Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
So, yeah, Facebook continues to be the single greatest threat to Western society outside of Russia. These are serious issues with serious consequences.
Except TikTok, like Facebook, is not available in China. The 抖音 platform cannot see posts from tiktok.
I can't help but roll my eyes whenever I come across such statements. Which one is it now guys? Russia or China or Iran or Muslims or Liberals or etc.?
The single greatest threat to Western society is itself.
This is ridiculous hyperbole.
And TikTok, as a Chinese company whereupon they can be compelled to do the bidding of the CCP at any time, in whatever terms, remains problematic.
It doesn't matter what the 'founder' thinks.
Xi (and the CCP) don't interfere directly very often, but he can and will do so as he chooses. He's an Emperor. Nobody has that kind of power in Japan.
Yes, if someone is pointing Nuclear Weapons at Japan, they will force Yahoo.jp to fork over data on the spot, but otherwise, no.
In China, a random person making a comment about someone in government could be suppressed as a matter of 'national interest'.
It's pointless to make rhetorical analogies. Even if one could argue they are 'different in extent and not in character' (though I would disagree), the 'extent of difference' is sufficient to make them different in character.
A random person walking down the street has little to fear in either country, but that line can be crossed quickly and arbitrarily in authoritarian regimes.
This is obviously much more of a concern for companies in the information domain such as social media or finance, than others such as manufacturing.
Donald Trump for example, could not remove the Google founders by any means.
If Facebook did this to Tiktok, you can bet it tried similar tactics against Snapchat.
Why is Zuckerberg the boogieman? He just wants to run his company well and get as many eyeballs on paid advertisements as possible... right? Why is there some notion that he wants to push either a liberal or conservative agenda internationally?
It's near impossible to moderate a billion people posting crap on a social media platform well enough to the point where you keep everybody happy. How does this make him "the single greatest threat to Western society outside of Russia"?
Yes he is a very large threat to Western society, the United States of America and world peace. The current state of affairs should be the proof anyone needs.
Yes, I would definitely agree that this is the case and I think that is a large part of the problem. The Machiavellian ends justifying the means equates to him not caring about the negative impacts that he has on society while trying to attract the most eyeballs possible.
The idea has, however, been catching on that Zuckerberg may just be a Greenwald-Democrat, i. e. someone going through a process of alienation in increasingly schizophrenic episodes.
Combine bad faith with the power of Facebook and it's possible to consider that dangerous. The superlative feels strange indeed, but can you think of any other credible alternative, especially outside of (party) politics?
> these failing have been interpreted as growing pains and various lapses in skill or judgement.
"[...]have been interpreted[...]" are wikipedia "weasel words" here; this is really what centrist party Democrats feel. They interpret the acts of "smart and happy" middle-class people through the lens of "people trying to do good badly" rather than "people doing what they want to do, consistently with what they've always done."
These are the only people that need to rationalize their associations with Facebook, and this is how they do it. Republicans and libertarian-types don't actually think these are issues that Facebook should be concerned about, and lefties don't need to to rehabilitate Facebook.
No it’s not. The greatest threat to any society is its own ineptitude.
this statement is both hyperbolic and naive at the same time.
It was a tool used to influence elections in the United States, I can't think of any other entity that has had a larger negative impact on our society recently (maybe coronavirus?).
Are you talking about fake Russian accounts buying $100k worth of facebook ads in 2016? That constitutes 0.00625% of total spending (1.6 bn) on the 2016 election. Or are you talking about something else?
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/facebook-sold-100000-ads-fak...
This is very well documented https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
And I don’t know why the sister comment about Facebook being used to commit genocide in Myanmar was flagged and killed. This is also well documented by eg the NYT and the UN. It was also admitted by Facebook itself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
The only saving grace is that this is probably but not certainly a bluff.
Ukraine is not part of "western society". Numerous Western politicians have had off-mic moments in which they admitted that dangling NATO membership was only ever meant to bait Ukraine and Russia into a ruinous proxy war. Which has now occurred.
Please don't spread conspiracy theories.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-puti...
This ultimately led to gross mismanagement of the pandemic when it was most vital leading to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
In order to have a larger negative effect on society each and every Facebook engineer would have to personally conduct a mass shooting.
Edit: In support of this position consider that the 2016 election was arguably lost entirely based on 78,000 votes in the rust belt. Basically based on 1/20th of 1% of voter turn out.
Some sources put the number of unnecessary covid deaths in 2020 at around 200k deaths.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/lancet-study-40-...
Other sources put the number of software engineers at around 8850
https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software...
The number of unnecessary covid deaths per Facebook software engineer is ergo about 23.
Looking at stats from the FBI from 2000 - 2018 884 were killed in 277 incidents meaning the average shooter only managed to kill about 3 people.
https://www.fbi.gov/about/partnerships/office-of-partner-eng...
Nearly every nut bar I know personally who is radicalized was first radicalized on facebook before sometimes moving on to other platforms.
Facebook engineers by the numbers are actually far more effective at killing folks than the average shooter. Your choice of employment isn't moral nor is it morally neutral to just write code. Individuals in high demand who could work nearly anywhere ought to consider working somewhere more ethical.
That being said there are many other threats to western society and while many or most of those will exploit Facebook as much as they can for influence they will continue to exist should Facebook fall.
So, for one thing, Meta / Facebook has been great at raising the comps for engineering in SV.
I guess you were getting at the Mafia analogue in GP. Perhaps that was an unfortunate analogue, but GP's points were valid, not native.
As for Silicon Valley collusion re: wages in my opinion the agreement that George Lucas / Steve Jobs / Ed Catmull / Others made in the late 90s / early 2000s to screw over tech workers and specifically VFX workers (they were afraid of a VFX union) was worse and flys under the radar way more than it should. VFX workers to this day continue to get screwed by this totally illegal collusion (and there was a large settlement of "unknown amount" at one point).
edit: After looking into the above lawsuit we may actually be talking about the same thing - although it did dramatically screw the VFX industry more than tech. And I refuse to credit Facebook with helping with that - it was the exposure of that collusion that ended it.
That does not mean Google gets a pass and I don't think my original comment implies that at all
Right now, the same thing is happening thanks to Amazon. They're having a hard time hiring SWE's due to the terrible reputation, so they've increased their compensation sharply to attract talent. Facebook followed suit since they are also finding it difficult due to its horrible public perception right now.
The result is that other major tech players are upping their compensation to continue to compete for top talent. It's wonderful.
Facebook is guilty of poor management; involving themselves in partisan politics in order to get a competitor banned is an incredible stupid risk to take.
China had their chance to challenge America in the 21st Century, but they threw it away the moment Xi became too obsessed with his own power and ambitions. The focus on building a Han ethnostate is costing them dearly, both in the eyes of the world and in terms of population growth. Without immigration, China's demographic window is closing rapidly and they will grow old before they grow rich.
It is a logical absurdity to suppose that folks coming to America are a threat to the integrity of western civilization while those who descended from immigrants are part of it. We are all of us who grew up in the west and who have chosen to come live here a part of western civilization. There is no them we are all us.
The firm itself seems to advertise a “republican” outlook, and was also apparently founded initially as a strategy firm for the Republican Party.
Sure, to me it reads like Facebook and the GOP are working hand in hand to defame poor startup TikTok. In reality, Facebook donates millions of dollars to the Democratic Party to ensure their operations and ... practices ... are safely legal and unregulated.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/meta/totals?id=D000033563
I'm not certain how much different it would have made to the main thrust of the story to mention that it worked with a GOP firm. Based on the donations, I'm pretty sure they have used Democrat firms as well for similar purposes, if not this one. The author doesn't mention it, but assuming omission means it didn't happen isn't a safe assumption.
Another point, not sure it's a realistic idea to paint TikTok as anything other than a data harvesting tool for the CCP. Seems like they would be similar to Kapersky in that it's just a spying / infiltration tool used by adversarial governments.
Aside from that, the choice of a Republican focused group makes sense since the strategy was to assert threats to traditional values and appeals to nationalism / anti-China sentiment.
> What's the point of making "Republican" so prominent in the article? Is it just to use the negative connotation most WP readers have about the Republican party to malign Facebook a little more?
> The firm is one of the biggest recipients of Republican campaign spending, earning more than $237 million in 2020, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Its biggest payments came from national GOP congressional committees and America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC.
A consulting firm that advertises itself as being "born from political campaigns" and being "right of center." Both things on the second slide of their homepage.
>Penn was a chief strategist and pollster in the Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential campaign
>Penn met with Trump in February and November 2019 to give him advice on his 2020 re-election strategy.
The company claims to be right wing, why would you deny it?
What's contradictory about a strategist who worked for Ds in 2008 and was working for Rs by 2016? Hell, there's a whole term describing the large set of people who made that shift in that exact time period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama%E2%80%93Trump_voters
This might be a better link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Unity_My_Ass
I noticed this back in the late 2000s when I read newspapers about state politicians who were caught in corruption scandals. If the politician were a Republican, their party affiliation would be mentioned in the headline. If they were a Democrat, that fact would be mentioned in the article's continuation on a page farther back in the newspaper, if at all.
I offer no judgement on whether this is right or wrong, but it is what is done.
12 matches for republican 1 match for conservative 0 matches for democrat
It's a firm comprised of former republican political talent. Maybe you're just as willing to fan the flames of political war as those you accuse?
They also seem to be into crypto.
* The firms are the next career stepping stone for campaign workers. If you have worked on half a dozen Democratic campaigns, you presumably believe in the cause and are unlikely to want to start working on Republican campaigns where you disagree with the candidate. (Maybe you won't be as good at working on GOP campaigns either). * If you are a politician, you are unlikely to be too excited to hire the firm that in the last election cycle wrote an ad trashing some of the positions you old. You are also more likely to get referred to a firm by a politician from the same party as you.
You might have firms that work with both parties, but they are likely to be working with centrist candidates from those parties.
So if this is a strategy firm that has mostly done political work for Republican candidates and causes, it seems perfectly reasonable to call it a "Republican strategy firm"
A person self identifies with a party that has questionable (/s) practices in a democracy and they’re being maligned. Jokes are funny because they have truth.
If you don't see that in both predominant US parties, you probably aren't looking. Of course Facebook pays the Democratic Party millions a year to look the other way. Can't have good privacy laws, ya know.
I don't think this is malignment, per se: Facebook makes a big show of being a progressive company (internally) with a nominally neutral political outlook. Hiring a Republican strategy firm undermines that image: it demonstrates that, push come to shove, Facebook's commitment to these things is primarily a facade intended to deflect criticism.
Ask any progressive, they will say there's nothing politically neutral about preventing unionization: https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-union...
I also don't think people are falling for rainbow capitalism internally or not. I think people generally understand that it is just a show and the only color on the rainbow they care about is green.
Political consulting firms -- especially those that specialize in strategy, oppo, or ads -- are very often partisan-aligned. That's how the biz works.
I doubt the use of a GOP firm reflects anything beyond a desire to persuade Republican voters and lawmakers.
Having a political career means shifting between consulting companies strongly associated with political parties, direct party employment, campaign employment, government employment when your party is in power, "think tanks," "journalism," and employment as a lobbyist for government contractors or industries with a legislative agenda.
Journalists drop the keyfabe when they're speaking casually, sometimes accidentally. They do go out of their way to do so when the subject is associated with a party their employer doesn't approve of.
Including the truth about party association doesn't make a story more or less truthful. The problem is when they leave it out, or create an association out of whole cloth to fit a narrative.
It often seems like there’s two “worlds” operating at the same time. In one, there’s outrage and indignation at this sort of thing. In the other, that public outrage is just another item in the chess game, to be weaponised against your competitors as appropriate. But maybe that’s too pessimistic of a view, and not all industries are like this? I’m genuinely curious.
That said, for the subset of companies that operate in fiercely competitive markets with well-funded players, this sort of activity is common.
In my prior company, where 2 competitors & us had raised 9 figures in venture capital, we found multiple instances of such undermining attacks going on from 1 of the competitors. Although we never engaged in such activities, it was clear to me that we were at a slight disadvantage due to our lack of willingness. Imo, such activities require sociopathic leadership, and unfortunately, that sort of personality is overrepresented in the c-suite.
We have had malicious litigation too and now I’m ramping up on security (cybersecurity or corposec as I call it, not network) because knowing our competitors I think it’s not a case of if there is a hostile op against us, but when.
The details make all the difference.
Apple goes on stage and posts misleading graphs about their competition multiple times per year. The latest event showed the M1 Ultra matching an RTX 3090 in performance, yet that’s nowhere close to true in anyone’s testing and the graph was deliberately misleading in dishonest ways (3090 curve was truncated before it reached peak performance).
The difference is that most people here really like Apple hardware, so they get a free pass. Most people here really dislike Facebook, so this seems like a mortal sin for a company to promote negative misleading ideas about their competitor.
Everyone markets against their competitors to some degree, even if it’s just a comparison chart on a marketing page somewhere. I’d need to see more evidence that Facebook was deliberately lying to really be concerned about this. It seems the authors are relying heavily on anti-Facebook anger to fuel this story.
https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/facebook...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-13374048
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/update-facebooks-smear...
When Facebook pays a marketing agency to get anti tiktok headlines into local news, the reader has no idea who was involved and is left with negative impressions of tiktok that stay with them long after they forgot the details of the story (if they even read that far).
This is exactly the point here. If Apple paid a company to post messages under various "fake" personas that the 3090RTX under performs compared to their CPU, they would be behaving like Facebook.
I think it’s pretty clear the difference isn’t Apple vs Facebook (e.g. CSAM blowback) but boasting about yourself versus hiring someone to attack a competitor.
An analogous comparison would be if Facebook said their algorithms benefited mental health more than competitors, or if Apple paid to have an op-ed in a newspaper talking about how Intel’s GPU’s might explode or something. The difference is that Apple’s slide was Apple’s slide and any bias was clear. Facebook went through backdoors and PR firms to sway local journalists and congressmen in an actually dark game of chess.
> I’d need to see more evidence that Facebook was deliberately lying to really be concerned about this
That’s the whole point. Facebook wasn’t lying, Targeted Victory was. Take your pick of the evidence:
Firm director’s email:
> get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app
> Campaign operatives were also encouraged to use TikTok’s prominence as a way to deflect from Meta’s own privacy and antitrust concerns.
> rumors of the “devious licks” challenge initially spread on Facebook, not TikTok.
> Targeted Victory worked to spread rumors of the “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge” in local news… In reality, no such challenge existed on TikTok. Again, the rumor started on Facebook
> In addition to planting local news stories, the firm has helped place op-eds targeting TikTok around the country, especially in key congressional districts.
If that feels like a wall of text, it’s because it is, chock full of specific evidence Targeted Victory was manipulating congressmen and newspapers to report in a way benefitting them, all because they know that the TikTok algorithm is leagues superior and more user curated than their own outrage-bate dumpster fire.
The authors aren’t relying on “anti-Facebook anger” anymore than it’s Facebook’s bed and now they need to lie in it after years of turning the web into a partisan surveillance state. This was a targeted campaign of disinformation ranging far further than one slide on a keynote.
The other problem with thinking "this is what everybody does" is there's the unstated "so keep your mouth shut and just go along with it" that's really unhealthy for us all. If you work for Facebook and you think this is the norm then you're not going to be inclined to question this behavior and if you really think it's universal then you may not even be inclined to leave. Thus the problem perpetuates itself.
If you ever find yourself working for one of this hell hole companies then leave. Don't buy into the false narrative that this is normal, it's the same everywhere, keep your mouth shut and don't rock the boat. You'll come to realize the money doesn't make up for what's been done to your mental health and the quality of your life.
I agree with you that most people have status quo bias making up the majority of their moral compass. But I disagree with your defense of isolated demands for ethical behavior, which are dangerous and counterproductive.
First off, they cheapen principle by making it a conditional bludgeon, used to attack only unpopular entities. Participating in the lie that FB is doing something uncommonly nefarious implicitly shields every other actor that (eg) HN doesn't feel such obsessive hate for.
Secondly, it provides a scapegoat so people can ignore the difficult work of actually addressing systemic rot. If this is a widely-used tactic, and we agree that it's harmful, then perhaps there's a structural issue to be addressed. You can't even have this conversation if everyone thinks it's just something uniquely evil that FB did.
This was my problem with the way my social milieu handled Trump. I think the guy was a dangerous lunatic, but my friends/family's tendency to immediately assign all of the world's ills solely to him (kids in cages! 100s of ks of covid deaths!) gave them an excuse to ignore the systemic rot underlying society's actual problems (borders inherently rob people of their humanity, and our public health agencies have severe cultural issues).
It's not "defending the bad guy" to say that turning them into the literal Devil, solely responsible for all evil, is harmfully letting others off the hook.
The people were fantastic (except a the ex G and Amazon folks who were a lot less fun to work with), the problems were fun and the culture and tools were phenomenal.
Granted, I don't agree with what they're doing in this article, but if you think they're the only big tech company that does this, I have a bunch of bridges to sell you ;)
Generally, large, publicly traded companies tend to behave like psychopaths, but personally I think FB held out a lot longer than most.
If Facebook is anything like the typical SV mega-corp, the rank and file questions this kind of behaviour. A lot.
But as the saying goes, a dog barks, the wind carries it away.
The politicians at the head of the firm don't care about what their workers think about political matters. [1]
[1] And would like everyone who isn't them to stop being political. #nopolitics, and all that jazz. We're just trying to do work here, not get involved in an unsanctioned-from-corporate culture war...
Similarly, this seems to affect consumer companies a bit more often than B2B companies, but that isn't to say that they are immune.
Certainly not surprising to hear this about Facebook given it's history.
- Pharmaceutical companies trash generics and lobby both directly to doctors and governments
- The sugar and food industry has had a significant role in informing consumers that their obesity was their fault and not the fault of their products
- The oil industry has had a significant role in informing consumers that climate change was their fault and not the fault of their products
- Fruit/vegetable companies I don't even want to get into (look up Chiquita/United Fruit Company)
- Anything to do with any major retailer/distributor and unions
They aren't "dirty" tactics so much as "profit maximizing tactics" and they are inherent to capitalist mega-corps.
I can't help but wonder if it was FB behind it, "all publicity is good publicity." And despite the amazing success of the campaign at raising "awareness" of the campaign, it didn't have any apparent aim or effect beyond that. We've seen that before from FB, vast resource deployed with intricate execution towards trivial goals.
So no, doesn't seem like a hit job at all, just a good mix of first-order incentives. The media balleting is part of the defense, but also it was really informative for many.
EDIT: forgot the media reaction that indeed seemed coordinated and bold. Part of that is just media hating Facebook. They take any chance they get.
For reference, Ronan Farrow names names and relates his own lived experience. Among a zillion other similar accounts. (Sibel Edwards, Snowden, the TV journalist couple that tried to report on illegal doping of dairy cows, ad nauseum.) So I assume paid harrassment is standard practice.
Could be worse. At least killing whistleblowers is rare in the USA.
Does your 9yo have friends on TikTok? I sometimes see the younger crowd often follow each other on TikTok and make posts primarily intended for their friends. This seems a very different usage pattern from mostly watching strangers on the for you page. Maybe 9 is too young for that mode though.
I have distraction issues with doomscrolling text feeds, but none whatsoever w/ TT because I dont' find super short videos entertaining. But it's probably very different for those who're exposed to it from a young age.
[1]https://thewire.in/political-economy/for-campaign-ads-on-fac...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855113
Summary: "A lawsuit accusing Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook of overstating its advertising audience got a lot bigger Tuesday when a court expanded the pool of plaintiffs to include more than 2 million small ad buyers.
Dismissing what he called a “blunderbuss of objections” by the company, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the case can proceed as a class action on behalf of small business owners and individuals who bought ads on Facebook or Instagram since Aug. 15, 2014.
The decision is another setback for the social networking giant after court filings in 2021 revealed that its audience-measuring tool was known by high-ranking Facebook executives to be unreliable because it was skewed by fake and duplicate accounts."
But in doing so Facebook left younger users underserved they chose TikTok. And now to paper over their product failure they’re crying to the government.
Also, as anecdotal evidence, there's a reason there's a stereotype of PKs (preacher's kids).
The harder control is attempted to be applied, the more resistance there will be and the further away the kids will run when they finally escape.
Those of you who are parents, keep this in mind - kid's are people too. You cannot control them, and if you think you have, they are hiding from you. Help them grow, don't push them away.
It was so puzzling, because my experience has been so different. TikTok is the most positive, large scale, social platform I've ever used. It has exposed me to disabled people's, LGBTQ, POV and all kinds of neat things I'd have never even thought of.
California forever, goodbye!
Imagine if most papers or news channels in the US were controlled by a single, foreign, adversarial country. That’s what TikTok is for gen z.
Stories not about politics, crimes, or disasters ... are not news?
But I would add corporate malfeasance to the list of "politics, crimes, or disasters" (or does that count as crime?).
There are plenty of things happening around me that influence me, like kind gestures big or small, the birth of my children, learning about things (that are verifiable), which I can assure you are not staged or driven by someone.
You’re being really pedantic with those examples - obviously, they weren’t talking about events like the “birth of a child”…
If I expand OP's statement, I'm a bit troubled by the (purposeful) spreading erosion of trust in society. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to distrust, especially now, but when you blanketly start distrusting everything, the trustworthy lose and the unscrupulous win. Further, you yourself lose.
TL;DR: trust but verify > distrust and don't verify. We might recognize that verification is the only relevant conditional, but I think it's safe to say that it's not what's being generally applied when it comes to media consumption.
Nope, you’re 100% being pedantic. OP said “things happening around you”, which most would not interpret as “birth of my child” or random “kind gestures”.
> I'm a bit troubled by the (purposeful) spreading erosion of trust in society
I hear this kind of misguided sentiment quite often. I hate to break it to you, but your hope/trust for humanity doesn’t change reality.
Eg, my European colleagues who call political corruption as “transgressions”, implying that somehow it’s a rare occurrence in the EU, but obviously developing countries are “deeply corrupt”.
There’s no way you could hold the opinion that PR and influence pervade our society, without having read “Submarine”.
Idk, I like PG. I've read the really long-form pieces like "What I've Done", etc., but from what I gather by following his Twitter, he's less and less defined by creative or unique ideas and has turned towards more standard neo-con, gen X silicon valley. More than anything, there is a noticeable lack of emotional intelligence that doesn't hold up to the standards of youth today.
He went to RISD; cool, awesome; he's a brilliant computer scientist; okay, cool. The world is more global now, a lot of people have these Renaissance man-type experiences, and haven't yet made the money that will put a veil over their eyes. A lot of the essays are mediocre. A lot of them are good. But I think it's just less his time in 2022 for what he was trying to do.
But yeah, anyone who knows how social media sites got started with faked engagement shouldn't believe most of the things they see online.
Facebooks main site is less responsive than visual studio on my school lap and i cannot use messenger on my phone from web browser cuz they want me to install spyware
Once i graduate i dont think ill use this mess more than once a month for 5mins
Perhaps the most blatant case of "Always accuse your enemy of exactly what you are doing yourself."
My basic perception at this point is that TikTok, Facebook, and Roblox all deserve each other. Hopefully they waste their money attacking each other until they mutually self-destruct.
"The firm is one of the biggest recipients of Republican campaign spending, earning more than $237 million in 2020, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Its biggest payments came from national GOP congressional committees and America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC."
Facebook made a gamble though and as a downside they probably have less goodwill with the current administration compared to what they could have had.
Like, isn't this just normal business these days? Isn't this sort of thing a natural eventuality in a capitalist world?
Capitalism crowns the person who wins, regardless of how they won.
And besides, all press is good press because it's all exposure. Why wouldn't you do this sort of thing?
It's only wrong to get caught.
And even then, you can pay for a lawyer to prove that you were either:
- not doing anything wrong,
- not legitimately caught,
- or simply giving your opinion.
Also, that was open advertising, not a covert disinformation campaign; it's a bit different.
> Negative campaigns that function solely to tear down your opponents, as the article says (and my experience matches), are relatively uncommon outside of politics.
If you have competitors, they will try to trash your name, I promise you. It doesn't matter what scale you're operating at.
Trash talk is universal.
If you know how to ride a media wave, you literally can't lose in today's media landscape (mixed metaphor, I know).
In 1910, I'd absolutely attribute focus on China to racism. Today, if I were to rank the biggest threats to US for the coming decades, I would put China in distant first place. But I'm no geopolitics expert, am I missing something?
Ideology is just the trash can we are all eating from.
IE, you would need to also assert that Western companies having these data is no better than Chinese companies, an opinion which is hotly debated and not at all settled.
I may have missed your overall point though - would you mind being explicit about it?
- having Facebook/Meta experience on your resume starts hurting you against others who don't
- selling your company to Facebook/Meta or product on it hurts your brand and perceived to be immoral
Is Facebook/Meta the Tobacco company of our generation? The harmful effects of smoking were covered up for almost a century, much as the impact of mass remote dopamine manipulation is not as prolific.
Problem is those companies start to attract people that thrive in toxic cultures, worsening the problem.
Part of the playbook of any addiction-based industry is to encourage outrage at the prospect of the product being restricted; it builds their moat and delays the resolution of the problem (allowing their revenue streams to continue for longer).
Why would it hurt you? They're at the forefront of technical challenges of scaling an immensely popular product and developing internal tooling. These aren't necessarily applicable everywhere, but they're incredibly valuable. If anything, I think the fact that they're working at a place where a very vocal minority of their peers jeers at is a positive signal. They can withstand a snarky comment from some hipster at a party to potentially work on interesting technical challenges (money is good too).
> - selling your company to Facebook/Meta or product on it hurts your brand and perceived to be immoral
I think you're in a bubble. Facebook is a very popular brand name outside of a very vocal minority of internet commenters and tech journalists. They have a few of the most popular consumer apps in the world with 3 billion total users across the products. When you consider their products in open source like GraphQL and React, it's even more.
I get it, you don't like Facebook. But don't gaslight yourself into thinking they're some toxic entity that everyone hates and is on the verge of irrelevance
Edit: I've had a chance to think about it after a cup of coffee and I take back my comment. Everyone deserves a second chance. Everyone gets the same ethical review.
I might add that prior employment at Facebook is very positively correlated with engineering talent -- you are not just selecting against something orthogonal to engineering talent, you are actually selecting against something that indicates they are a good engineer, meaning you have a smaller labor force you are willing to hire and a lower quality one. Go tell HR and your boss that you have prejudices against people from Facebook and you are going to discriminate against them in hiring as a consequence, see how well that goes for you.
The first part is true. The second is a leap, plenty of high quality talent actively chooses to not work at FB, or happens to not work there. By not selecting from the former FB pool I have not lowered the overall quality of my labor pool. I have increased the integrity standards though.
len(set(high quality talent) - set(ever employed at facebook)) < len(set(high quality talent) - set(refuses to work at facebook))
Note that "refuses to work at facebook" doesn't select for engineering talent, while "ever employed at facebook" explicitly does, meaning the average talent in the set containing facebook employees is higher.
Given all this, you have to fill the roll (or why hire?) and you don't have infinite time (there is a cost associated with every day you've not filled the role relative to it being filled). Given those constraints, if you limit your pool due to prejudice the optimal outcome is for you to hire a lower quality person versus the situation if you were not prejudiced; if you hire the same quality person, it means you likely paid for it in another form, namely the cost associated with the role being unfilled longer.
Why wouldn't a future employer take that into account?
Anecdotally, I had a friend who used to work at Monsanto and he told me of a few very uncomfortable social encounters when people learned where he worked. It made him question whether he should find a job somewhere else. I don't think we're there with Facebook, the general public mostly seems focused on misinformation rather than privacy but who knows what the future holds.
I've never ever experienced any other popular system/service so broken.
I am sure behind it all is complex overengineered cathedral of frameworks, systems and libraries. Some of it may be even cool. But the final result is piece of shit, no matter how I look on it, no matter how many chances I give it.
Compared to quality of say various google apps is... well incomparable. So yeah, having this on resume is underwhelming, even without looking at moral topics.
It's quite bizarre that you would go out of your way to try and gaslight me that Facebook's toxicity is my own imagination.
Do you work for facebook in some way, sold a company to them or own their stocks?
Yes. It is a digital pharmaceuticals drugs company and it was 'addictive' for the previous generation back then. Not so for this generation as it has no effect on them. Facebook™ and Instagram™ do not work on them anymore.
The new digital crack / cocaine is TikTok™, manufactured by ByteDance. Another generation will find another 'hit' to be addicted to once they get bored off on this one.
Rinse and repeat.
Why not both? They certainly are small players in a big machine, but the reality is that any engineer capable of getting a job in FAANG has plenty of other options that are less morally dubious. If they chose FAANG in spite of this they either don't believe it's immoral or are willing to look the other way for money/prestige.
I certainly wouldn't advocate for writing people off entirely based on their work history (after all, it could be that they went in not realizing the extent of the harm and that's why they're leaving), but I do think it's a factor worth considering.
Do people typically put that specific information on their resume? Alphabet employs over a hundred thousand people, 99% of them won't have looked at that at all. I personally don't work at a FAANG but I'd take the chance if I got it - the bucks are so monstrous compared to my current compensation it would be borderline unethical to not accept a position when I know how much it could help my family.
This kind of thinking, first and foremost, will only result in a culture of fear (eg: what company will be next to be unsafe on my resume?) It also is a quiet signal that certain people have given up on the long fight to change things. Changing things is hard, but it is just that - a long exhausting process. It requires patience and changing people's minds and perspectives, not by strong arming, but by aligning incentives in a direction that's better for the majority.
Would you penalize a mechanical engineer for having Volkswagen on their resume because you read about the VW emissions scandal? Should we refuse to hire anyone who interned for politicians who were later involved in scandals?
Of course not, because it’s dumb to punish former engineers for something a previous employer did over which they had no control.
Good engineers are good engineers. Period. Trying to get revenge on a company you don’t like by forcing former employees in unrelated departments to suffer the consequences of your anger is ridiculous.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830414-800-how-did-...
"Volkswagen programmed its on-board software to detect when cars with its TDI diesel engine were undergoing an emissions test, using information from the steering, brakes and accelerator. It then tweaked the engine settings to minimise levels of nitrogen oxides (NOx)."
connecting people?
Depends if one is a React, Folly, BOLT, OCaml, GHC, clang contributor or not.
It already does. Meta is reportedly paying more to hire talent because of their reputation.[0]
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire...
* They went through one of the hardest interview loops in the industry
* They went through one of the hardest promotion ladders in the industry
* They solve all problems at huge scale out of the box
* If you aren't paying top of market and they're still interested, they're most likely financially comfortable from their years at Meta and won't be jumping ship every 18 months for a 20% raise
I'd say that's pretty attractive as a hiring manager
Even then, why do we assume they were promoted, or solved "all problems", or have some altruistic reason to make less?
The only thing we know is that they were hired by Meta sometime in the past.
I'd say never. There will always be some company more than glad to hire high-merit developers without paying a premium. As a result, you know that all these Meta developers you're rejecting are going straight in the arms of your competitor. This tends to balance the market.
>“We recognize this is a critically important avenue in the way the American public is finding out about the latest,” said the White House director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, “so we wanted to make sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/11/tik-tok...
Company a threat to American children pays a company to accuse another company that's a threat to American children of being a threat to American children.
Being the Washington Post, I'm sure it's to insinuate that all the bad things that happen are Republican-led. Only the GOP plays dirty tricks, right? After the Steele dossier, the Biden laptop, the Russia collusion misinformation campaign, and willfully hiding the mental decline of the current president - you'd think we'd get past the whole "only Republicans bad" narrative. But I guess that just goes to show how successfully the WashPo and others are running their own strategies to push agendas...
Compared to what? Chinese public?
I don’t think twitch or YouTube are the same as Facebook or Twitter.
It is? In which markets?
Amazon Prime video is also an indirect competitor to other time wasting products like social media apps / video sharing etc.
edit: Also don't forget data collection / AI / advertising.
How would you explain articles like this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/01/amazon-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/12/facebook-...
Letters to the editor and soliciting reporters is considered "bare-knuckle"!?!
>In October, Targeted Victory worked to spread rumors of the “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge” in local news, touting a local news report on the alleged challenge in Hawaii. In reality, no such challenge existed on TikTok. Again, the rumor started on Facebook, according to a series of Facebook posts first documented by Insider.
I guess this was not communicated to the entire WaPo newsroom...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10/06/tiktok-slap...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/10/08/tiktok-t...