What It’s Like to Report on Facebook | Hacker News Reader

What It’s Like to Report on Facebook

cjr.org

With his characteristic geeky excitement, Zuckerberg described the promising initial test flight of Aquila, a drone with a wingspan larger than a 737 jet that was part of his plan to provide internet connectivity all over the world.
Though Newton hadn’t witnessed the test flight in Yuma, Arizona—no members of the press were invited—he believed Zuckerberg’s account of it. When his article was published, it reported that Aquila “was so stable that they kept it in the air for 90 minutes before landing it safely.”

Months later, however, a Bloomberg story revealed that the flight hadn’t gone so smoothly after all—Aquila had crashed. While the craft had indeed stayed aloft for longer than intended, high winds tore a chunk out of a wing, leading to a crash landing.

Interesting episode! It would be interesting to know if this was intentional deception or incompetent ignorance on Zuck's part.

More interesting, I think, is why a "reporter" reported as fact something that they didn't witness and had no way to verify except from the words of one very biased source. And what added value this kind of "reporting" provides - if we wanted to know what Zuckerberg wants to say, we can read the press release?

This is all too common a pattern nowdays - instead of reporting something that happens the press reports something that somebody (usually extremely biased and frequently anonymous) said about something that might happen, or, as frequently turns out later, didn't happen. It's much easier and cheaper, but its contribution to the society is net negative.

When it comes to things like internal R&D projects, military and government matters, and a huge amount of the tech industry's goings-on, the only source is the company itself. This is a serious challenge facing press in many industries.

How do you propose Casey should have challenged or verified whether the Aquila flew as well as claimed? Any data about the craft would come from FB, any paper describing it would be published by FB, any researchers who worked on it would work at FB. Anyone else who might be an "objective" source would be under NDA. Companies are very thorough about this sort of thing.

A journalist doing an investigative piece on the Aquila would not take Zuckerberg's words as gospel, but that doesn't mean those words are unimportant. This was a news piece, and CEOs speaking publicly about an R&D project, and answering questions and so on, is an opportunity to provide a different kind of value. Readers are curious about details companies don't always provide, and also require context that isn't always obvious. Reporters do this work too - it's not all cloak and dagger stuff, whistleblowers and top-secret dossiers.

Aquila was a solar-powered drone that FB wanted to use to create a laser-powered internet for developing countries. That's an interesting story that should be told - and not just by the company, which would leave out important parts like opposition to Internet.org or indeed the unfinished nature of the aircraft. That's important work for reporters as well - filling in those gaps so that readers' understanding of a topic or event is more full than it would be had only people with a stake in it done so.

I also have not seen the pattern you describe and am not sure it's as endemic as you suggest.

> the only source is the company itself

Then don't report it as fact. With all blatant editorializing going on right now, simple "we've been told by company representatives that X but we have no independent verification of this" would already do. And also maybe give company the incentive to actually make their claims verifiable.

> How do you propose Casey should have challenged or verified whether the Aquila flew as well as claimed

Maybe he couldn't verify it. Then he should have told "we don't know what happened, only thing we know what biased sources told us, so that's all we have for now". Maybe less sensational but more true.

> Reporters do this work too - it's not all cloak and dagger stuff, whistleblowers and top-secret dossiers.

True. But just refusing to parrot the press release would already be a step forward - if the company knows their unverified press releases would always have asterisk next to it, they'd have an incentive to make them more verifiable. Or at least the honest ones would. And thus we'd get a way to distinguish between honest companies and cheaters.

> That's an interesting story that should be told

Sure, what should not be told is what actually didn't happen except in company's press release - and the reporter reported it as something that did happen, because they wanted to juice up the story and pretend they have more access than they actually did. As a human, I can understand that weakness, as a consumer of the press I can not forgive it.

> How do you propose Casey should have challenged or verified whether the Aquila flew as well as claimed?

How did Bloomberg do it? By not publishing immediately, checking other sources. Also known as journalism.

Bloomberg covered Aquila at the time (a couple times) citing Facebook claims, using Facebook b-roll and Zuckerberg interviews.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-30/facebook-...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-27/after-goo...

They, like every other outlet, covered the news with the resources immediately available, then followed up later when information became available that led them to question the completeness of Facebook's account and details of the project.

This is such an insightful comment. I worked as a reporter for a little outside-of-Philly paper in the 2000s and it was the extreme taboo to report on something you couldn't independently verify. Even then pay was bad and younger folks were bailing ship. Now newsrooms are so gutted that there is no staff left to do this kind of reporting.

Neither, it's just PR speak: the plane landed "safely" in the sense that no one was injured and only some property damage occurred.

No, that's deceptive and projects weakness and insecurity. You can put a turd in a gold box, but it's still a turd.

If a man needs to stretch the language to conceal a trivial event that is publicly known, what else is he hiding? It's weird on many levels, as yakking about the disappointment of a pet/vanity project's stumble on it's ascent to greatness is a great distraction from the substance of Facebook.

what's worse, this is a systemic issue not at all unique to facebook.

it all started when every pizzeria became the best pizza in the city; and just goes off from there.

Saying something landed safely when it actually crashed goes beyond mere puffery.

Calling deception "PR speak" doesn't make it not deception.

So intentional deception.

You mean whether the decision not to invite any members of the press to the test flight was intentional or incompetence?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702169

Case in point, here's a HackerNews link to an article by Nick Clegg, the former British Lib-Dem party leader now FB VP of Global Affairs and Communications, using AdAge to impart some semblance of legitimacy. The article's headline is complete BS: "Facebook Does Not Benefit from Hate" my ass. They benefit from hate speech every damn day that shit's on their site, because eyeballs == $$. The article ends with the ridiculous notion that "We may never be able to prevent hate from appearing on Facebook entirely, but we are getting better at stopping it all the time." A company with the resources of Facebook can do practically anything it wants. If hate speech was look at with the same level of disgust as child porn, would the above statement still hold true? And getting better all the time? By what measure?

Oh, it was that Nick Clegg. The one who destroyed the Lib-Dem party by voting the Tory party into power, without getting anything meaningful in return. I thought perhaps the name was a coincidence.

Yeah, he should have insisted on a different voting system as a condition of coalition, instead of the referendum.

Given that the referendum failed by a 2:1 margin, I don't think he'd have been any more popular even if they had gotten their alternative voting system.

Maybe it's one of those things that voters would have liked once they had experience with it, but if Clegg thought it was something voters were clamoring for, he was very wrong.

Clegg's mistake was agreeing to "alternative vote" being an option instead of a proper system of proportional representation which would have made a victory like Johnson's in late 2019 near impossible (though not impossible, as the Scottish system _designed_ to keep the SNP out of power showed).

In terms of moderating an otherwise horrific bunch of people (see every action since 2015), Clegg and the Liberal Democrats did a reasonable job.

Do not read this as a defence of his employment at Facebook, where he has shown himself to be for sale to the highest bidder at any available opportunity.

>If hate speech was look at with the same level of disgust as child porn, would the above statement still hold true?

Of course this is a slippery slope where you rely on Facebook defining what hate speech is. It may seem fine to you now but there's no reason to think Facebook won't in the future start defining things you typically like to say as hate speech.

> They benefit from hate speech every damn day that shit's on their site, because eyeballs == $$.

I don't think that considers the opportunity cost.

I wish there was a way for tech to handle the underlying problem. Facebook is the big massive cherry on top of everything, but we’ve been optimizing and hacking society ever since the 24 hour news channel became a thing.

Once we crossed a few critical milestones - 24 hour news, concentration of news agencies, buyouts by large firms - the templates for the current predicament was writ.

Human minds are hackable.

Violence, sex, and bias sells. “News”, “truth” are too slippery and malleable as concepts to hold corporations to.

This will always create a race to the bottom, of the same nature as willful pollution of the environment.

Facebook is the obvious target, but so is YouTube, Twitter, Reddit. What’s horrifically worse is that this is America talking about excesses with social media it identifies.

There’s no space in most of the discussions on HN which consider the global scope of this problem - and it is a global issue.

The model of captive news channel spraying crazy fodder to build up stories and tilted facts so that crops of confused and opinionated voters can be harvested is a global phenomenon.

This isn’t a problem as easy to solve as techno utopists thought. The internet doesn’t route around censorship (as well as it did).

But it’s still a problem to solve. There has to be a way to break the attention economy while also doing justice to newsworthy content - not simply censoring Mexican gang violence news because American/UK friends of Facebook Employees come online and tell them to remove it (Custodians of the internet.)

Edit: Sure - the internet is a (Many) step changes away from the cable news era. It’s a whole different beast.

But the more I spend time looking at the problem, the more it seems to be a function of tools/ecosystems with a faster rate of revolution than our native ability to process. It’s still the Fight for attention span and ad dollars driving the race to the bottom.

Anyway, this is one of those useless rants that describes a problem (hopefully fairly) without any solution. I guess getting the problem definition right (or separated) would be a good enough start.

I think part of the problem is that people lack the imagination, or the cynicism, to see that their tools will be turned against them in due time.

Activists get a huge rush from influencing social media platforms by dishonest means, and the people operating those platforms are all too happy to oblige, because of the precedent it sets, and in part because they agree.

Media companies got too used to manipulating this phenomenon when the ad money was there, now they're just left there holding the gun, with an itchy trigger finger and a target-rich environment.

This page took upwards of 20 seconds to allow me to scroll (or do anything) on the page. Shockingly bad performance.

(just checked again in an incognito window, and counted 33 seconds).

I checked the network tab and weirdly it was downloading the same image over and over again. Very strange...

Came here for this. How did computing evolve to the point where in 2020 it takes half a minute to display some text & images and be able to scroll on the page?!

I've recently swiched to using Links on the linux framebuffer as my primary browser. No javascript and a very fast HTML parser and graphics driver and I've been blown away at how much time I now save never waiting on a page load.

The page in question took less than a half a second to fetch and completely render. On a circa 2006 ThinkPad (Core 2 1.85GHz).

Ahaha, oh! At first I thought it was some artsy web page brick wall statement or something. Now that I clicked back, there's actually content too! Thank you revealing it for me. Weren't it for you, it'd probably just kept scrolling HN lol!

just realised the redownloading images was to do with resizing the window. no idea what was stopping the page from allowing scrolling. (this was on desktop on a solid internet connection for context).

It loaded immediately here. Is your ad blocker properly configured?

Yep, both uBlock origin and privacy badger. Btw, loading the page finished after a couple of seconds, but scrolling wasn't possible for over 30s. I checked the performance metrics in chrome out of interest but couldn't figure out why.

> The Aquila drone was soon grounded and, within two years, the entire program scrapped

Gee, it seems bonkers to scrap it just because it had a problem on a test flight, right? Presumably it was scrapped because they decided that it wouldn't be profitable, not because they couldn't fix whatever made it crash.

> Gee, it seems bonkers to scrap it just because it had a problem on a test flight, right?

That depends entirely on the nature of the problem revealed during the test. Some tests may reveal that an idea won't work and the whole project is unsalvageable.

Facebook were trying to build a very large (43m wingspan) very light (400kg) aircraft, with the intention of using it for ultra-long endurance missions (90 days) in remote areas. For remote endurance in the field you need durability. Evidently more durability than was possible given the lightweight construction, since it was destroyed by the wind. I can easily see that sort of failure damning the whole project.

"The company controls the communications and informational intake of more than two and a half billion people."

That's scary.

Facebook used to be useful as a way to keep track of what my friends were doing. But the front page filled with more and more off-topic junk. Now I don't use Facebook at all.

Yep, deactivated my account just the other day and deleted the facebook app from my phone. I don't need a constant stream of advertising and political propaganda.

I can seek those things out on my own if I want them.

There are tools to handle that - like FB Purity. Of course, not using it is always an option.

There's no question that Facebook attempts to shape the media narrative. But there's no need for any careful journalistic exposés to show that. The fact that there's a corporate PR department is enough.

But Facebook is not just another company that's being objectively scrutinized by journalists who are acting in the public interest. Among other effects, Facebook threatens the practice of journalism itself, and much of the reporting is intended to craft that narrative. That's indicated at the bottom of the article:

> What Facebook has become is the press’s assignment editor, its distribution network, its great antagonist, devourer of its ad revenue, and, through corporate secrecy, a massive block to journalism’s core mission of democratic accountability.

The problem I have is with this claim that the press is a democratic institution that acts in the public interest. In reality, the press is owned by billionaires. Influential journalists and editors come from a particular class of society through elite universities. No mechanisms for democratic accountability exist and the public has no real input into the agenda or topics that are covered. At the same time, journalists maximize their own power by relentlessly promoting the idea that (at least nominally) democratic institutions like government and politics are always untrustworthy and corrupt.

http://archive.is/NYrtV

"[Casey] Newton’s professional arc, from enthusiastic tech beat reporter to skeptical industry investigator, matches the trajectories of a number of journalists in recent years."

This is the natural progression. And the bigger story.

I'm barely interested in Facebook or their antics. Maybe because I had already lived this story a few times.

Like most geeks in my cohort, I started as a technophile, which is Neal Postman's pejorative, steeped in libertarian and transhumanism ideology. Then I started to notice the ledgers kept not adding up, promised advances failed to materialize, people of poor constitution repeatedly gobbled up all the resources.

At some point I read Technopoly and Design of Everyday Things. Those and many other skeptics gave voice to my misgivings. Then I learned about prior technological waves causing mass social upheaval and what kind of people ended up on top. (The French have a cliche for this...)

The hero worship and suspension of disbelief was the problem. People are still just people. I'm glad the Teflon coatings are starting to wear off. So we can resume talking about this stuff like adults.

Technopoly ought to be considered in that group of books held as 'mandatory reading', alongside 'Mythical Man Month', 'Clean Code', and 'The Soul of a New Machine'.

"A similar tactic was employed in 2018, after George Soros criticized Facebook as a “menace” against which society needed to be defended in a public speech in Davos. The company hired a firm to produce incendiary pro-Facebook research that contained anti-Semitic tropes about Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, as the shadowy funder of anti-Facebook groups. The documents were then passed around to journalists with the urging that they look into Soros’s financial interests. In the ensuing controversy, Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s head of comms and policy and already on the way out, was blamed, while Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg stated they had no knowledge of the affair."

How does Facebook get away with this kind of stuff?

Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish, and Soros really is a billionaire who funds all sorts of NGO's and has financial interests in all kinds of things, so I think it would be pretty hard to make something stick.

Someone’s membership of <identifiable tribe or social grouping> does not confer a specific additional moral obligation to defend a fellow member of their tribe/group more than they might deserve otherwise.

Indeed this myth is actively invoked by bigots & bullies in conjunction with a counterexample as a twisted justification for ongoing persecution.

I was not saying it does - I'm saying it's harder to go after someone for anti-Semitism when they're Semitic.

Although now that I've seen the document in question, I must say there's really nothing there anyway.

What kind of a journalist publish a story without corraborating it? Facebook is scum. But on the flip side these so called journalists are a sham.

"Several reporters told me that Facebook, like other large tech companies, makes aggressive use of off-the-record sourcing to obstruct the reporting process. “It’s pretty standard for a tech comms person to give you an on-record statement, they’ll talk about the story with you on background, and then when it’s published, they’ll come back to you and try to undermine it off the record,” says Biddle."

I must say, I never thought of it this way till today. Big Tech and Donald Trump are basically two peas from the same pod.

Journalists are lazy and PR people are sneaky. Whose fault is that? Why, of course, Donald Trump's!

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