Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis

>The rash of news coverage was no accident: NTK is an affiliate of Definers, sharing offices and staff with the public relations firm in Arlington, Va. Many NTK Network stories are written by staff members at Definers or America Rising, the company’s political opposition-research arm, to attack their clients’ enemies. While the NTK Network does not have a large audience of its own, its content is frequently picked up by popular conservative outlets, including Breitbart.

Facebook employed content writers posing as journalists, as hired guns against their enemies. A page out of the playbook of the Internet Research Agency.

To me, this story reads a lot like a media narrative that has very little to do with users's actual lives. And I've been reading variations on "Why Facebook sucks" and "Why Facebook is doomed" for a very long time. It's like the "Why this is the year of Linux on the desktop," but for media companies.

Don't get me wrong: I'm barely a Facebook user and agree with much of the criticism. But what I do, anecdotally, is less significant than what users do and want to do.

I think the conventional media sources, including the NYT, doesn't want to confront its own role in the 2016 election (the relentless media focus on Clinton's email server was insane). We don't want to acknowledge that most people's epistemological skill is low. Why look at ourselves, when we have this handy scapegoat right... over... there?

https://www.iep.utm.edu/girard/#H3

> “We’re not going to traffic in your personal life,” Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in an MSNBC interview. “Privacy to us is a human right. It’s a civil liberty.” (Mr. Cook’s criticisms infuriated Mr. Zuckerberg, who later ordered his management team to use only Android phones, since the operating system has far more users than Apple’s.)

If I were running FB, my main worry would be the fact that it's devolved into a platform for baby boomers to yell at each other about politics. An angry Congress, even a really angry one, has a limited ability to kill FB. In fact, I'd posit that a bona fide War With The Man might even be good for employee morale, another Cartago Delenda Est moment.

User shrinkage, declining engagement and general loss of relevancy, on the other hand -- that would be the death knell, and it already kind of appears to be happening.

"...if Facebook pulled down the Russians’ fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived: His own mother-in-law, Mr. Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls."

Yeah, great idea, Facebook. Let's protect the users from the outrage of having been deceived by... initiating a much bigger layer of deceit/coverup. That will totally work!

That's why I don't trust anything I read in the news. If I don't hear it from a friend working at one of the SV companies (which isn't that hard to find, we're a much smaller community than one would imagine) then I consider it to be sensationalized, hyperbolic, and/or downright wrong.

It also tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

It is incredible that the NYTimes were able to obtain some very private information that was presented in this article. It must have been leaked through someone at a very high ranking within Facebook executive team.

The guest went into this topic some more: "While Facebook had publicly declared itself ready for new federal regulations, Ms. Sandberg privately contended that the social network was already adopting the best reforms and policies available. Heavy-handed regulation, she warned, would only disadvantage smaller competitors."

Ooh, what an insidious tension. I actually never considered it as a security risk of proprietary systems.

Can someone here on HN filter for posts that rankly speculate about how secure FAANG must be based on the high skill level of the security teams there? I know I've read some. I'd like to read back through them with this threat in mind.

This is the biggest corporate f'up I've seen in a while. Someone needs to own it and step down.

Though the article uses the Russian interference as the launching off point, in my reading, it seems that these attacks on our democracy are essentially waived off. That the most pressing issue for Zuck was not that the families of his senior staff were being fooled (along with the rest of the voting public), but that his company may be ruined. This extremely serious, and continuing, attack on the public seems to not really matter to any of the parties involved, only that they may get 'in trouble' or lose money.

Good Lord. Where is the maturity? Where are the adults? Zuck seems like he's still 24 here, bopping about feeding calves and 'listening'. At least write up a report on your summer vacation.

The dire situations that the company (and the government) is in seems to be only taken as far as the mirrors these actors look into.

What absolute children.

Quoting:

> Yesterday, The New York Times published an article about the past two years at Facebook. There are a number of inaccuracies in the story, including:

> 1. Russia Investigation: The story asserts that we knew about Russian activity as early as the spring of 2016 but were slow to investigate it at every turn. This is not true. As Mark Zuckerberg told Congress, “Leading up to Election Day in November 2016, we detected and dealt with several threats with ties to Russia … [including] a group called APT28 … we also saw some new behavior when APT28-related accounts, under the banner of DC Leaks, created fake personas that were used to seed stolen information to journalists. We shut these accounts down for violating our policies.” After the election, no one ever discouraged Alex Stamos from looking into Russian activity — as he himself acknowledged on Twitter. Indeed as The New York Times says, “Mark and Sheryl [Sandberg] expanded Alex’s work.” Finally, we did not name Russia in our April 2017 white paper — but instead cited a US Government report in a footnote about Russian activity — because we felt that the US Director of National Intelligence was best placed to determine the source.

> 2. The Muslim Ban: We did decide that President Trump’s comments on the Muslim ban, while abhorrent to many people, did not break our Community Standards for the same reasons The New York Times and many other organizations covered the news: Donald Trump was a candidate running for office. To suggest that the internal debate around this particular case was different from other important free speech issues on Facebook is wrong.

> 3. Commitment to Fighting Fake News: Mark and Sheryl have been deeply involved in the fight against false news and information operations on Facebook — as they have been consistently involved in all our efforts to prevent misuse of our services.

> 4. Sex Trafficking Legislation: Sheryl championed this legislation because she believed it was the right thing to do, and that tech companies need to be more open to content regulation where it can prevent real world harm. In fact, the company faced considerable criticism as a result.

> 5. Android: Tim Cook has consistently criticized our business model and Mark has been equally clear he disagrees. So there’s been no need to employ anyone else to do this for us. And we’ve long encouraged our employees and executives to use Android because it is the most popular operating system in the world.

I can't get enough of the Apple-Facebook beef. Also kind of a "cut off your nose to spite your face" kind of move from a security perspective.

People in high places really make me sick sometimes. This guy told the truth about an important matter and she chewed his ass for it. Super professional to take some (well-deserved) shit from the board, and then go proverbially kick your dog in retaliation. What an asshole.

That's why I don't trust anything I read in the news. If I don't hear it from a friend working at one of the SV companies (which isn't that hard to find, we're a much smaller community than one would imagine) then I consider it to be sensationalized, hyperbolic, and/or downright wrong.

At the very least, we certainly are never going to hear of the things Facebook is doing right. We aren't going to hear about the economic opportunity or positive connections it has produced. To say that something is completely one sided is a strong sign of bias.