The consensus against retrospective punishment is a lot weaker than people might expect, and who knows what new social crimes the future will bring.
Government's role is to make the ideologically agnostic machine of business align with our values. In the kind of competitive economy we have, it can only be this way. If we try to apply politics from within a business, we risk introducing instabilities and ineffeciencies, making the business less competitive–an existential threat to the values we incorporated into the business.
How do you know if people cant express anger at someone? It is not mock question. I recently found out that colleagues who pretended to have good relationships (because we dont talk negatively about others as cultural thing) had long term resentments against each other. And those resentments were influencing work under surface in negative way - until it blew up into dysfunction which is how I realized.
If the countermeasure is reasonable we implement it.
We've found this keeps people from festering. Heck.. one employee thought he was being underpaid. He was.
He put it in the issue tracking system and we now have a public skill system and renumeration scale.
That sounds good to me. I've never had to talk about these kind of things at work. Are there work places where this is unavoidable?
Otherwise, you're basically saying corporations should participate in the political process but individuals should not. And that's exactly how we got the Earth into the increasingly shitty state it is currently in.
I have no idea how you came to this conclusion.
That's like saying "if employees don't have total freedom of speech at work that means only corporations have freedom of speech".
However, I'm sure it's easier for my jobs since they were for a retail company and an engineering firm.
Sorry, but this is misleading. Most such companies are actively complying with antidiscrimination laws. These diversity discussions/initiatives at work are almost always unrelated to those laws. It's not a case of "Hey, we suddenly realized we're not complying with laws, so let's launch these initiatives." Most such discussions don't have any content about the law or legal aspects because they are not about laws prohibiting discrimination.
How are these two things causally connected in your mind?
I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that if a facebook employee wants to talk about poverty in underdeveloped countries on internal social media, then that's going to be ok, but if the discussion concerns people who were harmed because they followed bad medical advice that was spread by use of facebook, all of a sudden that's an unacceptable socal issue at work.
Nah.
Every Facebook employee I've met, every one that I'm reading, they are sincere about what they're angry about.
It's a bad look, to assume some Facebook employee's opinions are being co-opted by... fucking Google? Apple? That's ridiculous.
I'm not even going to speculate why anyone questions some random Facebook employee's sincerity.
Instead I offer: Imagine if someone told you, every opinion you had, all the time, talked over you or told you to shut the fuck up and said, "Oh you're getting co-opted by Google, this is exactly what they want you to do, 'destroy our culture.'" And then, in the same breath, that guy defends, breathlessly, some idiot outraged over the removal of master/slave nomenclature, or some idiot trying to mainsplain crackpot sex difference theories to his female coworkers.
C'mon, you'd be mad as hell, it's so utterly ridiculous.
You only get one-sided discussions because going against the grain will be career suicide.
Greg, a nobody who nobody likes says X thing - X isn't a big deal, and doesn't affect most people and about 45% of people would agree X shouldn't be said, even if it isn't a big deal.
Mark, a senior directo who everybody loves says Y thing - Y is a big deal, but only 10% of people would agree it shouldn't be said.
Guess which will get called out?
Seriously, haven’t they don’t studies that most of these revolutionaries are actually not very smart people. How does risking your life for a cause have anything to do with being correct about an issue?
Maybe you're right and developers at FB don't see that they have any responsibility or input towards what FB does with the tech they build, but I hope not. It would be horrible to be that detached from the outcome of your work.
Lets say you're a delivery driver for a pizza parlor that is famous for the level of rat poison in its sauce. Do you continue to knowingly deliver the poison pizzas because you're not the one making the sauce? Afterall, who's going to deliver the poisonous pizzas?
Come on. This is right up there with, "I was just following orders."
A big part of the problem was just that everyone was using Facebook for work all the time. So quite often, there would be some enormous thread arguing about whether X or Y was the right policy, was Trump violating the rules and should be kicked off Facebook, or was Facebook's anti-Trump policies violating freedom of speech, or was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting, etc etc.
And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week, could you provide feedback on it. Type X of hardware is being deprecated next quarter. So you really have to be checking Facebook-for-work consistently for professional reasons. You have to scroll past the political debates all the time.
Some features are work-specific, but it feels basically like you are using the Facebook interface, but just with all the content being from your coworkers about work stuff.
> was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting
This is sort of what I was thinking about in my original comment. I would hate to have to discuss political affiliation, or make public judgements on other people/issues.
> And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week,
I miss so much in my news feed already, using it for work would make me nuts.
I would say, FB did the right thing here, to not supporting a platform that actively politicizing itself.
Many:
Education. Healthcare. Corrections, law, and law enforcement. Social work. Public utilities and subsidized housing. Etc.
People whose existences are deeply politicized (and they do indeed exist) are not often excited to have political conversations with people who say things like "'existence is political' thing is just a bullshit phrase."
I'm not trying to be a dick, but it took me a long time to realize that there were conversations I was not being made a part of because I was not receptive to, or dismissive of, those conversations.
For people who believe that everything is political, there are no projects with less moral ambiguity, it's just more or less openly visible.
It used to be that people and organizations making unethical purchases were the ones we considered, and held, responsible. For a long time we've had good, positive movements centered on informing the buyer. We added expiration dates, ingredient lists, nutritional value information, crashworthiness scores and reliability ratings, country of origin labels, even ethical sourcing labels. Perhaps too much of a good thing caused information overload and resulting numbness? Somehow, between the Prohibition, the "war on drugs", and the supply side moral regulations, we've lost the spirit of "well informed free agents making decisions".
Most of the services (FB and the likes) we're discussing here are morally neutral by their nature, and it takes concerted efforts to make them non-neutral[1]. It is the particular use they are being put to that is moral or immoral. Let's not shift vast moral powers from the wide society to a narrow cadre, shall we? The economy is a neat distributed system. It's the popular democracy before democracy became popular. Let's not give it up.
--
[1] example of non-neutrality: the current trend of algorithmic manipulation
Everything has some political issue around it, but Facebook has politics baked into it because it's using political issues as a means of making money. They sell advertising to politicials, when they know the ads are lies. Their platform is filled with fake accounts pushing genocidal agendas from dictators, and in many cases facebook is sweeping it under the rug.
The way their platform is built is setup to manipulate people, and that platform is being used at scale to do so in ways facebook knows is fucking up the world. Its very existence is political at this point.
Food and water production has VERY big ethical issues. Palm oil, mass-slaughter of animals, deforestation, Nestle taking away water from locals, CO2 emmissions etc.
So yes, there are problems in the food and water industry, but I don't really get what your point is? Should we just close our eyes, ears and mouths and say "fuck it, not my problem"?
If you're writing accounting software for paper suppliers or something equally banal with few ethical implications, then sure, there's no need (and less reason) to have water cooler conversations about pro-genocide agitprop or whatever.
EDIT to add that of course not all departments at Facebook make the sort of decisions that have a marked social impact. More referring to the content policy teams, and the news feed algo teams, and so on.
The problem is distinguishing ethics from politics. These are very hard to disentangle, because ethical values are usually based on some political orientation. And I don't want Facebook to be making political decisions on my behalf, as a user. And I don't even want internal employee discussions to be derailed by political considerations.
So how do you distinguish ethics from politics? I don't think it's possible, unless the company defines its own ethical values, a priori, and only considers those when making decisions.
If you read the article, I think that this is precisely what Facebook's new policy is trying to do by putting a fence around "social issues."
Are you sure that isn't exactly backwards? Because it definitely should be the other direction in my very strong opinion. One's morals or beliefs on ethics should inform their politics, not the other way around.
One way is based around a person's inner being, the other is molding their being and stances based on a sports team.
The company's products are in no way social media platforms.
It's hard to square that with the algorithmic feed, likes, etc, which are making the world worse every single day in favor of engagement metrics. We've known for many years how destructive these are.
Facebook and Twitter could literally make the world a better place simply by disabling those kind of features. Just remove them. It doesn't get easier than that to substantially improve the world, yet it's not being done.
I'm not sure about that. I agree that the world might be better, but I'm not sure they could just disable them. The next smaller competitor who won't will have more user engagement and grow. If something is a very effective advantage, I believe you can only remove it by coordinated action and enforce it on a global scale.
Modern weapons are terribly efficient at killing people. But if you're the only country that's removing them from your arsenal, you depend on the mercy of your neighbors.
Whatever internal discussions you're having, they're not working. I'd posit that they can't work, because FB's entire business model is predicated on user-hostile, polarizing behavior, whether anyone internally will admit it or not.
It frankly does not matter one bit what things are like internally when externally we can see the harm FB has caused, and there is zero evidence that harm is going to stop.
Incidentally, this is why Google+ failed -- it was a social network marketed to the kind of people that hate social networking :)
That being said, it’s a good idea to understand why the pay is so high (and it’s not because they’re nice people who only want the best for their employees):
You will be expected to leave moral qualms at the door. This an unwritten rule at many companies, but Facebook had to write it. That says something.
You will be expected to work for it. Hard. The people I know at Facebook easily put in 1.5-2x the hours I do at a FAANG-ish (late nights and weekends seem to be the norm), but get paid roughly 1.5-2x what I do. If that’s a tradeoff you’re willing to make, go for it. I however am making more money than I know what to do with, and thus value all the time I’m not working (hobbies, travel, side projects, etc) way more than the money I’d make from working during that time.
At the end of the day you aren’t going to singlehandedly destroy the fabric of society all that much in your first year, so you’re fine making the above sacrifices for a year or two for some quick cash then fucking off to pursue some real interests, go for it. But I sincerely warn you against sacrificing too much of your life (youth especially) and morals for money —- it really isn’t as valuable as it’s cracked up to be.
It sounds like, from reading your comment a couple times, you know what is right but are tempted to ignore that and take the cash.
It's therefore hard to see how taking this offer would not be choosing to sell your ethics for money and success, given that you could likely land a well paid job anywhere.
Usually you see someone say something like this when they're presented with truly awful options. Seeing it used to refer to a $400k comp package is a bit jarring.
And if you've made it through FB's hiring process and they've given you an attractive offer, I find it hard to believe you don't have other options that don't involve a big ethical quandary, or wouldn't if you interviewed around more.
I used to loathe Facebook and like Google. These days both seems about the same. Facebooks policy to leave people alone deeply resonates with me even though I still dislike them intensely for what they did to WhatsApp.
And for what it is worth, Facebook unlike Google hasn't insulted me for a decade with the ads they show.
As a screw in the Facebook machine, your significance is trivial. This is true regardless of your intention.
Get over the ethnical drama I would say. Big tech is about as ethnical as banks. In another word, the companies don't care, and they are probably not.
I have worked for a lot of start-ups, including several that grew to become significant giants in their segment of the internet. Facebook has been the only one I worked at where there was a group of employees whose job was to create posters to hang up in all of the offices telling everyone else how important and worthwhile it was to work at FB -- looking back I think this level of internal propaganda should have been a warning sign.
Sounds like there's nothing left to abdicate.
No normal company is going to sign _any_ contract provided by a prospective full-time employee (except perhaps if you are a sought after celebrity being hired at a VP level or above), so it would just be a waste of time and money for someone to take your advice.
Even if the hiring manager personally wanted to, there is no process for doing this. They don't have lawyers standing by to review such contracts. It would probably be hard to even find out who would have the authority to sign such a contract.
Further, retaliating against whistle-blowers is already illegal, as is ordering employees to break laws, so I don't know what additional protection you imagine you would get from such a contract.
Agreed. To take my advice, you would need to be hired as a contractor/consultant. Normal companies do this all the time.
That seems like a bigger issue. If I am an activist and I poison the enormous dataset that's being fed to a ML model, is anyone even going to notice?
For example the work Google does on "de-biasing AI" is all about taking ML models and warping its understanding of the world to reflect ideological priorities.
My point is that the individual level outputs (which you'd need to accomplish what the OP was talking about) are essentially impossible to tune so precisely, given our current understandings of the models.
The have also suggested a "meme cache" - one of the memes shown is a Folgers coffee cup which says "Best part of waking up, Hillary lost to Trump".
Based on this classifier and hits to the meme cache, "trolls" would experience things like auto-logout, limited bandwidth.
Under "when to trigger this" they also suggest the period "Leading upto elections".
So on the one hand this document seems well-intentioned because there's some bad behavior in these groups like raiding, doxxing, racism, etc.
Rather than focusing on behaviour like doxxing and raids, the approach suggested seems to be directed at a specific group. Why? In the entire universe is it only this group that engages in this kind of behaviour?
It also does a broad classification that lumps anyone sharing the same memes, or vocabulary with punitive action.
Also they associate the election with this, which seems especially puzzling.
The IRA and/or its successors or friends appear to have taken the same approach as Russian security services have with the rash of targeted murders in Europe, with a "this totally isn't our doing, but anyone slightly educated on the subject will recognize our hand, because we want them to be aware that it's us and we don't actually mind people knowing" wink wink nudge nudge threadbare veneer of disclaiming responsibility.
Normally, I wouldn't really care: the 2016 stuff everyone made a fuss about on social media was largely ineffective and at best served as a smokescreen to distract from their very successful actions outside social media--Buff Bernie is a lasting meme treasure and nothing more. This go 'round, however, they've apparently learned from their mistakes, and I'm seeing.evidence that personal friends _are_ receiving and and are influenced by their messaging.
I thankfully haven't really had to watch any family or friends succumb to the Fox News media poison, and thought my social circles largely insulated from that sort of problem, but I was apparently quite wrong--right about _what_ wouldn't influence people, but blind to the idea that other actors would follow the same model and create content that _would_ suck in their target audience.
https://twitter.com/evelyndouek is a good source of reporting about Facebook and other social media cos' continued lackluster attempts to stand up potemkin independent review bodies, if you want more info on the space and can stomach more disheartening news.
So the dastardly Russkies didn't intend that Trump be elected? Someone tell Rachel Maddow! This changes everything!
American coverage on their efforts was by and large terrible, at least from major outlets. Focused analyst coverage in the space has been a lot more nuanced, but nobody's reading that without an existing personal or professional interest.
The other half of that analyst coverage is that they rapidly became quite tired of Maddow and friends hammering on a very simple narrative that missed the point, but was very effective at achieving its actual goal, keeping consumers of major media on the left-of-center end of the American political spectrum engaged in their content and bringing in continued advertiser money. That tiredness is relegated to water cooler discussion on Twitter, however, so it's not going to shape major outlet coverage much.
That's about the extent of the claims that can actually be checked by the reader. Of the rest, I certainly agree with the warnings about poor security for voting machines and other election infrastructure, but that's been a commonplace on HN for a decade, and the most salient if by no means the most egregious example this cycle, the Iowa Primary, is totally dismissed. Also in other parts of the article we're assured without any sort of proof that no one hacked a voting machine in 2016. Can we be so sure? The narrative walks a narrow path. The Russians did bad things but not catastrophically terrible things (i.e. they prepared to discredit the election on social media but didn't change the results). Voting machines should be more secure but let's not even mention requirements for open code and hardware audits (about which I've been writing my legislators for many years). Federal efforts on election security since Trump took office have been paltry but everything before that was great. Did Goldilocks write this? Was she the confidential source who provided most of the information without attribution?
I'm glad that normal neoliberal Democrats will finally distance themselves from the Maddow noise, but I would have preferred actual progress by this date rather than just "yeah sorry we went loopy for 3.5 years". I'd also like some indication that the next president, whether he takes office in January or four years later, will do anything at all to make voting more secure and more accessible to citizens. As it is, I just expect more attacks on the First Amendment. News media firms won't complain; as you observe they're banking fat stacks with Trump to kick around. The concern that keeps me up at night is that they're cooking up a new Russia effigy with which to torment the public now that Covid-19 seems likely to remove Trump himself from public office.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-phishing-email-that-hacked-...
When you work at Facebook you should know what's going on and what the company is doing and causing and trying to help fix it.
It sounds like leadership is asking employees to put the head in the sand - shouldn't a leader propose the opposite? What happened to move fast and break things?
But this cannot be done, despite all attempts to quiet the cognitive dissonance. Every employee of an evil company is evil.
Every political message lobbied for by the employer is the employee's political statement. Any claims to the contrary reek of hypocrisy.
If you work at Facebook, your work directly or indirectly supports Facebook's political decisions. Facebook just doesn't want you to talk about it. Because Mark and the executives make the decisions, and you're just supposed to follow orders. This is how it works at many other companies. But for a long time, Facebook was able to recruit people to work their by promising that they could 'change the world' and 'make a difference.'
Side note: One of Facebook's board members apparently enjoys the company of white supremacists. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24444704 Will Facebook employees be allowed to talk about that? If you work at Facebook, how do you feel about that?
Why is that "by its nature"? I don't think that's "by its nature" at all. Phone companies and ISPs facilitate communication between people, but that doesn't necessitate they take political stances on what communication to allow. Why should Facebook? If certain language should be restricted, then laws should be written restricting said language and Facebook should comply with those laws. Nothing about Facebook's nature forces them to go beyond that and act as de facto language legislators.
Some of filtering is based on what the user wants to see, some of it is based on some notion of how "good" a piece of content is (scored by likes and engagement numbers), some of it is from advertisers paying to have their content make it through the filter, and some of it is Facebook deciding what should be seen and what shouldn't (mostly driven by their desire to keep you on the platform). Every single thing you see on Facebook has made it through a huge filter that ultimately decides if it's something you should see or not. And the inevitable outcome of building a gigantic what-information-do-you-get-to-see machine is that there are many, many parties trying to influence the machine.
Phone lines don't have that problem.
If Facebook limits the filtering to engagement, then it isn't the fault of Facebook that political content is engaging. That's just human nature. Disasters, outrage, politics, polarizing topics - these are all popular topics both online and off-line, and apread quickly as town gossip well before Facebook.
It is only when Facebook steps in and says that particular topics need to be exceptions to the filtering rules that apply to everything else, that they make themselves into a political actor.
For instance, let's say that the news feed showed you content based purely on number of likes. If political posts get lots of likes that isn't Facebook's problem. If the same ranking rules apply to all posts (# of likes) then they would remain neutral. As soon as Facebook says "content from x person will have their ranking artificially changed to reduce/increase engagement with it" thereby making an exception to the rule that applies to everything else, they have now become a political actor.
And the inevitable outcome of building a what-calls-go-through machine is that there are many parties trying to influence the machine. Eg. faking caller ID, evading blocks with throwaway numbers, spamming no-response calls to figure out which numbers are valid to target, faking a robot voice to pretend to be a real person.
Practically every modern platform uses centralized systems to filter the noisy world down to something fit for purpose, and sometimes this intersects with political issues. That's no reason to expect a platform like Facebook to become even more political in their stance than the existing level of politicization that is almost impossible to avoid.
Taking a stance to not control what communication is allowed is a very political stance. It just so happens that, I believe in those cases, it's also a legally mandated stance; but, if it weren't a legally mandated stance, it would absolutely be a political stance, whatever they ended up saying.
Where a private company decides to limit free speech (or not limit free speech) is, 100%, a political stance when the laws have not been written that make that decision for them.
Even if we maintain a law around protecting companies that just host other people's content vs curating and publishing content, it could be seen as a political decision whether a given website and company choose to be on the publisher vs public content stance.
I'm forgetting the word for publisher vs ... whatever it is where they take no responsibility for what people post on the site; but I hope my point is clear.
Then in your model of the world, how would one not take a political stance?
If everyone takes a political stance in your model by definition no matter what their intents or actions are then it's a rather useless definition.
A segment of social media company staff also don't like that reality and want their social to censor the political parties / discussions they don't like and thus they toe the line and give unsatisfying non-answers at all hands and to the media.
Publishers are liable for everything posted on their websites. Platforms are not - as long as they make good faith efforts to take down or prevent posting of illegal content.
Both are allowed to engage in moderation, curation or "censorship". Engaging in such does not make a website a publisher.
Not really, no. That is not usually what people mean, when they say "take a political stance".
We can extend this to other examples. Do you think that a grocery store should ban people from their stores, if the individual is wearing a pro Trump, or pro Biden Tshirt?
I think it would be pretty silly to condemn a grocery store, for refusing to ban people from their stores, if they were wearing a "Vote for Biden/Trump" shirt.
Most people would find it absolutely and completely ridiculous to ban people from stores for doing that.
That's simply not true. One can verify the truth or falsehood of your statement by applying the knife of logic. Draw your statement to its logical conclusion in order to determine if it results in absurdity.
Let's do that.
A person who has had their brain surgically removed will (quite probably) never mention politics or attempt to control other's communications about politics. According to your statement, that person's actions are political. Sorry, but that's absurd.
These are key to the usability of any social network. And they are inherently biased. Any such organization also has to take money, so ads are also key to their operations, and they have taken political stands on ads too.
The attempted comparison to utility companies is not compelling.
* arguably they do now by limiting "scam calls"
Facebook doesn't "facilitate" communication in the same way a computer "facilitates" communication. It facilitates communication in the same way that a forum or book club or group of people facilitates communication. Groups require some moderation to remain popular. Facebook is driven to moderate by the market.
The ethics of being a/the major institution of mass communication in large parts of the world may not force FB to act as language legislators, but these ethics certainly should compel them to do so.
Relevant points:
- If FB’s status as a mass comms source is threatened, then the company itself is threatened. This threat can be due to a lack in trust in the platform and/or legislation that effectively legislates them out of existence (see below re free speech). This existential issue should compel them to factor language legislation into their corporate policies.
- Stockholders certainly care about FB’s status as a mass comms source even if no one else does.
- Stakeholders obviously care about this, too.
- Relying on governments to regulate mass communications is a Pandora’s box for FB since FB is an international platform.
- In the US, in order to facilitate and encourage free speech, mass comms laws are not particularly restrictive, but they are built on an underlying assumption about social-based regulation that generally hold up but seem to be completely broken with platforms like FB. If FB doesn’t address this issue, then the laws that end up addressing this issue may end up legislating FB out of existence.
To close, whether playing the language legislator is part of FB’s nature, an emergent property, or something else, there are very real reasons that FB has policies on regulating language. Whether they do this well or not is a completely different issue, but putting the onus on government legislators to address the problem with formal laws seems, at best, overly dismissive.
Companies don't just have no reason to regulate language, they also have no serious authority to do so. The onus has always been and can only be on government legislators to address these issues in the most fundamental sense.
I'd like to see Facebook try to take on the Democrat/Republican eternal conflict in the US or the CCP in China on adopting a universal policy that they don't agree with, armed with powerful arguments like "the power of ethics compels me!" or "it's a Pandora's box because we're international!" or "stockholders care about our status!". Going above and beyond their most basic policy obligations has been a great way to attract the ire of political authorities who are now agitated over whether Facebook's policy is intentionally empowering or weakening their political enemies.
[1] https://www.getrevue.co/profile/themarkup/issues/probing-fac...
Because Facebook explicitly chooses how to construct the timeline it presents to its users, and becomes some of that timeline contains political content.
If Facebook were a dumb first-in-first-out aggregator, it wouldn't be political.
But it's not.
They were regulated as public utilities and common carriers. Facebook is not.
Just like any corporate decision, you have a small number of people who are relevant to making the decision, and they discuss among themselves. It isn't productive to have 10,000 people who are all angry if Facebook doesn't make the decision their way, and they each spend an hour complaining about it on Facebook, while claiming that they're doing work because they're discussing a corporate decision.
Probably gotta just do what Mark thinks is right and, should that not be clear, guess what he would think is right. And suffer the consequences yourself should you guess wrong.
I use Facebook to say in touch with old friends. If they want to share last Tucker's video, not sure why FB should block them if I don't block them.
My problem with Facebook is that it acts as radicalization pipeline by channeling lies that are too crazy for mass market media into the minds of people who are susceptible to believe them.
For a recent example in America, Facebook was used to spread propaganda to Republican rural residents in Oregon by telling them that Democrats were coming to light wildfires in their towns. Oregon rural people responded by setting up their own vigilante checkpoints.
It goes without saying that the claim that Democrats were coming to set rural Oregon on fire was a lie, but that lie spread like wildfire through Facebook, and it was a lie that could have very easily resulted in fatal violence.
To make matters worse, many of the too-crazy-for-mass-media ideas spread on Facebook are the product of astroturf propaganda and are not organic. The problem is not people sharing videos of Tucker Carlson, or even individuals spewing racist diatribes; the problem is well-funded right wing propaganda groups using Facebook to distribute material that encourages people to hate--or even kill--their fellow citizens.
While I agree that judges should make the ultimate decision on what is acceptable speech, the judicial system just isn't fast enough to respond to the speed of Facebook-propagated propaganda. Society needs a better solution; we can't wait for a perfect one.
Facebook is pouring gasoline on the fires of social division. This is not just unethical but is extremely dangerous to social stability and it ought to be stopped.
Most of its employees job have nothing about politics. They imagined such relevancy themselves to create a greater significance/satisfaction from the daily mundane job.
My parents are very much of the "no politics at work" generation and I really question why that cultural strain has carried itself into 2020 since it only serves company board members/executives and categorizes rank and file employees as automaton code monkeys who should "shut up and type".
Armchair thought: in this odd period of history where, ostensibly, capitalism "won" as the political system of choice and "the end of history" was declared we have entered an alarming stage of hyper-capitalism mixed with growing discontent/civil unrest. More than ever there seems to be a breathless determination by upper-middle class professionals to not rock the boat in any way in the hopes that these mega-corporations will continue to prop up the stock market, pay out outrageous salaries, and keep the gravy train running. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance where we can see how much damage the big players in tech are wreaking on global society - there's ample evidence - but to recognize and face it would sully the deeply held ideal that tech is some kind of great, benevolent force in our society (more cynically: confronting it would also mean confronting that fact that we as tech workers have ethical responsibilities to society at large that we have at best ignored, at worst defied).
Practically, it's not. Yes, you can catch up on how your cousin's new baby is doing, but you can't disentangle that from the extremist propaganda, disinformation, and real harm that these platforms incur by leveraging human psychology against us. Taking the view that ethics and work are separate silos is hopelessly naive. Almost every profession requires constant awareness and ethics in order to be a benevolent force: doctors, lawyers, builders, scuba gear manufacturers, car designers all have a responsibility to their end user and I can't see how tech is any different. I doubt people would react the same way if this were GM instead of Facebook and their employees were up in arms after learning the car they had been designing and building had a track record of blowing up and killing people.
On a more personal side: I honestly cannot stand when most people discuss politics in the Slack at work. The vast majority of comments are snarky, are unsupported (by data) opinions, or are caustically dismissive of opposing views. It's bad enough when people holding political views I disagree with engage in that behavior, but it's much worse when people I do otherwise agree with do. And it happens in just about equal measure, as far as I've experienced.
Work is already stressful enough without adding to it with political fights.
2. I think it's disingenuous to imply that Facebook workers - and bear in mind we're not talking about the janitorial staff here, but tech workers who command salaries at and above $100K p.a. - must work at Facebook lest they be destitute. The greatest advantage of being a tech worker is the range of high salary positions available to you. That aside, I return to my previous point about this not being an abstract, culture wars style debate, but specific critique of company actions. It's not politics, but internal politics. Every company has internal debates about the strategic and ethical direction of the company - why not this one?
3. I understand that politics can be exhausting, especially in the highly polarized environment we live in, but I don't think that's sufficient reason to forbid internal critique of any company. Moreover I think the stakes are higher than we are comfortable with - Facebook has already ADMITTED that they provoked the Burmese genocide 2 years ago [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...].
To flip the question around: what makes YOU think that YOUR personal right to feeling relaxed at work is more important than an employee's right to ensure that they do not work on a product that can lead to mass murder? Moreover, is it really a political stance to demand that you are not complicit in unethical activity?
These issues are not part of your job description. You were hired to write Javascript, not to set corporate strategy. Sit in your seat, content yourself with the $500K/yr you're being paid by your betters, and refrain from sharing with everyone else your facile moralism.
Why would they give up control of the world by doing something silly like that? Think about how much political influence Twitter has based solely on which tweets they show the President and corporate press. Consider how much untraced in-kind donations these companies can make by tweaking which news stories you see. The crazy thing about it is these things can be tweaked by humans, but it's largely controlled by AI now, which no one person will completely understand what's happening in any of these systems. We're in the early stages of AI controlling the global political future and it will tend to create whatever kind of future generates the most clicks. It's kind of like the game Universal Paperclips, except with clicks/rage/ads.
I hope you take this as kindly as I intend it, but what you're proposing is a conspiracy theory. This is a relatively nice attribute for a theory to have, because it gives you a nice heuristic for deciding whether the theory is true!
The likelihood of a conspiracy being true decreases as the number of people with knowledge of the theory and an incentive to report on it increases.
To take an extreme example, if the moon landing was faked, tens of thousands of people have somehow held on to that secret. Tens of thousands of people who could gain overnight notoriety by telling their story, and hundreds would have the proof required to gain even more popularity. The fact that nobody has ever broken ranks is a strong sign that the moon landing was not faked.
"Twitter and Facebook are secretly tweaking which news stories Trump and the rest of us are seeing" isn't a conspiracy on nearly the same scale as a faked moon landing. It requires some pretty incredible things to be true though.
- Maybe every employee knows, and none of them have decided to say anything, despite the large incentives to reveal the secret and win their moment in the limelight.
- Maybe not every employee knows, just enough employees know to implement it and hide that implementation from the others. Maybe every employee on the Algorithmic News Feed team knows. I don't know how Twitter and Facebook are structured, the team probably isn't called Algorithmic News Feed, but as one of the more important systems both Facebook and Twitter must dedicate at least a hundred engineers. So, 200 people were quietly chosen for their ideological purity and ability to keep a secret from their peers. These 200 people write code in secret. Somehow they commit lies to the monorepo and apply private patches to the code before deploys. The SREs must also be in on it, because those private patches will still show up in traces and their bugs will show up as errors. All of this happens inside Facebook, a company notorious for employees who speak up and expect transparency. It also happens inside Twitter, a company with such lax controls that until just recently thousands of people could use the internal admin tool to take over any account.
I don't know, I guess it's possible? Maybe you have a better idea for how it could be happening, but it just doesn't seem very likely at all.
I’ve seen this kind of thought pattern a few times and frankly the way you are thinking doesn’t match reality.
I work on a 1000+ person enterprise software project.
Less than 5% of those 1000+ understand our customers requirements and use cases in any real depth. This is despite trying for years to incentivise developers to have a broader understanding of our business.
Within that core 5% most decisions are driven by the 3-5 people who care about the particular area.
So for a 1000 person+ org you would need to corrupt 3-4 people to drive a hidden agenda.
This is for a project not trying to be secretive in any way.
To relate it back to Twitter you would probably need the right 3-4 people to push hard for content moderators to be hired in San Francisco instead of Bangalore in order to push hard left views.
(FB == Fish Bowl)
Just less than 10 years ago, it would've been considered very rude to push your religious or political opinions on to others, especially when it's a professional setting it would've been considered highly unprofessional. But nowadays that line doesn't seem to exist anymore.
In Facebook, there are only "friends". So, if you don't like what they are always carrying on about, don't have them as a friend. Just like in real life.
Some people are indeed immune to covid, babies too, most probably. I've personally heard of numerous cases of persons not getting the virus at all while their spouse was in intensive therapy or worse.
HN readers seem to have totally lost it w.r.t. COVID and misinformation. It's practically guaranteed that in any thread about misinformation/FB/Twitter/etc someone will state something about COVID that's true and then describe it as misinformation, or state something about it that's false and then decry the conspiracy theorists who don't believe it.
Pre-2012 Facebook was awesome. Now the feed is almost exclusively bullshit from people I don't know.
Or they could just not show posts to groups you're not in and from pages and public profiles you don't follow! Allowing something to interject into your newsfeed should be opt-in, but right now it isn't even opt-out, except for not logging on at all. It would also be cool if there were a way to opt-out from seeing shared posts selectively for people on your friends list, e.g. I want to see things that Overly Political Relative posts themselves, but not things that they share from other places.
That being said, I deactivated my Facebook account a couple years ago, so I'm no longer a user whose opinion they should theoretically care about anymore.
My timeline shows as strictly chronological, and only text and photos posted by my immediate friends. No groups, ads, publisher's bullshit, promoted things, no trending, no nothing. Just photos and plain text.
Eh, I don't really like that idea. For one, it only really addresses the problem of being exposed to content you find unenjoyable.
Honestly, sometimes I do wonder if consumer-level broadcast technology is the psychic equivalent of doing something like letting everyone fly planes without any training. It might be better to adopt communication technologies with a little more friction.
I bet a simple keyword filter for names of politicians could catch 90%.
I wonder if people would pay for it?
Giving people tools to make sub-lists of certain friends/groups/etc. in order to organize their experience better (on their terms, not at FB's whim) would be great, too.
You're swearing off the internet entirely?
No one has to use Facebook.
I applaud the move.
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-09-17/facebook-...
I guess he realizes they don't work.
Because people don't typically use Facebook at work? It's a recreational tool. The issue is that for Facebook employees, they are working on building that recreational tool, and that hampers productivity and professionalism.
> I guess he realizes they don't work.
Or he realizes that they work for a service that's typically consumed during one's free time, and not as a direct component of one's employment.
It feels very old fashioned, but are we not getting a little burned out by a world where people openly nail gun their identity politics to the mast?
When I were a lad (way back in the nineties) I was taught it was rude to talk about politics, religion, or money. This applied to anywhere one was in polite company, not just at home, and definitely not at work.
On one side, some people have an interest in not accepting that their financial success is arbitrary and illegitimate. On the opposite side, some people feel that they have been locked out of an arbitrary wealth transfer and so they have a strong interest in not accepting that they're incompetent losers and that they deserve to be at the bottom of the food chain because they didn't time the market right (a highly speculative and irrational market too!). Or maybe they didn't pass the Facebook whiteboard test job interview questions several years back (which is also an arbitrary hiring process by many accounts)... So basically they missed out on a huge opportunity because of some fickle arbitrary reason.
I don't think blocking discourse is going to improve things. History has shown time and time again that preventing free speech will stop people from finding compromises. The only solution to the worsening problems will be violence.
If the elites keep suppressing speech, the result will be worse than WW2 and the elites will not stand a chance because it will be fought on their own turf... The elites won't even know who their enemy is. Their own friends and family members could be against them. They won't even realize it until it's too late.
The right thing to do is to find political solutions. I personally think that UBI (Universal Basic Income) would solve most problems. It wouldn't fix the wealth gap immediately, but it would fix the mechanism which is suspected of causing arbitrary (centralizing) wealth transfer and that would at least level the playing field.
UBI is a really good compromise. If the elites are so confident in their superior abilities, surely they have nothing to lose by leveling the playing field right?
BTW, I currently earn 100% passive income so I'm actually saying this as someone who is on the winning side... I've come so close to complete failure - I leaped over the crevasse in the nick of time; the system's fickleness and arbitrariness are crystal clear to me. I'm currently standing on the winning side of a very deep precipice and I can see legions of talented people running straight into it.
“If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies.”
― Jon Stewart
(Many said something similar, but I just love Jon Stewart)
I see so much debate about what's right to do within FB, "how will people change the structure from the inside with this rule?", etc.
QUIT. Just quit. Seriously. Make it public why you quit. Quit en masse. FB is not a good company. Your talents are useful in many other places.
Yes, I'm privileged in saying this. No, I wouldn't feel comfortable quitting my job right now.
But if you believe enough that FB is an evil company--as many of us have known for 10+ years now--you should not work there.
If they are doing bad things, and they are not open to people fixing said bad things, stop helping them do bad things.
Why does quitting help?
Consider IBM. Their revenue is about 20% of its peak. It used to be seen as a monopoly power. Now we barely think about them.
I think that IBM has made itself an unattractive place for employees where it used to be seen as an extremely prestigious place to work. And I think poor quality employees, along with average to mediocre management has squandered an incredible, dominant company over the past 20 years.
Facebook will decline if all the most desirable employees just quit. It’s basically just math - those who know the most, interview best, and have the most accomplishments will be able to leave the fastest. Facebook will be left with the D team and they’ll get taken to the cleaners by competitors (as they already are with TikTok - and what’s the average age of the most engaged users of Facebook again?)
Anyway, the point is, you quitting hits a company in precisely the right place - their wallet. Employee turnover is tracked and costs companies money. Higher turnover does bring about changes.
And FB ceases to exist. A loud message will echo through silicon valley fit years to come.
The only ethical decision for the engineers to make is to quit. Thus all employees there are mathematically unethical. They are writing the code that executes the immoral decisions.
What is the plausible internal plan of the agitators and activists inside FB and other firms? They have none, beyond systematically ban more and more users who violate ever more bizarre and ad-hoc purity rules. That's not a plan.
Moreover, quitting over this stuff isn't a one way street.
Facebook is not an evil company. I wouldn't work there today but that's exactly because of their vicious internal partisan politics that make these firms so unfriendly to anyone who isn't strongly on the left. For anyone who thinks corporate diversity programmes are sexist against men, Brexit is a commendable move towards localism, that sometimes Trump actually might have a point, etc, Facebook is just not attractive to those people today.
It sounds like Zuck may be getting a grip on his workforce and professionalising it. If so, for every activist quitter they'll suddenly find they're more appealing to 10 more normal employees who just don't want their workplace to be a political battleground. Moreover people get more conservative as they age, and they also get more experienced. So they may suddenly discover they have access to more experienced senior engineers who were previously, uh, content with their current job.
To elaborate: They don’t all pay well. Not even close. And none of them pay workers in other countries well, and they can outsource endlessly with no repercussions.
But they want to keep their home in the US (the world military empire) because it lets them do whatever they want. And they don’t pay migrants nearly the same because migrants are bound by their visas. But too much of that and the Americans will catch on.
Unionizing in this case is extremely unlikely. There is too much for the employees to lose. Instead, Facebook and the US Government will continue doing whatever they want.
That's fine, let them. "If I don't do it, someone else will" is a poor justification for anything.
It's a horribly dystopian opinion that disparages the moral action and inhibits good people from doing a good thing: taking a stand against unethical behavior.
What fixes things is organized political action.
I did not vote for them and I would rather have the people I did vote for (and that I can stop voting for) solving those problems.
That is just me though. I'm sure many other people would much rather have their problems solved by Facebook employees than elected representatives, I mean I for one also think that most people elect literally the worst people in the world and would rather have them ruled over by unelected clerks at facebook.
The sooner this fucking election is over, the better. No more having to read about Marxism, Trump, Racists, Snowflakes and Trannies.
I downloaded nVidia Broadcast a while ago, it's really quite good.
Why does it sound good to anyone that Facebook employees should be prevented from discussing the ethical implications of the product they sell their labor to create? Facebook complete lack of accountability - internal or governmental - has to date:
- incited a genocide [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...]
- provided a bias for right wing content in a American election year (and fired the employee who blew the whistle on it) [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...]
- exacerbated a global pandemic, indirectly causing 1000s of deaths, by not policing Covid misinformation [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/19/facebook-...]
- is arguably a contributor to the global rise in authoritarianism [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/24/facebo...]
and that's really just the tip of the iceberg. If you buy into the notion that Mark Zuckerberg is a nice man in a hoodie trying to run a business that his employees are tearing down with some radical agenda then I'm sorry, but how naive are you? Facebook has a track record of ignoring the consequences of what happens on their platform in order to continue profiting. It's not a mistake, it's the point.
We should be cheering on tech workers challenging the ethics of the work they produce, not talking about how inconvenient it is for Facebook workers to start realizing how questionable the product they're building really is.
It's unfortunately very much in the interest of Facebook's leadership team to discourage it, however, as a clock in clock out, see and hear no evil labor culture is good for the leaders' personal wealth, so ethics be damned, number go up.
Nobody is stealing anything, as the rules are set right now influencing public opinion through media channels is not seen as "stealing". If the powers that be were to physically alter the votes and the voting process that would be another discussion, but almost everything presented in the media is fair game.
