[PragmaticPulp]

> are dirty tactics like this (and worse) par for the course

The details make all the difference.

Apple goes on stage and posts misleading graphs about their competition multiple times per year. The latest event showed the M1 Ultra matching an RTX 3090 in performance, yet that’s nowhere close to true in anyone’s testing and the graph was deliberately misleading in dishonest ways (3090 curve was truncated before it reached peak performance).

The difference is that most people here really like Apple hardware, so they get a free pass. Most people here really dislike Facebook, so this seems like a mortal sin for a company to promote negative misleading ideas about their competitor.

Everyone markets against their competitors to some degree, even if it’s just a comparison chart on a marketing page somewhere. I’d need to see more evidence that Facebook was deliberately lying to really be concerned about this. It seems the authors are relying heavily on anti-Facebook anger to fuel this story.

[lozenge]

When Apple lies about performance on a stage... It's clearly from Apple and people treat it accordingly. Nobody relied on that information or even believed it.

When Facebook pays a marketing agency to get anti tiktok headlines into local news, the reader has no idea who was involved and is left with negative impressions of tiktok that stay with them long after they forgot the details of the story (if they even read that far).

[thewileyone]

> When Apple lies about performance on a stage... It's clearly from Apple and people treat it accordingly. Nobody relied on that information or even believed it.

This is exactly the point here. If Apple paid a company to post messages under various "fake" personas that the 3090RTX under performs compared to their CPU, they would be behaving like Facebook.

[f38zf5vdt]

Does this make Putin an ideal politician, since we know that anything that comes out of his mouth is likely a falsehood? That someone or something compulsively lies doesn't feel like a redeeming value.

[sgjohnson]

Putin doesn’t care what the foreign audience thinks, whatever he says is almost certainly intended for his domestic audience.

[tyrfing]

The one difference is that most of big tech these days doesn't actually have any competition, and will collude in ways like wage fixing in any areas they do. As such, it's not too surprising to see they don't care about competitors - they don't have any.

[uncomputation]

> The difference is that most people here really like Apple hardware, so they get a free pass

I think it’s pretty clear the difference isn’t Apple vs Facebook (e.g. CSAM blowback) but boasting about yourself versus hiring someone to attack a competitor.

An analogous comparison would be if Facebook said their algorithms benefited mental health more than competitors, or if Apple paid to have an op-ed in a newspaper talking about how Intel’s GPU’s might explode or something. The difference is that Apple’s slide was Apple’s slide and any bias was clear. Facebook went through backdoors and PR firms to sway local journalists and congressmen in an actually dark game of chess.

> I’d need to see more evidence that Facebook was deliberately lying to really be concerned about this

That’s the whole point. Facebook wasn’t lying, Targeted Victory was. Take your pick of the evidence:

Firm director’s email:

> get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app

> Campaign operatives were also encouraged to use TikTok’s prominence as a way to deflect from Meta’s own privacy and antitrust concerns.

> rumors of the “devious licks” challenge initially spread on Facebook, not TikTok.

> Targeted Victory worked to spread rumors of the “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge” in local news… In reality, no such challenge existed on TikTok. Again, the rumor started on Facebook

> In addition to planting local news stories, the firm has helped place op-eds targeting TikTok around the country, especially in key congressional districts.

If that feels like a wall of text, it’s because it is, chock full of specific evidence Targeted Victory was manipulating congressmen and newspapers to report in a way benefitting them, all because they know that the TikTok algorithm is leagues superior and more user curated than their own outrage-bate dumpster fire.

The authors aren’t relying on “anti-Facebook anger” anymore than it’s Facebook’s bed and now they need to lie in it after years of turning the web into a partisan surveillance state. This was a targeted campaign of disinformation ranging far further than one slide on a keynote.

[lern_too_spel]

Apple lies themselves. They don't pay the news to lie for them, though they do sanction reporters who report inconvenient truths. Facebook has a history of paying for smear campaigns.

https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/facebook...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-13374048

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/update-facebooks-smear...