Althouse: "Facebook tanking."

November 20, 2018

"Facebook tanking."

"The social media giant's shares fell more than 5 percent after The Wall Street Journal reported that CEO Mark Zuckerberg blamed second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg for the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its subsequent fallout. The WSJ's report adds more fuel to criticism of Facebook's handling of the scandal and whether the two top executives have been too slow to change its platform. The New York Times detailed last week how the company ignored and then tried to hide that Russia used the platform to disrupt the U.S. election in 2016."

CNBC reports.

42 comments:

mccullough said...: Sure. Blame the Jews for Russian “disrupting” or “meddling” or whatever nefarious-sounding word works best to propagate this bullshit. Facebook is just a code word for Jews now.; 11/20/18, 6:25 AM
Jaq said...: So if your company is caught in any way, even it its role as a public accommodation, serving a Republican, you are toast. This will bode well for democracy and liberty.; 11/20/18, 6:27 AM
stevew said...: Have to say the recent decline of FB correlates with my decision to delete my account. Coincidence? I think not.; 11/20/18, 6:28 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 11/20/18, 6:31 AM
rhhardin said...: It's a joy of taking them down crowd reaction, which in turn is click bait for others to sell to advertisers.

Nobody actually cares about the issue.; 11/20/18, 6:33 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: "The New York Times detailed last week how the company ignored and then tried to hide that Russia used the platform to disrupt the U.S. election in 2016."

I don't know about anyone else here, but any time that I see that sort of twaddle, I immediately discount the entire article. Wake up. The Russians threw an almost minuscule amount of money into the mix, while Crooked Hillary and her minions and enablers threw over a billion into the campaign. She still lost. She was still too sickly, and too arrogant to campaign where she needed to, too corrupt to be trusted, and was completely out hustled by Trump. She didn't lose because the Russians tried to intervene. She lost because she was a horrible candidate that even a billion dollars couldn't pull across the finish line.; 11/20/18, 6:34 AM
rhhardin said...: Maybe it's a modern form of trustbusting. Anything big is a fun target eventually.; 11/20/18, 6:34 AM
stevew said...: Right you are Bruce. The NYT uses a story about the decline at FB to restate the lie that Russia disrupted the U.S. election in 2016. The goal is to make this assertion true in people's minds by saying it as often as possible, and regardless of its relationship to what is actually being reported.; 11/20/18, 6:37 AM
Darrell said...: The way I heard it at the time was that someone in the Obama Administration called Facebook and asked them to look into Russian ads before the election--and they reported back that they had not found much of anything of relevance. Then Obama personally called Zuck and asked him to come up with the Russian interference in the election. Zuckerberg came back in a few weeks and told Obama that he had assigned a large group of people to comb all their accounts and he had a small list of candidates--many of which had not run before the election. Zuck was told to just say that they had found evidence of Russian interference and it had been turned over to the Obama Administration for future action. And that nothing more can be said at this time.; 11/20/18, 6:44 AM
Jeff Brokaw said...: The platform is not the problem. The users are the problem.

The platform just showcases many of humanity’s worst traits: tribalism, mob mentality, gullibility, lack of intellectual rigor, etc.

Don’t blame the platform, or social media as a concept, which in theory was a good idea. The people took a test, and they failed it.; 11/20/18, 6:47 AM
Darrell said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 11/20/18, 6:48 AM
Darrell said...: Did Sheryl Sandberg ever deliver a coherent account of her husband's death in Mexico? What she said kept changing and it didn't make much sense. She doesn't have to tell me but I hope she made a formal statement to authorities and that they questioned anything that didn't seem right. Or do the ultra-rich of the right political persuasion get a pass?; 11/20/18, 6:51 AM
Jeff Brokaw said...: I agree completely with Bruce above.; 11/20/18, 6:51 AM
Jeff Brokaw said...: If we really want to dive into interference in elections (which is defined how, exactly?), “Russians buying Facebook ads” is not even in the same solar system as “media serving as PR agency for Democrats”.

But we don’t really want to dive into it, and by “we” I mean the media.; 11/20/18, 7:05 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 11/20/18, 7:08 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: The place where FB screwed up in the 2016 election campaign is that it allowed Jered Kushner to mine their data to micro target voters for his father in law. It was just fine when the company almost openly helped Obama, and it is just fine that they deplatform conservatives, and promote left wing news. But they didn't prevent Kushner from using them to get Trump elected, and that is unforgivable.

Except that isn't why they are losing eyeballs and membership. That is partially because it has come out that they sell your demographic information to whomever they want to, and technical/legal fibbing and misdirection sell far deeper information about us than most of us had any intention of allowing them to do. And partially because it has become toxic for conservatives. Left wing "news" and information is promoted, while right wing stuff and people are demoted. And, a lot of us have found the anti Trump drumbeat of everyone there depressing every time we go online there. So we don't. I go online to see pictures of what my kid is doing any more. Period.

Another reason that they are in trouble is that they are obsessing about Russia, when they should be worried about Trump and the Republicans. The Republicans have the Presidency and the Senate still. They should be worried that Republicans are starting to turn away from them, and think that they are one of the more evil of the big tech companies for the very simple reason that the Republicans officially control the DoJ, and could force the breakup of FB. Or hold them legally responsible for the massive way that they have sold members' personal information far beyond what the members thought that they were authorizing. The left, the Democrats, that FB is pandering to, can't stop the Republicans if they decide to cut FB up, and massively fine them.; 11/20/18, 7:11 AM
David Begley said...: 1. Disrupt the election?

Both Power Line and Rush discussed a recent poll where over 40% of the American people believe the Russians tampered with vote totals.

2. On CNBC the knives were out for both Mark and Sheryl.; 11/20/18, 7:15 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: Bummer. I have twice, in this thread posted decently long posts, just to reread them after posting, find glaring problems with what I just posted, correct it, repost, and delete the previously posted version. That is what "Preview" is for, a function that I haven't used for years. I think that it may be the older screen combined with a heavily used AOS Spellcheck, but this iPad, the one I tend to use overnight, is the worst. I have the problem of hopelessly messed up comments during the daytime, using my newer iPad, far less. And that may be why I quit using Preview.; 11/20/18, 7:19 AM
Amadeus 48 said...: They have done the impossible: they are making me sympathize with Zuckerburg and Sandburg.; 11/20/18, 7:22 AM
Mike Sylwester said...: I was counting on the Russians to spend tens of thousands of dollars again on the 2018 elections, as they had done decisively in the 2016 elections.

I think that Facebook did manage to reduce the Russian expenditures to only thousands of dollars -- down from tens of thousands of dollars.

That is why the Republicans lost their majority in the House. I did not see any Facebook ads showing Jesus arm-wrestling Nancy Pelosi. That's when I knew that Facebook had got tough against Russian meddling in our 2018 election.; 11/20/18, 7:23 AM
Tommy Duncan said...: I find it amazing that Russia, Russia, Russia is still in the spot light, while Hillary's e-mail server forwarding her mail directly to China is not.; 11/20/18, 7:34 AM
Paco Wové said...: "Disrupt" is at least a meaningful verb, unlike "hack". However, the 2016 was in no way "disrupted" – it went off reasonably smoothly, as I recall – so saying it was is simply a lie.; 11/20/18, 7:49 AM
Leland said...: Local news says FB is considering charging for use. I so hope they do it.; 11/20/18, 7:51 AM
rehajm said...: “Russians buying Facebook ads” is not even in the same solar system as “media serving as PR agency for Democrats”.

Or what about Facebook and Google handing all your personal data over to the Democrats, essentially for free?; 11/20/18, 7:58 AM
rehajm said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 11/20/18, 7:59 AM
rehajm said...: BTW, not the only reason the stock is tanking- there’s a bit of a bear market happening at the moment. FANG stocks hard hit but so is most everything else.; 11/20/18, 8:00 AM
narciso said...: Tongue planted firmly in cheek Mike Sylvester. They nuked cambridge analytica from orbit, I noted earlier a known communist spinelli was among the planners behind the eu.; 11/20/18, 8:00 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: What I think some of the analysts understand, but most of the tech companies may not, is that the Democrats are the party any more of big business. You just have to see how they managed TARP and financial "reform" (exempting the biggest financial institutions, that helped precipitate the crash, as "too big to fail"), etc when they had control under Obama. Republicans have always been more zeleous as trust busters. And they control the DoJ now. Kinda. And I think that Trump has finally gotten an Antitrust chief there confirmed. Much of his base sees the tech companies as monotheisticly opposed to them and their politics. They should be panicking p, and sucking up to Trump and tge Republicans. They aren't. I am reminded about the story about outracing the bear, and the one guy pointing out that he doesn't have to outrace the bear, but just the other person running from it with him. That is where these tech companies should be. And maybe Amazon, with the most maybe to lose, sees this, with their putting one of their new headquarters right across the river from DC in N VA, and the other in Queens, across from Manhattan, where a lot of the analysts work. Plus control of the hometown newspaper, WaPo.

I am reminded of the story of two antitrust suits being run in parallel throughout the 1970s: against IBM and AT&T. In the end, AT&T was broken up, and IBM escaped unscathed. The official line with IBM was that there was never any merit to the case. BS. According to a friend, and former law school prof of mine, who had worked on the case as a DoJ atty, IBM was guilty as hell, and would very likely have lost the lawsuit if it hadn't settled when it did. Probably gotten broken up like AT&T. What happened? Reagan was elected, and his new Antitrust AAG was a former IBM attorney. Think about it for a minute - a former IBM attorney, now in charge of DoJ Antitrust enforcement found no merit in the lawsuit against his old employer, so settled the case that his former company was probably going to lose in its favor. As for AT&T? There is only one Antitrust AAG slot, IBM got it, and AT&T got broken up. (They did something similar with the USPTO, taking the Directorship long enough to enact the America Invents Act, moving the US from First to Invent to First to File - which was followed by Google taking control long enough to greatly diminish software patents). It's called running faster than the other guy, when you are trying to prevent being eaten by a bear. IBM outran AT&T. Right now it looks like FB is in the back of the pack, and is looking the other way, not even seeing the bear that has sighted his prey.; 11/20/18, 8:02 AM
MayBee said...: Hahahahaha! Ms Lean In has been nowhere in sight once the "scandals" started.; 11/20/18, 8:02 AM
Tommy Duncan said...: Bruce Hayden said:

"...IBM escaped unscathed."

BS. IBM was greatly constrained under a "consent decree".; 11/20/18, 8:08 AM
Darrell said...: Ms Lean In has been nowhere in sight once the "scandals" started.

They put her in a pumpkin shell and there they kept her very well.; 11/20/18, 8:13 AM
Retail Lawyer said...: Ms Bend Over forgot she had a day job.; 11/20/18, 8:13 AM
Retail Lawyer said...: Can you Lean In without Bending Over?; 11/20/18, 8:15 AM
Dave Begley said...: Bruce Hayden:

How right you are about the Dems and patent law. Big Tech had a picnic under the Obama Administration. Michelle Lee was a Google shill.

The fact that the PTAB and district courts have two different burden of proofs is crazy. Trump's new guy is fixing it.

Someone here posted a comment about like this: When Obama used Facebook in 2012 he was hailed as a genius.; 11/20/18, 8:40 AM
Wince said...: Damn, I've been meaning to short the FB stock after it broke through 200 in July.; 11/20/18, 9:43 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: "BS. IBM was greatly constrained under a "consent decree"".

Presumably, you are talking about the 1956 Consent Decree, which didn't seem to slow them down that much in the computer business, up until they failed to keep control over the PC part of the industry. That consent decree required that they do such things as provide replacement parts to 3rd party repair companies at a reasonable price, etc and limited their ability to lease their equipment.; 11/20/18, 10:28 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 11/20/18, 11:01 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: “How right you are about the Dems and patent law. Big Tech had a picnic under the Obama Administration. Michelle Lee was a Google shill.”

Dave Kappas was the IBM shill right before Lee. One day he was lobbying for IBM for what became the AIA, and a couple days later, he was lobbying Congress for the USPTO and Dept of Commerce for the same legislation. Then, when it passes, leaves shortly thereafter, followed by Lee, whose mandate seems to have been to weaken patents in general, and software patents in particular, presumably because of Google’s potential mega billion dollar patent liabilities for their habit of appropriating technology that they hadn’t invented.

One of the interesting aspects there was that Obama had put in place rules that should have prevented exactly what USPTO Dir Kappos had done, which was to lobby one day for their employer, then effectively lobby for their former employer as a high ranking govt employee. As with much with supposedly the most open and ethical Administration ever, it was all window dressing. When complaints were made about Kappos lobbying Congress as the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and USPTO Director on exactly the same legislation that he had lobbied for as IBM Corporate General Counsel, the response was, as invariably happened with the Obama Administration, Crickets.

What was scary was the amount of money thrown in on the one side of that fight. Several of us went up on the Hill to lobby against it, representing the largest society of engineers in the country, and it was Rep of Sensenbrenner of WI, one of the few who actually understood (and opposed) the legislation who told us, in his office (surrounded by UW memorabilia) that we faced almost impossible odds, and that the other side had more than 500 paid lobbyists (we were working pro bono). It has estimated that more than a billion dollars were spent to enact the AIA.

Of course, the PTAB is another of the consequences of enacting the AIA. It’s obvious goal was to give infringers a second (third, etc) bite at proving invalidity of patents being asserted against them. The name of the legislation (America Invents Act) gave away its purpose, which was to tilt US patent law away from small inventors and towards huge multinational technology companies like IBM, Google, etc.; 11/20/18, 11:06 AM
Jupiter said...: "O'Sullivan and Letterman and the audience laugh and laugh over what is the mistreatment of the chimpanzee used in the Tarzan movies."

They do laugh and laugh, but the only example of "mistreatment" is shooting it with BB's, and that doesn't actually get much of a laugh. Of course, this was clearly recorded forty or fifty seconds ago, when homosexuality was still understood to be a perversion, so the idea of a male chimpanzee having a hard-on for Tarzan was humorous.; 11/20/18, 11:43 AM
Sebastian said...: "how the company ignored and then tried to hide that Russia used the platform to disrupt the U.S. election in 2016."

"how the company treated a trivial complaint as trivial, knowing that whatever any Russian posted on FB was a trivial drop in an ocean of invective and blather, which had no impact on anyone"

Of course, FB was right to downplay the phony narrative. But they were wrong to downplay the political risks. When prog interests are at stake, we live in the era of That's Not Trivial.; 11/20/18, 12:45 PM
Jim at said...: Admittedly, I've been on FB since 2008. And not once - not even once - did I notice a single thing about Russians, the election, Trump or any of the other bullshit they're still peddling.

It's a crock. All of it.; 11/20/18, 1:29 PM
Jim Gust said...: I won't miss Facebook when it's gone.; 11/20/18, 10:51 PM