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Meta COO Sandberg reportedly tried to block story about Activision CEO Kotick
- jackvalentine 5y ago_Lean in_ apparently means use your power to shield your wealthy boyfriend from scrutiny.
- oh_sigh 5y agoThe best part is the scrutiny was about a restraining order his previous partner got on him. Imagine being a pretty powerful person in FB, reporting directly to Sheryl, and she tasks you with this shit. What a loser.
- manquer 5y agoAlmost all high powered people give some amount of shit jobs to their EAs and chief of staffs, it is par of the course in such jobs. People in these roles typically build more trust and get more responsibility when they handle sensitive /private tasks for their bosses well.
- giancarlostoro 5y agoAnd people are afraid of Elon Musk turning Twitter into a free speech platform. The big tech censorship is real and whatever they want told is the narrative allowed. Good luck competing on audience anywhere else.
- JaimeThompson 5y agoIf Elon Musk had a documented history of supporting free speech it might be different but he has no such history.
- gitfan86 5y agoWhen has he run a social media platform and deplatformed people? I'm not saying he is going to do a great job at Twitter, but why don't we give him a chance. If the woke mob and the Trump supporters are equally mad after a year he will have done a good job.
- JaimeThompson 5y agoThat he nuked someones car order because of things they said to me shows he doesn't exactly support freedom of expression.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- saghm 5y ago>> If Elon Musk had a documented history of supporting free speech it might be different but he has no such history. > When has he run a social media platform and deplatformed people? I think I need a telescope to see the goalposts to where you moved them
- gitfan86 5y agoSo one of the current major owners is Saudi Arabia. How about we use that for goal posts? SA has beheaded people for speaking out against the government. Please explain how Elon has a worse documented history than these current owners.
- JaimeThompson 5y agoWhile Saudia Arabia has since sold their share of Tesla at one time they owned quite a bit of Tesla stock. [1] So when Musk says [2] I have questions. "@Alwaleed_Talal @Twitter @Kingdom_KHC Interesting. Just two questions, if I may. How much of Twitter does the Kingdom own, directly & indirectly? What are the Kingdom’s views on journalistic freedom of speech?"" [1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/17/news/companies/saudi-arabia-tesla-competitor/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/17/news/companies/saudi-arabia... [2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1514683079968931841 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1514683079968931841
- jackvalentine 5y agoWhy did you derail this by mentioning Musk?
- majormajor 5y agoIt's not exactly free speech, but it's deeply and depressingly amusing to see him champion this idea that "the algorithm needs to be more open and transparent" when he is very resistant to making Tesla's driving algorithms more open and transparent and very defensive against criticism of them. Lots of lives at stake there too! His reaction to Tesla leaks/whistleblowing is more directly speech related. And Tesla's relationship with the press. You are making an error in assuming that "big tech" (which now... doesn't include Musk??) people use their powers any differently than other powerful people. And that moving power between different powerful douchebags is any sort of solution, compared to breaking up powerful actors into less-powerful separate entities.
- kmeisthax 5y agoElon Musk is big tech. That's why we don't trust him. When he releases Tesla schematics, sells spare parts, and allows unaffiliated repair shops to reserialize them, then maybe we can talk about him being different or better than the current set of big tech oligarchs.
- bombcar 5y agoIf we’re going to be ruled by big tech then maybe we should have warring factions not cooperating ones.
- kmeisthax 5y agoWe already have that. Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all vie for monopolistic control over different tech fiefdoms and compete with each other in different ways. What we need are new ground rules that ban monopolistic control, not Elon Musk throwing money around to overthrow the local digital warlord and replace them with himself.
- wnevets 5y agoHow does that kool aid taste? Elon has proven time and time again he doesn't care about free speech if its speech he doesn't like. [1][2][3][4] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/03/elon-musk-blogger-tesla-motors-model-x https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/03/elon-musk... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk-british-diver-thai-cave-rescue-pedo-twitter https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-05/tesla-s-fall-from-grace-in-china-shows-perils-of-betting-on-beijing?sref=LPaI0SF6 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-05/tesla-s-f... [4] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/28/22696463/tesla-fsd-beta-nda-video-clips-controversy-full-self-driving https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/28/22696463/tesla-fsd-beta-n...
- sixQuarks 5y agoHow are any of those links against free speech? All I see is anti-Elon bias
- darth_avocado 5y agoI think this story is great. She has cultivated and milked an image of a woman who fought against the discrimination and lived through her husband's trauma and is an inspiration to other women. But I've always had the opinion that someone who is at that level in Facebook and stays there without anyone trying to get rid of her, has definitely had plenty of skeletons in her closet. It's high time people see her for what she is, a hypocrite contributing to a system that she's always complained about and made money from.
- throw7 5y agoI love Sheryl. She has something very few possess: IQ and EQ.
- tiahura 5y agoI wonder what her personality is like in private? Is it the same smirking condescension she displays in public?
- nwiswell 5y agoWhich one of the two led her to select Kotick as a romantic partner?
- treyfitty 5y agoIs this some bot that defends the powerful subordinates of powerful corporations? If so, I’d be interested to know what tech automates this process. It’s truly a pain point for C-suite employees to manage PR- surely a unicorn idea.
- DethNinja 5y agoThere are automated crawlers that track major social media sites for certain topics. Once such topics are found, PR companies engage and try to sway public opinion. I find such attempts truly pathetic though. One has to be totally brain dead to get swayed by such tactics but these PR companies still manage to sell their services to rich people regardless. Also I recommend that you don’t built such a startup, unless you are well connected. Such PR companies operate because they got good networking, not good tech.
- notatoad 5y ago
- GauntletWizard 5y agoThis article gives so little detail it's hard to see what's been said. It's reporting on a report that Sandberg involved meta employees with a coordinated PR campaign with Activision, but doesn't actually say what they said to the mail or even hint at it. Sandberg giving a personal reference to her boyfriend of "He's never hit me" would probably have been partially Facebook's problem, given her position as COO. On the other hand, she could have used that position to make threats at the mail, the article hints but refuses to state. You can probably infer all you need to about Sheryl's personal ethics from "Works at Meta", so any involvement with Kotick is mere icing.
- lupire 5y agoSandberg doesn't "work at Meta", she runs Meta.
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y agoOf course she did. It's not surprising at all.
- bogwog 5y agoA facebook executive with no morals?! Impossible!
- IAmWorried 5y agoPowerful people will be powerful people. Who the hell cares?
- capableweb 5y agoWe, the non-powerful people, hope that eventually they will get what (should) be coming for them. Darkness dies in the sun, and things like these have to be exposed.
- tiahura 5y agothings like these That the manager of a really big BBS tried to help her video game company president boyfriend with his controversy about being mean? One can only imagine the horrors if we don’t learn every sordid detail.
- dijonman2 5y agoWe are all better off having less angst.
- IAmWorried 5y agoYeah that's where I'm at as well. In fact this makes me like Sandberg more for being a regular person who is attempting to shield their loved ones from harm.
- hello_popppet 5y ago
- capableweb 5y agoLess ill-directed angst, I agree. But the working class as a whole should be feeling more angst than what they (we) currently are feeling, as they are being exploited every day.
- dijonman2 5y agoAbsolutely not, it’s negative and destructive. We need to use language that steers us towards what we want, not calling out what we don’t want.
- madrox 5y agoProbably nothing will come of this, as there's a tenuous line to be drawn between squashing the story and Facebook's interests via Sandberg getting pulled in since they were dating at the time. Her perception does affect stock price, after all. That said, the really damaging thing I learned from this article was that she dated Bobby Kotick. I didn't want to know that.
- eric4smith 5y agoPeople try to squash stories all the time. Especially if there is something to lose. It’s human nature. Move on.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ec109685 5y agoBarbra Streisand effect in full display here. She was trying to get a story of a somewhat retracted restraining order squashed.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoKinda. By squashing it at the time they've both made their salary for an extra ~4 years, earning them well over a hundred million dollars.
- Gatsky 5y agoThis story is being spun the wrong way. The real issue isn’t that she tried to quash the story (I mean, who wants their dirty laundry aired in public?), it’s that the Daily Mail lacked the fortitude and integrity to ignore her.
- thaway2839 5y agoThe Daily Mail lacking integrity is not news.
- Sakos 5y agoYes, let's ignore the wealthy people abusing the power and resources their positions give them. It's all the newspaper's fault. People like you make me angry.
- Gatsky 5y agoI actually don't care a nit about what Sandberg and her boyfriend are up to, it is completely immaterial. This story looks like pure muckracking for clicks, pandering to the perverse desire of the public to see powerful women fail. Nor do I have any need to express the appropriate level of outrage every time someone in power transgresses imaginary lines. Media integrity on the other hand is genuinely important. Not trying to make anyone angry, just my persepctive.
- Archio 5y agoI don’t care a nit about Sanbergs personal life either, but I certainly DO care that she can apparently silence news stories from phone calls. I feel like the content of the story itself is pretty irrelevant here. Are you saying wealthy people abusing their influence and power to contain news stories is fine, as long as you personally view the stories as “immaterial” or “muckraking for clicks”? How would you feel about a public figure you dislike silencing negative stories from a news organization? What if supporters of that public figure think the silencing is fine, because you don’t need to read that muckraking trash?
- 5y ago
- walrus01 5y agoThe Daily Mail and The Star, etc, are not actual journalism. That they caved in to demands from somebody like Sandberg and Meta is not surprising in the slightest. They're far right wing agitation/propaganda tools that only publish things when they serve their purposes.
- bogwog 5y agoDidnt this guy also implicated some governor in something similar? How does this dude have so much influence?
- ethbr0 5y ago> How does this dude have so much influence? A lot of people play CoD. A lot of people yell very emotional things while playing CoD. Who's listening to that microphone? Now, I'm not saying Activision Blizzard is blackmailing politicians and high profile individuals; I'm just asking the question.
- coolspot 5y agoYou know what they found on Hunter Biden’s laptop? CoD. You know what game Putin played before he decided to start the WW3? CoD. You know what fish is sold in Costco? CoD.
- hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
- robobob 5y agoGo back to reddit
- bobkazamakis 5y ago
- gordon_freeman 5y agoI don’t get it - Article says Meta is reviewing her conduct [0] but then the same article mentions the spokesperson statement essentially saying she didn’t do it. [1] So is Meta done reviewing? [0] Facebook is now reviewing whether Sandberg violated company rules, unnamed sources told the Journal. [1] “Sheryl Sandberg never threatened the MailOnline’s business relationship with Facebook in order to influence an editorial decision,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “This story attempts to make connections that don’t exist.”
- boomboomsubban 5y agoThe PR statement says she didn't do it, but they're holding an internal review that leaked. If the review finds she did something improper, the PR statement won't change but she'll face some kind of punishment for "violating internal rules."
- glaucon 5y agoConfusion in the Meta comms department. Both narratives were approved but by accident they were issued simultaneously ... it was intended that [1] go out 24 hours after [0].
- secondary 5y agoOr it was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630448
- stakkur 5y agoIs it not widely known anymore what a nasty operator Sandberg is? Once upon a time she was rather infamous.
- approxim8ion 5y agoGaslight, gatekeep, girlboss!