
Leaked Zuckerberg audio: 'You go to the mat and you fight' - sjcsjc
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49893913
======
sekasi
I have to say, as someone who's been somewhat critical of Facebook's dealings
for the past years, I read the entire thing and I can't pick up on anything
that doesn't seem like a reasonable thing to say to your team.

Is anyone able to educate me on why there seem to be some air of hawks
swooping on Zuckerberg because of this?

~~~
mrtksn
I think it plays into "corporations control the government, there's no
democracy" narrative.

Essentially means, it doesn't matter what's your position on immigration or
gun laws or healthcare, what will determine the administration is the
candidate's relationship with Facebook.

I think it feeds from the distrust towards the political system more than the
distrust towards Zuckerberg.

If you think about it, the concerns are not entirely baseless. Facebook can
analyze the public interest towards the candidates, analyze the candidates
campaign and tweak Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp to boost the campaign of the
friendly candidate when penalizing the other candidate's campaign. They can do
this through tweaking colours, changing the mood of the public(they
experimented with that), slowing down interactions that channels where the
unfavoured candidates flourish, detect behaviour differences between the
candidate supporters(maybe republican share more videos and democrats more
written documents? facebook would know) and boost those, affecting the
virality of the information flow. What are the users gonna do? Go use
Friendster?

I mean, I don't say that FB does these but I can see how some people would
want to sharpen their pitchforks when a corporation weights in a political
debate.

~~~
basch
I'd argue the press has always chosen the political winners (sometimes by
accident by always talking negatively about them) and facebook as the new
kingmaker is not much different than hearst, gannett, murdoch or soros
anointing someone. the main difference is facebook actually abandoning any
cohesively human choice in who they pick, shifting blame/responsibility
towards an algorithm they write and control but want to remain sentientish in
its own ways. i do see some reckless abandon in letting mathematical output
get a nearly final say vs just admitting to and owning the existence of
editorial discretion.

>changing the mood of the public

its the same type of thing the press has been doing since forever, just more
targeted. the change is in scale (both more macro AND more micro) not kind.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> I'd argue the press has always chosen the political winners (sometimes by
> accident by always talking negatively about them) and facebook as the new
> kingmaker is not much different than hearst, gannett, murdoch or soros
> anointing someone.

There's an important difference you're missing: The press isn't monolithic and
it's also self-consciously part of the American democratic political order.
Facebook _is monolithic_ and it seems to want to shirk its democratic
responsibilities much of the time.

~~~
basch
I'm not sure I see it as monolithic in its press displaying reach. Facebook,
Twitter, GoogleSearch/GoogleNews/Android/Youtube, Apple each have their own
way of controlling peoples attention and driving what sites people view, what
apps people open. Facebook may or may not be the biggest of those four, but
Facebook does not have a monopoly on peoples attention. One could argue
Twitter is much smaller than Facebook, but its concentration of celebrities
and journalists brings into question its overall utilitarian influence and
impact, as opposed to just its raw MAU. The attention of one influential
person may change way more in the world than 1000 nonfluencial people.

------
disillusioned
>>>There's no bombshell revelation in this leak

Oh boy is that an understatement. Of course Zuck's strategy if the government
attempts to break up Facebook for antitrust or whatever else they can spin
together is to fight it legally. Of course his preference is going to be for a
presidential candidate who hasn't made an overt commitment to force that break
up.

There's really no there, there.

~~~
roland00
The bigger thing is a mismatch between the employees of facebook and the
management. These weekly meetings happen all the time, what is different is
now the employees are recording them and releasing them to the press. This
means at least one employee no longer thinks the interest of upper management
and the workers align and she or he spent forethought in order to record the
conversation and then spent time afterwards figuring out a way to contact the
press.

This is a there there, even if the actual conversation transcript is banal and
what you would expect from Zuck.

~~~
dmurray
The big news is that one of Facebook's 40,000 employees is disgruntled,
idealistic or just likes to feel important?

~~~
roland00
This is big news when the Facebook employees we are referring to starting
salary is 120k a year and the median employee is 240k a year. [Note many
people who work for facebook are some form of contract employees and thus do
not make this, but it was also not a contract employee who recorded this
conversation for they do not get to sit down with Mark in these weekly
meetings.]

Even if you are not happy with everything about Facebook that income level
often prevents this type of behavior for the incentives of company and worker
align generally. And it is a big deal for this was a new thing, not a thing
that never happens, but also not a thing that happens often that it becomes
the new normal.

------
the_duke
Seems like it doesn't contain anything surprising or terribly noteworthy.

Also, while FB, Instagram and Whats App being under the same umbrella is very
questionable (and the Whats App acquisition should have been blocked by
regulators), I'd argue breaking up Google or Amazon would be more important.

------
subroutine
Is there any concern about the implications of breaking up big tech in an
attempt to make US markets more competitive, but in so doing allow a foreign
competitor to swoop in and become the de facto choice in some market? I
imagine the US benefits substantially from the likes of Google and fb
dominating competitors in foreign markets.

~~~
apatters
This concern does get expressed from time to time, but I think it is
sacrificing the long-term for the short-term. Sure, you can prop up bad
businesses through government intervention in the short term, and we do it all
the time.

But in the long term, they're still bad businesses, and you end up with entire
industries that are dysfunctional. Eventually, someone else eats your lunch.

In fact you can argue that's happening now, as the article hints: Zuck was
able to assimilate Whatsapp and IG into his bloated empire, but he can't buy
TikTok and its 500M users because it's from China. Maybe if FB has been forced
to actually compete with its biggest American competitors instead of getting
the greenlight from regulators to just buy them, it would be in a better
position now.

~~~
cjhopman
Rarely are anti-trust measures needed to break up bad businesses. It's the
good (well, good in the sense of effective, profitable, etc) businesses that
tend to be the focus of those.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> Rarely are anti-trust measures needed to break up bad businesses. It's the
> good (well, good in the sense of effective, profitable, etc) businesses that
> tend to be the focus of those.

The same business can look good or bad depending on your perspective. Mylan is
a great business from its shareholders perspective and a bad business from
everyone else's, because it gouges consumers by charging $600 for some that
costs ~$15.

~~~
subroutine
It's a neutral business from my perspective (I've never needed a Mylan
product). Medicine is a tricky space to operate in, and regulate, because
monopolies exist almost by default (if your company finds a cure for
something, the gov. grants 'monopoly' rights for 20 years). Also Pharma
companies often service small markets, but of extremely loyal customers (
_because their life depends on it_ ). The space is essentially anticompetitive
by design; even if there was a bunch capable pharma companies in the same
space, they couldn't provide competition without major regulator hurdles. Just
ask Sanofi, and Teva...

Sanofi made AuviQ (EpiPen clone) but pulled out after regulators made Sanofi
do a full-scale recall after several injector faults. Teva was set to provide
its own generic version, but in the final stages of the review process, it was
rejected by the FDA.

The solution was to create policy (and to punish Mylan for breaking policy
that already existed). Conducting an antitrust break-up of Mylan would have
only made things worse imo.

------
mxscho
> He repeatedly refused to attend meetings with politicians in the UK, sending
> other Facebook representatives in his place. "I did hearings in the US. I
> did hearings in the EU," he said. "It just doesn't really make sense for me
> to go to hearings in every single country that wants to have me show up
> [...]"

Not sure how Brexit supporters feel about that.

~~~
random42
> Not sure how Brexit supporters feel about that.

Zuckerberg does not care.

------
rollingdeep
BBC coverage on this is a bit minimal and lazy.

Posted already here with more coverage on Zuckerberg's comments about suing
the government and election interference.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133244)

~~~
rr-geil-j
>
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133244)

It's already deleted.

~~~
dang
It was flagged by users—correctly so, because this seems like just back-and-
forth political ephemera, of the sort that the HN guidelines explain is off
topic:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

The test on HN for whether a new development in an ongoing story counts as on
topic is whether the new article adds significant new information:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&sort=byDate&type=comment).
When that happens, it will surely be fully discussed on HN.

~~~
rollingdeep
Dang, that is not a stringent test any of kind. It is highly arbitrary. It is
a list of your previous decisions on whether a post is new information—most of
which are simply declarations of your decision and provide no stringent rules
to test.

It also doesn’t explain why the previous topic was locked and deleted. This
new information had just been broken and not posted here before with the
specific story coverage on Zuckerberg’s election interference comments. All
that had been posted before was the raw audio leak/transcripts but not real
journalism coverage of the significance like techcrunch. Theverge literally
had one sentence of journalistic coverage on this: “In language that is often
more candid than he typically uses in his public comments, Zuckerberg seeks to
rally the company against Facebook’s competitors, critics, and the US
government.”

And because it’s in every readers interest to be informed why certain actions
are taken, I have no option but to show the community the rest of the
conversation here which I don’t see you giving any attention to in your post
(which is concerning).

[https://web.archive.org/web/20191002162442/https://news.ycom...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191002162442/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133765)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20191002162822/https://news.ycom...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191002162822/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133244)

>rollingdeep: Article is opinionated as many on HN but represents an important
current news story to discuss. By all means the source can be substituted for
a less opinionated one if an alternative source of similar coverage exists (I
did not find any at the time). I have not found a negative comment that does
not misquote the article, nor is anyone able to reply with correct info or
bring more substance in response such as the disturbing history of antitrust
lawsuits funded by Microsoft that surpass even the funding by the government.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133244)

>dang: This seems to me to be political back-and-forth of the moment and
therefore off topic by the site guidelines. Sorry; I understand that
interpretations of these things can differ.

Daniel (moderator)

>rollingdeep: So you are saying you would not have allowed the coverage of the
Microsoft antitrust suits at the time on HN (if HN existed in the 1990’s and
early 2000’s)? If find that difficult to believe.

>dang: I'm not saying that. What antitrust suit is happening right now? I was
under the impression that there isn't one yet; just political sniping between
advocates for either side of one which may or may not happen.

Daniel

>rollingdeep: Google and Facebook are currently being investigated by by 50
attorney generals (of 50 U.S. states) in an antitrust probe. That is more than
political sniping. These new comments by Zuckerberg are a direct result of
this regulatory action that is already in motion, which would obviously come
under even closer scrutiny under a Warren presidency (she is the current
leading candidate in the U.S. polls). The story here is:

1: Zuckerberg openly talks about funding a major legal battle that would very
likely outsize any normal regulatory budgets (that are more or less fixed in
size) to enforce U.S. antitrust regulations—similar to how Microsoft was able
to escape regulatory interventions by funding a legal war of attrition against
the U.S. government, even though the anticompetitive behavior was well known
and evident.

2: Zuckerberg talks about not being able to control election influences in the
face of a breakup. This is rather odd considering that he testified that
nefarious election influence via facebook was not a serious threat. It implies
there is power to influence elections and there are implications suggesting FB
may use this power for their own purposes or as a bargaining chip in
regulatory actions.

Again, this is more than political sniping.

>dang: When said antitrust probe generates significant new information, that
will be on topic on HN and get lots of discussion. Articles about what
candidates say during election campaigns, not so much. If we're to treat all
those as on topic, there won't be room for anything else.

Warren said some stuff; Zuckerberg said some stuff; Warren said some more
stuff. Politicians and CEOs say lots of things. I don't think that meets the
bar for significant new information, and I'm pretty sure the bulk of the HN
community would agree, which explains why the submission got flagged.

Daniel

>rollingdeep: Again, I find that very difficult to believe Daniel. If you feel
so strongly that your are correct, please explain this time how this news not
significant new information. You can’t just declare that and not present
evidence of your declaration. I just summed up what was significant in what
was said by Zuckerberg beyond any “back and forth” and you completely ignored
that and hand waved it away without directly addressing any of the
significance of that content.

You also appear to be appealing to whatever users would like to flag this news
beyond it not being newsworthy. Just because there are users that dislike any
negative news about FB whether it is newsworthy or not, does not prove a topic
was appropriately flagged for being too political. I’m afraid your logic does
not add up.

Please do a solid and present a comment from the discussion that you believe
accurately articulates how this news is not at all significant, how there is
not enough HN appropriate content (again, Microsoft would have been no
different), and does not misquote or hand wave away the opposing points
presented.

I’m confident you can’t present any such comment because they don’t
exist—because they fail to meet a stringent set of stipulations and actual
scrutiny. To be honest I feel your decisions here are not meeting any
stringent standards of enforcing HN policy. This enforcement feels rather
arbitrary.

~~~
rollingdeep
_update_

>dang: I'm sorry it feels arbitrary. I think we're looking at this from
different perspectives and continuing to argue about it will likely only be
repetitive.

One thing's for sure: if antitrust action against Facebook or other big tech
cos does go ahead, it will get thoroughly and repeatedly discussed on HN. So
our positions will converge in the long run.

I just don't think "candidate says X" is substantive enough to meet the
bar—keep in mind that front page space is the scarcest resource on HN, so
every important story gets insufficient attention, and whatever story you care
most about, it's always going to feel like it's starved for coverage. (I'm
sure even Rust hackers feel the same way.) I appreciate your passion on the
topic and the fact that you care enough about HN to take time to make a case
about it.

Daniel

>rollingdeep: The only way this has been repetitive is that I have repeated my
simple request for you to directly address the specific concerns instead of a
general dismissal on your part. If you cared to directly engage the content,
this would not be repetitive. Alas, I don’t believe you care about such news
even if it is legitimately significant which you have failed demonstrate
otherwise. Per my reasonable requests, you haven’t even attempted to directly
engage the content and substance, but you have generally dismissed it.

I’m afraid because you have no interest in the significance of this kind of
news, that the spread of such information is hampered. Do you realize that you
are effectively influencing the spread of information, and this news is highly
relevant to that and you? Just as Facebook has the power to influence the
spread of information, so does HN. I see no reason to hamper/suppress this
discussion as you are allowing, except perhaps the suppression of this
information/discussion is preferable to you and Y Combinator.

On some level there is no guarantee of actual regulatory action without public
education and public support of those issues and regulatory actions. Your
decisions seem to support obstructing the spread of that information and
letting the facts bubble to the surface of public consciousness.

Thus I completely disagree with your decisions on a factual basis.

------
patd
I don't think there anything in there that is unexpected.

The most interesting part is probably how Facebook will compete with TikTok in
the coming months and years.

------
tannhaeuser
That's actually the first time where Zuck officially acknowledges breaking up
Fb and Google is a possibility, placing this onto the agenda for future (or
even current) US administration and campaigns apart from Elizabeth Warrens
plans. Fb should never have been allowed to buy WhatsApp, nor should've
Google's DoubleClick and YouTube acquisition been allowed.

------
siscia
> "It just doesn't really make sense for me to go to hearings in every single
> country that wants to have me show up and, frankly, doesn't have
> jurisdiction to demand that."

While this is technically true, I am not quite sure that it is the way to
manage this kind of relationship.

As European I am pretty pissed off just by this affirmation.

~~~
scarejunba
Why? He went to Europe. Obviously he's not going to Leichtenstein and
Azerbaijan.

~~~
siscia
Did he go to England?

> Azerbaijan

This is a very wide definition of Europe...

~~~
cjhopman
> > Azerbaijan > This is a very wide definition of Europe...

wtf? what definition of Europe doesn't include Azerbaijan?

> As European I am pretty pissed off just by this affirmation.

According to wikipedia, there are 50 countries in Europe. So are you truly
pissed off that he would say that it doesn't make sense for him to go to Malta
or Azerbaijan just because they want to parade him before some cameras? And
that the company would be happy to send a representative that is
senior/authorized to represent them in such legal proceedings.

Or maybe you just mean, well, you don't count those smaller countries. Just
the big ones. In which case, the UK would be behind 4 other european countries
by population. And if that's what you feel matters, maybe he should first go
to the 7 chinese provinces with greater population and the 7 indian provinces.
And all that would just be if we accept the UK as the very minimum of what he
would have to go to if requested.

Really the whole idea is nonsense. The idea that the CEO of some company needs
to be at the beck and call of every elected official in some podunk country is
crazy.

~~~
areyousure
> what definition of Europe doesn't include Azerbaijan?

From the Wikipedia article you mention: """The UN Statistics Department places
Azerbaijan in Western Asia for statistical convenience: "The assignment of
countries or areas to specific groupings is for statistical convenience and
does not imply any assumption regarding political or other affiliation of
countries or territories." The CIA World Factbook places Azerbaijan in South
Western Asia, with a small portion north of the Caucasus range in Europe.
National Geographic and Encyclopædia Britannica also place Georgia in Asia."""

------
chillacy
The full transcript is on the verge
[https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20892354/mark-
zuckerberg-...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20892354/mark-zuckerberg-
full-transcript-leaked-facebook-meetings)

~~~
nindalf
That was submitted yesterday, but failed to gain traction. It appears that the
clickbait headline used by BBC got more attention from HN.

~~~
modeless
I'm sad about this. It appears to me that the original was buried, despite
being interesting and extremely relevant for HN, because it doesn't fit the
popular narrative of Zuckerberg being an uncaring evil robot. This BBC article
appears to fit that narrative better, labeling him "combative" and "paranoid"
despite his comments being perfectly reasonable IMO.

------
trhway
i'm not sure what a breakup can accomplish beside populist political goals. I
meant to avoid losing the great societal benefits of the large networks the
resulting post-breakup components/parts would have to be interoperational.
Then why not enforce interoperability upon the too big players right now? Why
not enforce that any client can be used for Twitter, that any player can
federate/aggregate Twitter, and that any user can firehose its own data and
the data of any users who gave permission? Why not enforce Facebook to allow
firehose the data in similar manner and to accept posts/updates/etc. from
other social networks, like posting Snaps into IG feed? Or Lyft (or some small
unknown operator) ride requests routed through Uber. Any "platform" should
come with API gateway with legally enforced generous performance guarantees
and providing read/write access to all the user data and user visible services
of the "platform". That would increase competition, give small and innovative
players a chance, decrease the "winner takes all" with associated excesses and
distortions and provide even greater societal benefit of making those networks
even larger without the networks controlled by any one "platform". Instead of
costly and obsolete breakup approach, the enforcing of interoperability and
data access must become the battle cry of progressives. That would be the
infrastructure of the 21st century which would even allow to efficiently
approach even the super-issues like healthcare.

~~~
hos234
It will naturally break apart just as news media broke apart along liberal and
conservative, national and regional lines. There have been and continue to be
attempts to consolidate news into as few orgs as possible. But beyond a
'tipping point' consolidation fails even though it's technically and
economically more efficient. Because it's socially inefficient. (Same is true
of religions and nations btw as population grows differences grow too and then
things break). Even in democracies you can constantly see this breakage going
as districts and counties across the world keep having their boundaries
redrawn.

Many newspapers have died out because the more inter networked we get it's
more efficient to consolidate. Info flows around gatekeepers as the network
gets more and more connected. Yet notice how we have so many news sources
divided along social differences. They resist merging with each other.

Those same forces resist consolidation of 6 billion people onto a single
network.

This has already happened with China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, North
Korea etc where the differences are stark. Many countries are already
demanding local data centers. As soon as that happens it's guaranteed some
political entity will misuse the data to hold onto power and further pressure
builds.

Give it time and few more elections where one side has to loose (we will see
many more Obama/Trump/Brexit type event where one group goes viral and beats
another) and the pressure on the consolidated network will keep growing from
the disappointed parties. This is still early days in the history of a social
network.

Niall Ferguson's book The Square and the Tower is full of examples from
history of how networks of people grown, merge and break apart. Highly
recommended for anyone interested in this stuff.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
As Chief Executive, it's his responsibility to prevent the dismantling of the
company. Why would anyone expect him to roll over and accept it? It wouldn't
be want shareholders would want.

------
sschueller
Can we hear the audio or was this recorded in a two party consent state?

~~~
sifex
[https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20756701/mark-
zuckerberg-...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20756701/mark-zuckerberg-
facebook-leak-audio-ftc-antitrust-elizabeth-warren-tiktok-comments)

