Nothing to see here
Leaving anyway, takes the blame, gets a couple of million $ as “consolation”.
Facebook's outgoing public policy chief, Elliot Schrage, appears to have fallen on his sword, taking the blame for smearing critics of the company. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Facebook's CEO on his latest almighty Zuck-up: OK, we did try to smear critics, but I was too out-of-the-loop to know READ MORE Facebook had already …
The main statement : “ double-check whether anything had crossed my desk”. Smart move - making sure first there is no paper trail so she can say whatever the hell she likes. How could she not know?
She ain’t presidential material though: they are past masters at “plausible deniability” without so clumsily demonstrating how they achieve it.
Anti-Facebook protesters had arrived at one Congress hearing with placards comparing Facebook to a globe-encircling octopus.
Facebook reportedly called the Anti-Defamation League to condemn the placards as antisemitic.
That is rich coming from a company that has behaved as badly as Facebook - are octopi jewish?
Sandberg is just getting her excuses in early, I am sure that more of her involvement (and Zuck's) will begin to leak out - lots of little mea culpas in an attempt to make this look a little less worse than it really is.
They were also used in anti-Semitic propaganda - but not only - it's a common trope, but of course trying to shift the protest towards antisemitism looked useful - of course while attacking Soros as well - who has been attacked because his Jewish roots.
Those are pure propaganda techniques - you don't look for facts or reasonable defense, you just try to agitate hitting sensitive topics which will make people fist act and then think.
What is very worrying is people setup up such companies and are hired and paid as it was plain business.... and data hoarders like Facebook are a boon for such crooks.
"They were also used in anti-Semitic propaganda"
I don't think it's specifically antisemitic, it's more like a good metaphor for something/someone having many fingers in many different pies... the fact that the metaphor has been used as antisemitic propaganda doesn't mean that using the metaphor is antisemitic. For example in Italian 'la piovra' (Italian for octopus) is a nickname for the mafia.
Certainly the use of the octopus metaphor with respect to Facebook is not intended to be complimentary.. but then again FB fully deserve it..
No, it isn't, but it didn't matter to Definers - all they needed was to draw some kind of parallel between the protesters images and some anti-Semitic images - of course in this case there would be many others as the octopus is not used only and mostly in that context (there are some specific anti-Semitic tropes, that's not one) - and that was enough to stir some specific activists outrage.
I believed that after the successful Russian trolling activists groups on any side would have learned to check before acting to avoid to be utterly used, but the word "activist" itself looks to mean that thinking and assessing facts and tailoring reactions is not what they are.
Let's remember the (apocryphal) Lenin's words (who knew propaganda techniques very well) about "useful idiots".
I'm much scared about the number of "useful idiots" who can be identified, selected, grouped and reached through systems like Facebook.
I'd be happier if they did admit that they hired an agency to research critics of them. There is nothing wrong with that, and knowing if the critics are genuine (as in not a smear campaign) then it can provide a lot of valuable input to fixing things. Targetting critics as a result is not on at all though.