An Ugly Truth“ gives sneak peek as Zuckerberg becomes wartime leader | Hacker News Reader

An Ugly Truth“ gives sneak peek as Zuckerberg becomes wartime leader

axios.com

12 pointsystad10 comments

A war against people recognizing that social media like Facebook and Twitter are today's Big Tobacco equivalent?

I was working at facebook during some of that time and I found the external bad press cycle and the comments on HN really frustrating. Peak was when that documentary came out on Netflix. Often it was a lot of nonsense which I feel made people at Facebook less and less willing to listen to actual issues. Things were so different internally from what people depicted here, it really sounded like we were all evil or something like that. A lot of times I was frustrated that fb didn’t fight back, I can only guess I was not alone.

>Often it was a lot of nonsense which I feel made people at Facebook less and less willing to listen to actual issues.

Which points do you think were nonsense? And which ones would you agree are the most valid and pressing issues?

I often felt like small things were blown out of proportion because Facebook, or bad things were attributed to facebook the same way you could have blamed any other mean of communication or broadcast. Worse, the positive impact of the platform or social networks was/is never discussed.

I’m reading the comments on the Github copilot thread today and I have a feeling Github employees must have the same feeling today. They’re releasing something that is likely to change the world and people can only focus on the negative impact.

Most pressing issue is the issue of propaganda or information manipulation. This is a huge problem on every platform. Today I know a lot of russians and chinese people who live abroad and are still brainwashed by the news back home, it’s half working in the US with fox news.

"They’re releasing something that is likely to change the world," which is exactly why people are so upset about it! There doesn't seem to have been any thought whatsoever given to something that has the potential to disrupt the lives of many people.

It's "half working in the US with fox news" is amazing, given that Facebook is arguably at least half of the problem.

"Brainwashed" is mostly used as another word for people who seem blind to any evidence that the trust they have for [whatever] is misplaced. So I wouldn't say that Facebook has brainwashed you, but I invite you to consider how your comments might be different if you had, in fact, been brainwashed by Facebook--if at all.

You didn't answer the question really.

> Worse, the positive impact of the platform or social networks was/is never discussed.

Sounds like a good balance to Facebook's PR department.

It sounds as if you believe that it takes evil people thinking evil thoughts for the results to be evil. As Hannah Arendt has argued, quite persuasively in my opinion, this is not the case at all. While she was writing about events and people more insidious than Facebook's ills, her description of "the banality of evil" seems appropriate.

Your suggestion that criticism "made people at Facebook less and less willing to listen to actual issues" is a pretty good description of evil, by the way.

Agreed. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

War against who? Humanity?

negative press and political threats, particularly in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica shenanigans and the like

Reply on news.ycombinator.com