- worked there for less than two years and had no direct reports
- never attended some sort of key meeting
- did not work on the subject matter in question
...and therefore, she lacks context which undermines some of her claims.
Which of those is a matter of character, or a "disgusting" attack? They might be wrong, or they might be right but bringing up irrelevancies, but the writer is acting like stating these is some sort of reprehensible smear.
However, since she didn't work on anything relevant, they have to do research without any guidance.
It's Day 1. They can't come out and say "we don't know what she's talking about or where she got her data, so we can't refute it."
As PR, the worst thing for them to do is deny something only to be hit by factual evidence; they'd rather know all the evidence to begin with them try to put it in a good light or reveal a good reason for things being that way.
Of course they cannot do that because she is literally citing their own words. Which is why this is just a thinly veiled, pathetic attack on a worker.
Re-read the parent comment. How is the whistleblower getting smeared based on the assertions above? Are they not factual AND relevant?
edit:
I see comments below talking past this sub-thread. Let's get down to definitions.
> Smear: damage the reputation of (someone) by false accusations; slander.
At best, the article's premise that FB's claims "smear" the whistleblower is flawed and non-constructive even if you're seeking to slit FB's throat.
Yes. So they're right but bringing up irrelevancies. It's a diversionary tactic, no doubt. But it's not a "smear".
EDIT: Honestly, I could care less about facebook. Although I think Mark Zuckerberg should be in jail (look at the allegations that his company knowingly experimented on people without their consent), individuals should have the ability to publish on the platform. If bakers must bake cakes, this is only fair.
What about your focus on the word "disgusting" is worth resolving BEFORE we get to the threat to the long term sustainability of the democratic political systems currently in place?
1: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/edwardrmurrowtomcc...
> If this is all that your comms department can get through legal, you know what’s being said is almost 100% true.
For the record, I fully side with the whistleblower's claims. It's just that this article is very emotional, and could have been so much more. This is a fascinating quote the author failed to address fully:
"Facebook PR: “Despite all this, we agree on one thing; it’s time to begin to create standard rules for the internet. It’s been 25 years since the rules for the internet have been updated, and instead of expecting the industry to make societal decisions that belong to legislators, it is time for Congress to act."
Facebook has a point here. We don't even know what Facebook is. A media company? A news organization? A shop? A dating site? And if it does all of these things, and does so at planetary scale, is has the potential to do harm to big parts of the world, in countless ways. Yet there's pretty much zero rules.
I think we vastly underestimate how complicated the balancing act is. If Instagram does mental harm to teenage girls, whilst this very likely was not the original intent, what exactly is the "correct" course of action, in a way codified in law? Should it be forbidden for other girls (influencers) to broadcast their beauty lifestyle? Should there be a maximum time cap for consumers to browse the feed? The China way? Should influencers just be deplatformed if we don't like them, taking away their income?
None of these rules or laws seem very plausible or sane to me, and this is just one example of how Facebook can do harm.
Anyway, to end constructively, I'd say a first step is to force Facebook to give full access to its underlying (anonymized) data. If we've created a planetary-scale monster, we should treat it as a special case.
1. Abdicating responsibility so that when the public or politicians complain about Facebook hosting or not hosting some content he can say it's not his problem, he follows the law.
2. The second is for regulatory capture. Once a social network gets a stigma of being uncool, people move on to the next thing. His status and net worth are tied up in an entity he must aggressively defend against becoming the next MySpace. If he can't buy out upstarts anymore because of antitrust then the next best protection is to make it so difficult to build a new network without a team of lawyers and moderators that no one would even think about doing it.
Is it avoidance or asking for a democratic process to provide guidance? For example, yes automakers did push for a lot of rulemaking that cemented the car's position in transportation and yes a rule about driving on the left or right side is better decided by the community of drivers represented by their government, not GM alone.
But I still believe there's a category of societal issues that are extremely hard to codify into rules, even if Facebook would be morally sound. It would still be hard or impossible.
You guessed correctly.
Guess whom can't comply? Indeed, everybody else. That's why they welcome regulation.
Facebook is an entity that controls the information flow reaching its users and shapes it in the interest of the highest bidder.
A pretty powerful closing statement IMHO.
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.
Perhaps it's premature to call it character assassination, but we've seen this play out quite a few times.
Despite that, not everyone has the will to connect these dots.
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.
And the use of the term "God's own truth" feels like a really underhanded and unjustified rhetorical trick. To use a analogy, It feels like they are declaring a winner during the opening argument of the prosecution, before the defense has even had a chance to fully respond: "If Facebook had evidence, it would show it." Doesn't the author realize that kind of counter evidence will come later?
No, the author doesn't hate Facebook, nor does the "whistleblower". This isn't being drive by hate, it's being driven by love: love of government-mandated censorship. They're not alone, either, Zuckerberg himself is a huge fan; that's why his pushback here was so weak. Facebook was running TV commercials last summer calling for tighter legal restriction on social media.
Tremendously convincing.
What is relevant, is the documents, which are not being released in full. Only after they are will we see the full picture, so anything happening before that is just manufactured narrative to serve someone's purpose.
Vetting data over dumping everything often has benefits.
As a hypothetical
FB: we only did that once!
Leaker: in fact you did that many times (shows papers)
Public forkable repo or gtfo.
[1] Jen Psaki's former employer https://www.dailywire.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-leftis...
Absolutely disgusting. I can't believe intelligent people read, let alone cite, this Enquirer-level garbage.
And obviously, discounting someone presenting factual evidence that at the moment is unchallenged based on perceived personal politics is fair game, reasonable, and the measure of good faith discussion.
1. this is fishy
2. she is a political operative for the dems
3. she has a liberal bias therefore this is all fishy and she cannot be trusted
4. she is rich and has some backing so she is definitely a political operative. This one is especially true because if she was poor Facebook would have been SLAPPed her already into shutting up. So there's no winning here.
5. (US) adults are responsible enough for the government to not have to regulate social media. Let's conveniently temporarily forget about the Rohingya minority.
6. Facebook is a net positive for civilization
7. nothing is actually whistleblown, we already knew all that. Therefore, we're ok with it and we should ignore this. Also see 1.
8. We're dealing with Schrödinger's censorship. Conservative voices are being censored on Facebook which is ran by 'libs' and at the same time they're not censored as the government (also libs) prepares to censor them. Or censor them more? Who knows anymore. TLDR they're going to be censored.
9. the staple of 'tech companies' is discussed all over the place as someone is talking to congress about its internal workings so the news is all over HN. Super fishy (see 1) so definitely a hit piece. If there was only one or two links it would probably be fine. But so many links may definitely be the hand of some lib political operative. Or not? Who knows? We're just saying that to muddy the waters. Big if true!
I think I'm going to be taking a break from forums in general. Either some Facebook friendly PR machine got activated or the collective mind has been poisoned by years and years of misinformation and generally sowing mistrust to the point of 'everything is a conspiracy and nothing is real'.
Why is she getting full media coverage and support, when previous whistleblowers were roundly ignored?
She's a very wealthy person (1B estimated), so perhaps she's fairly well insulated from any blowback?
But again, why is now the time to pile on Facebook, and why this person?
[edit] Hint: She's in fact calling for more censorship of the views she doesn't like.
[edit] Greenwald nails it (just published): https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-...
- Facebook has stated (in the press release the article is reporting on) that they support regulation. This is typical for large market incumbents, who have been said to always support fixed-overhead regulation, because it hurts smaller competitors more than it hurts them.
- Washington loves regulating things and can be safely assumed to be pro-policy in most cases. More to the point, incumbents today are far more concerned about the possibility of being blindsided in their campaigns by maneuvers on a platform their own team doesn't know how to work with, than they are about the difficult to quantify pros and cons of balancing antitrust and libertarian policy. You'd expect them to be pro-regulation on average, if it reduces the importance of the internet in running campaigns.
- The public is not presently pro-regulation and nobody really knows what form the regulations should take.
So in a nutshell, everyone who's powerful in this situation wants the same outcome, and all that is left is to convince the public to support a bill which will probably be titled something like "Cyberspeech Freedom Act of 2022." Lobbyists may have already drafted it, and we can expect that well-meaning activists will be swept along by the push and end up supporting something they wouldn't like if they fully understood what it was.
Additionally, reading the whistleblower's account and her opinions/goals struck me as an incredibly naive way of thinking...although I think she may be genuine (she's my age and I have many peers like her).
What kind of organization respects the value of complete top-down organizational change initiated by rank and file members of the company? Who would think an organization would give them that kind of power? The role that she was hired for seems destined to give her no resources to accomplish the stated goals; we saw something similar but on a much smaller scale with Basecamp.
I know a lot of my peers believe in the power to make sweeping organizational changes like that, but it's "fucking with other peoples' money". To me the whole situation seems like the setup to a bad joke.
Facebook doesn't have to do much to smear her in my eyes because she already strikes me as a ridiculous person. That said, Facebook is similarly ridiculous for hiring people with causes in direct opposition to how they do business and giving everyone in the company unfettered access to damaging internal information.
If one did want to coordinate such a campaign, there's a certain society-wide informational/narrative vulnerability that makes such a campaign potentially attractive:
-You have a public who loves latching onto 'good vs evil', 'david vs goliath' stories, and in this meta-narrative, we the public shall vanquish the evil goliath by any means necessary!
-We also have a public who at large isn't terribly interested in questioning their own biases, thinking through the higher abstract principles at play, thinking through externalities from vanquishing said evil, and in general going against the grain in these 'good vs evil' battles
-You have a news media environment who profits off such engaging meta-narratives and stories, and is more than willing to push these stories out into the public
-The companies and their employees in the news media environment also have their own in-house biases against certain 'villians' such as FB, which further incentives the spread of such stories and meta-narratives. FB has been a competitive threat to media companies. FB has also done or been accused of things which have frustrated media employees of all political persuasions.
FB is a perfect villian in this meta-narrative, regardless of any of the facts at play. They know it too.
A majority of Americans support regulation of big tech https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/20/56-of-ameri...
I guess that this is true for the USA. But Facebook is a global company and other countries may be more regulation friendly.
Is this always true? I always thought that these companies do want to fix themselves but fixing yourself when your competition won't means that you lose. Regulation helps force everyone to fix themselves.
Out of the blue some larger-than-life person (with impeccable credentials, no less) comes out of the woodwork and is lauded with attention while the big news outlets make this massive push against Facebook, all while congress is holding hearings about regulating social media. Then a massive outage happens at Facebook right after the New York Times published an article titled "Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew." (This could honestly just be atrocious luck and an incredible coincidence.)
This woman is also 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 that with how well she is being received by senators from both parties and you start to wonder just how much of this was orchestrated in advance.
But what if the reason she is being heared is because she is remarkably calm, well-spoken, knowledgeable and articulate? Should that theory not be tested first accoring to Occams razor? [1]
So?
Do you think Zuckerberg doesn't get coaching and preparation before his hearing appearances?
Facebook is the only one still allowing far-right speech on their platform. That is why the Democrats are going after them.
Update: There is no verifiable information about her stake in the company.
She's receiving a large press and Congressional focus because she's testifying about harm to children.
Not political censorship, perceived bias, or internal politics.
It's a cleaner story.
Greenwald, like all politicians, is twisting the story to meet his narrative. He doesn't "nail it". He's just regurgitating his preferred talking point, and ignoring her actual testimony.
Let them defend themselves without character assassination, please.
Where does it mention her character??
While this article uses some pretty sensational language, it does accurately describe Facebook's response to Haugen's revelations.
