What can go wrong when the COO of you company is cornered and desperately tries to fight back?
If the ship is in collision course and you can’t blame it on Zuckerberg, Sandberg, blame it on the Iceberg.
Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.
Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis Sheera Frenkel at al. – New-York Times
Lean in she wrote (Sandberg Facebook profile pictures circa 2016)
The three features that make Facebook Facebook also make it the ideal platform for working on behalf of dangerous and violent forces. The first is scale. Facebook gathers posts from more than 2.2 billion people in more than 100 languages. The second is algorithmic amplification. Facebook promotes extreme content like hate speech and conspiracy theories over thoughtful, balanced, deliberate work. And the third is the best advertising system ever created. Facebook can put an ad in front of exactly the type of person who might respond to a sales pitch or a call to political action and ignore those who might not.
Zuckerberg and Sandberg can’t fix Facebook because to fix Facebook is to scrap one or more of these essential attributes. The problem with Facebook is Facebook.
Facebook is a normal sleazy company now – Siva Vaidhyanathan, Slate
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