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Facebook Admits Hiring PR Firm To Smear Google
hasanabbas1987 writes "The clash of the Internet Giants reached new heights after a spokesman for Facebook confirmed to Daily Beast that Facebook paid a high level Public Relation firm to publish and spread stories against Google throughout the media to study various methods to examine the allegations that Google has been violating user privacy."
Facebook didn't hire them to publish stories against Google. That would be libel. They merely hired them to help educate the public about Google's anti-privacy practices that may violate the Consumer Protection Act. That's all. It's just part of Facebook's ongoing efforts to help educate us all and make us better consumers.
And who better to educate us on privacy than Facebook, after all--a company well-known for its respect for user privacy?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
How dickish.
Indeed it is. And Facebook is not the worst offender by far. Ever notice that when a critical Microsoft story comes up, we are bombarded by comments from certain people? dave420, x**xy**yo(or whatever), bing tsher, westlake, d'aldredge, and many more names that escape me now. Of course, when a pro-Google story pops up, the usual suspects are right there to jeer them down. It is tiresome. Then the sock puppet accounts come to mod up the shills and mod down any dissenters.
Remember the Kin? Hordes of astroturfers came to tell us all that if we didn't see how a dumb-smartphone aimed at tweens with a plan of 80 dollars a month would succeed, we just didn't get it? Then the things sell less than 10000 units. Apparently nobody else got it either. Or the Zune HD? Took 10 seconds for the calculator app to start and then you were subjected to advertising to boot. But the shills kept screeching that it was just going to kill the iPod touch and they couldn't wait to sell "their" ipod to go get that piece of shit. And the shills keep telling us how good Vista was and how well 7 runs on netbooks even though it is slower than congealed shit. Of course, now the refrain is the iPad is just a "consumption" device and just wait for Windows 8. Yeah like $WINDOWS_CURRENT_VERSION's shortcomings will all be addressed when $WINDOWS_NEXT_VERSION comes out. Same refrain.
Just know shills, that shit may have worked on OS/2 vs NT when you all flooded usenet but, the competitors are much stronger now and people apparently think a little more critically.
If anyone really wants to see how the masters orchestrate this farce, start here
Google - Don't be evil.
Microsoft - Be incompetent.
Intel - Be oligopolistic.
Dell - Be beige.
Acer - Be shoddy.
HP - Be recurrent.
Cisco - Be expensive.
Sony - Be invasive.
Twitter - Terse.
Apple - Be exclusive.
Facebook - Be evil.
I was talking to my 23 year old sister about this phone. Not only did she not care about the lack of app store, she saw it as a bonus. It looks like MSFT was definitely listening to a consumer segment when they designed the phone.
Given a choice between an EnV or a Kin, the Kin is an easy choice
The thing is, not everyone is, and phones like this are going to have appeal to people who are looking one tier below a smart phone.
And so on.
What is the difference between a shill and a fanboi?
A shill is paid whether he likes the product or not, generally follows some sort of script and is usually an account manned by more than one person. It's really a coordinated attack on the truth. A fanboy genuinely likes the product and, though extreme, is actually representative of the true fan base. It's the difference between grass-roots and astroturf to use the terminology generally associated with the phenomenon.
Real fanboys don't bother me because it's all in good fun but shills are pure poison and the practical differences are significant as what happened on usenet during the OS/2 NT wars. Say a product comes out and there are 10,000 people roaming around on the internet that actually care about it and post to message boards with a 50/50 distribution of for/against. Then a "relationship management" firm gets in the game with multiple shill accounts on the most important sites, i.e., Engadget, Slashdot, Zdnet, etc. It's not that hard to turn the conversation on its head with a coordinated campaign on a few target sites with the right kind of money in a specific time frame. Those 5000 people out of our hypothetical 10,000 can easily be drowned out by a room full of Indians shilling full time for the company du jour. This happens all of the time and has been going on for a while.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.