1. Their focus was Soros. They were criticised, and they essentially said "we haven't done anything wrong that needs to be addressed, he must have another motive for criticising us, find out if he's going to get rich from this somehow". They set out to attempt to discredit Soros, for the crime of criticising them.
2. Having failed to find a financial motive, they did discover that he was funding a FB pressure group (which you might expect of a wealthy critic). That was then used to smear the group, among the people for whom "is funded by Soros" is an effective smear.
3. Many of the people appealed to in (2) are anti-semitic. It's why the smear works. It's therefore an anti-semitic act to use Soros as a smear in this way.
In sum: they used their financial power to attack a critic of theirs with an ad hominem smear that had an anti-semitic basis. That's not the act of a laudable organisation. It's a controversial act.
Soros funded smear groups focused on Facebook. Facebook responding in kind doesn’t strike me as better or worse than what Soros did. Bringing antisemitism into it is a stretch.
No, Facebook critics are saying that FB was OK with undermining its critics at all costs, even if that meant dogwhistling for anti-Semitic trolls.
I'll repeat something I posted in my other comment: Do you believe that George Soros is also actively behind a campaign to destroy Tesla [0]? Reveal has received money through Soros's Open Society Foundations [1].
[0] https://www.revealnews.org/article/inside-teslas-factory-a-m...
https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-left-injuries-off-t...
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/why-dont-we-hear-about-soros...
Perhaps I’m being naive but I see two Jewish business leaders fighting a proxy war — and yet one is called antisemitic and one is not. And I suspect it’s because people are only attacking the side they disagree with politically.
Edit: looks like some Soros money was sloshing around in there, but the primary funding was from elsewhere.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/freedom-from-facebook-open-marke...
Their act was a dog whistle because it was done with the intent of discrediting Soros (to protect Facebook from his criticisms), and the main way it could achieve that was by appealing to the anti-semites.
There was so much else that FB did wrong (Stamos admitted in his WaPo opinion piece that Sheryl was upset at him for telling the board about Russia and that PR pieces about that were obfuscated). Why is the media so focused on what seems to me to be a routine investigation which even they engage in? This just doesn't seem like a winning argument to me.
That's ridiculous. Every antisemite eats, does that make eating antisemitic? Most people on the right don't like when Soros pays for protestors. 75% of Orthodox Jews support Trump. Most of whom I assume disagree with Soros. Are they also antisemitic?
Well no that’s not really the story.
The story is really that FB hired a PR agency to dig up dirt to personally attack a FB critic, and tried to hide the truth that they were behind the PR campaign targeting an individual. Further, Zuckerburg publicly denied it.
The story is about FB coming clean, that they did hire a political consulting firm to discredit a FB critic, and acknowledge FB later falsely claimed they didn’t do what they in fact did.
Is it not scary to you a Company like FB would, under shield on anonymity, hire a PR firm to publicly discredit someone? And you don’t take any issue with the idea FB (Zuckerburg) later falsely denied FB hired the Firm to target and discredit an individual?
If it wasn’t a big deal FB wouldn’t have hired a firm to target an individual to discredit them, and hide behind the cloak of anonymity. They wouldn’t have subsequently publicly denied their behavior. And they wouldn’t have come clean on Thanksgiving eve in attempt to sweep the story under the rug (it’s never an accident when companies publish bad news before a long weekend and it’s telling).
This happens all the time. Theranos literally did this when they hired Fusion GPS for air cover and that’s just one recent example of many. It’s credibility laundering and anyone can pay organizations like Definers that get outlets like NYT and WsJ to publish ‘credible’ scoops
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/03/15/elizabeth-holme...
2. From what you linked it’s not clear Theranos did the same thing (ie hired a firm to dig up dirt on an individual and attack them in the media, got caught and lied about it).
But if Theranos did the same exact thing as FB and what you linked to states that...well isn’t that proof such behavior is newsworthy.
That doesn't make it less scary or dysfunctional. It undermines the health of politics and society when this is acceptable behaviour.
That makes it all the more frightening
So is this an argument that the behavior is acceptable?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming there is or should be anything illegal about this, but I certainly reserve the right to make judgements of companies that I might work for or do business with based on both the lies and the truths they choose to advocate for.
You've focused on 1 and then used 2 against critics: 'smear people for telling the truth'. But doesn't that criticism apply to the original stories about Soros? How do you tell a smear from a balanced story? Doesn't that require understanding who is telling it and what they have at stake? In which case, 3 becomes relevant.
Also, you've pulled a straw-man on the anti-semitic front: that's not part of the article or argument. Pragmatically, a well-intentioned actor would show an effort to make criticism explicitly anti-semitic, given the racist undertones to large parts of the discussion.
It could definitely be done, but not making an effort on that part _when it is your job to know how the communication will be received_ is a signal that you don't mind the inference being made.
They might not be implying something racist, but they know others will infer something racist and they still went ahead. Do you think that is acceptable behaviour?
So if Facebook wants to make a non-dogwhistling good-faith claim that Soros is attempting to profit from the destruction of Facebook, the burden of evidence is on them to make the case that Facebook is indeed being specifically targeted by Soros, in a way that say, Tesla isn't. If they had that evidence, and they weren't just trying to dog whistle for all the folks who think Soros is a Jewish globalist puppetmaster, then it raises the question of why they went through an intermediary who pushed anti-Soros stories through well known right-wing trolls?
To put it another way, a true fact about George Soros is that he is Jewish. Would you see any problem if Facebook funded a PR group to push news stories focusing solely on the fact that George Soros is totally a Jew? Or to use another example, how about if that firm pushed stories about how Barack Obama spent his early life living with a white teenage woman, another very true fact? [2]
edit: added link for the fact about Obama
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/why-dont-we-hear-about-soros...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-bonds-analysis/geor...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/magazine/mag-24Obama-t.ht...
I see a problem with demonizing Facebook and their management based on things we imagine they could do if they were in fact evil.
> for all the folks who think Soros is a Jewish globalist puppetmaster
I wonder if that’s because he is a billionaire Jew who funds a lot of fringe globalist progressive groups?
I’m not here to play word games.
> Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.
Of course, but I get that vibe from some of the criticism of Stephen Miller I read, too. I bet there are not too many people defensive of Miller and Soros equally.
Or are you surprised that Jews are not a homogenous group that all think the same?
He gave all his money to the Open Society Foundation. OS receives funding from multiple sources. OS is funding a lot of organizations around the world based on decisions by tens of committees.
Does that mean that everything these thousands of organizations do are paid by Soros?
I’m not clear on what the motives are, but it feels Orwellian that we now have news stories that smear people for telling the truth. I guess some anti-Semites don’t like George Soros, so the reasoning is that any criticism or even mention of George Soros must be anti-Semitic.
I’d like to hear some coherent refutation to this. Why is this story at all controversial when Soros did, in fact, fund FB critics? I’ll entertain any reasons other than, “Nazis.”