Before you believe anything the press writes about the hearings, go watch the question and answer portions of the hearings themselves. The Intercept tries to paint the senators as having piercing questions that Zuckerberg failed to answer. That is not at all the case. With a few exceptions, such as Orin Hatch, the questions were either bizarre misunderstandings of the basics or verged into word salad.
Actually, the tone of the article wasn't that senators asked "piercing questions that Zuckerberg failed to answer", but that they were asking "basic questions that he failed to answer despite the answers being clearly available on his company's website".
To be fair to the parent commenter's point, I don't think your restatement of the article's characterization is any more accurate with respect to the hearing itself. There were basic questions he failed to answer, complex questions he did answer, and various questions were not well-founded enough for him to give a coherent answer.
...And various perfectly well-formed questions he clearly did not want to answer, and dodged.
His answer about logged-out tracking cookies is the most glaring example from the article, but the most serious one he dissembled over was the questioning from Harris.
I wasn't commenting on the hearing, though. I was commenting on the way the parent post attempted to portray the article linked in this thread.
That said, I watched the both hearings in full and I can't recall a single complex, non-softball question being answered. Unless, of course, you consider "Senator, this is a very important question" followed by some time wasting non-answer material an "answer".
Agree. There were also numerous opinion questions that involved "Mr. Zuckerberg .... blah blah ... what are you views on XYZ?" I mean that's not exactly piercing Q&A.
I think he did his job. He passed a hearing in front of the congress, while telling as little as he could.
What he did, of course, for HN / tech people / journalists was fiasco, because we know what actually happens there. For the average people it was another reassurance, because now they say "Facebook is okay, the guy went in congress and no consequences followed, so it's good."
I tend to believe that the questions and the hearing itself was so bad and uneventful, because Facebook probably holds tons of data and collaborates closely with US government. So it will be quite unfortunate for the government and for Facebook if the real questions are being asked.
I really enjoyed reading the commend of @DyslexicAtheist [1] from yesterday's thread.
> it was a sham because asking hard questions would require them to admit FB being an important asset for US own intelligence operations.
Like some dude who had no idea with 19, got the proper idea by chance / zeitgeist, gathered a lot of good people around him who build all of it and now he is unbelievable rich, boss of a way to influencel company and has no clue about it.
He doesn't feel like a Bill Gates or Buffet or any other rich known person.
He stole the idea from the twin brothers who hired him and used the leading metric of @university email addresses to create contextual-relational importance for viral growth, so it's not surprising.
Makes me wonder if he or someone else came up with/suggested original The Facebook name.
I don't think Mark's developed the open pathways for deep critical thinking, say that Elon Musk's thoughts all stem from - foundational principles being something he's commonly referred to.
> someone else came up with/suggested original The Facebook name.
It was a tradition on Harvard campus that academic Houses published their own facebooks. The people Zuck stole the idea from were making a digital version. Here's a piece about it from Harvard's newspaper in 2004:
>Lisa H. Feigenbaum ’04 said that she joined thefacebook.com because it provided an open alternative to the password-protected House facebooks.
Harvard was also trying to make their own before students did it:
>“There is a project internally with computer services to create a facebook,” Davis said. “We’ve been in touch with the Undergraduate Council, and this is a very high priority for the College. We have every intention of completing the facebook by the end of the spring semester.”
This is one of the most telling parts of the whole story:
>Davis said that the principle complication with the creation of an official facebook was figuring out how to design an interface so that directory information could not easily be compiled without authorization.
Everything was really lined up well for him to take advantage of, eh? The student population was excited and waiting for such a platform -- with the same name too.
Mark's right though from his quote: “I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.” - you can certainly launch things much more quickly if you don't take into account any concerns that others worry about/want to take into account -- like the privacy and security of people's information.
It's no surprise this is where we are today: people who think ahead and want to be careful because of ethics, all the way to him taking the idea, implementing it - while deceiving/leading on the brothers who hired him vs. the foundation of Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica happenings.
I wonder if he'll ever understand this himself, and how grave this all is.
> He stole the idea from the twin brothers who hired him and used the leading metric of @university email addresses to create contextual-relational importance for viral growth, so it's not surprising.
While uncharitably stated, in my opinion this demonstrates a lot of technical ability and business savvy.
Sure, intelligence can exist and people can function and be very successful psychopaths - disconnected from emotion, empathy and the like - disconnected from holistic understanding and having your logic to include how feelings should influence decisions. It's really a difference of understanding right and wrong vs. if you react to the feelings of right or wrong. If you're able to suppress/repress feelings, right and wrong and other, through use of control (usually formed as a coping mechanism of ego mind) then you'll be able to do what others would find more unethical than not; I suppose people will may do a risk/reward analysis. It's heavily why many people find Mark's facial expressions to be quite muted, robotic - giving birth to the Data from Star Trek meme. I don't think he's a lost cause, however he's certainly still controlling and calculating, I think he likely has deep healing that needs to happen, however his ego mind having full control got him this far and so he'll have a lot to process, self-forgiveness and such. This controlling thought and behaviour certainly floods into Facebook's ecosystem of a closed-system; I wrote blog post many years ago relating to controlled vs. managed ecosystems.
To be clear I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is sociopathic, and I don't think it's productive or fair to speculate about him like this. My comment about his technical and business capabilities was intended in good faith, not as a springboard to rehash a discussion of "psychopaths in suits."
I also think we (as in Hacker News) need to consider the extent to which useful discussion about Facebook's legitimate failings is getting drowned out by the noise of hyperbole and outrage.
I don't think anyone should have assumed that from your reply - I wasn't stating he is a psychopath either, simply wanted to tie into the idea that there are a lot of successful people in powerful positions ("psychopaths in suits") - they're intelligent yet because they don't factor in the people element, they make decisions that increase profits at the expense of others.
I haven't seen much hyperbole and outrage re: Facebook on here. The scale of Facebook and the issue, how Trump and others got elected into power because of what Cambridge Analytica did -- the gravity (hmm, how grave it is..) and scale, how serious this situation is, would be fairly hard to exaggerate - it should warrant strong anger as well, if looking at the holistic impact, even though individual users may not realize the malice through purposeful ignorance.
Mark has never had an original idea. He stole Facebook then bought everything else like Instagram, Whatsapp and many many more.
Not exactly an insult but since they're not his ideas he doesn't have the ideology to back it up or an end goal. He never wanted to connect people. Vs someone like Musk who lives and breathes his ideas and has an end goal.
I like Elon Musk. A lot. But it's sick how it just became the new standard when referring to "genius" or worse "perfect being". He did not start Tesla. Ditto Solar City. Actually, I'd say he intentionally pushed out the former founder and CEO of Tesla. Read the story :-). He "only" started Space X.
He's an easy reference, shouldn't be surprising that he's used - he's fresh on people's minds, recency effect and all that. When I reference Elon and the companies he's leading, it's not stating an assumption he's doing it alone - I'm simply referencing his thinking style based on the videos I've seen of him speaking. They're big industries too he's disrupting, forcing change and innovation from others/competitors - so that makes him even more prevalent in my mind as well.
Who would you jump to referencing if wanting to include an example of holistic thinking, empathetic person, who is known to work/think/make decisions from founding principles?
He started X.com. The founders of PayPal were forced by their VCs to merge the two companies, because X.com had a massive cash position, and a banking license.
I agree with everything you said - except "Mark has never had an original idea" is a bit of an unfair statement, however it's perhaps true he's blocked from creativity.
Talk to anyone who actually knows Zuck. He's a compassionate liberal that gets a bit intense at times, but he's both incredibly intelligent and fully aware of whats riding on his decisions.
Bill Gates has a different personality, but he also grew wealthy in a different time. The world was unipolar under American leadership, and Microsoft was a key element to American power. Gates could focus his energy on fighting malaria and studying flu epidemics. The world Zuck lives in is far different. Machine learning is taking off, China is ascendant, and America / the liberal order is asymmetrically exposed.
Bill Gates is/was an guy who build Microsoft. Zuckerberg got lucky with facebook. There is not much to build because the whole it world already exists.
He as a human being brought more distress to this world as anything he is doing with his money to help, can't fix.
Tx to his luck with the Zeitgeist, he is facebook and because of his incompetence, facebook hurts us all.
Totally agree. Watching his testimony, how he handled himself, the way he spoke, you really get the sense that he's just a kid who got lucky rather then this business savant.
You can't get lucky for so long, for so many things. He got poor public facing skills, which just means he has even stronger other talents that he is using where can't see what's happening.
Don't underestimate a guy who built a billion dollar empire and sits on the biggest potential dictatorship tool in human history.
Now the funny thing is that his presidential ambitions seem to be dead for now. It's interesting...
Luck can't give you a billion dollar alone, simply because accumulating said money is a long and complicated process. It didn't happen overnight, and it was not a lottery. Plus there are many people with money going broke, or not having power.
Do you think because of his responses and demeanor during the hearing or because of his overall leadership at Facebook? If it's both, which one of those made you consciously think about it first?
From a technical standpoint and from a political standpoint. Facebook feels like the small brother of all those big impressive companies who did things, invented things and formed technology like i know it. Google, Microsoft etc. Facebook on the other hand feels strange.
Political speaking: they are reacting and not acting.
I think most people would look just as nefarious if private conversations from their college years were selectively publicized. For all of his failings it's unfortunate that at 33 years old, Mark Zuckerberg still has people vilifying him using quotes he made when he was 22 years old.
If I thought his behavior was materially different (aside from capability) 11 years later, I'd drop it, just like I have with many other people who grew out of or otherwise dealt with their early problems.
On the other hand, I also repeat things about a person I know who stole from me many years ago. That person happens to be in jail for, among other things, theft.
The problem here is that he was and is rewarded for the bad behavior, so he keeps repeating it.
Perhaps he has got broderline Asperger's/autism spectrum. These may cause a fragmented conversational pattern, where the thoughts are trying to catch up with utterances.
I feel like some friends of mine who are actually on the spectrum would be insulted seeing Mark's blatant lies and question dodging excused in this manner.
> When asked by Senator Maria Cantwell whether Facebook employees helped with the Cambridge Analytica work: “Senator, I don’t know.”
If someone asks you "did any of your employees ever do XYZ?", and you've never heard of a case where they did, then sure in normal conversation you'd answer "no". But if you're under oath, you'd better damn well say "I don't know."
Imagine they interview everyone who conceivably could've talked to CA during those years. And everyone says, no, we never worked with them directly. So then Zuckerberg testifies that, no, no Facebook employees ever worked with CA. But then a few weeks from now, some old emails are discovered that prove otherwise, which one of those interviewees forgot about somehow. Now Zuckerberg is on the hook for having lied to Congress! And literally no one would be satisfied that he "thought his answer was true at the time."
Lawyers see this sort of thing happen all the time. Coaching Zuckerberg not to give answers like that, would be one of the first things they'd do to prepare.
Right; its a publicized opportunity to get your sound byte in the press. So everybody is 'on message' and repeating the same points, questions and fake outrage no matter what the topic.
I think people are really trying hard to get this to fit their narrative. Admittedly, I did not watch the whole thing, but out of the multiple hours I had the energy to watch I can't see how you would blame Zuckerberg. Not saying that he's a perfect guy, but he is not "ignorant" or "deliberately misleading". Many of the questions he was asked were meant to deliberately mislead and create unnecessary hatred for MZ, even if it was something very innocent. 90% of the questions were ignorant of literally all of the technology being discussed, making either outlandish claims (e.g. blaming Facebook for not being able to control how you use downloaded data from the API) or getting caught up on irrelevant details (conflating selling of user data with selling of user data-based ad space). MZ was not adversarial at all and openly embraced the suggestions for new legislation (while acknowledging the shortcomings). When he said his team would get back to them later, the reason was pretty clear. He didn't want any bad sound bites to bear his name. By using his tech team, he was able to avoid answering questions that sound bad to a Facebook user. To be completely fair, it seemed that the whole goal of the hearing was to create outrage rather than get at any truth. He also had plausible deniability here because he doesn't know all the specific technicalities of the millions (billions?) of lines of code Facebook uses, so he can basically argue that he wasn't sure what they were asking was technically true or false. Is this borderline lying? Sort of, but that doesn't mean he did the wrong thing here for either Congress or his own company. He's not trying to protect from Congress, he's trying to protect from public outrage.
It's amazing how many people expected Zuckerberg to understand every technical aspect of Facebook in minute detail, and accused him of lying or deliberately dodging when he didn't have an answer immediately available. Facebook stopped being a one-man-band a very long time ago, I don't imagine he's personally touched the code in years.
I can't believe I'm defending the guy - I'm really not a fan - but most of the criticism I've seen seems to be based on unrealistic expectations.
By all means criticise Facebook's business practises and hold MZ to account for getting them changed... But this circus seems like a meaningless distraction.
I’m not sure the American public at large cares. I don’t think most folks know how much the hand of someone else controls and guides their everyday actions, assumptions, and opinions. That hand being a foreign power or Jiffy peanut butter. Facebook is an echo chamber. The perfect propaganda tool in an age of critical-less thinking. How many people open the Facebook app 30 times a day and see the same “alternative-fact” or falsehood repeated, in an ever-so-slightly flavor, and eventually believe it? Never realizing they are eating shit pies all day?
The most valuable good/commodity/crop today is our attention, because with it outsiders can influence what you think and feel.
The way the hearings happened(I only watched the house hearing), it looked to me Z was gaining in confidence as it went on. Most of the congressmen IMO didn't make effective use of their allotted time; most used part of their time to make statements and not to ask pointed questions to Z; some really peripheral things like rural broadband and suspected online sales of restricted drugs and FDA actions on the same took a lot of time and weren't enlightening; and many were demanding yes or no answers to possibly nuanced questions.One female congressmember from Florida, Kathy Castor I think,, hardly gave Z time to respond, and thereby left all answers to her questions in fragmentory state.
There was much repetition, in some instances multiple speakers asked questions in very similar vein.At the end of it it remains unclear to me whether any laws has been contravened attracting any kind of liability.
I couldn't help but notice that one of the few genuine-seeming smiles that appeared on Zuckerberg's face, appeared immediately before and during the broadband guy's "questioning". I couldn't help but get the feeling that Zuckerberg knew in advance that that particular person was going to be lobbing praise and softballs.
I don't think anyone's getting fooled here. These sessions get fed directly back into the legislative process and, unlike a court of law, Zuckerberg's intransigence is going to be treated as tacit admission of guilt and an indictment of the entire social media industry.
Now the legislative sausage has to get made. Social media's lobbyists are going to have a rough time of it, and the telecom industry, who has been nipping at their heels for a decade, are going to lay it on thick, trying to gut them so their data becomes more valuable to advertisers.
Expect any law that gets passed to marginally affect privacy, and maximally affect a few pocketbooks.
Not sure if that'd work. I guess his lawyers told him it's ok to evade questions this way. Esp following up is probably safe since he doesn't give away any details. And playing stupid could also work, even if there was an email a few years back explaining the topic to you.
It does not matter. More than 40 of the 50 persons on that panel received money from the little boy bot. You want to bring down Facebook, gonna take something else.
Whoever's really in charge of Facebook, whether that's Zuckerberg or not, can consider the congressional hearing a resounding success. I recently saw him ridiculed as "speaking from a booster seat" by one commentator, and everyone here knows what "ideas guy" is an euphemism for. The more frivolous commentary and petty insults he gets the less threatening he seems.
> The more frivolous commentary and petty insults he gets the less threatening he seems.
And as usual in American Politics and/or debates the focus has shifted to be about the petty stuff of the individual, rather than focusing on the actual topic at hand. Pretty soon everyone will be so busy criticizing Zuck they'll forget why he was even speaking to Congress in the first place.
Americans love a good gossip, to the determent of actually getting anything done.
While I expected nothing more than what it has been, the reality was painfully beaten into me when I read "can this guy just go to jail already???"
It's a sad state of affairs. I only heard part of the second day, but one of the ladies asked a question about the Obama administration using that survey leading to the huge amount of data gathered. Had it not been only four minutes, I feel this is the question that would have lead to the most important discussion of why it was not against terms for that administration to use Facebook data, but was for Analytica (Other than the fact that it was sold to them, but I believe unless Zuck passed the buck, it could have lead to discussion about the data itself being the problem, not the selling to Analytica.)
Maybe there is a revenue-generator/paper clip factory engine running over there and they're just stalling while they try to figure out how to unplug it.
Or the process of how that massive budget proposal with handwritten amendments was handled. And that all the congress persons understood all the motions and that the entire thing 's Consequentials where correct :-)
Or is it like a former HOC whip said to me once executives get a way with " a lot of naughty shit"
Can someone talk about the reason MZ didn't need to testify under oath? I understand it's a federal crime to lie to Congress; However, was that out of the ordinary ?
If you are sworn in you can be prosecuted for perjury if you lie. That's a different statute with different penalties than "making false statements," which is what you get if you lie to Congress while not under oath. Whether or not witnesses must be sworn in vary based on the rules of the particular committee in question, and is often subjectively done.
To be fair, Zuckerberg likely hasn’t been spending that much time at facebook. Most of his time has most likely been focused on his attempted political carrier. Just because he’s failing miserably doesn’t make it less time consuming.
The Mueller worship never ceases to amaze me. This is a man who was key to spreading the lies about WMD in Iraq that led to the most disastrous war of the 21st century, who horribly bungled the (still unsolved) anthrax investigation, leading to the suicides of multiple people he wrongly accused of being responsible, and oversaw Bush's construction of the surveillance state. No matter how much you hate Trump or think he is guilty of a crime, you should keep in mind that Mueller has been an incompetent agent of the police state for decades.
One of my pastimes is watching hours of video of such people speaking, in order to get a sense of their thought process. Without having any particular motivation to take a shot at Zuckerberg, I honestly agree with you. He simply does not demonstrate any sign of being in the same class as those 4.
