
With Facebook at ‘War,’ Zuckerberg Adopts More Aggressive Style - dcgudeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-facebook-at-war-zuckerberg-adopts-more-aggressive-style-1542577980
======
amasad
The company is most comfortable being at war. That's the first thing I noticed
when I started working there. People glorified the days when they were
fighting head-to-head with Google or before that with the other social
networks. They reminse with pride about the "lockdown" periods when everyone
would not leave the office for days to fend off a competitor. It's kind of an
intoxicating feeling when everyone around you is driven to win, and I liked
it.

However, I don't think it's the best environment to be creative, that's why I
think FB has to rely on acquisitions to keep the growth going (except that on
the infrastructure side of Facebook it is very creative and has the time and
space for innovation, hence all their awesome open source stuff).

~~~
adamnemecek
> everyone would not leave the office for days to fend off a competitor. It's
> kind of an intoxicating feeling when everyone around you is driven to win,
> and I liked it.

This is such a Stockholm syndrome. How productive are you if you haven’t slept
for three days?

I really don’t care about what Facebook does but these are just such blatant
examples of mismanagement and I don’t want them to spread.

~~~
rock_hard
Not leaving office != not sleeping

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
Even then it's a kind of perverse modern slavery.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
Please don't trivialize the horrors of actual slavery by throwing around the
term for 6-digit-salaried folks hustling for something they enjoy doing.

~~~
krageon
You're right, it's more like the formation of a cult. The money presented to
them really doesn't matter very much, what we should consider is the mindset
this sort of thing creates and whether or not it is a good thing to have it
spreading to the rest of society. There's a real societal impact to having
large companies getting more and more powerful and their employees being
fanatically devoted to it's well-being.

------
sys_64738
> In October, Facebook hired former U.K. deputy prime minister Nick Clegg as
> head of global policy and communications, the company’s most high-profile
> external hire since Ms. Sandberg joined from Google in 2008.

When Mr Clegg became deputy PM to the tory leadership he forever condemned the
Lib-Dems to be classed as a poodle for the tory party. The Lib-Dems voters of
2010 deserted the party for this act of treachery which cost Clegg his
constituency in 2017.

So if Facebook hope this failed politician can save them then it's going to be
a tough way ahead for Zuck.

~~~
jackbrookes
Just because he's politically unpopular doesn't mean he won't be valuable to
them.

~~~
mcny
I don't think the point made was that he is unpopular. I think the point is he
is incapable of making good decisions.

With some things like the failed alternate vote referendum I have read people
blame Labour more than the Lib Dems. However, he clearly lacks charisma and
skills in hindsight.

I don't think anyone at Facebook will force Nick Clegg to do or say anything
but I'll be shocked if he has any serious decision-making power within
Facebook. I'm trying to avoid saying he is a rubber stamp but it is difficult
to say he is much more when even ex CSO Alex Stamos clearly had restrictions
(if you read between the lines).

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
You're assuming that Clegg has expressed his true aims in public. Given his
record of spectacular outright lies - such as the famous u-turn on tuition
fees, or the way that he denied being a Young Conservative at Cambridge, in
spite of the evidence - it's possible his affable victim-of-circumstance brand
is just a cover for someone who is essentially manipulative and dishonest.

Given the successful spoiler/enabler role of the LibDems in UK politics,
there's a good chance he doesn't think of his record as one of failure on any
level.

Interesting, he has already deleted all of his tweets, including the anti-
Brexit ones - not quite the action of the absolutely committed anti-Brexit
campaigner he claimed to be.

(To say "FB wouldn't let him keep them" misses the point. Someone who was
genuinely committed to stopping Brexit would never accept a job which might
conflict with keeping them.)

~~~
mcny
> it's possible his affable victim-of-circumstance brand is just a cover for
> someone who is essentially manipulative and dishonest

In that case, he has a long and productive career ahead at Facebook or perhaps
at a company like British Petroleum.

------
tabs_masterrace
Is there a Facebook smear campaign going on or people just love to pile on
Zuckerberg? Facebook is an advertisement company and collects data, but so
does everybody else. Gmail launched in 2004. Snowden leaks in 2013 were
greeted with general apathy. But know it's the time to crucify Zuckerberg for
what exatly? Make use of targeted advertisement? Or letting Facebook have
user-generated content, that may or may not have influenced votes in the past?

Either way, the ongoing collection of all kinds of data has been obvious for
many years now. And it's not going to stop, so some advice: Instead blaming
this one actor, better get used to it.

Platforms also can't fully and completely be responsible for political views
expressed by user-generated content.

~~~
jseliger
This is a very good comment and I hope it rises to the top of the heap.

I wrote this post on an HN comment, but I wonder, "Is there an actual Facebook
crisis, or media narrative about Facebook crisis?"
[https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-
facebo...](https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebook-
crisis-or-media-narrative-about-facebook-crisis)

It seems to me that Zuckerberg doesn't know that he's in a media scapegoating
situation. When you've become the scapegoat, there is nothing you can do to
stop it. You can observe the scapegoating mechanism, but even that will likely
do very little to halt it in action.

The media cannot accept (or comprehensively address) its own culpability for
the 2016 election. So let's put the blame on those guys, over there, instead
of looking at ourselves.

~~~
pm90
It is not a good comment at all. I know its the go-to reaction for engineers
in SV to empathize with a fellow engineer and portray him as a martyr in the
altar of an east-coast elitist media. But please look at the facts and details
of what NYT has uncovered.

> It seems to me that Zuckerberg doesn't know that he's in a media
> scapegoating situation. When you've become the scapegoat, there is nothing
> you can do to stop it. You can observe the scapegoating mechanism, but even
> that will likely do very little to halt it in action.

He's much much smarter than you give him credit for. A lot of folks think of
him as a clueless programming genius, but this is brilliant guy who
understands politics a lot better than most engineers in SV. All the feel-good
tours were not for his personal political ambition, but to create goodwill for
his most precious, valuable child, Facebook. And he has done every thing in
his power to cut the criticism, scapegoat critics and regulation.

> The media cannot accept (or comprehensively address) its own culpability for
> the 2016 election. So let's put the blame on those guys, over there, instead
> of looking at ourselves.

Certainly there is some aspect of that. But please lets look at the facts.
Facebook did hire a PR firm that spread Soros-based conspiracy theories
against its critics. They fired Stamos when he exposed the extent of Russian
intervention and kept quiet or dismissed the magnitude of Russian activity
until it became untenable for them to do so.

All the steps they have taken to become better, have been forced onto them ...
by who? Its by the Media. The media uncovering _facts_ about the company.
That's their job: to bring to light these facts. Let them do their job, and
lets hope Facebook does its job as well.

~~~
kodablah
I'm not hearing anyone dispute these facts. Media-driven fervor is rarely
devoid of facts. Rather, with story choice and interspersed op-eds, the
narrative becomes clear even if not untrue. For every fact-based article,
there are dozens of opinion ones (happening with all big-web tech) and my
flag-clicking finger grows weary. These digital opinion pieces sharing the
same domain become much harder to differentiate than in print. Even if you're
focusing on facts, many don't care about them or at least don't consider them
or their consequences as damning as the coverage might deserve.

At this point, I'll take my bulleted lists of uncovered facts and eschew the
rest of this crap. Sadly my peers, pitchforks in hand, can't do so and are
hastily cheering on government oversight. Something none of us can ever
recover from (a one way street in almost all instances).

~~~
pm90
I keep hearing about this fear of Government overreach. I won't go as far as
to dismiss them, but I do think its important to recognize that regulations do
have an important role to play in a Capitalist Economic system, to prevent the
accumulation of power, as happened in the Gilded Age.

Your comment talks of fears of Government oversight but I haven't seen a
better solution to the menace of Facebook. They have repeatedly failed to
curtail bad actors in their platforms. Government oversight may help increase
the penalties for bad behavior to an extent that forces them to think
seriously about these issues.

~~~
kodablah
Too often, discussion on nuance of a specific topic devolves to general
politics. Fear of government oversight for me applies specifically to internet
laws being bandied about.

> I haven't seen a better solution to the menace of Facebook

There doesn't have to be. Sometimes recognition that there is no winning move
is acceptable. With open models like the internet, we must take the bad with
the good. I don't see them as a menace, and they don't really affect my life
at all. Many of the harms are either blindly assumed to have effect (i.e.
political advertising) or are ones that are endemic to large amounts of humans
in an open space.

I'll take the status quo. If media or others wants to help educate the
populace on harms, awesome. If others such as myself just don't participate on
some of these social sites, awesome. Most thought around FB harms centers
around the uneducated masses and only if they knew what they were doing. A
similar mindset many would say lost the last presidential election. What if I
told you they do know, implicitly agree, and unlike this echo chamber we
comment on, are content? Let's avoid legislating their wants in this case and
also avoid the unintended consequences on the rest of us with internet
businesses. The harm caused by this fly isn't worth pulling out the shotgun.

I get this deja vu... now it's big web tech (and the rich and immigrants but
that's another topic), previously it was terrorists, before that druggies,
before that communists, before that alcoholics, on and on. We've got to learn
to face this hysteria with a pragmatic approach at some point.

~~~
pm90
I think you're conflating a lot of issues and trying to portray what we have
today as inevitable and just the way things are. If we make a little more
effort and isolate the issues, I think it makes a lot more sense to take
actionable steps in this direction.

> There doesn't have to be. Sometimes recognition that there is no winning
> move is acceptable. With open models like the internet, we must take the bad
> with the good. I don't see them as a menace, and they don't really affect my
> life at all. Many of the harms are either blindly assumed to have effect
> (i.e. political advertising) or are ones that are endemic to large amounts
> of humans in an open space.

There definitely can be better solutions. Throwing up your hands and saying:
"Its just the way this system is" isn't an answer to the specific changes
being recommended. Its in the nature of people to be addicted to tobacco; yet
we do have regulations around tobacco to stop tobacco companies from
advertising their products, to add disclaimers and health warnings to their
product, to forbid them from advertising to children. We didn't just throw up
our hands and accept it as a failure of the human nature.

> I'll take the status quo. If media or others wants to help educate the
> populace on harms, awesome. If others such as myself just don't participate
> on some of these social sites, awesome. Most thought around FB harms centers
> around the uneducated masses and only if they knew what they were doing. A
> similar mindset many would say lost the last presidential election. What if
> I told you they do know, implicitly agree, and unlike this echo chamber we
> comment on, are content? Let's avoid legislating their wants in this case
> and also avoid the unintended consequences on the rest of us with internet
> businesses. The harm caused by this fly isn't worth pulling out the shotgun.

Its not in the nature of the internet to act as an amplifier for conspiracy
theories disguised as truth in respectable internet properties. We don't
expect nytimes.com or the websites of any news organizations to peddle in
conspiracy theories and we should expect the same from facebook.com; if not,
we need to call them out for not being valid source of information and make
them add that disclaimer to everything they show.

> I'll take the status quo. If media or others wants to help educate the
> populace on harms, awesome. If others such as myself just don't participate
> on some of these social sites, awesome. Most thought around FB harms centers
> around the uneducated masses and only if they knew what they were doing. A
> similar mindset many would say lost the last presidential election. What if
> I told you they do know, implicitly agree, and unlike this echo chamber we
> comment on, are content? Let's avoid legislating their wants in this case
> and also avoid the unintended consequences on the rest of us with internet
> businesses. The harm caused by this fly isn't worth pulling out the shotgun.

But that's not what the situation is at all. Instead of the uneducated masses
being content with facebook, they're angry, so angry at: Immigrants for taking
away their jobs and benefits, at liberals for taking away their privileges
etc. This is exactly why we want to control the medium: apparently, they're
not aware that the things they see aren't facts, they're conspiracy theories.

I'm sorry, I can't justify not doing anything just because it has the
potential (not even proven what side effects it might have really) of ruining
your next/current internet venture. We unleashed technological changes on
American (and the World) society, and its about time we took responsibility
for the harms that this technology can cause and place reasonable checks and
controls.

> I get this deja vu... now it's big web tech (and the rich and immigrants but
> that's another topic), previously it was terrorists, before that druggies,
> before that communists, before that alcoholics, on and on. We've got to
> learn to face this hysteria with a pragmatic approach at some point.

Every generation has to deal with the problems unique to it. I don't think we
will ever run out of problems that need to be addressed. What is your point...
that we just stop trying? Everything we try gives us more data into what works
and what doesn't and we have to continue trying.

~~~
kodablah
I'm not sure we'll change each other's minds here. I'll just make one more
quick point:

> There definitely can be better solutions.

I totally agree. I just divorce the ideal/utopian/theoretical from the actual
and believe the societal cost/benefit to favor non-interference at the current
time. At the very least, I hope we're very slow and measured as opposed to the
hasty whims of those frothing at the mouths from these articles. We might
never run out of problems that need to be addressed, but maybe we can become
smarter about how we address them.

------
softwaredoug
Large companies often get stuck in analysis paralysis, so a decisive leader
can be a good thing. I think the more important question is whether the
decisiveness originates from core values the company projects our, or if it’s
just about defending turf. If it’s the latter, Facebook is in its long slow
decline phase as a company

------
elliekelly
This article and others I’ve read depict Zuckerberg as angry. An angry CEO
makes decisions based on emotion and ego and that is a recipe for disaster.

------
toje22
Facebook needs a credible trustworthy leader at this point in time. I don't
know who Zuck thinks trusts him. His rep is more a liability than anything
else at this stage.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
...and something of a change in policy. They seem to keep making choices and
decisions that are asking for criticism.

------
toddh
The advantage of deploying a war metaphor is it resists leadership change. An
at risk leader can always say "You don't change want to change horses in the
middle of a river, do you?"

------
InclinedPlane
Exactly the wrong tack. Firstly, Facebook is 100% in the wrong here, they did
bad things (including helping to facilitate genocide) and there needs to be
consequences for those. They need to accept that they have done wrong they
need to accept that they need to accept responsibility and they need to accept
that they need to make big changes. Instead they've been avoiding taking full
responsibility and issuing wishy-washy press releases. It's going to catch up
with them sooner than later and the public is going to stop giving them a pass
for their awful behavior.

------
plainOldText
So many articles written about a company that adds so little value to human
life (at least in its current form).

If you spend just 1h/day on Facebook, over the course of 10 years, that's
approx. 150 days or roughly half a year. I'm sure plenty of people spend more
than 1h/day scrolling through their pointless feeds.

So my question to you is this: What could you achieve if you could spend half
a year of your life, fully immersing yourself in something meaningful and of
value?

~~~
christophilus
There’s a big difference between what you can accomplish with an hour here and
an hour there vs contiguous, high quality focused time. I suspect that the
average user’s Facebook time is of the former, low quality kind.

~~~
SeanBoocock
This is a great point and too seldom raised when comparisons like this are
made. I only have so much capacity for highly focused engagement in a given
day, and even within those periods there is variability to my focus. That
Facebook, or any other activity, occupies time that I am less engaged is not
an indictment of those activities or the choice to spend that time in a less
deliberate way; its just how most people work.

A better criticism in my mind would be to weigh Facebook and its value against
actual competitors for people’s attention in those time periods.

------
clubm8
Some might think becoming belligerent in the face of criticism would be a poor
strategy, but it worked for Brett Kavanaugh...

~~~
phillipcarter
It's the primary play in the modern conservative playbook.

------
n3d1m
Paywall

~~~
Klover
[https://www.outline.com/86w5yw](https://www.outline.com/86w5yw)

------
qbaqbaqba
It's getting boring.

