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Facebook CEO Zuckerberg conspicuously absent as data scandal grows
- protomyth 9y agoI would suppose with a video like https://twitter.com/Uncle_Jimbo/status/976087974109736960 https://twitter.com/Uncle_Jimbo/status/976087974109736960 floating around, it does make for some uncomfortable questions. You cannot keep saying you are neutral when you clearly get outraged when one side does something you let the other side do. Particularly when you shouldn't of let anybody do it in the first place.
- bbctol 9y agoThat's a... nonstandard use of the word collusion.
- protomyth 9y agoThe text isn't the important part, its the video that keeps popping up a lot, I just grabbed the first tweet with it in it.
- dglass 9y agoYeah, the lid was blown wide open and if Facebook has to answer to why it turned a blind eye to this Cambridge Analytica scandal they should also have to answer to how their platform was used by the Democrats in 2008 and 2012. It's well known that the Obama campaign used big data to gain an advantage in those elections. It's looking like they were just doing the same thing with Facebook's data too.
- wavefunction 9y ago>It's looking like they were just doing the same thing with Facebook's data too Crafting lies into propaganda? No, I don't see them doing the same thing at all.
- basedecode 9y agoObama did the same thing in 2012. "The campaign didn’t go into much detail, at the time, about exactly how it used Facebook. But St. Clair put it in fairly stark terms when I talked to him at A.M.G.’s temporary offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in April. They started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information. In another prompt, the campaign asked for access to the users’ Facebook news feeds, which 25 percent declined, St. Clair said. Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on. “It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list,” St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said. But the campaign’s ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president. “We would grab the top 50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall” to figure out who were most likely to be their real-life friends, not just casual Facebook acquaintances. St. Clair, a former high-school marching-band member who now wears a leather Diesel jacket, explained: “We asked to see photos but really we were looking for who were tagged in photos with you, which was a really great way to dredge up old college friends — and ex-girlfriends,” he said." [1] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaigns-digital-masterminds-cash-in.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/the-obama-campaig...
- hedora 9y agoWhat you describe is fundamentally different than building psychological profiles of the entire electorate using stolen data, then finding mentally unstable swing voters, and serving them self-deleting, libelous advertisements designed to exploit their mental illness to get them to vote your way. That is the service that Cambridge Analytica sells. It was used to swing the brexit vote and by the Trump campaign. CA was replicating this strategy on multiple continents until Facebook (hopefully) pulled the plug.
- jrs235 9y ago
- RugnirViking 9y agoCould somebody give me a breakdown of the allegations? What exactly have they done with the data.
- criley2 9y agoThe allegations against Facebook are that for a period of several years they turned a blind eye to rampant Developer abuse of their API, allowing Political organizations (and others) to download massive amounts of Facebook user data. Facebook also continuously marginalized their Chief Security Officer who routinely complained about the API loopholes, were caught informing employees of a "don't ask don't know therefore no liability" quasi-official policy towards the widespread abuse (don't rock the advertising/business boat), and eventually reduced the CSO's staff from 120 to 3 and role to what appears to be "tweeting pre-approved pro-Facebook messages". The FTC is now investigating if Facebook has violated it's 2011 FTC privacy mandate, something which carries fines in the millions per event range I believe (i.e. trillions of USD in fines for this size of privacy mandate failure)
- foota 9y agoI read the reduction in the CSO's staff as a prelude to his leaving the company, not as a "nerfing" to his role.
- ce4 9y agoHis team has been reassigned in december already: "By December 2017, Mr. Stamos, who reports to Facebook’s general counsel, proposed that he report directly to higher-ups. Facebook executives rejected that proposal and instead reassigned Mr. Stamos’s team" https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-alex-stamos.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-al...
- jrs235 9y agoDamn. This reeks of higher-ups knowing what was going on (or taking advice from malvolent scrupulous people) in order to maintain plausible deniability.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoCompanies give the silent treatment all the time but add on how terrible Zuckerberg is at public relations and even I really have trouble blaming Facebook for keeping him stashed away right now.
- ilamont 9y agoHe's finally learning that you can't duck, spin, and charm your way out of everything.
- badcede 9y agoCharm?
- ilamont 9y agoOn Capitol Hill, Zuckerberg is expected to meet Thursday with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Republican leaders, Senate Commerce panel Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and other committee members, and the top four House Republican leaders. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is also hosting a meeting with Zuckerberg Thursday focused on immigration, according to a Democratic aide. Democratic Reps. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, Xavier Becerra and Zoe Lofgren of California, Joe Crowley and Steve Israel of New York, Luis Gutierrez of Illinois and John Yarmuth of Kentucky have been invited to the gathering. A House Republican aide said that while immigration may come up with Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans, it is not the sole purpose of their session. https://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/mark-zuckerberg-dc-096933 https://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/mark-zuckerberg-dc-09... And in other countries too: Facebook's Zuckerberg meets propaganda czar in China charm drive: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-facebook-idUSKCN0WL0KB https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-facebook-idUSKCN0WL... Facebook's German Charm Offensive: https://global.handelsblatt.com/companies/facebooks-german-charm-offensive-453984 https://global.handelsblatt.com/companies/facebooks-german-c...
- kelvin0 9y agoHe is to charm what Mother Theresa was to the tech world. (no disrespect intended)
- Firebrand 9y agoSo I think Zuck's presidential campaign is officially toast at this point. Now what?
- jayess 9y agoDid it ever have a real chance?
- an4rchy 9y agoThey were planning to use Cambridge Analytica to make it happen /s In all reality, the common public is probably indifferent to his running, at this point, and I believe this current series of events hasn't changed much.
- differentView 9y agoMost people didn't think Trump had a chance either.
- paulcole 9y agoWith Trump's win it feels wrong to rule anyone out this early.
- jrs95 9y agoIt was easy enough to see Trump coming ahead of time though. He’s been talking on and off about running for a long time, and that speech more recently where he called the Chinese “motherfuckers” in particular should have made it clear that what he might do could be effective. Once you accept that he’s running and what his style would be like, it’s easy to see him getting the nomination. It’s not easy to see Zuckerberg getting the nomination under pretty much any circumstances.
- paulcole 9y agoThe major sports books had him as a 4:1 underdog on the afternoon of election day. It's easy to say in hindsight but nobody gave the guy much of a chance until it was too late.
- product50 9y agoPersonally, I think he is doing the right thing. The more fb communicates the more the press is going after them. At this pt, fb should just stop communicating as that will give media less fodder to go after since they tend to dig into smaller details anyways to get more views. A good counter example is Twitter which had equal if not more exposure on Russian ads but they have kept mum. And no one is going after them.
- TAForObvReasons 9y agoThere are two ways to weather a crisis: get out in front of it or keep quiet and hope people move on. The problem in this case is that FB represents a direct threat to the media businesses, and they are incentivized to drag out the issue as long as necessary
- timr 9y ago"The problem in this case is that FB represents a direct threat to the media businesses, and they are incentivized to drag out the issue as long as necessary" Maybe the problem is that they've actually done something objectionable here, and it's not just a conspiracy against them.
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago> Maybe the problem is that they've actually done something objectionable here, and it's not just a conspiracy against them. That is very clear, and I think you missed the point. We've seen numerous examples recently, including Equifax and Wells Fargo and Mylan, of objectionable situations where the strategy of "say as little as possible" allowed the companies to move on and show even greater profits. None of those companies represent a threat to the media entities. What makes the current Facebook situation different from those is the added incentives.
- timr 9y agoI don't grant your premise. All three of those examples were (and continue to be) excoriated by the media for weeks. So far, Facebook has had a bad weekend. We're a long way from media conspiracy. In other words, nothing here is out of the ordinary.
- sigi45 9y agoIf Zuckerberg would ever has the balls to do right with facebook... He got lucky in life, there is not much at how he became what he is by having any special character or much of experience.
- jrs235 9y ago>He got lucky in life, there is not much at how he became what he is by having any special character or much of experience. Sounds like the current POTUS.
- HumanDrivenDev 9y agoAn off the cuff anti-trump comment on hacker news. You are an incredibly courageous human being.
- jrs235 9y ago>He got lucky in life, there is not much at how he became what he is by having any special character or much of experience. I highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.
- bitmapbrother 9y agoZuck isn't absent. He's just following the tried and true method of letting enough time pass by so that the public loses interest and moves on to the next big thing. Three months from now this will all be forgotten and it's back to business as usual.
- hedora 9y agoWhat? Trump will be out of office, and brexit cancelled in three months? (I actually agree with your point, but think it is wishful thinking on FB’s part)