Zuckerberg's trust problem | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg's trust problem

wired.com

68 pointsgfredtech37 comments

Why has this article been removed from the top 250 news results? It was #1 for a few minutes, then #5, and now it's gone. We've successfully discussed much more risqué topics here on HN...

Why did the comment by `TAForObvReasons calling out this apparent censorship get deleted?

I would like to know the same, it's pretty ironic for an article titled "Mark Zuckerberg's Trust Problem"

Ok, thanks, i was thinking i was paranoid but it's clear that i'm not the only one who has seen this.

I actually trust institutions more than I trust people.

Institutions are built on laws, they outlive humans, and they are impervious to the individualist nature of humans. Although it's a different story for companies and corporation (which facebook is).

Facebook is a bad idea because it is only about individuals and their private circles of friends. You would expect from a social network to give you opportunities to enlarge and open your friendship to new individuals, but facebook does the exact opposite, it builds exclusivity between individuals.

The whole real name idea makes no sense, since it only enables stalking. Zuckerberg have this naive optimism about people trusting people, and it would somehow justify the intrusiveness of facebook because he thinks that most people have good intentions. Except you need a very few individuals to ruin the experience.

The internet is not a trustworthy place, and facebook has made it even worse. It is really frustrating because facebook really has the potential to be so much better with its userbase, but it seems it will keep being this useless photo and news sharing website. I wish technologies like decentralized networks and the blockchain could change that.

The whole distrust for institutions is another great meme of the libertarian agenda.

Zuckerberg is my go-to example of a tool. Utterly consumed by ambition. Eager to serve power. No vision, no internal compass, just endless hunger. The guy sucks up to Xi Jinping! Of course he has a trust problem. It's rare to encounter someone so eager to sell their soul doing harm when it would have been easier to do something decent.

> In the days that followed Trump’s election, Zuckerberg used the stage at the Techonomy conference to deny Facebook could have had a hand in the election’s outcome. Only now, we learn that 10 days after Zuckerberg’s Techonomy appearance, Obama warned Zuckerberg privately that he believed misinformation and fake news had influenced the election

Is this not all just a little insane? Of course misinformation and fake news influenced the election. Most political ads are a combination of both.

The supposed Russian agents spent $100,000 on 3,000 ads. I don't know if you guys market on Facebook, but that's not a lot of reach (by comparison, $11,000,000 was spent by the campaigns). Furthermore, reports state the ads they bought were not fake, nor against the terms. Rather they were 'divisive' - covering stuff like gun control, BLM, immigration. Is it 'divisive' to hold an opinion on these things?

Now, here's the kicker: rewind to 2011 and the US government was paying political NGOs in Russia to meddle in the Russian elections. They didn't call it meddling, of course. Instead they were 'promoting democracy'. So how much was spent? $100,000 worth of ads on VK.com?

Nope, instead about $9,000,000 was funneled to NGOs.

This from Reuters:

> Golos, which means ‘voice’ in Russian, has been instrumental in reporting allegations of irregularities....Its money trail leads from Washington and Brussels to its headquarters in a residential neighborhood in central Moscow....In 2010 Golos received a two-year $2.8 million grant from USAID, which extends funding to non-governmental organizations in foreign countries working in areas from the health sector to political competition.

and

> Golos is one of 57 organizations that have been receiving funding from USAID. More than half of the USAID's 2012 budget of $50 million (38.6 million euros) went to groups promoting human rights and democracy.

and

> The United States has criticized Russia’s elections and its record on upholding the rule of law, but has dismissed accusations that its funding of human rights and pro-democracy organizations is intended to influence domestic politics.

The moral panic and the sheer hypocrisy is astounding. Putin, in his wildest dreams, couldn't have imagined inflicting the sort of hysteria currently being whipped up by the media and some politicians.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-financing/analysis-...

So apologies if too many rants about Zuckerberg are annoying, but the reason why he disturbs me so much is he's so transparently power hungry and manipulative.

You can find it in everything he does. He's got this weird personal aura where he feels like everyone in the world cares about him and his kids, while at the same time he uses himself and his kids to spread his view of the world and his view of how it works. It just makes me feel slimy.

Example, his attitudes about Xi:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabetheconomy/2014/12/09/zuc...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently stirred up controversy by advising his employees to read Chinese President Xi Jinping’s book The Governance of China, because he wants them to “understand socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The book appeared prominently placed on his desk during a recent visit from China’s Internet czar Lu Wei, and he apparently has bought a number of copies to share with others.

This of course went so far as to ask Xi to name his child. What the fuck is that? Xi hilariously turned him down, but let us remember that this is the same Xi whose father was the vice premier and propaganda chief while Mao was killing murdering millions of his countrymen, the same Xi who is now the most powerful Chinese leader in a generation and who continues to consolidate power and control.

Yet here's Mark, putting out posts about the importance of democracy, etc. It's like he's speaking out of two sides of his mouth and what he really wants is people to trust his institution, Facebook, and him as benevolent or competent. I'd have less of a problem with it if what Facebook did wasn't so damn mediocre, but he continually excuses that mediocrity through acting all feely carey about social issues.

In earlier eras, when the leader of a trusted institution failed to live up to the mores of the organization, he (and it was usually a “he”) could leave without threatening the existence of the institution.

Maybe, but the reality is that up until about 100 years ago, non-democracy, authoritarianism, and autocracy were the norm and incompetent leaders and their progeny could go on fucking up a nation and other nations for centuries. Our governments have opened up, but Facebook and other companies are still kingdoms. We've got this social system thing going on where we funnel the smartest and most well off kids through lottery machines and when one of those kids wins the lottery, we assume they are specially gifted and fit to rule the world. Maybe they aren't. Maybe they should accept that having a net worth of 50 billion dollars is enough and they should spend that money to shut the fuck up about things they don't know anything about.

It's fun to bullshit on HN about worldviews, but Mark's HN quality bullshit has been affecting the world for the last 10 years and his only excuse is trust me, dumb fucks. Of course Mark won't call you a dumb fuck anymore because Mark has studied human behavior enough to understand that's not palatable, but how different are his actions?

He wants more, more, more, like a bunch of this titans of industry. It's never enough, presumably because they've adopted the idea that the best possible thing in life is to have "influence" and to them that influence is more important than whether that influence is any good.

Of course he would rationalize it as being a boon to democracy if Facebook ever gets into China.

Which is a complete joke as we now see.

I don't say I've never had a Facebook account because I want to be a hipster or show any sort of virtue. I say it because I want to share that life functions just fine without it.

I think 'scares' is probably too strong a word, but it's close to fear. So, I'll say I find it disconcerting that people are talking about, and suggesting he do so, an eventual run for presidency. Fark is a good place to see people who support this idea.

I am somewhere between flabbergasted, dismayed, dumbfounded, and scared. The worst part being that I'm pretty sure he'd get quite a few votes.

You're taking oddly personal offense at someone doing rather straightforward things to promote the growth of his business into the largest economy on Earth, which also happens to be his wife's ethnic homeland.

It's fine to disagree with his attempts to accumulate power and be a demagogue like most politicians and CEOs, but there's no need to be creepy about it.

Oh, right, I'm being creepy because Zuckerberg broadcasts his every action to 2 billion people and I happen to follow the news.

You should take personal offense, too. This guy affects your everyday life, today, right now. You can be happy with that if you want, but I also have the right to criticize it.

Could you please stop posting hot-under-the-collar comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot, and they're really not what the site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang, I respect you and the site, and I recognize that some of my comments are inflammatory. I delete a lot because I realize that and feel bad.

My problem is that there's a lot of content that is very "hot-under-the-collar" thinly veiled hatred and prejudice around here, but it gets upvoted and left alone. I'll try to tone it down, and I'm happy to take a break from commenting for awhile, I just wish HN had a fair standard for this stuff.

I don't understand how my response to someone calling me a creep (due to my opinions about a public and political figure) is what gets a response from you. But again, I'm not trying to be disrespectful.

Thanks for your work because it's probably a pain.

> My problem is that there's a lot of content that is very "hot-under-the-collar" thinly veiled hatred and prejudice around here, but it gets upvoted and left alone.

Strongly agree with this.

That might be something of an illusion. People tend to strongly agree on this until they realize they think it about incompatible comment sets.

> but it gets upvoted and left alone

We see only some of the comments, since there are far too many for us to read. Because of this quantity, it's impossible to moderate the whole corpus. So you're always going to see examples of people getting away with worse in the neighborhood, just like you see cars speeding on the same road where the cops pull you over for a ticket. It doesn't mean it's ok or that we endorse it, just that we have human-scale limitations.

It always feels like the opposite side gets away with it more; everyone always feels that way. Drivers who get pulled over feel it too. It's a cognitive bias that I've posted about a lot: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

The way to deal with comments breaking the HN guidelines is to make sure we know about them. You can do that by flagging them or by emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. It's amazing how often, when I see complaints about a comment on HN, the complainer never flagged the comment. It seems to be hard for people not to leap from "I saw X on HN" to "HN says X" to "the mods support X". (By that argument, Larry must agree with all YouTube comments.) The likeliest explanation is that we just didn't see it.

People don't seem to realize how big a difference comment-flagging (or emailing us) makes. A single user can have a lot of impact just by doing that.

That's makes sense, thank you for explaining that. I'll be a better citizen going forward.

The fact that Mark is not trustworthy is a real issue, and I've been screaming it from the rooftops since 2004 because I was actually there. In fact, it was the subject of my first post on Hacker News, for which I was ridiculed.