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windexh8er 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The "legacy media" is not a single individual who has total control of billions of dollars in capital to do whatever they want at the drop of a hat. You're conflating two very different issues.

Zuckerberg deserves all of the negative attention he draws, and I'd argue that his spotlight is his own doing. He, individually, could choose to do good at the global level. He chooses not to. That, to me, means that your finger pointing is inverted. "Legacy media" may have had that level of influence in the past but properties like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp now hold those cards. One can only hope Zuckerberg ends up being displaced in the same way.

	▲	baron816 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Rupert Murdoch absolutely is capable of doing all that. He’s absolutely done far more harm globally than Zuckerberg.

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Reddit_MLP2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

legacy media is not proactively manipulating us via algorithmically amplifying division to increase 'engagement', all to sell us some ads... I do think Zuck is one of the more harmful figures in modern history. That being said, good open models? great!

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tverbeure 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> But I think the legacy media deserves 100x that criticism for doing the same thing.

No, they don’t do the same thing.

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hn_throwaway_99 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I always hope that people who write things like this are considerably younger than I, because as someone who experienced "legacy media" for decades before the Internet was widely available, the idea that "they’re not doing anything more evil than what was already the norm" is complete, total, 100% bullshit.

Yes, "clickbait" was a thing even before people were clicking. "Yellow journalism" helped start the Spanish-American war over 125 years ago. But the pernicious effects on society of social media are way, way worse, if only because social media companies have way more data, and correspondingly more levers to act on that data. They run addiction machines that legacy media could only dream of, and they do it for the sole purpose of making money, all other consequences be damned.

I'm into a rather niche artistic pursuit, and I get lots of reels on this topic, and I noticed that the top comment on these reels is always the dumbest, most asinine comment imaginable. It's like if HN's algorithm were literally reversed. It's like this because of course these comments get lots of "engagement" because it's just rage bait. And all of Facebook is like this - they deliberately push the most rage inducing content because it's profitable.

Zuckerberg deserves all the opprobrium he gets and then some. I'm not necessarily arguing that legacy media is more "moral", but they simply never had the tech to tear society apart like Zuckerberg does.

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munk-a an hour ago | parent [-]

There were some brief excellent years in the nascent days of the blogosphere where stories that CNN would miss (especially stories about marginalized groups) managed to get widespread attention and the compensation to journalists held up. But where we are today in terms of news compared to the 00s or 90s (even with all the retrospective knowledge about journalism catastrophes like NYT's coverage of the Iraq War) is so much fundamentally worse.

Journalism, if done correctly, is unprofitable - the times in American history it has thrived, imo, have been when journalists have been patronized by people willing to trade money for prestige. That could have happened with the WaPo but now it appears to be more convenient to have a mouthpiece even if it's obvious to everyone.

Organizations like NPR and the CBC that get government funding can survive a while, but inevitably an administration will come into power that will threaten them or outright deny their funding to the point of impotency. Still, given how cheap they are to us in terms of a national budget it feel like just diverting 5% of the DOD's unmarked funding to just throwing money at journalists with no strings attached would probably result in immense transparency and quality.

	▲	hn_throwaway_99 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Journalism, if done correctly, is unprofitable - the times in American history it has thrived, imo, have been when journalists have been patronized by people willing to trade money for prestige. I agree with the first part of that, but not necessarily the second. For a very long time in America good journalism was essentially paid for by classified ads. They were really two separate (but obviously related) businesses. Journalism could be more "walled off" from the money making side of things since classified ads were bringing in money hand over fist. The Internet decimated the classified ads business, so now you see more sensational stories that try to make money in their own right. Even on the CNN website, there are ads at the bottom that are confusingly meant to look like stories. They're often embarrassingly dumb (literal "the one trick doctors don't want you to know" type of stuff), but I think that's what it's come to for news businesses to survive.

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creaturemachine 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Have you read Sarah Wynn-Williams' book? The whole org is rotten.

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SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sarah Wynn-Williams book contains a number of implausible anecdotes which people repeat as gospel truth even though they have not AFAIK been corroborated. I am pretty skeptical, for example, that Sheryl Sandberg punished Ms. Wynn-Williams for not getting in bed with her.

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FireBeyond an hour ago | parent [-]

And yet Sandberg has not sued for defamation…

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dwedge an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not sure she needs to given the rest of the case against the author

> Ms Wynn-Williams was told she must refrain from engaging in or "amplifying any further disparaging, crucial or otherwise detrimental comments".

> All previous disparaging comments "to the extent within her control" must also be retracted, the ruling also said

She apparently isn't even allowed to criticise Meta in private. They're a horrible company but so many of that book read like poor fiction

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bluGill an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is it really worth getting a lawyer? Even of you win what is the gain?

	▲	creaturemachine an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They could have it taken out of print if it was as fictional and damaging as some say. I see new copies are still for sale so it can't be that.

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SpicyLemonZest 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Why would she want to? Attempting to prove that private conversations did not happen as alleged is always a frustrating uphill battle, and winning the lawsuit wouldn’t stop people on social media from saying they think the court got it wrong and Sandberg really did do it. Wynn-Williams is already not allowed to repeat the allegations right now due to her case with Meta.

A lawsuit might get the relevant passage yanked from the book, I suppose.

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dwedge an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I read half of it. I couldn't get paat her weird character attacks at his autism traits, her attacks on the male programmers in general despite most of the problems she faced coming from her (all female) team, and how she tried to frame herself as both indispensable and some unaware victim. I think the moment she wrote about giving birth while writing emails and her doctor begging her to stop as a humblebrag was the end of my relationship with that book

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Krasnol 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But I think the legacy media deserves 100x that criticism for doing the same thing.

This comparison is absurd.

"Legacy media" wouldn't even be technically able to cause so much damage because they send one message to everybody while meta aims their messages and members at specific other members of their platform.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-so...

So yeah, Zuck's reputation might be even too good these days but I may see it wrong. It may be that the moral levels in the US are so deep right now that he looks better to me from the outside.

...compared to Elon for example.

	▲	Barrin92 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>Zuck built an empire purpose built to damage democracy and the mental health of children to suicidal levels, for money. That may have been the result of those platforms and he profited from it but I doubt he purpose built them to that end, because his businesses do profit from an open society, not a closed one. I think if he could snap his fingers and not have teenagers lose their sanity on the site he'd do it if only for PR reasons and to avoid congressional hearings. I don't like him as a person but most of what happened on those sites we did to ourselves. I don't see him anywhere close to his techno-feudal peers who explicitly seem to seek out to destroy most institutions. In a democracy, you, I and we are the pronouns when it comes to who is responsible. One greedy nerd can't end a democracy of people who have some degree of virtue, education, temperance and civil sense in them. If that happens you already had much bigger problems.