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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

>Facebook PR: “Today a Senate Commerce subcommittee held a hearing with a former product manager at Facebook who worked for the company for less than two years, had no direct reports, never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives — and testified more than six times to not working on the subject matter in question.”

This doesn't sound like character assassination, it's Facebook claiming that she wasn't informed enough. It would be like the NSA telling us not to listen to Snowden because he didn't actually work on the programs that he obtained documents about.

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Character assassination is not done in one press release. It's done in a campaign of PRs and cossetting friendly journalists and newspapers.

Perhaps it's premature to call it character assassination, but we've seen this play out quite a few times.

I believe that the term of art is "backgrounding".

As in the company provides "background" information such as seems to be the case here. Of course, this is really the company framing the conversation and deflecting the criticisms without addressing them.

I see the discussion here is largely fixated on whether this constitutes a "smear" or not. So, it seems to be working from Facebook's point of view as we are not discussing the actual allegations against them.

It’s a rather unconvincing but mean way to discount someone. If anything, FB saying how unrelated she is to these problems absolves her of being a part of it. Focus on the documents.

Despite that, not everyone has the will to connect these dots.

You're not wrong. But Facebook's attempt to discredit Frances Haugen is poor.

From the congressional hearing today, she did not answer questions beyond her expertise [1], and she had over a decade of relevant experience in Engagement Based Ranking algorithms [2], which was largely the focus of the hearing.

[1] https://youtu.be/GoSPmqqKams?t=4160

[2] https://youtu.be/GoSPmqqKams?t=3482

Sounds to me this type of language can also backfire; next step of Congress could be to then subpoena someone who did work on the subject matter and did have C-level exec access...

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