Sheryl Sandberg Is Said to Have Asked Facebook Staff to Research George Soros
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It’s when FB went on the offensive and started attacking Soros with “factually questionable” information that they crossed the line.
Well, he is an investor who has a history of causing financial damage to whole countries by betting against their currencies.
So, it shouldn't be surprising FB would want to know what might be in store for them if he went nuclear on them.
What is surprising is the odd bedfellows of Soros on the left and others on the right clamoring for FB regulation. I probably agree they need some kind of regulation --but one more generalized to all user-facing internet companies (colloquially "user is the product" companies).
Later, she claimed the investigation turned up emails about Facebook's deceptive practices that "crossed her desk" [2], but made it sound like her involvement was peripheral and incidental.
Naturally, now we learn those were all lies, and she was personally involved the entire time actually leading the effort.
Just more Delay, Deny and Deflect.
Facebook cannot be trusted to fix Facebook.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/business/on-thanksgiving-...
Ms. Sandberg [...] asked for the information in an email to a senior executive in January[...]. The email came within days of a blistering speech Mr. Soros delivered that month at the World Economic Forum, attacking Facebook and Google as a “menace” to society and calling for the companies to be regulated.
You know, like targeting Facebook users who are racist and anti-Semitic with disinfo about George Soros, while simultaneously telling Jewish users that Facebook's critics are themselves anti-Semitic.
FTFA, first paragraph:
Sheryl Sandberg was directly involved in the social media company’s effort to conduct opposition research against billionaire philanthropist George Soros...
...reporting contradicts Sandberg’s previous portrayals of her involvement; she has said she was unaware of the campaign-style communications work done by Republican public relations firm Definers Public Affairs
It's okay, that game is already lost. The headline is "Sheryl Sandberg..." We've moved on from Facebook being the object of the scandal to Sheryl Sandberg. I'm sorry it worked out this way, but as you point out yourself, she lied, which is really very super quite bad.
Seriously though, Facebook is bad for reasons that have very little to do with bickering with George Soros or lies and more to do with its actual effect on human relationships and identity. As a person who doesn't care about a lot of things, I can't find it in my heart to get upset about Sheryl Sandberg telling lies. I don't find the moralizing over it to be genuine, given all of the things happening in the world, and even given Facebook's effect on culture-at-large, Sheryl Sandberg lying (which I don't even 100% believe) is so low on the list.
Let me bring Hitler in as an example. And I'm not going to compare you to Hitler. No, I am going to compare Sheryl Sandberg to Hitler, but I am writing in her favor (kind of), so I feel like this is fair to do and not in the spirit of whatever that internet law about bringing up Hitler is.
Let's say Hitler led Nazi Germany to systematically exterminate millions of people (he did). Now, let's say he lied about it. People said, "Hey Hitler, are you killing millions of people?" And he said, "No, I am absolutely not doing that." Time passes and, one day, we come to find out Adolf Hitler did, in fact, lead Nazi Germany to kill millions of people. Imagine waking up in 1944, visiting Hacker News, reading some headlines, and spitting out your coffee because, come to find out, Hitler lied and also btw he killed a few million people. And for weeks, headline after headline, Hitler lied, Hitler is a liar.
All I am saying is, can we get some content from NYT on how Facebook is genuinely bad that doesn't have to do with their PR lies? Because I don't care about what their PR is doing or saying. I also don't care if Sandberg's career is ruined, I just don't see how any of this is relevant to anyone's interests other than something like Two Minutes Hate.
For myself, I'd like to see a 95% contraction in the online advertising market $ value, so I'm uBlock Origin all the way.
Edit: for clarity, I'm not here to shill for Facebook - they're toxic! I'd be quite happy if Facebook shrunk to $0.
Because George Soros is a lightning rod for the alt-right and NWO conspiracy theorists.
> what their motivations might be by doing research is just common sense
The rhetoric that you guys use, especially when you talk about someone who's probably as genuinely committed to a civil, liberal world as George Soros: you sound like a South Park character. You can watch a clip that uses conspiratorial rhetoric (and makes fun of it) here: [1].
And I think the amazing thing is, it's not that South Park turned into this right-leaning children's TV show. It's that Republicans, libertarians and just cocky, downvoting male engineers alike have all started to turn into South Park.
"What you gotta understand [Hacker News], everyone has an agenda."
[0] https://www.georgesoros.com/2018/01/25/remarks-delivered-at-...
I have no idea what you're referring to with the South Park reference and George Soros, I don't really follow the show.
But South Park has actually long been considered right-leaning by some people, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park_Republican
As far as I can tell the main people who hold this view are right-leaning, e.g. https://www.city-journal.org/html/we%E2%80%99re-not-losing-c...
I usually see the creators referred to as libertarians. E.g. Matt Stone saying "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals."
When the UK government made a commitment to prop up a fake GBP exchange rate and then failed, isn't it the UK government that caused the financial damage rather than George Soros?
Whole countries? I have heard of only one - the infamous british pound. And that too it caused the GBP rates to fall but then financial damage to Britian as a country? What is your source exactly?
Soros wasn’t alone, but the hedges funds certainly helped crush Thailand in 1997, triggering the Asian financial crisis. It’s not a stretch to suggest that his massive funding of political groups in countries in which he has bet against the currency is connected.
Yet Soros wasn't the biggest single speculator to hold a position against the currency. Julian Robertson's Tiger Fund had three times the exposure of Soros with almost $3 billion bet against the baht. If anything, Julian Robertson would have been more motivated to engineer Thailand's decline.
It seems there were only rumors that Soros had anything to do with it, all the while someone else was more profitable than him. And given that he was already famous for the GBP trade why not blame him?
What is interesting is that people don't seem to understand the consequences of pegs. It is much easier to paint a picture of greedy investor. But in most cases it has nothing to do with the investor and all up to the central banks. Something similar happened in the swiss franc and here's what happened to Soros:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-23/how-swiss-national...
because it's a conservative, anti-semitic trope. he is the ur-villian, the mega boss after people tire of you complaining about the clintons. it's been this way for twenty years
Your last point is worded as if Soros is the sole and direct cause of the clamor. I think the more likely cause is the large number of (elderly -- voting!) people for whom facebook is the internet. It serves politicians to play to this confusion, as it gives them a clear company/CEO to point the finger at to appear 'tough on the bad things happening on the internet.' Bill Gates used to be the 'computer person' to old people (the president said in 2015, "We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way." in regards to the internet), and now it's Zuckerberg.
So you're judging him on the fact that he plays Forex and short?
If they didn't want that then it should be made illegal. This is a dubious statement.
thinking that this is possible is disingenuous and such a conservative fever dream.
But let's say they look into it...are they likely to find his criticism to be reasonable and just walk away after that?
I just wonder if you go as far as to investigate such things if you've got some motivation or inclination to find / feel their actions are biased or uncalled for and that might lead to what Facebook did... fire up their own disinformation...
Sounds nailed on to be the DNC nominee then.
Obviously the exception here is Hillary Clinton. But I do wonder about the gender component of the beer test - while she was seen as aloof and alienating a lot of women didn't see Hillary that way.
It’s a spectrum, right? Skill and luck. How much of each has contributed to its success?
There was never any shortage of competitors, and Facebook wasn't the first on the social media scene by any measure. It came out of nowhere and toppled the dominant incumbent, and is still going strong against competition from giants like Google.
Facebook started with Harvard students. Then Boston area colleges, Ivy League, then it was expanded to most universities with a .edu domain. You didn't need invites (Google's preferred method), just to be a member of the right kind of institution. It launched to the public at large in 2006.
Those first couple years, a lot of the use of Facebook was reconnecting with old friends. High school classmates, or if you'd graduated but still had a university email your fellow college classmates. This was a distinct endeavor from Myspace. It was explicitly about connecting people who shared a particular geographic or institutional social context (not any context, school). There were no bands, no autoplaying music. Just you and people you may or may not know connecting to each other.
Now, they obviously intended to grow it into something larger. And they have done a great job with it. Here's the question:
The choice to open it to universities was obviously deliberate, but was the intent to test scaling Facebook or to create an initial critical mass of likeminded, like-aged individuals?
My wager is on the former, though I could be proven wrong. That initial smaller but focused group is what allowed them to successfully compete.
Luck: They stumbled onto a successful model for building a from-scratch social network with their focused approach.
Skill: They intended to be focused on college-aged students believing it would build their critical mass social network more effectively.
Lets see zuck try that - I think he will succeed too at least better than the "charming" presidents of the recent past on either side
TPP cancelled
Prison reform
NAFTA renegotiated (this is something that is nit clear how well he did)
China trade war (which by bloombergs account he has an upper hand in)
North Korea peace
Yes, he closed all those tax loopholes that he is an expert at exploiting (his words, not mine). He implemented his plan to win the war in Afghanistan. The wall along the border of Mexico is 30 feet tall and beautiful and Mexico paid for it. The opioid problem has been solved. He has released his tax returns. He has put his assets in a blind trust. He has Made America Great Again.
He has control over this !massive! amount of data that companies are chomping at the bit for. He’s trying to make sure his company survives and his product does no harm. But, he’s losing control. They’re trying to wiggle out of these wormholes they’ve sunk in and all of their fabrications are coming to light.
To address your first point: he started the company deliberately. He had sold a successful company before Facebook. He also turned down multi-billion dollar acquisition offers because he knew exactly what he was doing and what the opportunity was. Many of the funding rounds for FB were red hot and everyone was trying to get in.
And to your second point: what he built is unprecedented. And because it is unprecedented, there are a lot of questions that we as a society need to answer collectively about the role a product like Facebook plays in our lives (kinda just like with every other new, transformational technology, including email). But to call his execution "In over his head" is laughable. I don't think other leaders would have fared any better and many could have fared much, much worse.
Now, are there questions and valid criticisms about his execution today or his handling of the recent controversies? Of course! Does that mean he's a random guy with a side-project that accidentally blew up and suddenly he's in over his head? Absolutely not, your comment is more fantasy than reality.
I forgot that he didn't actually end up selling. He did come very close to selling to Microsoft, though.
Here's a bit about it: https://www.revealingthestuffs.com/mark-zuckerbergs-synapse-...
I think any product can become valuable depending on how you market it to your targeted users. FB is said to be somewhere you can go to be with friends and family; share memories, no matter where you are. If we’re going to ignore all of the ads and data mining going on behind the scenes, it’s easy to say that FB is doing a good for society. But it has its flaws.
Just earlier on HN there was a link about FB possibly selling user data. We have the Cambridge Analytica mess from the election.
Zuckerburg is smart when it comes to programming and tech, but running a company ethically is a different ballgame and that is the problem a lot of people have with his company. Nobody is saying he’s doing a bad job at building the product. He’s doing a bad job of managing the trust his users put into him when they use his service every single day.
Alright, not to be rude but this is a dead giveaway that you've never built a business or product before and you don't know what you're talking about.
I hate to call you out like this...I understand the sentiment you're trying to express, but any entrepreneur or product leader who looks at your comment will immediately know that it has no legs in reality.
This is not how any of this works.
Your follow-up is also a completely different argument than the one you initially presented.
I don't know what the editorial team at NYT thinks is happening, but I don't think Sandberg would condone anti semetic attacks against anyone, even rivals.
My statement doesn't constitute a defense, because the NYT has failed to prove that Sanberg explicitly requested an anti-Semitic line of attack be launched again Soros. You'd expect a paper of NYT's stature to not omit the fact that Sandberg & Zuck are Jews themselves, and the likelihood of them conding attacks that paint their own heritage in bad light, is low, if not impossible
That doesn't mean anything and such terrible logic.
There are many cases of Neo Nazi that are Jewish. Just cause they're Jewish doesn't mean they can't hurt other Jewish people.