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Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

There is something that doesn't sit right with me about the whistleblower. Yes, she is a data scientist which gives her many many extra points. But, she was a PM for 2 years in FAANG. Her actual scope of the what was going on in FB as a huge org, as she's trying to comment on (the "I want to fix FB" quotes from 60 minutes)

Everyone I know who works in FAANG, FB specifically, and PMs even more specifically, really have little idea of whats going on in the bigger picture. They kind of understand their little piece of the puzzle, but even then things can get ambiguous sometimes (and this is intentional, as I understand the inner workings at FB)

Bringing her in to the media and Congress as this star witness that understands exactly whats going on seems misleading. People from outside this world are taking her word like we are hearing from someone at the C-suite or an executive who has been with the company for 10+ years

That, and she seems to falsely claim she is an officially titled co-founder of Hinge on her Linkedin

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What's your point here? This lady is a PRODUCT manger and heads up the entire product, in this case Civic Integrity, which was directly charged with tamping down hate on the platform related to civic engagement. She is not a PROJECT manager like what you deal with on your engineering team. She is by definition an expert on this segment of Facebook and you're dismissing her wrongly for being a "PM".

She's a Harvard MBA with a degree in Computer Engineering and experience at Google and Pinterest. She's qualified to have a pretty significant role in the company and rightly so earned the job that she has.

EDIT: I looked into the claim that she co-founded Hinge and it's mostly accurate. She worked with Justin McLeod (Hinge CEO) to build "Secret Agent Cupid" which was Hinge before it rebranded with the launch of it's new mobile app.

Her engineering degree from Olin is more impressive than her MBA from Harvard. If you highlight just one then highlight that. Every idiot with money can get an MBA from Harvard (this is going to be down-voted badly I know; but don't get me wrong, I worked with a lot of very smart MBAs but also with many idiots; the distribution is very wide)

Also, a Facebook PM is not a senior role. While she does have a lot of experience, I doubt she led anything significant at FB with a PM role. With her experience I would expect her to be at least senior PM if not Principal. Probably didn't do well in the interview or maybe concerns about lack of promotions anywhere she worked.

Agree with the Olin point. But disagree on the scope argument; I agree with GP about banality of evil - doesn't matter how small or minor it is

The issue is that her experience at Facebook did not put her in a position know the company strategy.

The company strategy seems pretty self-explanatory from the documents that she released.

Company strategy isn't only what C-level execs chat about behind closed doors. It's also the prioritization strategy that drives decisions throughout every level of the company.

Facebook focuses on "impact". Any engineer, be they veterans or just 6 months in, can tell you priority is always given to projects that drive "core" metrics up, and projects that dip metrics get axed.

If this simple decision-making strategy is what makes and beaks teams, what decides who is successful and who falls behind, and ultimately what gets built and what doesn't, it drives the company. And it's something any employee at any level knows.

The PM people usually deal with on eng teams are product managers and people do call them PMs.

Lots of junior people also have these educational credentials.

Not saying she isn't senior, but these two things mean nothing.

This is simply forgetting the context.

Someone said she doesnt know firm strategy,

The response was that she is one of the best people to speak on this topic.

And then your response dismisses the value of her credentials.

In context, her credentials rebut the claim that she has no perspective. A Harvard MBA and Data Science degree give her unique perspective and valid perspective on what she is talking about.

Further I have watched the Whistleblower deposition and she has said things within the ambit of what she has said.

Additionally I personally have a position to know this particular space and she has repeated things that many already know.

> Everyone I know who works in FAANG, FB specifically, and PMs even more specifically, really have little idea of whats going on in the bigger picture

That's exactly the thing about the banality of evil, any individual person working on some small subsystem or component of something in a FAANG, to them it might not immediately be apparent that what they're doing is enabling the corrosion of democracy and discourse. And enabling the monetization of peoples' attention into endlessly scrolling social media feedback loops.

It's the end result of all the work of hundreds, or thousands of 'engineers' and 'product managers' in facebook working together on their own projects, combined together in aggregate, that turn it into a monster.

You can also see the same thing in hardware and software engineers that work on some small discrete component of some piece of equipment in the defense industry. They might not agree with the total product as it's used in the real world (precision US weapons sold to Saudi Arabia and deployed in Yemen, for instance). But all that one engineer sees is the small item or subsystem that is within their scope of work.

You just compared a social media company to a weapons manufacturer.

Elsewhere, I see comparisons to cigarettes, oxycontin, gambling.

It is easy to see how one might think Facebook to be evil if they are constantly bombarded with these false equivalencies.

Nothing false about those equivalencies. In the case of cigarettes and Facebook you have the exact same practice of optimizing for addiction with no regard for the harm it does.

Not to mention targeting children specifically to foster deeper, longer-term addiction

You really cant see the comparison to gambling? not so long ago most would think that was absurd to put on the list as well

How are they false?

The similarities being talked about center around those companies specifically leveraging the mechanisms of addiction in order to make more money in spite of the fact that doing so harms people.

I think a very good argument can be made that Facebook (among others) are doing this very thing.

Let me put it this way: how would you go about measuring the harm that Facebook or any other social media company causes?

With cigarettes, oxycontin, or weapons manufacturers, you can look directly at the physical harm they cause. We have statistics and studies that require little effort to interpret.

With social media, it is nearly impossible to connect physical or psychological harm to a platform over the course of someone's life. The papers that draw conclusions in this space are based on limited studies and polls that could be influenced by any number of external factors. We judge these things based on little more than feeling.

Now, I think it would be great to be able to make informed decisions based on diligently collected data (and maybe that's what we should be fighting for) but we don't have that right now. Why, in this case, do we seem eager to throw scientific rigor and frankly due process out the window?

The misbehavior of Facebook has been well documented and has been going on for many years. Facebook has been shifty and deceptive in their responses, and there is literally no reason to give them the benefit of any doubt at this point.

Your comments about hard data are well-taken, but you talk as if we have no, or very little, evidence that harm has been (and continues to be) done. I think that we have a lot of evidence to indicate that there's a real problem here -- and one that Facebook continues to downplay. None of that evidence is as clear-cut and solid as physical injury is, but that's to be expected with social harm.

> Why, in this case, do we seem eager to throw scientific rigor and frankly due process out the window?

I'm not eager for that at all. On the other hand, the evidence we do have very strongly indicates (but does not prove) that there's a real, serious issue here. Are you suggesting that we should ignore that? If we waited until there was zero uncertainty on things before taking action, the world would be unacceptably dangerous.

Facebook could have helped on this front by being honest and taking the issue as seriously as they take profit-generation. But they chose not to, and now, after so many years of deceptive and abusive behavior, we have no reason to trust them anyway.

> With social media, it is nearly impossible to connect physical or psychological harm to a platform over the course of someone's life. The papers that draw conclusions in this space are based on limited studies and polls that could be influenced by any number of external factors. We judge these things based on little more than feeling.

Yeah, you'd need to some kind of A/B testing on unsuspecting users and see if you can manipulate their mental health to get worse. Fortunately this sort of thing would never pass an ethics review board. Unfortunately, Facebook either didn't have one at the time or didn't listen to it, because they literally did exactly that.

The discussion around FB, and social media in general, has gone off the deep end. There is no nuance. Facebook is Hitler, Philip Morris, and Purdue combined.

The comparisons are completely relevant. All are companies that provide a product with significant negative societal externalities. The only difference is that social media has yet to be regulated in any way.

Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil) understood CO2 emissions caused by fossil fuel consumption were causing climate change on a catastrophic scale [1]. What followed were decades of denial, push-back and intentional disinformation. Only fairly recently have fossil-fuel companies admitted the product they have so eagerly promoted and sold for decades is destroying life on Earth.

Perhaps what's at stake here is not the careful balance of life on a global scale, but what's worrying is that it's a similar pattern:

- Something bad is going on. Researchers find it can attributed to the cash-cow of a multi-billion company.

- The corporation denies it. They have their own research showing it's good.

- Some time later, the truth comes out. The company knew all along that what they sold was bad, and any internal efforts to make it better were shut down because they hurt the bottom-line.

The planet isn't as stake here but a lot is— teenagers shouldn't be stressing, nor should misinformation keep spreading, etc so Facebook can keep milking its cash cow. The point of comparison isn't that Facebook is literally causing deaths, but that they are putting profits before the well-being of the people they know they're pushing a harmful product to.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210211073059/https://www.nytim...

> But, she was a PM for 2 years in FAANG.

More like 15 years. I've known Frances since 2009 when she was a PM at Google, where she worked on a few products including Google+. She also spent several years an Pinterest which, while not technically a FAANG, is certainly a major social network that does lots of algorithmic ranking. She is definitely an expert in the topics she is testifying about.

my point was, people who work for 2 years at FAANG, in 1 company, far from understand the complete scope. I did not mean she was 2 years into her career

It can take 6 months to just fully understand what a 7 person team does

After 2 years at Facebook, does she really understand the full strategy 4 levels above her? Her leak is super important, but she doesn't have all the answers the media is claiming she does

I think her fundamental argument isn't even really about Facebook specifically. It's about algorithmic content ranking being intrinsically harmful to society. The thing that's specific to Facebook is that they actually have a ton of research quantifying this -- which she has released -- and yet they are still all-in on it.

It doesn't seem like there's a lot of complexity to understand here about how Facebook works as a company. Their commitment to optimizing metrics over all else is well-known already. The interesting thing is the research showing how harmful that is.

I'm not surprised G+ wasn't brought up earlier. What a failure

From her profile:

> In June 2019, she joined Facebook. There, she handled democracy and misinformation issues, as well as working on counterespionage as part of the civic misinformation team, according to her personal website.

So she's not just a random "PM" in Facebook; she was intimately involved in what she's talking about. Please stop trying to spread disinformation.

This is textbook ad hominem:

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

> attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself

Question her motives or qualifications, rather than the claims themselves.

No. I want to see c-level, senior vp's, and around them start answering questions. Now that its in congress, subpoenas are pretty easy

Lucky for Zuck he’s spent the last decade cultivating lots of relationships in DC...

To me at least, something feels very off about this whole situation. Out of the blue some larger-than-life person comes out of the woodwork and is lauded with attention while the big news outlets make this massive push against Facebook, all the while congress is holding hearings and a massive outage happens at Facebook right after the New York Times published an article titled "Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew."

Edit: She is remarkably calm, well-spoken, knowledgeable, and articulate for someone testifying before the Senate for the very first time - all while being broadcast around the globe, live on television. Perhaps she's simply a natural, but I sense she received some coaching and preparation beforehand.

Combine all of this with politicians chomping at the bit to fight online 'misinformation' and I become very skeptical.

It certainly could all just be a perfect storm and Mark Z. has some terrible luck. But again, my intuition is telling me there is something coordinated going on here.

Let me ask you something: How much of the "bigger picture" did Snowden have?

Because, you know, one person is male and the other is female, and I'd really like to believe that gender has nothing to do with it.

They're pretty much seem the same to me

Same with Snowden. The person who needs to answer the question is 10 levels above him

She is showing us "evil stuff happened"

The question we're asking is "Did evil stuff happen on purpose, and who directed it"

Both Snowden and Her can't honestly answer than question (Snowden wasn't really an official employee IIRC)

My issue is her portrayal not by herself but mostly by the media like she can prove the latter

>Everyone I know who works in FAANG, FB specifically, and PMs even more specifically, really have little idea of whats going on in the bigger picture.

First, I disagree with your assertion, based on my experience in, well, working anywhere. Two years as a PM in the field on which she is blowing the whistle is not a lack of credibility (others are saying her PM experience at FB dealt with the kinds of issues that would make her pretty informed).

Second, if what you say is true, then what kind of Hell is Facebook? This behemoth of a company, this pillar of society is somehow so large that only a handful of privileged overseers can possibly understand its mechanics?

Tear it down, then.

Are there any specific parts of her testimony that you disagree with?

From what I have seen, everything she has said tracks correctly, and does not go outside her realm of knowledge.

She has limited her focus very clearly, for example on FB prioritizing reshares vs a known increased risk of violence.

So she is in perfect position say that FB has chosen to prioritize growth over user safety.

Well, yes and no.

While as a PM (or IC) she'd be primarily working on a scoped area of work, the reality is also that she likely didn't come to learn all this on her own. At nearly any large tech company it's pretty easy to get in touch with someone on another team and learn more about their work, etc.

The fact that she's been able to get all this context and significant supporting documentation points to her not having gone about this totally solo (despite her claims).

There's also something to note about things being intentionally ambiguous-- that's by design to prevent most ICs from putting together broader context. But it's not clear that it would prevent a highly motivated employee from amassing broader context. Like I said before, with even a bit more context other ICs can be looped in to fill in the gaps.

You're giving Facebook far too much credit here.

FYI the lady was the Product Manager and ran the entire Civic Engagement group. She's not just a project manager working on a team of devs.

Every small engineering team I have worked on had its own product manager.

Right, but my point is that even if she ran the entire civic engagement group it's naive to think she couldn't find out more about what's going on in other orgs if properly motivated. She'd have to go out of her way to do it and do a fair amount of digging but it's far from impossible.

>FYI the lady was the Product Manager and ran the entire Civic Engagement group. She's not just a project manager working on a team of devs.

See, i'd just like to hear more of this

* How many direct reports did she have?

* What was her official FB level?

* What level of management were in meetings with her?

* Who did she directly report into?

All really good context most people are ignoring

She collected all this info from Facebook Workplace. Nearly everything is available there. It’s very open.

> Bringing her in to the media and Congress as this star witness that understands exactly whats going on seems misleading

I mean, they tried bringing Zuckerberg in, but he apparently just lied, so she seems like the best option to get honest informed answers.

Maybe she read the internal docs and meeting notes? Most employees wouldn't notice an proverbial elephant farm in another department aslong as it didn't involve them directly. Even if it was advertized in mails and on billboards ...

So who do you propose to bring in and testify against Facebook who does understand the bigger picture, shmatt?

Are you arguing in good faith here?

At minimum it needs to be someone who is aware of the company strategy.

She simply doesnt have any relevant knowledge.

This is all politics.

"Oh, they're a Corporal? They don't know the strategy."

"Oh, they're a General? They don't know what's actually in the trenches."

Question both then?

like i've written in other comments

She has proven evil happened, we're now asking who directed it. The first thing we need to know is who did she report into, and who the most senior person in her teams meetings was.

From there just keep going up, it will stop at some point (I have no doubt there will be zuck martyrs, just wondering at which level)

The importance here is she understands the B2C model for revenue which is to test and test some more and let the date optimize your funnel. That’s the story and that method has lots of unintended chickens coming home to roost

So, what, we should just wait until Zuckerberg decides to get his act together one day and admit he's been a wee bit evil?

The whole point of whistleblowing is so the average worker cna tattle on the unethical decisions made by leadership. The C-suite isn't going to volunteer for the guillotine.

There is not much mystery here IMO.

The obvious options: - she went in with an agenda from the beginning intending to get this stuff - she went in, discovered that the sociopathic pattern she'd been warned about and had a nagging doubt about was worse than she though, got the religion, and got the stuff

As an aside,

Facebook hires smart. Both of these and her success are consistent with a smart and motivated person. Isn't that what we're supposed to be selecting for? Isn't drive and high functioning what Facebook is filtering for?

More: isn't setting aside moral misgivings and agonizing, in pursuit of achievement of your mission, EXACTLY what Facebook is trying to filter for...?

Always a shame when the sword cuts the wielder!

But back to the point: does it matter which of these is true?

Not to me, or to democracy; the bottom line is that it takes an action like this to force the endless malfeasance, amorality, and actual destructive behavior into public consciousness. Not least when fighting a machine that seeks to stifle criticism and control narrative: this is indeed exactly what she is bringing receipts on.

The supposition seems to be that she is a plant, sent on a mission to bring down Facebook.

Let's say that's the case.

I have no issue with that, as Facebook belongs down.

I don't care who paid for this skullduggery—especially if it's the US taxpayer.

The GOP has done everything it can to curtail the ability of the state to challenge the power of accumulated capital.

I would applaud a game leveling asymmetric warfare style methods to do the state's work.

Indeed, this would be a remarkable and rare return on taxpayer money, should it bring about the dismantling of their profoundly caustic monopoly.

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