Movie dialogue is scored on being interesting but there are a lot of interesting responses to Congressional inquiry, including interesting and true responses, which pessimize for your tactical or strategic goals.
They also plausibly pessimize for Congress' goals. If you wanted to learn when Zuckerberg learned of a topic, you could send him a letter, and he would check his notes and send you a
letter, and then you would know a thing you don't care about in the least. The point of grilling Zuckerberg in person about it is not to ascertain the truth, it is to grill Zuckerberg on television.
Congressional inquiries haven't been about finding truth since TV was invented. They are a platform for the parties involved to signal their positions. MZ is talking to his investors, AOC to her constituents.
My point is: there is no conversation going on. Just people talking.
This is very true -- there are also echoes of how politicians prepare talking points in response to journalists' questions these days. The person being quizzed isn't actually prepared to answer questions, they come prepared with a set of themes to talk about and will seek to massage their answer to almost any question to one of those prepared themes.
The other interesting thing specifically about televised Congressional hearings is that Congresspeople have very little time -- AOC had 5 minutes, if I recollect correctly. This gives the person being grilled an advantage -- by simply taking his time with his answers he can run down the clock and be done with AOC's questions.
The whole "grilling" format is just publicity for politicians. If they were really interested in answers, they would send an email and get a response back, and if they didn't they'd send a subpoena or start court proceedings.
And if they really wanted to do something, they would pass legislation. But of course, you can't do that and get paid by lobbyists and/or get favors from businesses at the same time. This grilling format solves all interests. Politicians get to look like they're doing something, many gullible voters think the politicians are doing something, and the businesses being looked into get to look like there is something being done about them.
It's not symmetric, though. The congresspeople are there to stir trouble, and the CEO is there to dodge it. For all of Zuck's misdeeds (or those of anyone dragged in), at a congressional hearing, the participant is a victim of a punishment, not an agent of their agenda.
Public meetings are performance art. Town halls, hearings, Q&As, etc. Good ones are scripted, controlled.
All the discovery, negotiation happens beforehand. The testimony and whatever votes occur are kabuki.
As a citizen with a little bit of experience, I now enthusiastically support how the game works. How else could it work? I've seen what happens when yahoos or saboteurs are allowed to take the dialog off script.
As an activist, I was once allowed to speak unscripted. The body suspended the rules to allow my testimony. What harm could be done? I revealed evidence that spiked the appropriation under consideration. (Vendor receiving the contract was actually out of business.) Whoops! Made the local news.
Neither side made that mistake again.
I now have a much greater appreciation for lobbying, engaging sympathetic representatives (or more likely, their staff) face-to-face, long before any decisions are made.
I'm by no means an expert in these things. So don't base your actions on my experiences.
FWIW, A similar exchange, Feynman's revelation about the O-rings failing leading to the lose of the Challenger and it's crew, is related in Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr Feynman.
Preparing and asking a bunch of interview questions is a lot easier than being on the receiving end and having to think though the legal ramifications about what you’re about to answer. Contrasting the slickness of the interviewer with the interviewee and drawing conclusions based on that is not accurate.
At the same time, he should be able to clearly state the policies of his company. He seemed completely unprepared for some basic questions that he should have been prepared to answer.
I appreciate that answering questions in a grilling interview is more difficult than asking questions, but ...
> “You don’t know? This was the largest data scandal with respect to your company, that had catastrophic impacts on the 2016 election. You don’t know?”
... but at the same time, I would certainly expect the chairman and CEO of a company to be more prepared to answer these difficult questions than what is reported in the original article. This was one of the biggest scams related to Facebook. I understand that Zukerberg's legal team may have advised him to be vague during the interview and he probably answered what is best for his company.
But as citizens of the world, we should never find such vague answers acceptable. The way Cambridge Analytica has upset the process of democracy and how Facebook data was used while doing so requires Facebook to be subject to such grilling. It should be made clear to Facebook in no uncertain terms that it needs to present answers and concrete answers.
Sure, we should not find this dodging acceptable, but shouldn't we start by using this standard on the politicians themselves first? At least Zuckerberg is offering a service we can opt out of, that's not the same for what the politicians do.
Facebook's adoption is so high that even if you and I choose not to use it—choose to take every measure available to us to avoid personal interaction with anything Facebook does—we cannot avoid its effects, because of the millions of people around us who do not take that choice.
Facebook can, without any exaggeration or doubt, influence elections in multiple countries. Treating Zuckerberg like he's the CEO of, say, Dropbox just doesn't fly anymore.
In 2009-2013 Facebook was under a lot of pressure to share their data with academic researchers. They didn’t have the resources to process information, anonymise and make those tables available and manage the relationship, the research project, etc. More importantly, they were afraid of data leaks from careless handling. One researcher with an interesting research topic on personality traits and impeccable credentials (Cambridge, great PhD advisor) started collecting information on his own with a personality test, an app the newly updated API. It seemed like an easy to manage relation, someone who knew about information security and a good test-balloon for engaging more with the academic community.
There were some warnings later when the app grew suddenly: he started paying Amazon Mechanical Turk to increase the subscribers; however, paying subject was common in psychology and AMT was becoming a standard in that area. More power to him. There were some documents signed to confirm he was focusing on academic-only interest. So far, that was hardly a scandal.
But Kogan wanted to live from his research and he would end up selling the database to a company called SCL, doing psychological research. That wasn’t completely leftfield. Facebook anticipated and decided to pull the plug, giving the app weeks to close (in order to let end-customers download their data, a standard process at the time when data portability was the main topic of conversation).
Kogan claimed he used a different app but kept the same credentials and user base, so that argument was, as expected, invisible to the API detection systems. The AMT budget grew massively to a million dollars. I don’t know how or when Facebook learned about the sale; I suspect the increase of activity triggered an audit.
Once the lie was clear, Facebook asked the buyer to delete the data, obtained outside of the agreement in the API license. Without being the ICO, you can’t use the law to guarantee that, so they did the next best thing: they asked the buyer to sign legal documents promising that they had deleted it. If Facebook could have used the ICO then to enforce the deletion, they would have. I’ve had to deal with them since and I would find that confidence… generous. But either way: physical force wasn’t an option between two companies, neither had breached the letter of the law.
All academic collaboration projects were put on ice and later cancelled because that test proved sour.
Third-party apps misbehaving is alas common and there’s nothing special about this: people were scamming gullible users into clicking on fake buttons at an industrial scale. So false claims where banned. More dodgy stuff emerged, they were blocked; scammers tried again with renewed trick and were caught with an increasingly refined detection system. And, as far as Facebook was concerned, it was a massive cat-and-mouse game but that was it. CA was one of many game studios, spammers, etc. who had abused the API in ways that were unexpected in 2008 and patched since.
One thing that has not been documented about this: banning and lawyer letters were possibly not enough; there is a system to detect suspicious targeting (like racist real-estate ads). Most likely, Kogan’s list, like other data stolen by spammers was added to that system. It would detect anyone using stolen information -- so if CA used it, they would get caught again. That particular feature is not talked about a lot for obvious reasons but fairly expected when you have so many scammers at scale.
For Facebook, that story is a classic case of enforcing API rules: extensive observability, defence in depth, complying with the law at the time (who couldn’t care less about disclosure) and being flexible with rules that abusers are keen to circumvent.
So, saying that Cambridge Analytica used that leaked data to target advertising was surprising to anyone in charge, and their expected reaction was likely to check, see that wasn’t the case and likely focus on something else, something that wasn’t a (for...
While the data scientists working for CA were reasonable people dealing with the usual bullshit from agency salespeople massively over-selling their work, the sales team (picture in that Channel 4 leaked video) are the worst -- lying about prostitutes on camera is hardly surprising. Because, yeah: that “we can entrap your opponent, we do it all the time” was obviously made-up bullshit to impress a fake gullible prospect. Not sure it makes it “better” but it’s a clearer illustration of who you are dealing with.
Where things get suspicious for outsiders but fairly straightforward: Did Facebook collaborate further? No, but if you look for trouble, it’s easy to make it look bad:
Presidential campaigns are fairly large individual clients for Facebook; they have to ramp up fast; have time-sensitive campaigns to run so, to avoid any blockers and being accused of being unfair and undemocratic, every campaign has points of contact to check that all is smooth. Essentially, salespeople familiar with Facebook more advanced ad targeting options and who can be there to help with idiosyncrasies like having some text on ad images (a big, hard-to-comprehend No-No for a while, a very common mistake for inexperienced campaigns, who are naturally quick to scream censorship when they are blocked).
Several people assumed that because “Facebook” had banned SCL Elections three years prior, ”Facebook” should know better than to let CA, a company with a different name, help the Trump campaign:
- Facebook is a large company and the anti-abuse team for the API has little to do with the Sales team; they are not even based on the same office or the same coast of the US;
- Facebook is growing incredibly fast and no one helping sell was there three years prior -- campaign assistant are very junior;
- the client wasn’t the same: the GOP and the campaign were the official holders of that account; banning them for having consultants from a company with dodgy behaviour wasn’t going to make sense.
But more importantly: none of what the GOP did was against any of Facebook’s rules. They bought all the data they needed from Experian, from press delivery companies, something that was a common request from advertisers then (who wanted to target based on credit rating, newspaper subscriptions). They tested a lot of their ideas and the audiences emerged organically from how people reacted to those. Read any story on how the two campaigns had such a different approach to campaigning online. No secret data was needed to make a difference: one tried, the other coasted.
What did Facebook do after they realised you could run a scandalous campaign using Experian and other third-party data? Block those (For many reasons, being slimy and not allowing people to edit false information was one; having shitty data in the first place was another big one). That was actually the best thing to do, but no one reacted to that actual, effective, meaningful change.
So what was Facebook to do after they had consistently adapted and enforced their policy for ten years on an API that wasn’t perfect, but that had learned faster than anyone else? Explain why they did what they did?
They tried and no one listened, accusing the company of inconsistencies rather than understand that, say, Mark doesn’t personally handle banned apps on the API. After too many people demanding that Facebook use Police power to delete data they didn’t know was still there, I think most of the senior brass checked out: it was a made-up scandal and nothing they could say or do would really help.
That populists get elected and run countries to the ground is real and problematic, but that’s due to mechanisms that are unrelated to Facebook targeting algorithms, at least as far as we can understand them. There’s growing inequality, diverging perspectives between citizens; a few operative have developed real expertise in spewing bullshit, but none of that will be solved if people don’t separate causes and false claims. Telling people to leave Facebook won...
I've worked in marketing for an Agency. If Facebook had to check everything we did, they'd really had a hard time. We had multiple clients with multiple banners with multiple landing pages and all of this with a software rotating stuff with A/B tests and regressions. If a political party came to hire us, I'm sure we'll do it. This was in Spain, so I guess that there will be a lot more companies doing this in the US.
Checking all of this within an acceptable timeframe for advertisers requires a lot of labor. That comes with another wide set of problems. Loosy boundaries, arbitrary bans, increased cost of ads etc etc. I have no special sympathy for Facebook, but we have to understand that this is a really hard problem to solve, and maybe there won't be any solution that satisfies the public.
Facebook et all grew on the fact that they could automate the process - but in reality they have only automated part of it - the easy part of taking the money and placing the ad - not checking the content.
If they can't check the content in an automated way ( very hard because people will be actively working against you ) and the remedy is to have an army of people checking content then their competitive edge over the traditional business model largely disappears.
The other way to fix this - which I'd imagine Facebook and Google might want to push - is to put the responsibility onto the generator of the content. Google and Facebook could easily help automate the the shifting of responsibility if everyone is identifiable.
That would be like a newspaper not taking responsibility for a story being wrong - simply passing the legal blame onto a source - while there is some justice here as the source has a responsibility also, it is ignoring the fact that the platforms play a role in placing and promoting the content.
If it's hard, then it's hard. That no perfect, complete solution is possible just means we accept the imperfect, incomplete solution if it is an improvement on the status quo.
I really don't have a lot of sympathy for the woes of the advertising industry, considering the consequences.
If I, working there, found that FB was painful to work with, I'd go somewhere else, as simple as that. I won't spend two days wrestling with FB to see if my ad it's ok or not.
I may not care for political advertising, since my client is not looking to "make a profit" like a traditional customer. But I definitely do for an eCommerce brand for example.
Most agencies use FB because it's easy to work with and it's cheapish with a little expertise. If that dissapeares then nobody is goung to pour money on it.
> this is a really hard problem to solve, and maybe there won't be any solution that satisfies the public
I'm not a fan of this argument. It reminds me of people saying that the big US banks are too big to fail during the sub prime mortgage crisis a decade ago. If the banks are too big to fail, then we better fix the regulation of those banks so they are less likely to fail or break the banks up.
If Facebook is too big to effectively moderate what it publishes, then reduce how much they publish (ie your Agency is going to be rate limited) or break up Facebook into pieces that can moderate their traffic.
Have you seen or heard of the Night Trap hearings? They refused to hear answers to accusations of lurid content that "wasn't even remotely in the goddamn game".
The have proven that they will refuse to listen to any answer that they can't grandstand about. I think Zuckerberg and Facebook is shady as hell and even I feel sympathy for him here and suspect he may be drugging himself to not snap at the hours of stupid and dishonest questions. Since it wouldn't be good for the company long term to make enemies by shaming them during their grandstand hours with many choice lines.
Claiming that Cambridge Analytica had a catastrophic impact on the 2016 election. It's hard to know what to answer to such a thing.
If you get into a debate with her on whether her completely unproven claim is true or false you are guilty, if you try to avoid it you are basically saying she is right and are guilty.
This kind of questioning only works because it's not a courtroom. This would never be allowed as an actual question.
> Claiming that Cambridge Analytica had a catastrophic impact on the 2016 election. It's hard to know what to answer to such a thing.
"Congresswoman, half of this country thinks that your statement about the impact of Cambridge Analytica in the last election is factually false. In case you wanted to publish an ad that mentioned it, should Facebook reject it?"
You cannot be asked to take the responsibility of an impossible task such as telling truths from lies. It's a responsibility that even the government doesn't want. What about "congresswoman, you pass a bill to institute the Ministry of Truth, and I'll scrupulously follow their indications".
- candidates can be serious or not so much, but it’s unclear where the line is between the GOP and Vermin Supreme.
- PACs represent the bulk of “political” spending: it’s also unclear where you set the line there; clear attack ads are not the same as a more generic charity defending the environment and supporting a candidate; you can’t ban one without banning the other, or you have to define clear rules that allow “Vote for a candidate that supports your values” but not anything more specific, where using the same symbol, colour, font, as a specific campaign becomes a problem.
- If you ban any communications about the environment, gender equality, etc. commercial companies who bolster their ecological credential or empower women are becoming liminal and problematic when they really shouldn’t.
- None of those questions can accept a US-centric answer: Facebook hosts political ads from 190 countries, where all of the above is slightly different. What counts as controversial in other countries would definitely surprise you.
What counts as true, another argument in that debate isn’t clear: a lot of political promises like “we have the budget to pass that reform” can seem… “very bold and optimistic” to some fact-checkers. Facebook has struggled with fact-checkers in the past and felt it was preferable to downplay their role, given that previous scandal.
>- PACs represent the bulk of “political” spending: it’s also unclear where you set the line there; clear attack ads are not the same as a more generic charity defending the environment and supporting a candidate; you can’t ban one without banning the other, or you have to define clear rules that allow “Vote for a candidate that supports your values” but not anything more specific, where using the same symbol, colour, font, as a specific campaign becomes a problem.
Well, they're PACs. Political Action Committees. So if you're banning political ads it would be trivial to ban organisations that are registered as a 527 organisation. That seems like a screaming flashing bright red line there.
You would think so but tell that to anyone advertising to say, for instance, that Greta Thunberg is right or selling t-shirts insulting Trump and they'll be outraged--claiming that this is not political but essential.
More generally, you would see a lot of people unwilling to provide documentation that they are not a 527, or a foreign entity.
That will effectively prohibit all issue-based advertising. Maybe that's a good thing, but consider the scope and impact before advocating for such a sweeping change.
In Germany every political party gets a fixed number of slots for TV-Spots basically free of charge ahead of an election. There is no other political advertisement allowed (only the parties themselves are allowed to advertise). Unfortunately neither newspapers nor internet advertisement is as strictly regulated, but I feel like it should be eventually as well.
Similar in the UK - set up that way to stop money being able to buy elections.
Overall, election spending has been very strictly controlled.
One of the problems is recently people have being getting around this with hard to trace online campaigns - using "national funding" and effectively locally targeted online campaigns.
I'd like to see people being properly sanctioned for breaking the rules. In my view there are few things more serious than trying to subvert democracy. It shouldn't be normalized like it is in the US.
I agree, basically it should either not be allowed or strictly controlled how to advertise politics online. Targeted political advertisement should be banned completely. Then there is twitter, which also basically serves as a direct marketing channel for political parties. In Germany this is a huge problem especially with the AFD, they can publish lots of nonsense there, more or less unchallenged by facts or reason.
In America, the usual argument is that such an approach would impair free speech, especially in telling third parties that they are not allowed to express views about an upcoming election.
Where do you draw the line though? I mean sure, you can ban ads promoting a political party or candidate - that's simple.
But what about e.g. "awareness" campaigns about e.g. refugees?
What about ads pretending to promote products to the LGBT community but targeted to be presented to conservatives / right-leaning people so that their bigotry will only increase?
You can affect people's political affiliations and their voting behaviour in really insidious ways. I wouldn't be surprised if agents are active on HN that operate with that in mind.
I am sure people can debate for decades about where to draw the line. But many other countries have banned political ads and they drew the line somewhere.
The congressional hearings are a hostile environment. The only reason to have Zuckerberg there is to get camera footage of him looking shifty and to pressure him to do whatever the politicians want him to do.
His tactical and strategic goal is not to deliver 'zingers', it is ideally for the situation to go quiet and be forgotten by everyone. Failing that, an acceptable fallback is for any anti-Facebook action by government to get mired in endless committee investigations that are boring, neverending and unproductive to slow down any hostile regulation that might eventuate. Failing that, regulation that is onerous but favours Facebook by locking out any competition from the American markets. None of these will be achieved by interesting public exchanges with Congresspeople.
Public government hearings are not where the serious moves are made. It is more a show-and-tell for the politicians to communicate to their voters what is being negotiated in the backrooms where real work happens.
Yes I suspect the less televised select committees the UK have is a better solution.
I recall seeing George Galloway (Uk MP) who was called to one of These and he used his experience in the HOC to rip the good old boy asking the questions to pieces.
Only one of these parties to the negotiation works on behalf of the American people. Zuckerberg said he has 3B customers.
You seems bored with the process but I would argue the job politicians are doing is equally important if not more so than the construction of an Online Ad Delivering Skinner Box, the “real work” you allude to. (Current top most on HackerNews explains how much people despise ads and pay money to avoid them)
Holding powerful people accountable, publicly, creating laws and regulations and governing the rules of our society is very important to operating this country.
Only if the said lawyers were doing those for the benefit of the people. Many of those lawyers would kiss Zucks ass for a million. Hearings are just theaters until we get money out of politics.
Did you watch the hearing? Very few people said anything that wasnt a 1) scripted grandstand that didnt even have a question 2) had already been covered in another hearing or 3) was a misunderstanding of the business and its technology. Some of them did have good points sprinkled in. But to call what they did a "good job" is an extreme overstatement.
Having watched quite a bit of parliamentary footage, the style of question that can be asked could reasonably include such curly ones as "Research suggests that Facebook harms the mental development of adolescents. Did you stop to think about the potential damage to teenage girls when you were crafting your extractive corporate empire?"
Now in theory someone asked that could answer without accidentally agreeing that their company is extractive/they are harming young girls/they are recklessly not considering the impacts of their work. Bonus points if they can answer without getting shouted down for not directly answering a yes/no question with a yes/no. Lose a point if the answer gets testy and they look like they are defensive or flustered.
They also have to do that while being completely honest, without getting tongue-tied and correctly assessing the question in a very short time frame.
Zuckerberg isn't a barrister, he didn't found an empire on the ability to think quickly under a barrage of questions and he may just not be an expert at it (most clever people aren't). He is far better off just looking a little wilted and evasive. People who try to be clever tend to end up looking worse.
The example question may have fallen too close to actual beliefs to be properly illustrative. If you mentally substitute something that you believe Facebook is not doing which would definitely be harmful, the "no short, truthful answer" result may be clearer.
> Now in theory someone asked that could answer without accidentally agreeing that their company is extractive/they are harming young girls/they are recklessly not considering the impacts of their work.
The right answer to this question is to accept that the company is extracting / harming people. And admit that they didn't stop to think about that when they were building it. That's understandable - they had no idea the impact that facebook would have on society when they were building it.
You can then go on to have a productive collaborative discussion about what to do about it (which isn't obvious or easy). The environment is hostile because Zuckerberg isn't engaging in the process, and is stonewalling congress with "we have a process for this".
He's not being honest, and I suspect (and hope tbh) it will eventually be the downfall of his company.
Admitting fault, and then retroactively be punished for it at the tune of X million "potentially harmed"? If this were a board meeting and it was simply to say what should be fixed, understood or analyzed going forward, then admission of failure is fine; but this is about meting out punishment, in which case you tell the cops nothing.
> The right answer to this question is to accept that the company is extracting / harming people.
If the answer is predetermined and known it isn't a question. It is some sort of formal whipping and there is no point giving any answer.
From the peanut gallery it is plausible that Facebook is a net win or a net loss for adolescents and it is possible that the company has a staff psychologist who has actually thought about its impacts. That question is so hard to answer in the negative I seem to have 2 people answering in this comment chain as though the frame is obviously correct and Zuckerberg needs to answer yes then atone for his sins. Public hearings are not the place to engage with these sorts of questions (there might be consequences if he makes a mistake in his answers).
I haven’t seen any studies showing Facebook is a net win for anyone. But I search pubmed and see page after page showing it actively harms those that use it. A close analog is the literature for tobacco smoking.
> The right answer to this question is to accept that the company is extracting / harming people. And admit that they didn't stop to think about that when they were building it. That's understandable - they had no idea the impact that facebook would have on society when they were building it.
The right answer to "have you stopped beating your wife?" is not "yes" if you don't actually beat your wife.
Similarly, the answer to "did you know the thing you were doing was evil?" is not "no" if the thing you did was not evil. Answering like that is conceding the point.
There's a difference between "yes, Cambridge Analytica used our platform to do bad things and we facilitated that" and "our platform is fundamentally bad for you", though.
But if you can't give a convincing answer to "What are you doing to prevent that happening again?", then everyone's going to make that conclusion anyway.
If everyone knows you're in the wrong, then it's better to concede the point than stubbornly go on pretending like everything's ok. If you do the latter then it might help you in the short-term, but it's a great big red flag telling everyone that you can't be trusted.
Most of the time it seems like a question is complicated only if you realize that what you are doing is wrong, but it makes you a lot of money so you don't want to change.
One example, Ocasio-Cortez asked: Can a politician lie about Election Day on a Facebook ad?
The answer is clearly yes. It isn't complicated.
Or this one: Does Facebook see a problem with its lack of fact-checking capabilities?
How can the answer to this be anything except yes?
Why the hell would you want a private company to censor political advertisement? Are they required by law to do that? Why is censorship bad if enacted by the government but it is ok when a private corporation does it?
Imagine that Facebook is required by law to check every fact in every advert that is on their platform. Is that even possible? Would they have the resources to hire unbiased, critical-thinking people who are capable of doing htat? How expensive is that? Would they just rely on the cheaper option - algorithms.
A friend of mine got banned from Facebook for a month for sharing a meme, posted by somebody else, that had a swastika in it. The meme was of the sort "Nazis were horrible idiots". He appealed the ban, on the grounds that the original post was not taken down (he just shared it) and that this had nothing to do with nazi propaganda. It was, in fact, the opposite. An actual human being looked at that appeal and still confirmed the ban.
What makes you think the process will be any more efficient and rational with political advertising? Relying on companies to police content is absurd in every respect, from freedom of speech rights to just plain capability. There's an entire court system built up with the sole purpose of determining truth and even that isn't 100% accurate. Trust the same responsibility on a corporation?
I wouldn't defend Facebook for anything. But when you see reps like AOC hurl questions at him, and not even care if he answers them, it really highlights how these events only serve to create headlines or steer a narrative. You'd think they want information out of him if they wanted to accomplish something.
If you think she didn’t care about the answers, you missed most of what’s going on. The process is similar to a trial: she knows full well what he’s trying to avoid admitting and was very carefully inching him into a situation where he had to either answer honestly or admit that his previous answers had not been correct. Each time he gave their usual spin rather than answering she recognized it as such and moved him on to something which highlighted the inconsistencies in his answers.
> The only reason to have Zuckerberg there is to get camera footage of him looking shifty and to pressure him to do whatever the politicians want him to do.
Bingo.
It's a pretty classic deal, we've done these things in the US for a while when it comes to new tech and other things. Here's the terms: You get, essentially, a monopoly. In that congress leans heavily on you to write up the laws for the new fangled thingy. So, you write yourself into law such that only you can do the thingy legally. For this monopoly, you get, pretty much, guaranteed profit. Not much, 5%, something about that; but your company gets it forever.
You, your kids, your grandkids, their grandkids, however you bequeath the stocks, those rugrats will never be poor. Stupid, drunks, coke addicts, adrenaline junkies, maybe, whatever, up to you, but never poor. Dream weddings, the best colleges, vacations of legend, you name it. In exchange for this wealth, you damn well better make sure that you run this company how congress damn well wants you to run it: cheap, good, or fast (pick two).
For the robber barons, it was making sure that the trains ran on time and that you weren't trying to jack the cattle car prices just before the stock show. For Bill Gates, it was making sure the DoD could use the OS and get some damn support phone calls at 2am. For AT&T it was making sure the long distance calls went down in price. For Rockefeller it was making sure the oil kept on flowing and that those poor folks out in Billings got their heating oil for a reasonable price. For Monsanto, it was making sure they stopped suing all the farmers that I put in my campaign ads.
To leverage this power, they get you in front of both houses, have you answer questions for hours and hours, and eventually get you in a few lies. It is a super big crime to lie to congress. You go to big boy jail for as long as they fell like putting you there, maybe even for a week (the horror!).
So, you play ball. You get up there, they ask you all kinds of stuff, you lie, they now have power over you too. So you get together, write the laws, and poof, you are never poor again. Go take up painting, water skiing, scotch collecting, whatever.
That's the deal: You're perma-rich, but you do what we say.
So, it's super strange to see Zuck not playing ball here.
It's likely that he's not gotten the memo here (Hanlon's razor and all). But I think he's a tad smarter than that. I think it's because congress is asking him to shut all the grassroots rabble down, to get the Russians out of their voters' heads, to get Gramps to stop sending Cameroonian scammers $5k in Walmart gift cards. But Zuck has no clue how to go about doing that except for making the company 50x larger, and thereby crashing it. The moderation that congress is asking for, neigh demanding, as basic terms of the deal, is just not possible for what he can charge in ads. Zuck just can't moderate the whole of the thing to where Congress will sign off. Look at China, to get their moderation working they have thousands and thousands of people working at it all the time. It just plain takes a LOT of cheap eyeballs. I takes government money, not ad money.
So Zuck is stuck.
He's trying to talk to right wingers, hoping that they'll buy him some time to get the AI stuff kinda, sorta, cross-your-fingers, working. But he knows, he can't close his end of the bargain. Maybe he can persuade congress to nationalize him, like we did with lighthouses and the post office, but man alive, that's an uphill battle. So, here we are, hoping for quantum computers or some other magical thing to happen.
There was a very inspiring response from the original founding Facebook team about Sorkin’s movie (right around the time they had the entire company go and see it): like most people here know, starting a company isn’t glamorous, at all, certainly in 2004-2006. Servers going down, impossible hiring; they remember a blur of incessant crisis. They thought romanticised version of that story where they look good, say witty things and kick ass was surprising but inspiring for them.
Zuckerberg has gone through media training and can be very good when he’s prepared for specific questions (see his public Q&A). He’s also notoriously focused and happy to delegate. Asking him to come talk about Libra and ask questions about Cambridge Analytica is an easy way to get vague answers.
I have to admit that there was something surreal in the short videos of hearing I saw on the internet. Congressmen/women, people of power, whom we stereotype as poker-faced, cynical, and manipulative, having people-like problems - e.g. "my granddaughter played with a mobile phone and then some creepily relevant ads started to appear", against a youngster without any formal power who cuts them off with laconic responses.
I've only seen a few clips from the interview-- clips that were supposed to show Zuckerberg getting owned by some politician or other. To be honest, the politicians seemed really childish to me. Their questions were uninformed, hostile, and off topic. I thought Zuckerberg handled himself just fine, given the circumstances.
I say this as someone who thinks the world would be better off without Facebook. I don't use it. I don't invest in it.
“No one had any doubts who the adult in the room was Wednesday,” ends the article. Right before the promoted content “This deadly sex habit is killing seniors!”
I know that’s a bit off topic, but does speak towards the current environment of not just Facebook, but the entire internet.
Not sure how much the idea makes sense, but these days I feel that rather than education, looks, status, etc. being the rare and difficult-to-attain markers or benefits of being of a higher class, being a generally sane person with a coherent worldview and some degree of emotional control is.
Is this the state of journalism in this day and age? Is there any surprise that a real life CEO carefully coached by PR and lawyers is less interesting than his doppelganger in a multi-million dollar Oscar-targeted movie backed by a team of professional writers?
Yes. It's all a show. The "journalist" pretends that congressional hearings are serious events rather than the entertainment clown shows that they are. Then said "journalist" compares the performance at such a show-trial light to dialogue in a fictional movie. People click on it. Ads are shown. Comments fly. Money is made.
No, I would not use this particular publication as a good indicator of the state of journalism. There are almost more quotes from the movie than from the hearing, and the premise was a joke, taken seriously.
Looks just like a guy who did something ho-hum, at the right time and with the right connections, and thanks to lots of in-between people, got 1000000000x more value that he'd ought to get. Facebook was neither impressive technology, nor original conceptually. It just was there at the right time and had the right funding.
Not even for a moment did he strike as a computer genius, a business genius, or anything in between.
I agree his answers about why political ads shouldn't be fact checked weren't good, but I found some of these "zinger" clips on Twitter really silly.
> Mr. Zuckerberg, what year and month did you personally first become aware of Cambridge Analytica?”
Unless I missed that the hearing was highly related to this, why would he remember this exact date offhand?
You'd be better declining to answer this question than guess and get it wrong which seems like what he did. Asking if he became aware of them before or after a specific event would have been much more reasonable. There's tons of important events in my life where I don't know the month it happened because it's not important to remember.
I think he's right to say "I don't know" when he can't be completely sure. That's not a zinger.
Likewise, it's not a zinger when you ask a really long question that contains several factual claims that you require clarification on, or try to force a yes/no answer to a loaded question (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_question#Complex_quest...).
> Unless I missed that the hearing was highly related to this, why would he remember this exact date offhand?
Because it is one of the biggest scandals affecting Facebook in probably its entire history, and he's been grilled about it before? You'd think that once they found out his staff and advisors would make sure to tell him every single detail about it. Likewise, it should be the thing that occupies him for months on end.
It's inexcusable for him to not seem to know some basic factoids about the whole thing.
Fun fact: The "oid" suffix in factoid means "like", or "resembling". So a factoid is not a true fact, but a statement resembling a fact. The word "factoid" was coined by Norman Mailer to mean "an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print." So it is a source of great irony that the meaning of the word has been inverted by the press to mean a trivial but true fact. Historians of the future may have a fun time trying to figure out if our factoids are a true fact that we consider trivial, or a fact that we know is false but is believed to be true.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadPeople are boring, bias and sometimes, really dumb (or playing dumb to avoid further persecution).
They also plausibly pessimize for Congress' goals. If you wanted to learn when Zuckerberg learned of a topic, you could send him a letter, and he would check his notes and send you a letter, and then you would know a thing you don't care about in the least. The point of grilling Zuckerberg in person about it is not to ascertain the truth, it is to grill Zuckerberg on television.
My point is: there is no conversation going on. Just people talking.
The other interesting thing specifically about televised Congressional hearings is that Congresspeople have very little time -- AOC had 5 minutes, if I recollect correctly. This gives the person being grilled an advantage -- by simply taking his time with his answers he can run down the clock and be done with AOC's questions.
And if they really wanted to do something, they would pass legislation. But of course, you can't do that and get paid by lobbyists and/or get favors from businesses at the same time. This grilling format solves all interests. Politicians get to look like they're doing something, many gullible voters think the politicians are doing something, and the businesses being looked into get to look like there is something being done about them.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/312003/what-is-the-most-...
It's still kind of tongue-in-cheek because it hasn't caught on enough. I think it's used more widely in ML but I may be way off the mark on this.
Ostrich and Possum have no awesome options for optimal animal posture, a literal posthumous aspect or optical pessimum.
All the discovery, negotiation happens beforehand. The testimony and whatever votes occur are kabuki.
As a citizen with a little bit of experience, I now enthusiastically support how the game works. How else could it work? I've seen what happens when yahoos or saboteurs are allowed to take the dialog off script.
As an activist, I was once allowed to speak unscripted. The body suspended the rules to allow my testimony. What harm could be done? I revealed evidence that spiked the appropriation under consideration. (Vendor receiving the contract was actually out of business.) Whoops! Made the local news.
Neither side made that mistake again.
I now have a much greater appreciation for lobbying, engaging sympathetic representatives (or more likely, their staff) face-to-face, long before any decisions are made.
I'm by no means an expert in these things. So don't base your actions on my experiences.
FWIW, A similar exchange, Feynman's revelation about the O-rings failing leading to the lose of the Challenger and it's crew, is related in Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr Feynman.
> “You don’t know? This was the largest data scandal with respect to your company, that had catastrophic impacts on the 2016 election. You don’t know?”
... but at the same time, I would certainly expect the chairman and CEO of a company to be more prepared to answer these difficult questions than what is reported in the original article. This was one of the biggest scams related to Facebook. I understand that Zukerberg's legal team may have advised him to be vague during the interview and he probably answered what is best for his company.
But as citizens of the world, we should never find such vague answers acceptable. The way Cambridge Analytica has upset the process of democracy and how Facebook data was used while doing so requires Facebook to be subject to such grilling. It should be made clear to Facebook in no uncertain terms that it needs to present answers and concrete answers.
Facebook's adoption is so high that even if you and I choose not to use it—choose to take every measure available to us to avoid personal interaction with anything Facebook does—we cannot avoid its effects, because of the millions of people around us who do not take that choice.
Facebook can, without any exaggeration or doubt, influence elections in multiple countries. Treating Zuckerberg like he's the CEO of, say, Dropbox just doesn't fly anymore.
It actually wasn’t but no one will listen to people familiar with what happened.
There were some warnings later when the app grew suddenly: he started paying Amazon Mechanical Turk to increase the subscribers; however, paying subject was common in psychology and AMT was becoming a standard in that area. More power to him. There were some documents signed to confirm he was focusing on academic-only interest. So far, that was hardly a scandal.
But Kogan wanted to live from his research and he would end up selling the database to a company called SCL, doing psychological research. That wasn’t completely leftfield. Facebook anticipated and decided to pull the plug, giving the app weeks to close (in order to let end-customers download their data, a standard process at the time when data portability was the main topic of conversation).
Kogan claimed he used a different app but kept the same credentials and user base, so that argument was, as expected, invisible to the API detection systems. The AMT budget grew massively to a million dollars. I don’t know how or when Facebook learned about the sale; I suspect the increase of activity triggered an audit.
Once the lie was clear, Facebook asked the buyer to delete the data, obtained outside of the agreement in the API license. Without being the ICO, you can’t use the law to guarantee that, so they did the next best thing: they asked the buyer to sign legal documents promising that they had deleted it. If Facebook could have used the ICO then to enforce the deletion, they would have. I’ve had to deal with them since and I would find that confidence… generous. But either way: physical force wasn’t an option between two companies, neither had breached the letter of the law.
All academic collaboration projects were put on ice and later cancelled because that test proved sour.
Third-party apps misbehaving is alas common and there’s nothing special about this: people were scamming gullible users into clicking on fake buttons at an industrial scale. So false claims where banned. More dodgy stuff emerged, they were blocked; scammers tried again with renewed trick and were caught with an increasingly refined detection system. And, as far as Facebook was concerned, it was a massive cat-and-mouse game but that was it. CA was one of many game studios, spammers, etc. who had abused the API in ways that were unexpected in 2008 and patched since.
One thing that has not been documented about this: banning and lawyer letters were possibly not enough; there is a system to detect suspicious targeting (like racist real-estate ads). Most likely, Kogan’s list, like other data stolen by spammers was added to that system. It would detect anyone using stolen information -- so if CA used it, they would get caught again. That particular feature is not talked about a lot for obvious reasons but fairly expected when you have so many scammers at scale.
For Facebook, that story is a classic case of enforcing API rules: extensive observability, defence in depth, complying with the law at the time (who couldn’t care less about disclosure) and being flexible with rules that abusers are keen to circumvent.
So, saying that Cambridge Analytica used that leaked data to target advertising was surprising to anyone in charge, and their expected reaction was likely to check, see that wasn’t the case and likely focus on something else, something that wasn’t a (for...
Where things get suspicious for outsiders but fairly straightforward: Did Facebook collaborate further? No, but if you look for trouble, it’s easy to make it look bad:
Presidential campaigns are fairly large individual clients for Facebook; they have to ramp up fast; have time-sensitive campaigns to run so, to avoid any blockers and being accused of being unfair and undemocratic, every campaign has points of contact to check that all is smooth. Essentially, salespeople familiar with Facebook more advanced ad targeting options and who can be there to help with idiosyncrasies like having some text on ad images (a big, hard-to-comprehend No-No for a while, a very common mistake for inexperienced campaigns, who are naturally quick to scream censorship when they are blocked).
Several people assumed that because “Facebook” had banned SCL Elections three years prior, ”Facebook” should know better than to let CA, a company with a different name, help the Trump campaign:
- Facebook is a large company and the anti-abuse team for the API has little to do with the Sales team; they are not even based on the same office or the same coast of the US;
- Facebook is growing incredibly fast and no one helping sell was there three years prior -- campaign assistant are very junior;
- the client wasn’t the same: the GOP and the campaign were the official holders of that account; banning them for having consultants from a company with dodgy behaviour wasn’t going to make sense.
But more importantly: none of what the GOP did was against any of Facebook’s rules. They bought all the data they needed from Experian, from press delivery companies, something that was a common request from advertisers then (who wanted to target based on credit rating, newspaper subscriptions). They tested a lot of their ideas and the audiences emerged organically from how people reacted to those. Read any story on how the two campaigns had such a different approach to campaigning online. No secret data was needed to make a difference: one tried, the other coasted.
What did Facebook do after they realised you could run a scandalous campaign using Experian and other third-party data? Block those (For many reasons, being slimy and not allowing people to edit false information was one; having shitty data in the first place was another big one). That was actually the best thing to do, but no one reacted to that actual, effective, meaningful change.
So what was Facebook to do after they had consistently adapted and enforced their policy for ten years on an API that wasn’t perfect, but that had learned faster than anyone else? Explain why they did what they did?
They tried and no one listened, accusing the company of inconsistencies rather than understand that, say, Mark doesn’t personally handle banned apps on the API. After too many people demanding that Facebook use Police power to delete data they didn’t know was still there, I think most of the senior brass checked out: it was a made-up scandal and nothing they could say or do would really help.
That populists get elected and run countries to the ground is real and problematic, but that’s due to mechanisms that are unrelated to Facebook targeting algorithms, at least as far as we can understand them. There’s growing inequality, diverging perspectives between citizens; a few operative have developed real expertise in spewing bullshit, but none of that will be solved if people don’t separate causes and false claims. Telling people to leave Facebook won...
Checking all of this within an acceptable timeframe for advertisers requires a lot of labor. That comes with another wide set of problems. Loosy boundaries, arbitrary bans, increased cost of ads etc etc. I have no special sympathy for Facebook, but we have to understand that this is a really hard problem to solve, and maybe there won't be any solution that satisfies the public.
Facebook et all grew on the fact that they could automate the process - but in reality they have only automated part of it - the easy part of taking the money and placing the ad - not checking the content.
If they can't check the content in an automated way ( very hard because people will be actively working against you ) and the remedy is to have an army of people checking content then their competitive edge over the traditional business model largely disappears.
The other way to fix this - which I'd imagine Facebook and Google might want to push - is to put the responsibility onto the generator of the content. Google and Facebook could easily help automate the the shifting of responsibility if everyone is identifiable.
Imagine the CASE act - but automated for everyone who breaches copyright on youtube... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/house-votes-favor-disa...
That would be like a newspaper not taking responsibility for a story being wrong - simply passing the legal blame onto a source - while there is some justice here as the source has a responsibility also, it is ignoring the fact that the platforms play a role in placing and promoting the content.
I really don't have a lot of sympathy for the woes of the advertising industry, considering the consequences.
I may not care for political advertising, since my client is not looking to "make a profit" like a traditional customer. But I definitely do for an eCommerce brand for example.
Most agencies use FB because it's easy to work with and it's cheapish with a little expertise. If that dissapeares then nobody is goung to pour money on it.
I'm not a fan of this argument. It reminds me of people saying that the big US banks are too big to fail during the sub prime mortgage crisis a decade ago. If the banks are too big to fail, then we better fix the regulation of those banks so they are less likely to fail or break the banks up.
If Facebook is too big to effectively moderate what it publishes, then reduce how much they publish (ie your Agency is going to be rate limited) or break up Facebook into pieces that can moderate their traffic.
The have proven that they will refuse to listen to any answer that they can't grandstand about. I think Zuckerberg and Facebook is shady as hell and even I feel sympathy for him here and suspect he may be drugging himself to not snap at the hours of stupid and dishonest questions. Since it wouldn't be good for the company long term to make enemies by shaming them during their grandstand hours with many choice lines.
Claiming that Cambridge Analytica had a catastrophic impact on the 2016 election. It's hard to know what to answer to such a thing.
If you get into a debate with her on whether her completely unproven claim is true or false you are guilty, if you try to avoid it you are basically saying she is right and are guilty.
This kind of questioning only works because it's not a courtroom. This would never be allowed as an actual question.
"Congresswoman, half of this country thinks that your statement about the impact of Cambridge Analytica in the last election is factually false. In case you wanted to publish an ad that mentioned it, should Facebook reject it?"
Either have a coherent policy that the CEO can explain or just don't do it.
- candidates can be serious or not so much, but it’s unclear where the line is between the GOP and Vermin Supreme.
- PACs represent the bulk of “political” spending: it’s also unclear where you set the line there; clear attack ads are not the same as a more generic charity defending the environment and supporting a candidate; you can’t ban one without banning the other, or you have to define clear rules that allow “Vote for a candidate that supports your values” but not anything more specific, where using the same symbol, colour, font, as a specific campaign becomes a problem.
- If you ban any communications about the environment, gender equality, etc. commercial companies who bolster their ecological credential or empower women are becoming liminal and problematic when they really shouldn’t.
- None of those questions can accept a US-centric answer: Facebook hosts political ads from 190 countries, where all of the above is slightly different. What counts as controversial in other countries would definitely surprise you.
What counts as true, another argument in that debate isn’t clear: a lot of political promises like “we have the budget to pass that reform” can seem… “very bold and optimistic” to some fact-checkers. Facebook has struggled with fact-checkers in the past and felt it was preferable to downplay their role, given that previous scandal.
Well, they're PACs. Political Action Committees. So if you're banning political ads it would be trivial to ban organisations that are registered as a 527 organisation. That seems like a screaming flashing bright red line there.
More generally, you would see a lot of people unwilling to provide documentation that they are not a 527, or a foreign entity.
Overall, election spending has been very strictly controlled.
One of the problems is recently people have being getting around this with hard to trace online campaigns - using "national funding" and effectively locally targeted online campaigns.
I'd like to see people being properly sanctioned for breaking the rules. In my view there are few things more serious than trying to subvert democracy. It shouldn't be normalized like it is in the US.
But what about e.g. "awareness" campaigns about e.g. refugees? What about ads pretending to promote products to the LGBT community but targeted to be presented to conservatives / right-leaning people so that their bigotry will only increase?
You can affect people's political affiliations and their voting behaviour in really insidious ways. I wouldn't be surprised if agents are active on HN that operate with that in mind.
His tactical and strategic goal is not to deliver 'zingers', it is ideally for the situation to go quiet and be forgotten by everyone. Failing that, an acceptable fallback is for any anti-Facebook action by government to get mired in endless committee investigations that are boring, neverending and unproductive to slow down any hostile regulation that might eventuate. Failing that, regulation that is onerous but favours Facebook by locking out any competition from the American markets. None of these will be achieved by interesting public exchanges with Congresspeople.
Public government hearings are not where the serious moves are made. It is more a show-and-tell for the politicians to communicate to their voters what is being negotiated in the backrooms where real work happens.
I recall seeing George Galloway (Uk MP) who was called to one of These and he used his experience in the HOC to rip the good old boy asking the questions to pieces.
You seems bored with the process but I would argue the job politicians are doing is equally important if not more so than the construction of an Online Ad Delivering Skinner Box, the “real work” you allude to. (Current top most on HackerNews explains how much people despise ads and pay money to avoid them)
Holding powerful people accountable, publicly, creating laws and regulations and governing the rules of our society is very important to operating this country.
Private Corporation there is no such method.
That's true, but if an honest answer to any of the hostile questions makes Zuckerberg look and feel bad, then maybe he should fix his company.
Now in theory someone asked that could answer without accidentally agreeing that their company is extractive/they are harming young girls/they are recklessly not considering the impacts of their work. Bonus points if they can answer without getting shouted down for not directly answering a yes/no question with a yes/no. Lose a point if the answer gets testy and they look like they are defensive or flustered.
They also have to do that while being completely honest, without getting tongue-tied and correctly assessing the question in a very short time frame.
Zuckerberg isn't a barrister, he didn't found an empire on the ability to think quickly under a barrage of questions and he may just not be an expert at it (most clever people aren't). He is far better off just looking a little wilted and evasive. People who try to be clever tend to end up looking worse.
I'm saying maybe Zuckerberg should acknowledge the nature of his company. Then openly try to fix it.
The right answer to this question is to accept that the company is extracting / harming people. And admit that they didn't stop to think about that when they were building it. That's understandable - they had no idea the impact that facebook would have on society when they were building it.
You can then go on to have a productive collaborative discussion about what to do about it (which isn't obvious or easy). The environment is hostile because Zuckerberg isn't engaging in the process, and is stonewalling congress with "we have a process for this".
He's not being honest, and I suspect (and hope tbh) it will eventually be the downfall of his company.
Anything you say can and will...
If the answer is predetermined and known it isn't a question. It is some sort of formal whipping and there is no point giving any answer.
From the peanut gallery it is plausible that Facebook is a net win or a net loss for adolescents and it is possible that the company has a staff psychologist who has actually thought about its impacts. That question is so hard to answer in the negative I seem to have 2 people answering in this comment chain as though the frame is obviously correct and Zuckerberg needs to answer yes then atone for his sins. Public hearings are not the place to engage with these sorts of questions (there might be consequences if he makes a mistake in his answers).
The right answer to "have you stopped beating your wife?" is not "yes" if you don't actually beat your wife.
Similarly, the answer to "did you know the thing you were doing was evil?" is not "no" if the thing you did was not evil. Answering like that is conceding the point.
But they have conceded the point. I think that's why things like Cambridge Analytica were mentioned so many times during the hearing.
If the person doesn't answer the question, go ahead & berate them. Just don't expect a complicated question to be answered with a simple yes/no.
Likewise it's terrible to judge a politician based on their yes/no voting record without understanding why they voted for/against something.
One example, Ocasio-Cortez asked: Can a politician lie about Election Day on a Facebook ad?
The answer is clearly yes. It isn't complicated.
Or this one: Does Facebook see a problem with its lack of fact-checking capabilities?
How can the answer to this be anything except yes?
Imagine that Facebook is required by law to check every fact in every advert that is on their platform. Is that even possible? Would they have the resources to hire unbiased, critical-thinking people who are capable of doing htat? How expensive is that? Would they just rely on the cheaper option - algorithms.
A friend of mine got banned from Facebook for a month for sharing a meme, posted by somebody else, that had a swastika in it. The meme was of the sort "Nazis were horrible idiots". He appealed the ban, on the grounds that the original post was not taken down (he just shared it) and that this had nothing to do with nazi propaganda. It was, in fact, the opposite. An actual human being looked at that appeal and still confirmed the ban.
What makes you think the process will be any more efficient and rational with political advertising? Relying on companies to police content is absurd in every respect, from freedom of speech rights to just plain capability. There's an entire court system built up with the sole purpose of determining truth and even that isn't 100% accurate. Trust the same responsibility on a corporation?
Bingo.
It's a pretty classic deal, we've done these things in the US for a while when it comes to new tech and other things. Here's the terms: You get, essentially, a monopoly. In that congress leans heavily on you to write up the laws for the new fangled thingy. So, you write yourself into law such that only you can do the thingy legally. For this monopoly, you get, pretty much, guaranteed profit. Not much, 5%, something about that; but your company gets it forever.
You, your kids, your grandkids, their grandkids, however you bequeath the stocks, those rugrats will never be poor. Stupid, drunks, coke addicts, adrenaline junkies, maybe, whatever, up to you, but never poor. Dream weddings, the best colleges, vacations of legend, you name it. In exchange for this wealth, you damn well better make sure that you run this company how congress damn well wants you to run it: cheap, good, or fast (pick two).
For the robber barons, it was making sure that the trains ran on time and that you weren't trying to jack the cattle car prices just before the stock show. For Bill Gates, it was making sure the DoD could use the OS and get some damn support phone calls at 2am. For AT&T it was making sure the long distance calls went down in price. For Rockefeller it was making sure the oil kept on flowing and that those poor folks out in Billings got their heating oil for a reasonable price. For Monsanto, it was making sure they stopped suing all the farmers that I put in my campaign ads.
To leverage this power, they get you in front of both houses, have you answer questions for hours and hours, and eventually get you in a few lies. It is a super big crime to lie to congress. You go to big boy jail for as long as they fell like putting you there, maybe even for a week (the horror!).
So, you play ball. You get up there, they ask you all kinds of stuff, you lie, they now have power over you too. So you get together, write the laws, and poof, you are never poor again. Go take up painting, water skiing, scotch collecting, whatever.
That's the deal: You're perma-rich, but you do what we say.
So, it's super strange to see Zuck not playing ball here.
It's likely that he's not gotten the memo here (Hanlon's razor and all). But I think he's a tad smarter than that. I think it's because congress is asking him to shut all the grassroots rabble down, to get the Russians out of their voters' heads, to get Gramps to stop sending Cameroonian scammers $5k in Walmart gift cards. But Zuck has no clue how to go about doing that except for making the company 50x larger, and thereby crashing it. The moderation that congress is asking for, neigh demanding, as basic terms of the deal, is just not possible for what he can charge in ads. Zuck just can't moderate the whole of the thing to where Congress will sign off. Look at China, to get their moderation working they have thousands and thousands of people working at it all the time. It just plain takes a LOT of cheap eyeballs. I takes government money, not ad money.
So Zuck is stuck.
He's trying to talk to right wingers, hoping that they'll buy him some time to get the AI stuff kinda, sorta, cross-your-fingers, working. But he knows, he can't close his end of the bargain. Maybe he can persuade congress to nationalize him, like we did with lighthouses and the post office, but man alive, that's an uphill battle. So, here we are, hoping for quantum computers or some other magical thing to happen.
Then, of course, maybe was I biased by the movie and everything else I already heard about him? I'm sill wondering.
Zuckerberg has gone through media training and can be very good when he’s prepared for specific questions (see his public Q&A). He’s also notoriously focused and happy to delegate. Asking him to come talk about Libra and ask questions about Cambridge Analytica is an easy way to get vague answers.
I say this as someone who thinks the world would be better off without Facebook. I don't use it. I don't invest in it.
I know that’s a bit off topic, but does speak towards the current environment of not just Facebook, but the entire internet.
I try, and it is hard for me to focus after a few such sentence-paragraphs. (No matter what is the topic.)
Not even for a moment did he strike as a computer genius, a business genius, or anything in between.
> Mr. Zuckerberg, what year and month did you personally first become aware of Cambridge Analytica?”
Unless I missed that the hearing was highly related to this, why would he remember this exact date offhand?
You'd be better declining to answer this question than guess and get it wrong which seems like what he did. Asking if he became aware of them before or after a specific event would have been much more reasonable. There's tons of important events in my life where I don't know the month it happened because it's not important to remember.
I think he's right to say "I don't know" when he can't be completely sure. That's not a zinger.
Likewise, it's not a zinger when you ask a really long question that contains several factual claims that you require clarification on, or try to force a yes/no answer to a loaded question (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_question#Complex_quest...).
Because it is one of the biggest scandals affecting Facebook in probably its entire history, and he's been grilled about it before? You'd think that once they found out his staff and advisors would make sure to tell him every single detail about it. Likewise, it should be the thing that occupies him for months on end.
It's inexcusable for him to not seem to know some basic factoids about the whole thing.