
The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version - wil_I_am_27
https://forward.com/culture/433666/the-real-mark-zuckerberg-is-a-lot-less-impressive-than-the-movie-version/
======
roenxi
The congressional hearings are a hostile environment. The only reason to have
Zuckerberg there is to get camera footage of him looking shifty and to
pressure him to do whatever the politicians want him to do.

His tactical and strategic goal is not to deliver 'zingers', it is ideally for
the situation to go quiet and be forgotten by everyone. Failing that, an
acceptable fallback is for any anti-Facebook action by government to get mired
in endless committee investigations that are boring, neverending and
unproductive to slow down any hostile regulation that might eventuate. Failing
that, regulation that is onerous but favours Facebook by locking out any
competition from the American markets. None of these will be achieved by
interesting public exchanges with Congresspeople.

Public government hearings are not where the serious moves are made. It is
more a show-and-tell for the politicians to communicate to their voters what
is being negotiated in the backrooms where real work happens.

~~~
supercanuck
Only one of these parties to the negotiation works on behalf of the American
people. Zuckerberg said he has 3B customers.

You seems bored with the process but I would argue the job politicians are
doing is equally important if not more so than the construction of an Online
Ad Delivering Skinner Box, the “real work” you allude to. (Current top most on
HackerNews explains how much people despise ads and pay money to avoid them)

Holding powerful people accountable, publicly, creating laws and regulations
and governing the rules of our society is very important to operating this
country.

~~~
objektif
Only if the said lawyers were doing those for the benefit of the people. Many
of those lawyers would kiss Zucks ass for a million. Hearings are just
theaters until we get money out of politics.

~~~
supercanuck
And in a representative democracy, there is an ability for the public to
remove said lawyer. We need to do that.

Private Corporation there is no such method.

------
patio11
Movie dialogue is scored on being _interesting_ but there are a lot of
_interesting_ responses to Congressional inquiry, including _interesting and
true_ responses, which pessimize for your tactical or strategic goals.

They also plausibly pessimize for Congress' goals. If you wanted to learn when
Zuckerberg learned of a topic, you could send him a letter, and he would check
his notes and send you a letter, and then you would know a thing you don't
care about in the least. The point of grilling Zuckerberg in person about it
is not to ascertain the truth, it is _to grill Zuckerberg on television_.

~~~
ohduran
Congressional inquiries haven't been about finding truth since TV was
invented. They are a platform for the parties involved to signal their
positions. MZ is talking to his investors, AOC to her constituents.

My point is: there is no conversation going on. Just people talking.

~~~
signal11
This is very true -- there are also echoes of how politicians prepare talking
points in response to journalists' questions these days. The person being
quizzed isn't actually prepared to answer questions, they come prepared with a
set of themes to talk about and will seek to massage their answer to _almost
any_ question to one of those prepared themes.

The other interesting thing specifically about televised Congressional
hearings is that Congresspeople have very little time -- AOC had 5 minutes, if
I recollect correctly. This gives the person being grilled an advantage -- by
simply taking his time with his answers he can run down the clock and be done
with AOC's questions.

~~~
lotsofpulp
The whole "grilling" format is just publicity for politicians. If they were
really interested in answers, they would send an email and get a response
back, and if they didn't they'd send a subpoena or start court proceedings.

And if they really wanted to do something, they would pass legislation. But of
course, you can't do that and get paid by lobbyists and/or get favors from
businesses at the same time. This grilling format solves all interests.
Politicians get to look like they're doing something, many gullible voters
think the politicians are doing something, and the businesses being looked
into get to look like there is something being done about them.

------
seanwilson
I agree his answers about why political ads shouldn't be fact checked weren't
good, but I found some of these "zinger" clips on Twitter really silly.

> Mr. Zuckerberg, what year and month did you personally first become aware of
> Cambridge Analytica?”

Unless I missed that the hearing was highly related to this, why would he
remember this exact date offhand?

You'd be better declining to answer this question than guess and get it wrong
which seems like what he did. Asking if he became aware of them before or
after a specific event would have been much more reasonable. There's tons of
important events in my life where I don't know the month it happened because
it's not important to remember.

I think he's right to say "I don't know" when he can't be completely sure.
That's not a zinger.

Likewise, it's not a zinger when you ask a really long question that contains
several factual claims that you require clarification on, or try to force a
yes/no answer to a loaded question (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_question#Complex_quest...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_question#Complex_question_fallacy)).

~~~
Cthulhu_
> Unless I missed that the hearing was highly related to this, why would he
> remember this exact date offhand?

Because it is one of the biggest scandals affecting Facebook in probably its
entire history, and he's been grilled about it before? You'd think that once
they found out his staff and advisors would make sure to tell him every single
detail about it. Likewise, it should be the thing that occupies him for months
on end.

It's inexcusable for him to not seem to know some basic factoids about the
whole thing.

~~~
fungicide
Fun fact: The "oid" suffix in factoid means "like", or "resembling". So a
factoid is not a true fact, but a statement resembling a fact. The word
"factoid" was coined by Norman Mailer to mean "an invented fact believed to be
true because it appears in print." So it is a source of great irony that the
meaning of the word has been inverted by the press to mean a trivial but true
fact. Historians of the future may have a fun time trying to figure out if our
factoids are a true fact that we consider trivial, or a fact that we know is
false but is believed to be true.

------
fatjokes
Is this the state of journalism in this day and age? Is there any surprise
that a real life CEO carefully coached by PR and lawyers is less interesting
than his doppelganger in a multi-million dollar Oscar-targeted movie backed by
a team of professional writers?

~~~
Pigo
Are you not entertained?!?

------
bertil
There was a very inspiring response from the original founding Facebook team
about Sorkin’s movie (right around the time they had the entire company go and
see it): like most people here know, starting a company isn’t glamorous, at
all, certainly in 2004-2006. Servers going down, impossible hiring; they
remember a blur of incessant crisis. They thought romanticised version of that
story where they look good, say witty things and kick ass was surprising but
inspiring for them.

Zuckerberg has gone through media training and can be very good when he’s
prepared for specific questions (see his public Q&A). He’s also notoriously
focused and happy to delegate. Asking him to come talk about Libra and ask
questions about Cambridge Analytica is an easy way to get vague answers.

------
toddmorey
“No one had any doubts who the adult in the room was Wednesday,” ends the
article. Right before the promoted content “This deadly sex habit is killing
seniors!”

I know that’s a bit off topic, but does speak towards the current environment
of not just Facebook, but the entire internet.

~~~
bigred100
Not sure how much the idea makes sense, but these days I feel that rather than
education, looks, status, etc. being the rare and difficult-to-attain markers
or benefits of being of a higher class, being a generally sane person with a
coherent worldview and some degree of emotional control is.

------
davidhyde
Preparing and asking a bunch of interview questions is a lot easier than being
on the receiving end and having to think though the legal ramifications about
what you’re about to answer. Contrasting the slickness of the interviewer with
the interviewee and drawing conclusions based on that is not accurate.

~~~
carloswilson
I appreciate that answering questions in a grilling interview is more
difficult than asking questions, but ...

> “You don’t know? This was the largest data scandal with respect to your
> company, that had catastrophic impacts on the 2016 election. You don’t
> know?”

... but at the same time, I would certainly expect the chairman and CEO of a
company to be more prepared to answer these difficult questions than what is
reported in the original article. This was one of the biggest scams related to
Facebook. I understand that Zukerberg's legal team may have advised him to be
vague during the interview and he probably answered what is best for his
company.

But as citizens of the world, we should never find such vague answers
acceptable. The way Cambridge Analytica has upset the process of democracy and
how Facebook data was used while doing so requires Facebook to be subject to
such grilling. It should be made clear to Facebook in no uncertain terms that
it needs to present answers and concrete answers.

~~~
iagovar
I've worked in marketing for an Agency. If Facebook had to check everything we
did, they'd really had a hard time. We had multiple clients with multiple
banners with multiple landing pages and all of this with a software rotating
stuff with A/B tests and regressions. If a political party came to hire us,
I'm sure we'll do it. This was in Spain, so I guess that there will be a lot
more companies doing this in the US.

Checking all of this within an acceptable timeframe for advertisers requires a
lot of labor. That comes with another wide set of problems. Loosy boundaries,
arbitrary bans, increased cost of ads etc etc. I have no special sympathy for
Facebook, but we have to understand that this is a really hard problem to
solve, and maybe there won't be any solution that satisfies the public.

~~~
jacques_chester
If it's hard, then it's hard. That no perfect, complete solution is possible
just means we accept the imperfect, incomplete solution if it is an
improvement on the status quo.

I really don't have a lot of sympathy for the woes of the advertising
industry, considering the consequences.

~~~
iagovar
If I, working there, found that FB was painful to work with, I'd go somewhere
else, as simple as that. I won't spend two days wrestling with FB to see if my
ad it's ok or not.

I may not care for political advertising, since my client is not looking to
"make a profit" like a traditional customer. But I definitely do for an
eCommerce brand for example.

Most agencies use FB because it's easy to work with and it's cheapish with a
little expertise. If that dissapeares then nobody is goung to pour money on
it.

------
ar7hur
I had at few meetings with Zuck at Facebook after Wit.ai was acquired in 2015.
To me, the real version is at least as impressive as the movie version.

Then, of course, maybe was I biased by the movie and everything else I already
heard about him? I'm sill wondering.

~~~
allie1
Care to share an anecdote?

------
FredrikMeyer
There's a missing "real" in the title of the submission: "The Mark Zuckerberg
Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version"

------
raister
Reality != Movies

People are boring, bias and sometimes, really dumb (or playing dumb to avoid
further persecution).

------
dimitar
Slightly off-topic - why doesn't FB just ban all political ads? Is it really
worth continuing to display them?

Either have a coherent policy that the CEO can explain or just don't do it.

~~~
orbifold
In Germany every political party gets a fixed number of slots for TV-Spots
basically free of charge ahead of an election. There is no other political
advertisement allowed (only the parties themselves are allowed to advertise).
Unfortunately neither newspapers nor internet advertisement is as strictly
regulated, but I feel like it should be eventually as well.

~~~
DrScientist
Similar in the UK - set up that way to stop money being able to buy elections.

Overall, election spending has been very strictly controlled.

One of the problems is recently people have being getting around this with
hard to trace online campaigns - using "national funding" and effectively
locally targeted online campaigns.

I'd like to see people being properly sanctioned for breaking the rules. In my
view there are few things more serious than trying to subvert democracy. It
shouldn't be normalized like it is in the US.

~~~
orbifold
I agree, basically it should either not be allowed or strictly controlled how
to advertise politics online. Targeted political advertisement should be
banned completely. Then there is twitter, which also basically serves as a
direct marketing channel for political parties. In Germany this is a huge
problem especially with the AFD, they can publish lots of nonsense there, more
or less unchallenged by facts or reason.

------
tyingq
Popups, tiny font, etc.
[https://outline.com/kFKtF3](https://outline.com/kFKtF3)

------
stared
Is it only me, or for anyone else, articles written in one-sentence paragraphs
are unreadable?

I try, and it is hard for me to focus after a few such sentence-paragraphs.
(No matter what is the topic.)

------
lifestyleguru
I have to admit that there was something surreal in the short videos of
hearing I saw on the internet. Congressmen/women, people of power, whom we
stereotype as poker-faced, cynical, and manipulative, having people-like
problems - e.g. "my granddaughter played with a mobile phone and then some
creepily relevant ads started to appear", against a youngster without any
formal power who cuts them off with laconic responses.

~~~
christophilus
I've only seen a few clips from the interview-- clips that were supposed to
show Zuckerberg getting owned by some politician or other. To be honest, the
politicians seemed really childish to me. Their questions were uninformed,
hostile, and off topic. I thought Zuckerberg handled himself just fine, given
the circumstances.

I say this as someone who thinks the world would be better off without
Facebook. I don't use it. I don't invest in it.

------
RichardHeart
The title is missing the word "real" Title on site: "The Real Mark Zuckerberg
Is A Lot Less Impressive Than The Movie Version"

------
chooseaname
Maybe if there was dramatic background music to manipulate your emotions?

------
coldtea
Looks just like a guy who did something ho-hum, at the right time and with the
right connections, and thanks to lots of in-between people, got 1000000000x
more value that he'd ought to get. Facebook was neither impressive technology,
nor original conceptually. It just was there at the right time and had the
right funding.

Not even for a moment did he strike as a computer genius, a business genius,
or anything in between.

------
aeortiz
Drop the "the". Just "Mark Zuckerberg". It's cleaner that way.

