{"id":176356,"date":"2020-07-05T18:59:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-05T23:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/07\/05\/stating-the-obvious-4\/"},"modified":"2020-07-05T18:59:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-05T23:59:00","slug":"stating-the-obvious-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/07\/05\/stating-the-obvious-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Stating the Obvious"},"content":{"rendered":"
The folks at the Columbia Journalism Review<\/i> (CJR<\/i>) are shocked to discover that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook will lie to the press without compunction<\/a>.<\/div>\n

Well, duh:<\/p>\n

One day in July 2016, Casey Newton, a tech reporter for The Verge, sat down at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park for the biggest interview of his career. Across from him was Mark Zuckerberg. With his characteristic geeky excitement, Zuckerberg described the promising initial test flight of Aquila, a drone with a wingspan larger than a 737 jet that was part of his plan to provide internet connectivity all over the world. <\/p>\n

Though Newton hadn\u2019t witnessed the test flight in Yuma, Arizona\u2014no members of the press were invited\u2014he believed Zuckerberg\u2019s account of it. When his article was published, it reported<\/a> that Aquila \u201cwas so stable that they kept it in the air for 90 minutes before landing it safely.\u201d <\/p>\n

Months later, however, a Bloomberg story<\/a> revealed that the flight hadn\u2019t gone so smoothly after all\u2014Aquila had crashed. While the craft had indeed stayed aloft for longer than intended, high winds tore a chunk out of a wing, leading to a crash landing. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Newton is still in touch with executives at Facebook\u2014some of them are subscribers to his newsletter\u2014but he\u2019s since focused his attention on the company\u2019s abuses of low-level employees and third-party contractors<\/a>. He no longer trusts Facebook like he once did.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

In conversations with more than fifteen journalists and industry observers, I tried to understand what it is like to cover Facebook. What I found was troublesome: operating with the secrecy of an intelligence agency and the authority of a state government, Facebook has arrogated to itself vast powers while enjoying, until recently, limited journalistic scrutiny. (Some journalists, like The Observer\u2019s Carole Cadwalladr<\/a>, have done important work linking Facebook data to political corruption in the UK and elsewhere.) Media organizations have stepped up their game, but they suffer from a lack of access, among other power asymmetries. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

The 2016 presidential election changed everything. After Donald Trump\u2019s ascent, greased by the Cambridge Analytica scandal<\/a> and the embedding of Facebook staff<\/a> in the Trump campaign\u2019s digital operation, tech was seen as a political force unto itself. Journalists began digging into Facebook<\/a> in a way few had before. <\/p>\n

The company responded by closing itself off. \u201cPeople have described it to me as a bunker mentality,\u201d says Charlie Warzel, a New York Times opinion writer who covers technology, media, and politics. \u201cThe relationship is just naturally strained by the fact that they\u2019re dealing with a crisis pretty much weekly, if not more frequently.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

Michael Nu\u00f1ez, a technology journalist who has worked at Forbes and Gizmodo and has broken several notable stories on Facebook, is more blunt in his assessment of Facebook\u2019s comms operation. In his experience, he says, Facebook has been \u201cwilling to lie on the record.\u201d Nu\u00f1ez recalled reporting on an internal poll<\/a> in which Facebook employees asked Zuckerberg whether the company should do something to try to stop Donald Trump from becoming president. When he asked a Facebook flack about it, they denied the poll existed. \u201cI remember begging this person: \u2018I\u2019m not asking you to confirm the validity of this,\u2019\u2009\u201d Nu\u00f1ez said. \u201c\u2009\u2018I\u2019m looking at [a screenshot of] it. I\u2019m just here asking you for a comment.\u2019\u2009\u201d <\/p>\n

In Nu\u00f1ez\u2019s eyes, Facebook is not a trustworthy interlocutor. \u201cThe company seems to be pretty comfortable with obfuscating the truth, and that\u2019s why people don\u2019t trust Facebook anymore,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019ve had the chance to be honest and transparent plenty of times, and time and time again, you see that the company has been misleading either by choice or by willful ignorance.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

Warzel compares the company\u2019s mentality to that of an intelligence agency. \u201cI have former Facebook sources who will tell me an interesting tip and then lament that they don\u2019t know a single person who could possibly confirm this, even though these people would like to confirm this, because they don\u2019t own a single device that Facebook couldn\u2019t forensically tap into to figure out the source of a leak.\u201d <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Zuckerberg has been a liar since the early days of Facebook, which is why, unlike people like the founders of Google and Amazon, there have been repeated lawsuits claiming that he cheated them.<\/p>\n

It should be no surprise that that Zuck and Facebook lie to the press, they lie to everyone, and they always have.
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The folks at the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) are shocked to discover that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook will lie to the press without compunction. Well, duh: One day in July 2016, Casey Newton, a tech reporter for The Verge, sat down at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park for the biggest interview of his career. Across …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[365,367,523,602],"class_list":["post-176356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-internet","tag-journalism","tag-lying"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176356"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}