
Facebook policy chief admits hiring PR firm to attack George Soros - cityzen
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/21/facebook-admits-definers-pr-george-soros-critics-sandberg-zuckerberg
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the_duke
I have an immense dislike for the whole PR industry, and to a certain extent
it astounds me that it's even legal.

PR boils down to manipulation of public opinion that can't be traced back to
the source easily.

They are also used for things that would be too dirty / illegal to touch for a
company itself, like fake reviews and fake online comments propagating a
certain view.

I have long thought that there should be a public registry where you have to
announce when and for what purpose you have hired a PR firm.

~~~
munk-a
I absolutely agree, and it falls in the same category as marketing. If a
person is a marketer they are devoting their lives to manipulating the minds
of others and that's just terrible.

~~~
the_duke
I see PR as being much, much worse.

I also dislike marketing. It is manipulation that mostly works on a
subconscious level, circumventing your rational thought.

But with marketing, at least it's obvious who the source is, and you can make
a conscious effort to avoid it.

With PR, where pushing highly biased news articles on various news outlets is
common, it's much harder.

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isoskeles
I still love that the story here is that Facebook hired people to say
something _true_ about George Soros. NYT, etc. are reporting that someone else
saying something _true_ about Soros is bad.

I’m not clear on what the motives are, but it feels Orwellian that we now have
news stories that smear people for telling the truth. I guess some anti-
Semites don’t like George Soros, so the reasoning is that any criticism or
even mention of George Soros must be anti-Semitic.

I’d like to hear some coherent refutation to this. Why is this story at all
controversial when Soros did, in fact, fund FB critics? I’ll entertain any
reasons other than, “Nazis.”

~~~
bonaldi
Facebook's actions are controversial for a few reasons.

1\. Their focus was Soros. They were criticised, and they essentially said "we
haven't done anything wrong that needs to be addressed, he must have another
motive for criticising us, find out if he's going to get rich from this
somehow". They set out to attempt to discredit Soros, for the crime of
criticising them.

2\. Having failed to find a financial motive, they did discover that he was
funding a FB pressure group (which you might expect of a wealthy critic). That
was then used to smear the group, among the people for whom "is funded by
Soros" is an effective smear.

3\. Many of the people appealed to in (2) are anti-semitic. It's why the smear
works. It's therefore an anti-semitic act to use Soros as a smear in this way.

In sum: they used their financial power to attack a critic of theirs with an
ad hominem smear that had an anti-semitic basis. That's not the act of a
laudable organisation. It's a controversial act.

~~~
nostromo
2 and 3 are also true of Soros attacking Facebook. So in effect you’re saying
that Zuckerberg, Soros, and Sandberg - all jews - are antisemetic.

Soros funded smear groups focused on Facebook. Facebook responding in kind
doesn’t strike me as better or worse than what Soros did. Bringing
antisemitism into it is a stretch.

~~~
danso
> So in effect you’re saying that Zuckerberg, Soros, and Sandberg - all jews -
> are antisemetic.

No, Facebook critics are saying that FB was OK with undermining its critics at
all costs, even if that meant dogwhistling for anti-Semitic trolls.

~~~
nostromo
How is Facebook correctly pointing out that Soros funded a smear campaign
against them a dog whistle? Is it not possible to criticize money in politics
if they’re anyone other than WASPs like the Kochs?

~~~
danso
If Facebook was so correct, why did they hire a PR firm to launder that claim?

I'll repeat something I posted in my other comment: Do you believe that George
Soros is also actively behind a campaign to destroy Tesla [0]? Reveal has
received money through Soros's Open Society Foundations [1].

[0] [https://www.revealnews.org/article/inside-teslas-factory-
a-m...](https://www.revealnews.org/article/inside-teslas-factory-a-medical-
clinic-designed-to-ignore-injured-workers/)

[https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-left-injuries-
off-t...](https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-left-injuries-off-the-
books-but-it-might-not-face-penalties/)

[1] [https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/why-dont-we-hear-about-
soros...](https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/why-dont-we-hear-about-soros-ties-
to-over-30-major-news-organizations)

~~~
nostromo
Soros is also laundering his attacks...

Perhaps I’m being naive but I see two Jewish business leaders fighting a proxy
war — and yet one is called antisemitic and one is not. And I suspect it’s
because people are only attacking the side they disagree with politically.

~~~
shard972
The fact you see them as Jews and not just People shows your anti-Semitic bias
to be honest.

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mindgam3
What I don’t understand is why everybody is swallowing this latest admission
of guilt by FB as the whole truth. Isn’t it just so convenient that the man
responsible for this latest clusterfuck is already on his way out?

I mean, what are the chances that neither Zuck nor Sandberg knew absolutely
nothing about this? It’s just too convenient to have this guy jump on the
grenade to spare upper management. I don’t buy it for a second.

~~~
will_brown
>Isn’t it just so convenient that the man responsible for this latest
clusterfuck is already on his way out?

Exactly...I mean as a publicly traded company maybe this should be
investigated. I’d start by taking a look at the severance package/golden
parachute the departed received.

~~~
nerfhammer
A law enforcement agency can't investigate unless there is reason to believe a
particular law was broken. Congress could though.

~~~
will_brown
Well I don’t think it’s to difficult to pursue the same charges against Sheryl
Sandburg that landed Martha Stewart in jail.

Many falsely believe Martha Stewart went to jail for insider trading but she
actually went to jail for claiming she would be found innocent of the insider
trading charges which the prosecution alleged she did for the sole purpose of
manipulating the actual Martha Stewart Inc stock price, which would have
tanked otherwise. 1st amendment rights to publicly claim her innocence offered
her no protection.

Here we have facts that Sheryl Sandberg publicly posted on FB that FB didn’t
hire the PR Firm and much less hire a PR Firm to publicly attack Soros.

With the release of these new facts, Sheryl Sandburg admitted in fact she did
get memos and emails about FB hiring the Firm (and I believe the purpose). So
one must ask why the initial public lie?

Did Sandberg know or have reason to know:think if the truth came out FB stock
may have dipped? I’d say yes and if they can make the case against Martha
Stewart that was the case with her public statement of innocence for unrelated
insider trading charges, then a case could be made here, that Sandberg
knowingly lied about FB hiring this PR Firm because admitting the same would
have hurt FBs stock price.

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dawhizkid
Does it really matter? Anyone can see he is taking the hit for the executive
team. He’s a “lame duck” in the sense he already he announced he was leaving
months ago.

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WheelsAtLarge
Zuckerberg and Sandberg need to own the hiring of the PR firm. It does not
matter whether they knew or not. Most C level executives don't know what most
of the company's employees are doing but the problem here is that Zuckerberg
and Sandberg have created a company culture where this type malfeasance is
accepted. I'm sure there were plenty of subordinates to the policy chief that
knew about the hiring yet they never notified the executive team.

Not knowing is not a pass. They need to own it.

But I think one of them knew.

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buboard
biased article: it's hard to take it seriously when a billionaire involved in
unsavory investing in his heyday is described as someone "exercising their
first amendment rights to protest Facebook’s role". Didn't facebook's exec
have exactly the same right ?

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Quequau
This seems like something straight out of the Scientology playbook.

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resters
Facebook is quickly becoming the de facto Great Firewall of the world.

Of course there will be conflict with world-scale ideologues like Soros.

Of course there will be an elaborate dance between Facebook and US politicians
who want to control more and more aspects of the firewall.

In case it’s not clear, facebook’s news feed algorithm is a content filter and
in many ways it performs (or can be adapted to perform) much the same function
as China’s Great Firewall, which is suppression of dissent and certain
political ideas.

But compared to China’s Firewall, Facebook has orders of magnitude more power
because it has significantly more metadata about each person.

~~~
buboard
i dont think the hyperbole helps in anything. there are other avenues, and
nobody can force me to use facebook.

~~~
resters
That’s a correct but ultimately naive perspective. So many of the other
systems (such as news publishing) are closely intertwined with Facebook and
strive to publish content that will be maximally boosted by the algorithm.

~~~
buboard
you 're grossly overstating the amount of traffic that facebook brings to news
sites. It's about 10%.

~~~
resters
Googled it and saw 35% at the peak declining by 25% which would be around 26%.

But that is not the important metric. When an article goes viral the traffic
is essentially free.

~~~
buboard
that would be 35% of referral traffic, which is approximately 50% of total
traffic? [https://www.recode.net/2018/2/15/17013618/google-facebook-
tr...](https://www.recode.net/2018/2/15/17013618/google-facebook-traffic-
publishers-amp-chartbeat)

the stats differ depending on the source, but there is clearly a huge drop for
facebook past years.

~~~
resters
True the exact numbers are hard to pin down. My point is that articles gaining
traction on social media is viewed as a major dimension of editorial strategy
(as is obvious by the dramatic increase in clickbait headlines), because once
a story goes viral it is all upside for the paper's own views and ad sales.

This was either already incentivized by the internal incentives given to
editors and writers, or incentives have been adapted (by papers that have
survived) to take this valuable channel into strong consideration when
deciding how to phrase something.

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fbinthrow
They are throwing this guy under the bus to avoid embarrassment for Mark and
Sheryl. Hopefully the general public will see past this.

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whoisjuan
Of course they were going to find a scapegoat for all this mess.

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philwelch
It's extremely disingenuous to assume that attacks on George Soros are
_necessarily_ anti-Semitic. Soros is a quintessential politically-active-
billionaire bogeyman like the Koch brothers, or Sheldon Adelson (who is also
Jewish). In fact, Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish themselves, and I don't
think they're necessarily the self-hating type.

Sure, actual anti-Semites probably also criticize George Soros, but (a) of
course they would, and (b) why the fuck are you paying attention to those
bozos anyway?

Of course, accusing people of anti-Semitism is, in reality, usually a dog-
whistle for calling them Nazis.

~~~
starbeast
>It's extremely disingenuous to assume that attacks on George Soros are
necessarily anti-Semitic.

The messages may be paid for by people with other overall intents, but the
receptive audience for the messages is people like that recent bomb maker. And
the people paying for the messages know this.

I could tell people all day long that something was being funded by Warren
Buffet and nobody would give a shit. Tell them it is funded by Soros and
suddenly you have raised a following crowd of prime fuckwits and I do not
think it is because he is Hungarian.

edit - assembled prime fuckwits, you know who you are, there is a reason I
picked Warren Buffet for comparison and once you have bothered to look it up,
you are really not going to like it.

~~~
meowface
Warren Buffett generally isn't a political financier. The Koch brothers and
George Soros are.

~~~
starbeast
And I am generally not sarcastic. No, really.

~~~
meowface
So why _did_ you pick Warren Buffett for comparison? I did look it up, and do
not see what point you were trying to make.

~~~
starbeast
He was one of Obama's first funders, advisers and public fundraisers, way back
when Obama was still a senator. It is very unlikely that Obama would have
become and then stayed president without Warren Buffett's initial and
continued support.

Warren Buffett is a liberal, very politically involved billionaire
philanthropist, very much like George Soros, but with quite literally ten
times as much money and political influence.

Furthermore, he has promised to spend all of this money on fluffy liberal
causes and social welfare programs and all sorts of other scary commie-
sounding stuff before he dies. And he is very old.

Yet, where the hell are all the Warren Buffett conspiracies? He must feel
really left out.

~~~
philwelch
It's easier for each side to have one designated boogeyman. Why do the Koch
Brothers take all the heat from progressives when there's still Sheldon
Adelson and Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel?

~~~
starbeast
>Why do the Koch Brothers take all the heat from progressives when there's
still Sheldon Adelson and Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel?

I'm not sure they do. Mercer particularly is getting a lot of flack right now.

I just find it slightly odd that people put George Soros up as some scary
liberal billionaire kingmaker while completely and utterly ignoring an actual
liberal billionaire kingmaker.

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jimjimjim
and remember, don’t be not evil.

