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The fact that they have this kind of credulous pull with the man who has his fingers on the controls of so much of our information plumbing is even more upsetti

The fact that they have this kind of credulous pull with the man who has his fingers on the controls of so much of our information plumbing is even more upsetting than what the right has been charging which is that Zuck is just a big ol lib, especially given some of the bigger screw ups of America's intelligence apparatus. Watching the Earth move beneath the feet of the gatekeepers in the 00s came with a lot of warranted but clearly unsubstantiated catharsis.

throwaway4good 4y ago
Didn’t Zuckerberg implicitly support trump at one point? (What he is doing here certainly supports trump.) In the hope trump would ban TikTok. I thought that was why the Biden admin put Facebook in the doghouse.
- throwaway4good 4y ago
  I was referring to stories like this (there are others as well): https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo... Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok The firm, Targeted Victory, pushed local operatives across the country to boost messages calling TikTok a threat to American children. “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger,’ ” one campaign director said.
  - DubiousPusher 4y ago
    I don't think this signals any implicit Republican alignment. While firms like these often end up working more on one side of the aisle than the other they're usually not all that obsessed with their own ideology. They end up working on the side they do, usually because they start out of a campaign operation and then their connections mostly stem from that work. Facebook pprobably used them because the firm has operations in the soecific media markets Facebook wanted to target. They probably leaned towards a political ad company because they wanted something that combined ads and opposition research (dirt digging) which political advertisers are especially known for.
- benreesman 4y ago
  I think that it's worth keeping in mind that no matter what you think of their morals (that's a whole other debate for a whole other comment thread), people who have helmed sometime trillion-dollar companies for decades aren't in general stupid, and it would be fantastically stupid to make serious enemies of any candidate in any high-impact political race: if you load the boat on that and guess wrong you're going to have a bad time. The last thing any of these people want is to be clearly partisan: it jeopardizes favorable regulation, it jeopardizes common-carrier type treatment, and it wins you roughly nothing. You want to sell software/ads/equipment/etc. to both sides obviously, but the Nash point is to get as much of that as possible without taking sides.
  - throwaway4good 4y ago
    Yes. Agreed and I also think fb overplayed their hand and got too friendly with republicans. However when Zuckerberg goes on Joe Rogan assume things are carefully planned and rehearsed; and a statement/story like this is intended and the politics of it is well understood. So I guess they are doubling down.
    - benreesman 4y ago
      So let me start by saying that I think your reply is the kind of thing we need more of around here: I think you've created scope for a productive conversation about the specifics of what we want to encourage or discourage as a society. There are plenty of examples of these mega-FAANGS doing stuff that just sucks, and to the extent that a community like HN can be calm, concrete, and solution-oriented about that we have a lot of clout in aggregate. These companies absolutely cannot function without elite heavyweight hackers, and they absolutely cannot afford to pay "fuck the planet" wages to a group of people heavily skewed towards "made some serious money already". I think my point is that partisan political bias should be relatively low on HN's collective list of things that urgently need changing in hyper-tech: it's one of those examples of the arbitrarily selfish incentives aligning with roughly the "right" thing. FB/Mark had to cut Thiel loose because he was dragging them into extreme partisan politics. I strongly suspect that the dominant term there was the practical necessity, but I'm on board with the outcome.

throwaway4good 4y ago

Didn’t Zuckerberg implicitly support trump at one point? (What he is doing here certainly supports trump.) In the hope trump would ban TikTok. I thought that was why the Biden admin put Facebook in the doghouse.

throwaway4good 4y ago
I was referring to stories like this (there are others as well): https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo... Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok The firm, Targeted Victory, pushed local operatives across the country to boost messages calling TikTok a threat to American children. “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger,’ ” one campaign director said.
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  I don't think this signals any implicit Republican alignment. While firms like these often end up working more on one side of the aisle than the other they're usually not all that obsessed with their own ideology. They end up working on the side they do, usually because they start out of a campaign operation and then their connections mostly stem from that work. Facebook pprobably used them because the firm has operations in the soecific media markets Facebook wanted to target. They probably leaned towards a political ad company because they wanted something that combined ads and opposition research (dirt digging) which political advertisers are especially known for.
benreesman 4y ago
I think that it's worth keeping in mind that no matter what you think of their morals (that's a whole other debate for a whole other comment thread), people who have helmed sometime trillion-dollar companies for decades aren't in general stupid, and it would be fantastically stupid to make serious enemies of any candidate in any high-impact political race: if you load the boat on that and guess wrong you're going to have a bad time. The last thing any of these people want is to be clearly partisan: it jeopardizes favorable regulation, it jeopardizes common-carrier type treatment, and it wins you roughly nothing. You want to sell software/ads/equipment/etc. to both sides obviously, but the Nash point is to get as much of that as possible without taking sides.
- throwaway4good 4y ago
  Yes. Agreed and I also think fb overplayed their hand and got too friendly with republicans. However when Zuckerberg goes on Joe Rogan assume things are carefully planned and rehearsed; and a statement/story like this is intended and the politics of it is well understood. So I guess they are doubling down.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    So let me start by saying that I think your reply is the kind of thing we need more of around here: I think you've created scope for a productive conversation about the specifics of what we want to encourage or discourage as a society. There are plenty of examples of these mega-FAANGS doing stuff that just sucks, and to the extent that a community like HN can be calm, concrete, and solution-oriented about that we have a lot of clout in aggregate. These companies absolutely cannot function without elite heavyweight hackers, and they absolutely cannot afford to pay "fuck the planet" wages to a group of people heavily skewed towards "made some serious money already". I think my point is that partisan political bias should be relatively low on HN's collective list of things that urgently need changing in hyper-tech: it's one of those examples of the arbitrarily selfish incentives aligning with roughly the "right" thing. FB/Mark had to cut Thiel loose because he was dragging them into extreme partisan politics. I strongly suspect that the dominant term there was the practical necessity, but I'm on board with the outcome.