
What It’s Like to Report on Facebook - blinding-streak
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/reporting-on-facebook.php
======
KKKKkkkk1
_With his characteristic geeky excitement, Zuckerberg described the promising
initial test flight of Aquila, a drone with a wingspan larger than a 737 jet
that was part of his plan to provide internet connectivity all over the world.

Though Newton hadn’t witnessed the test flight in Yuma, Arizona—no members of
the press were invited—he believed Zuckerberg’s account of it. When his
article was published, it reported that Aquila “was so stable that they kept
it in the air for 90 minutes before landing it safely.”

Months later, however, a Bloomberg story revealed that the flight hadn’t gone
so smoothly after all—Aquila had crashed. While the craft had indeed stayed
aloft for longer than intended, high winds tore a chunk out of a wing, leading
to a crash landing._

Interesting episode! It would be interesting to know if this was intentional
deception or incompetent ignorance on Zuck's part.

~~~
smsm42
More interesting, I think, is why a "reporter" reported as fact something that
they didn't witness and had no way to verify except from the words of one very
biased source. And what added value this kind of "reporting" provides - if we
wanted to know what Zuckerberg wants to say, we can read the press release?

This is all too common a pattern nowdays - instead of reporting something that
happens the press reports something that somebody (usually extremely biased
and frequently anonymous) said about something that might happen, or, as
frequently turns out later, didn't happen. It's much easier and cheaper, but
its contribution to the society is net negative.

~~~
devindotcom
When it comes to things like internal R&D projects, military and government
matters, and a huge amount of the tech industry's goings-on, the only source
is the company itself. This is a serious challenge facing press in many
industries.

How do you propose Casey should have challenged or verified whether the Aquila
flew as well as claimed? Any data about the craft would come from FB, any
paper describing it would be published by FB, any researchers who worked on it
would work at FB. Anyone else who might be an "objective" source would be
under NDA. Companies are very thorough about this sort of thing.

A journalist doing an investigative piece on the Aquila would not take
Zuckerberg's words as gospel, but that doesn't mean those words are
unimportant. This was a news piece, and CEOs speaking publicly about an R&D
project, and answering questions and so on, is an opportunity to provide a
different kind of value. Readers are curious about details companies don't
always provide, and also require context that isn't always obvious. Reporters
do this work too - it's not all cloak and dagger stuff, whistleblowers and
top-secret dossiers.

Aquila was a solar-powered drone that FB wanted to use to create a laser-
powered internet for developing countries. That's an interesting story that
should be told - and not just by the company, which would leave out important
parts like opposition to Internet.org or indeed the unfinished nature of the
aircraft. That's important work for reporters as well - filling in those gaps
so that readers' understanding of a topic or event is more full than it would
be had only people with a stake in it done so.

I also have not seen the pattern you describe and am not sure it's as endemic
as you suggest.

~~~
JetSpiegel
> How do you propose Casey should have challenged or verified whether the
> Aquila flew as well as claimed?

How did Bloomberg do it? By not publishing immediately, checking other
sources. Also known as journalism.

~~~
devindotcom
Bloomberg covered Aquila at the time (a couple times) citing Facebook claims,
using Facebook b-roll and Zuckerberg interviews.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-30/facebook-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-30/facebook-
unveils-web-connected-aircraft-with-wingspan-of-a-737)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-27/after-
goo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-27/after-google-
grounds-drone-project-facebook-ramps-up-flights)

They, like every other outlet, covered the news with the resources immediately
available, then followed up later when information became available that led
them to question the completeness of Facebook's account and details of the
project.

------
Pr0ducer
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702169](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702169)

Case in point, here's a HackerNews link to an article by Nick Clegg, the
former British Lib-Dem party leader now FB VP of Global Affairs and
Communications, using AdAge to impart some semblance of legitimacy. The
article's headline is complete BS: "Facebook Does Not Benefit from Hate" my
ass. They benefit from hate speech every damn day that shit's on their site,
because eyeballs == $$. The article ends with the ridiculous notion that "We
may never be able to prevent hate from appearing on Facebook entirely, but we
are getting better at stopping it all the time." A company with the resources
of Facebook can do practically anything it wants. If hate speech was look at
with the same level of disgust as child porn, would the above statement still
hold true? And getting better all the time? By what measure?

~~~
jfengel
Oh, it was that Nick Clegg. The one who destroyed the Lib-Dem party by voting
the Tory party into power, without getting anything meaningful in return. I
thought perhaps the name was a coincidence.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Yeah, he should have insisted on a different voting system as a condition of
coalition, instead of the referendum.

~~~
jfengel
Given that the referendum failed by a 2:1 margin, I don't think he'd have been
any more popular even if they had gotten their alternative voting system.

Maybe it's one of those things that voters would have liked once they had
experience with it, but if Clegg thought it was something voters were
clamoring for, he was very wrong.

~~~
jen20
Clegg's mistake was agreeing to "alternative vote" being an option instead of
a proper system of proportional representation which would have made a victory
like Johnson's in late 2019 near impossible (though not impossible, as the
Scottish system _designed_ to keep the SNP out of power showed).

In terms of moderating an otherwise horrific bunch of people (see every action
since 2015), Clegg and the Liberal Democrats did a reasonable job.

Do not read this as a defence of his employment at Facebook, where he has
shown himself to be for sale to the highest bidder at any available
opportunity.

------
intended
I wish there was a way for tech to handle the underlying problem. Facebook is
the big massive cherry on top of everything, but we’ve been optimizing and
hacking society ever since the 24 hour news channel became a thing.

Once we crossed a few critical milestones - 24 hour news, concentration of
news agencies, buyouts by large firms - the templates for the current
predicament was writ.

Human minds are hackable.

Violence, sex, and bias sells. “News”, “truth” are too slippery and malleable
as concepts to hold corporations to.

This will always create a race to the bottom, of the same nature as willful
pollution of the environment.

Facebook is the obvious target, but so is YouTube, Twitter, Reddit. What’s
horrifically worse is that this is America talking about excesses with social
media it identifies.

There’s no space in most of the discussions on HN which consider the global
scope of this problem - and it is a global issue.

The model of captive news channel spraying crazy fodder to build up stories
and tilted facts so that crops of confused and opinionated voters can be
harvested is a global phenomenon.

This isn’t a problem as easy to solve as techno utopists thought. The internet
doesn’t route around censorship (as well as it did).

But it’s still a problem to solve. There has to be a way to break the
attention economy while also doing justice to newsworthy content - not simply
censoring Mexican gang violence news because American/UK friends of Facebook
Employees come online and tell them to remove it (Custodians of the internet.)

Edit: Sure - the internet is a (Many) step changes away from the cable news
era. It’s a whole different beast.

But the more I spend time looking at the problem, the more it seems to be a
function of tools/ecosystems with a faster rate of revolution than our native
ability to process. It’s still the Fight for attention span and ad dollars
driving the race to the bottom.

Anyway, this is one of those useless rants that describes a problem (hopefully
fairly) without any solution. I guess getting the problem definition right (or
separated) would be a good enough start.

~~~
microcolonel
I think part of the problem is that people lack the imagination, or the
cynicism, to see that their tools will be turned against them in due time.

Activists get a huge rush from influencing social media platforms by dishonest
means, and the people operating those platforms are all too happy to oblige,
because of the precedent it sets, and in part because they agree.

Media companies got too used to manipulating this phenomenon when the ad money
was there, now they're just left there holding the gun, with an itchy trigger
finger and a target-rich environment.

------
mijoharas
This page took upwards of 20 seconds to allow me to scroll (or do anything) on
the page. Shockingly bad performance.

(just checked again in an incognito window, and counted 33 seconds).

I checked the network tab and weirdly it was downloading the same image over
and over again. Very strange...

~~~
bzb3
It loaded immediately here. Is your ad blocker properly configured?

~~~
mijoharas
Yep, both uBlock origin and privacy badger. Btw, loading the page finished
after a couple of seconds, but scrolling wasn't possible for over 30s. I
checked the performance metrics in chrome out of interest but couldn't figure
out why.

------
wyldfire
> The Aquila drone was soon grounded and, within two years, the entire program
> scrapped

Gee, it seems bonkers to scrap it just because it had a problem on a test
flight, right? Presumably it was scrapped because they decided that it
wouldn't be profitable, not because they couldn't fix whatever made it crash.

~~~
catalogia
> _Gee, it seems bonkers to scrap it just because it had a problem on a test
> flight, right?_

That depends entirely on the nature of the problem revealed during the test.
Some tests may reveal that an idea won't work and the whole project is
unsalvageable.

Facebook were trying to build a very large (43m wingspan) very light (400kg)
aircraft, with the intention of using it for ultra-long endurance missions (90
days) in remote areas. For remote endurance in the field you need durability.
Evidently more durability than was possible given the lightweight
construction, since it was destroyed by the wind. I can easily see that sort
of failure damning the whole project.

------
Animats
_" The company controls the communications and informational intake of more
than two and a half billion people."_

That's scary.

Facebook used to be useful as a way to keep track of what my friends were
doing. But the front page filled with more and more off-topic junk. Now I
don't use Facebook at all.

~~~
jcadam
Yep, deactivated my account just the other day and deleted the facebook app
from my phone. I don't need a constant stream of advertising and political
propaganda.

I can seek those things out on my own if I want them.

------
mrxd
There's no question that Facebook attempts to shape the media narrative. But
there's no need for any careful journalistic exposés to show that. The fact
that there's a corporate PR department is enough.

But Facebook is not just another company that's being objectively scrutinized
by journalists who are acting in the public interest. Among other effects,
Facebook threatens the practice of journalism itself, and much of the
reporting is intended to craft that narrative. That's indicated at the bottom
of the article:

> What Facebook has become is the press’s assignment editor, its distribution
> network, its great antagonist, devourer of its ad revenue, and, through
> corporate secrecy, a massive block to journalism’s core mission of
> democratic accountability.

The problem I have is with this claim that the press is a democratic
institution that acts in the public interest. In reality, the press is owned
by billionaires. Influential journalists and editors come from a particular
class of society through elite universities. No mechanisms for democratic
accountability exist and the public has no real input into the agenda or
topics that are covered. At the same time, journalists maximize their own
power by relentlessly promoting the idea that (at least nominally) democratic
institutions like government and politics are always untrustworthy and
corrupt.

------
forgotmypw17
[http://archive.is/NYrtV](http://archive.is/NYrtV)

------
specialist
_" [Casey] Newton’s professional arc, from enthusiastic tech beat reporter to
skeptical industry investigator, matches the trajectories of a number of
journalists in recent years."_

This is the natural progression. And the bigger story.

I'm barely interested in Facebook or their antics. Maybe because I had already
lived this story a few times.

Like most geeks in my cohort, I started as a technophile, which is Neal
Postman's pejorative, steeped in libertarian and transhumanism ideology. Then
I started to notice the ledgers kept not adding up, promised advances failed
to materialize, people of poor constitution repeatedly gobbled up all the
resources.

At some point I read Technopoly and Design of Everyday Things. Those and many
other skeptics gave voice to my misgivings. Then I learned about prior
technological waves causing mass social upheaval and what kind of people ended
up on top. (The French have a cliche for this...)

The hero worship and suspension of disbelief was the problem. People are still
just people. I'm glad the Teflon coatings are starting to wear off. So we can
resume talking about this stuff like adults.

~~~
thundergolfer
Technopoly ought to be considered in that group of books held as 'mandatory
reading', alongside 'Mythical Man Month', 'Clean Code', and 'The Soul of a New
Machine'.

------
rewindtheclock
"A similar tactic was employed in 2018, after George Soros criticized Facebook
as a “menace” against which society needed to be defended in a public speech
in Davos. The company hired a firm to produce incendiary pro-Facebook research
that contained anti-Semitic tropes about Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor,
as the shadowy funder of anti-Facebook groups. The documents were then passed
around to journalists with the urging that they look into Soros’s financial
interests. In the ensuing controversy, Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s head of
comms and policy and already on the way out, was blamed, while Sheryl Sandberg
and Mark Zuckerberg stated they had no knowledge of the affair."

How does Facebook get away with this kind of stuff?

~~~
Uhhrrr
Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish, and Soros really is a billionaire who
funds all sorts of NGO's and has financial interests in all kinds of things,
so I think it would be pretty hard to make something stick.

~~~
inopinatus
Someone’s membership of <identifiable tribe or social grouping> does not
confer a specific additional moral obligation to defend a fellow member of
their tribe/group more than they might deserve otherwise.

Indeed this myth is actively invoked by bigots & bullies in conjunction with a
counterexample as a twisted justification for ongoing persecution.

~~~
Uhhrrr
I was not saying it does - I'm saying it's harder to go after someone for
anti-Semitism when they're Semitic.

Although now that I've seen the document in question, I must say there's
really nothing there anyway.

------
mola
What kind of a journalist publish a story without corraborating it? Facebook
is scum. But on the flip side these so called journalists are a sham.

------
rewindtheclock
"Several reporters told me that Facebook, like other large tech companies,
makes aggressive use of off-the-record sourcing to obstruct the reporting
process. “It’s pretty standard for a tech comms person to give you an on-
record statement, they’ll talk about the story with you on background, and
then when it’s published, they’ll come back to you and try to undermine it off
the record,” says Biddle."

I must say, I never thought of it this way till today. Big Tech and Donald
Trump are basically two peas from the same pod.

~~~
smsm42
Journalists are lazy and PR people are sneaky. Whose fault is that? Why, of
course, Donald Trump's!

