
Zuckerberg told execs the company's at 'war,' called media coverage 'bulls---' - SirLJ
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-promises-to-be-more-hands-on-at-facebook-2018-11
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Tempest1981
More discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18482855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18482855)

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awakeasleep
I hate it when executives start using war analogies to talk about business.

It has always indicated that I should start looking for a new job because I'm
not going to fit with the new culture. It's not just that I'm an anti-war
hippie either. Describing your business in terms of war both disrespects the
tremendous toll paid by soldiers and civilians, and indicates a "winners and
losers" mindset, but that mindset also indicates it's part of your objective
to hurt 'the enemy'.

It's a morally broken, inefficient and emotional way to look at business.

~~~
gaius
_war analogies to talk about business._

A previous job had the “tiger team” who would meet in the “war room”. But to
the entire rest of the company they were mediocre middle-managers of a medium-
sized IT department and everyone else called it the “comfy room” because it
had sofas and a Nintendo.

Also, to anyone with similar delusions, a Bluetooth headset does not make you
a gunship pilot...

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closeparen
If there's a concise, non-militaristic name for a team with a specific,
urgent, short-term objective holed up in a room together, I'd love to hear
about it. "Strike team" and "war room" just work really well.

~~~
thecatspaw
crysis team works really well (and is commonly used in german)

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closeparen
That's pretty good. I worry that admitting there's a "crisis" (even when there
is) wouldn't go over too well with management, though.

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gaius
Another true story, at a different job I was once on the “disaster recovery”
team but that implied there might be a disaster so we became the “business
continuity team” but that implied there might be an interruption so we were
finally renamed “the major events team”.

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mratzloff
Sure. Maybe Zuckerberg shouldn't have put the screws to every media outlet on
the planet. Is he so arrogant that he thought pissing all of them off in
unison wouldn't have any blowback in their editorial decisions?

Oh, by the way, he's created a surveillance apparatus that would have been
beyond even the wildest dreams of secret police everywhere 50 years ago. He
collects thousands of discrete data points about every man, woman, and child
on the planet who uses the Web, regardless of whether or not they use
Facebook—or even have an account. He put such lax access security in place
around that personal data that anyone who wanted to could get access to it.
And he did nothing after detecting a state-sponsored propaganda war being
waged against US citizens.

But sure. It's unfair.

~~~
russdpale
Very well put. There are a few articles detailing his own involvement with
Russian players, including oligarchs invested in facebook. And didn't facebook
take a lot of money from the and NSA business front back when it was still
only for college students?

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knolan
I think that anyone who cares enough about Facebook’s behaviour has already
left. Most folks just keep going back to see their feeds regardless of how
horrible it becomes.

~~~
jmspring
Sadly groups I belong to have settled on FB as the community forum. It’s a
lowest denominator thing.

~~~
cenal
It’s also free.

I know plenty of companies charge members to belong to private Facebook
groups.

Great business for the group organizers while it lasts.

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onetimemanytime
When in a hole, start a war with the press. Yeah, that's the way to go Mark
the Great.

FB and Google have siphoned much of the media advertising money, so there's no
love left.

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joeblau
At war with whom? Media outlets, hackers, propaganda organizations?

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sAbakumoff
I can't resist, sorry [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elrV-
oHeSjE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elrV-oHeSjE)

~~~
PavlovsCat
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IEwBrJzhlg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IEwBrJzhlg)

> War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or
> sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to
> make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too
> intelligent.

\-- George Orwell

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pcdoodle
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXrKKwHmPz4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXrKKwHmPz4)

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AzzieElbab
Super nasty swan song from NYT and co. Of course FB is at war, when media
keeps calling for the gov to break it up

~~~
PavlovsCat
The media, the inventor of the web.. but that's all details.

~~~
AzzieElbab
No. Al Gore is

~~~
PavlovsCat
I was referring to this:

[https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/11/01/146204/tim-
berners-...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/11/01/146204/tim-berners-lee-
says-tech-giants-may-have-to-be-split-up)

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asianthrowaway
I'm really curious if there's a deeper reason for why companies are suddenly
thrown under the bus by the mainstream media, or if it's just journalists
mimicking each other because they lack imagination. First Elon, now Zuck.
Who's next?

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fromthestart
I don't think you can quite compare Elon to Zuck. As far as we know, Elon
isn't stripping away a captive audience's privacy with reckless abandon.

~~~
asianthrowaway
Google is just as bad as Facebook but they don't get this constant negative
media coverage.

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cenal
Google had “Do no evil”

Zuck had “I’m CEO b!tch”

One is much more likable than the other.

~~~
arrogant_vs
Arrogance is less dangerous than hypocrisy IMO.

~~~
mmjaa
But hubris is worst of all.

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seunosewa
This is probably the most exciting thing Mark has said in years. I rather like
it because it probably means that Facebook will be making some bold moves
soon.

~~~
Lio
Which bit do you think is bold? That Facebook is paying right wing lobbyists
to tie criticism of its past behaviour to George Soros or that it "tapped its
business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights group to cast some
criticism of the company as anti-Semitic,"?

Both of these seem like the kind of horrible dick moves that define Facebook
as a company.

If they were truely bold they would look for ways to operate without gathering
massive amounts of people's personal data or supporting those only interested
in fostering chaos in the West.

If Zuckerberg was a truly bold leader he'd be winning hearts and minds by
showing up to Parliaments in Canada and the UK when summoned over his
company's past misdeeds ...instead of cowering behind generic press releases
saying "we didn't do nufin'".

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Bucephalus355
My takeaway from these latest articles was actually that Zuckerberg was,
strangely enough, doing a pretty good job responding to the crisis.

It’s just that Sheryl Sandburg has been undermining him and kind of stabbing
him in the back.

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cauldron
Interesting, Chinese IT companies have long been controlling the media,
basically corralling "reporters and self-media operators" into private chat
groups administered by their staff, therefore excluding outsiders and
naysayers, effectively forestall most negative coverage.

Also they don't have quite as many insider leaks.

Cellphone companies like Huawei and Xiaomi would give these people test units
and guidelines about how to write articles. You can hardly see candid reviews,
a lot of them just do shit-tier translation of TheVerge and other English
sites(not sure authorized or not).

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ryacko
Translating an article and publishing it is a violation of copyright, so
clearly not.

~~~
cauldron
Chinese tech media basically rely on it.

The "self-media" cottage industry that Wechat and Toutiao (by TikTok parent
company ByteDance) created, is of 99.99% garbage, but they know what content
their users want and like to see, boasts "give me a pic and I can spin it into
a hit story", they basically provided a heaven platform for sensationalists
and hustlers like this guy.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/fake-news-hillary-
clin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/fake-news-hillary-clinton-
cameron-harris.html)

