Facebook Hired a Full-Time Pollster To Monitor Zuckerberg's Approval Ratings (theverge.com)

According to The Verge, Facebook hired a full-time pollster to track Mark Zuckerberg's approval ratings last year as the young CEO was making his 50-state tour across the country. The pollster, Tavis McGinn, reportedly "decided to leave the company after only six months after coming to believe that Facebook had a negative effect on the world." From the report: It was April, and Facebook was caught up in the fallout of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. After initially discounting the possibility that fake news had contributed to Donald Trump's victory, Facebook acknowledged that Russia-linked groups had spent more than $100,000 on political advertising. Zuckerberg undertook a nationwide listening tour modeled after a modern political campaign. McGinn would fill another role common to political campaigns: leading an ongoing poll operation dedicated to tracking minute changes in Zuckerberg's public perception. "It was a very unusual role," McGinn says. "It was my job to do surveys and focus groups globally to understand why people like Mark Zuckerberg, whether they think they can trust him, and whether they've even heard of him. That's especially important outside of the United States."

McGinn tracked a wide range of questions related to Zuckerberg's public perception. "Not just him in the abstract, but do people like Mark's speeches? Do they like his interviews with the press? Do people like his posts on Facebook? It's a bit like a political campaign, in the sense that you're constantly measuring how every piece of communication lands. If Mark's doing a barbecue in his backyard and he hops on Facebook Live, how do people respond to that?" Facebook worked to develop an understanding of Zuckerberg's perception that went beyond simple "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" metrics, McGinn says. "If Mark gives a speech and he's talking about immigration and universal health care and access to equal education, it's looking at all the different topics that Mark mentions and seeing what resonates with different audiences in the United States," he says. "It's very advanced research."

Comments

OMG!!!

[Frosty Piss]

Facebook Hired a Full-Time Pollster To Monitor Zuckerberg's Approval Ratings

Jesus, people, who the fuck cares?

Re:OMG!!!

[FeelGood314]

All those Hawaiian people he kicked off their own island probably care.

Talk about fake news. He never kicked anyone off. His property surrounded a bunch of other properties. Mark owed these people access rights across his property. With one exception, no one had been using these properties or paying taxes on them. It appears that most of the owners never even knew they owned the properties. Mark didn't force anyone to sell. He offered people money for something they didn't know they even owned. We are talking about plots of land that haven't been used in 2 or 3 generations. I'd be grateful if someone gave me $200 for 1/25 of a plot of land that my grand parents abandoned, before I was born, in a place I'll never visit. The worst he did was force the tax office and land registry office to clean up their act.

In case they needed some more poll data

[Anonymous Coward]

Mark Zuckerberg is a sociopathic, evil person, and his life's work is a stain upon humanity.

Marixism

[labnet]

Because the Zuk has access to a billion eyeballs, is an SJW, and has political aspirations.

I've been listening a bit lately to Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychology professor.
He thinks SJW's and their identity politics are really similar to the marxist ideology that caused so much suffering in Russia.
Thus I think we need to be playing close attention to people like the Zuk.