8 ms·

Is there a Facebook smear campaign going on or people just love to pile on Zuckerberg? Facebook is an advertisement company and collects data, but so does every

Is there a Facebook smear campaign going on or people just love to pile on Zuckerberg? Facebook is an advertisement company and collects data, but so does everybody else. Gmail launched in 2004. Snowden leaks in 2013 were greeted with general apathy. But know it's the time to crucify Zuckerberg for what exatly? Make use of targeted advertisement? Or letting Facebook have user-generated content, that may or may not have influenced votes in the past? Either way, the ongoing collection of all kinds of data has been obvious for many years now. And it's not going to stop, so some advice: Instead blaming this one actor, better get used to it. Platforms also can't fully and completely be responsible for political views expressed by user-generated content.

jseliger 8y ago
This is a very good comment and I hope it rises to the top of the heap. I wrote this post on an HN comment, but I wonder, "Is there an actual Facebook crisis, or media narrative about Facebook crisis?" https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebook-crisis-or-media-narrative-about-facebook-crisis https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo... It seems to me that Zuckerberg doesn't know that he's in a media scapegoating situation. When you've become the scapegoat, there is nothing you can do to stop it. You can observe the scapegoating mechanism, but even that will likely do very little to halt it in action. The media cannot accept (or comprehensively address) its own culpability for the 2016 election. So let's put the blame on those guys, over there, instead of looking at ourselves.
- GreeniFi 8y ago
  You’ve been reading Rene Girard it would seem. And he’s a good guide to what’s going on: they were all at it, but Zuck is soaking up the blame not just for the ills of the social media biz model but the ills of late capitalism.
  - Zelphyr 8y ago
    He may be soaking up undeserved blame but a lot of it is deserved. He has demonstrated time and again that he has little care for user privacy when that got in the way of selling an ad. People are (hopefully) starting to wake up to how dangerous that is.
    - pm90 8y ago
      I think its the danger part that was not sufficiently recognized and is only now being realized. When the personal data was used to sell soap, nobody really cared. When its used to instead sell political agenda and conspiracy theories... that is when the danger starts.
      - aylmao 8y ago
        To be fair, it has always been used to sell political agendas. Politicians have advertised in online platforms way before 2016.
        pm90 8y ago
        > To be fair, it has always been used to sell political agendas. Politicians have advertised in online platforms way before 2016. Agreed. Perhaps a better way to phrase it is that its only in 2016 that the true power of the platform to spread misinformation with a political agenda was realized. Which naturally people care about a lot more than product placements.
    - GreeniFi 8y ago
      For sure it’s deserved, but as is often the case with scapegoats, FB is not the only one. The Gusrdian collects and sells used data to advertisers, for example.
- nkozyra 8y ago
  Plenty of blame to spare, but "the media" is a vast and wide net without any specific claims. Regardless, it's whataboutism here. And let's face an uncomfortable fact: the "media" once meant the gatekeepers for information. Facebook is absolutely fulfilling that role in 2018. You cannot separate the two.
- spamizbad 8y ago
  Facebook received largely anodyne coverage for most of its life; it's only been the last few years that people took a critical eye. And I don't understand your media argument. "The media" spends a tremendous amount of time analyzing and criticizing its own output, even within institutions. If anything, the media tends to catch flack for too much navel-gazing instead of covering actual news. Facebook would benefit from some of that introspection, rather than top-down order-following.
  - toomim 8y ago
    > Facebook received largely anodyne coverage for most of its life; it's only been the last few years that people took a critical eye. No way. You're totally forgetting how much fear the media heaped on Facebook in 2005 first over children having (gasp) photos of themselves on the internet, some people even listing their phone numbers publicly, and then in 2006 and 2007 it was about college kids posting photos of themselves drinking alcohol, which (it was hypothesized) would prevent them from getting jobs when their future employer went through their facebook account. Please. The media narrative around Facebook has been exaggerated fear from the beginning. The only thing new today is the choice of fear to exaggerate.
    - spamizbad 8y ago
      The examples you give are all “people behaving badly” on Facebook, not Facebook explicitly acting in bad faith.
      - behavingbadly 8y ago
        Here is one (of many examples.) Facebook COO Sandberg hires a right-wing firm to spread rumors and shift blame onto George Soros. This isnt just bad behavior -- this is abhorrent. George Soros gets bears brunt of anti-semitism (recall just weeks ago a rightist sent him a bomb due to propaganda blaming him for literally everything.) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-... Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.
- pm90 8y ago
  It is not a good comment at all. I know its the go-to reaction for engineers in SV to empathize with a fellow engineer and portray him as a martyr in the altar of an east-coast elitist media. But please look at the facts and details of what NYT has uncovered. > It seems to me that Zuckerberg doesn't know that he's in a media scapegoating situation. When you've become the scapegoat, there is nothing you can do to stop it. You can observe the scapegoating mechanism, but even that will likely do very little to halt it in action. He's much much smarter than you give him credit for. A lot of folks think of him as a clueless programming genius, but this is brilliant guy who understands politics a lot better than most engineers in SV. All the feel-good tours were not for his personal political ambition, but to create goodwill for his most precious, valuable child, Facebook. And he has done every thing in his power to cut the criticism, scapegoat critics and regulation. > The media cannot accept (or comprehensively address) its own culpability for the 2016 election. So let's put the blame on those guys, over there, instead of looking at ourselves. Certainly there is some aspect of that. But please lets look at the facts. Facebook did hire a PR firm that spread Soros-based conspiracy theories against its critics. They fired Stamos when he exposed the extent of Russian intervention and kept quiet or dismissed the magnitude of Russian activity until it became untenable for them to do so. All the steps they have taken to become better, have been forced onto them ... by who? Its by the Media. The media uncovering facts about the company. That's their job: to bring to light these facts. Let them do their job, and lets hope Facebook does its job as well.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    I'm not hearing anyone dispute these facts. Media-driven fervor is rarely devoid of facts. Rather, with story choice and interspersed op-eds, the narrative becomes clear even if not untrue. For every fact-based article, there are dozens of opinion ones (happening with all big-web tech) and my flag-clicking finger grows weary. These digital opinion pieces sharing the same domain become much harder to differentiate than in print. Even if you're focusing on facts, many don't care about them or at least don't consider them or their consequences as damning as the coverage might deserve. At this point, I'll take my bulleted lists of uncovered facts and eschew the rest of this crap. Sadly my peers, pitchforks in hand, can't do so and are hastily cheering on government oversight. Something none of us can ever recover from (a one way street in almost all instances).
- codyb 8y ago
  There's a ton of things which impacted the 2016 election (disproporionate representation, 24 hour news cycle's obsession with Trump, foreign interference, people seeming to get most of their media from social media, disinformation, billions of dollars of dark money, disenfranchisement, Comey, etc). However, Facebook's stock has dropped from a high of 220 to 140 (today) in less than six months. That seems like an actual Facebook crisis to me.
- mcphage 8y ago
  > The media cannot accept (or comprehensively address) its own culpability for the 2016 election. So let's put the blame on those guys, over there, instead of looking at ourselves. After all this time, do you still not realize that Facebook is part of the media, perhaps even the biggest part.
- siidooloo 8y ago
  Facebook is ‘the media.’ Newspapers, magazines and TV are just advertisements with enough other stuff in the middle to get you attention. Facebook is the same thing.
- tomjen3 8y ago
  Interesting point. I am not entirely sure that Facebook can't do anything to get out the scapegoat situation though. Of the top of my head, they could say that they want to focus more on your friend and friends, so for the next 2 weeks it will not be possible to share news articles at all and the feed will prioritize messages from people you have lots of mutual friends with. It is kind of hard to argue with, and it would show the media exactly how much power Facebook has over them.
- philwelch 8y ago
  Making matters worse, the legacy media blame the tech industry for their own decline and fight back the only way they can, with hit pieces. The NYT did the same to Amazon a few years ago. Facebook, which is a more direct competitor, is an even bigger target.
ravenstine 8y ago
There is, but there are things Facebook could have done to curb it. The problem with blatant insincerity is it quickly gives everyone else the moral high ground.
nkozyra 8y ago
> Platforms also can't fully and completely be responsible for political views expressed by user-generated content. Maybe, maybe not. But in Facebook's case, they did not hesitate to commoditize disinformation and propaganda. While a lot of platforms are/were susceptible to this vector, we now know that Facebook knew what was happening and didn't care as long as the money came in. Which brings us back to "maybe, maybe not." Corporations use profit (and variants) as their natural reward function. Look at FBs stock the last few months. People are speaking. We, the users, may be demanding some accountability from our platforms we previously did not.
- the_snooze 8y ago
  >But in Facebook's case, they did not hesitate to commoditize disinformation and propaganda. They're just in the business of making the world more open and connected (TM).
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    In a sense it's not inaccurate. But if you have no filter, no ethos, decisions about what's allowed and distributed are prone to malice, prone to exploit or both. Of course, Facebook has these things. But they go out the door the minute you have money to spend.
    - foxhedgehog 8y ago
      So true.
- Zarel 8y ago
  I might have missed something from the news, but what does "did not hesitate to commoditize disinformation and propaganda" mean? Did Facebook do something other than just allow users to post content, just like Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, or any other social media website?
  - all2 8y ago
    No. They're just a well enough known target for the latest round of hyperbole. News isn't news if it isn't bad.
na85 8y ago
I don't need a smear campaign to dislike a guy who got so rich selling my personal data to advertising scum that he can afford to buy all the mansions around his, in order to protect his own privacy[0], all the while spending billions on advertising campaigns to tell us poor people that "privacy is dead"[1] while calling his users "dumb fucks".[2] Zuck's just generally a first-rate piece of shit. If he weren't filthy rich, HN would have no reason to hero-worship him. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-buys-4-homes-for-privacy-2013-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-buys-4-homes... [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/01/10/10readwriteweb-facebooks-zuckerberg-says-the-age-of-privac-82963.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/external/readwri... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuckerberg-ims-confirmed-by-zuckerberg-the-new-yorker-2010-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zu...
jhayward 8y ago
> Is there a Facebook smear campaign going on or people just love to pile on Zuckerberg? How about "neither"? Facebook has been abysmally led on the subject of misuse, in fact going so far as to tell themselves explicitly it was OK if they got people killed[1] as long as they grew the user base and its monetization. They are just now coming out from under the default presumption that tech == good, and a fairly prodigious PR campaign aimed at suppressing criticism, indeed even smearing critics and misleading the US Congress. There is very good evidence that FB employees knew, and that executives either should have known, or were grossly negligent in not knowing, the extent of the various types of abuses, up to and including genocide, that were being conducted using FB as a primary platform for the campaign. No matter how you try to frame this as the tech biz equivalent "just boys being boys" and "business like everyone else" there is a lot, a whole lot, about FB and Zuckerberg's leadership that deserves exposure, criticism, and ultimately a change of leadership. [1] https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/this-facebook-executives-single-tweet-response-to-leaked-memo-reveals-companys-greatest-problem.html https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/this-facebook-executives-s... Edited to add: Take note that Zuckerberg's response to these events is to concentrate power, use a "war" metaphor for his approach, and generally follow the authoritarian play book. Anyone thinking that FB is any kind of "western liberal values" kind of actor is fooling themselves. It will always be more in line with the kinds of things conservatives find attractive, especially today.
wslack 8y ago
Local and state governments in the US build most roads and are responsible for them. When the roads are built in a way that causes lots of accidents at a particular intersection (even though the people "at fault" in these accidents are the drivers themselves) people expect the government to improve the roads and reduce the harm. So likewise, Facebook's choices in how it presented content (giving equal weight to the NYTimes and fake news generated for profit in North Macedonia) and mechanisms for maximizing likes, views, and engagement, allowed lies and nonsense to blossom on its platforms. This isn't an issue that's restricted to any individual political party or cause, though the people in North Macedonia have been clear that "right" fake news sold much better than "left" fake news in 2016. Facebook build the roads here and made decisions about the tools to navigate those. Users are using those tools as designed to get maximum engagement and profit, causing the propagation of memes, trolling, and lies over quality content that doesn't generate the same metrics but costs much more to produce and fact-check. That people lie isn't Facebook's fault, but like any local government, now that they know their design is contributing to problems, some expect them to address that. Same would go for the owner of an event venue that's being used weekly to promote a violent cause, even though that owner isn't responsible for the tenants, they do choose to give them space to organize. I'm not taking a position on what exactly they should do, but I want to be clear: regardless of if there is a scapegoat effect or not, claims of Facebook's degree of measured responsibility have clear precedent.
- chillacy 8y ago
  > So likewise, Facebook's choices in how it presented content (giving equal weight to the NYTimes and fake news generated for profit in North Macedonia) and mechanisms for maximizing likes, views, and engagement, allowed lies and nonsense to blossom on its platforms. Isn't that the default choice everywhere? On HN links from NYT and trash sites look the same. On Youtube videos from ABC and conspiracy theorists look the same.
  - CaptainZapp 8y ago
    It's far more profitable to promote outrage and that's exactly what Facebook's algorithms have done and are doing. And that's what you find in your news feed. Youtube has pretty much the same problem on a different level. That's despite the mealy mouthed bullshit that the dear leader spouts those days.
thanatropism 8y ago
Honestly? Snowden's leaks implied Obama did bad stuff; the Facebook scandals invariably point to mr. Trump. (I'm comfortable with downvotes.)
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  Snowden's leaks showed that Obama shut down programs instituted by his predecessor (including bulk email metadata collection). There was one bulk domestic data collection that was ongoing at the time of Snowden's leaks, and Obama immediately called for its end, which happened soon after.
tomp 8y ago
Yea I installed Signal yesterday. Open source, funded by a non-profit, default end-to-end encrypted, peer-reviewed encryption protoocl.
dgzl 8y ago
> some advice: Instead blaming this one actor, better get used to it. I think you've nailed it with this bit, but you're not respecting the side effects of being an unsuspecting victim of their model. Youth were the people who first adopted social media, and that was before our data was considered either sensitive or valuable. By the time we've realized that our content and behavior are being targeted, we have become hooked and addicted to social media. At the same time, we really shouldn't expect ourselves or others to understand the potential side-effects and consequences of this kind of collection. That would be a disservice to the ourselves and the public.
- danShumway 8y ago
  > we really shouldn't expect ourselves or others to understand the potential side-effects and consequences I am somewhat with you, but people have been warning about the potential side-effects and consequences of this collection a long time[0]. I don't fault anyone who is only just now figuring out that Facebook might be problematic. I don't fault people who ignored those warnings. That is what it is, that's just what people do, and that part of human nature is never really going to go away. I can live with it. What annoys me is that when I read articles like this, there's this undertone I pick up of "we've uncovered something crazy and we need to start having a conversation about this." And no, we don't. If you're just now figuring out that Facebook might potentially be maybe evil, you don't need to start a conversation, you need to join the conversation that already exists. This might sound like bitterness, but there is a real point beyond, "serves you all for not listening." The vast majority of criticism I see on Medium/Twitter/Cable/Outlets in general ignores the perspectives of people who have been thinking about this problem way longer than they have, and as result people come up with, frankly, really bad solutions that are equally problematic. To make a comparison, this is like everybody waking up one day and realizing that climate change is a real problem. And then instead of going and talking to the scientists who have been warning about it for years, we get a bunch of very reactionary takes on Cable news that ignore the nuance of the situation and say stupid things like, "this is all solar's fault because the mirrors get really hot", or "Facebook should just filter everything that gets uploaded from anywhere for hate speech." So no shame to people who are just now figuring out that advertising and data collection have downsides. Yes shame to people who feel like this is a novel problem that requires completely novel solutions, or who are using Facebook as an excuse to avoid the broader problem that literally everyone is doing this and many of the other actors are just as bad as Facebook if not worse. [0]: https://www.xkcd.com/743/ https://www.xkcd.com/743/
rhizome 8y ago
But know it's the time to crucify Zuckerberg for what exatly? Trump, and rightfully so.
- aylmao 8y ago
  Americans amaze me-- they always need to find a villain but always fail to find the villainousness in themselves. Trump could be more rightfully blamed in the combination of: - A Democratic Party that failed its middle and lower class - A media industry obsessed with growth and sensationalism - A cultural obsession with money and so called "success" - A deep-rooted racial problem - A population trained to not be skeptical, and be responsive to advertisement - A shared obsession to "be the greatest country on earth" - A two-party political system with sports-like irrational rivalry - A democracy where the popular vote of the majority doesn't seem to matter - A tradition of long-standing political dynasties disconnected from the people's needs Just to name a few big and complex systems that played into the election of Trump. Yet, it's hard to find the villain in those or to introspect, reflect and accept that the US has deep flaws and in some aspects is rotting from inside. It's easier to just not talk about all the rest, and fully blame it on the few thousand dollars Russians spent on advertising.
  - sjg007 8y ago
    >- A Democratic Party that failed its middle and lower class Republicans blocked almost all efforts to get anything done. Blame would lie equally with them. Their specific motive was to shut Obama down and render his presidency mute. As such he expanded the executive which Trump has taken advantage of. >- A media industry obsessed with growth and sensationalism Ad dollars and there was a repeal of the fairness doctrine. That lead to Fox News not being news but entertainment and pushing the right wing agenda. >- A cultural obsession with money and so called "success" It's reported this way but is it actually true? Most Americans make less than 50k so I maybe money is a concern. >- A deep-rooted racial problem Probably true. It's been codified into law, not explicitly per se anymore but effectively so. >- A population trained to not be skeptical, and be responsive to advertisement Americans do learn what propaganda is in school but a vocal irrational minority tends to saturate social media. But there are political agendas driven by state legislatures to write the curriculum as well as a lot of revisionist history in school textbooks. >- A shared obsession to "be the greatest country on earth" Only because it drives headlines. - A two-party political system with sports-like irrational rivalry This is about guns, abortion and taxes mostly. Most of the time it is about the economy. - A democracy where the popular vote of the majority doesn't seem to matter Well this is a founding of the country problem.. basically the rich people at the time didn't want a true democracy and instead opted for a republic. And politicians exploit these properties to shift the balance of power in their favor. The mechanism to power here is the vote and they suppress voters they don't want etc... - A tradition of long-standing political dynasties disconnected from the people's needs This is not really true. I think the bigger issue is that a lot of money is needed to fund a campaign and most people don't donate and as such politicians have to court big business or big monied interests. McCain wanted campaign finance reform as well as a repeal of super pac funding. At a minimum we need full transparency so people can make an informed choice.
notacoward 8y ago
Important point here: groupthink can be functionally identical to conspiracy, even without explicit communication or coordination. There are a lot of people in media who hate Facebook because as a new medium it's killing their own business model. This creates a cognitive bias in which they'll be hyper-aware of anything bad about Facebook and oblivious to anything good, which is reflected in what they write. There are others in tech who have a similar bias. For example, anyone at Google probably hears lots of messages distinguishing between the two and portraying Google as the good twin. Then all of these factions feed on each others' signals that such views are virtuous. The net result is a massive piling-on equivalent to conspiracy, even though there isn't a literal one.
- Flenser 8y ago
  There's even a term for this, Stand Alone Complex: > Accidental collectivism made up of detached individuals, resembling a highly organized conspiracy and lacking a deliberate origin. The stand alone complex is from Ghost in the Shell. — https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=stand%20alone%20complex https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=stand%20alon... More here: http://ghostintheshell.wikia.com/wiki/Philosophy http://ghostintheshell.wikia.com/wiki/Philosophy See Also: There Is No Cabal: > There Is No Cabal is a catchphrase used on Usenet. Its common abbreviation, TINC, is used humorously to suggest that people should lighten up and not see a conspiracy around every corner. It is alternatively used as a pseudo-ironic statement, since presumably an insider or someone who knows "the cabal" would inevitably deny that there is a cabal. It was used extensively by members of the backbone cabal. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal
  - notacoward 8y ago
    Never heard of Stand Alone Complex. Thanks! I had heard of TINC, having been active on Usenet at the time. I remember it a bit differently, more like "it doesn't matter if there's a cabal" perhaps, but then I probably hung out in different cliques and every one had its own flavor.
gopher2 8y ago
The NY Times published about 10 articles on Facebook between November 14-16th. It was a like a coordinated blitz recently. * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/business/media/facebook-advertisers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/business/media/facebook-a... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/jobs-facebook-computer-science-students.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/jobs-facebook-... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-crisis-mark-zuckerberg-sheryl-sandberg.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-crisi... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/facebook-definers-opposition-research.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/facebook-defin... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/zuckerberg-facebook-sandberg-tactics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/zuckerberg-fac... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/opinion/facebook-data-congress-russia-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/opinion/facebook-data-con... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/letters/facebook-scandals.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/letters/facebook-... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/facebook-zuckerberg-investigation-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/facebook-zuckerbe... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/business/dealbook/facebook-defends-itself.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/business/dealbook/faceboo... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-sheryl-sandberg-silicon-valley-antitrust.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/facebook-mark-zuc... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-democrats-congress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-democ...
- ucaetano 8y ago
  > a coordinated Being a single newspaper, it absolutely is coordinated. Ever newspaper is coordinated. It would be surprising if it wasn't. So this is largely irrelevant. It would be relevant if there was coordination amongst multiple newspapers. And even then, it might not matter: coordination doesn't imply the the news aren't true. So, no. There isn't a coordinated media blitz, and even if there was, it wouldn't matter.
  - 8y ago
InclinedPlane 8y ago
Facebook essentially facilitated genocide and has done almost nothing to correct their "mistakes" or accept their role in the tragedy. They also went out of their way to run backdoor smear campaigns against their critics, including using anti-semitic attacks. And that's just the drop in the bucket of their faults, bad behavior, and crimes. This isn't just about data collection, stop pretending it is.
BLKNSLVR 8y ago
I don't think it makes any difference whether it's a smear campaign or not, through the lens that most media companies are pushing an agenda one way or another as their bread and butter. Rupert Murdoch wanted the Australian Prime Minister replaced, and within a week his wish was granted[0]. News media is a powerful force, and Facebook is no doubt stepping on those powerful toes that have enjoyed the ability to influence elections and political leadership for a century. The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal put some blood in the water, and the Old Media sharks have gathered. If there is a smear campaign going on, it's another case of elephants fighting and the grass getting trampled. Old Media want Facebook to be better regulated so the trajectory of Old Media's declining influence is temporarily improved. Facebook will implement relatively ineffective reforms with all the enthusiasm of an aspiring sportsman writing an english literature essay, and the users will continue to slowly leave the service as they grow weary of it for their own reasons as opposed to some spectre of manipulation; if they're not off FB already, there's no further scaremongering that will make any difference. The scale of Facebook's user numbers means that this attrition rate will probably still see it more powerful and influential than Old Media for the foreseeable future; Old Media are just trying to tilt the playing field in their favour. Same ol' same ol'. [0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/liberal-leadership-spill-rupert-murdoch-kerry-stokes-influence/10262552 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/liberal-leadership-sp...
- tensor 8y ago
  This isn't a case of Facebook influencing the election. It is a case where they outright took money from a foreign government to help them interfere in the democratic process to the foreign governments benefit. It's borderline treason, not simply using it's resources to speak louder via lobbying or broadcasting as many other companies have done. This is not a case of "all sides same" as much it seems that many posters here want to keep pushing that narrative.
  - BLKNSLVR 8y ago
    "outright took money from a foreign government to help them interfere in the democratic process to the foreign governments benefit" That gives the idea that it was Facebook's intent. They took money for advertising from someone who was gaming the system - FB didn't know the system was being gamed. They're just selling targeted advertising (reprehensible for different reasons), which is just what FB does as a business. That's also somewhat why I used the example of a media mogul obviously having enough power to have a Prime Minister of a country replaced. That's well beyond what should be considered legal. It's not treasonous because it's in corporate interests as opposed to a foreign power, but how big does a 'corporate' need to be before it's considered a foreign power? It's still against the interests of the country. The shame of it is, most efforts to increase transparency and close loopholes in political bribery (cough donations cough) are watered-down: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-15/labor-and-coalition-reject-changes-to-political-donation-laws/10502660 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-15/labor-and-coalition-r... Facebook were passively, not actively complicit. Greedy and naive, stupid and blind; not malicious. The irony is that they ARE actively malicious when it comes to selling out their users' privacy to the highest bidder, but that's not what this is about. I haven't read everything about all the angles on this topic, so if I'm obviously missing specific information about how Facebook actively colluded with foreign powers (allegedly or otherwise), please point me to it. Fundamentally, Facebook shouldn't be used as a scapegoat for Trump winning the election. (US) politics has been a cesspool of corruption since long before Zuck had any influence on the world. Wholly and solely blaming FB would be an injustice whilst allowing the more fundamental injustices to continue unpunished.
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
A platform can't be held responsible for every opinion some idiot posts, true. When nations weaponize your platform to disrupt foreign elections[1] and facilitate outright genocide[2], you don't get to shrug and ignore it. This is not just about selling data to advertisers anymore. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/05/facebooks-election-interference-problem-exponentially-worse-on-eve-of-midterms-study-suggests/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/05/facebooks-election-interfe... [2] https://www.lawfareblog.com/facebooks-role-genocide-myanmar-new-reporting-complicates-narrative https://www.lawfareblog.com/facebooks-role-genocide-myanmar-...
- sjg007 8y ago
  This is the actual issue. Everyone suggesting a smear campaign here is ignoring the facts. Facebook most likely did not have controls or processes or policy to prevent foreign actors from abusing the platform even when reported by legitimate organizations and governments aligned with US interests and policy. It's actually in Facebook's best interest to fix these problems because people will leave for another network to share their photos with friends and these issues will accelerate a decline.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    They aren't ignoring facts, they just already accepted them dozens of articles ago. Questioning coverage frequency has nothing to do with the facts and definitely is not a sign of ignoring them.
lern_too_spel 8y ago
> Snowden leaks in 2013 were greeted with general apathy. The only mass domestic collection (phone metadata) that was ongoing at the time of the leaks was shut down soon after and had been known about since 2006. Why would you expect more of a furore than what we had? https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-n... > Gmail launched in 2004. Email servers collect emails. This has been the case since long before 2004. The reason people are pissed off at Facebook is that Zuckerberg has not only been collecting users' data but also using it in shady ways (including to attack critics and competitors) since he was at Harvard and has shown no sign that he's changed.
- adventured 8y ago
  > The only mass domestic collection (phone metadata) that was ongoing at the time of the leaks was shut down soon after and had been known about since 2006 That's some amusing phrasing gymnastics. The mass collection was not stopped at all. May 2018: "N.S.A. Triples Collection of Data From U.S. Phone Companies" "The National Security Agency vacuumed up more than 534 million records of phone calls and text messages from American telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon last year — more than three times what it collected in 2016, a new report revealed on Friday." "Intelligence analysts are also more frequently searching for information about Americans within the agency’s expanding collection of so-called call detail records — telecom metadata logging who contacted whom and when, but not the contents of what they said." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/politics/nsa-surveillance-2017-annual-report.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/politics/nsa-surveilla...
  - zzo38computer 8y ago
    This NSA surveillance is going to be a waste of energy and money, in addition to eroding privacy. Therefore, it is extra extra extra bad.
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago
    A fraction of a percent of phone call metadata is a far cry from 100%.
cromwellian 8y ago
Facebook's behavior kind of goes beyond mere data collection tho. They have hired paid shills/astroturf orgs like Microsoft and Oracle did to go after rivals or plant fake stories. And then there's the Onavo VPN fiasco, wherein Facebook was using VPN snooping for competitive intelligence, so they could buy up any threats early, at least according to leaks. There's some questionable stuff you could say Google has done (Disclosure: I work for Google), like fund think tanks on free speech that end up coming to the conclusion that 'Search Algorithms = Free Speech' and that you can't regulate algorithms (although some of those orgs, like the ACLU and EFF likely held those positions prior, and the EFF is not beyond publishing critical pieces on Google), but I think funding researchers who end up writing favorable opinions is a different category than funding people to plant fake stories and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Like, the Koch Brothers funding a college researcher that studies global warming, and it publishing a skeptical review of existing papers, is more defensible than the Koch's funding a bunch of online trolls that post non-credible rumors or conspiracy stories on regulators who want to crack down on carbon. The former is at least philosophically defensible if the criticisms of the academic literature actually expose real flaws. The latter is just immoral.
jessewmc 8y ago
For those of us who think that 'get used to it' is not an acceptable answer for Facebook, Gmail or anything else, a little heat on any one of them is a good way to bring the problem to more public light.
- kodablah 8y ago
  So long as it's recognized that, as the problem is continually forced into the public light, lots of people may think that 'get used to it' is an acceptable answer when weighing all options.
r00fus 8y ago
Trump is deeply unpopular with about 60% of the US population. People don't forget about Cambridge Analytica. FB doubled down when they defended one of their higher-ups who went to support Kavanaugh in his time of need. Then they aligned with a GOP ooo research group, etc. Facebook's problems are the result of its own-goals. It doesn't hurt that FB's app has sucked more and gotten less generally useful/addictive as people abandon it.
wutbrodo 8y ago
> Snowden leaks in 2013 were greeted with general apathy This really isn't how I remember it. I was at Google at the time, and it very clearly marked a decisive shift in Google's public reputation. And not just among the privacy-conscious HN crowd, but for the first time I had laymen acquaintances accosting me about how Google exploited users and their privacy etc etc. There were always rumblings of this kind of thing, but there was a clear discontinuity: in the layman's imagination, Google went from "generally liked, with occasional mirthful teasing about being a Panopticon", to "indispensable but mostly evil (like Microsoft/Amazon/Facebook, etc)".
Sylos 8y ago
> Is there a Facebook smear campaign going on or people just love to pile on Zuckerberg? Facebook fucked up twice, leaking user data. First Cambridge Analytica and about a month ago an even bigger leak.

jseliger 8y ago

This is a very good comment and I hope it rises to the top of the heap. I wrote this post on an HN comment, but I wonder, "Is there an actual Facebook crisis, or media narrative about Facebook crisis?" https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebook-crisis-or-media-narrative-about-facebook-crisis https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo... It seems to me that Zuckerberg doesn't know that he's in a media scapegoating situation. When you've become the scapegoat, there is nothing you can do to stop it. You can observe the scapegoating mechanism, but even that will likely do very little to halt it in action. The media cannot accept (or comprehensively address) its own culpability for the 2016 election. So let's put the blame on those guys, over there, instead of looking at ourselves.

GreeniFi 8y ago
You’ve been reading Rene Girard it would seem. And he’s a good guide to what’s going on: they were all at it, but Zuck is soaking up the blame not just for the ills of the social media biz model but the ills of late capitalism.
- Zelphyr 8y ago
  He may be soaking up undeserved blame but a lot of it is deserved. He has demonstrated time and again that he has little care for user privacy when that got in the way of selling an ad. People are (hopefully) starting to wake up to how dangerous that is.
  - pm90 8y ago
    I think its the danger part that was not sufficiently recognized and is only now being realized. When the personal data was used to sell soap, nobody really cared. When its used to instead sell political agenda and conspiracy theories... that is when the danger starts.
    - aylmao 8y ago
      To be fair, it has always been used to sell political agendas. Politicians have advertised in online platforms way before 2016.
      - pm90 8y ago
        > To be fair, it has always been used to sell political agendas. Politicians have advertised in online platforms way before 2016. Agreed. Perhaps a better way to phrase it is that its only in 2016 that the true power of the platform to spread misinformation with a political agenda was realized. Which naturally people care about a lot more than product placements.
  - GreeniFi 8y ago
    For sure it’s deserved, but as is often the case with scapegoats, FB is not the only one. The Gusrdian collects and sells used data to advertisers, for example.
nkozyra 8y ago
Plenty of blame to spare, but "the media" is a vast and wide net without any specific claims. Regardless, it's whataboutism here. And let's face an uncomfortable fact: the "media" once meant the gatekeepers for information. Facebook is absolutely fulfilling that role in 2018. You cannot separate the two.
spamizbad 8y ago
Facebook received largely anodyne coverage for most of its life; it's only been the last few years that people took a critical eye. And I don't understand your media argument. "The media" spends a tremendous amount of time analyzing and criticizing its own output, even within institutions. If anything, the media tends to catch flack for too much navel-gazing instead of covering actual news. Facebook would benefit from some of that introspection, rather than top-down order-following.
- toomim 8y ago
  > Facebook received largely anodyne coverage for most of its life; it's only been the last few years that people took a critical eye. No way. You're totally forgetting how much fear the media heaped on Facebook in 2005 first over children having (gasp) photos of themselves on the internet, some people even listing their phone numbers publicly, and then in 2006 and 2007 it was about college kids posting photos of themselves drinking alcohol, which (it was hypothesized) would prevent them from getting jobs when their future employer went through their facebook account. Please. The media narrative around Facebook has been exaggerated fear from the beginning. The only thing new today is the choice of fear to exaggerate.
  - spamizbad 8y ago
    The examples you give are all “people behaving badly” on Facebook, not Facebook explicitly acting in bad faith.
    - behavingbadly 8y ago
      Here is one (of many examples.) Facebook COO Sandberg hires a right-wing firm to spread rumors and shift blame onto George Soros. This isnt just bad behavior -- this is abhorrent. George Soros gets bears brunt of anti-semitism (recall just weeks ago a rightist sent him a bomb due to propaganda blaming him for literally everything.) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-... Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.
pm90 8y ago
It is not a good comment at all. I know its the go-to reaction for engineers in SV to empathize with a fellow engineer and portray him as a martyr in the altar of an east-coast elitist media. But please look at the facts and details of what NYT has uncovered. > It seems to me that Zuckerberg doesn't know that he's in a media scapegoating situation. When you've become the scapegoat, there is nothing you can do to stop it. You can observe the scapegoating mechanism, but even that will likely do very little to halt it in action. He's much much smarter than you give him credit for. A lot of folks think of him as a clueless programming genius, but this is brilliant guy who understands politics a lot better than most engineers in SV. All the feel-good tours were not for his personal political ambition, but to create goodwill for his most precious, valuable child, Facebook. And he has done every thing in his power to cut the criticism, scapegoat critics and regulation. > The media cannot accept (or comprehensively address) its own culpability for the 2016 election. So let's put the blame on those guys, over there, instead of looking at ourselves. Certainly there is some aspect of that. But please lets look at the facts. Facebook did hire a PR firm that spread Soros-based conspiracy theories against its critics. They fired Stamos when he exposed the extent of Russian intervention and kept quiet or dismissed the magnitude of Russian activity until it became untenable for them to do so. All the steps they have taken to become better, have been forced onto them ... by who? Its by the Media. The media uncovering facts about the company. That's their job: to bring to light these facts. Let them do their job, and lets hope Facebook does its job as well.
- kodablah 8y ago
  I'm not hearing anyone dispute these facts. Media-driven fervor is rarely devoid of facts. Rather, with story choice and interspersed op-eds, the narrative becomes clear even if not untrue. For every fact-based article, there are dozens of opinion ones (happening with all big-web tech) and my flag-clicking finger grows weary. These digital opinion pieces sharing the same domain become much harder to differentiate than in print. Even if you're focusing on facts, many don't care about them or at least don't consider them or their consequences as damning as the coverage might deserve. At this point, I'll take my bulleted lists of uncovered facts and eschew the rest of this crap. Sadly my peers, pitchforks in hand, can't do so and are hastily cheering on government oversight. Something none of us can ever recover from (a one way street in almost all instances).
codyb 8y ago
There's a ton of things which impacted the 2016 election (disproporionate representation, 24 hour news cycle's obsession with Trump, foreign interference, people seeming to get most of their media from social media, disinformation, billions of dollars of dark money, disenfranchisement, Comey, etc). However, Facebook's stock has dropped from a high of 220 to 140 (today) in less than six months. That seems like an actual Facebook crisis to me.
mcphage 8y ago
> The media cannot accept (or comprehensively address) its own culpability for the 2016 election. So let's put the blame on those guys, over there, instead of looking at ourselves. After all this time, do you still not realize that Facebook is part of the media, perhaps even the biggest part.
siidooloo 8y ago
Facebook is ‘the media.’ Newspapers, magazines and TV are just advertisements with enough other stuff in the middle to get you attention. Facebook is the same thing.
tomjen3 8y ago
Interesting point. I am not entirely sure that Facebook can't do anything to get out the scapegoat situation though. Of the top of my head, they could say that they want to focus more on your friend and friends, so for the next 2 weeks it will not be possible to share news articles at all and the feed will prioritize messages from people you have lots of mutual friends with. It is kind of hard to argue with, and it would show the media exactly how much power Facebook has over them.
philwelch 8y ago
Making matters worse, the legacy media blame the tech industry for their own decline and fight back the only way they can, with hit pieces. The NYT did the same to Amazon a few years ago. Facebook, which is a more direct competitor, is an even bigger target.

ravenstine 8y ago

There is, but there are things Facebook could have done to curb it. The problem with blatant insincerity is it quickly gives everyone else the moral high ground.

nkozyra 8y ago

> Platforms also can't fully and completely be responsible for political views expressed by user-generated content. Maybe, maybe not. But in Facebook's case, they did not hesitate to commoditize disinformation and propaganda. While a lot of platforms are/were susceptible to this vector, we now know that Facebook knew what was happening and didn't care as long as the money came in. Which brings us back to "maybe, maybe not." Corporations use profit (and variants) as their natural reward function. Look at FBs stock the last few months. People are speaking. We, the users, may be demanding some accountability from our platforms we previously did not.

the_snooze 8y ago
>But in Facebook's case, they did not hesitate to commoditize disinformation and propaganda. They're just in the business of making the world more open and connected (TM).
- nkozyra 8y ago
  In a sense it's not inaccurate. But if you have no filter, no ethos, decisions about what's allowed and distributed are prone to malice, prone to exploit or both. Of course, Facebook has these things. But they go out the door the minute you have money to spend.
  - foxhedgehog 8y ago
    So true.
Zarel 8y ago
I might have missed something from the news, but what does "did not hesitate to commoditize disinformation and propaganda" mean? Did Facebook do something other than just allow users to post content, just like Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, or any other social media website?
- all2 8y ago
  No. They're just a well enough known target for the latest round of hyperbole. News isn't news if it isn't bad.

na85 8y ago

I don't need a smear campaign to dislike a guy who got so rich selling my personal data to advertising scum that he can afford to buy all the mansions around his, in order to protect his own privacy[0], all the while spending billions on advertising campaigns to tell us poor people that "privacy is dead"[1] while calling his users "dumb fucks".[2] Zuck's just generally a first-rate piece of shit. If he weren't filthy rich, HN would have no reason to hero-worship him. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-buys-4-homes-for-privacy-2013-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-buys-4-homes... [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/01/10/10readwriteweb-facebooks-zuckerberg-says-the-age-of-privac-82963.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/external/readwri... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuckerberg-ims-confirmed-by-zuckerberg-the-new-yorker-2010-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zu...

jhayward 8y ago

> Is there a Facebook smear campaign going on or people just love to pile on Zuckerberg? How about "neither"? Facebook has been abysmally led on the subject of misuse, in fact going so far as to tell themselves explicitly it was OK if they got people killed[1] as long as they grew the user base and its monetization. They are just now coming out from under the default presumption that tech == good, and a fairly prodigious PR campaign aimed at suppressing criticism, indeed even smearing critics and misleading the US Congress. There is very good evidence that FB employees knew, and that executives either should have known, or were grossly negligent in not knowing, the extent of the various types of abuses, up to and including genocide, that were being conducted using FB as a primary platform for the campaign. No matter how you try to frame this as the tech biz equivalent "just boys being boys" and "business like everyone else" there is a lot, a whole lot, about FB and Zuckerberg's leadership that deserves exposure, criticism, and ultimately a change of leadership. [1] https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/this-facebook-executives-single-tweet-response-to-leaked-memo-reveals-companys-greatest-problem.html https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/this-facebook-executives-s... Edited to add: Take note that Zuckerberg's response to these events is to concentrate power, use a "war" metaphor for his approach, and generally follow the authoritarian play book. Anyone thinking that FB is any kind of "western liberal values" kind of actor is fooling themselves. It will always be more in line with the kinds of things conservatives find attractive, especially today.

wslack 8y ago

Local and state governments in the US build most roads and are responsible for them. When the roads are built in a way that causes lots of accidents at a particular intersection (even though the people "at fault" in these accidents are the drivers themselves) people expect the government to improve the roads and reduce the harm. So likewise, Facebook's choices in how it presented content (giving equal weight to the NYTimes and fake news generated for profit in North Macedonia) and mechanisms for maximizing likes, views, and engagement, allowed lies and nonsense to blossom on its platforms. This isn't an issue that's restricted to any individual political party or cause, though the people in North Macedonia have been clear that "right" fake news sold much better than "left" fake news in 2016. Facebook build the roads here and made decisions about the tools to navigate those. Users are using those tools as designed to get maximum engagement and profit, causing the propagation of memes, trolling, and lies over quality content that doesn't generate the same metrics but costs much more to produce and fact-check. That people lie isn't Facebook's fault, but like any local government, now that they know their design is contributing to problems, some expect them to address that. Same would go for the owner of an event venue that's being used weekly to promote a violent cause, even though that owner isn't responsible for the tenants, they do choose to give them space to organize. I'm not taking a position on what exactly they should do, but I want to be clear: regardless of if there is a scapegoat effect or not, claims of Facebook's degree of measured responsibility have clear precedent.

chillacy 8y ago
> So likewise, Facebook's choices in how it presented content (giving equal weight to the NYTimes and fake news generated for profit in North Macedonia) and mechanisms for maximizing likes, views, and engagement, allowed lies and nonsense to blossom on its platforms. Isn't that the default choice everywhere? On HN links from NYT and trash sites look the same. On Youtube videos from ABC and conspiracy theorists look the same.
- CaptainZapp 8y ago
  It's far more profitable to promote outrage and that's exactly what Facebook's algorithms have done and are doing. And that's what you find in your news feed. Youtube has pretty much the same problem on a different level. That's despite the mealy mouthed bullshit that the dear leader spouts those days.

thanatropism 8y ago

Honestly? Snowden's leaks implied Obama did bad stuff; the Facebook scandals invariably point to mr. Trump. (I'm comfortable with downvotes.)

lern_too_spel 8y ago
Snowden's leaks showed that Obama shut down programs instituted by his predecessor (including bulk email metadata collection). There was one bulk domestic data collection that was ongoing at the time of Snowden's leaks, and Obama immediately called for its end, which happened soon after.

tomp 8y ago

Yea I installed Signal yesterday. Open source, funded by a non-profit, default end-to-end encrypted, peer-reviewed encryption protoocl.

dgzl 8y ago

> some advice: Instead blaming this one actor, better get used to it. I think you've nailed it with this bit, but you're not respecting the side effects of being an unsuspecting victim of their model. Youth were the people who first adopted social media, and that was before our data was considered either sensitive or valuable. By the time we've realized that our content and behavior are being targeted, we have become hooked and addicted to social media. At the same time, we really shouldn't expect ourselves or others to understand the potential side-effects and consequences of this kind of collection. That would be a disservice to the ourselves and the public.

danShumway 8y ago
> we really shouldn't expect ourselves or others to understand the potential side-effects and consequences I am somewhat with you, but people have been warning about the potential side-effects and consequences of this collection a long time[0]. I don't fault anyone who is only just now figuring out that Facebook might be problematic. I don't fault people who ignored those warnings. That is what it is, that's just what people do, and that part of human nature is never really going to go away. I can live with it. What annoys me is that when I read articles like this, there's this undertone I pick up of "we've uncovered something crazy and we need to start having a conversation about this." And no, we don't. If you're just now figuring out that Facebook might potentially be maybe evil, you don't need to start a conversation, you need to join the conversation that already exists. This might sound like bitterness, but there is a real point beyond, "serves you all for not listening." The vast majority of criticism I see on Medium/Twitter/Cable/Outlets in general ignores the perspectives of people who have been thinking about this problem way longer than they have, and as result people come up with, frankly, really bad solutions that are equally problematic. To make a comparison, this is like everybody waking up one day and realizing that climate change is a real problem. And then instead of going and talking to the scientists who have been warning about it for years, we get a bunch of very reactionary takes on Cable news that ignore the nuance of the situation and say stupid things like, "this is all solar's fault because the mirrors get really hot", or "Facebook should just filter everything that gets uploaded from anywhere for hate speech." So no shame to people who are just now figuring out that advertising and data collection have downsides. Yes shame to people who feel like this is a novel problem that requires completely novel solutions, or who are using Facebook as an excuse to avoid the broader problem that literally everyone is doing this and many of the other actors are just as bad as Facebook if not worse. [0]: https://www.xkcd.com/743/ https://www.xkcd.com/743/

rhizome 8y ago

But know it's the time to crucify Zuckerberg for what exatly? Trump, and rightfully so.

aylmao 8y ago
Americans amaze me-- they always need to find a villain but always fail to find the villainousness in themselves. Trump could be more rightfully blamed in the combination of: - A Democratic Party that failed its middle and lower class - A media industry obsessed with growth and sensationalism - A cultural obsession with money and so called "success" - A deep-rooted racial problem - A population trained to not be skeptical, and be responsive to advertisement - A shared obsession to "be the greatest country on earth" - A two-party political system with sports-like irrational rivalry - A democracy where the popular vote of the majority doesn't seem to matter - A tradition of long-standing political dynasties disconnected from the people's needs Just to name a few big and complex systems that played into the election of Trump. Yet, it's hard to find the villain in those or to introspect, reflect and accept that the US has deep flaws and in some aspects is rotting from inside. It's easier to just not talk about all the rest, and fully blame it on the few thousand dollars Russians spent on advertising.
- sjg007 8y ago
  >- A Democratic Party that failed its middle and lower class Republicans blocked almost all efforts to get anything done. Blame would lie equally with them. Their specific motive was to shut Obama down and render his presidency mute. As such he expanded the executive which Trump has taken advantage of. >- A media industry obsessed with growth and sensationalism Ad dollars and there was a repeal of the fairness doctrine. That lead to Fox News not being news but entertainment and pushing the right wing agenda. >- A cultural obsession with money and so called "success" It's reported this way but is it actually true? Most Americans make less than 50k so I maybe money is a concern. >- A deep-rooted racial problem Probably true. It's been codified into law, not explicitly per se anymore but effectively so. >- A population trained to not be skeptical, and be responsive to advertisement Americans do learn what propaganda is in school but a vocal irrational minority tends to saturate social media. But there are political agendas driven by state legislatures to write the curriculum as well as a lot of revisionist history in school textbooks. >- A shared obsession to "be the greatest country on earth" Only because it drives headlines. - A two-party political system with sports-like irrational rivalry This is about guns, abortion and taxes mostly. Most of the time it is about the economy. - A democracy where the popular vote of the majority doesn't seem to matter Well this is a founding of the country problem.. basically the rich people at the time didn't want a true democracy and instead opted for a republic. And politicians exploit these properties to shift the balance of power in their favor. The mechanism to power here is the vote and they suppress voters they don't want etc... - A tradition of long-standing political dynasties disconnected from the people's needs This is not really true. I think the bigger issue is that a lot of money is needed to fund a campaign and most people don't donate and as such politicians have to court big business or big monied interests. McCain wanted campaign finance reform as well as a repeal of super pac funding. At a minimum we need full transparency so people can make an informed choice.

notacoward 8y ago

Important point here: groupthink can be functionally identical to conspiracy, even without explicit communication or coordination. There are a lot of people in media who hate Facebook because as a new medium it's killing their own business model. This creates a cognitive bias in which they'll be hyper-aware of anything bad about Facebook and oblivious to anything good, which is reflected in what they write. There are others in tech who have a similar bias. For example, anyone at Google probably hears lots of messages distinguishing between the two and portraying Google as the good twin. Then all of these factions feed on each others' signals that such views are virtuous. The net result is a massive piling-on equivalent to conspiracy, even though there isn't a literal one.

Flenser 8y ago
There's even a term for this, Stand Alone Complex: > Accidental collectivism made up of detached individuals, resembling a highly organized conspiracy and lacking a deliberate origin. The stand alone complex is from Ghost in the Shell. — https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=stand%20alone%20complex https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=stand%20alon... More here: http://ghostintheshell.wikia.com/wiki/Philosophy http://ghostintheshell.wikia.com/wiki/Philosophy See Also: There Is No Cabal: > There Is No Cabal is a catchphrase used on Usenet. Its common abbreviation, TINC, is used humorously to suggest that people should lighten up and not see a conspiracy around every corner. It is alternatively used as a pseudo-ironic statement, since presumably an insider or someone who knows "the cabal" would inevitably deny that there is a cabal. It was used extensively by members of the backbone cabal. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal
- notacoward 8y ago
  Never heard of Stand Alone Complex. Thanks! I had heard of TINC, having been active on Usenet at the time. I remember it a bit differently, more like "it doesn't matter if there's a cabal" perhaps, but then I probably hung out in different cliques and every one had its own flavor.

gopher2 8y ago

The NY Times published about 10 articles on Facebook between November 14-16th. It was a like a coordinated blitz recently. * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/business/media/facebook-advertisers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/business/media/facebook-a... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/jobs-facebook-computer-science-students.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/jobs-facebook-... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-crisis-mark-zuckerberg-sheryl-sandberg.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-crisi... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/facebook-definers-opposition-research.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/facebook-defin... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/zuckerberg-facebook-sandberg-tactics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/zuckerberg-fac... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/opinion/facebook-data-congress-russia-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/opinion/facebook-data-con... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/letters/facebook-scandals.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/letters/facebook-... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/facebook-zuckerberg-investigation-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/facebook-zuckerbe... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/business/dealbook/facebook-defends-itself.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/business/dealbook/faceboo... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-sheryl-sandberg-silicon-valley-antitrust.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/facebook-mark-zuc... * https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-democrats-congress.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-democ...

ucaetano 8y ago
> a coordinated Being a single newspaper, it absolutely is coordinated. Ever newspaper is coordinated. It would be surprising if it wasn't. So this is largely irrelevant. It would be relevant if there was coordination amongst multiple newspapers. And even then, it might not matter: coordination doesn't imply the the news aren't true. So, no. There isn't a coordinated media blitz, and even if there was, it wouldn't matter.
- 8y ago

InclinedPlane 8y ago

Facebook essentially facilitated genocide and has done almost nothing to correct their "mistakes" or accept their role in the tragedy. They also went out of their way to run backdoor smear campaigns against their critics, including using anti-semitic attacks. And that's just the drop in the bucket of their faults, bad behavior, and crimes. This isn't just about data collection, stop pretending it is.

BLKNSLVR 8y ago

I don't think it makes any difference whether it's a smear campaign or not, through the lens that most media companies are pushing an agenda one way or another as their bread and butter. Rupert Murdoch wanted the Australian Prime Minister replaced, and within a week his wish was granted[0]. News media is a powerful force, and Facebook is no doubt stepping on those powerful toes that have enjoyed the ability to influence elections and political leadership for a century. The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal put some blood in the water, and the Old Media sharks have gathered. If there is a smear campaign going on, it's another case of elephants fighting and the grass getting trampled. Old Media want Facebook to be better regulated so the trajectory of Old Media's declining influence is temporarily improved. Facebook will implement relatively ineffective reforms with all the enthusiasm of an aspiring sportsman writing an english literature essay, and the users will continue to slowly leave the service as they grow weary of it for their own reasons as opposed to some spectre of manipulation; if they're not off FB already, there's no further scaremongering that will make any difference. The scale of Facebook's user numbers means that this attrition rate will probably still see it more powerful and influential than Old Media for the foreseeable future; Old Media are just trying to tilt the playing field in their favour. Same ol' same ol'. [0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/liberal-leadership-spill-rupert-murdoch-kerry-stokes-influence/10262552 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/liberal-leadership-sp...

tensor 8y ago
This isn't a case of Facebook influencing the election. It is a case where they outright took money from a foreign government to help them interfere in the democratic process to the foreign governments benefit. It's borderline treason, not simply using it's resources to speak louder via lobbying or broadcasting as many other companies have done. This is not a case of "all sides same" as much it seems that many posters here want to keep pushing that narrative.
- BLKNSLVR 8y ago
  "outright took money from a foreign government to help them interfere in the democratic process to the foreign governments benefit" That gives the idea that it was Facebook's intent. They took money for advertising from someone who was gaming the system - FB didn't know the system was being gamed. They're just selling targeted advertising (reprehensible for different reasons), which is just what FB does as a business. That's also somewhat why I used the example of a media mogul obviously having enough power to have a Prime Minister of a country replaced. That's well beyond what should be considered legal. It's not treasonous because it's in corporate interests as opposed to a foreign power, but how big does a 'corporate' need to be before it's considered a foreign power? It's still against the interests of the country. The shame of it is, most efforts to increase transparency and close loopholes in political bribery (cough donations cough) are watered-down: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-15/labor-and-coalition-reject-changes-to-political-donation-laws/10502660 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-15/labor-and-coalition-r... Facebook were passively, not actively complicit. Greedy and naive, stupid and blind; not malicious. The irony is that they ARE actively malicious when it comes to selling out their users' privacy to the highest bidder, but that's not what this is about. I haven't read everything about all the angles on this topic, so if I'm obviously missing specific information about how Facebook actively colluded with foreign powers (allegedly or otherwise), please point me to it. Fundamentally, Facebook shouldn't be used as a scapegoat for Trump winning the election. (US) politics has been a cesspool of corruption since long before Zuck had any influence on the world. Wholly and solely blaming FB would be an injustice whilst allowing the more fundamental injustices to continue unpunished.

PhasmaFelis 8y ago

A platform can't be held responsible for every opinion some idiot posts, true. When nations weaponize your platform to disrupt foreign elections[1] and facilitate outright genocide[2], you don't get to shrug and ignore it. This is not just about selling data to advertisers anymore. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/05/facebooks-election-interference-problem-exponentially-worse-on-eve-of-midterms-study-suggests/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/05/facebooks-election-interfe... [2] https://www.lawfareblog.com/facebooks-role-genocide-myanmar-new-reporting-complicates-narrative https://www.lawfareblog.com/facebooks-role-genocide-myanmar-...

sjg007 8y ago
This is the actual issue. Everyone suggesting a smear campaign here is ignoring the facts. Facebook most likely did not have controls or processes or policy to prevent foreign actors from abusing the platform even when reported by legitimate organizations and governments aligned with US interests and policy. It's actually in Facebook's best interest to fix these problems because people will leave for another network to share their photos with friends and these issues will accelerate a decline.
- kodablah 8y ago
  They aren't ignoring facts, they just already accepted them dozens of articles ago. Questioning coverage frequency has nothing to do with the facts and definitely is not a sign of ignoring them.

lern_too_spel 8y ago

> Snowden leaks in 2013 were greeted with general apathy. The only mass domestic collection (phone metadata) that was ongoing at the time of the leaks was shut down soon after and had been known about since 2006. Why would you expect more of a furore than what we had? https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-n... > Gmail launched in 2004. Email servers collect emails. This has been the case since long before 2004. The reason people are pissed off at Facebook is that Zuckerberg has not only been collecting users' data but also using it in shady ways (including to attack critics and competitors) since he was at Harvard and has shown no sign that he's changed.

adventured 8y ago
> The only mass domestic collection (phone metadata) that was ongoing at the time of the leaks was shut down soon after and had been known about since 2006 That's some amusing phrasing gymnastics. The mass collection was not stopped at all. May 2018: "N.S.A. Triples Collection of Data From U.S. Phone Companies" "The National Security Agency vacuumed up more than 534 million records of phone calls and text messages from American telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon last year — more than three times what it collected in 2016, a new report revealed on Friday." "Intelligence analysts are also more frequently searching for information about Americans within the agency’s expanding collection of so-called call detail records — telecom metadata logging who contacted whom and when, but not the contents of what they said." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/politics/nsa-surveillance-2017-annual-report.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/politics/nsa-surveilla...
- zzo38computer 8y ago
  This NSA surveillance is going to be a waste of energy and money, in addition to eroding privacy. Therefore, it is extra extra extra bad.
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  A fraction of a percent of phone call metadata is a far cry from 100%.

cromwellian 8y ago

Facebook's behavior kind of goes beyond mere data collection tho. They have hired paid shills/astroturf orgs like Microsoft and Oracle did to go after rivals or plant fake stories. And then there's the Onavo VPN fiasco, wherein Facebook was using VPN snooping for competitive intelligence, so they could buy up any threats early, at least according to leaks. There's some questionable stuff you could say Google has done (Disclosure: I work for Google), like fund think tanks on free speech that end up coming to the conclusion that 'Search Algorithms = Free Speech' and that you can't regulate algorithms (although some of those orgs, like the ACLU and EFF likely held those positions prior, and the EFF is not beyond publishing critical pieces on Google), but I think funding researchers who end up writing favorable opinions is a different category than funding people to plant fake stories and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Like, the Koch Brothers funding a college researcher that studies global warming, and it publishing a skeptical review of existing papers, is more defensible than the Koch's funding a bunch of online trolls that post non-credible rumors or conspiracy stories on regulators who want to crack down on carbon. The former is at least philosophically defensible if the criticisms of the academic literature actually expose real flaws. The latter is just immoral.

jessewmc 8y ago

For those of us who think that 'get used to it' is not an acceptable answer for Facebook, Gmail or anything else, a little heat on any one of them is a good way to bring the problem to more public light.

kodablah 8y ago
So long as it's recognized that, as the problem is continually forced into the public light, lots of people may think that 'get used to it' is an acceptable answer when weighing all options.

r00fus 8y ago

Trump is deeply unpopular with about 60% of the US population. People don't forget about Cambridge Analytica. FB doubled down when they defended one of their higher-ups who went to support Kavanaugh in his time of need. Then they aligned with a GOP ooo research group, etc. Facebook's problems are the result of its own-goals. It doesn't hurt that FB's app has sucked more and gotten less generally useful/addictive as people abandon it.

wutbrodo 8y ago

> Snowden leaks in 2013 were greeted with general apathy This really isn't how I remember it. I was at Google at the time, and it very clearly marked a decisive shift in Google's public reputation. And not just among the privacy-conscious HN crowd, but for the first time I had laymen acquaintances accosting me about how Google exploited users and their privacy etc etc. There were always rumblings of this kind of thing, but there was a clear discontinuity: in the layman's imagination, Google went from "generally liked, with occasional mirthful teasing about being a Panopticon", to "indispensable but mostly evil (like Microsoft/Amazon/Facebook, etc)".

Sylos 8y ago

> Is there a Facebook smear campaign going on or people just love to pile on Zuckerberg? Facebook fucked up twice, leaking user data. First Cambridge Analytica and about a month ago an even bigger leak.