
Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis - cmmn_nighthawk
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html
======
strict9
>On a conservative news site called the NTK Network, dozens of articles
blasted Google and Apple for unsavory business practices. One story called Mr.
Cook hypocritical for chiding Facebook over privacy, noting that Apple also
collects reams of data from users. Another played down the impact of the
Russians’ use of Facebook.

>The rash of news coverage was no accident: NTK is an affiliate of Definers,
sharing offices and staff with the public relations firm in Arlington, Va.
Many NTK Network stories are written by staff members at Definers or America
Rising, the company’s political opposition-research arm, to attack their
clients’ enemies. While the NTK Network does not have a large audience of its
own, its content is frequently picked up by popular conservative outlets,
including Breitbart.

Facebook employed content writers posing as journalists, as hired guns against
their enemies. A page out of the playbook of the Internet Research Agency.

~~~
lern_too_spel
This is not the first time Facebook has used these tactics.
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/12/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/12/facebook-
pr-firm-google)

------
jseliger
Is there an actual crisis, outside the media narrative? Has Facebook seen an
actual fall in monthly, weekly, or daily active users?

To me, this story reads a lot like a media narrative that has very little to
do with users's actual lives. And I've been reading variations on "Why
Facebook sucks" and "Why Facebook is doomed" for a very long time. It's like
the "Why this is the year of Linux on the desktop," but for media companies.

Don't get me wrong: I'm barely a Facebook user and agree with much of the
criticism. But what I do, anecdotally, is less significant than what users do
and want to do.

I think the conventional media sources, including the NYT, doesn't want to
confront its own role in the 2016 election (the relentless media focus on
Clinton's email server was insane). We don't want to acknowledge that most
people's epistemological skill is low. Why look at ourselves, when we have
this handy scapegoat right... over... there?

[https://www.iep.utm.edu/girard/#H3](https://www.iep.utm.edu/girard/#H3)

~~~
bepotts
This is exactly it.

Look, Facebook needs to get its act together. They are in need for serious
reform. However, mainstream media knows that Facebook is under a ton of
pressure and these types of stories generate a ton of clicks. I know people
want Facebook to die, but Facebook's usage has remained pretty much the same
during all these negative stories. The public is not hating Facebook as much
as people want to believe.

But the media has its narrative and it'll continue this "Facebook is evil"
beat. The same with Clinton's email server, and more recently, the same with
that immigrant caravan coming up from Central America.

~~~
ForHackernews
I mean, you can bloody well hate some business and still patronize it. I'd
wager most Americans hate their cable company.

I agree there's little risk of users deserting Facebook en masse, but what we
may see is lawmakers coming down on FB like a ton of bricks. It will be
popular, too: Heavily regulating social media and slapping them with massive
fines will be winning issues with constituents on both sides of the aisle.

~~~
dcow
If 3 other people pledge with me, I’ll delete my Facebook account right now.
I’ve already exported all my data.

~~~
cableshaft
No takers so far after 6 hours. Expected to see at least one person.

I'm definitely not one of them. I use it for networking. Pretty much everyone
in the board game industry is on Facebook at the moment (publishers,
designers, developers, artists, media, etc), to get feedback from each other,
coordinate events, and reach out to fans and potential customers.

~~~
dcow
I commented pretty far down a long thread. I didn’t expect much. Like you, the
network is what I’m afraid of losing.

------
minimaxir
Funny quote:

> “We’re not going to traffic in your personal life,” Tim Cook, Apple’s chief
> executive, said in an MSNBC interview. “Privacy to us is a human right. It’s
> a civil liberty.” (Mr. Cook’s criticisms infuriated Mr. Zuckerberg, who
> later ordered his management team to use only Android phones, since the
> operating system has far more users than Apple’s.)

~~~
samfisher83
If Tim cook believed this why is he taking billions from google to be the
default search engine? Why not pick a more privacy friendly search engine?

~~~
xvector
Because no other search engine provides nearly as smooth an experience as
Google.

Coincidentally, nothing is stopping privacy-conscious users to use, for
example, DuckDuckGo. It's right there in the options on both macOS and Safari.

Finally, it's pretty absurd to say that Tim Cook/Apple don't believe in
privacy. Out of all major consumer software/hardware manufacturers, Apple
easily takes the most privacy-conscious stance of them all - which isn't
saying much until you see the extent that they've gone to protect user privacy
- ranging from the Secure Enclave and the T2 chip to fingerprinting and
tracking prevention in Safari 12.

~~~
ric2b
> Because no other search engine provides nearly as smooth an experience as
> Google.

DDG is actually smoother, it loads faster and is more lightweight on phone
browsers.

------
leroy_masochist
Facebook's recent preoccupation with staying in Washington's good graces, as
described in the article, seems misplaced. It almost seems like the long-term
personal legacy concerns of Zuck, Sandberg, Bickert, and others (many of whom
clearly aspire to elected or appointed office) is taking precedence over FB's
actual strategic priorities.

If I were running FB, my main worry would be the fact that it's devolved into
a platform for baby boomers to yell at each other about politics. An angry
Congress, even a really angry one, has a limited ability to kill FB. In fact,
I'd posit that a bona fide War With The Man might even be good for employee
morale, another Cartago Delenda Est moment.

User shrinkage, declining engagement and general loss of relevancy, on the
other hand -- that would be the death knell, and it already kind of appears to
be happening.

~~~
humanrebar
> ...it's devolved into a platform for baby boomers to yell at each other
> about politics.

I think the draw of a Two Minutes Hate isn't specific to an age group.

------
mindgam3
This nugget made me want to laugh and cry at the same time:

"...if Facebook pulled down the Russians’ fake pages, regular Facebook users
might also react with outrage at having been deceived: His own mother-in-law,
Mr. Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls."

Yeah, great idea, Facebook. Let's protect the users from the outrage of having
been deceived by... initiating a much bigger layer of deceit/coverup. That
will totally work!

------
ilovecaching
To me the negative press cycle involving Facebook and other advertising
companies is more about the hidden war between the new age digital
advertisers, and the former rulers of ads: the conventional news outlets. The
news outlets will jump on any chance they can get to kill their competitors
just like any other company. Without Facebook, they could become the sole
source of news again, and reap the lost ad revenue themselves.

That's why I don't trust anything I read in the news. If I don't hear it from
a friend working at one of the SV companies (which isn't that hard to find,
we're a much smaller community than one would imagine) then I consider it to
be sensationalized, hyperbolic, and/or downright wrong.

~~~
skeptic_69
how would hear about this story unless you are personally friends with alex
stamos or zuckerberg or sandenberg? I am all for skepticism but blanket
rejection of responsible journalism seems like an over-reaction. the reporting
of the new york times on facebook has been continuously borne out by events.

~~~
ilovecaching
You're asserting that it is responsible journalism. That is not a given in
this debate.

------
kakaorka
Makes me think about the quote ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand
something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!’ Of course
they don’t care about anything but profit and growth because it’s what makes
them richer.

~~~
viburnum
The leadership of Facebook has more money than they could ever enjoy. They do
all this sleazy stuff because they enjoy being sleazy.

~~~
mrguyorama
You should really take a look at the price tags of luxury yachts sometime. The
cost of extreme luxury expands to completely use up the unending streams of
money directed at it

------
panarky
_Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat
Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off
damaging regulation.

Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist
protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros.

It also tapped its business relationships, persuading a Jewish civil rights
group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic._

~~~
IBM
A few months ago Bloomberg published a story which I'm 99% sure was directed
by Facebook PR, in-line with their strategy being reported on in this story
[1][2].

Also can any mods tell me why all my comments are dead?

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-08/is-
apple-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-08/is-apple-really-
your-privacy-hero)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17719607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17719607)

~~~
nkurz
_Also can any mods tell me why all my comments are dead?_

Write to 'hn@ycombinator.com' and ask --- and report back what they say. It
looks like it's because of your comment linking Russia and Assange, but it's
not clear if this was because it was too pro, too anti, or just because it
mentioned one or the other. I'd guess it's user flagging gone awry, but maybe
it's a new automated system that's broken instead.

~~~
eiaoa
> It looks like it's because of your comment linking Russia and Assange,

I don't think so, my guess is that it was due to one of the comments _prior_
to the one you mentioned, or some activity that occurred on the same IP IBM
was using.

------
stock_toaster
I have heard apocryphal stories of people not wanting to hire ex-uber
employees, because the culture there had such a bad reputation as being
ethically bankrupt. I wonder if continued fb employment would make someone
similarly less desirable as a hire.

------
skeptic_69
I rendered my disapproval of Facebook by deleting it. That is the only action
they care about.

~~~
gaius
They kept your shadow profile and are still tracking you, I guarantee it

~~~
dwd
The shadow profile is probably just as valuable as a real one when it comes to
selling advertising.

And that's what matters. Everything else is just a cost of doing business.

~~~
jcbrand
There's no way it can be just as valuable.

For one, if you're not using their site, they can't show you ads there.

~~~
dwd
They don't need to. They can advertise to other members of your household,
friends or any associates who they have linked that profile to.

Also you could be targeted on any site in their Advertising Network. In those
cases they don't need specifics, just a profile/persona they can target or
crosslink your browser fingerprint from like buttons and pixel tracking with a
FaceBook user with the same IP address.

------
netwanderer3
Great article! This explains the reason why Google started receiving so much
shit since last year. Typically you would see them appearing gradually but for
anyone who live on the internet, I'm sure they noticed the sudden sharp
increase in Google attacks starting from the end of last year.

It is incredible that the NYTimes were able to obtain some very private
information that was presented in this article. It must have been leaked
through someone at a very high ranking within Facebook executive team.

~~~
richardaway
The tide has really turned against Sheryl Sandberg internally. I think some of
her entourage are either reading the tea leaves or trying to create them.

------
sheana_ahlqvist
The Innovation For All podcast released a super timely episode related to this
yesterday. It was on whether tech companies like Facebook and Google are
monopolies and if that's really a problem.
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/google-facebook-are-
mono...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/google-facebook-are-monopolies-
does-it-matter-feat/id1426194513?i=1000423848439&mt=2)

The guest went into this topic some more: "While Facebook had publicly
declared itself ready for new federal regulations, Ms. Sandberg privately
contended that the social network was already adopting the best reforms and
policies available. Heavy-handed regulation, she warned, would only
disadvantage smaller competitors."

------
davidw
I sense that there may be a bipartisan crapping on FB next year; it seems like
no one much is very happy with them.

~~~
pweissbrod
You underestimate the power of lobbying :)

[https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientlbs.php?id=D00003356...](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientlbs.php?id=D000033563&year=2018)

------
Yizahi
How leaders of non-facebook social media companies dealt with facebook crisis
(probably): "I hope the public won't remember about us. Please god, make them
forget about us."

------
Stryder
What a shitshow all around. Leadership is dead in today's climate.

------
jancsika
> Looking into the Russian activity without approval, she said, had left the
> company exposed legally.

Ooh, what an insidious tension. I actually never considered it as a security
risk of proprietary systems.

Can someone here on HN filter for posts that rankly speculate about how secure
FAANG must be based on the high skill level of the security teams there? I
know I've read some. I'd like to read back through them with this threat in
mind.

------
starchild_3001
As Warren Buffet would say Facebook leaders need to start imagining seeing all
their words and actions on the front page of WSJ and act accordingly. Nothing
stays private. Say and do the right thing, don't play games.

This is the biggest corporate f'up I've seen in a while. Someone needs to own
it and step down.

------
Balgair
This Times piece should be taken seriously by FB, it's shareholders,
employees, and users. With good sourcing, this paints a _very_ immature
picture of the company, from leadership on down to the users.

Though the article uses the Russian interference as the launching off point,
in my reading, it seems that these attacks on our democracy are essentially
waived off. That the most pressing issue for Zuck was not that the families of
his senior staff were being fooled (along with the rest of the voting public),
but that his company may be ruined. This extremely serious, and continuing,
attack on the public seems to not really matter to any of the parties
involved, only that they may get 'in trouble' or lose money.

Good Lord. Where is the maturity? Where are the adults? Zuck seems like he's
still 24 here, bopping about feeding calves and 'listening'. At least write up
a report on your summer vacation.

The dire situations that the company (and the government) is in seems to be
only taken as far as the mirrors these actors look into.

What absolute children.

~~~
fthssht
What is the extent of the Russian interference really though? Studies show it
didn't change the outcome. We still don't really know who hacked the DNC,
whether it was Russia as a hand selected group of people from intelligence
agencies included was likely, or whether it was an insider as implied by
Assange and security experts who looked at how fast the information was
downloaded. We know Russia did take both sides on issues like black lives
matter to "cause division" We know they created a "Buff Bernie" meme, but it
really feels like a massive excuse by the Democrats for an embarrassing
failure. The whole thing at this point has come to feel comical. Am I missing
something or is this still all a bunch of nonsense strewn around for clicks
and ratings?

~~~
mikeyouse
> Studies show it didn't change the outcome.

Nothing credible says that, or could say that. Counterfactuals of that nature
are very hard and in an election that was decided by 70,000 total votes out of
over 130,000,000 it's nearly impossible to assign causation.

> We still don't really know who hacked the DNC, whether it was Russia as a
> hand selected group of people from intelligence agencies included was
> likely, or whether it was an insider as implied by Assange and security
> experts who looked at how fast the information was downloaded.

Nah, we know it was Russia. The CIA said so from the beginning (learned via
signals intelligence), independent security firms all said the same (by
attributing the C&C servers and link shorteners to other attacks known to be
from Russia), and the DOJ laid out the full detail in the indictments. We even
know who specifically was sitting at the keyboard (presumably via Dutch intel
who had literal real-time video access). The Bill Binney nonsense about
download speeds was immediately discredited -- and further discredited once it
turned out that the Russians were using US-based proxy servers.

> We know Russia did take both sides on issues like black lives matter to
> "cause division" We know they created a "Buff Bernie" meme, but it really
> feels like a massive excuse by the Democrats for an embarrassing failure.

They repeatedly expressed preferences for Trump, the divisions they were
trying to cause were all for his benefit. They started targeting Marco Rubio
and Ted Cruz, and then eventually moved on to anything that would harm HRC,
such as propping up Bernie. The democrats obviously failed to win what should
have been a very winnable election but to deny Russian influence at this point
is to be deliberately obtuse.

If you have any doubt at all about the DNC hack, please just read the
'speaking indictment'. There's really no question at all:
[https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4598902-DOJ-
Russian-...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4598902-DOJ-Russian-
Indictments.html#document/p1)

~~~
coloneltcb
Thanks for that point by point refutation, but why do I feel like a Russian
troll just wasted both of our times...

------
Flimm
Here is Facebook's response to this article from NYTimes:
[https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/new-york-times-
update/](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/new-york-times-update/)

Quoting:

> Yesterday, The New York Times published an article about the past two years
> at Facebook. There are a number of inaccuracies in the story, including:

> 1\. Russia Investigation: The story asserts that we knew about Russian
> activity as early as the spring of 2016 but were slow to investigate it at
> every turn. This is not true. As Mark Zuckerberg told Congress, “Leading up
> to Election Day in November 2016, we detected and dealt with several threats
> with ties to Russia … [including] a group called APT28 … we also saw some
> new behavior when APT28-related accounts, under the banner of DC Leaks,
> created fake personas that were used to seed stolen information to
> journalists. We shut these accounts down for violating our policies.” After
> the election, no one ever discouraged Alex Stamos from looking into Russian
> activity — as he himself acknowledged on Twitter. Indeed as The New York
> Times says, “Mark and Sheryl [Sandberg] expanded Alex’s work.” Finally, we
> did not name Russia in our April 2017 white paper — but instead cited a US
> Government report in a footnote about Russian activity — because we felt
> that the US Director of National Intelligence was best placed to determine
> the source.

> 2\. The Muslim Ban: We did decide that President Trump’s comments on the
> Muslim ban, while abhorrent to many people, did not break our Community
> Standards for the same reasons The New York Times and many other
> organizations covered the news: Donald Trump was a candidate running for
> office. To suggest that the internal debate around this particular case was
> different from other important free speech issues on Facebook is wrong.

> 3\. Commitment to Fighting Fake News: Mark and Sheryl have been deeply
> involved in the fight against false news and information operations on
> Facebook — as they have been consistently involved in all our efforts to
> prevent misuse of our services.

> 4\. Sex Trafficking Legislation: Sheryl championed this legislation because
> she believed it was the right thing to do, and that tech companies need to
> be more open to content regulation where it can prevent real world harm. In
> fact, the company faced considerable criticism as a result.

> 5\. Android: Tim Cook has consistently criticized our business model and
> Mark has been equally clear he disagrees. So there’s been no need to employ
> anyone else to do this for us. And we’ve long encouraged our employees and
> executives to use Android because it is the most popular operating system in
> the world.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
"Except for the dates when it knew of the Russian attacks, Facebook doesn't
appear to be attacking the facts of the reports, but the interpretation. For
instance, the NYT never said that what Facebook did was anti-Semitic, but
rather that it was using Definers to depict attacks _against it_ as anti-
Semitic. 'It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil
rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic,' the
report stated. Many of its other responses, including the Stamos
investigation, fall along the same lines -- rebutting points that the NYT
never made."

[https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/15/facebook-response-nyt-
ex...](https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/15/facebook-response-nyt-expose/)

------
patrickg_zill
Translation: THEY LIED

------
IBM
>“We’re not going to traffic in your personal life,” Tim Cook, Apple’s chief
executive, said in an MSNBC interview. “Privacy to us is a human right. It’s a
civil liberty.” (Mr. Cook’s criticisms infuriated Mr. Zuckerberg, who later
ordered his management team to use only Android phones, since the operating
system has far more users than Apple’s.)

I can't get enough of the Apple-Facebook beef. Also kind of a "cut off your
nose to spite your face" kind of move from a security perspective.

------
draw_down
> “You threw us under the bus!” she yelled at Mr. Stamos, according to people
> who were present.

People in high places really make me sick sometimes. This guy told the truth
about an important matter and she chewed his ass for it. Super professional to
take some (well-deserved) shit from the board, and then go proverbially kick
your dog in retaliation. What an asshole.

------
ilovecaching
To me the negative press cycle involving Facebook and other advertising
companies is more about the hidden war between the new age digital
advertisers, and the former rulers of ads: the conventional news outlets. The
news outlets will jump on any chance they can get to kill their competitors
just like any other company. Without Facebook, they could become the sole
source of news again, and reap the lost ad revenue themselves.

That's why I don't trust anything I read in the news. If I don't hear it from
a friend working at one of the SV companies (which isn't that hard to find,
we're a much smaller community than one would imagine) then I consider it to
be sensationalized, hyperbolic, and/or downright wrong.

At the very least, we certainly are never going to hear of the things Facebook
is doing right. We aren't going to hear about the economic opportunity or
positive connections it has produced. To say that something is completely one
sided is a strong sign of bias.

~~~
astrange
The purpose of propaganda is to make you feel that the smart choice is to not
trust anything you hear.

~~~
fzeroracer
Every time I hear someone claim 'I just don't trust the news in general' it
makes me weep. Not only have we failed at imparting basic critical thinking
for people to make informed decisions as to the validity of various news
pieces, it also just confirms that as you mentioned the propagandists are
winning.

If you claim all news sources are fake news, then the only winner in that race
to the bottom are the ones making actual fake content.

~~~
ilovecaching
Trust != assumed validity. It simply means I do think critically and do my
research before trusting non-primary sources of information.

And weep all you want, I'd rather people question the news then blindly accept
everything they're fed on TV and in the papers. The news cycles have become
extremely sensationalized.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _I 'd rather people question the news then blindly accept everything they're
> fed on TV and in the papers_

That's fair. But it isn't what you're claiming to be doing. You're saying you
blindly disbelieve everything unless a friend vouches for it. That is neither
critical thinking nor rational thought--it's unquestioning faith in social
proof [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof)

