Meta COO Sandberg reportedly tried to block story about Activision CEO Kotick | Hacker News Reader

Meta COO Sandberg reportedly tried to block story about Activision CEO Kotick

cnbc.com

208 pointsahiknsr61 comments

I don’t get it - Article says Meta is reviewing her conduct [0] but then the same article mentions the spokesperson statement essentially saying she didn’t do it. [1] So is Meta done reviewing?

[0] Facebook is now reviewing whether Sandberg violated company rules, unnamed sources told the Journal.

[1] “Sheryl Sandberg never threatened the MailOnline’s business relationship with Facebook in order to influence an editorial decision,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “This story attempts to make connections that don’t exist.”

The PR statement says she didn't do it, but they're holding an internal review that leaked. If the review finds she did something improper, the PR statement won't change but she'll face some kind of punishment for "violating internal rules."

Confusion in the Meta comms department.

Both narratives were approved but by accident they were issued simultaneously ... it was intended that [1] go out 24 hours after [0].

Or it was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630448

This article gives so little detail it's hard to see what's been said. It's reporting on a report that Sandberg involved meta employees with a coordinated PR campaign with Activision, but doesn't actually say what they said to the mail or even hint at it. Sandberg giving a personal reference to her boyfriend of "He's never hit me" would probably have been partially Facebook's problem, given her position as COO. On the other hand, she could have used that position to make threats at the mail, the article hints but refuses to state.

You can probably infer all you need to about Sheryl's personal ethics from "Works at Meta", so any involvement with Kotick is mere icing.

Sandberg doesn't "work at Meta", she runs Meta.

Probably nothing will come of this, as there's a tenuous line to be drawn between squashing the story and Facebook's interests via Sandberg getting pulled in since they were dating at the time. Her perception does affect stock price, after all.

That said, the really damaging thing I learned from this article was that she dated Bobby Kotick. I didn't want to know that.

Didnt this guy also implicated some governor in something similar? How does this dude have so much influence?

> How does this dude have so much influence?

A lot of people play CoD.

A lot of people yell very emotional things while playing CoD.

Who's listening to that microphone?

Now, I'm not saying Activision Blizzard is blackmailing politicians and high profile individuals; I'm just asking the question.

You know what they found on Hunter Biden’s laptop? CoD.

You know what game Putin played before he decided to start the WW3? CoD.

You know what fish is sold in Costco? CoD.

_Lean in_ apparently means use your power to shield your wealthy boyfriend from scrutiny.

And people are afraid of Elon Musk turning Twitter into a free speech platform. The big tech censorship is real and whatever they want told is the narrative allowed. Good luck competing on audience anywhere else.

If Elon Musk had a documented history of supporting free speech it might be different but he has no such history.

It's amazing how short and selective people's memories are on this subject. The 'debate' happening right now is coming from an earnest place but very uninformed about realities of managing large online spaces.

He has a substantial history of the opposite even.

When has he run a social media platform and deplatformed people?

I'm not saying he is going to do a great job at Twitter, but why don't we give him a chance.

If the woke mob and the Trump supporters are equally mad after a year he will have done a good job.

That he nuked someones car order because of things they said to me shows he doesn't exactly support freedom of expression.

>> If Elon Musk had a documented history of supporting free speech it might be different but he has no such history.

> When has he run a social media platform and deplatformed people?

I think I need a telescope to see the goalposts to where you moved them

So one of the current major owners is Saudi Arabia. How about we use that for goal posts?

SA has beheaded people for speaking out against the government. Please explain how Elon has a worse documented history than these current owners.

While Saudia Arabia has since sold their share of Tesla at one time they owned quite a bit of Tesla stock. [1]

So when Musk says [2] I have questions.

"@Alwaleed_Talal @Twitter @Kingdom_KHC Interesting. Just two questions, if I may. How much of Twitter does the Kingdom own, directly & indirectly? What are the Kingdom’s views on journalistic freedom of speech?""

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/17/news/companies/saudi-arabia...

[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1514683079968931841

> Please explain how Elon has a worse documented history than these current owners.

I don't think anyone said anything about the current owners; the only claim was that Elon Musk does not have a documented record of supporting free speech, which no one has seemed to actually challenge, including you.

Why did you derail this by mentioning Musk?

It's not exactly free speech, but it's deeply and depressingly amusing to see him champion this idea that "the algorithm needs to be more open and transparent" when he is very resistant to making Tesla's driving algorithms more open and transparent and very defensive against criticism of them. Lots of lives at stake there too!

His reaction to Tesla leaks/whistleblowing is more directly speech related. And Tesla's relationship with the press.

You are making an error in assuming that "big tech" (which now... doesn't include Musk??) people use their powers any differently than other powerful people. And that moving power between different powerful douchebags is any sort of solution, compared to breaking up powerful actors into less-powerful separate entities.

Elon Musk is big tech. That's why we don't trust him.

When he releases Tesla schematics, sells spare parts, and allows unaffiliated repair shops to reserialize them, then maybe we can talk about him being different or better than the current set of big tech oligarchs.

If we’re going to be ruled by big tech then maybe we should have warring factions not cooperating ones.

We already have that. Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all vie for monopolistic control over different tech fiefdoms and compete with each other in different ways.

What we need are new ground rules that ban monopolistic control, not Elon Musk throwing money around to overthrow the local digital warlord and replace them with himself.

How does that kool aid taste? Elon has proven time and time again he doesn't care about free speech if its speech he doesn't like. [1][2][3][4]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/03/elon-musk...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-05/tesla-s-f...

[4] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/28/22696463/tesla-fsd-beta-n...

How are any of those links against free speech? All I see is anti-Elon bias

The best part is the scrutiny was about a restraining order his previous partner got on him.

Imagine being a pretty powerful person in FB, reporting directly to Sheryl, and she tasks you with this shit. What a loser.

Almost all high powered people give some amount of shit jobs to their EAs and chief of staffs, it is par of the course in such jobs.

People in these roles typically build more trust and get more responsibility when they handle sensitive /private tasks for their bosses well.

I think this story is great. She has cultivated and milked an image of a woman who fought against the discrimination and lived through her husband's trauma and is an inspiration to other women.

But I've always had the opinion that someone who is at that level in Facebook and stays there without anyone trying to get rid of her, has definitely had plenty of skeletons in her closet. It's high time people see her for what she is, a hypocrite contributing to a system that she's always complained about and made money from.

This story is being spun the wrong way. The real issue isn’t that she tried to quash the story (I mean, who wants their dirty laundry aired in public?), it’s that the Daily Mail lacked the fortitude and integrity to ignore her.

The Daily Mail lacking integrity is not news.

Yes, let's ignore the wealthy people abusing the power and resources their positions give them. It's all the newspaper's fault.

People like you make me angry.

I actually don't care a nit about what Sandberg and her boyfriend are up to, it is completely immaterial. This story looks like pure muckracking for clicks, pandering to the perverse desire of the public to see powerful women fail. Nor do I have any need to express the appropriate level of outrage every time someone in power transgresses imaginary lines.

Media integrity on the other hand is genuinely important. Not trying to make anyone angry, just my persepctive.

I don’t care a nit about Sanbergs personal life either, but I certainly DO care that she can apparently silence news stories from phone calls.

I feel like the content of the story itself is pretty irrelevant here. Are you saying wealthy people abusing their influence and power to contain news stories is fine, as long as you personally view the stories as “immaterial” or “muckraking for clicks”?

How would you feel about a public figure you dislike silencing negative stories from a news organization? What if supporters of that public figure think the silencing is fine, because you don’t need to read that muckraking trash?

We’re saying the same thing really. You want to blame every self-interested elite for manipulating the narrative, which I think is a pointless, thankless exercise in outrage farming, despite it. Whereas I think the onus rests on the media outlet to publish the news they want to publish regardless of who might want otherwise. When this process breaks down it is the media outlet that has failed. Part of this of course involves publishing news you think it is worth suffering for.

Is it not widely known anymore what a nasty operator Sandberg is? Once upon a time she was rather infamous.

Barbra Streisand effect in full display here. She was trying to get a story of a somewhat retracted restraining order squashed.

Kinda. By squashing it at the time they've both made their salary for an extra ~4 years, earning them well over a hundred million dollars.

The Daily Mail and The Star, etc, are not actual journalism. That they caved in to demands from somebody like Sandberg and Meta is not surprising in the slightest. They're far right wing agitation/propaganda tools that only publish things when they serve their purposes.

Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss!

Of course she did. It's not surprising at all.

A facebook executive with no morals?! Impossible!

People try to squash stories all the time. Especially if there is something to lose.

It’s human nature.

Move on.

I love Sheryl. She has something very few possess: IQ and EQ.

I wonder what her personality is like in private? Is it the same smirking condescension she displays in public?

Which one of the two led her to select Kotick as a romantic partner?

Probably the JQ.

definitely not GQ.

Is this some bot that defends the powerful subordinates of powerful corporations? If so, I’d be interested to know what tech automates this process. It’s truly a pain point for C-suite employees to manage PR- surely a unicorn idea.

There are automated crawlers that track major social media sites for certain topics. Once such topics are found, PR companies engage and try to sway public opinion.

I find such attempts truly pathetic though. One has to be totally brain dead to get swayed by such tactics but these PR companies still manage to sell their services to rich people regardless.

Also I recommend that you don’t built such a startup, unless you are well connected. Such PR companies operate because they got good networking, not good tech.

it's a zuckerberg quote. i'm assuming that it's being posted here sarcastically.

Powerful people will be powerful people. Who the hell cares?

We, the non-powerful people, hope that eventually they will get what (should) be coming for them. Darkness dies in the sun, and things like these have to be exposed.

things like these

That the manager of a really big BBS tried to help her video game company president boyfriend with his controversy about being mean?

One can only imagine the horrors if we don’t learn every sordid detail.

We are all better off having less angst.

Yeah that's where I'm at as well. In fact this makes me like Sandberg more for being a regular person who is attempting to shield their loved ones from harm.

Less ill-directed angst, I agree. But the working class as a whole should be feeling more angst than what they (we) currently are feeling, as they are being exploited every day.

Absolutely not, it’s negative and destructive. We need to use language that steers us towards what we want, not calling out what we don’t want.

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