1. Before Ms. Sandberg’s Senate testimony, Facebook lobbyists pushed lawmakers to refrain from questioning her about privacy, censorship and other issues, and to stick to election interference. The committee’s chairman, Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, was swayed and warned members to stick to the hearing’s planned topic, The Times reported Wednesday.
2. Facebook had also lobbied for the hearing to include a Google emissary of similar rank to Ms. Sandberg. Mr. Burr invited Larry Page, a Google co-founder, but he did not show up.
3. In an email days before the hearing, a Definers employee pressed a Times reporter to write that Facebook was taking the senators’ concerns seriously while Google was irresponsible for skipping the hearing.
4. The day before the hearing, NTK Network reported that Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, had suggested that Google was possibly a monopoly.
5. Those pieces were just two of at least 11 negative items NTK has posted about Google since late March.
Facebook really seems butthurt about Google. Instead of learning from Google about being transpernt on how they use user data, they basically dragged Google in the controversy, and I would say they have been pretty successful.
“Instead of learning from Google about being transpernt on how they use user data”
I am curious evidences of this. Or are you comparing objectively with the two relative to recent events? Then sure. FB’s been very sketchy all this time with little knowing until the whole election interference and Cambridge scandal went public and viral did people pay attention.
Google, for all the negative press and bashing they are getting lately, has not hidden what they collect, how they collect. They also do not sell user data (that's not their business model). Sure, they have had their share of issues, but I don't think they are systematic or intentional. They are happy if you want to take your data and go to someone else - they released takeaway tool more than 10 years ago.
Fb, on the other hand, never were trustworthy, even before any of the recent scandals became public. They have had history of changing things around that led to users unknowingly expose their details they thought they had locked down, more than once. They have been caught lying to advertisers about clicks and views.
But those finer points are lost when they have successfully dragged Google in the mudbath with their smear campaign, irrespective of the scale or intentions at Google.
> Google, for all the negative press and bashing they are getting lately, has not hidden what they collect, how they collect.
I'm curious what led to you to this conclusion and how you define "hide." What about how they were tracking location information even after you turned off location history??
Uhhh, I'm gonna have to strongly disagree with you about Google being a "good guy" here. For example, did you know that people at Google can read your email [1]? ...And so can literally hundreds of app makers...[2] That to me is about as flagrant and messed up as I can imagine. If you really trust Google with your data, I recommend you investigate their (very) checkered history a bit more.
> Sure, they have had their share of issues, but I don't think they are systematic or intentional.
Or Google is just better at staying out of the spotlight:
> Disclosure will likely result “in us coming into the spotlight alongside or even instead of Facebook despite having stayed under the radar throughout the Cambridge Analytica scandal”, Google policy and legal officials wrote in a memo obtained by the Journal. It “almost guarantees Sundar will testify before Congress”, the memo said, referring to the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai. The disclosure would also invite “immediate regulatory interest”.
Just a polite reminder that using "butthurt" to mean "resentful"or "angry" paints a picture that is often homophobic and nearly always making light of rape. In my opinion, we should try not to normalize its use any further.
"Essentially, the term is used when someone is upset that someone else has gotten the better or them or beaten them or bested them in some way. That is to say, they dominated them. You know, like when someone is raped."
Your source is the blog entry of some self-professed 'angry feminist' making up an etymology and then trying to police everyone's language on that basis. People like this are such insufferable know-it-alls.
Does inappropriate adoption of a word necessarily preclude its use in its original form?
Example: "autistic".
In recent times, this word is sometimes used as an insult, which seems to me to be somewhat offensive to those with the actual syndrome. However, referring to those who do have the syndrome as medically autistic is obviously not offensive.
This is a more clear-cut example to make the point that misappropriating a word and giving it secondary connotations in certain contexts does not make the word unfit for use in all cases.
I tend to agree here. I can recall it being referenced in flame wars on various forums nearly 20 years ago followed by faggot and absolutely referencing anal rape. Thinking about the personalities that used the term and yeah, they absolutely meant it as such. I don't care what knowyourmeme or stackexchange has to say on the matter because they clearly don't speak to my experience with the intent of those that used the term.
I do not mean to promote the validity of Freudian psychology, I'm pointing out that the term "butthurt" is part of a universal human "thing" that has been going on and acknowledged for hundreds (if not thousands) of years. I.e. "Asshole", "blow it out your ass", "stick it in your ass", "pound sand up your ass", "shit head", etc...
I had never previously made a connection between that term and anal rape and frankly I'm irritated that ForrestN put the idea in my head.
Now, I know what it's like when you have a pet peeve about public discourse. For me, I wish people didn't use the term "cakewalk" or phrase "piece of cake", even though they do it innocently, because I once went and looked it up and it's fucking horrible. (If you go look it up, brace yourself, it's really ugly. It has to do with American slavery. You've been warned.)
I have this idea, I call it "The Grey File". It's like an idea for a sci-fi story. In the near future history will be controlled and whitewashed. All of the crazy bad stuff we used to do is almost entirely forgotten, but records are kept in a kind of museum called the Grey File. It's built in the middle of the desert, or on Antarctica, or somewhere inaccessible, and it's staffed by inmates: perverts who get off on corrupting innocence. It's kind of a prison for them.
The thing is, I can't tell if this idea is dystopian or utopian.
Well, it's been whitewashed there, as you might expect for an information source so prominent in the public eye.
I'll be damned if I'm going to try to unpack the enormities contained in the idea of masters awarding slaves cake for the best performances of their own mockery, here on HN, on a thread about FB.
I'll point out that the wikipedia section on "Fancy ladies" opens with a warning that "This section's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia."
These details have only recently escaped the Grey File. I didn't suspect about "Fancy ladies" until I read certain passages in Sam Clemens' uncensored autobiography when it was finally published in 2010. They sure don't teach this stuff in school.
My meta-point stands: should I feed you more details until you see the horrible truth, like some deviant that gets off on violating innocence? Should I keep my mouth shut and look forward to a day when all the nightmares have been forgotten?
As for being shocked so deeply by this, perhaps it's time to grow up a little and realise history isn't clean sections with adverts in-between and censoring of the violence, it's full of arseholes doing the most rotten shit they can get away with either for pleasure or gain, and then realise the shocker: those arseholes still exist.
>"While senators are no strangers to opposition research — they use it all the time against political rivals — they take a dimmer view when it used against them outside of election season."
Why? And how long is "election season" these days? It seems to be almost always.
I have not closed my account, as I don't want to entirely lose touch with a bunch of people. But I've decided I'm not going to log in more than once a month. I just can't in good conscience let them rent my eyeballs or use my content any more.
I've pretty much been running in that mode for a while now (though maybe more on average once per week). It's fine. As long as you don't engage in any commentary on other people's stuff, you naturally gravitate away from checking. The content is usually not that interesting. The moment you write anything there, you get an emotional stake in checking its progress.
Hah. It would be a hit piece if it were untrue and simply attempting to sway opinion against.
Facebook applying for patents on distinctly creepy inferences from photos is hardly a hit piece. It puts it squarely in the category of Facebook bringing it on itself.
> Facebook applying for patents on distinctly creepy inferences from photos is hardly a hit piece.
That one is by buzzfeednews, not the nytimes. I know it's hard to tell the difference between news companies today. There are 3 hitpieces on facebook on the frontpage. 2 of those are by the nytimes.
There is a 4th by the businessinsider trying to make it's way to the frontpage.
I still don't see them as hit pieces though, and I've seen only two NYT pieces about FB hit HN today. This one is talking of a specific company they hired. The piece about students not wanting to work there is a bit more woolly, granted.
It doesn't seem like they're being singled out unfairly to me.
This is an interesting comment. My guess is that fb is directly or indirectly paying these shills here and in other tech forums to defend fb and/or smear Google.
(Of course, Mark wouldn't know anything about it.)
BTW, does HN make their content available in programming friendly way (like Reddit)? It would be interesting to do some analysis on age of account vs their comments.
I've been noticing a lot of anti-Facebook stuff popping up in HN recently. I think this is the 5th anti-Facebook post to make the frontpage in the last 2 days. I don't care about Facebook one way or the other, but I wonder how organic this really is...
Swisher holding some of the richest people in the world to account for their impact on billions of people isn't anti-tech. But it is telling that "pro-tech" is being conflated here with "pro-Silicon Valley capitalism."
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Can we please stop with the NYT assassination pieces on Facebook? This piece is barely tangentially related to technology at all, and serves no purpose other than to allow more virtue signalling and hearsay arguments and personal opinions on right and wrong.
1. Before Ms. Sandberg’s Senate testimony, Facebook lobbyists pushed lawmakers to refrain from questioning her about privacy, censorship and other issues, and to stick to election interference. The committee’s chairman, Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, was swayed and warned members to stick to the hearing’s planned topic, The Times reported Wednesday.
2. Facebook had also lobbied for the hearing to include a Google emissary of similar rank to Ms. Sandberg. Mr. Burr invited Larry Page, a Google co-founder, but he did not show up.
3. In an email days before the hearing, a Definers employee pressed a Times reporter to write that Facebook was taking the senators’ concerns seriously while Google was irresponsible for skipping the hearing.
4. The day before the hearing, NTK Network reported that Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, had suggested that Google was possibly a monopoly.
5. Those pieces were just two of at least 11 negative items NTK has posted about Google since late March.
Facebook really seems butthurt about Google. Instead of learning from Google about being transpernt on how they use user data, they basically dragged Google in the controversy, and I would say they have been pretty successful.