Sure, I can believe it. Because facebook, and companies like them, routinely manage, via their PR departments, to get articles not different than that published without paying for it too. It's certainly the easiest way for a journalist/writer to write an article, from the press releases and interviews given to you by a company, provided on a silver platter. And there isn't a whole lot of money for articles beyond the easiest/cheapest way these days.
The division between "journalism" and "content farm" (write whatever you want that gets eyeballs, if you didn't lie about anything, that's plenty ethical!)... is increasingly a grey area.
Teen Vogue actually happens to be pretty responsible journalism that usually does better than that. But how or why would Sandberg keep track? I'm sure she knows that they got the article their PR department wanted, it literally does not matter to her whether they actually wrote a check with "for that article" in the memo line to make it formally 'sponsored content' or not.
On what basis do you say that?
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/12/te...
https://qz.com/866305/the-true-story-of-how-teen-vogue-got-m...
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/teen-vogues-evolution-high-f...
That primarily happened under former editor Elaine Welteroth; she left shortly after Condé Nast killed the print edition, and it's my impression that TV has been moving back toward a fashion focus -- although a glance at their web site shows that they're still doing political reporting and op-eds.
I think this is similar to the Sokal Squared[0] scandal, in that a tribe (in this case purveyors of progressivism) will judge some work unduly positively.
Put another way, Teen Vogue's notoriety at the time was less "wow, this is truly groundbreaking journalism", and more "wow! Teen Vogue usually writes about makeup, but now they've gone all serious, and they said Fuck Trump! And Fuck Trump indeed! Go Feminism!"
I would argue that given your evidently gross misinterpretation of my comment, it is now actually you who looks hysterical.
But you did "air quote" for satire.
In any case, I think the point in the context of TV publishing and unpublishing the Facebook fluff piece is that doing that sort of thing runs counter to the more recent perception of them as politically savvy enough to understand how publishing a PR-provided article like that might look to their audience in particular.
Well, first off, I doubt she wrote that FB post herself, and it's questionable if she even saw it before it went out. But even so, I'd easily believe that she thought the article was organic, not sponsored.
FB (like all other large companies, organisations, interest groups, etc.) pays a lot of money to a PR team to get content like this into publications, and it works quite well. PR flacks are constantly talking to journalists, offering info, trading favours, giving journalists access to insiders or the opportunity to do a photo shoot, and even providing "draft" articles that the journalist can use as a starting point.
These efforts succeed all the time; is it shocking that some FB execs may have believed they worked on Teen Vogue? (We're not exactly talking about the NYT here...)
From Sandberg's point of view, FB pays a lot of money to PR people to get fawning puff pieces into print, and here's a fawning puff piece in print. Why would she smell a rat?
What I want to know is, where did the communication breakdown happen? Who wrote that wording? Did everyone at FB believe they'd convinced Teen Vogue to run an organic puff piece? Was that intended to be a draft that the reporter was going to rewrite? Or was it always intended to be a sponsored post, Teen Vogue messed up by publishing it normally?
This is particularly ironic because there are likely rules against account sharing that Facebook PR does not in fact follow.
I know you're making a different point and not defending her, but this type of thing irks me.
Which was fine if she did it personally but people used it was her pr team as an excuse to shut down drama.
She unblocked MKBHD after deleting/retweeting those tweets using an android phone this time.
I found it a bit weird how her fans and most people casually ignored it using the pr team theory. That just makes it worse.
Simple story:
- ok we'll do a sponsored post in teen vogue - story is written up! - oh, looks like it’s out, time to post about it
There isn’t gross incompetence, at best it’s just a bit of a timing issue from the mistaken early publish.
Mistake or not, FB leadership clearly cheer led it's publication, and then walked back and claimed they had no idea this was sponsored, and only in the last hour or so said it was a "mistake" to deny it was sponsored.