Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I was pretty annoyed after I watched the Netflix documentary on this to find out it was produced by the same people at "FuckJerry." That's also why they had so much better "inside" footage compared to the Hulu one. I watched them both, and from a visual/entertaining stand point, the Netflix one was far superior, but the Hulu one was much more informative and critical of all parties involved. Clearly this article explains that neither were innocent, though. I just feel like Netflix was pretty sketchy not to include a disclaimer at the start or end of theirs to explain that the people at "FuckJerry" were a producer of the doc.

The whole thing, from the festival itself to the documentaries, is incredibly fascinating. Just another example of the plague that is social media. In years to come, I expect we will only see more stories of this level of social media marketing manipulation. It's scary.

View on HN

"Just another example of the plague that is social media"

I'm not an advocate for Social Media. But i do not see Fyre Festival as a product of Social Media. Social Media was a tool that Fyre Frestival used very effectively. But if Instagram or whatever didn't exist i guarantee you Billy would have been running some other high risk fraudulent venture. It's who he is. Instead of social media as the tool, it may have been tv or radio. Heck, what about all the railway scams that existed back when we had only newspapers. Conmen will always find a way.

> Conmen will always find a way.

During the south sea bubble vendors sold shares in the streets.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company#/media/Fil...

NPR had a very interesting article on scammers in the 1800s: https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/02/12/385...

The first guy would be a perfect fit for GoFundMe.

Agreed. However I see Billy as a product of the startup culture embracing failure. You have an idea for a company, convince someone else to finance it, the company fails and that person looses all their money. If that company succeeds then you're hailed as the next Steve Jobs despite the very real possibility you're a conman at heart like Billy.

FuckJerry deserves all the backlash they get and probably more but we can't let them overshadow the type of culture that has allowed someone like Billy to be doing this for so long.

I’ve only seen the Netflix one. Although nobody looks good in the documentary, the involvement of one of the parties in the production is certainly troubling. There is no way to make it even seem objective if they were involved. I’m discounted.

Same, but my understanding is that in the Netflix doc, some of the people on the agency side were claiming that they had no knowledge or involvement, which is in question because they could have made the doc to distance themselves from the mess.

Then again, Hulu paid an undisclosed amount of money to Billy McFarland for an interview on a documentary after he scammed a whole bunch of people.

Noone can throw the first stone here.

To be fair though, Billy basically didn't answer any questions during that interview (at least that were put into the final cut). Nearly every question asked of him was met with awkward silence and pursed lips, or canned "I have no knowledge.." or "I can't comment on.." responses. I don't know that his interview added any bias in terms of what was shown in the film.

Yep, he didn't truly seem remorseful either. He was more interested in protecting himself from any further legal issues. I don't think it was ethical to pay for his interview whatsoever.

Doesn't that make it worse? They paid him money and didn't really get anything out if it means he just scammed someone else.

Which is likely a deliberate editing choice. Billy was paid to do the interview and then the director showed all that awkwardness to illustrate the depth of the grift.

It's not a competition - both docs can be biased or contain misinformation. The Netflix doc was accused of what I'm outlining.

Paying a scumbag for an interview is problematic in the sense that it shows a willingness to "fund bad people" in exchange for their stories. This does not create a conflict of interest, or the appearance of a bias.

Having the scumbags who were responsible for producing the festival involved in producing the documentary can lead to a MASSIVE conflict of interest and screams of bias in the narrative.

This is a false equivalency. One is good jurnos doing bad things to tell the story. The other could be bad jurnos doing a bad thing to spin a story.

But they did grill him pretty hard in that interview, at least. I think the interview scenes reinforced he was a complete liar and charlatan. I was not aware they paid him for it, but I think it was valuable to present his side of the story (and knock it down if it was bullshit - which it was, and which they did).

Well, Internet Historian can.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBPg5ftCMv8

It's a Netflix documentary intended for entertainment. I think expecting it to the objective at all wasn't very realistic in the first place.

A lot of people in the Netflix special (the marketing/pr consultants, the models, some of the influencers and other "outside" firms) came off pretty well. The view I think it was pushing was that they failed to do their due diligence but in a way that everybody fails to do, so no biggie. I am aware that this lack of due diligence isn't at all uncommon in the modern world but it is a problem. Subcontracting out the removal of toxic waste then throwing up your hands and saying "I had no idea that the firm was going to throw that directly in the river after we paid them peanuts" is illegal (though... not always prosecuted... separate issue) and contracting out services is similar.

This, I think, is where the fallacy of the gig economy comes from. As an example Uber should not be held not-at-fault if one of their drivers breaks the law, the standard needs to be the same as if a UPS driver did the same thing.

I do agree they should have disclosed this at the top.

They promoted the thing and it could be argued hold some responsibility for the failure.

Could you elaborate on what "FJerry" is for the uninformed.

It's a social media marketing agency [1] (the article mentions they are trying to rebrand though as "Jerry Media" [2]) that lead all the social media marketing for the festival. They also mainly known for having a very popular Instagram account [3] where they have been in trouble in the past for reposting memes or content without giving credit to the creators. Basically people pay them to post content or spread content through their social media "influencer" network.

[1] http://fuckjerry.com/ [2] http://jerrystudios.com/ [3] https://www.instagram.com/fuckjerry

Was going through their instagram and noticed one of their obviously paid posts pushing the Hinge dating app:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqDzdzLBJti/

I tried looking up the girl in the tweet to see if even that part was real and the username (https://twitter.com/dontcallortext_) doesn't exist, nor does searching "Simone Axing". So I'm guessing the entire tweet was manufactured for marketing purposes.

I guess fake tweets interspliced within other stolen content is modern marketing 101.

>> modern marketing 101

No, it's false advertising and misleading business practices, if not plainly illegal. The regulations just haven't caught up to this because politicians are terrible at understanding how this works and the public doesnt care.

Famous people endorsing snake oil has been a thing since famous people and snake oil, instagram is just the latest way to serve it up.

I get that, but there are rules governing that on other mediums. There are specifics to every distribution channel that change how something like this occurs and the impact it has. Social media currently has 0 accountability or oversight.

>only see more stories of this level of social media marketing manipulation

Yes. See the news about Burning Man and the Humana Camp. Mobile right now can't grab the links easily but I will try to come back with them.

I mean, Im not sure the meta-deception could be anymore apropos given the topic and response. I think the backstory takes a good story and makes it an accidental masterpiece.

Except that Hulu paid Billy Mcfarland, whereas NetFlix didn't. I see Netflix as the more responsible party in terms of compensating bad actors in this case. With that said, I have a strong disdain for FuckJerry and their founder Elliot Tebele.

Mcfarland has been sentenced for wire fraud and his sentence includes restitution for Fyre festival; so it seems this complaint of hulu is nearly fungible (where Netflix seems to have offered direct restitution that may or may not have counted toward Mcfarland's debt)

The "FuckJerry" people apparently had final cut.

"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it"

Churchill

And indeed some of the awful screw ups that Churchill made at the start of WW2 (which bizarrely led to him being made PM) have been mostly removed from history - the Narvik campaign in particular.

That fuckjerry was involved doesnt really matter imho. I dont really care who specifically was to blame. The lesson is that the entire situation was allowed to happen. The individual personalities are secondary to the larger story. What matters is what physically happened. Blame and who made what decision doesnt matter to the lessons we should all take from the overall event. So some internal bias doesnt really alter my opinion of the doc.

It doesn't bother you that they could splice out any footage that would make themselves look worse? Or cut in footage out of context that would make themselves look better?

Having watched the movie I can't say that they got away with anything...the blame got evenly distributed

Reply on news.ycombinator.com