Early Facebook Employees Regret the Monster They Created
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
It is such a dishonest narrative.
I thought it would be a story about the wider cultural effects of social media and Facebook, but it was more partisan conspiracy theories.
I'm disapointed in Vanity Fair for running this type of piece.
FWIW, I do agree that the wider cultural impact of Facebook is more important than any specific instance of foreign meddling, but that’s not the subject of the article. The article is about the people at Facebook, and if the Russian interference is what they are focusing on, even if they’re wrong, then that is what the article will mention.
There are plenty of stories about the social impact of Facebook if that’s the subject matter you want.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/facebook-russi...
$100,000 in Facebook ads versus billions in advertising spending from the DNC and RNC? http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/10/hillary-clin...
It is a manufactured conspiracy theory.
Given the resources available to these state actors, isn’t it possible that the easily tracked $100k spend is the tip of an iceberg?
No. That would be a conspiracy theory.
And beyond the miniscule amount in ad spending, you also have to accept that a small number of political ads on Facebook swung the election in the States that Clinton lost.
If there's one constant in the investigations, it is the steady drip of new facts. In fact, it is self-assured reactions like the above that have destroyed a lot of people's credibility on the topic.
That's just speculation. We can only base rational discussion on the information available to us now.
At that rate, even if the Russians ads we're discussing had all been targeted at the Presidential election in those 3 states (far from true), that only equals about 5,000 votes.
Further assuming that 2/3's of votes aren't changeable and the $2.5 billion was spent to influence the remaining third, we're talking about 1500 votes influenced.
And I brought up credibility because one important facet that seems to be serially forgotten is that the major targets of the investigations have already destroyed their credibility, as have many commentators. I would encourage some googling to look at the past claims people make - more often than not you're hearing assertions of tribal fidelity rather than arguments based on factual exploration, and one bit of that information available to us now is a fair amount of background on motivations.
> We can only base rational discussion on the information available to us now.
This is false. We are planning animals. We do what-if projections constantly. In fact, we can't not do it - you did it yourself to make an implicit argument above attempting to make any forward-looking seem silly.
There is a problem right there, if there was state funded/directed interference in US elections then Facebook have every incentive to downplay and hide this.
Off the top of my head I can think of at least two instances where they blatantly miscounted the amount they charged advertisers for paid traffic they never sent, and that's without even getting into zuck's wild claims that fb had zero effect on the 2016 election, and then months later admitting that was completely wrong.
There is very little reason to trust 'facebook releasing numbers' on this issue. They have EVERY reason to obfuscate, stall, and misreport on it - they are complicit in an extremely serious federal crime.
One was rather irrelevant, while the other will result in more distant relations with our Cold War rival, serious witch-hunting, and most importantly: further polarization of the U.S. political climate.
"You lie!" was such a telling moment.
The GOP basically decided that Kenyan-born interloper was illegitimate and thus everything he did was too.
Remember, birtherism was relegated to the fringe (basically just Orly Taitz) until Trump revived it in 2011 and nearly started beating Romney in the polls. Sure enough, the same thing happened when he called Mexicans and illegal immigrants rapists and murderers.
People are fooling themselves if they think a big part of Trumps ascendancy isn’t pure racial animus.
If they wanted to keep decent relations they shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine and shot down an airliner.
It has ranged from:
* Bernie Sanders (second pick for Democrat candidate)
* James Comey (former FBI Director)
* Huma Abedin (deputy chief of staff for Clinton Campaign)
* Russian hackers
* Vladimir Putin (President of Russia)
* Wikileaks (ie: more Russian hackers)
* the Benghazi Committee
* the "Basket of Deplorables" (ie: white America)
* white women (ie: 53% of white women voted for Trump)
* white men (ie: universally reviled by progressive supremacists everywhere)
It seems the Democratic Party will never recover as it is more fragmented than ever, with ailing Nancy Pelosi and out-of-touch NYC urbanite Chuck Schumer being the only notable Democrats as of late. All they can do is respond with righteous indignation rather than form a coherent party platform, especially given extremists of all flavors left-of-center being unable to form anything beyond a rickety coalition under shredded banner of "Democrat."
Self-reflection and soul-searching is totally beyond the left's comprehension.
Clinton was just an awful candidate and the shrieking of the liberal media -- from WaPo to CNN to has-been celebrities -- was (and continues to be) tasteless. Whether Clinton's campaign was ever more than "shame on everybody that won't vote for me, also it's a woman's turn now" is irrelevant because that was the only message that got out there.
I would love to see a candidate campaign on, specifically, "tolerance, shared responsibility, and mutual respect." The Democratic Party has truly abandoned tolerance, shared responsibility, and mutual respect, and returning to it would go a long way to bridging the ever-widening gap between Democrats and Republicans.
That phrase didn't refer to "white America"-- it referred to white supremacists.
The problem was that Clinton rankly speculated that half of Trump's supporters were made up of white supremacists, in a futile effort to divide his base. And later in that same paragraph she said this:
"He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million."
Even if Clinton's statistics were even close to correct, it was a counterproductive statement. Trump voters who were white supremacists were energized by being attacked directly by Clinton. Trump voters who were not white supremacists were energized by the likelihood that Clinton was exaggerating the numbers to spread FUD and misdirect from her own historically low polling numbers as a presidential candidate. And Bernie supporters who were on the fence wondered why Clinton was name-calling Trump supporters when a large part of Bernie's appeal had been the exact opposite kind of behavior-- instead employing care and caution when referring to the grievances of Trump supporters-- as a primary candidate.
But more importantly, presidential candidates don't just improvise new phrases like that in the middle of speeches. Has there been anything written about who authored that phrase for Clinton and why they did it?
Edit: clarification
Actually, it was much broader than "white supremacists". Here's the quote:
They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic — Islamophobic — you name it.
If someone is critical of arbitrary elevation of women above men, are they racist?
If someone is critical of unrestricted immigration, are they xenophobic?
If someone is critical of violent political expression steeped in Islamic ideology, are they Islamophobic?
---
Let me be clear, I am by no means advocating that one particular race is superior over another and I wholeheartedly reject discrimination and prejudice based on race or ethnicity.
Furthermore, I am all for protecting women from sexual violence and ensuring women have the right to vote, right to hold public office, right have equal rights in family law, and so many other rights and freedoms that women (and men!) have fought for.
Additionally, I am all for legal immigration where (for example) high-value applicants are expedited.
And finally, I have absolutely no dislike or fear of Islamic cultures and peoples, nor do I regard Islam as a dangerous political force.
In addition to "tolerance, shared responsibility and mutual respect" it would be awesome to see a candidate with a platform that was fiscally conservative and socially liberal (i.e. the middle) which is what I think most Americans have wanted for decades.
Unfortunately, wedge politics and the two party system has driven the electorate to a game of political ping pong for those same decades in a single file march toward an ever increasing indebted, imperialistic, totalitarian police state
You can be fiscally conservative and socially neutral maybe or socially laissez faire but not socially progressive or socially liberal.
If you want social liberalism, money has to be spent on programs that enable social progress or has to be spent on enforcement of socially liberal laws and regulations, (history has shown it won't happen otherwise). This is the opposite of what we know fiscal conservatism to be in America.
I know this sounds nitpickish, but the closest you can get is to say something like I want liberal policies as cheaply as possible and unfortunately for those who want to claim the middle with that, that's essentially the policy of liberalism and the left. That's what liberals want too...
What socially liberal, fiscally conservative generally means is I don't care what you do but I don't wanna pay for it and that's not the middle, that's libertarian.
Sorry for the rant but I'm generally tired of seeing a claim for the middle being used as a substitute for I want socially liberal policies but I don't want to feel bad about not fully supporting them because I don't wanna give up any money...
This probably isn't you of course, but it sure is a lot of people who claim to be "socially liberal, fiscally conservative"
While libertarian ideology may be akin to some brand of utilitarian nihilism, we don't have to lower ourselves to that level of impersonal cold distance. Government need not be devoid of personality for us to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
We don't need to give way to expensive social welfare programs in order to have a clean conscience.
The primary difference between being socially liberal and socially conservative is the idea of the government’s role in our lives (and more generally, collectivism vs. individualism). The socially liberal concepts of universal health care, social security, welfare, public schools and universities, environmental regulations and others all require funding in the form of taxation and then spending in form of government programs.
This type of taxation and the growth of government spending goes against the basic principles of fiscal conservatism.
Until robot-powered post-scarcity and UI changes the fundamental structure of society and government, social liberalism and fiscal conservatism is a paradox.
According to Wikipedia,
"Classical liberalism is a political ideology and a branch of liberalism which advocates civil liberties under the rule of law with an emphasis on economic freedom."
I think universal health care is fundamentally incompatible with both civil liberties and economic freedom.
What some consider progress, like more centralized power from elites that live X,000s miles away, others consider a regression. The biggest problem with monarchies was not their bloodline-based successions or validation by the Pope, it was their highly-centralized power.
NYC urbanite? Hmm that sounds like another politician I know.
> awful candidate
An awful candidate wouldn’t win the PV
> shrieking of the liberal media
You’re aware that the National Review had a cover story dedicated to stopping Trump right? Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol, Goerge Will and David Brooks all opposed him through today.
> tolerance, shared responsibility, and mutual respect
That sounds a lot like “Stronger Together”, the slogan of the defeated candidate.
Takes about 10 seconds for any digital marketer to look at the spend and reach and call bs. Unless of course they have some ominous fantasy of this 'only being the tip of the iceberg'
It's a little unsettling to see the media do a terrible job, scream "look over their!", and then try to present themselves as the great defenders of American democracy.
And I've been very disappointed in U.S. mainstream press for repeating these partisan talking points with very little objective analysis. They complain about RT meddling in our election but our own consolidated media has opened the door to all of this IMO.
"while the ads may have only reached a small group of people, Trump won the electoral college by a small number of votes, too."
Russia interfered (and we should definitely do something about that)... but Clinton ran a badly managed campaign, and that's why she lost.
First major party nominee to never step foot in Wisconsin since 1972? Clinton [0]
SEIU says to Clinton campaign that they are moving their staff to Michigan toward the end of the campaign (like they wanted to from the beginning).. Clinton's response: turn the bus around and go back to Iowa[1]
Michigan operatives relay stories like one about an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not “scientifically” significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return. A crew of building trade workers showed up at another office looking to canvass, but, confused after being told there was no literature to hand out like in most campaigns, also left and never looked back.[1]
I mean come on... how can she expect to win Wisconsin when she never even stepped foot in the state?
0. http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/hil...
1. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michigan-hillary-clint...
People will agree and disagree about her vs Sanders, policies, etc. And they have varying opinions of Clinton, and she can't do much to change that because of how long she's been in the public eye. But how she ran her campaign was entirely up to her.
It wasn't just Clinton's campaign that was awfully run, it was the whole DNC who screwed up by conspiring to make her the candidate.
...and the NYT and other newspapers run front-pages saying "Clinton 85% likely to win". I can't imagine a better recipe for fostering voter apathy and absenteeism.
less awful than the winner, so I doubt this is why she lost.
Yes, she'd be far better actually doing the job, but it was clear to anyone with any knowledge of politics that she was the worst major party candidate, as a candidate, in a very long time.
There was a lawsuit against the DNC for their actions, unfortunately they were able to get the lawsuit dismissed by successfully arguing that they were within their rights to internally choose their own candidate regardless of their own election systems.
http://observer.com/2017/08/court-admits-dnc-and-debbie-wass...
Also, her victory was so overdetermined that about five things had to go wrong for her to lose. (Email investigation, flawed campaign, the last-minute Comey letter, probably Bernie making trouble for months after he was statistically eliminated but that's hard to tell, Russia intervention, bad electoral college distribution, probably some others I'm forgetting right now)
I think tough primary competition should be the norm, and she should have faced more than one strong challenger.
It hurt further because Bernie had an absurd cult of personality that Clinton did not have in 2016
1. https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/chomsky_half_the_world...
Ironic. Washington DC has the exact same problem: isolated, life in a bubble, mono-vision, etc.
Blaming FB and only FB is an oversimplification, to say the least, but it's a great spin that protects the elites (from their responsibility for the build up to Nov 2016 and all that has come to light since).
How have filter bubbles changed our political landscape? How has the obsession for "likes" and "shares" incentivized certain speech over others? Has it diminished the variety of opinions? How do we create a platform that encourages people to step outside their comfort zone and learn things they may initially disagree with? How do we get people of differing opinions, who in our current world demonize each other, to sit down and share their stories and listen to? Is it even possible to build a popular platform that fights against our innate biases, like selection bias, confirmation bias, etc.?
Be the alleged Russian involvement as it may, I think that the above questions are far more damaging to the long term political stability in this country.
"Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News"
https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...
There really are only two real solutions:
1. Paid political ads should be marked as such. 2. Remove fake accounts / bots.
That still can't prevent paid shills...
Washington Post discussion of the leaks framing this information, nonetheless, in favor of a Russian conspiracy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-o...
Something related to that article as well is this one is that I think people for whom these stories confirm their biases (e.g. the Russian conspiracy is true) should try to read only the facts. There are indeed lots of facts within these articles, but they're constantly buried within extremely suggestive and extremely unsupported rhetoric. For instance in Washington Post article, they state that "$100,000 worth of Facebook ads could have been viewed hundreds of millions of times." Let's think about that for a minute. In the election both parties spent about $6 billion on advertising and of course most all of it targeting the US. Going on with that figure from the Washingon Post that $6 billion could have resulted in tens of trillions of views. To put that another way, that would be each and every man, woman, and child in America seeing 30,000 ads at the minimum. And that minimum is multiplicative as I assumed "hundreds of millions of views" = exactly 100 million views. That is clearly in no way a reasonable suggestion, yet that's the sort of thinking it takes to support the views implicitly expressed within this article.
However, I assumed the headline was going to lead to a story about their regrets around PHP, HHVM, Hack, etc.
Assuming it's sarcasm, at least someone seemed to be aware of the issues....
// Holy shit, is this the cleanest fucking frontend file you've ever seen?!
To prevent this, this site really needs to work hard to maintain an interesting, thought-provoking culture that welcomes dissenting opinions as long as they're well wrote and not overly emotional.
It's funny how technical discussions are much better here, and anything touching politics is terrible. Kind of reminds me of how you can hear good debates on sports radio, but not politics.
Plus I do highly suspect that there is significant astroturfing with political issues as well, but because that line of thinking accomplishes nothing but makes me ignore opposing political opinions(which is bad!) I try to avoid that mode of thinking.
I think the goal of some people is to intentionally cause feelings of hopelessness, thus reducing civic involvement and rates of voting. You have to fight that!
Many others share GP's view that the whole Russia thing is potentially overblown. Personally, I'm still rather skeptical of the whole matter, considering I haven't been presented with sufficiently strong evidence to make me agree that it played a large role in the 2016 election.
Because this kind of comment usually incites a debate that is below the intellectual standards of HN.
This is not a statement about the comment's merit. Just a few days ago, there was a submission about how the US and Israel are leaving UNESCO. I was initially disappointed to see it being flagged off the front page because I was hoping for some insightful commentary on this development, but 90% of comments was arguing about whether there is a Jewish world conspiracy going on. That's why political stories and comments are very often flagged or downvoted to death.
Can someone please explain why the left's frustration over a Trump presidency is any more justified than the right's was over the Obama presidency. And can they also explain how screaming "RUSSIANS" is better than developing a platform that works for the fly over states and not just the coasts.
Honestly, is couching everything in the Socratic method the blessed way to comment on HN?
Sometimes I don't want to discuss I just want to make a statement.
Even if I agreed with the man's vile philosophy, if I was a supporter I would be frankly embarrassed by the man's performance. He is not even able to staff his branch of government.
The man is a failure by every metric. I am speaking now more to the "frustration" over a Trump presidency that the entire country has, not "the left" as you identify them.
250 years ago, Europe was still ruled by kings.
Basically, contrast the American revolution to the French one.
Anyway, the American right has generally been for preserving liberal democracy, not a monarchy or a cultural identity. Trump is a bit of an exception to this pattern, and doesn't have full support from the Republican party in the aspects of his politics that mirror the European right's (building walls, America first, etc.). The fact that the American congress has problems passing significant legislation demonstrates this fact.
It's not like he proudly boasted about his sexual assaults. Nor has he spoken at conferences for white supremacists. He hasn't even said that Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers (and some, he assumes, are good people). He definitely doesn't have a VP that supports gay conversion camps. And he isn't trying to take healthcare from millions of individuals.
Really, as a white man in the highest tax brackets, I have no reason at all to fear Trump, so why would anyone else?
Because if not, let me rewrite your last sentence: "Really, as a member of the inoculated group, I have no reason to fear the plague, so why would anyone else?"
Does anyone want it to happen? Really?
This is a prettyyyyyy unflattering comparison
Zuckerberg just has a bad case of affluenza, always has.