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Comment by numair | Hacker News Reader

This guy has a decade plus vendetta against Facebook [0] and posts in all these threads. While I respect that, I wouldn't read too much into this comment.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029872

Having a strong opinion you're willing to advocate for doesn't make the opinion any less valid in my book

Quite the opposite

I read the comment you linked. They seem to be eloquent and have good reason to dislike Facebook. Other commenters seem to agree with their views as well.

I’m not sure what your intention is here, but this makes it feel like you’re taking a stance FOR Facebook/Meta and trying to discount numair’s feelings about FB which seem valid.

This reads like a bot/paid commenter trying to de-legitimize real and honest discussion about the topic at hand.

I just noticed his username because I’ve seen it so often in these threads about Facebook. And it seems dishonest for him to level accusations while carefully wording his comment to sound like an insider.

I posted the link for context. FWIW I agree with him on most points, and I’ve just sent traffic to his 10 year old post disparaging Facebook, so if I’m a paid shill I’m pretty bad at it.

Yeah, I do agree the “insider” take did come across as unnecessary to make their points and does seem odd.

Also, a HN mod requested I didn’t make the comments I did about you. Seems like a valid rule and my comment didn’t really add to the discussion, so sorry about that as well.

No worries! It was my first time being called a paid shill for Facebook, which I found quite amusing anyway :D

Yeah, in retrospect, even wondering if that’s true about someone is pretty insulting. So again, sorry about that.

Glad you’re the kind of person to laugh it off, you seem like cool people.

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yet, "this guy"'s comment was an interesting read, while yours was not.

"I have a lot of info on this and more will come out in the coming weeks and months" is no more interesting to me than a typical 4chan larp post.

If more people do what he’s doing (rally against evil corps) the world might be a better place

It's funny that so much ire is directed at tech companies when I think there are a number of other companies that could be critiqued for much worse behavior.

Ah yes, the "but we're not Exxon" defense. You know things are bad when you have to stoop this low.

Exxon? I think any company that employs a size-able number of service workers is almost certainly doing things more impermissible than FB/Meta.

Many of the critiques that people have of FB are just critiques of what happen when large groups of people communicate online. If that's what people have issue with, I wish they would flag it.

Here, at least, most of us are in the tech industry, so ire directed at tech companies is us collectively trying to get our house in order first.

Whataboutism, other companies are criticized just as much or even more than FB. One can care about multiple things at the same time.

Pointing out a decade long track record of being right is a strange way of trying to discredit somebody.

Posting a comment deliberately constructed to sound like an insider revealing information is dishonest. And I even agree with him. I just thought his speculation needed some context.

Bahaha. This is an excellent take.

You say you know Facebook ”… a lot better than 99% of those who will comment…”, could you be a little more specific as to how/what you know? Are you talking about being personally acquainted with executives, privy to internal communications, or familiar with the code base?

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly lately, and flamewars are what we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I wish to read such posts. OP's comments are often tendentious but also generally substantive. Given a history of FB being criticized for the ethics of political advertising both domestically and internationally, the criticism seems on point to me.

There's nothing substantive about telling everyone how much better informed you are followed by unsubstantiated dark mutterings about how every time someone uses FB, a little squirrel in the Amazon loses its home. There are lots of better places to find an unlimited supply of this stuff than HN, if you're into it.

I'm sure you understand the meaning of 'generally', and I note you're only addressing one part of the post in question while ignoring the broader point - one which you may not agree with, but which view is as valid as your own.

What part of the post am I not addressing? It's basically all generic bombast and invective. You can't really post generic bombast and invective on HN, even if some people like your generic bombast and invective because it's generic bombast and invective. I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't know about a forum we've both been on for about 83771 million years.

Arguing that FB's primary reason for being is as a political influence operation rather than providing network effects to its users. I don't agree with your characterization of the comment. No doubt our interpretations will continue to differ.

My characterization of the comment is entirely orthogonal to any underlying truth it may be referring to - it's a trash comment. Yelling 'you're fat!' at an overweight person is a trash comment even if you somehow happen to believe it's also public health advocacy.

No doubt our interpretations will continue to differ.

dang, you are awesome, and I appreciate your efforts at keeping 4chan and Reddit away...

but IMHO his comment is not really flaming, especially as it wasn't a combative response.

[A quick look at his other comments implies he is not a troll, though a bit pessimistic.]

If I look closely at it, the GP comment seems completely unsubstantive. Unsubstantive + generic + indignant = flamewar.

There is a world of difference between "posting flamewar comments" and pointing out the problems associated with Facebook's massive political influence campaigning.

Sure, but they can overlap and it's the flamewar bits that we don't want here.

You're making two relatively-unrelated claims. One, that Facebook--a wildly profitable publicly-traded company--is run as a political machine. Two, that its employees bear moral culpability.

The first claim is extraordinary. Is Facebook's leadership powerful? Of course. Do they have undue influence in the U.S.? Probably not. If anything, their government affairs unit is laughably incapable of keeping its client from being a perennial political punching bag.

The second claim has more substance. It's becoming increasingly common, at least in regulatory and political circles, to hear calls for holding individual employees responsible for Facebook's actions.

> If anything, their government affairs unit is laughably incapable of keeping its client from being a perennial political punching bag.

To be honest I'm pretty sure they are perfectly ok being a political punching bag as long as that's where it ends and no-one does anything substantial to them... Sadly, I don't recall them really getting their teeth kicked in for anything they did wrong.

>Do they have undue influence in the U.S.? Probably not.

Facebook can arbitrarily decide what millions of people will see. And no reason not to use it whenever convenient.

> Do they have undue influence in the U.S.? Probably not.

Banning the former President, having affiliations with political agencies, getting people to change political opinions with targeted advertising, experimenting brain control through algorithms... Are you sure?

Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean here? Possibly some examples?

It pretty clearly means that Facebook makes conscious decisions on how to weight what is displayed to users with the intention of politically influencing millions of people. Examples are probably difficult unless there's source code available from different eras of Facebook with a strict chain of custody, which obviously won't happen.

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