Facebook hired PR firm that wrote negative articles about Apple and Google | Hacker News Reader

Facebook hired PR firm that wrote negative articles about Apple and Google

cnbc.com

280 pointssahin-boydas49 comments

Active discussion about the original NYT report from a few hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453958

This reminds me of the youtube beauty gurus who will get paid 25k to give a positive review of the client's product, but can make 85k from the same client for leaving a negative review of a competitor's client.

https://www.revelist.com/beauty-news-/beauty-influencer-nega...

Relevant quote, ""A brand I consulted with asked me to inquire about working with a top-level beauty influencer. The influencer's management offered me these options: 1) $25K — product mention in a multi-branded product review. 2) $50K–$60K — dedicated product review (price determined by length of video). 3) $75K–$85K — dedicated negative review of a competitor's product (price determined by length of video). 4) A minimum 10% affiliate link or code to use on IG and YT."

The market is eating itself. The old adage was that if you wanted your competitor's market share, you had to design a better product. You can now get away with selling a worse product, if your advertising convinces consumers that the previous model is worthless or the competitor's product is poor. The pricing data here supports that negative advertising goes a lot further than positive advertising.

What is the incentive to pay for good product design or innovation if it's more profitable to pay off reviewers and advertisers to lie for you? Why develop a valuable product when you can so easily lie about its actual value? We are moving out of an age of engineering and into an age of advertising and snake oil.

Marketing includes making a product and finding customers through messaging, so nothing is changing.

False advertising has long been against the law but social media and the various "influencer" platforms are mostly unregulated wastelands that dont have proper oversight or standards. It's not like unscrupulous companies weren't able to buy bad word-of-mouth before.

The 50s was the golden age of advertising, and the basis for the show Mad Men. Its no coincidence this was around the time that it was discovered the product really wasn't important. It was more about how the person felt when buying and consuming that product.

In short the "better mousetrap" hasn't been thought true for the last 70 years. If you are going to actually make a better product you better make your customer feel smart for buying it - or you will fail.

Do you only buy products that make you feel better or smart for buying it?

On average, yes. Statistically speaking you do as well.

Statistically speaking I do as well? What does that even mean?

Would it be fair for me to say that your entire argument is a hot take that ignores evidence to the contrary when it contradicts your priors, because it makes you feel better and smarter even though better quality arguments exist?

Not every purchase a person makes is some decision derived from marketing. You're basically arguing that people have no free will here and all decision-making is outsourced to advertising.

I see ads for things I don't buy and have no interest in all the time that do try to use the method of appeal you describe. Your model falls apart and doesn't explain this.

I could have used the raw statistics but it would have undermined the whole point. People don't make fully rational decisions - even when up/down voting.

But to get analytical, the argument is not that you buy everything that is advertised. The argument is that your purchases are primarily based upon how the purchase makes you feel. Even for everyday "necessities" like toilet paper which Japan gets away just fine without (they use bidet style toilets which are more effective at cleaning). In North America a bidet "feels" weird so nobody has one. When you get down to it toilet paper is not a logical purchase at all - better alternatives exist.

Further the argument is not that people don't have free will, quite the contrary. The argument is that the decision process is based upon considerations outside the efficacy of the product. Consumers don't do scientific studies on the products they buy, they only infer based upon heuristics which are primarily emotional in nature. This is why people consider bad tasting medecine to be more effective, and why Buckley's uses the slogan, "Tastes terrible, but works!".

Also how presidents get elected. The spokesppl/talkingheads/oped columnists/twitterati/news reader class all do the same thing - https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway

URL should probably be https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-..., since the submitted URL seems to only report that NYT reported something.

Agreed, the NYT story is massive, and about so much more than hiring a PR firm to discredit critics. It includes a lot of detail of how Zuckerberg and Sandberg reacted very poorly to the warnings from former security chief Alex Stamos.

This is not exactly new. Way back when Circles/Plus were being developed/launched/leaked, FB paid a PR company (M-B, I think) to attack Google, while insisting on keeping anonymous about their funding. I was at Google at the time and almost everyone thought of the usual suspects of that era: Microsoft, Oracle or even Steve Jobs. FB was not on the radar on that front yet and thus took everyone by surprise.

The heck? What exactly did they write and why?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/12/facebook-...

To their credit, FB got better (or smarter).

>pushed the idea that liberal financier George Soros was behind a growing anti-Facebook movement

Is there any real connection here? If not, it is really bad approach. People pissed off about misinformation on your platform? Better fuel some conspiracy theories to make up for it.

Perhaps they've seen how well this practice works on a subset of the American population and decided to emulate it because it was their best and least worst idea? While a bad approach it certainly seems to resonate with some portion of the populace.

This is exactly the danger. Morally egregious, but extremely effective advertising for the large swaths of uneducated and ill-informed. What is to stop a private corporation from polluting national discourse? Apparently nothing, now that Facebook has taken the drivers seat spreading loony conspiracy theories. This Russian playbook is public knowledge now, and intimately studied for better or worse.

I still wonder to this day who is paying WSJ authors to write hit pieces against YouTube. It's uncanny how the WSJ is persistent in its attacks on top YouTube personalities for the purpose of getting advertisers to leave the platform, see adpocolypse.

My best guess is Amazon/Facebook, for the purpose of boosting Twitch and Amazon video, though I also suspect Fox/Hulu.

How is it “uncanny”? Because the WSJ tech reporter has found an issue and decides to keep reporting on it, as new developments and revelations are made? Who do you think paid the WSJ reporters who kept on writing “hit pieces” on Theranos until Theranos collapsed?

I don't mean to be cheeky, but I think the owner of the WSJ is paying them.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118589043953483378 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-02/murdoch-s...

Not only WSJ, but a lot of anti-google articles by other publishers are doing rounds of YN and most of them get upvoted right here.

The only balanced coverage I find is nytimes. Sure, they are critical of Google when there is a reason to be, but they aren't printing them either because somebody paid them to do it, or for hype train click-baits.

Also, they are the only ones who has balls to call out Apple.

> the only ones who has balls to call out Apple.

So courageous!

So Facebook is producing fake news. Hmm.

Ah, the Netflix model. After a point, you just have to start producing your own content.

Here's a story about that firm from June of last year.

https://www.recode.net/2017/6/7/15746928/republicans-politic...

The big question for me is not whether hiring an opposition-research firm is within normal ethical limits. That ship sailed long ago, and don't think for a moment that FB is the only one who has ever hired such an outfit. The question is: why this one? Just one look at the people involved and their records would have told anyone who was paying attention that it's an exceptional sleaze magnet and engaging with them could not turn out well in the long term. Seriously, not a wise choice.

Someone was recently convicted for fake hotel reviews if I remember right. I don’t see how this should be any different.

Does facebook ever do anything with a shred of decency or just plain not-evil?

What I don't get is why they don't "just" try genuinely cleaning up their act. Why not be rich, stable and wholesome; why reach for filthy rich and filthy? Unbridled greed, and wanting to be so good one cannot admit any wrongdoing, can easily wrap around to being more self-destructive than selfish.

They're not doing that because their long-term goal is to remain formless while consuming other businesses, like they have with Instagram and WhatsApp. Long before those have gone into terminal decline, they will have purchased some other trending technology. I don't think they really believe anyone's going to be talking about Facebook in another 5 years, and it may even go full Livejournal in the next year or so.

Besides that fact, they never had a clean act in the first place. Zuckerberg's vision was never to "make the world more connected", no matter how many times he said it. Anyone who actually looked into the guy would have found out quickly that he was a talented programmer who happened to do the right thing at the right time, but never in a million years had the ethos of changing the world for the better. The company of Facebook never had a leader with a clean vision, nor will it ever.

Long before those have gone into terminal decline, they will have purchased some other trending technology.

I don't think so. Any other significant acquisition by Facebook will be scrutinized by a very fine comb by the responsible authorities.

While this will matter less in the US I don't believe that European competition authorities would allow those deals to go through today.

In addition the really dirty slime oozing out of that carbuncle [and what else did they try to pull off, which we don't know yet?] also won't really help new acquisitions.

The politics are not surprising. They fact that they managed to not know about radicalizing content and fake news (or not care) is more surprising. They have the data. It's staring them in the face.

Classy.

Last month when the spin pieces posted on why WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton left, I asked, "Who's submarines [0] are these?"... the contrast in the two articles is telling....

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18078230

Not sure why this is news, just the free market in motion. If consumers didn't like this, they can just signup for another social media network.

...What other social media network?

Perfect time to switch to Google+! /s

If you are talking about market efficiency one of the main components of it (which is really often overlooked) is access to accurate information to be able to judge the quality of products. It hurts consumers when they do things like this and consumers also can't do anything about it unless they know about it (which is the whole point of the article that you are dismissing).

Ok but ... "reportedly" and "didn't respond for comment", so that remains to be seen. I am not downplaying the effects of Facebook on politics though, that's a huge problem.

It is true though that in many newspaper sites you'll find an inciendary title labelled "opinion" and that could be anti-anything and very biased with little sources (talking about the posts written by this PR firm).

That stuff has to stop. People read it like the news being reported factually and the emphasis on "opinion" is never there.

The word 'opinion' doesn't appear anywhere in the article, much less the whole page. You seem to be implying strongly that this article is fraudulent/biased with no evidence of that. I hope you do realize that news outlets (especially at the size of CNBC) fact-check and try to make sure their stories are vetted. They're not 100% perfect at that for sure, but you seem to be ascribing almost malice to them.

'People read it like the news being reported factually' because it is. That's literally what this is. There shouldn't be emphasis on 'opinion' because it's not an opinion piece.

Your take on this news article is however straight up opinion.

I think keyle is suggesting PR campaigns like the one Facebook reportedly ran may publish slanted articles as "opinion" pieces, not that this news story is an opinion piece.

Ahhhhhhhhh. Yes I suppose that is a possible take on what they said. It didn't seem at all clear to me that this was the case from my reading of it.

keyle, if this is your message I'm totally sorry about my interpretation.

yes it was, all good :)

Sorry! I really misinterpreted what you meant to say and think we're actually probably of the same mind on all this.

Take care.

> reportedly

Yes, because the original article is from NYTimes, which did the reporting. And from that article, they have quotes from specific people.

Opinion articles are labelled as such and are written in a different style and tone than other articles. They are written as an argument, not an objective presentation of an event.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com