
Sheryl Sandberg: I want to address some of the claims that have been made - tareqak
https://www.facebook.com/717545176/posts/10160967443525177/
======
pm90
She doesn’t address any of the specific facts that investigators found among:

* hiring Republican lobbyists to make a good name for FB

* Sen. Schumer’s apparently personal involvement in protecting FB

* the firing of Alex Stamos, who surfaced Russian Inflirtration

This is just another vapid “we’re sorry, we promise to do better next time”
posts. Completely meaningless... does she really think SV will be fooled by
this crap?

~~~
cjhopman
> * hiring Republican lobbyists to make a good name for FB

??? There's an entire paragraph in her post about that.

> * Sen. Schumer’s apparently personal involvement in protecting FB

True, she didn't address that. It doesn't really seem to be one of the major
issues people have found offensive.

> * the firing of Alex Stamos, who surfaced Russian Inflirtration

The NYTimes never claimed that Stamos was fired (and, afaik, no reputable
source has).

~~~
pm90
A social media company getting the Senate leader of one of the 2 major parties
in the US on their side is a huge fucking deal.

The Stamos firing is mentioned prominently in the article. He seems like the
only person with the guts to speak truth to power... and he was fired, his
career basically ended, for exposing the truth of a foreign Governments
malicious interference? Come on man... this is HUGE. The message She sent with
Stamos’ firing was: if you get in the way of our growth, we will git ya. And
she hasn’t addressed that in this post.

~~~
cjhopman
> A social media company getting the Senate leader of one of the 2 major
> parties in the US on their side is a huge fucking deal.

Odd then that in the many comments on this very website discussing the
original article
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453958)),
the terms "Schumer", "Senator", "Senate", and "Sen." never appear.

------
decebalus1
Oh dear.. I don't know what to believe. Hasn't Facebook reached the whole
'check with legal' thing yet? I mean seriously, I've worked with companies the
size of Facebook and vetting vendors/vendor relations was always a thing,
especially for touchy matters (large transactions, government relations,
government contracts, PR, anything that touches politics, PACs etc..). I find
it hard to believe upper management legitimately has total ignorance.

~~~
dorchadas
They're used to getting away with things, and think it's going to keep
happening. They've been running unregulated, so have really had no need to
check with legal.

------
shard972
So facebook didn't know that they were paying for the creation of fake news?
Seems like they are really going to be up against the wall trying to figure
out who their platform is making fake news if they can't even see it under
their own nose.

------
LaserToy
I think it is time to Lean In and do something, like put your customer first.

Honestly, after integrating with your platform 6 years ago, I realized that if
you want to post something privately on FB - you just don’t post it.

~~~
jnwatson
It was always about the customers. The users, however...

~~~
LaserToy
Are the product

------
jf
Internet Archive link for those who don’t want to give Facebook any traffic or
have the site blocked:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20181116055923/https://m.faceboo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181116055923/https://m.facebook.com/717545176/posts/10160967443525177/)

------
seagullz
> I did not know we hired them or about the work they were doing...

If true, was this by design, to have plausible deniability, much like the
willful ignorance on the part of the military top brass when it comes to
massacres etc.?

Regardless, some lack of coordination seems real even as now the scandal
unfolds:

> Our relationship with Definers was well known by the media...
> [[https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/new-york-times-
> update/](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/new-york-times-update/)]

------
ravenstine
> We’re no longer working with them but at the time, they were trying to show
> that some of the activity against us that appeared to be grassroots also had
> major organizations behind them. I did not know we hired them or about the
> work they were doing, but I should have.

It never occurred to anyone at Facebook to _audit_ what Definers was doing?

For goodness sake, make sure you don't read the comments on that post.

~~~
jakelazaroff
Two suspicious things about these claims:

1) In Facebook's official response [1], they say

 _> Our relationship with Definers was well known by the media – not least
because they have on several occasions sent out invitations to hundreds of
journalists about important press calls on our behalf._

But somehow neither Sheryl Sanders nor Mark Zuckerberg [2] were aware of this
"well known" relationship.

2) If Definers' job were really as benign as exposing faux-grassroots
criticism, why mask the connection to Facebook by going through then? Why
wouldn't Facebook respond directly, as they did to the New York Times exposé?

[1] [https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/new-york-times-
update/](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/new-york-times-update/)

[2] [https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-says-he-
didn...](https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-says-he-didnt-know-
facebook-hired-definers-to-discredit-critics-2018-11)

------
mixologic
What about the Rohingya, Sheryl?

~~~
kochikame
Everyone is reading this in Archer's voice

------
smaili
> I also want to address the issue that has been raised about a PR firm,
> Definers...I did not know we hired them or about the work they were doing,
> but I should have.

To be fair, are COO's normally aware of every firm that the company is working
with? I feel like the CFO would need to know given their role in overseeing
company financials, but not sure if it would make sense for a COO to be in the
loop.

------
oculusthrift
oh please really? her excuse is she’s incompetent and didn’t know who she was
hiring? and what about the fact that she yelled at the security chief for
being honest about russia?

------
patrickg_zill
They lied to congress directly in claiming during testimony that Palmer Luckey
was not fired because of his $10k donation to an anti Hillary PAC. As the
recent Wall Street Journal article shows, what FB told Congress was untrue.

Why believe them now?

------
nickgrosvenor
It's over for facebook, they are myspace 2.0. They should count their
blessings they bought instagram.

~~~
shard972
Come back in 6 months and say that.

Not trying to be cruel, but it seems like social media entities like FB seem
almost impossible to unseat from their position of being the new public space
of the 21st century.

Nothing over the last day has been overly surprising and pretty much typical
facebook behaviour, doesn't seem like near enough to overcome the demand-side
economies of scale they hugely benefit from.

~~~
gingerbread-man
Speaking personally, two things have kept me from permanently deleting my
Facebook account: my contact list, and apps that require FB sign-in.

Facebook's core utility as the web's primary identity provider, and the
network effects underlying that position, form a tremendous "economic moat."

The amount of time users spend on Facebook.com and the iOS/Android apps may
decline and cut into their revenue, but their core platform isn't going away
for a long time.

~~~
llampx
> Facebook's core utility as the web's primary identity provider, and the
> network effects underlying that position, form a tremendous "economic moat."

Maybe its just me being extremely privacy-conscious, but I only ever had
Airbnb and Spotify linked to Facebook. I never wanted to link Facebook further
into my life than I had to. When I deleted my Facebook account it was simple
to convert my Airbnb account, and I just let the fb-linked Spotify account die
with it.

------
pm90
@dang.. why has this article disappeared from the front page?

------
benwad
To clear things up for confused people like me, when she says the IRA she
means the Internet Research Agency, not the Irish Republican Army.

~~~
tarboreus
That dang IRA is always popping up.

------
oculusthrift
how can we vote for either part when the leader (schumer) is so corrupt?

~~~
anonuser123456
As a society we are learning that democracy doesn't work when you vote for the
person you least hate, or the other side hates most.

Don't vote for a party. Vote for a person, and the person you actually want.

------
cityzen
Say it under oath, Sheryl.

------
hereiskkb
Facebook is directly culpable in abetting a genocide level event in Myanmar.
Enough said.

~~~
ssijak
People are, not the tools. There are always tools that could be used for bad
acts but people are the once who can deicide how to use them.

~~~
andromedavision
Exactly. Going on a tangent here but this is exactly what I tell gun control
proponents. Deal with the root cause of the problem and leave gun owners be.

~~~
tempestn
Unfortunately, the root cause in that case is unstable people getting a hold
of guns and then killing people with them (themselves or others). (Leaving
aside gun accidents, which are also a problem.) While we should certainly do
everything we can to help prevent and treat mental illness, it will never be
possible to eliminate it completely. Therefore we should also make it as
unlikely as possible that such a person would have access to a gun.

That's not to say that people should not be allowed to own guns, but I believe
it does follow that very careful standards should be in place to ensure that
licensed gun owners will use, transport, and store their weapons with the due
level of care. Reasonable people could certainly debate what sort of standards
those would be, in terms of licensing, restrictions, education, storage and
transportation requirements, etc., but given the evidence that availability of
firearms contributes to deaths by homicide and suicide, the issue certainly
seems worthy of investigation.

~~~
andromedavision
> Reasonable people could certainly debate what sort of standards those would
> be

Sounds reasonable to me. I would however, also ask you to consider that
excessive control leading to difficulty in accessing guns for personal
protection is dangerous as well. The question becomes how much power do you
want to give government over this issue.

A lot of gun owners cite the concerns that they have over the emergence of a
tyrannical government. With guns, these citizens can protect themselves more
adequately.

You don't want a scenario where the government of the day rounds up a bunch of
deplorables/undesirables and sets out to massacre them. This has happened
before and I'd bet that guns in the hands of each of these individuals would
have accorded them a fairer chance at defending themselves.

As far as deaths go, governments have killed more people than a few gun toting
individuals who clearly have mental issues have. Governments are more
dangerous.

~~~
tempestn
I don't think it's fair that you're getting down votes here without replies. I
didn't down vote, but I'll explain why I disagree.

It is most likely true that governments have killed more people than
individuals with guns acting alone, although I don't think it's as lopsided as
you suggest. As an example, the United States death toll in all of World War
II was about 400,000. Currently there are over 30,000 gun deaths in the US
every year.

The more significant issue though, is the claim that a prevalence of guns
would prevent government tyranny to the extent that it outweighs the damage
they cause. Speaking of the US specifically, that would first require that the
US would have a government at some point that was intent on killing hundreds
of thousands of its own people. But not only that, it would require an armed
insurrection against that government to actually be successful in stopping it.
I'm no fan of the current US government's policies or effectiveness, but both
of those events seem astronomically unlikely anytime in the foreseeable
future. It is incredibly unlikely that the US government would morph into a
murderously tyrannical regime. And if that somehow did happen, it is also
unlikely that individual citizens with guns could do much to stop it. On the
other hand, it's a fact that access to guns causes tens of thousands of deaths
in the US _every year_.

I just can't see any reasonable argument that the likelihood of the emergence
and defeat of a tyrannical government is so great that it is _remotely_ likely
to outweigh the existing annual gun death toll. Not to mention that I'm not
even suggesting preventing gun ownership, just sensible restrictions. In order
to drive a car you need to prove that you know the rules of the road and that
your vision is sufficient (or that you will wear corrective lenses). Your car
must be registered and in good working order. I'm in favor of a similar
licensing process for guns: a thorough, standardized test to prove that you
are of sound mind and are aware of proper safe use and storage. Registration
so that law enforcement can be aware of potential threats, and can track
weapons used in crimes. Restrictions on how guns can be legally stored and
transported, and where they can be taken. I'm not an expert, and I could
certainly be convinced I'm off on the specifics, but opposing any restrictions
on ownership whatsoever seems an untenable position to me.

~~~
dcow
I agree with you completely except that I caution people not dismiss the idea
of an armed rebellion so easily. It’s really easy to fool ourselves into
thinking bad shit doesn’t happen and we are “beyond violence”. I want to
believe it too, but let’s just say for example Trump starts rounding up
“illegals” and shooting them if they refuse to leave our country. Just think
about that. At some point many of us would break and as we see our friends and
families torn apart we would be willing to die to defend their humanity.
Hopefully we’d have some of the military on our side, but we’d likely break
out in civil war. Our military is powerful but not as big as many people
assume. It can’t do shit to a bunch of people in concrete urban structures
with AKs what makes anyone think 100MM citizens with weapons wouldn’t be
effective in seizing control back from a tyrannical leader?

Those who sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither.

I know you’ve heard it before. But I honestly worry we’re suffering from a
“times are good why do I need all these liberties my ancestors fought for”
phase and it would be really dumb to forfeit them all and then end up back at
square one with an actual actively oppressive system governing us and no way
to defend ourselves against it.

~~~
andromedavision
> Trump starts rounding up “illegals” and shooting them if they refuse to
> leave our country

I'd say that that's a valid I'd concern even as a Trump supporter. All
governments are capable of copious amounts of nastiness. Today, my guy could
be in power, tomorrow someone else's will be. Therefore, systems that take
this into account would perform better than those that don't.

