Zuckerberg’s Preposterous Defense of Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg’s Preposterous Defense of Facebook

nytimes.com

64 pointselsewhen32 comments

Zuck says that people are mad because people are sharing ideas that the other side doesn’t like but also defends FB’s actions in the German election: “We have been working to ensure the integrity of the German elections this weekend, from taking actions against thousands of fake accounts, to partnering with public authorities like the Federal Office for Information Security, to sharing security practices with the candidates and parties.”[1]

I’m very disappointed in Zuck’s intellectual honesty.

[1]https://gizmodo.com/facebook-deleted-tens-of-thousands-of-fa...

I'm not sure I understand what's the contradiction between those two things -- he says that people don't like certain kinds of sharing and a large corporation with a lot of cyber security experience assists a government with security while also monitoring its own platform for abuse during the election.

People are retroactively upset that they didn't do this during our election.

All the while pretending it was only one side engaged in such tactics.

The Russians took out ads to depress African-American voter turnout, in Trump's favor.

The Clinton campaign did not do anything remotely similar.

Well, at least future candidates know that they no longer need to spend billions on their campaign and can just spend a few hundred thousand on targeted Facebook ads instead.

> The Clinton campaign did not do anything remotely similar.

We are in agreement then that Clinton campaign was on a whole 'nother level.

Apologies, but going off-topic to respond. It's highly likely that when all the Russia stuff plays out, Trump's campaign will be seen to have been so full of moles as to make the Cambridge Five look like amateurs.

In terms of sheer audacity, the Russian campaign is unprecedented in ambition and success. The CIA will be unpicking this cluster-fuck for a decade at least.

After Trump is reelected he will close down the CIA. (To be clear: without my vote! He is a cretin and a horrible man and I would never vote for him. Still, I can be happy about happy events...)

That action will deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, but he won't get it.

You have a lot of imagination.

I'm not sure if this constitutes politics or what on HN, but as an outside, not taking part in the election and living in another country, here is my observation on this point.

Hillary f*ed up the Bernie Sanders campaign using pretty much the same tactics, only it was not the "Russians", they just did it themselves[0].

If anyone are to be accused for a dirty campaign it is her.

[0] https://www.salon.com/2016/06/20/congressional_black_caucus_...

On the contrary, your article doesn't say what you claim, and Clinton led the charge to enfranchise black voters. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/politics/democrats-...

Are you absolutely sure about that?

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/56638#efmAAGAA2...

Oh boy, as a Black guy I'd like to be able to flag this comment alone. This accusation is racist and criminal.

Let's stipulate the ads were deployed. Any proof that they worked?

Zuck’s intellectual honesty

Is this a thing? [0] Let's face it, Zuck is too busy making money to even pretend. Even this current hamhanded "sorry we suck" posture is more of an attempt to convince the right people that he's going along with their favored narrative, than a sincere statement about anything that might or might not have happened.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/01...

Sorry, America (and NY Times), don't make this all about you. Facebook (and WhatsApp and Twitter and Google) have already significantly influenced the electorate of other nations with fake news and other such tactics. Look at the elections of more polarizing and more dangerous leaders before Trump in Turkey, Phillipines, India, et al. Good that you woke up now, but neutrality of the medium needs to be intact. In the long term, truth will win. More platforms, not more regulation is the answer.

How is more platforms going to create neutrality? Wouldn't governments put their bots on the new networks?

More platforms cannot ensure neutrality by itself; but can open options to relay voices that need to be put out.

  Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
  Zuck: Just ask
  Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
  [friend]: What? How'd you manage that one?
  Zuck: People just submitted it.
  Zuck: I don't know why.
  Zuck: They "trust me"
  Zuck: Dumb fucks

Per Upton Sinclair:

    It is difficult to get a man to understand something, 
    when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

> “Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don’t like,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “That’s what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”

> This doesn’t hold water at all.

It does, almost by definition.

> Are you bothered by fake news, systematic misinformation campaigns and Facebook “dark posts” — micro-targeted ads not visible to the public — aimed at African-Americans to discourage them from voting? You must be one of those people “upset about ideas” you disagree with.

Users can control which ads they see.

> Are you troubled when agents of a foreign power pose online as American Muslims and post incendiary content that right-wing commentators can cite as evidence that all American Muslims are sympathizers of terrorist groups like the Islamic State? Sounds like you can’t handle a healthy debate.

I can debate that.

> Does it bother you that Russian actors bought advertisements aimed at swing states to sow political discord during the 2016 presidential campaign, and that it took eight months after the election to uncover any of this? Well, the marketplace of ideas isn’t for everyone.

I do remember pro-Clinton anti-Trump opinions from leaders in dozens of countries. The influence of the Russian boogeyman is vastly overstated.

> And the unfortunate truth is that by design, business model and algorithm, Facebook has made it easy for it to be weaponized to spread misinformation and fraudulent content.

The best defense against false speech is more speech. An elite centralized few deciding what can and can't be said to we the sheeple is not the future I want.

What remains unclear to me is how Facebook makes misinformation and fraudulent content so powerful, but not factual content.

I have yet to hear one person admit they did any of the following:

1) Switch their vote from HRC to DJT; 2) Decide to stay home instead of vote for HRC; 3) Decide to vote for DJT instead of staying home.

If we're going to consider whether FB was complicit in a dirty win by DJT, we should at least also consider some of the polls were fabricated in a attempt to make HRC's victory look inevitable and depress R turnout.

I admit to number 2, as a lot of us in MI did. I just stayed home because I was so disappointed in HRC.

Fun fact, in my state the number of ballots with a blank presidential section exceeded the margin of HRC's loss in the state. This was a Bernie state.

We can all regret that DNC wiped their asses with the majority of votes in the primaries. Bernie would have beaten Trump.

Because misinformation can be as catchy and as (un) appealing as you want, whereas the truth is almost mostly a lot more boring.

> If we're going to consider whether FB was complicit in a dirty win by DJT,

My observation of the discussion is that no one (well, very few) is trying to claim that FB was complicit, but their inaction and what defines them as a platform implicitly involved themselves in all of this.

...the truth is almost mostly a lot more boring.

By this metric, which should we believe? That a) one unpopular candidate barely beat some other unpopular candidate, or that b) some heretofore unimagined global conspiracy of crypto-Stalinists overturned what would have been an electoral landslide just by trolling from some sockpuppet accounts?

As an outsider watching this all play out from Australia, it was always my understanding that it was a bit of both.

HRC is extremely unlikeable, an easy target to hate, but I don’t think they expected their opposition to play ‘dirty’ on social the way they did.

...bit of both

The only reason anyone believes anything untoward happened (other than Bernie getting shafted in the primary by the DNC, because we have actual proof of that) is that they previously believed Clinton was poised for a landslide victory. There is no overlap between that fantasy and the truth that few voters liked either candidate, but the process is set up to pick a winner anyway.

"we should at least also consider some of the polls were fabricated in a attempt to make HRC's victory look inevitable and depress R turnout"

That rings true to me. I would be curious if anyone would disagree with that?

I’m sure that somewhere, a poll was fabricated to make this seem true. Much like the maps showing Facebook shares supporting Trump and thereby “proving” that Trump was really winning, and the polls were rigged. People remember the last example much more than any real examples of actual poll rigging, though.

> Users can control which ads they see.

What? How is this, in reality, even remotely true?

As someone who operated an online community website twice longer than Zuckeberg, I can confirm he is right.

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