
Mark Zuckerberg is a hypocrite - MilnerRoute
http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2016/11/22/mark-zuckerberg-is-a-hypocrite/
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dasil003
The irony of the article title is that Facebook being terrible at this has
nothing to do with hypocrisy. At worst, Zuckerberg is _lying_ about Facebook
having taken this issue seriously, but there's no hypocrisy anywhere to be
seen.

On a tangent, hypocrisy is tricky to nail down and not an accusation that
people should lightly spew. The reason is that through the human powers of
pattern matching and abstraction you can make anyone appear a hypocrite. If
they aren't a hypocrite in their direct statements and deeds, just go up
another level of abstraction, at some point you reach "he said he prefers good
things, but he clearly does bad things!". Sometimes hypocrisy is blatant, and
therefore a fair accusation, but one should think very hard about it every
single time before coming to that conclusion.

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ivraatiems
It's also important to note that being hypocritical _doesn 't make you wrong._
Smokers saying "don't smoke, it's bad for you" is a classic example.

That's why it can be legitimate for a politician to say things like "yes, I
take lobbyist money - everyone does. The system's broken and should be fixed."

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greenshackle2
Yes, this.

Or, another example, a corporation could legitimately be advocating for more
stringent regulation while doing the bare minimum to abide by the law.

If the environment is sufficiently competitive, the corporation or politician
that goes the extra ethical mile gets outcompeted and _fails_. So the choice
is between being hypocritical or not existing.

To succeed, they have to either convince all other players to cooperate and
use the more ethical, less competitive strategy, or change the system so that
the less ethical strategy is not an option.

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marche101
Comment in the article gets it pretty spot on.

"Please learn the definition of a word before using it. Something isn’t
hypocrisy if it takes time to fix due to the pervasive nature of the problem."

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ivraatiems
> hypocrisy: the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to
> which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense.

Zuckerberg: "We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves..."

Zuckerberg (paraphrasing): "We'll penalize sites we deem to contain inaccurate
information."

To be clear, I think the latter stance is appropriate and reasonable in this
case. It's also Facebook's right to police content on its system as it wishes.
However, I think that in this and many cases, Zuckerberg is being somewhat
disingenuous.

This statement in particular is not a huge example, and the article itself is
crying wolf somewhat, but it's a mistake to assume good faith from Facebook at
this point.

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greendragon
Zuck 3 (paraphrasing): "We're building tools to help states censor things they
don't like, independent of the truth of those things."

Consistent with 1, not really with 2. Agree that 2's not a huge deal in the
grand scheme of issues with Facebook but yeah, best not to assume good faith
lightly.

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gfodor
this reminds me of those people who sift through Google search results to try
to find some controversial query/result pair. they then go on to reveal their
mental model of Google's search model is "humans with an agenda curate each
page."

beyond the point about how "hypocracy" is not the right term here, it's also
just a hard problem, and an example of a single false positive doesn't provide
much evidence about the state of Facebook's filtering algorithms.

also to be fair I can empathize with the hesitancy of Facebook to wade into
this. the slippery slope from filtering out "fake erectile dysfunction ads" to
"things lots of people disagree with" I think is very real and very scary.

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theseatoms
And the truth is that "humans with an agenda curate each [linked] page."

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giarc
The ads beside his posts aren't specific to his page, they are being served
just like any other users page.

I also think the issue isn't just simply blocking fox.com.news.magazine from
advertising. If FB blocks that site, they just create a new one. The solution
is more complicated than search and destroy.

I think we have to keep in mind that it's in FBs best interest to produce
relevant ads. If people start to learn that ads are just fronts for viagara
sites, they stop clicking on ads. Facebooks ad revenue would drop and that's a
big issue. So I'm sure they are working on solutions and for someone to see
Mark is lying or being insincere is just incorrect.

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lancewiggs
Comments about the use of the word hypocrisy aside, and assuming the
screenshot isn't mocked up and fake itself, this does show how Facebook has a
serious issue that it has, until now, wilfully ignored.

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throwaway420
I think taking Zuckerberg at face value here is incorrect.

I suspect when he's talking about misinformation, he's not really referring to
shady erectile disfunction or supplement ads or anything else that's not true
that isn't really meaningful in the big picture.

I suspect he's referring to news items that the corporate media will not touch
with a 10 foot pole.

The elites don't care if the plebs line some billionaires pockets by clicking
on a few fake penis enlargement ads: they do care about the masses getting a
little too woke however.

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nullnilvoid
How is Mark Zuckerberg a hypocrite? He did not say the problem is solved
forever. He says he takes it seriously and is working hard on it. The problem
itself is very complex.

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mankash666
Click bait. This article in no way demonstrates Zuckerberg's hypocrisy. It
simply demonstrates the draw of a sensationalist headline

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parenthephobia
It's unreasonable to hold Mark personally responsible for what ads Facebook's
algorithm chose to display next to his post.

What the article shows is not hypocrisy, but ironic juxtaposition.

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TTPrograms
The AIs generating the click-bait ads and pages were just confused by the
false feedback metrics they were seeing.

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marknutter
"This Title is Link Bait"

