What the Wall Street Journal Got Wrong (by FB VP of Global Affairs) | Hacker News Reader

What the Wall Street Journal Got Wrong (by FB VP of Global Affairs)

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20 pointsalihm23 comments

It's kind of weird watching an ex deputy prime minister (famous mainly for betraying his supporters and reneging on his flagship campaign promise so he could stay deputy PM) get so self-righteously indignant about the idea that he and his employer might have motives that arent completely pure.

The fact he claimed that the motives of the researchers were impugned as if they made the decision to ignore their own research is even more bizarre.

Nick Clegg is a clown.

FYI the author of this post is paid just shy of 4 million dollars a year by Facebook to say this sort of stuff.

He's a former head of state, of course he's expensive.

He most certainly is not. The Queen is the head of state of the United Kingdom, and Clegg was only deputy prime minister in any case.

Further clarification: deputy prime minister is not a position that exists as a matter of constitution in the UK. The position was created for Clegg as the junior partner in a coalition government. I think it has existed before and no doubt will again, but you don't need to have a deputy PM.

He also reneged so hard on a campaign promises as part of the 2010 coalition his Liberal Democrat party was wiped out in the 2015 election and is now a non-entity in British politics. They went from 57 seats to 8.

I'm British. I used to be able to name the leader of the lib dems in the same way I knew the leaders of labour and the conservatives. I now no longer know who they are and I don't think anyone else cares either.

So yeah the guy that brought that about is earning 4MM/yr.

> Further clarification: deputy prime minister is not a position that exists as a matter of constitution in the UK.

the same is true of prime minister!

Very true, but the role exists by long standing convention, which in the UK is almost as good ;)

Whereas the role of deputy PM is much more nebulous.

I guess I really wanted to contrast this against the US VP, which while that also hasn't always existed, does mean something, e.g. the next in line of succession and senate tie breaker.

Clegg bet big on a referendum to replace First Past The Post with Alternative Vote. He believed that this would greatly increase the power of third parties, especially his third party.

It was rejected by a 2:1 margin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_Voting_System_an...

It's possible that it could have been a huge win, which would have enabled all of the rest of his (and the LibDem's) agenda. Instead, it basically destroyed the party.

His successor tried to resuscitate it, when Labour failed to be an anti-Brexit party. That was a huge opportunity. But they were so far behind after Clegg's debacle that all it really did was to turn some Labour seats to Tory.

I forgot about that. I think they wanted proportional representation / single transferable vote and alternative vote was already a compromise.

They also promised tuition fees would be abolished. As a junior partner they were unlikely to achieve that, but the government they were part of ended up tripling them. So they didn't even 'prevent things from getting worse'.

Why do referendums to replace FPTP fail so often? It is an objectively less democratic system.

Yeah it didn’t exist under Blair — then Gordon Brown was the de facto #2 but it was never an official designation.

But it did. John Prescott was Deputy Prime Minister under Blair. And Michael Heseltine was Deputy Prime Minister in the previous Tory government.

Wow, mine was just an amazingly brain-dead post, but it also reinforces the idea that the deputy PM isn’t the PM-in-waiting.

Apologies, and thanks for the correction! I forgot about parliamentary systems distinguishing those two (heads of government / of state).

This is hardly a rebuttal. I wish it had actually provided some content to address specific claims in the WSJ articles, rather than simply asserting that their central thesis is "just plain false" and leaving it at that.

Yes, He’s just stonewalling.

And if this is the official response from Facebook…

Pardon my skepticism of a guy in charge of global affairs of a company that openly "curates" news feeds to "maximize engagement" with 0 regard for facts and logic trying to criticize a news agency for "selective reporting". Pot, kettle?

Do you have a citation of how they "openly" not give any weight to facts?

Their algorithms are based on predicted engagement not truthfulness. One is trivial to measure and the other very difficult.

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-provides-new-...

Being difficult to measure doesn't mean they don't try though. It would just mean they are less likely to fully succeed.

I would be pretty surprised if they don't have a "disinformation penalty" as a factor in the scoring function.

> It’s a claim which could only be made by cherry-picking selective quotes from individual pieces of leaked material in a way that presents complex and nuanced issues as if there is only ever one right answer.

Distributing narratives (worldview, values, etc) is basically the function of the news today.

Hard facts are commoditized, they're available for free as AP wires. Picking, omitting, and organizing these facts to construct narrative–that's where each news organization can add its own flair.

The "research into the impact social media has on people is still relatively nascent and evolving" bit reminded me of Exxon knowing in 1979 that fossil fuels caused climate change and for the next 40 years pushing the narrative that the science wasn't settled.

Reasonable, but misses the key point that he simply can't address.

Is social media a good idea for teenagers? As parents, should we be finding ways to limit their use? At least until it becomes more clear that it makes a positive impact.

This, to me, is what I got from the WSJ article. Not how / good bad FB is. I mean - Capitalist company going to capitalize. Duh.

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