5 ms·

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

by 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).
- pm90 8y ago
  I keep hearing about this fear of Government overreach. I won't go as far as to dismiss them, but I do think its important to recognize that regulations do have an important role to play in a Capitalist Economic system, to prevent the accumulation of power, as happened in the Gilded Age. Your comment talks of fears of Government oversight but I haven't seen a better solution to the menace of Facebook. They have repeatedly failed to curtail bad actors in their platforms. Government oversight may help increase the penalties for bad behavior to an extent that forces them to think seriously about these issues.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    Too often, discussion on nuance of a specific topic devolves to general politics. Fear of government oversight for me applies specifically to internet laws being bandied about. > I haven't seen a better solution to the menace of Facebook There doesn't have to be. Sometimes recognition that there is no winning move is acceptable. With open models like the internet, we must take the bad with the good. I don't see them as a menace, and they don't really affect my life at all. Many of the harms are either blindly assumed to have effect (i.e. political advertising) or are ones that are endemic to large amounts of humans in an open space. I'll take the status quo. If media or others wants to help educate the populace on harms, awesome. If others such as myself just don't participate on some of these social sites, awesome. Most thought around FB harms centers around the uneducated masses and only if they knew what they were doing. A similar mindset many would say lost the last presidential election. What if I told you they do know, implicitly agree, and unlike this echo chamber we comment on, are content? Let's avoid legislating their wants in this case and also avoid the unintended consequences on the rest of us with internet businesses. The harm caused by this fly isn't worth pulling out the shotgun. I get this deja vu... now it's big web tech (and the rich and immigrants but that's another topic), previously it was terrorists, before that druggies, before that communists, before that alcoholics, on and on. We've got to learn to face this hysteria with a pragmatic approach at some point.
    - pm90 8y ago
      I think you're conflating a lot of issues and trying to portray what we have today as inevitable and just the way things are. If we make a little more effort and isolate the issues, I think it makes a lot more sense to take actionable steps in this direction. > There doesn't have to be. Sometimes recognition that there is no winning move is acceptable. With open models like the internet, we must take the bad with the good. I don't see them as a menace, and they don't really affect my life at all. Many of the harms are either blindly assumed to have effect (i.e. political advertising) or are ones that are endemic to large amounts of humans in an open space. There definitely can be better solutions. Throwing up your hands and saying: "Its just the way this system is" isn't an answer to the specific changes being recommended. Its in the nature of people to be addicted to tobacco; yet we do have regulations around tobacco to stop tobacco companies from advertising their products, to add disclaimers and health warnings to their product, to forbid them from advertising to children. We didn't just throw up our hands and accept it as a failure of the human nature. > I'll take the status quo. If media or others wants to help educate the populace on harms, awesome. If others such as myself just don't participate on some of these social sites, awesome. Most thought around FB harms centers around the uneducated masses and only if they knew what they were doing. A similar mindset many would say lost the last presidential election. What if I told you they do know, implicitly agree, and unlike this echo chamber we comment on, are content? Let's avoid legislating their wants in this case and also avoid the unintended consequences on the rest of us with internet businesses. The harm caused by this fly isn't worth pulling out the shotgun. Its not in the nature of the internet to act as an amplifier for conspiracy theories disguised as truth in respectable internet properties. We don't expect nytimes.com or the websites of any news organizations to peddle in conspiracy theories and we should expect the same from facebook.com; if not, we need to call them out for not being valid source of information and make them add that disclaimer to everything they show. > I'll take the status quo. If media or others wants to help educate the populace on harms, awesome. If others such as myself just don't participate on some of these social sites, awesome. Most thought around FB harms centers around the uneducated masses and only if they knew what they were doing. A similar mindset many would say lost the last presidential election. What if I told you they do know, implicitly agree, and unlike this echo chamber we comment on, are content? Let's avoid legislating their wants in this case and also avoid the unintended consequences on the rest of us with internet businesses. The harm caused by this fly isn't worth pulling out the shotgun. But that's not what the situation is at all. Instead of the uneducated masses being content with facebook, they're angry, so angry at: Immigrants for taking away their jobs and benefits, at liberals for taking away their privileges etc. This is exactly why we want to control the medium: apparently, they're not aware that the things they see aren't facts, they're conspiracy theories. I'm sorry, I can't justify not doing anything just because it has the potential (not even proven what side effects it might have really) of ruining your next/current internet venture. We unleashed technological changes on American (and the World) society, and its about time we took responsibility for the harms that this technology can cause and place reasonable checks and controls. > I get this deja vu... now it's big web tech (and the rich and immigrants but that's another topic), previously it was terrorists, before that druggies, before that communists, before that alcoholics, on and on. We've got to learn to face this hysteria with a pragmatic approach at some point. Every generation has to deal with the problems unique to it. I don't think we will ever run out of problems that need to be addressed. What is your point... that we just stop trying? Everything we try gives us more data into what works and what doesn't and we have to continue trying.
cjhopman 8y ago
"But please lets look at the facts. [...] They fired Stamos" They didn't fire Stamos.
rock_hard 8y ago
> Facebook did hire a PR firm that spread Soros-based conspiracy theories against its critics. Nope, they didn’t! From facebooks newsroom Statement: “The New York Times is wrong to suggest that we ever asked Definers to pay for or write articles on Facebook’s behalf – or to spread misinformation. Our relationship with Definers was well known by the media – not least because they have on several occasions sent out invitations to hundreds of journalists about important press calls on our behalf. Definers did encourage members of the press to look into the funding of “Freedom from Facebook,” an anti-Facebook organization. The intention was to demonstrate that it was not simply a spontaneous grassroots campaign, as it claimed, but supported by a well-known critic of our company. To suggest that this was an anti-Semitic attack is reprehensible and untrue.” And if you don’t believe Facebook then why don’t just take it from Definers (the PR firm Facebook worked with) themselves: https://definersdc.com/our-work-with-facebook/ https://definersdc.com/our-work-with-facebook/
isoskeles 8y ago
> But please lets look at the facts. Facebook did hire a PR firm that spread Soros-based conspiracy theories against its critics. I find this funny because I'm seeing it repeated a lot now. It's repeated so much that I'll go ahead and guess that these "Soros-based" conspiracy theories are true. Of course, they're not particularly horrible. The "conspiracy theories" are what, that some of Facebook's critics are linked to or even backed by Soros? As far as I know, George Soros is wealthy and funds many things. He's like the Koch Brothers of the "left". So it wouldn't surprise me, nor would I really care, if he funded some people who also don't like Facebook. In fact, if it weren't true, I'd figure the headlines and repeated statements of fact would be, "Facebook accuses X of being backed by Soros and by the way, that's not true." No, it's always just the first half of that sentence. Because, let's admit it, no one who repeats this fact really cares whether or not it's true that George Soros backed anyone. Doesn't matter whether or not that is a true "fact" (hey, let's look at the facts, as some might say), it just feels bad that someone would mention a fact about George Soros. What I do care about is the dishonesty here, this willful ignorance that (1) George Soros backed something critical of Facebook and (2) Facebook pointed out that it was backed by George Soros, which is technically true, and (3) we want to pretend this is awful. You have a problem with Facebook telling the truth, although I understand your specific problem is you think it's a dog whistle and it's thrown into a pot with a bunch of other conspiracy theories, except that this specific fact is true, George Soros did back some of these critics of Facebook. So it's not even a conspiracy theory, it's an actual fact, but yes, Soros is the target of other conspiracy theories. And just to be clear, I looked this up, Soros absolutely did back at least one of the groups mentioned: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/facebook-george-soros-pr-firm-discredit-critics-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/facebook-... > Another tactic was to cast Soros as the driving force behind groups critical of Facebook. The firm circulated a research document connecting Soros to “a broad anti-Facebook movement”, the Times reported, and pressed reporters to look into financial links between Soros and groups such as Freedom from Facebook and Color of Change. > Color of Change is a not-for-profit civil rights organization. It receives some money from Soros, Robinson said, in addition to many other funders, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s foundation, the Open Philanthropy Project. Robinson also said that over the past year, he has been asked numerous times by journalists about funding from Soros. If I cared enough, I'd do more research on it, but this is all I need to know. What do you think you're doing when you call facts conspiracy theories? Do you suppose that your lack of care for the facts (sorry to say, invoking "lets look at the facts" isn't enough) might start pushing some people in the direction of actual conspiracy theories (by this, I mean conspiracy theories that are not true).

by pm90 8y ago

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).

pm90 8y ago
I keep hearing about this fear of Government overreach. I won't go as far as to dismiss them, but I do think its important to recognize that regulations do have an important role to play in a Capitalist Economic system, to prevent the accumulation of power, as happened in the Gilded Age. Your comment talks of fears of Government oversight but I haven't seen a better solution to the menace of Facebook. They have repeatedly failed to curtail bad actors in their platforms. Government oversight may help increase the penalties for bad behavior to an extent that forces them to think seriously about these issues.
- kodablah 8y ago
  Too often, discussion on nuance of a specific topic devolves to general politics. Fear of government oversight for me applies specifically to internet laws being bandied about. > I haven't seen a better solution to the menace of Facebook There doesn't have to be. Sometimes recognition that there is no winning move is acceptable. With open models like the internet, we must take the bad with the good. I don't see them as a menace, and they don't really affect my life at all. Many of the harms are either blindly assumed to have effect (i.e. political advertising) or are ones that are endemic to large amounts of humans in an open space. I'll take the status quo. If media or others wants to help educate the populace on harms, awesome. If others such as myself just don't participate on some of these social sites, awesome. Most thought around FB harms centers around the uneducated masses and only if they knew what they were doing. A similar mindset many would say lost the last presidential election. What if I told you they do know, implicitly agree, and unlike this echo chamber we comment on, are content? Let's avoid legislating their wants in this case and also avoid the unintended consequences on the rest of us with internet businesses. The harm caused by this fly isn't worth pulling out the shotgun. I get this deja vu... now it's big web tech (and the rich and immigrants but that's another topic), previously it was terrorists, before that druggies, before that communists, before that alcoholics, on and on. We've got to learn to face this hysteria with a pragmatic approach at some point.
  - pm90 8y ago
    I think you're conflating a lot of issues and trying to portray what we have today as inevitable and just the way things are. If we make a little more effort and isolate the issues, I think it makes a lot more sense to take actionable steps in this direction. > There doesn't have to be. Sometimes recognition that there is no winning move is acceptable. With open models like the internet, we must take the bad with the good. I don't see them as a menace, and they don't really affect my life at all. Many of the harms are either blindly assumed to have effect (i.e. political advertising) or are ones that are endemic to large amounts of humans in an open space. There definitely can be better solutions. Throwing up your hands and saying: "Its just the way this system is" isn't an answer to the specific changes being recommended. Its in the nature of people to be addicted to tobacco; yet we do have regulations around tobacco to stop tobacco companies from advertising their products, to add disclaimers and health warnings to their product, to forbid them from advertising to children. We didn't just throw up our hands and accept it as a failure of the human nature. > I'll take the status quo. If media or others wants to help educate the populace on harms, awesome. If others such as myself just don't participate on some of these social sites, awesome. Most thought around FB harms centers around the uneducated masses and only if they knew what they were doing. A similar mindset many would say lost the last presidential election. What if I told you they do know, implicitly agree, and unlike this echo chamber we comment on, are content? Let's avoid legislating their wants in this case and also avoid the unintended consequences on the rest of us with internet businesses. The harm caused by this fly isn't worth pulling out the shotgun. Its not in the nature of the internet to act as an amplifier for conspiracy theories disguised as truth in respectable internet properties. We don't expect nytimes.com or the websites of any news organizations to peddle in conspiracy theories and we should expect the same from facebook.com; if not, we need to call them out for not being valid source of information and make them add that disclaimer to everything they show. > I'll take the status quo. If media or others wants to help educate the populace on harms, awesome. If others such as myself just don't participate on some of these social sites, awesome. Most thought around FB harms centers around the uneducated masses and only if they knew what they were doing. A similar mindset many would say lost the last presidential election. What if I told you they do know, implicitly agree, and unlike this echo chamber we comment on, are content? Let's avoid legislating their wants in this case and also avoid the unintended consequences on the rest of us with internet businesses. The harm caused by this fly isn't worth pulling out the shotgun. But that's not what the situation is at all. Instead of the uneducated masses being content with facebook, they're angry, so angry at: Immigrants for taking away their jobs and benefits, at liberals for taking away their privileges etc. This is exactly why we want to control the medium: apparently, they're not aware that the things they see aren't facts, they're conspiracy theories. I'm sorry, I can't justify not doing anything just because it has the potential (not even proven what side effects it might have really) of ruining your next/current internet venture. We unleashed technological changes on American (and the World) society, and its about time we took responsibility for the harms that this technology can cause and place reasonable checks and controls. > I get this deja vu... now it's big web tech (and the rich and immigrants but that's another topic), previously it was terrorists, before that druggies, before that communists, before that alcoholics, on and on. We've got to learn to face this hysteria with a pragmatic approach at some point. Every generation has to deal with the problems unique to it. I don't think we will ever run out of problems that need to be addressed. What is your point... that we just stop trying? Everything we try gives us more data into what works and what doesn't and we have to continue trying.

cjhopman 8y ago

"But please lets look at the facts. [...] They fired Stamos" They didn't fire Stamos.

rock_hard 8y ago

> Facebook did hire a PR firm that spread Soros-based conspiracy theories against its critics. Nope, they didn’t! From facebooks newsroom Statement: “The New York Times is wrong to suggest that we ever asked Definers to pay for or write articles on Facebook’s behalf – or to spread misinformation. Our relationship with Definers was well known by the media – not least because they have on several occasions sent out invitations to hundreds of journalists about important press calls on our behalf. Definers did encourage members of the press to look into the funding of “Freedom from Facebook,” an anti-Facebook organization. The intention was to demonstrate that it was not simply a spontaneous grassroots campaign, as it claimed, but supported by a well-known critic of our company. To suggest that this was an anti-Semitic attack is reprehensible and untrue.” And if you don’t believe Facebook then why don’t just take it from Definers (the PR firm Facebook worked with) themselves: https://definersdc.com/our-work-with-facebook/ https://definersdc.com/our-work-with-facebook/

isoskeles 8y ago

> But please lets look at the facts. Facebook did hire a PR firm that spread Soros-based conspiracy theories against its critics. I find this funny because I'm seeing it repeated a lot now. It's repeated so much that I'll go ahead and guess that these "Soros-based" conspiracy theories are true. Of course, they're not particularly horrible. The "conspiracy theories" are what, that some of Facebook's critics are linked to or even backed by Soros? As far as I know, George Soros is wealthy and funds many things. He's like the Koch Brothers of the "left". So it wouldn't surprise me, nor would I really care, if he funded some people who also don't like Facebook. In fact, if it weren't true, I'd figure the headlines and repeated statements of fact would be, "Facebook accuses X of being backed by Soros and by the way, that's not true." No, it's always just the first half of that sentence. Because, let's admit it, no one who repeats this fact really cares whether or not it's true that George Soros backed anyone. Doesn't matter whether or not that is a true "fact" (hey, let's look at the facts, as some might say), it just feels bad that someone would mention a fact about George Soros. What I do care about is the dishonesty here, this willful ignorance that (1) George Soros backed something critical of Facebook and (2) Facebook pointed out that it was backed by George Soros, which is technically true, and (3) we want to pretend this is awful. You have a problem with Facebook telling the truth, although I understand your specific problem is you think it's a dog whistle and it's thrown into a pot with a bunch of other conspiracy theories, except that this specific fact is true, George Soros did back some of these critics of Facebook. So it's not even a conspiracy theory, it's an actual fact, but yes, Soros is the target of other conspiracy theories. And just to be clear, I looked this up, Soros absolutely did back at least one of the groups mentioned: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/facebook-george-soros-pr-firm-discredit-critics-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/facebook-... > Another tactic was to cast Soros as the driving force behind groups critical of Facebook. The firm circulated a research document connecting Soros to “a broad anti-Facebook movement”, the Times reported, and pressed reporters to look into financial links between Soros and groups such as Freedom from Facebook and Color of Change. > Color of Change is a not-for-profit civil rights organization. It receives some money from Soros, Robinson said, in addition to many other funders, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s foundation, the Open Philanthropy Project. Robinson also said that over the past year, he has been asked numerous times by journalists about funding from Soros. If I cared enough, I'd do more research on it, but this is all I need to know. What do you think you're doing when you call facts conspiracy theories? Do you suppose that your lack of care for the facts (sorry to say, invoking "lets look at the facts" isn't enough) might start pushing some people in the direction of actual conspiracy theories (by this, I mean conspiracy theories that are not true).