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Comment by isoskeles | Hacker News Reader

I still love that the story here is that Facebook hired people to say something true about George Soros. NYT, etc. are reporting that someone else saying something true about Soros is bad.

I’m not clear on what the motives are, but it feels Orwellian that we now have news stories that smear people for telling the truth. I guess some anti-Semites don’t like George Soros, so the reasoning is that any criticism or even mention of George Soros must be anti-Semitic.

I’d like to hear some coherent refutation to this. Why is this story at all controversial when Soros did, in fact, fund FB critics? I’ll entertain any reasons other than, “Nazis.”

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Facebook's actions are controversial for a few reasons.

1. Their focus was Soros. They were criticised, and they essentially said "we haven't done anything wrong that needs to be addressed, he must have another motive for criticising us, find out if he's going to get rich from this somehow". They set out to attempt to discredit Soros, for the crime of criticising them.

2. Having failed to find a financial motive, they did discover that he was funding a FB pressure group (which you might expect of a wealthy critic). That was then used to smear the group, among the people for whom "is funded by Soros" is an effective smear.

3. Many of the people appealed to in (2) are anti-semitic. It's why the smear works. It's therefore an anti-semitic act to use Soros as a smear in this way.

In sum: they used their financial power to attack a critic of theirs with an ad hominem smear that had an anti-semitic basis. That's not the act of a laudable organisation. It's a controversial act.

2 and 3 are also true of Soros attacking Facebook. So in effect you’re saying that Zuckerberg, Soros, and Sandberg - all jews - are antisemetic.

Soros funded smear groups focused on Facebook. Facebook responding in kind doesn’t strike me as better or worse than what Soros did. Bringing antisemitism into it is a stretch.

> So in effect you’re saying that Zuckerberg, Soros, and Sandberg - all jews - are antisemetic.

No, Facebook critics are saying that FB was OK with undermining its critics at all costs, even if that meant dogwhistling for anti-Semitic trolls.

How is Facebook correctly pointing out that Soros funded a smear campaign against them a dog whistle? Is it not possible to criticize money in politics if they’re anyone other than WASPs like the Kochs?

If Facebook was so correct, why did they hire a PR firm to launder that claim?

I'll repeat something I posted in my other comment: Do you believe that George Soros is also actively behind a campaign to destroy Tesla [0]? Reveal has received money through Soros's Open Society Foundations [1].

[0] https://www.revealnews.org/article/inside-teslas-factory-a-m...

https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-left-injuries-off-t...

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/why-dont-we-hear-about-soros...

Soros is also laundering his attacks...

Perhaps I’m being naive but I see two Jewish business leaders fighting a proxy war — and yet one is called antisemitic and one is not. And I suspect it’s because people are only attacking the side they disagree with politically.

You aren’t being naive, but you may be credulous. Whereas there is evidence that FB hired someone specifically to undermine their critics, where is the evidence that Soros commanded his philanthropic grantees to wage an attack against Facebook?

The fact you see them as Jews and not just People shows your anti-Semitic bias to be honest.

The fact that you provided no evidence to back up your beliefs, but stated only the race of these people, implies that to you, race alone is enough to implicate these people. That is racism.

Because he did no such thing. Freedom From Facebook was actually funded by some other lefty with deep pockets. Definers saying a thing doesn’t make it true.

Edit: looks like some Soros money was sloshing around in there, but the primary funding was from elsewhere.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/freedom-from-facebook-open-marke...

It is possible to criticize money in politics; that's not what Facebook was doing. In fact, Facebook was spending money on politics.

Their act was a dog whistle because it was done with the intent of discrediting Soros (to protect Facebook from his criticisms), and the main way it could achieve that was by appealing to the anti-semites.

Yea pretty much, I thought we all agreed post WW2 that critiquing jews = antisemitism.

> 3

That's ridiculous. Every antisemite eats, does that make eating antisemitic? Most people on the right don't like when Soros pays for protestors. 75% of Orthodox Jews support Trump. Most of whom I assume disagree with Soros. Are they also antisemitic?

I think for (1), it's completely fair for a company to investigate the potential financial motivations of their critics (for example, people were not this upset when Google pointed out that the "search rankings are rigged" "independent" agencies were actually just Yelp and Microsoft paying for an attack.) I think the fact that a supposedly grassroots organization of protestors received a slew of money from a variety of significant liberal donors does point out that this isn't as grassroots as people think.

There was so much else that FB did wrong (Stamos admitted in his WaPo opinion piece that Sheryl was upset at him for telling the board about Russia and that PR pieces about that were obfuscated). Why is the media so focused on what seems to me to be a routine investigation which even they engage in? This just doesn't seem like a winning argument to me.

>the story here is that Facebook hired people to say something true about George Soros

Well no that’s not really the story.

The story is really that FB hired a PR agency to dig up dirt to personally attack a FB critic, and tried to hide the truth that they were behind the PR campaign targeting an individual. Further, Zuckerburg publicly denied it.

The story is about FB coming clean, that they did hire a political consulting firm to discredit a FB critic, and acknowledge FB later falsely claimed they didn’t do what they in fact did.

Is it not scary to you a Company like FB would, under shield on anonymity, hire a PR firm to publicly discredit someone? And you don’t take any issue with the idea FB (Zuckerburg) later falsely denied FB hired the Firm to target and discredit an individual?

If it wasn’t a big deal FB wouldn’t have hired a firm to target an individual to discredit them, and hide behind the cloak of anonymity. They wouldn’t have subsequently publicly denied their behavior. And they wouldn’t have come clean on Thanksgiving eve in attempt to sweep the story under the rug (it’s never an accident when companies publish bad news before a long weekend and it’s telling).

>Is it not scary to you a Company like FB would under shield on anonymity hire a PR firm to publicly discredit someone? And you don’t take any issue with the idea the later falsely denied hiring the Firm to discredit an individual?

This happens all the time. Theranos literally did this when they hired Fusion GPS for air cover and that’s just one recent example of many. It’s credibility laundering and anyone can pay organizations like Definers that get outlets like NYT and WsJ to publish ‘credible’ scoops

https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/03/15/elizabeth-holme...

>This happens all the time.

That makes it all the more frightening

1. Because something happens “all the time” doesn’t make it news worthy? Or concerning/scary behavior.

2. From what you linked it’s not clear Theranos did the same thing (ie hired a firm to dig up dirt on an individual and attack them in the media, got caught and lied about it).

But if Theranos did the same exact thing as FB and what you linked to states that...well isn’t that proof such behavior is newsworthy.

>This happens all the time.

So is this an argument that the behavior is acceptable?

> This happens all the time.

That doesn't make it less scary or dysfunctional. It undermines the health of politics and society when this is acceptable behaviour.

Because there are so many true things that any communication is doomed to include only a small number of truths, the truths that are chosen to be told are just as revealing as the lies, if not more so. I would argue that it is yet more revealing a PR firm is hired to amplify specific truths. I'm reading an interesting book about this right now: Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality by Hector Macdonald.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming there is or should be anything illegal about this, but I certainly reserve the right to make judgements of companies that I might work for or do business with based on both the lies and the truths they choose to advocate for.

In the very simplest form, because there's a large class of people for whom "We're being attacked by Soros" translates directly to "We're being attacked by a massive globalist (read: Jewish) cabal", and Facebook appears to have exploited this. It's a clear dogwhistle in my opinion.

There's a few issues in play: (1) the content of the story, (2) the presentation of the story, (3) the intent to mislead.

You've focused on 1 and then used 2 against critics: 'smear people for telling the truth'. But doesn't that criticism apply to the original stories about Soros? How do you tell a smear from a balanced story? Doesn't that require understanding who is telling it and what they have at stake? In which case, 3 becomes relevant.

Also, you've pulled a straw-man on the anti-semitic front: that's not part of the article or argument. Pragmatically, a well-intentioned actor would show an effort to make criticism explicitly anti-semitic, given the racist undertones to large parts of the discussion.

It could definitely be done, but not making an effort on that part _when it is your job to know how the communication will be received_ is a signal that you don't mind the inference being made.

They might not be implying something racist, but they know others will infer something racist and they still went ahead. Do you think that is acceptable behaviour?

It's not just about whether Soros money went to groups that funded Facebook critics. Soros donates to a lot of progressive groups, you'd be hard to find any single company/organization that have not been criticized by a group that has ever taken Soros money. For example, Soros's Open Society Institute has made grants [0] to many media orgs, such as the Center for Investigative Reporting -- better known to HN readers as Reveal for publishing recent stories about unsafe conditions at Tesla. The very same Tesla that Soros himself has had a stake in [1] to improve its stock price.

So if Facebook wants to make a non-dogwhistling good-faith claim that Soros is attempting to profit from the destruction of Facebook, the burden of evidence is on them to make the case that Facebook is indeed being specifically targeted by Soros, in a way that say, Tesla isn't. If they had that evidence, and they weren't just trying to dog whistle for all the folks who think Soros is a Jewish globalist puppetmaster, then it raises the question of why they went through an intermediary who pushed anti-Soros stories through well known right-wing trolls?

To put it another way, a true fact about George Soros is that he is Jewish. Would you see any problem if Facebook funded a PR group to push news stories focusing solely on the fact that George Soros is totally a Jew? Or to use another example, how about if that firm pushed stories about how Barack Obama spent his early life living with a white teenage woman, another very true fact? [2]

edit: added link for the fact about Obama

[0] https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/why-dont-we-hear-about-soros...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-bonds-analysis/geor...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/magazine/mag-24Obama-t.ht...

> Soros donates to a lot of progressive groups, you'd be hard to find any single company/organization that have not been criticized by a group that has ever taken Soros money

> for all the folks who think Soros is a Jewish globalist puppetmaster

I wonder if that’s because he is a billionaire Jew who funds a lot of fringe globalist progressive groups?

Could you define what you mean by "fringe", "globalist" and "progressive" here?

What exactly confuses you about these terms?

I’m not here to play word games.

"Would you see any problem if Facebook funded a PR group to push news stories focusing solely on the fact that George Soros is totally a Jew?"

I see a problem with demonizing Facebook and their management based on things we imagine they could do if they were in fact evil.

If is a centuries old anti-Semitic trope to see powerful, evil but smart Jews behind everything. If you forget it (but what would you), it's still fallacious

> Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.

Right, but what is weird in this case is that the person who calls the company run by the two smart jews evil is jewish himself.

Why is it weird for a person to dislike the actions of a company run by other people?

Or are you surprised that Jews are not a homogenous group that all think the same?

"If is a centuries old anti-Semitic trope to see powerful, evil but smart Jews behind everything."

Of course, but I get that vibe from some of the criticism of Stephen Miller I read, too. I bet there are not too many people defensive of Miller and Soros equally.

Soros is 88 years old.

He gave all his money to the Open Society Foundation. OS receives funding from multiple sources. OS is funding a lot of organizations around the world based on decisions by tens of committees.

Does that mean that everything these thousands of organizations do are paid by Soros?

He created Open Society Foundation and fundementally shaped its vision and direction, so yes, absolutely.

at 88 years old he makes every decision about organizations that OS sponsors. Highly doubt it.

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