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Facebook policy chief admits hiring PR firm to attack George Soros

245 points by cityzen 8y ago

dawhizkid 8y ago
Does it really matter? Anyone can see he is taking the hit for the executive team. He’s a “lame duck” in the sense he already he announced he was leaving months ago.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
philwelch 8y ago
It's extremely disingenuous to assume that attacks on George Soros are necessarily anti-Semitic. Soros is a quintessential politically-active-billionaire bogeyman like the Koch brothers, or Sheldon Adelson (who is also Jewish). In fact, Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish themselves, and I don't think they're necessarily the self-hating type. Sure, actual anti-Semites probably also criticize George Soros, but (a) of course they would, and (b) why the fuck are you paying attention to those bozos anyway? Of course, accusing people of anti-Semitism is, in reality, usually a dog-whistle for calling them Nazis.
- starbeast 8y ago
  >It's extremely disingenuous to assume that attacks on George Soros are necessarily anti-Semitic. The messages may be paid for by people with other overall intents, but the receptive audience for the messages is people like that recent bomb maker. And the people paying for the messages know this. I could tell people all day long that something was being funded by Warren Buffet and nobody would give a shit. Tell them it is funded by Soros and suddenly you have raised a following crowd of prime fuckwits and I do not think it is because he is Hungarian. edit - assembled prime fuckwits, you know who you are, there is a reason I picked Warren Buffet for comparison and once you have bothered to look it up, you are really not going to like it.
  - Jach 8y ago
    Maybe it simply has something to do with what Soros has funded[0], and partly with what he's alleged to have funded (such as riots), that people don't approve of? Not the act of funding. Additionally Soros has been at this for decades. I think that you would find people caring about Buffet funded projects if he had the same streak. Honestly I'm just impressed by the master play at deflecting so much criticism, critics are either anti-semites or part of a nutty conspiracy group like the fake moon landing folks. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_projects_supported_by_George_Soros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_projects_supported_by_...
    - fzeroracer 8y ago
      I can't believe I'd see someone the whole pull the whole 'paid protestor' nonsense here on HN but here we are. The reason why people dismiss a lot of criticism against Soros is because a lot of the criticism is not based in reality, period. I am more than happy to criticize rich billionaires but the meme around Soros is clearly based around the anti-Semitic idea of a Jewish cabal running everything behind the scene rather than any sort of issue with wealth.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        nhaz 8y ago
        The downvotes here say all that needs to be said. Just put your fingers in your ears and scream "antisemites!!!". It's like that episode of Seinfeld, everything is antisemitic, even Jews. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQpvK72le4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQpvK72le4Q
      - virtuabhi 8y ago
        Downvote such commentators. It is a common tactic of racists to write anti-semitic comments and pretend that they are only asking innocent questions.
    - 8y ago
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  a) Anti-Semites rarely make any effort to criticize Sheldon Adelson, though, and b) because ignoring them doesn't lead them to disappear, since the popularity of falsehoods is well understood to exceed that of truth over the short run.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    I do not think the best way to fight anti-Semitism is to widely publicize every anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, publicize the Jewish ethnicity of every controversial figure, and accuse as many people as possible of being anti-Semitic. I do think that's the best way to convince yourself and those who already agree with you that everyone on the other side is a Nazi.
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      Good thing I'm not doing that then. I have very particular criteria for deciding whether someone is a Nazi and reject your insinuation.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  I would argue it's extremely disingenuous to not recoginize that the crowds that blame Soros for everything have a distinctly anti-Semitic streak. You would have to be either blind or deliberately ignoring the massive dog whistles.
  - aylmao 8y ago
    Being Jewish isn't his only defining characteristic. There's also the fact that he's a billionaire who is politically active. I would argue it's extremely disingenuous to not recoginize that the crowds that blame Soros for everything could very likely have a distinctly anti-billionaire streak.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    This is an extremely disingenuous guilt-by-association argument that groups together "generic conservatives who gripe about billionaires financing their political adversaries" with "anti-Semitic nutjobs". There are anti-Semites in many movements, both left and right. Louis Farrakhan has been openly anti-Semitic for years. Jesse Jackson has referred to New York City as "Hymietown". Should we dismiss the entire black civil rights movement as "crowds with a distinctly anti-Semitic streak", or should we condemn Farrakhan and Jackson personally while acknowledging that not all of the people they work with share their most repugnant views? Should we dismiss the UK Labour Party as a "crowd with a distinctly anti-Semitic streak" because of Jeremy Corbyn's uncomfortably friendly comments about Hamas? Let's also not miss the facts that (a) much of the criticism towards Facebook has been directed at Mark Zuckerberg personally, (b) Mark Zuckerberg happens to be Jewish, and (c) there is also no shortage of anti-Semites who make the connection between A and B. But, because it doesn't serve the media's vested interests to protect Zuckerberg the way they protect Zuckerberg's critics (remember that Facebook is a direct competitor to the mainstream media), they don't go out of their way to point out this connection.
- sek 8y ago
  Your last sentence is a disingenuous straw-man or you have no idea what you are talking about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism#Manifestations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism#Manifestations Soros is the most popular target because he combines many traits and is very public.
- nhaz 8y ago
  Soros is a very wealthy person who uses his wealth to push a leftist agenda all around the world. There's no doubt about that, you just have to take a look at the "Open Society Foundations" website to see it. Discrediting all of his detractors as "antisemitic" is merely a tactic used to delegitimise them.
  - Iamhisalt 8y ago
    >Soros is a very wealthy person who uses his wealth to push a leftist agenda all around the world. There's no doubt about that, you just have to take a look at the "Open Society Foundations" website to see it. Discrediting all of his detractors as "antisemitic" is merely a tactic used to delegitimise them. This.
factsaresacred 8y ago
> baseless conspiracy mongering about Soros has become more mainstream in recent years The article tells us in paragraph six that Soros was indeed funding many of the groups attacking Facebook: > Definers “learned that George Soros was funding several of the coalition members”. So it's neither baseless nor a conspiracy now is it? Soros has become a metonym* to describe any overly liberal policy. I'm certain 90% of the criticism is not antisemitism. Sidebar: For those in crypto communities, on any big price move you'll hear 'Soros this' and 'Soros that' as he claimed to be investing $8 billion in the currency. There's also 'Buffet this' and 'Buffet that' when the price plummets as he called the currency trash. This ain't antisemitism, just Internet meme silliness. * metonym /ˈmɛtənɪm/ a word, name, or expression used as a substitute for something else with which it is closely associated. For example, Washington is a metonym for the US government.
- ngcazz 8y ago
  Internet meme silliness brought you Gamergate, then Breitbart brewed that into the alt-right.
  - factsaresacred 8y ago
    That's it, shoehorn all your alt-righty villains into one comment. On which side are the conspiracy theories again?
isoskeles 8y ago
I still love that the story here is that Facebook hired people to say something true about George Soros. NYT, etc. are reporting that someone else saying something true about Soros is bad. I’m not clear on what the motives are, but it feels Orwellian that we now have news stories that smear people for telling the truth. I guess some anti-Semites don’t like George Soros, so the reasoning is that any criticism or even mention of George Soros must be anti-Semitic. I’d like to hear some coherent refutation to this. Why is this story at all controversial when Soros did, in fact, fund FB critics? I’ll entertain any reasons other than, “Nazis.”
- bonaldi 8y ago
  Facebook's actions are controversial for a few reasons. 1. Their focus was Soros. They were criticised, and they essentially said "we haven't done anything wrong that needs to be addressed, he must have another motive for criticising us, find out if he's going to get rich from this somehow". They set out to attempt to discredit Soros, for the crime of criticising them. 2. Having failed to find a financial motive, they did discover that he was funding a FB pressure group (which you might expect of a wealthy critic). That was then used to smear the group, among the people for whom "is funded by Soros" is an effective smear. 3. Many of the people appealed to in (2) are anti-semitic. It's why the smear works. It's therefore an anti-semitic act to use Soros as a smear in this way. In sum: they used their financial power to attack a critic of theirs with an ad hominem smear that had an anti-semitic basis. That's not the act of a laudable organisation. It's a controversial act.
  - nostromo 8y ago
    2 and 3 are also true of Soros attacking Facebook. So in effect you’re saying that Zuckerberg, Soros, and Sandberg - all jews - are antisemetic. Soros funded smear groups focused on Facebook. Facebook responding in kind doesn’t strike me as better or worse than what Soros did. Bringing antisemitism into it is a stretch.
    - danso 8y ago
      > So in effect you’re saying that Zuckerberg, Soros, and Sandberg - all jews - are antisemetic. No, Facebook critics are saying that FB was OK with undermining its critics at all costs, even if that meant dogwhistling for anti-Semitic trolls.
buboard 8y ago
biased article: it's hard to take it seriously when a billionaire involved in unsavory investing in his heyday is described as someone "exercising their first amendment rights to protest Facebook’s role". Didn't facebook's exec have exactly the same right ?
Quequau 8y ago
This seems like something straight out of the Scientology playbook.
Nasrudith 8y ago
At first I had a "seriously" reaction but honestly George Soros actually brought it on himself for once instead of just anti-Semitism. He actually deserves vicious invective for once. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/25/george-soros-facebook-and-google-are-a-menace-to-society https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/25/george-soro... It doesn't mattet what your race or political leanings are if you call companies that provide information to people a danger to democracy as goddamned a billionaire you deserve to be questioned if you are only in it for the money and power. It is a valid question. Furthermore it is fair to throw shade in response to aggressive rhetoric and calls to abolish to try to silence you because they don't like what you are saying. Since that in itself is a dangerously fascist path and the proper response to all of totalitarian ilk is always "fuck you all". Antisemitism is uncalled for but if you are a billionaire attacking other billionaires except to be hit in return regardless of if you are right or wrong.
resters 8y ago
Facebook is quickly becoming the de facto Great Firewall of the world. Of course there will be conflict with world-scale ideologues like Soros. Of course there will be an elaborate dance between Facebook and US politicians who want to control more and more aspects of the firewall. In case it’s not clear, facebook’s news feed algorithm is a content filter and in many ways it performs (or can be adapted to perform) much the same function as China’s Great Firewall, which is suppression of dissent and certain political ideas. But compared to China’s Firewall, Facebook has orders of magnitude more power because it has significantly more metadata about each person.
- buboard 8y ago
  i dont think the hyperbole helps in anything. there are other avenues, and nobody can force me to use facebook.
  - resters 8y ago
    That’s a correct but ultimately naive perspective. So many of the other systems (such as news publishing) are closely intertwined with Facebook and strive to publish content that will be maximally boosted by the algorithm.
    - buboard 8y ago
      you 're grossly overstating the amount of traffic that facebook brings to news sites. It's about 10%.
      - resters 8y ago
        Googled it and saw 35% at the peak declining by 25% which would be around 26%. But that is not the important metric. When an article goes viral the traffic is essentially free.
        buboard 8y ago
        that would be 35% of referral traffic, which is approximately 50% of total traffic? https://www.recode.net/2018/2/15/17013618/google-facebook-traffic-publishers-amp-chartbeat https://www.recode.net/2018/2/15/17013618/google-facebook-tr... the stats differ depending on the source, but there is clearly a huge drop for facebook past years.
whoisjuan 8y ago
Of course they were going to find a scapegoat for all this mess.
the_duke 8y ago
I have an immense dislike for the whole PR industry, and to a certain extent it astounds me that it's even legal. PR boils down to manipulation of public opinion that can't be traced back to the source easily. They are also used for things that would be too dirty / illegal to touch for a company itself, like fake reviews and fake online comments propagating a certain view. I have long thought that there should be a public registry where you have to announce when and for what purpose you have hired a PR firm.
- munk-a 8y ago
  I absolutely agree, and it falls in the same category as marketing. If a person is a marketer they are devoting their lives to manipulating the minds of others and that's just terrible.
  - the_duke 8y ago
    I see PR as being much, much worse. I also dislike marketing. It is manipulation that mostly works on a subconscious level, circumventing your rational thought. But with marketing, at least it's obvious who the source is, and you can make a conscious effort to avoid it. With PR, where pushing highly biased news articles on various news outlets is common, it's much harder.
  - mikekchar 8y ago
    I don't disagree that many(most? all?) successful marketing people approach the task in this fashion, but I wonder if we really have to do it that way. For example, take the "community manager" role that is popular in some companies. This is a full on marketing role. The goal is to create good feelings about the product and build a community that people want to join around it. However, I don't see anything wrong with that per se. In fact, in many niche markets (craft beer is a good example), the community manager tries to promote the entire industry (to be fair, in the craft beer industry, converting the average mega beer drinker to craft beer is good for business). Often, these people are working 100% in concert with the desires of the consumer. Also having to do with beer (hmmm... coincidence?), if you've ever spent time in the UK you know about the Weatherspoon pub chain. It is a massive company, with pubs everywhere. It undercuts the prices of the local, independent pubs and provides a kind of homogenised experience. But, good grief it does a good job. Every pub has an amazing selection of real ale in good condition -- sometimes at half the price of competing pubs. They have real ale and cider "festivals" and promote small breweries. They lobby the government for lower taxes on beer and work with the rest of the industry to create desirable business conditions for pubs (against the rising tide of cafes, wine bars and clubs). They save listed buildings and turn them into interesting venues. It's all of these actions that makes you think, "I just can't be against these guys, even if I want to support small independent pubs". I often wonder where the pub industry in the UK would be without Weatherspoons. So I think it's possible to take your job as a marketing person and use it as an opportunity to do something good (at least from some people's perspective) when it aligns with your interests. When you get it really right, I think you start working very hard to find those opportunities and ideally concentrate on them exclusively. I'm even going to go so far as to say that it's not necessarily marketers who make this a very rare occurrence. I suspect doing something like that would be a dream job for many people. I think the normal marketing job is really the reality imposed upon them by the business. The business, as a whole, is not interested in making the world a better place. They are interested in making as much money as possible. As a closing thought, I've often considered how wonderful a job in marketing or sales could be. What better job than to find someone that needs your product and introduce them to it? How amazing would it be to see people who are suffering and to think, "Hey, if they used our product instead, their life would be a lot better"? Instead, sales people are told, "Hey, we know our product sucks, but it's your job to sell it anyway. Sell the sizzle, not the steak. As long as we cut out our competitors, it doesn't matter how bad our product is. The customer will have to buy from us." It's that dynamic that makes marketing and sales a job from hell.
jimjimjim 8y ago
and remember, don’t be not evil.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mindgam3 8y ago
What I don’t understand is why everybody is swallowing this latest admission of guilt by FB as the whole truth. Isn’t it just so convenient that the man responsible for this latest clusterfuck is already on his way out? I mean, what are the chances that neither Zuck nor Sandberg knew absolutely nothing about this? It’s just too convenient to have this guy jump on the grenade to spare upper management. I don’t buy it for a second.
- woofyman 8y ago
  Sandberg admitted that it “came across her desk”.
  - mindgam3 8y ago
    [Edit] found the source article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/business/on-thanksgiving-eve-facebook-acknowledges-details-of-times-investigation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/business/on-thanksgiving-... <snip> This is a change from just a few days ago, when Facebook wrote on Nov. 15 that the Times report was full of “inaccuracies.” The same day, Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, posted on her Facebook page that she had no idea the company had hired Definers. “I did not know we hired them or about the work they were doing,” Ms. Sandberg said, adding, “I have great respect for George Soros.” But in the Thanksgiving eve memo, Ms. Sandberg issued an about-face, acknowledging that the Republican-oriented company’s work had crossed her desk. “Some of their work was incorporated into materials presented to me,” Ms. Sandberg wrote, ”and I received a small number of emails where Definers was referenced.” </snip> So just to recap, this is Sandberg admitting that he had some, limited knowledge of the plan, after she had previously publicly claimed she had no idea about it. This is really one of those times that calls for a “cool story, bro.”
    - woofyman 8y ago
      https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-facebook-sheryl-sandberg-definers-20181121-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-facebook-...
- 8y ago
WheelsAtLarge 8y ago
Zuckerberg and Sandberg need to own the hiring of the PR firm. It does not matter whether they knew or not. Most C level executives don't know what most of the company's employees are doing but the problem here is that Zuckerberg and Sandberg have created a company culture where this type malfeasance is accepted. I'm sure there were plenty of subordinates to the policy chief that knew about the hiring yet they never notified the executive team. Not knowing is not a pass. They need to own it. But I think one of them knew.
fbinthrow 8y ago
They are throwing this guy under the bus to avoid embarrassment for Mark and Sheryl. Hopefully the general public will see past this.

245 points by cityzen 8y ago

Does it really matter? Anyone can see he is taking the hit for the executive team. He’s a “lame duck” in the sense he already he announced he was leaving months ago.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

philwelch 8y ago

It's extremely disingenuous to assume that attacks on George Soros are necessarily anti-Semitic. Soros is a quintessential politically-active-billionaire bogeyman like the Koch brothers, or Sheldon Adelson (who is also Jewish). In fact, Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish themselves, and I don't think they're necessarily the self-hating type. Sure, actual anti-Semites probably also criticize George Soros, but (a) of course they would, and (b) why the fuck are you paying attention to those bozos anyway? Of course, accusing people of anti-Semitism is, in reality, usually a dog-whistle for calling them Nazis.

starbeast 8y ago
>It's extremely disingenuous to assume that attacks on George Soros are necessarily anti-Semitic. The messages may be paid for by people with other overall intents, but the receptive audience for the messages is people like that recent bomb maker. And the people paying for the messages know this. I could tell people all day long that something was being funded by Warren Buffet and nobody would give a shit. Tell them it is funded by Soros and suddenly you have raised a following crowd of prime fuckwits and I do not think it is because he is Hungarian. edit - assembled prime fuckwits, you know who you are, there is a reason I picked Warren Buffet for comparison and once you have bothered to look it up, you are really not going to like it.
- Jach 8y ago
  Maybe it simply has something to do with what Soros has funded[0], and partly with what he's alleged to have funded (such as riots), that people don't approve of? Not the act of funding. Additionally Soros has been at this for decades. I think that you would find people caring about Buffet funded projects if he had the same streak. Honestly I'm just impressed by the master play at deflecting so much criticism, critics are either anti-semites or part of a nutty conspiracy group like the fake moon landing folks. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_projects_supported_by_George_Soros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_projects_supported_by_...
  - fzeroracer 8y ago
    I can't believe I'd see someone the whole pull the whole 'paid protestor' nonsense here on HN but here we are. The reason why people dismiss a lot of criticism against Soros is because a lot of the criticism is not based in reality, period. I am more than happy to criticize rich billionaires but the meme around Soros is clearly based around the anti-Semitic idea of a Jewish cabal running everything behind the scene rather than any sort of issue with wealth.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
      - nhaz 8y ago
        The downvotes here say all that needs to be said. Just put your fingers in your ears and scream "antisemites!!!". It's like that episode of Seinfeld, everything is antisemitic, even Jews. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQpvK72le4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQpvK72le4Q
    - virtuabhi 8y ago
      Downvote such commentators. It is a common tactic of racists to write anti-semitic comments and pretend that they are only asking innocent questions.
  - 8y ago
anigbrowl 8y ago
a) Anti-Semites rarely make any effort to criticize Sheldon Adelson, though, and b) because ignoring them doesn't lead them to disappear, since the popularity of falsehoods is well understood to exceed that of truth over the short run.
- philwelch 8y ago
  I do not think the best way to fight anti-Semitism is to widely publicize every anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, publicize the Jewish ethnicity of every controversial figure, and accuse as many people as possible of being anti-Semitic. I do think that's the best way to convince yourself and those who already agree with you that everyone on the other side is a Nazi.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    Good thing I'm not doing that then. I have very particular criteria for deciding whether someone is a Nazi and reject your insinuation.
fzeroracer 8y ago
I would argue it's extremely disingenuous to not recoginize that the crowds that blame Soros for everything have a distinctly anti-Semitic streak. You would have to be either blind or deliberately ignoring the massive dog whistles.
- aylmao 8y ago
  Being Jewish isn't his only defining characteristic. There's also the fact that he's a billionaire who is politically active. I would argue it's extremely disingenuous to not recoginize that the crowds that blame Soros for everything could very likely have a distinctly anti-billionaire streak.
- philwelch 8y ago
  This is an extremely disingenuous guilt-by-association argument that groups together "generic conservatives who gripe about billionaires financing their political adversaries" with "anti-Semitic nutjobs". There are anti-Semites in many movements, both left and right. Louis Farrakhan has been openly anti-Semitic for years. Jesse Jackson has referred to New York City as "Hymietown". Should we dismiss the entire black civil rights movement as "crowds with a distinctly anti-Semitic streak", or should we condemn Farrakhan and Jackson personally while acknowledging that not all of the people they work with share their most repugnant views? Should we dismiss the UK Labour Party as a "crowd with a distinctly anti-Semitic streak" because of Jeremy Corbyn's uncomfortably friendly comments about Hamas? Let's also not miss the facts that (a) much of the criticism towards Facebook has been directed at Mark Zuckerberg personally, (b) Mark Zuckerberg happens to be Jewish, and (c) there is also no shortage of anti-Semites who make the connection between A and B. But, because it doesn't serve the media's vested interests to protect Zuckerberg the way they protect Zuckerberg's critics (remember that Facebook is a direct competitor to the mainstream media), they don't go out of their way to point out this connection.
sek 8y ago
Your last sentence is a disingenuous straw-man or you have no idea what you are talking about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism#Manifestations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism#Manifestations Soros is the most popular target because he combines many traits and is very public.
nhaz 8y ago
Soros is a very wealthy person who uses his wealth to push a leftist agenda all around the world. There's no doubt about that, you just have to take a look at the "Open Society Foundations" website to see it. Discrediting all of his detractors as "antisemitic" is merely a tactic used to delegitimise them.
- Iamhisalt 8y ago
  >Soros is a very wealthy person who uses his wealth to push a leftist agenda all around the world. There's no doubt about that, you just have to take a look at the "Open Society Foundations" website to see it. Discrediting all of his detractors as "antisemitic" is merely a tactic used to delegitimise them. This.

factsaresacred 8y ago

> baseless conspiracy mongering about Soros has become more mainstream in recent years The article tells us in paragraph six that Soros was indeed funding many of the groups attacking Facebook: > Definers “learned that George Soros was funding several of the coalition members”. So it's neither baseless nor a conspiracy now is it? Soros has become a metonym* to describe any overly liberal policy. I'm certain 90% of the criticism is not antisemitism. Sidebar: For those in crypto communities, on any big price move you'll hear 'Soros this' and 'Soros that' as he claimed to be investing $8 billion in the currency. There's also 'Buffet this' and 'Buffet that' when the price plummets as he called the currency trash. This ain't antisemitism, just Internet meme silliness. * metonym /ˈmɛtənɪm/ a word, name, or expression used as a substitute for something else with which it is closely associated. For example, Washington is a metonym for the US government.

ngcazz 8y ago
Internet meme silliness brought you Gamergate, then Breitbart brewed that into the alt-right.
- factsaresacred 8y ago
  That's it, shoehorn all your alt-righty villains into one comment. On which side are the conspiracy theories again?

isoskeles 8y ago

I still love that the story here is that Facebook hired people to say something true about George Soros. NYT, etc. are reporting that someone else saying something true about Soros is bad. I’m not clear on what the motives are, but it feels Orwellian that we now have news stories that smear people for telling the truth. I guess some anti-Semites don’t like George Soros, so the reasoning is that any criticism or even mention of George Soros must be anti-Semitic. I’d like to hear some coherent refutation to this. Why is this story at all controversial when Soros did, in fact, fund FB critics? I’ll entertain any reasons other than, “Nazis.”

bonaldi 8y ago
Facebook's actions are controversial for a few reasons. 1. Their focus was Soros. They were criticised, and they essentially said "we haven't done anything wrong that needs to be addressed, he must have another motive for criticising us, find out if he's going to get rich from this somehow". They set out to attempt to discredit Soros, for the crime of criticising them. 2. Having failed to find a financial motive, they did discover that he was funding a FB pressure group (which you might expect of a wealthy critic). That was then used to smear the group, among the people for whom "is funded by Soros" is an effective smear. 3. Many of the people appealed to in (2) are anti-semitic. It's why the smear works. It's therefore an anti-semitic act to use Soros as a smear in this way. In sum: they used their financial power to attack a critic of theirs with an ad hominem smear that had an anti-semitic basis. That's not the act of a laudable organisation. It's a controversial act.
- nostromo 8y ago
  2 and 3 are also true of Soros attacking Facebook. So in effect you’re saying that Zuckerberg, Soros, and Sandberg - all jews - are antisemetic. Soros funded smear groups focused on Facebook. Facebook responding in kind doesn’t strike me as better or worse than what Soros did. Bringing antisemitism into it is a stretch.
  - danso 8y ago
    > So in effect you’re saying that Zuckerberg, Soros, and Sandberg - all jews - are antisemetic. No, Facebook critics are saying that FB was OK with undermining its critics at all costs, even if that meant dogwhistling for anti-Semitic trolls.

buboard 8y ago

biased article: it's hard to take it seriously when a billionaire involved in unsavory investing in his heyday is described as someone "exercising their first amendment rights to protest Facebook’s role". Didn't facebook's exec have exactly the same right ?

Quequau 8y ago

This seems like something straight out of the Scientology playbook.

Nasrudith 8y ago

At first I had a "seriously" reaction but honestly George Soros actually brought it on himself for once instead of just anti-Semitism. He actually deserves vicious invective for once. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/25/george-soros-facebook-and-google-are-a-menace-to-society https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/25/george-soro... It doesn't mattet what your race or political leanings are if you call companies that provide information to people a danger to democracy as goddamned a billionaire you deserve to be questioned if you are only in it for the money and power. It is a valid question. Furthermore it is fair to throw shade in response to aggressive rhetoric and calls to abolish to try to silence you because they don't like what you are saying. Since that in itself is a dangerously fascist path and the proper response to all of totalitarian ilk is always "fuck you all". Antisemitism is uncalled for but if you are a billionaire attacking other billionaires except to be hit in return regardless of if you are right or wrong.

resters 8y ago

Facebook is quickly becoming the de facto Great Firewall of the world. Of course there will be conflict with world-scale ideologues like Soros. Of course there will be an elaborate dance between Facebook and US politicians who want to control more and more aspects of the firewall. In case it’s not clear, facebook’s news feed algorithm is a content filter and in many ways it performs (or can be adapted to perform) much the same function as China’s Great Firewall, which is suppression of dissent and certain political ideas. But compared to China’s Firewall, Facebook has orders of magnitude more power because it has significantly more metadata about each person.

buboard 8y ago
i dont think the hyperbole helps in anything. there are other avenues, and nobody can force me to use facebook.
- resters 8y ago
  That’s a correct but ultimately naive perspective. So many of the other systems (such as news publishing) are closely intertwined with Facebook and strive to publish content that will be maximally boosted by the algorithm.
  - buboard 8y ago
    you 're grossly overstating the amount of traffic that facebook brings to news sites. It's about 10%.
    - resters 8y ago
      Googled it and saw 35% at the peak declining by 25% which would be around 26%. But that is not the important metric. When an article goes viral the traffic is essentially free.
      - buboard 8y ago
        that would be 35% of referral traffic, which is approximately 50% of total traffic? https://www.recode.net/2018/2/15/17013618/google-facebook-traffic-publishers-amp-chartbeat https://www.recode.net/2018/2/15/17013618/google-facebook-tr... the stats differ depending on the source, but there is clearly a huge drop for facebook past years.

whoisjuan 8y ago

Of course they were going to find a scapegoat for all this mess.

the_duke 8y ago

I have an immense dislike for the whole PR industry, and to a certain extent it astounds me that it's even legal. PR boils down to manipulation of public opinion that can't be traced back to the source easily. They are also used for things that would be too dirty / illegal to touch for a company itself, like fake reviews and fake online comments propagating a certain view. I have long thought that there should be a public registry where you have to announce when and for what purpose you have hired a PR firm.

munk-a 8y ago
I absolutely agree, and it falls in the same category as marketing. If a person is a marketer they are devoting their lives to manipulating the minds of others and that's just terrible.
- the_duke 8y ago
  I see PR as being much, much worse. I also dislike marketing. It is manipulation that mostly works on a subconscious level, circumventing your rational thought. But with marketing, at least it's obvious who the source is, and you can make a conscious effort to avoid it. With PR, where pushing highly biased news articles on various news outlets is common, it's much harder.
- mikekchar 8y ago
  I don't disagree that many(most? all?) successful marketing people approach the task in this fashion, but I wonder if we really have to do it that way. For example, take the "community manager" role that is popular in some companies. This is a full on marketing role. The goal is to create good feelings about the product and build a community that people want to join around it. However, I don't see anything wrong with that per se. In fact, in many niche markets (craft beer is a good example), the community manager tries to promote the entire industry (to be fair, in the craft beer industry, converting the average mega beer drinker to craft beer is good for business). Often, these people are working 100% in concert with the desires of the consumer. Also having to do with beer (hmmm... coincidence?), if you've ever spent time in the UK you know about the Weatherspoon pub chain. It is a massive company, with pubs everywhere. It undercuts the prices of the local, independent pubs and provides a kind of homogenised experience. But, good grief it does a good job. Every pub has an amazing selection of real ale in good condition -- sometimes at half the price of competing pubs. They have real ale and cider "festivals" and promote small breweries. They lobby the government for lower taxes on beer and work with the rest of the industry to create desirable business conditions for pubs (against the rising tide of cafes, wine bars and clubs). They save listed buildings and turn them into interesting venues. It's all of these actions that makes you think, "I just can't be against these guys, even if I want to support small independent pubs". I often wonder where the pub industry in the UK would be without Weatherspoons. So I think it's possible to take your job as a marketing person and use it as an opportunity to do something good (at least from some people's perspective) when it aligns with your interests. When you get it really right, I think you start working very hard to find those opportunities and ideally concentrate on them exclusively. I'm even going to go so far as to say that it's not necessarily marketers who make this a very rare occurrence. I suspect doing something like that would be a dream job for many people. I think the normal marketing job is really the reality imposed upon them by the business. The business, as a whole, is not interested in making the world a better place. They are interested in making as much money as possible. As a closing thought, I've often considered how wonderful a job in marketing or sales could be. What better job than to find someone that needs your product and introduce them to it? How amazing would it be to see people who are suffering and to think, "Hey, if they used our product instead, their life would be a lot better"? Instead, sales people are told, "Hey, we know our product sucks, but it's your job to sell it anyway. Sell the sizzle, not the steak. As long as we cut out our competitors, it doesn't matter how bad our product is. The customer will have to buy from us." It's that dynamic that makes marketing and sales a job from hell.

jimjimjim 8y ago

and remember, don’t be not evil.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mindgam3 8y ago

What I don’t understand is why everybody is swallowing this latest admission of guilt by FB as the whole truth. Isn’t it just so convenient that the man responsible for this latest clusterfuck is already on his way out? I mean, what are the chances that neither Zuck nor Sandberg knew absolutely nothing about this? It’s just too convenient to have this guy jump on the grenade to spare upper management. I don’t buy it for a second.

woofyman 8y ago
Sandberg admitted that it “came across her desk”.
- mindgam3 8y ago
  [Edit] found the source article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/business/on-thanksgiving-eve-facebook-acknowledges-details-of-times-investigation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/business/on-thanksgiving-... <snip> This is a change from just a few days ago, when Facebook wrote on Nov. 15 that the Times report was full of “inaccuracies.” The same day, Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, posted on her Facebook page that she had no idea the company had hired Definers. “I did not know we hired them or about the work they were doing,” Ms. Sandberg said, adding, “I have great respect for George Soros.” But in the Thanksgiving eve memo, Ms. Sandberg issued an about-face, acknowledging that the Republican-oriented company’s work had crossed her desk. “Some of their work was incorporated into materials presented to me,” Ms. Sandberg wrote, ”and I received a small number of emails where Definers was referenced.” </snip> So just to recap, this is Sandberg admitting that he had some, limited knowledge of the plan, after she had previously publicly claimed she had no idea about it. This is really one of those times that calls for a “cool story, bro.”
  - woofyman 8y ago
    https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-facebook-sheryl-sandberg-definers-20181121-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-facebook-...
8y ago

WheelsAtLarge 8y ago

Zuckerberg and Sandberg need to own the hiring of the PR firm. It does not matter whether they knew or not. Most C level executives don't know what most of the company's employees are doing but the problem here is that Zuckerberg and Sandberg have created a company culture where this type malfeasance is accepted. I'm sure there were plenty of subordinates to the policy chief that knew about the hiring yet they never notified the executive team. Not knowing is not a pass. They need to own it. But I think one of them knew.

fbinthrow 8y ago

They are throwing this guy under the bus to avoid embarrassment for Mark and Sheryl. Hopefully the general public will see past this.