25 ms·

Facebook's PR feels broken

352 points by cjbest 7y ago

creaghpatr 7y ago
>Boz posted an explanation on Facebook, where he advertises the post as an organizational, internal call-to-debate. But while it's great to have a safe space for internal, organizational debates, it's still hugely concerning when that internal debate is whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S. Was Facebook having an internal debate over whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S.?
- quanticle 7y ago
  I would encourage you to read the memo itself [1] and find out. It's not that long. In it Bosworth acknowledges that Facebook, as a new medium for propagating information, had a role in shaping the outcome of the 2016 election. He said that it was no longer tenable for Facebook to claim that it had no effect, and that as the 2020 election approaches, Facebook should be conscious of its role and formulate specific policies proactively so that it doesn't find itself in the same position it found itself in 2016, as it reacted to candidates and third parties using the platform in ways that hadn't been anticipated. If Bosworth is calling for an "internal debate over whether we should have a free and fair election in the U.S.", it's exactly the same sort of debate that is occurring in newsrooms, radio and television studios all across the country. Every new media offends the old. Newspapers were offended by radio. Radio was offended by television. Now they're all ganging up on Facebook. [1]: https://www.facebook.com/boz/posts/10111288357877121 https://www.facebook.com/boz/posts/10111288357877121
  - iso1824 7y ago
    Newspapers, Radio, and Television all have a named editor who is responsible for output. Facebook doesn't.
    - cbhl 7y ago
      Facebook, at one point, did curate the news that was shown in the News Feed. It stopped doing so after one side complained.
    - elpool2 7y ago
      Why does it matter if they have an editor?
      - creaghpatr 7y ago
        I think there's a legal distinction. Just like phone companies don't have a responsibility to censor misinformation being spread over the phone.
  - ggggtez 7y ago
    > it's exactly the same sort of debate that is occurring in newsrooms I'm going to have to contradict you there. Anyone who was following the 2016 Russian Interference campaign, and related news stories, would know that Facebook used to pay people to moderate news stories, perhaps in a manner that was like a news room... But then they fired those people because they were not promoting conspiracy theory news stories, and so conservatives claimed FB news was "biased". This essentially created the environment where no one at FB was willing to fact check for fear of losing their jobs. When you hear about FB saying they will not fact check political content, it's specifically because if they did, they'd have no choice but to point out all the lies and inaccuracies in Trump's statements. So instead, they simply refuse to touch any of it, which leaves the door wide open to political actors to spread any disinformation they want. A few related stories, for the interested: [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/09/facebook-newsfeed-censor-conservative-news https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/09/facebook-... [2] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/facebook-will-reintroduce-human-editors-to-curate-news.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/facebook-will-reintro... As the [2] reference says, unless FB has suddenly grown a backbone with regards to standing up for truth over dollars, then any new effort will fail in the same way it did last time. Facebook has never been able to demonstrably prove it cares about election meddling, and you shouldn't believe empty words in their press releases.
    - quanticle 7y ago
      > As the [2] reference says, unless FB has suddenly grown a backbone with regards for truth over dollars, then any new effort will fail in the same way it did last time I find it somewhat sanctimonious for the traditional news media to be calling out Facebook for favoring dollars over truth when they themselves were just as key as Facebook was to normalizing and publicizing Trump. CNN executives made a conscious decision to give Trump lots of coverage, in an effort to compete with Fox News. They too presented Trump's views as being just as legitimate and valid as the views of those opposing him.
  - kichik 7y ago
    Other countries have rules about political advertisement especially before elections. Those include budget limits, content, attribution, locations, and more. It's weird to think the rules are so lax here.
    - creaghpatr 7y ago
      An advertising ban ahead of an election feels like a logical solution, or at least a simple-to-understand one. People would try and circumvent it still but the burden would be on the ad vendors to not be liable for a violation.
      - Marsymars 7y ago
        And if they don't want to risk liability, they always have the option to not show any ads to the relevant population ahead of an election.
    - smacktoward 7y ago
      The difference is that the U.S. has this pesky thing called the First Amendment that makes restricting political speech difficult.
      - taurath 7y ago
        But don't forget, money is speech, and corporations are people. All of which is absolutely not in the first amendment.
        methodin 7y ago
        Why is it that free speech extends to organizations? I'm all for free speech but outside of individuals and nonprofits I'm struggling to think of good reason it should extend to corporate entities.
        taurath 7y ago
        I can’t for the life of me figure it out.
  - hcnews 7y ago
    Wow, that post is pretty deluded. To paraphrase crudely, he is doing mental gymnastics to justify and invest in his/facebook's current position. An easy example of this is: > If I want to eat sugar and die an early death that is a valid position. Sure, if you want to make an informed choice, go for it. Nothing prevents a person from buying and consuming 10lbs of sugar everyday. However, the obvious problem which a lot of people have been focussed on is how do we prevent unhealthy amounts of sugar from being present in all food. All of this sidestepping from Facebook and its execs reminds me of tactics used by Trump (and Republicans).
  - mistermann 7y ago
    >>> Boz posted an explanation on Facebook, where he advertises the post as an organizational, internal call-to-debate. But while it's great to have a safe space for internal, organizational debates, it's still hugely concerning when that internal debate is whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S. >> Was Facebook having an internal debate over whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S.? > I would encourage you to read the memo itself [1] and find out. It's not that long. In it Bosworth acknowledges that Facebook, as a new medium for propagating information, had a role in shaping the outcome of the 2016 election. He said that it was no longer tenable for Facebook to claim that it had no effect, and that as the 2020 election approaches, Facebook should be conscious of its role and formulate specific policies proactively so that it doesn't find itself in the same position it found itself in 2016, as it reacted to candidates and third parties using the platform in ways that hadn't been anticipated. > If Bosworth is calling for an "internal debate over whether we should have a free and fair election in the U.S.", it's exactly the same sort of debate that is occurring in newsrooms, radio and television studios all across the country. This seems a bit illogical to me. Facebook is a platform that enables sophisticated communication, for anyone who chooses to to use it. I don't see how the opinion that Trump "got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser" in any way implies that the election wasn't either free or fair. Let's rewind to 2008: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.htm... >>> Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans. >>> As a result, when he arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern. His e-mail message to supporters on Tuesday night included the line, “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.” The incoming administration is already open for business on the Web at Change.gov, a digital gateway for the transition. >>> The Bush campaign arrived at the White House with a conviction that it would continue a conservative revolution with the help of Karl Rove’s voter lists, phone banks and direct mail. But those tools were crude and expensive compared with what the Obama camp is bringing to the Oval Office. Obama seems to have had an advantage in 2008 - was that "unfair"? If the capabilities within the Facebook platform, that are available to everyone, are deemed to be harmful to democracy, then so be it, but claims that it is unfair, or should somehow have no effect, seem way off the mark to me.
- svachalek 7y ago
  I think the argument goes like this: 1. The US Presidential election is decided by a small percentage of voters who have an open mind and live in the right districts. 2. Facebook’s targeted advertising allows advertisers to efficiently buy the votes of these select voters. 3. Without Facebook, this wasn’t already happening. Personally, I believe #1 is more or less indisputable, and I’m willing to believe #2. But I’m not so sure about #3.
  - asaramis 7y ago
    The other two major parts of this: Facebook's ad model is built to reward "virality" - meaning being over the top and salacious means lower costs. Even Boz acknowledges that was part of the Trump team's genius - they used the platform, as it was built, perfectly. The Democrats naturally have equal access to this platform, so I don't think its as much a left-right thing, vs a crazy-calm divide. The other thing is just disinformation / identity verification - making sure all advertisers are who they say they are (and you don't get russians posing as black lives matter, etc.)
  - Seenso 7y ago
    > 3. Without Facebook, this wasn’t already happening. > Personally, I believe #1 is more or less indisputable, and I’m willing to believe #2. But I’m not so sure about #3. I think you overstate #3 a little bit. It could have been happening without Facebook, but at a lower scale and not effectively enough to matter. I think there's also a #4: 4. Facebook ad-targeting allows the influence to be covert, because watchdog group members are probably not part of the targeted demographics.
    - sp332 7y ago
      4 isn't right (anymore) because they made all political ads available to anyone who wants to see them. https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2405092116183307?id=288762101909005 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2405092116183307?id=2...
      - Seenso 7y ago
- manfredo 7y ago
  There are a significant number of tech workers I know that do genuinely believe that companies should leverage their technology to benefit the candidates that they feel would be better for the country, and do things like ban Trump's social media accounts. This is what Bosworth was addressing: > But he maintained that the company should not change its policies on political advertising, saying that doing so in order to avert a victory by Mr. Trump would be a misuse of power, comparing it to a scene from “The Lord of the Rings.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/technology/facebook-andrew-bosworth-memo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/technology/facebook-andre...
  - Marsymars 7y ago
    Banning Trump's social media accounts wouldn't require bias against him, it would simply require him to stop receiving special exemption from platform rules.
    - chc 7y ago
      People are downvoting this, but it's just a matter of fact. Jack Dorsey has repeatedly said that the "newsworthiness" of Trump's tweets outweighs the ordinary standards of propriety that get applied to other people's tweets. Somebody asked Jack point blank whether Twitter would take action if Trump made a tweet explicitly asking his followers to murder a journalist, and Jack's response was, "We'd certainly talk about it." (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/18/would-calling-murder-get-trump-banned-twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-wont-say/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/18/would-calli...)
      - lol2143651 7y ago
        Twitter didn't ban accounts calling for the murder of the Covington kids. There clearly are no standards for you to hide behind.
    - gjs278 7y ago
      maybe those rules shouldn’t apply to anyone
muglug 7y ago
Facebook is just transitioning to becoming the digital equivalent of an oil company. They make a product that billions consume, but that many people think is doing damage to the environment (even though many of those critics still consume the product). That's why their PR machine is now switching to these slightly astroturfy campaigns. The next step is an advert along the lines of "They call it pollution. We call it life".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- r00fus 7y ago
  Analogies in fiction to the "oil company uber alles" - Technocore in the Hyperion Cantos [0] as well as Phyrexian Unlife [1] in Magic the Gathering CCG. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos [1] https://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/Card/Discussion.aspx?multiverseid=218058 https://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/Card/Discussion.aspx?mult...
  - EamonnMR 7y ago
    Phyrexian Unlife might be the most emotionally effective magic card.
- webdva 7y ago
  > Facebook is just transitioning to becoming the digital equivalent of an oil company. They make a product that billions consume, but that many people think is doing damage to the environment (even though many of those critics still consume the product). I like that analogy or narrative. The aesthetic value of the analogy is appealing to me.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  I’d argue that’s an improvement, their previous PR regime sounded like the Soviet information ministry.
- notadoc 7y ago
  > Facebook is just transitioning to becoming the digital equivalent of an oil company. Seems more analogous to a tobacco company. Some people think it's bad and they use it anyway.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
drewrv 7y ago
It still amazes me that the line of reasoning they publicly went with, around their decision not to fact check political advertisements, is that no one company should have that amount of power. The logical conclusion of their own argument is that Facebook should be broken up.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  > The logical conclusion of their own argument is that Facebook should be broken up. Luckily you don't need logic when you can just throw money at lobbying. Sadly, this is incredibly effective in the US today.
  - Seenso 7y ago
    > Luckily you don't need logic when you can just throw money at lobbying. Sadly, this is incredibly effective in the US today. Even if that's true, it might not work for Facebook. The politicians that Facebook would need to lobby may feel personally threatened by Facebook's power over the electoral process. Penny-ante campaign contributions and a few face to face meetings probably aren't enough to overcome that.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      > Penny-ante campaign contributions and a few face to face meetings probably aren't enough to overcome that. True, but a promise to use that power to benefit particular politicians probably would.
- farisjarrah 7y ago
  While I agree Facebook is doing a bad job with regards to political advertising, I am actually really glad facebook isnt stepping in and deciding whats truthful or not. Does anyone really think that we should give Facebook any power over our political system or give them the power to be the gatekeepers of what political ads we see? I think facebook should do what twitter did and just totally get out of the political ads game, however, since theyre not, call me crazy but I am kinda glad they arent deciding whats "right" and whats "wrong". Facebook has already proved to us over and over that they don't know the difference between right and wrong and that they make decisions that are bad for society.
throwaway122378 7y ago
Facebook’s PR isn’t broken, Facebook’s just doing some really bad stuff
- MBCook 7y ago
  Are you disagreeing with the argument in the article? Or is this just a comment on FB in general. I agree they’re doing bad stuff but I think the argument in the article makes a very good point about how they used to be good at handling PR for their evil and getting away with it and now they seem to have lost that touch. I doubt the level of evil has changed dramatically in the last 18mo but the PR reactions have.
  - cjbest 7y ago
    Yup. > something noticeably changed. They got combative. They got sloppy. An interesting take, whatever you think of the underlying merits of the company and the complaints against it.
    - cjbest 7y ago
      In fact, unless you think that the company was better before and is worse now, it should be striking how much the narrative has changed without any underlying change.
  - throwaway122378 7y ago
    Could be both. Ultimately PR is ineffective when the level of issues outweigh the amount of damage control PR can contain
JohnFen 7y ago
In my opinion, the problem with Facebook isn't really the PR. Yes, Facebook's PR is broken as the article describes, but the real problem started years ago, back when it was a "well-oiled machine". The problem is that there is a huge distance between what Facebook PR says and what Facebook does. The constant apologies for misbehaviors that never are never corrected, the apparently deliberate misinterpretations of much of the criticism leveled at Facebook, the continual discovery of new misbehaviors that should have been stopped, and so forth. That Facebook has now taken an official public stance of being antagonistic, dismissive, and condescending is bad, but it's just bad icing on an already bad cake.
- duxup 7y ago
  Yeah it seems like whatever rules there are ... there aren't many. The whole VPN they ran that tracks kids ... that's not even a mystery as far as being a terrible idea. Then Apple told them to knock it off. So Facebook renamed it (sloppily too) and put it up on the app store again until they got caught again. Kids, users, other companies, they don't care. How can a PR person even craft a response like "hey we did wrong but we're sure we won't ... well yeah we probabbly will do that again, maybe immediately"
  - artemisyna 7y ago
    As someone that knows the person that originally tipped Apple off about the tracking... this is such a misinformed editorialization of what actually happened where I don't even know where to start.
    - duxup 7y ago
      Can you help clarify what really happened?
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        From a factual perspective, it wasn't on the App Store. (It was distributed via an enterprise certificate, which I find to be even worse, since they are explicitly not supposed to be used in the manner that they were.)
ar_lan 7y ago
The beginning of this article really plays out like the author is just against Zuckerberg simply talking to people with conservative viewpoints. Being willing (and encouraging) others to listen to other viewpoints should not be considered a PR issue.
- wffurr 7y ago
  I didn't get that at all. What the author was against was Zuckerberg's defensive, belittling tone in his post "explaining" why he's meeting with people with conservative viewpoints.
- ptcampbell 7y ago
  That is what Zuck thought. And it would be missing the point. That is not what the author took issue with.
notadoc 7y ago
Just their PR?
wffurr 7y ago
I was wholly unsurprised to see that last tweet coming from someone on the Hillary 2008 campaign. It reads just like the kind of defensive use women as human shields to deflect criticism attitude that came from the campaign when faced with a real primary challenge both in 2008 and 2016.
cjbest 7y ago
This part really struck me: > It feels like finance in 2009. > One one side, you had smart, ambitious people who ended up there simply because you were told to go. On the other, you had the classic Gordon Gekko-ish types reciting Liar’s Poker anecdotes ad nauseam. > Enter the crisis and everyone was equally tarred as the bad guys. The former have slowly made their way out (mostly over to tech), while the latter remain[...] It does feel like the tide of public opinion might be turning from "too uncritical" to "too critical". At least, as somebody who spends too much time on both Hacker News and Twitter, this seems believable to me.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  > "too critical" That wasn't my takeaway. My takeaway was, "Good. Pressure is finally getting through to the masses of complacent co-conspirators who still have enough of a soul to care. Maybe things will finally start changing."
- TheFiend7 7y ago
  I don't really agree with the idea that people are being too critical of FB, or these massive social media giants in general. People vastly underestimate the power of data IMHO and therefore the responsibility that comes with it. We'll look back in 20 years and wonder wtf we were doing just like any other decade, cause hindsight is 20/20 (after a certain number of years out ofc). I don't think our society is really prepared for the digitization of so much information and there will be growing pains.
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    I studied a bit of politics, anthropology, history in my 20s. The one things that frightens me the most is that a relatively "safe" constant of pretty much all dictatorial / totalitarian / fascist / <insert_new_dystopia> regimes of the world, going back millennia, is control of information, and thereby the population. It's one of the simplest rule of a State hostile to its citizens: the more you control information, the stronger the leash. The tighter your hold. And if cruelty is on the menu, the worse it can get with more, better, faster information. So I thought, when Facebook really took off, "people do this now because there's this fad, this dopamine of novelty, but surely soon enough it'll recede" and I was damn wrong. I also thought, "oh but governments with half-decent minds will undoubtedly choose to increase protection for citizens, enact "digital rights" to further the reach of the sanctity of one's "home territory" to internet, a "digital democracy" in terms of infrastructure rules so to speak, and again I was dead wrong — they're doing it the exact opposite direction, proving that the concepts were not lunatic and very much implementable, but as it turns out in the form of "digital authoritarianism". So yeah, I'm the usual optimistic about most things, even the worst like climate change; but in this case, I know no example in history to disprove this assumption: in the current context, if any major western country falls into dictatorship / totalitarianism / etc, it may get very dark very fast. The powers of such a modern incarnation of extreme regimes would be, well, unprecendented, and that's kind of understating orders of magnitude in scale.
xwowsersx 7y ago
> Those last two lines. We all know that style of communication. Sardonic. Snarky. Sneering. Derisive. Whatever you want to call it, that mocking tone captures a dangerous combination of insecurity and arrogance. It feels like when Trump ends a tweet with SAD!. You read that and just think, what a dick. I get that's it's kind of sarcastic, but I don't really think "what a dick". It's not great for someone in his position to be sarcastic like that, but I think more "he must be hounded by people who are ready to burn him at the stake for having lunch with certain people so.."
ogre_codes 7y ago
One thing this piece really brings home to me is how unethical it is for media to sell sponsored content intermixed and indistinguishable from their own content. How do you trust a media outlet when their content is for sale? I know this practice pre-dates the internet, but it's hugely damaging to people's faith in the media. I think Facebooks' failure in PR is more a symptom of how far Facebook has slid down the ethical slope into outright corruption. As you do more and more heinous things, it becomes more difficult to defend those actions.
- inetknght 7y ago
  > how unethical it is for media to sell sponsored content intermixed and indistinguishable from their own content Some forms of media advertisements are unethical, you say?
- rhubarbquid 7y ago
  It's almost like there's a reason the FTC requires disclosure of paid content...
  - ogre_codes 7y ago
    In this specific case, it was clear Teen Vogue and Facebook were trying to do exactly that, and the fact that they pulled it suggests to me that omitting the "Sponsored Content" warning was part of the terms of the deal. I suspect this is extremely difficult to police and people get away with it all the time.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
DevKoala 7y ago
The author reads way too much on Zuckerberg’s response. It Makes me question their perception of the events and as a result, the analysis as a whole.
- stronglikedan 7y ago
  If I'm interpreting it correctly, it appears that the author is actually offended at the suggestion of listening to viewpoints that conflict with their own in order to possibly learn things from it.
  - lobe 7y ago
    I didn't read it like that at all. As stated in the article, the offending bit was the last two lines. "If you haven't tried it, I suggest you do" is the smug, condescending jab that was completely unnecessary. It is inflammatory for no benefit. The start of the response was perfectly fine and I did not feel the author took offence to it.
    - Aperocky 7y ago
      And the author should not take offense to that either. I have no idea why people would take offense to 'If you haven't tried it, I suggest you do'. Maybe the same reason they would be offended by talking to a person with different opinions.
      - manquer 7y ago
        I think more than offended to me he seemed surprised PR let it through
      - enraged_camel 7y ago
        >> I have no idea why people would take offense to 'If you haven't tried it, I suggest you do'. On its own it’s an innocent enough statement, and even correct. But in this context, i.e. when people are accusing you of something, and it is part of your response, it comes off as very condescending and smug. There is a reason PR departments exist: they tend to be hypersensitive to the different ways in which a piece of communication can be perceived, and to dull its sharp edges.
hinkley 7y ago
Stifling a glib, sarcastic response, who do we feel has good PR that's working, and not in some sinister meaning of 'working'? What groups and activities do people who think this way hold up as positive role models?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  It's not English, unfortunately, but Berlin's subway operator (BVG) has been doing an excellent job at PR for the past 5 years or so. They use mostly (self-deprecating) humour, both on billboards as well as individually as Twitter messages. This strategy seems somewhat risky. There were some where I thought "funny, but I wouldn't want to be the one posting this". Hard to describe, because it's mostly a function of each tweet being really good. They must have some larger advertising company behind this, with tons of talent. They have seen a spectacular improvement in public approval, and even on such measures as violence against employees, fare-evasion, and vandalism.
- creaghpatr 7y ago
  Theoretically, the best PR would rarely be identified as such.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Trying to answer my own question, I'd say Digital Ocean's paid documentation and whatever SEO they're doing that gets those documents highly placed in Google results might qualify as benevolent PR. Dev blogs for a couple of projects like Github might also count.
GoodJokes 7y ago
PR is industry who aim is crafting lies and misdirection. It is broken and unethical by design. This is an article that basically is just “how can Fb do bad things better.” A waste of time.
biznickman 7y ago
LOL "Before 2019, it felt like the Facebook communications machine was a well-oiled, unstoppable juggernaut." Umm how about Cambridge Analytica? Facebook's PR has been troubled for a very long time. To suggest that they has a stellar image before 2019 is a joke. I can list many other slip ups where Facebook could have come out and said something (or even better, did something) and then weeks later they come up with a weak statement. If that's great PR, I'd like to offer my services to anybody who needs it. While I'd agree that "No one ever broke rank. The messaging was crystal clear.", the message was always an awful one and now they have a relatively negative reputation despite being a remarkable success.
- danso 7y ago
  Cambridge Analytica is one of FB’s most known debacles but how did the PR team specifically fail?
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    How about by using "We can do better" over and over after every single gaffe that it's become a joke to people outside the SV bubble?
    - danso 7y ago
      FB stock hit a low at ~$157 right before Zuckerberg's April 10, 2018 testimony to Congress, and bounced back into a steady increase, hitting a then-all-time high in late July before going into a dive after the earnings report. The July 2018 dive was attributed to missing revenue expectations, but AFAIK, the general opinion [0] was that when it came to public fallout specifically related to Cambridge Analytica, FB weathered it quite well – hence the stock's steady climb from Zuckerberg's testimony until the July earnings report. That confidence in the stock is obviously not just from good PR, but I don't see the evidence that the PR folks fucked things up either, given how much potential damage the CA scandal was predicted to cause. [0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-stock-crushed-after-revenue-user-growth-miss-2018-07-25 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-stock-crushed-aft...
- 7y ago
blackbrokkoli 7y ago
I feel like the actual change is not really Facebook PR but the reporting about it? The TeenVogue affair seems to have caused a dam-break which shifted "reporting facebook as disfunctional" right into the middle of the Overton window all across the board regarding online media. Facebooks strategy was always running away from a trail of PR bodies via sheer sized based on "customers" (which should be called products, to be honest) which did and do not care. I mean sure, this PR debacle is not a bath in glory by any means. But I can not think of any PR campaign in response to the countless past scandals which made me think "Wow, nice catch". At least in Germany, their response to the accusation of manipulating elections was a billboard campaign advertising that in Facebook you have a settings page where you can click switches and thus be in full control of your privacy (:D). Was there ever any effective response to Zuckerberg abusing his company data to crack journalists accounts? I can even remember an age old thing where Facebook made all your posts visible forever on your board or something which was just drowned in the ongoing unchallenged growth of Facebook after some time... To clarify, I am glad that media is finally elevating from lizard memes but I reject the notion that this current affair is the first visible crack of rotten foundations one could have observed.
mihaaly 7y ago
Not everything is run by PR or fixed by PR or even measured by PR (except for PR personnel of course). Sometimes things are just bad and it takes time to realize. Regardless of the packaging.
allovernow 7y ago
At this point it is arguably obvious that Zuckerberg is a textbook sociopathic CEO who will say whatever is expedient to business needs. After constant misleading and outright false statements, not a single word that comes out of Facebook can be trusted. It's self serving corporatespeak taken to an extreme and I simply cannot fathom how so many people, including news media especially, are uncritical and even trusting of FB public statements. Zuckerberg's dumbfucks quote is consistent with the content of every public communication major steering decision FB has made to date. He is truly the embodiment of lawful evil.
- ptcampbell 7y ago
  Arguably obvious? Then I’d say it mustn’t be obvious.
AmericanChopper 7y ago
> One of their most longtime, loyal leaders is directly saying they have the power to sway national elections. It is their decision, and their decision alone, to resist the temptation to "change the outcome"! Oh, he better be careful. That’s pretty close to pushing a right-wing talking point /s Facebook, etc.. Is no different in its power to influence elections than traditional news papers ever have been. The only difference is a matter of scale and homogeny. Today, instead of thousands of media publications, each pushing their own biases and perspectives (which they always have), you have a very small group of tech giants that get to decide what you see (and even more frighteningly), what you’re allowed to say about it. Sure there’s more media outlets today than there’s ever been, but a small handful of companies get to control their reach, and (again more frighteningly) their ability to collect revenue. Then you have the issue that traditional media has always represented a diverse set of opinions and world views. You have conservative and liberal outlets, outlets the promote free market ideas and those that promote socialist ideas, outlets that promote regulation and those that promote small government. The small number of organisations that control access to ideas and speech today all represent an incredibly homogeneous political world view. The problem isn’t that those organisations have done a poor job of controlling the flow of information, it’s that they have the ability to do it in the first place. Those companies should not have the ability to act as gatekeepers who determine the credibility of information, or the moral implications of speech. In a free society, that responsibility falls of on the shoulders of every individual, and to have an authority doing that on their behalf denies them the opportunity to do so themselves. This is also a matter of values, not constitutional law (as people often like to derail such conversations by claiming regulation would violate 1A). The law that empowers these companies to to moderate content is the Communications Decency Act, not the 1st amendment.
- cycomanic 7y ago
  > > One of their most longtime, loyal leaders is directly saying they have the power to sway national elections. It is their decision, and their decision alone, to resist the temptation to "change the outcome"! > Oh, he better be careful. That’s pretty close to pushing a right-wing talking point /s > Facebook, etc.. Is no different in its power to influence elections than traditional news papers ever have been. The only difference is a matter of scale and homogeny. That's an empty argument. Everything is about the scale, by that argument each individual has the same power as e.g Facebook to influence elections, it's just a matter of scale. However, scale is the difference between effectively no power and a lot of power. > Today, instead of thousands of media publications, each pushing their own biases and perspectives (which they always have), you have a very small group of tech giants that get to decide what you see (and even more frighteningly), what you’re allowed to say about it. Sure there’s more media outlets today than there’s ever been, but a small handful of companies get to control their reach, and (again more frighteningly) their ability to collect revenue. > Then you have the issue that traditional media has always represented a diverse set of opinions and world views. You have conservative and liberal outlets, outlets the promote free market ideas and those that promote socialist ideas, outlets that promote regulation and those that promote small government. The small number of organisations that control access to ideas and speech today all represent an incredibly homogeneous political world view. > The problem isn’t that those organisations have done a poor job of controlling the flow of information, it’s that they have the ability to do it in the first place. Those companies should not have the ability to act as gatekeepers who determine the credibility of information, or the moral implications of speech. In a free society, that responsibility falls of on the shoulders of every individual, and to have an authority doing that on their behalf denies them the opportunity to do so themselves. > This is also a matter of values, not constitutional law (as people often like to derail such conversations by claiming regulation would violate 1A). The law that empowers these companies to to moderate content is the Communications Decency Act, not the 1st amendment.
jyrkesh 7y ago
> I’m sure, internally, it’s looked at as the “mainstream media trying to get clicks... I interviewed with FB shortly after the Cambridge Analytica stuff came out (but long enough after that it was clear to everyone that FB had screwed up big time). When it was my turn to ask questions in one particular interview, I gave a standard fallback when I have nothing else: "[despite all the blahblah positives], having worked at other technology companies, what's your least favorite thing about working at FB?" This guy was a FB vet (maybe 5 or 10 years? Very long in FB time, I think). He gives me this spiel about how hard the teams work to maintain user privacy and how unfairly they're being treated by the public and the media, and how hard it is to work in an environment where everyone treats you so unfairly. I was floored. Not even a hint of apology, remorse, or "we could have done X better". "Unfair. Fake news. We're doing great things, and no one thanks us enough." And from someone that had probably made a mint having been around at FB near-IPO time. It was my first or second of the day, and while no one else was so blatant, the sentiment persisted throughout the rest of the day. I bombed the interviews hard, they didn't want me back, but I had basically decided I'd never work there by the time lunch rolled around.
- ganstyles 7y ago
  I interviewed there this summer because the position/compensation offered was just too good to not consider seriously. Like, top 10% at FB kind of money, which is a lot. During the interview process, I asked many FB employees about their thoughts on FB in the news, the headlines, scandals, etc. All super smart and dedicated people, but anecdotally there was no hint of them thinking they had done anything wrong. They explained for example how Cambridge Analytica was totally overblown in the media, specifically because users opted in, and the media was just bashing them. They did say they wouldn't follow the same route again, but didn't seem to consider themselves responsible ethically/morally. I can see how one might debate whether having an opt-in absolves FB of responsibility, but it had a smell to it and didn't necessarily jive with my personal ethical framework. I did get an offer, and not necessarily for that reason ended up declining. But it parallels what you said except in May 2019. I would consider taking a job there in the future and I got the sense that they're working to turn things around, but what high level people at FB said to me largely seemed to mirror your experience many years later so I thought I'd share.
rhubarbquid 7y ago
I've worked in media, and I can confirm the "packages" that sponsors buy as described are totally normal in media. There's a reason editorial departments are totally separate from ad sales. FTC disclosure of paid content is extremely important and taken very seriously (at least where I worked and by the FTC). IMHO Facebook doesn't have any reputation left to tarnish, but Teen Vogue screwed themselves here, badly.
- vwcx 7y ago
  In my experience, editorial departments of most outlets are no longer separate from ad sales. On paper, maybe, and as a concept/line that too brass can say publicly, but the four major outlets I’ve worked all had edit staffs that end up being influenced heavily by the business side. Sometimes censorship, sometimes decision making and influence.
tempsy 7y ago
i don't think FB ever had great PR. The Social Network was largely a negative portrayal of Zuck and FB. I remember when FB bought Instagram there was a lot of initial backlash. Most of the positive stuff around Facebook was mainly due to the huge upward movements in it's stock price post IPO that solidified Zuckerberg and Sandberg as business geniuses. Would argue that their individual profiles became much more positive as the stock price increased, but would not really ever say Facebook the company was really perceived in a positive light outside of business community.
- bhl 7y ago
  Ben Mezrich, author of the Accidental Billionaires which was later adapted into the Social Network, has a differing opinion: like Liars Poker and Wall Street, the movie made Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg more well known and popular than before.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - tempsy 7y ago
    highly doubt it but would trust internal Facebook data on any bump in users if that was the hypothesis
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
I feel pretty contrarian about this piece. In the same piece that talks about how dangerous it is and how regulation is needed because facebook has the ability to influence public opinion, they talk about how "totally normal" it is for the media to act as mouthpieces for whomever wants to pay. No mention of how Fox News can swing public opinion, and really needs to be unbiased and in fact needs regulation to that end. Or any number of other media. And then it includes a gif making fun of zuckerberg for being robotic while complaining about him writing a post that was human instead of corporate.
- hogFeast 7y ago
  Comment talking about bias, only mentions Fox News. Welcome to hell (imo, this is what you get when you don't teach people how to argue and feed them too many Disney films). No, the press shouldn't be regulated. Yes, bias is normal. No, Fox News doesn't "swing public opinion" (they reflect views that already exist, and pander to them). Life is difficult, you have to think for yourself.
  - austinheap 7y ago
    Friendly feedback: your point would have been 10x more effective without the opener. I maybe agree but it never matters what you say; it matters how it’s heard.
    - hogFeast 7y ago
      I don't care about effectiveness, 95% of people have no interest in reality in this subject, there is nothing that you can say that will change their thinking.
  - notafraudster 7y ago
    You seem to be arguing two different things: first, Fox News does not influence public opinion; second, that it shouldn't matter if they do because adults should think for themselves. The second is fundamentally a subject view of the world, so you are neither right nor wrong. I disagree with you strongly. We should be concerned about things that harm the our civic health even if we ourselves to blame for them. I think there's a clear parallel to our actual health: when 80% of our population is overweight or obese, it's maybe time to think beyond "adults are responsible for what they eat" and towards "the world would be better if we could make progress on this issue". Ditto our past history with smoking. We know that people are subject to persuasion and psychological manipulation and exploitation of their cognitive biases. A model of the world that has everyone as solely responsible for their own destiny is a pretty useless one, in my opinion. But, your first claim -- "Fox News doesn't 'swing public opinion'" is an empirical one. Either it does or it doesn't. You're either right or wrong. DellaVigna and Kaplan's 2007 piece in the Quarterly Journal of Economics investigates this question. They exploit the fact that the phased roll-out of Fox News between 1996 and 2000 impacted 20% of the country. This allows for a natural experiment where some markets are "treated" by Fox News and others are not. Okay, so, first, should we believe this design? If the entry of Fox News into a market was random, then this is an experiment and we have a treatment effect. If the entry of Fox news into a market was conditional on market characteristics that we can assess, we have "selection on observables", and we can recover a treatment effect. We need only a good selection model. It is also the case that if entry into a market was non-random, but conditionally ignorable with respect to the potential outcomes of the market (e.g. random with respect to politics), we can get a treatment effect without knowing the full selection model. So we have some different routes to the answer here. The answer is between #2 and #3 -- Fox News did enter markets in a non-random way, but not based on demographics or past voting history, based mainly on geographic considerations. Given the regulatory and infrastructural component of entering a new market, this is probably not surprising, but it does guard against "Fox entered conservative markets first" as a counterclaim. Now, having clarified the design based considerations, the authors find that Fox News was responsible for a ~0.5 percent vote share increase in Republican vote share in the presidential election of 2000. Whether you consider that large or small depends on your frame of reference. My sense would be that 0.5 percent is small cosmically, but it's maybe possible that you could have an election where that kind of margin is decisive. Remind me again, was the 2000 election close? This is a fairly credible and careful design published in a good journal and widely cited (1486 citations, which is quite high for a nonmethods economics paper). That doesn't make it true, but it does suggest that the field of Economics views this as an important paper and that it has been exposed to scrutiny from a wide variety of sources. If there's a little contempt in my reply here, it's because I think your off-hand claim that media diet, priming, and framing effects are solely demand driven and have no actual impact on viewers seems to fly in the face of like 50 years of communications, economics, and political science research. In other words, it feels like your first reply was "50 years of research doesn't matter, humans aren't influenced by any of this stuff". Maybe that's not what you meant, but when I see someone flippantly respond without evidence, I think "Welcome to hell" -- imo, that's the kind of thing we get when we don't teach people to argue.
hogFeast 7y ago
When you have a guy who works at a company wondering if his company was responsible for an election result and making LOTR references...then you know something has gone wrong. No, Facebook isn't powerful enough to sway an election (I get that some people are really angry about Trump...if you aren't thinking rationally, don't have an opinion rather than start up with the conspiracy theories). No, business/life is not like LOTR. There aren't goodies and baddies (irony, this is part of why Trump was elected).
jarjoura 7y ago
I am not sure I completely buy the thesis of this essay because... 1. Facebook has NEVER had positive PR. The tech-media has always used FB as the Silicon Valley punching bag. Name me one good article in the news about FB? At some point you're just numb to it all. 2. Facebook has had leakers for years, and especially when Boz makes posts! To say that Facebook PR is broken implies it wasn't before. I'd argue that FB has long needed a comms team representative of the company it actually is. FB comms feel designed for the old college only network FB once was. When Google can do similar misdeeds and get only a tiny slap on the wrist, I do agree it's probably a comms problem in the end. Also, to completely write off Sandberg because of one corporate misstep reeks of "Cancel Culture" hysteria, but that's just me.
drongoking 7y ago
This is a place that famously had a motto "move fast and break things." In other words, fail early and fail often. For that culture to succeed you need people willing to admit (and tolerate) mistakes. Sounds like that's pretty well gone.
mola 7y ago
Is it just me, or is this completely bonkers? Let's say that teen Vogue were transparent about the article being sponsored. Meaning it would have had a tiny print somewhere saying that the article is part of a partnership with Facebook. How would that matter? Most people reading it would hardly notice it, even if they do notice it , it will hardly change the way they process the information in the piece. Our mind have a hard time knowing where certain facts it recalls came from. The bad thing is not the non cohesion of the Facebook PR it's the total lack of regard for truth and ethics that these corporate MBA and media types have. If it gets the job done then it becomes good, as in: morally good. Even if you manipulate the truth, bend the mind of the masses towards misconceptions, but do it well, then you are being ethical and good. Only if you fail then something is not good. That's a pretty messed up moral system. Corporate shouldn't be able to buy anything from media outlets other than Ads that look.like ads and completely visually separate from actual journalistic pieces. Anything else is just unethical.
Timyjoe 7y ago
very bad
rogerdickey 7y ago
Understatement of the century
Thorrez 7y ago
> You have someone like Antonia Woodford, rightly called out[2] for the absurdity of saying to combat misinformation you should require “advertisers use their real identities”. She has Yale, McKinsey and a rapid rise at Facebook, on her resume. This is the profile of someone who I imagine isn’t wanting to bunker down in a Trumpian hole of calling everything critical: “fake news”. I don't understand. How is it "absurdity"? And the linked Gizmodo article doesn't seem to call it absurd either. [2] https://gizmodo.com/teen-vogue-yanks-puff-piece-on-facebooks-anti-disinform-1840889839 https://gizmodo.com/teen-vogue-yanks-puff-piece-on-facebooks...
xorcist 7y ago
The Facebook / Cambridge Analytica story is completely baffling to me. Here we have a company whose business idea it is to lock up as much of the web as possible on their platform. Contacts, messageboards, photos, events, calendars, chat, dating, anything goes really. They then earn money from selling data. Then the Cambridge Analytica scandal breaks where a company has used data from Facebook unethically. How was this not expected? Had it been better if this company used their data a little less unethically? Had it been better if Facebook sold PR-as-a-service directly instead of enabling an ecosystem of smaller companies offering this? (Because the latter is what is going to happen over the long run should Facebook continue to be successful. When there is no room to grow anymore the ecosystem is going to be cannibalized.) This is all inherent to business models dependent on data ownership. Upon observing the majority of the population migrating to closed platforms, the discourse among the people who care about open data must instead be framed in terms of how to shape the conditions of said business models. Codifying data ownership is one way to move forward, GDPR being the most known example. It may be blunt but it at least poses the question of who owns which data.
MeteorMarc 7y ago
I believe on this forum PR means pull request.
nabla9 7y ago
From 2017: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Is Hiring a Team Worthy of a 2020 Presidential Campaign - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's latest hire is further fueling speculation that he could be planning a 2020 presidential bid https://people.com/politics/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-team-2020-presidential-campaign/ https://people.com/politics/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-team-20... >Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan have hired Democratic pollster Joel Benenson, a former top adviser and longtime pollster to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, as a consultant, >In January , Zuckerberg, 33, and Chan, 32, hired David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 presidential run, as president of policy and advocacy. They also brought on Amy Dudley, a former communications adviser to Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine. Ken Mehlman, who ran President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, is also on the charity’s board. >And Zuckerberg’s personal photographer, Charles Ommanney, was the photographer for Bush and Obama’s presidential campaigns, Business Insider reported. Joel Benenson and David Plouffe are working elsewhere now. Amy Dudley is still the spokesperson for Zuckerberg iniative. Zuckerberg has had incredible PR army working just for him, not for Facebook. I think there has been switch in his personal ambitions and change in PR people.
sharcerer 7y ago
Read this thread. I have been noticing a lot of reporting on tech by NYT etc, is wrong, not complete. In this case, a lot of arguments are there. But, an example from the past, they spread misinfo about Google's revenue figure from news industry(https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/that-4-7-billion-number-for-how-much-money-google-makes-off-the-news-industry-its-imaginary/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/that-4-7-billion-number-fo...) https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1214685876095045632?s=19 https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1214685876095045632?s=1...
necrophos 7y ago
The org chart shown in the article is old by 2 years and seems like an oddly selected on for that time. A current org chart would shown a different split between men and women.

352 points by cjbest 7y ago

>Boz posted an explanation on Facebook, where he advertises the post as an organizational, internal call-to-debate. But while it's great to have a safe space for internal, organizational debates, it's still hugely concerning when that internal debate is whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S. Was Facebook having an internal debate over whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S.?

quanticle 7y ago
I would encourage you to read the memo itself [1] and find out. It's not that long. In it Bosworth acknowledges that Facebook, as a new medium for propagating information, had a role in shaping the outcome of the 2016 election. He said that it was no longer tenable for Facebook to claim that it had no effect, and that as the 2020 election approaches, Facebook should be conscious of its role and formulate specific policies proactively so that it doesn't find itself in the same position it found itself in 2016, as it reacted to candidates and third parties using the platform in ways that hadn't been anticipated. If Bosworth is calling for an "internal debate over whether we should have a free and fair election in the U.S.", it's exactly the same sort of debate that is occurring in newsrooms, radio and television studios all across the country. Every new media offends the old. Newspapers were offended by radio. Radio was offended by television. Now they're all ganging up on Facebook. [1]: https://www.facebook.com/boz/posts/10111288357877121 https://www.facebook.com/boz/posts/10111288357877121
- iso1824 7y ago
  Newspapers, Radio, and Television all have a named editor who is responsible for output. Facebook doesn't.
  - cbhl 7y ago
    Facebook, at one point, did curate the news that was shown in the News Feed. It stopped doing so after one side complained.
  - elpool2 7y ago
    Why does it matter if they have an editor?
    - creaghpatr 7y ago
      I think there's a legal distinction. Just like phone companies don't have a responsibility to censor misinformation being spread over the phone.
- ggggtez 7y ago
  > it's exactly the same sort of debate that is occurring in newsrooms I'm going to have to contradict you there. Anyone who was following the 2016 Russian Interference campaign, and related news stories, would know that Facebook used to pay people to moderate news stories, perhaps in a manner that was like a news room... But then they fired those people because they were not promoting conspiracy theory news stories, and so conservatives claimed FB news was "biased". This essentially created the environment where no one at FB was willing to fact check for fear of losing their jobs. When you hear about FB saying they will not fact check political content, it's specifically because if they did, they'd have no choice but to point out all the lies and inaccuracies in Trump's statements. So instead, they simply refuse to touch any of it, which leaves the door wide open to political actors to spread any disinformation they want. A few related stories, for the interested: [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/09/facebook-newsfeed-censor-conservative-news https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/09/facebook-... [2] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/facebook-will-reintroduce-human-editors-to-curate-news.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/facebook-will-reintro... As the [2] reference says, unless FB has suddenly grown a backbone with regards to standing up for truth over dollars, then any new effort will fail in the same way it did last time. Facebook has never been able to demonstrably prove it cares about election meddling, and you shouldn't believe empty words in their press releases.
  - quanticle 7y ago
    > As the [2] reference says, unless FB has suddenly grown a backbone with regards for truth over dollars, then any new effort will fail in the same way it did last time I find it somewhat sanctimonious for the traditional news media to be calling out Facebook for favoring dollars over truth when they themselves were just as key as Facebook was to normalizing and publicizing Trump. CNN executives made a conscious decision to give Trump lots of coverage, in an effort to compete with Fox News. They too presented Trump's views as being just as legitimate and valid as the views of those opposing him.
- kichik 7y ago
  Other countries have rules about political advertisement especially before elections. Those include budget limits, content, attribution, locations, and more. It's weird to think the rules are so lax here.
  - creaghpatr 7y ago
    An advertising ban ahead of an election feels like a logical solution, or at least a simple-to-understand one. People would try and circumvent it still but the burden would be on the ad vendors to not be liable for a violation.
    - Marsymars 7y ago
      And if they don't want to risk liability, they always have the option to not show any ads to the relevant population ahead of an election.
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    The difference is that the U.S. has this pesky thing called the First Amendment that makes restricting political speech difficult.
    - taurath 7y ago
      But don't forget, money is speech, and corporations are people. All of which is absolutely not in the first amendment.
      - methodin 7y ago
        Why is it that free speech extends to organizations? I'm all for free speech but outside of individuals and nonprofits I'm struggling to think of good reason it should extend to corporate entities.
        taurath 7y ago
        I can’t for the life of me figure it out.
- hcnews 7y ago
  Wow, that post is pretty deluded. To paraphrase crudely, he is doing mental gymnastics to justify and invest in his/facebook's current position. An easy example of this is: > If I want to eat sugar and die an early death that is a valid position. Sure, if you want to make an informed choice, go for it. Nothing prevents a person from buying and consuming 10lbs of sugar everyday. However, the obvious problem which a lot of people have been focussed on is how do we prevent unhealthy amounts of sugar from being present in all food. All of this sidestepping from Facebook and its execs reminds me of tactics used by Trump (and Republicans).
- mistermann 7y ago
  >>> Boz posted an explanation on Facebook, where he advertises the post as an organizational, internal call-to-debate. But while it's great to have a safe space for internal, organizational debates, it's still hugely concerning when that internal debate is whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S. >> Was Facebook having an internal debate over whether we should all have a free and fair election in the U.S.? > I would encourage you to read the memo itself [1] and find out. It's not that long. In it Bosworth acknowledges that Facebook, as a new medium for propagating information, had a role in shaping the outcome of the 2016 election. He said that it was no longer tenable for Facebook to claim that it had no effect, and that as the 2020 election approaches, Facebook should be conscious of its role and formulate specific policies proactively so that it doesn't find itself in the same position it found itself in 2016, as it reacted to candidates and third parties using the platform in ways that hadn't been anticipated. > If Bosworth is calling for an "internal debate over whether we should have a free and fair election in the U.S.", it's exactly the same sort of debate that is occurring in newsrooms, radio and television studios all across the country. This seems a bit illogical to me. Facebook is a platform that enables sophisticated communication, for anyone who chooses to to use it. I don't see how the opinion that Trump "got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser" in any way implies that the election wasn't either free or fair. Let's rewind to 2008: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.htm... >>> Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans. >>> As a result, when he arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use the network not just to campaign, but to govern. His e-mail message to supporters on Tuesday night included the line, “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.” The incoming administration is already open for business on the Web at Change.gov, a digital gateway for the transition. >>> The Bush campaign arrived at the White House with a conviction that it would continue a conservative revolution with the help of Karl Rove’s voter lists, phone banks and direct mail. But those tools were crude and expensive compared with what the Obama camp is bringing to the Oval Office. Obama seems to have had an advantage in 2008 - was that "unfair"? If the capabilities within the Facebook platform, that are available to everyone, are deemed to be harmful to democracy, then so be it, but claims that it is unfair, or should somehow have no effect, seem way off the mark to me.
svachalek 7y ago
I think the argument goes like this: 1. The US Presidential election is decided by a small percentage of voters who have an open mind and live in the right districts. 2. Facebook’s targeted advertising allows advertisers to efficiently buy the votes of these select voters. 3. Without Facebook, this wasn’t already happening. Personally, I believe #1 is more or less indisputable, and I’m willing to believe #2. But I’m not so sure about #3.
- asaramis 7y ago
  The other two major parts of this: Facebook's ad model is built to reward "virality" - meaning being over the top and salacious means lower costs. Even Boz acknowledges that was part of the Trump team's genius - they used the platform, as it was built, perfectly. The Democrats naturally have equal access to this platform, so I don't think its as much a left-right thing, vs a crazy-calm divide. The other thing is just disinformation / identity verification - making sure all advertisers are who they say they are (and you don't get russians posing as black lives matter, etc.)
- Seenso 7y ago
  > 3. Without Facebook, this wasn’t already happening. > Personally, I believe #1 is more or less indisputable, and I’m willing to believe #2. But I’m not so sure about #3. I think you overstate #3 a little bit. It could have been happening without Facebook, but at a lower scale and not effectively enough to matter. I think there's also a #4: 4. Facebook ad-targeting allows the influence to be covert, because watchdog group members are probably not part of the targeted demographics.
  - sp332 7y ago
    4 isn't right (anymore) because they made all political ads available to anyone who wants to see them. https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2405092116183307?id=288762101909005 https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2405092116183307?id=2...
    - Seenso 7y ago
manfredo 7y ago
There are a significant number of tech workers I know that do genuinely believe that companies should leverage their technology to benefit the candidates that they feel would be better for the country, and do things like ban Trump's social media accounts. This is what Bosworth was addressing: > But he maintained that the company should not change its policies on political advertising, saying that doing so in order to avert a victory by Mr. Trump would be a misuse of power, comparing it to a scene from “The Lord of the Rings.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/technology/facebook-andrew-bosworth-memo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/technology/facebook-andre...
- Marsymars 7y ago
  Banning Trump's social media accounts wouldn't require bias against him, it would simply require him to stop receiving special exemption from platform rules.
  - chc 7y ago
    People are downvoting this, but it's just a matter of fact. Jack Dorsey has repeatedly said that the "newsworthiness" of Trump's tweets outweighs the ordinary standards of propriety that get applied to other people's tweets. Somebody asked Jack point blank whether Twitter would take action if Trump made a tweet explicitly asking his followers to murder a journalist, and Jack's response was, "We'd certainly talk about it." (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/18/would-calling-murder-get-trump-banned-twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-wont-say/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/18/would-calli...)
    - lol2143651 7y ago
      Twitter didn't ban accounts calling for the murder of the Covington kids. There clearly are no standards for you to hide behind.
  - gjs278 7y ago
    maybe those rules shouldn’t apply to anyone

muglug 7y ago

Facebook is just transitioning to becoming the digital equivalent of an oil company. They make a product that billions consume, but that many people think is doing damage to the environment (even though many of those critics still consume the product). That's why their PR machine is now switching to these slightly astroturfy campaigns. The next step is an advert along the lines of "They call it pollution. We call it life".

deleted 7y ago
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r00fus 7y ago
Analogies in fiction to the "oil company uber alles" - Technocore in the Hyperion Cantos [0] as well as Phyrexian Unlife [1] in Magic the Gathering CCG. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos [1] https://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/Card/Discussion.aspx?multiverseid=218058 https://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/Card/Discussion.aspx?mult...
- EamonnMR 7y ago
  Phyrexian Unlife might be the most emotionally effective magic card.
webdva 7y ago
> Facebook is just transitioning to becoming the digital equivalent of an oil company. They make a product that billions consume, but that many people think is doing damage to the environment (even though many of those critics still consume the product). I like that analogy or narrative. The aesthetic value of the analogy is appealing to me.
Spooky23 7y ago
I’d argue that’s an improvement, their previous PR regime sounded like the Soviet information ministry.
notadoc 7y ago
> Facebook is just transitioning to becoming the digital equivalent of an oil company. Seems more analogous to a tobacco company. Some people think it's bad and they use it anyway.

deleted 7y ago

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drewrv 7y ago

It still amazes me that the line of reasoning they publicly went with, around their decision not to fact check political advertisements, is that no one company should have that amount of power. The logical conclusion of their own argument is that Facebook should be broken up.

OnlineGladiator 7y ago
> The logical conclusion of their own argument is that Facebook should be broken up. Luckily you don't need logic when you can just throw money at lobbying. Sadly, this is incredibly effective in the US today.
- Seenso 7y ago
  > Luckily you don't need logic when you can just throw money at lobbying. Sadly, this is incredibly effective in the US today. Even if that's true, it might not work for Facebook. The politicians that Facebook would need to lobby may feel personally threatened by Facebook's power over the electoral process. Penny-ante campaign contributions and a few face to face meetings probably aren't enough to overcome that.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > Penny-ante campaign contributions and a few face to face meetings probably aren't enough to overcome that. True, but a promise to use that power to benefit particular politicians probably would.
farisjarrah 7y ago
While I agree Facebook is doing a bad job with regards to political advertising, I am actually really glad facebook isnt stepping in and deciding whats truthful or not. Does anyone really think that we should give Facebook any power over our political system or give them the power to be the gatekeepers of what political ads we see? I think facebook should do what twitter did and just totally get out of the political ads game, however, since theyre not, call me crazy but I am kinda glad they arent deciding whats "right" and whats "wrong". Facebook has already proved to us over and over that they don't know the difference between right and wrong and that they make decisions that are bad for society.

throwaway122378 7y ago

Facebook’s PR isn’t broken, Facebook’s just doing some really bad stuff

MBCook 7y ago
Are you disagreeing with the argument in the article? Or is this just a comment on FB in general. I agree they’re doing bad stuff but I think the argument in the article makes a very good point about how they used to be good at handling PR for their evil and getting away with it and now they seem to have lost that touch. I doubt the level of evil has changed dramatically in the last 18mo but the PR reactions have.
- cjbest 7y ago
  Yup. > something noticeably changed. They got combative. They got sloppy. An interesting take, whatever you think of the underlying merits of the company and the complaints against it.
  - cjbest 7y ago
    In fact, unless you think that the company was better before and is worse now, it should be striking how much the narrative has changed without any underlying change.
- throwaway122378 7y ago
  Could be both. Ultimately PR is ineffective when the level of issues outweigh the amount of damage control PR can contain

JohnFen 7y ago

In my opinion, the problem with Facebook isn't really the PR. Yes, Facebook's PR is broken as the article describes, but the real problem started years ago, back when it was a "well-oiled machine". The problem is that there is a huge distance between what Facebook PR says and what Facebook does. The constant apologies for misbehaviors that never are never corrected, the apparently deliberate misinterpretations of much of the criticism leveled at Facebook, the continual discovery of new misbehaviors that should have been stopped, and so forth. That Facebook has now taken an official public stance of being antagonistic, dismissive, and condescending is bad, but it's just bad icing on an already bad cake.

duxup 7y ago
Yeah it seems like whatever rules there are ... there aren't many. The whole VPN they ran that tracks kids ... that's not even a mystery as far as being a terrible idea. Then Apple told them to knock it off. So Facebook renamed it (sloppily too) and put it up on the app store again until they got caught again. Kids, users, other companies, they don't care. How can a PR person even craft a response like "hey we did wrong but we're sure we won't ... well yeah we probabbly will do that again, maybe immediately"
- artemisyna 7y ago
  As someone that knows the person that originally tipped Apple off about the tracking... this is such a misinformed editorialization of what actually happened where I don't even know where to start.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Can you help clarify what really happened?
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      From a factual perspective, it wasn't on the App Store. (It was distributed via an enterprise certificate, which I find to be even worse, since they are explicitly not supposed to be used in the manner that they were.)

ar_lan 7y ago

The beginning of this article really plays out like the author is just against Zuckerberg simply talking to people with conservative viewpoints. Being willing (and encouraging) others to listen to other viewpoints should not be considered a PR issue.

wffurr 7y ago
I didn't get that at all. What the author was against was Zuckerberg's defensive, belittling tone in his post "explaining" why he's meeting with people with conservative viewpoints.
ptcampbell 7y ago
That is what Zuck thought. And it would be missing the point. That is not what the author took issue with.

notadoc 7y ago

Just their PR?

wffurr 7y ago

I was wholly unsurprised to see that last tweet coming from someone on the Hillary 2008 campaign. It reads just like the kind of defensive use women as human shields to deflect criticism attitude that came from the campaign when faced with a real primary challenge both in 2008 and 2016.

cjbest 7y ago

This part really struck me: > It feels like finance in 2009. > One one side, you had smart, ambitious people who ended up there simply because you were told to go. On the other, you had the classic Gordon Gekko-ish types reciting Liar’s Poker anecdotes ad nauseam. > Enter the crisis and everyone was equally tarred as the bad guys. The former have slowly made their way out (mostly over to tech), while the latter remain[...] It does feel like the tide of public opinion might be turning from "too uncritical" to "too critical". At least, as somebody who spends too much time on both Hacker News and Twitter, this seems believable to me.

_bxg1 7y ago
> "too critical" That wasn't my takeaway. My takeaway was, "Good. Pressure is finally getting through to the masses of complacent co-conspirators who still have enough of a soul to care. Maybe things will finally start changing."
TheFiend7 7y ago
I don't really agree with the idea that people are being too critical of FB, or these massive social media giants in general. People vastly underestimate the power of data IMHO and therefore the responsibility that comes with it. We'll look back in 20 years and wonder wtf we were doing just like any other decade, cause hindsight is 20/20 (after a certain number of years out ofc). I don't think our society is really prepared for the digitization of so much information and there will be growing pains.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  I studied a bit of politics, anthropology, history in my 20s. The one things that frightens me the most is that a relatively "safe" constant of pretty much all dictatorial / totalitarian / fascist / <insert_new_dystopia> regimes of the world, going back millennia, is control of information, and thereby the population. It's one of the simplest rule of a State hostile to its citizens: the more you control information, the stronger the leash. The tighter your hold. And if cruelty is on the menu, the worse it can get with more, better, faster information. So I thought, when Facebook really took off, "people do this now because there's this fad, this dopamine of novelty, but surely soon enough it'll recede" and I was damn wrong. I also thought, "oh but governments with half-decent minds will undoubtedly choose to increase protection for citizens, enact "digital rights" to further the reach of the sanctity of one's "home territory" to internet, a "digital democracy" in terms of infrastructure rules so to speak, and again I was dead wrong — they're doing it the exact opposite direction, proving that the concepts were not lunatic and very much implementable, but as it turns out in the form of "digital authoritarianism". So yeah, I'm the usual optimistic about most things, even the worst like climate change; but in this case, I know no example in history to disprove this assumption: in the current context, if any major western country falls into dictatorship / totalitarianism / etc, it may get very dark very fast. The powers of such a modern incarnation of extreme regimes would be, well, unprecendented, and that's kind of understating orders of magnitude in scale.

xwowsersx 7y ago

> Those last two lines. We all know that style of communication. Sardonic. Snarky. Sneering. Derisive. Whatever you want to call it, that mocking tone captures a dangerous combination of insecurity and arrogance. It feels like when Trump ends a tweet with SAD!. You read that and just think, what a dick. I get that's it's kind of sarcastic, but I don't really think "what a dick". It's not great for someone in his position to be sarcastic like that, but I think more "he must be hounded by people who are ready to burn him at the stake for having lunch with certain people so.."

ogre_codes 7y ago

One thing this piece really brings home to me is how unethical it is for media to sell sponsored content intermixed and indistinguishable from their own content. How do you trust a media outlet when their content is for sale? I know this practice pre-dates the internet, but it's hugely damaging to people's faith in the media. I think Facebooks' failure in PR is more a symptom of how far Facebook has slid down the ethical slope into outright corruption. As you do more and more heinous things, it becomes more difficult to defend those actions.

inetknght 7y ago
> how unethical it is for media to sell sponsored content intermixed and indistinguishable from their own content Some forms of media advertisements are unethical, you say?
rhubarbquid 7y ago
It's almost like there's a reason the FTC requires disclosure of paid content...
- ogre_codes 7y ago
  In this specific case, it was clear Teen Vogue and Facebook were trying to do exactly that, and the fact that they pulled it suggests to me that omitting the "Sponsored Content" warning was part of the terms of the deal. I suspect this is extremely difficult to police and people get away with it all the time.
deleted 7y ago
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DevKoala 7y ago

The author reads way too much on Zuckerberg’s response. It Makes me question their perception of the events and as a result, the analysis as a whole.

stronglikedan 7y ago
If I'm interpreting it correctly, it appears that the author is actually offended at the suggestion of listening to viewpoints that conflict with their own in order to possibly learn things from it.
- lobe 7y ago
  I didn't read it like that at all. As stated in the article, the offending bit was the last two lines. "If you haven't tried it, I suggest you do" is the smug, condescending jab that was completely unnecessary. It is inflammatory for no benefit. The start of the response was perfectly fine and I did not feel the author took offence to it.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    And the author should not take offense to that either. I have no idea why people would take offense to 'If you haven't tried it, I suggest you do'. Maybe the same reason they would be offended by talking to a person with different opinions.
    - manquer 7y ago
      I think more than offended to me he seemed surprised PR let it through
    - enraged_camel 7y ago
      >> I have no idea why people would take offense to 'If you haven't tried it, I suggest you do'. On its own it’s an innocent enough statement, and even correct. But in this context, i.e. when people are accusing you of something, and it is part of your response, it comes off as very condescending and smug. There is a reason PR departments exist: they tend to be hypersensitive to the different ways in which a piece of communication can be perceived, and to dull its sharp edges.

hinkley 7y ago

Stifling a glib, sarcastic response, who do we feel has good PR that's working, and not in some sinister meaning of 'working'? What groups and activities do people who think this way hold up as positive role models?

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
It's not English, unfortunately, but Berlin's subway operator (BVG) has been doing an excellent job at PR for the past 5 years or so. They use mostly (self-deprecating) humour, both on billboards as well as individually as Twitter messages. This strategy seems somewhat risky. There were some where I thought "funny, but I wouldn't want to be the one posting this". Hard to describe, because it's mostly a function of each tweet being really good. They must have some larger advertising company behind this, with tons of talent. They have seen a spectacular improvement in public approval, and even on such measures as violence against employees, fare-evasion, and vandalism.
creaghpatr 7y ago
Theoretically, the best PR would rarely be identified as such.
hinkley 7y ago
Trying to answer my own question, I'd say Digital Ocean's paid documentation and whatever SEO they're doing that gets those documents highly placed in Google results might qualify as benevolent PR. Dev blogs for a couple of projects like Github might also count.

GoodJokes 7y ago

PR is industry who aim is crafting lies and misdirection. It is broken and unethical by design. This is an article that basically is just “how can Fb do bad things better.” A waste of time.

biznickman 7y ago

LOL "Before 2019, it felt like the Facebook communications machine was a well-oiled, unstoppable juggernaut." Umm how about Cambridge Analytica? Facebook's PR has been troubled for a very long time. To suggest that they has a stellar image before 2019 is a joke. I can list many other slip ups where Facebook could have come out and said something (or even better, did something) and then weeks later they come up with a weak statement. If that's great PR, I'd like to offer my services to anybody who needs it. While I'd agree that "No one ever broke rank. The messaging was crystal clear.", the message was always an awful one and now they have a relatively negative reputation despite being a remarkable success.

danso 7y ago
Cambridge Analytica is one of FB’s most known debacles but how did the PR team specifically fail?
- reaperducer 7y ago
  How about by using "We can do better" over and over after every single gaffe that it's become a joke to people outside the SV bubble?
  - danso 7y ago
    FB stock hit a low at ~$157 right before Zuckerberg's April 10, 2018 testimony to Congress, and bounced back into a steady increase, hitting a then-all-time high in late July before going into a dive after the earnings report. The July 2018 dive was attributed to missing revenue expectations, but AFAIK, the general opinion [0] was that when it came to public fallout specifically related to Cambridge Analytica, FB weathered it quite well – hence the stock's steady climb from Zuckerberg's testimony until the July earnings report. That confidence in the stock is obviously not just from good PR, but I don't see the evidence that the PR folks fucked things up either, given how much potential damage the CA scandal was predicted to cause. [0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-stock-crushed-after-revenue-user-growth-miss-2018-07-25 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-stock-crushed-aft...
7y ago

blackbrokkoli 7y ago

I feel like the actual change is not really Facebook PR but the reporting about it? The TeenVogue affair seems to have caused a dam-break which shifted "reporting facebook as disfunctional" right into the middle of the Overton window all across the board regarding online media. Facebooks strategy was always running away from a trail of PR bodies via sheer sized based on "customers" (which should be called products, to be honest) which did and do not care. I mean sure, this PR debacle is not a bath in glory by any means. But I can not think of any PR campaign in response to the countless past scandals which made me think "Wow, nice catch". At least in Germany, their response to the accusation of manipulating elections was a billboard campaign advertising that in Facebook you have a settings page where you can click switches and thus be in full control of your privacy (:D). Was there ever any effective response to Zuckerberg abusing his company data to crack journalists accounts? I can even remember an age old thing where Facebook made all your posts visible forever on your board or something which was just drowned in the ongoing unchallenged growth of Facebook after some time... To clarify, I am glad that media is finally elevating from lizard memes but I reject the notion that this current affair is the first visible crack of rotten foundations one could have observed.

mihaaly 7y ago

Not everything is run by PR or fixed by PR or even measured by PR (except for PR personnel of course). Sometimes things are just bad and it takes time to realize. Regardless of the packaging.

allovernow 7y ago

At this point it is arguably obvious that Zuckerberg is a textbook sociopathic CEO who will say whatever is expedient to business needs. After constant misleading and outright false statements, not a single word that comes out of Facebook can be trusted. It's self serving corporatespeak taken to an extreme and I simply cannot fathom how so many people, including news media especially, are uncritical and even trusting of FB public statements. Zuckerberg's dumbfucks quote is consistent with the content of every public communication major steering decision FB has made to date. He is truly the embodiment of lawful evil.

ptcampbell 7y ago
Arguably obvious? Then I’d say it mustn’t be obvious.

AmericanChopper 7y ago

> One of their most longtime, loyal leaders is directly saying they have the power to sway national elections. It is their decision, and their decision alone, to resist the temptation to "change the outcome"! Oh, he better be careful. That’s pretty close to pushing a right-wing talking point /s Facebook, etc.. Is no different in its power to influence elections than traditional news papers ever have been. The only difference is a matter of scale and homogeny. Today, instead of thousands of media publications, each pushing their own biases and perspectives (which they always have), you have a very small group of tech giants that get to decide what you see (and even more frighteningly), what you’re allowed to say about it. Sure there’s more media outlets today than there’s ever been, but a small handful of companies get to control their reach, and (again more frighteningly) their ability to collect revenue. Then you have the issue that traditional media has always represented a diverse set of opinions and world views. You have conservative and liberal outlets, outlets the promote free market ideas and those that promote socialist ideas, outlets that promote regulation and those that promote small government. The small number of organisations that control access to ideas and speech today all represent an incredibly homogeneous political world view. The problem isn’t that those organisations have done a poor job of controlling the flow of information, it’s that they have the ability to do it in the first place. Those companies should not have the ability to act as gatekeepers who determine the credibility of information, or the moral implications of speech. In a free society, that responsibility falls of on the shoulders of every individual, and to have an authority doing that on their behalf denies them the opportunity to do so themselves. This is also a matter of values, not constitutional law (as people often like to derail such conversations by claiming regulation would violate 1A). The law that empowers these companies to to moderate content is the Communications Decency Act, not the 1st amendment.

cycomanic 7y ago
> > One of their most longtime, loyal leaders is directly saying they have the power to sway national elections. It is their decision, and their decision alone, to resist the temptation to "change the outcome"! > Oh, he better be careful. That’s pretty close to pushing a right-wing talking point /s > Facebook, etc.. Is no different in its power to influence elections than traditional news papers ever have been. The only difference is a matter of scale and homogeny. That's an empty argument. Everything is about the scale, by that argument each individual has the same power as e.g Facebook to influence elections, it's just a matter of scale. However, scale is the difference between effectively no power and a lot of power. > Today, instead of thousands of media publications, each pushing their own biases and perspectives (which they always have), you have a very small group of tech giants that get to decide what you see (and even more frighteningly), what you’re allowed to say about it. Sure there’s more media outlets today than there’s ever been, but a small handful of companies get to control their reach, and (again more frighteningly) their ability to collect revenue. > Then you have the issue that traditional media has always represented a diverse set of opinions and world views. You have conservative and liberal outlets, outlets the promote free market ideas and those that promote socialist ideas, outlets that promote regulation and those that promote small government. The small number of organisations that control access to ideas and speech today all represent an incredibly homogeneous political world view. > The problem isn’t that those organisations have done a poor job of controlling the flow of information, it’s that they have the ability to do it in the first place. Those companies should not have the ability to act as gatekeepers who determine the credibility of information, or the moral implications of speech. In a free society, that responsibility falls of on the shoulders of every individual, and to have an authority doing that on their behalf denies them the opportunity to do so themselves. > This is also a matter of values, not constitutional law (as people often like to derail such conversations by claiming regulation would violate 1A). The law that empowers these companies to to moderate content is the Communications Decency Act, not the 1st amendment.

jyrkesh 7y ago

> I’m sure, internally, it’s looked at as the “mainstream media trying to get clicks... I interviewed with FB shortly after the Cambridge Analytica stuff came out (but long enough after that it was clear to everyone that FB had screwed up big time). When it was my turn to ask questions in one particular interview, I gave a standard fallback when I have nothing else: "[despite all the blahblah positives], having worked at other technology companies, what's your least favorite thing about working at FB?" This guy was a FB vet (maybe 5 or 10 years? Very long in FB time, I think). He gives me this spiel about how hard the teams work to maintain user privacy and how unfairly they're being treated by the public and the media, and how hard it is to work in an environment where everyone treats you so unfairly. I was floored. Not even a hint of apology, remorse, or "we could have done X better". "Unfair. Fake news. We're doing great things, and no one thanks us enough." And from someone that had probably made a mint having been around at FB near-IPO time. It was my first or second of the day, and while no one else was so blatant, the sentiment persisted throughout the rest of the day. I bombed the interviews hard, they didn't want me back, but I had basically decided I'd never work there by the time lunch rolled around.

ganstyles 7y ago
I interviewed there this summer because the position/compensation offered was just too good to not consider seriously. Like, top 10% at FB kind of money, which is a lot. During the interview process, I asked many FB employees about their thoughts on FB in the news, the headlines, scandals, etc. All super smart and dedicated people, but anecdotally there was no hint of them thinking they had done anything wrong. They explained for example how Cambridge Analytica was totally overblown in the media, specifically because users opted in, and the media was just bashing them. They did say they wouldn't follow the same route again, but didn't seem to consider themselves responsible ethically/morally. I can see how one might debate whether having an opt-in absolves FB of responsibility, but it had a smell to it and didn't necessarily jive with my personal ethical framework. I did get an offer, and not necessarily for that reason ended up declining. But it parallels what you said except in May 2019. I would consider taking a job there in the future and I got the sense that they're working to turn things around, but what high level people at FB said to me largely seemed to mirror your experience many years later so I thought I'd share.

rhubarbquid 7y ago

I've worked in media, and I can confirm the "packages" that sponsors buy as described are totally normal in media. There's a reason editorial departments are totally separate from ad sales. FTC disclosure of paid content is extremely important and taken very seriously (at least where I worked and by the FTC). IMHO Facebook doesn't have any reputation left to tarnish, but Teen Vogue screwed themselves here, badly.

vwcx 7y ago
In my experience, editorial departments of most outlets are no longer separate from ad sales. On paper, maybe, and as a concept/line that too brass can say publicly, but the four major outlets I’ve worked all had edit staffs that end up being influenced heavily by the business side. Sometimes censorship, sometimes decision making and influence.

tempsy 7y ago

i don't think FB ever had great PR. The Social Network was largely a negative portrayal of Zuck and FB. I remember when FB bought Instagram there was a lot of initial backlash. Most of the positive stuff around Facebook was mainly due to the huge upward movements in it's stock price post IPO that solidified Zuckerberg and Sandberg as business geniuses. Would argue that their individual profiles became much more positive as the stock price increased, but would not really ever say Facebook the company was really perceived in a positive light outside of business community.

bhl 7y ago
Ben Mezrich, author of the Accidental Billionaires which was later adapted into the Social Network, has a differing opinion: like Liars Poker and Wall Street, the movie made Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg more well known and popular than before.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tempsy 7y ago
  highly doubt it but would trust internal Facebook data on any bump in users if that was the hypothesis

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

I feel pretty contrarian about this piece. In the same piece that talks about how dangerous it is and how regulation is needed because facebook has the ability to influence public opinion, they talk about how "totally normal" it is for the media to act as mouthpieces for whomever wants to pay. No mention of how Fox News can swing public opinion, and really needs to be unbiased and in fact needs regulation to that end. Or any number of other media. And then it includes a gif making fun of zuckerberg for being robotic while complaining about him writing a post that was human instead of corporate.

hogFeast 7y ago
Comment talking about bias, only mentions Fox News. Welcome to hell (imo, this is what you get when you don't teach people how to argue and feed them too many Disney films). No, the press shouldn't be regulated. Yes, bias is normal. No, Fox News doesn't "swing public opinion" (they reflect views that already exist, and pander to them). Life is difficult, you have to think for yourself.
- austinheap 7y ago
  Friendly feedback: your point would have been 10x more effective without the opener. I maybe agree but it never matters what you say; it matters how it’s heard.
  - hogFeast 7y ago
    I don't care about effectiveness, 95% of people have no interest in reality in this subject, there is nothing that you can say that will change their thinking.
- notafraudster 7y ago
  You seem to be arguing two different things: first, Fox News does not influence public opinion; second, that it shouldn't matter if they do because adults should think for themselves. The second is fundamentally a subject view of the world, so you are neither right nor wrong. I disagree with you strongly. We should be concerned about things that harm the our civic health even if we ourselves to blame for them. I think there's a clear parallel to our actual health: when 80% of our population is overweight or obese, it's maybe time to think beyond "adults are responsible for what they eat" and towards "the world would be better if we could make progress on this issue". Ditto our past history with smoking. We know that people are subject to persuasion and psychological manipulation and exploitation of their cognitive biases. A model of the world that has everyone as solely responsible for their own destiny is a pretty useless one, in my opinion. But, your first claim -- "Fox News doesn't 'swing public opinion'" is an empirical one. Either it does or it doesn't. You're either right or wrong. DellaVigna and Kaplan's 2007 piece in the Quarterly Journal of Economics investigates this question. They exploit the fact that the phased roll-out of Fox News between 1996 and 2000 impacted 20% of the country. This allows for a natural experiment where some markets are "treated" by Fox News and others are not. Okay, so, first, should we believe this design? If the entry of Fox News into a market was random, then this is an experiment and we have a treatment effect. If the entry of Fox news into a market was conditional on market characteristics that we can assess, we have "selection on observables", and we can recover a treatment effect. We need only a good selection model. It is also the case that if entry into a market was non-random, but conditionally ignorable with respect to the potential outcomes of the market (e.g. random with respect to politics), we can get a treatment effect without knowing the full selection model. So we have some different routes to the answer here. The answer is between #2 and #3 -- Fox News did enter markets in a non-random way, but not based on demographics or past voting history, based mainly on geographic considerations. Given the regulatory and infrastructural component of entering a new market, this is probably not surprising, but it does guard against "Fox entered conservative markets first" as a counterclaim. Now, having clarified the design based considerations, the authors find that Fox News was responsible for a ~0.5 percent vote share increase in Republican vote share in the presidential election of 2000. Whether you consider that large or small depends on your frame of reference. My sense would be that 0.5 percent is small cosmically, but it's maybe possible that you could have an election where that kind of margin is decisive. Remind me again, was the 2000 election close? This is a fairly credible and careful design published in a good journal and widely cited (1486 citations, which is quite high for a nonmethods economics paper). That doesn't make it true, but it does suggest that the field of Economics views this as an important paper and that it has been exposed to scrutiny from a wide variety of sources. If there's a little contempt in my reply here, it's because I think your off-hand claim that media diet, priming, and framing effects are solely demand driven and have no actual impact on viewers seems to fly in the face of like 50 years of communications, economics, and political science research. In other words, it feels like your first reply was "50 years of research doesn't matter, humans aren't influenced by any of this stuff". Maybe that's not what you meant, but when I see someone flippantly respond without evidence, I think "Welcome to hell" -- imo, that's the kind of thing we get when we don't teach people to argue.

hogFeast 7y ago

When you have a guy who works at a company wondering if his company was responsible for an election result and making LOTR references...then you know something has gone wrong. No, Facebook isn't powerful enough to sway an election (I get that some people are really angry about Trump...if you aren't thinking rationally, don't have an opinion rather than start up with the conspiracy theories). No, business/life is not like LOTR. There aren't goodies and baddies (irony, this is part of why Trump was elected).

jarjoura 7y ago

I am not sure I completely buy the thesis of this essay because... 1. Facebook has NEVER had positive PR. The tech-media has always used FB as the Silicon Valley punching bag. Name me one good article in the news about FB? At some point you're just numb to it all. 2. Facebook has had leakers for years, and especially when Boz makes posts! To say that Facebook PR is broken implies it wasn't before. I'd argue that FB has long needed a comms team representative of the company it actually is. FB comms feel designed for the old college only network FB once was. When Google can do similar misdeeds and get only a tiny slap on the wrist, I do agree it's probably a comms problem in the end. Also, to completely write off Sandberg because of one corporate misstep reeks of "Cancel Culture" hysteria, but that's just me.

drongoking 7y ago

This is a place that famously had a motto "move fast and break things." In other words, fail early and fail often. For that culture to succeed you need people willing to admit (and tolerate) mistakes. Sounds like that's pretty well gone.

mola 7y ago

Is it just me, or is this completely bonkers? Let's say that teen Vogue were transparent about the article being sponsored. Meaning it would have had a tiny print somewhere saying that the article is part of a partnership with Facebook. How would that matter? Most people reading it would hardly notice it, even if they do notice it , it will hardly change the way they process the information in the piece. Our mind have a hard time knowing where certain facts it recalls came from. The bad thing is not the non cohesion of the Facebook PR it's the total lack of regard for truth and ethics that these corporate MBA and media types have. If it gets the job done then it becomes good, as in: morally good. Even if you manipulate the truth, bend the mind of the masses towards misconceptions, but do it well, then you are being ethical and good. Only if you fail then something is not good. That's a pretty messed up moral system. Corporate shouldn't be able to buy anything from media outlets other than Ads that look.like ads and completely visually separate from actual journalistic pieces. Anything else is just unethical.

Timyjoe 7y ago

very bad

rogerdickey 7y ago

Understatement of the century

Thorrez 7y ago

> You have someone like Antonia Woodford, rightly called out[2] for the absurdity of saying to combat misinformation you should require “advertisers use their real identities”. She has Yale, McKinsey and a rapid rise at Facebook, on her resume. This is the profile of someone who I imagine isn’t wanting to bunker down in a Trumpian hole of calling everything critical: “fake news”. I don't understand. How is it "absurdity"? And the linked Gizmodo article doesn't seem to call it absurd either. [2] https://gizmodo.com/teen-vogue-yanks-puff-piece-on-facebooks-anti-disinform-1840889839 https://gizmodo.com/teen-vogue-yanks-puff-piece-on-facebooks...

xorcist 7y ago

The Facebook / Cambridge Analytica story is completely baffling to me. Here we have a company whose business idea it is to lock up as much of the web as possible on their platform. Contacts, messageboards, photos, events, calendars, chat, dating, anything goes really. They then earn money from selling data. Then the Cambridge Analytica scandal breaks where a company has used data from Facebook unethically. How was this not expected? Had it been better if this company used their data a little less unethically? Had it been better if Facebook sold PR-as-a-service directly instead of enabling an ecosystem of smaller companies offering this? (Because the latter is what is going to happen over the long run should Facebook continue to be successful. When there is no room to grow anymore the ecosystem is going to be cannibalized.) This is all inherent to business models dependent on data ownership. Upon observing the majority of the population migrating to closed platforms, the discourse among the people who care about open data must instead be framed in terms of how to shape the conditions of said business models. Codifying data ownership is one way to move forward, GDPR being the most known example. It may be blunt but it at least poses the question of who owns which data.

MeteorMarc 7y ago

I believe on this forum PR means pull request.

nabla9 7y ago

From 2017: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Is Hiring a Team Worthy of a 2020 Presidential Campaign - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's latest hire is further fueling speculation that he could be planning a 2020 presidential bid https://people.com/politics/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-team-2020-presidential-campaign/ https://people.com/politics/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-team-20... >Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan have hired Democratic pollster Joel Benenson, a former top adviser and longtime pollster to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, as a consultant, >In January , Zuckerberg, 33, and Chan, 32, hired David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 presidential run, as president of policy and advocacy. They also brought on Amy Dudley, a former communications adviser to Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine. Ken Mehlman, who ran President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, is also on the charity’s board. >And Zuckerberg’s personal photographer, Charles Ommanney, was the photographer for Bush and Obama’s presidential campaigns, Business Insider reported. Joel Benenson and David Plouffe are working elsewhere now. Amy Dudley is still the spokesperson for Zuckerberg iniative. Zuckerberg has had incredible PR army working just for him, not for Facebook. I think there has been switch in his personal ambitions and change in PR people.

sharcerer 7y ago

Read this thread. I have been noticing a lot of reporting on tech by NYT etc, is wrong, not complete. In this case, a lot of arguments are there. But, an example from the past, they spread misinfo about Google's revenue figure from news industry(https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/that-4-7-billion-number-for-how-much-money-google-makes-off-the-news-industry-its-imaginary/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/that-4-7-billion-number-fo...) https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1214685876095045632?s=19 https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1214685876095045632?s=1...

necrophos 7y ago

The org chart shown in the article is old by 2 years and seems like an oddly selected on for that time. A current org chart would shown a different split between men and women.