5 ms·

Zuckerberg told execs the company's at 'war,' called media coverage 'bulls---'

66 points by SirLJ 8y ago

knolan 8y ago
I think that anyone who cares enough about Facebook’s behaviour has already left. Most folks just keep going back to see their feeds regardless of how horrible it becomes.
- jmspring 8y ago
  Sadly groups I belong to have settled on FB as the community forum. It’s a lowest denominator thing.
  - ovi256 8y ago
    Clear showing of the power of the network effect.
  - cenal 8y ago
    It’s also free. I know plenty of companies charge members to belong to private Facebook groups. Great business for the group organizers while it lasts.
- bigkm 8y ago
  Junkies keep going back even though they are trying their hardest to stop too.
fuckRightOff 8y ago
If facebook were really serious about staying relevant, they wouldn't make their shit website suck so fucking much. I mean, god damn, facebook.com fucking sucks. It never stops asking you to log in, no matter who posts what. It could be Carmack himself making a public post: WOULD YOU LIKE TO LOG IN OR CREATE AN ACCOUNT??? IT'S FREE AND ALWAYS WILL BE!!! No, facebook. No I don't. And I don't want to use the fucking mobile app either. I want to read something important, that John Carmack wrote. And then, if you do log in? It's just a black hole of total fucking nightmares. Sorry. Nope. Fuck you. GTFO.
Bucephalus355 8y ago
My takeaway from these latest articles was actually that Zuckerberg was, strangely enough, doing a pretty good job responding to the crisis. It’s just that Sheryl Sandburg has been undermining him and kind of stabbing him in the back.
joeblau 8y ago
At war with whom? Media outlets, hackers, propaganda organizations?
awakeasleep 8y ago
I hate it when executives start using war analogies to talk about business. It has always indicated that I should start looking for a new job because I'm not going to fit with the new culture. It's not just that I'm an anti-war hippie either. Describing your business in terms of war both disrespects the tremendous toll paid by soldiers and civilians, and indicates a "winners and losers" mindset, but that mindset also indicates it's part of your objective to hurt 'the enemy'. It's a morally broken, inefficient and emotional way to look at business.
- gaius 8y ago
  war analogies to talk about business. A previous job had the “tiger team” who would meet in the “war room”. But to the entire rest of the company they were mediocre middle-managers of a medium-sized IT department and everyone else called it the “comfy room” because it had sofas and a Nintendo. Also, to anyone with similar delusions, a Bluetooth headset does not make you a gunship pilot...
  - labster 8y ago
    Many Bothans died to bring us this TPS report.
    - dpflan 8y ago
      (+1) Well done.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    If there's a concise, non-militaristic name for a team with a specific, urgent, short-term objective holed up in a room together, I'd love to hear about it. "Strike team" and "war room" just work really well.
    - thecatspaw 8y ago
      crysis team works really well (and is commonly used in german)
onetimemanytime 8y ago
When in a hole, start a war with the press. Yeah, that's the way to go Mark the Great. FB and Google have siphoned much of the media advertising money, so there's no love left.
seunosewa 8y ago
This is probably the most exciting thing Mark has said in years. I rather like it because it probably means that Facebook will be making some bold moves soon.
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  The stock price is making bold moves already. I'm kinda hoping that they can keep that momentum.
- Lio 8y ago
  Which bit do you think is bold? That Facebook is paying right wing lobbyists to tie criticism of its past behaviour to George Soros or that it "tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic,"? Both of these seem like the kind of horrible dick moves that define Facebook as a company. If they were truely bold they would look for ways to operate without gathering massive amounts of people's personal data or supporting those only interested in fostering chaos in the West. If Zuckerberg was a truly bold leader he'd be winning hearts and minds by showing up to Parliaments in Canada and the UK when summoned over his company's past misdeeds ...instead of cowering behind generic press releases saying "we didn't do nufin'".
- seunosewa 8y ago
  My bad. I wasn’t thinking about the real world implications of what he said when I wrote the above. I was thinking about the entertainment value of the situation. Sorry.
sAbakumoff 8y ago
I can't resist, sorry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elrV-oHeSjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elrV-oHeSjE
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IEwBrJzhlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IEwBrJzhlg > War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. -- George Orwell
elonfan 8y ago
i feel terrible that i really dont care about cambridge analytica because its nice to have free stuff
cauldron 8y ago
Interesting, Chinese IT companies have long been controlling the media, basically corralling "reporters and self-media operators" into private chat groups administered by their staff, therefore excluding outsiders and naysayers, effectively forestall most negative coverage. Also they don't have quite as many insider leaks. Cellphone companies like Huawei and Xiaomi would give these people test units and guidelines about how to write articles. You can hardly see candid reviews, a lot of them just do shit-tier translation of TheVerge and other English sites(not sure authorized or not).
- ryacko 8y ago
  Translating an article and publishing it is a violation of copyright, so clearly not.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - cauldron 8y ago
    Chinese tech media basically rely on it. The "self-media" cottage industry that Wechat and Toutiao (by TikTok parent company ByteDance) created, is of 99.99% garbage, but they know what content their users want and like to see, boasts "give me a pic and I can spin it into a hit story", they basically provided a heaven platform for sensationalists and hustlers like this guy. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/fake-news-hillary-clinton-cameron-harris.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/fake-news-hillary-clin...
elonfan 8y ago
I'm just gonna say it - people being swayed by Russian Facebook trolls is just another form of political campaigning. If you can't learn to be objective on the internet about what you read don't you think you would be manipulated through alternative media anyway? Remember, there are no such things as stupid questions - only stupid people.
- vincnetas 8y ago
  I thought it was "there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_stupid_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_stupid_ques...
- klingebeil 8y ago
  Foreign countries undermining the manipulating democracy is "just another way form of political campaigning". That‘s a really really cynical way of framing the problem.
asianthrowaway 8y ago
I'm really curious if there's a deeper reason for why companies are suddenly thrown under the bus by the mainstream media, or if it's just journalists mimicking each other because they lack imagination. First Elon, now Zuck. Who's next?
- fromthestart 8y ago
  I don't think you can quite compare Elon to Zuck. As far as we know, Elon isn't stripping away a captive audience's privacy with reckless abandon.
  - asianthrowaway 8y ago
    Google is just as bad as Facebook but they don't get this constant negative media coverage.
    - cenal 8y ago
      Google had “Do no evil” Zuck had “I’m CEO b!tch” One is much more likable than the other.
      - arrogant_vs 8y ago
        Arrogance is less dangerous than hypocrisy IMO.
        mmjaa 8y ago
        But hubris is worst of all.
      - ahartmetz 8y ago
        It is really this. Google was founded by two nice guys and somewhat went the way of large corporations. Facebook was founded by a jerk and just expanded its capacity to be a jerk.
    - deleted 8y ago
mratzloff 8y ago
Sure. Maybe Zuckerberg shouldn't have put the screws to every media outlet on the planet. Is he so arrogant that he thought pissing all of them off in unison wouldn't have any blowback in their editorial decisions? Oh, by the way, he's created a surveillance apparatus that would have been beyond even the wildest dreams of secret police everywhere 50 years ago. He collects thousands of discrete data points about every man, woman, and child on the planet who uses the Web, regardless of whether or not they use Facebook—or even have an account. He put such lax access security in place around that personal data that anyone who wanted to could get access to it. And he did nothing after detecting a state-sponsored propaganda war being waged against US citizens. But sure. It's unfair.
- russdpale 8y ago
  Very well put. There are a few articles detailing his own involvement with Russian players, including oligarchs invested in facebook. And didn't facebook take a lot of money from the and NSA business front back when it was still only for college students?
Tempest1981 8y ago
More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18482855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18482855
AzzieElbab 8y ago
Super nasty swan song from NYT and co. Of course FB is at war, when media keeps calling for the gov to break it up
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  The media, the inventor of the web.. but that's all details.
  - AzzieElbab 8y ago
    No. Al Gore is
    - PavlovsCat 8y ago
      I was referring to this: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/11/01/146204/tim-berners-lee-says-tech-giants-may-have-to-be-split-up https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/11/01/146204/tim-berners-...
pcdoodle 8y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXrKKwHmPz4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXrKKwHmPz4

66 points by SirLJ 8y ago

I think that anyone who cares enough about Facebook’s behaviour has already left. Most folks just keep going back to see their feeds regardless of how horrible it becomes.

jmspring 8y ago
Sadly groups I belong to have settled on FB as the community forum. It’s a lowest denominator thing.
- ovi256 8y ago
  Clear showing of the power of the network effect.
- cenal 8y ago
  It’s also free. I know plenty of companies charge members to belong to private Facebook groups. Great business for the group organizers while it lasts.
bigkm 8y ago
Junkies keep going back even though they are trying their hardest to stop too.

fuckRightOff 8y ago

If facebook were really serious about staying relevant, they wouldn't make their shit website suck so fucking much. I mean, god damn, facebook.com fucking sucks. It never stops asking you to log in, no matter who posts what. It could be Carmack himself making a public post: WOULD YOU LIKE TO LOG IN OR CREATE AN ACCOUNT??? IT'S FREE AND ALWAYS WILL BE!!! No, facebook. No I don't. And I don't want to use the fucking mobile app either. I want to read something important, that John Carmack wrote. And then, if you do log in? It's just a black hole of total fucking nightmares. Sorry. Nope. Fuck you. GTFO.

Bucephalus355 8y ago

My takeaway from these latest articles was actually that Zuckerberg was, strangely enough, doing a pretty good job responding to the crisis. It’s just that Sheryl Sandburg has been undermining him and kind of stabbing him in the back.

joeblau 8y ago

At war with whom? Media outlets, hackers, propaganda organizations?

awakeasleep 8y ago

I hate it when executives start using war analogies to talk about business. It has always indicated that I should start looking for a new job because I'm not going to fit with the new culture. It's not just that I'm an anti-war hippie either. Describing your business in terms of war both disrespects the tremendous toll paid by soldiers and civilians, and indicates a "winners and losers" mindset, but that mindset also indicates it's part of your objective to hurt 'the enemy'. It's a morally broken, inefficient and emotional way to look at business.

gaius 8y ago
war analogies to talk about business. A previous job had the “tiger team” who would meet in the “war room”. But to the entire rest of the company they were mediocre middle-managers of a medium-sized IT department and everyone else called it the “comfy room” because it had sofas and a Nintendo. Also, to anyone with similar delusions, a Bluetooth headset does not make you a gunship pilot...
- labster 8y ago
  Many Bothans died to bring us this TPS report.
  - dpflan 8y ago
    (+1) Well done.
- closeparen 8y ago
  If there's a concise, non-militaristic name for a team with a specific, urgent, short-term objective holed up in a room together, I'd love to hear about it. "Strike team" and "war room" just work really well.
  - thecatspaw 8y ago
    crysis team works really well (and is commonly used in german)

onetimemanytime 8y ago

When in a hole, start a war with the press. Yeah, that's the way to go Mark the Great. FB and Google have siphoned much of the media advertising money, so there's no love left.

seunosewa 8y ago

This is probably the most exciting thing Mark has said in years. I rather like it because it probably means that Facebook will be making some bold moves soon.

ahartmetz 8y ago
The stock price is making bold moves already. I'm kinda hoping that they can keep that momentum.
Lio 8y ago
Which bit do you think is bold? That Facebook is paying right wing lobbyists to tie criticism of its past behaviour to George Soros or that it "tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic,"? Both of these seem like the kind of horrible dick moves that define Facebook as a company. If they were truely bold they would look for ways to operate without gathering massive amounts of people's personal data or supporting those only interested in fostering chaos in the West. If Zuckerberg was a truly bold leader he'd be winning hearts and minds by showing up to Parliaments in Canada and the UK when summoned over his company's past misdeeds ...instead of cowering behind generic press releases saying "we didn't do nufin'".
seunosewa 8y ago
My bad. I wasn’t thinking about the real world implications of what he said when I wrote the above. I was thinking about the entertainment value of the situation. Sorry.

sAbakumoff 8y ago

I can't resist, sorry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elrV-oHeSjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elrV-oHeSjE

PavlovsCat 8y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IEwBrJzhlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IEwBrJzhlg > War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. -- George Orwell

elonfan 8y ago

i feel terrible that i really dont care about cambridge analytica because its nice to have free stuff

cauldron 8y ago

Interesting, Chinese IT companies have long been controlling the media, basically corralling "reporters and self-media operators" into private chat groups administered by their staff, therefore excluding outsiders and naysayers, effectively forestall most negative coverage. Also they don't have quite as many insider leaks. Cellphone companies like Huawei and Xiaomi would give these people test units and guidelines about how to write articles. You can hardly see candid reviews, a lot of them just do shit-tier translation of TheVerge and other English sites(not sure authorized or not).

ryacko 8y ago
Translating an article and publishing it is a violation of copyright, so clearly not.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- cauldron 8y ago
  Chinese tech media basically rely on it. The "self-media" cottage industry that Wechat and Toutiao (by TikTok parent company ByteDance) created, is of 99.99% garbage, but they know what content their users want and like to see, boasts "give me a pic and I can spin it into a hit story", they basically provided a heaven platform for sensationalists and hustlers like this guy. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/fake-news-hillary-clinton-cameron-harris.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/fake-news-hillary-clin...

elonfan 8y ago

I'm just gonna say it - people being swayed by Russian Facebook trolls is just another form of political campaigning. If you can't learn to be objective on the internet about what you read don't you think you would be manipulated through alternative media anyway? Remember, there are no such things as stupid questions - only stupid people.

vincnetas 8y ago
I thought it was "there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_stupid_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_stupid_ques...
klingebeil 8y ago
Foreign countries undermining the manipulating democracy is "just another way form of political campaigning". That‘s a really really cynical way of framing the problem.

asianthrowaway 8y ago

I'm really curious if there's a deeper reason for why companies are suddenly thrown under the bus by the mainstream media, or if it's just journalists mimicking each other because they lack imagination. First Elon, now Zuck. Who's next?

fromthestart 8y ago
I don't think you can quite compare Elon to Zuck. As far as we know, Elon isn't stripping away a captive audience's privacy with reckless abandon.
- asianthrowaway 8y ago
  Google is just as bad as Facebook but they don't get this constant negative media coverage.
  - cenal 8y ago
    Google had “Do no evil” Zuck had “I’m CEO b!tch” One is much more likable than the other.
    - arrogant_vs 8y ago
      Arrogance is less dangerous than hypocrisy IMO.
      - mmjaa 8y ago
        But hubris is worst of all.
    - ahartmetz 8y ago
      It is really this. Google was founded by two nice guys and somewhat went the way of large corporations. Facebook was founded by a jerk and just expanded its capacity to be a jerk.
  - deleted 8y ago

mratzloff 8y ago

Sure. Maybe Zuckerberg shouldn't have put the screws to every media outlet on the planet. Is he so arrogant that he thought pissing all of them off in unison wouldn't have any blowback in their editorial decisions? Oh, by the way, he's created a surveillance apparatus that would have been beyond even the wildest dreams of secret police everywhere 50 years ago. He collects thousands of discrete data points about every man, woman, and child on the planet who uses the Web, regardless of whether or not they use Facebook—or even have an account. He put such lax access security in place around that personal data that anyone who wanted to could get access to it. And he did nothing after detecting a state-sponsored propaganda war being waged against US citizens. But sure. It's unfair.

russdpale 8y ago
Very well put. There are a few articles detailing his own involvement with Russian players, including oligarchs invested in facebook. And didn't facebook take a lot of money from the and NSA business front back when it was still only for college students?

Tempest1981 8y ago

More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18482855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18482855

AzzieElbab 8y ago

Super nasty swan song from NYT and co. Of course FB is at war, when media keeps calling for the gov to break it up

PavlovsCat 8y ago
The media, the inventor of the web.. but that's all details.
- AzzieElbab 8y ago
  No. Al Gore is
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    I was referring to this: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/11/01/146204/tim-berners-lee-says-tech-giants-may-have-to-be-split-up https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/11/01/146204/tim-berners-...

pcdoodle 8y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXrKKwHmPz4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXrKKwHmPz4