckerburg is this: we all suddenly become concerned with our civil liberties when those of our own are directly assaulted: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/05/the-nunes-memo-and-katie-roiphe-article-show-how-concerns-for-due-process-and-civil-liberties-are-highly-selective-and-self-centered/ https://theintercept.com/2018/02/05/the-nunes-memo-and-katie...

trs80 9y ago

When I see Mark I feel queasy just looking at him. People don't like to have their privacy violated, even if it is a result of them willingly giving up their information.

java_script 9y ago
He's definitely somewhere in the uncanny valley.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

I will draw immense personal satisfaction from not voting for Mark in 2020.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

oldcynic 9y ago

I would perhaps be far less cynical about FB and Zuck if he, and other senior people, used FB as we're expected to. He seems, from what I've read, to deeply value his privacy whilst FB does everything possible to gain more clicks, time and tracking from us. FB isn't even much good for keeping up with friends and family any more! At least when Google was trying to push G+ there were many senior people actually just using it. You could actually have conversations with them! If he wants to gain stellar ratings then perhaps he should set his sights a little higher. Like a certain Mr Musk recently did. :)

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
I'm not sure we're in the same class of paparazzi-attention as those folks. So there's some excuse for more paranoia from them.
- Slansitartop 9y ago
  > I'm not sure we're in the same class of paparazzi-attention as those folks. So there's some excuse for more paranoia from them. Yes, but that shouldn't matter when it comes to social media use. Paparazzi are about invading privacy, but social media posts are about voluntarily giving it up in order to share. I also believe Zuckerberg once characterized privacy as a kind of dishonesty.

JoshMnem 9y ago

I wish people would stop linking to AMP pages. They take about 8 seconds to load on non-mobile browsers with JS turned off.

MiguelHudnandez 9y ago
I don't think your experience is universal. For me, I got these results with the amp version [1]: javascript on: ~350kb / 24 requests javascript off: ~85kb / 4 requests Compare this to the full version [2]: javascript on: ~10.5mb / 125 requests javascript off: ~6.0mb / 24 requests [1] https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/2/6/16976328/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-pollster-tavis-mcginn-honest-data https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/2/6/16976328/face... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/16976328/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-pollster-tavis-mcginn-honest-data https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/16976328/facebook-mark-zuc...
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  Are you loading that in a browser? My browser reports 12 requests and 1.06 seconds for your first link, but it doesn't render anything for about 8 seconds. Clarification: block the JS files from loading from the CDN, like it's done with many privacy tools.
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    It looks like there is an 8 second delay in the style element with the attribute `amp-boilerplate` that makes AMP pages extremely slow when 3rd party JavaScript is blocked (as it should be by default).

Bucephalus355 9y ago

What really concerns me about Mark Zuckerberg is his sister, Randi Zuckerberg. She has to be one of the least intelligent (for a Harvard grad), most entitled, narcissistic people I’ve ever seen. I felt bad writing that about her, but Randi Zuckerberg desperately wants to be famous and popular and keeps putting herself out there, hence her radio show and book. If you have a chance to look at her book, which is available for rock bottom prices on Amazon, it’s absolutely awful, full of cliches, and weirdly enough, lots of toilet humor. Randi Zuckerberg scares the hell out of me. EDIT: just saw this quote from the article. It’s almost Shakespearean in what a tragedy Facebook has become and sums up our era quite nicely: >“I didn’t feel proud to tell people I worked at Facebook.”

whatshisface 9y ago
>In 2011 Zuckerberg ['s sister] advocated for the abolition of anonymity on the Internet to protect children and young adults from cyber-bullying. Zuckerberg explained how anonymity is protective for perpetrators. (Wikipedia) I'm really surprised to see anyone advocating anything like that, but I guess it goes to show that Hackernews is actually a little ways out of the mainstream.

cJ0th 9y ago

This is one of the key shortcomings of Mr Zuckerberg. If he was actually willing to behave like a normal, vulnerable human being that lives and learns over time more people would start liking him (no pun intended). But no, he has to be awkward about everything even after all those years.

Slansitartop 9y ago

This post was killed as a dup, but where was the prior discussion?

chalkandpaste 9y ago
I think someone just wanted this thread shutdown...
chalkandpaste 9y ago
Technically it's here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16323168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16323168 But this is the only post that got comments.

kapauldo 9y ago

The ego on this guy.