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0 pointsSpicyLemonZest5y ago0 comments

The reason to avoid political discussions is that they're often as toxic as the worst sports arguments, not that the underlying topics don't matter. No matter how important the underlying issue is, having my coworkers call each other nasty names won't resolve it.

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gabereiser5y ago

this, I’ve worked at places where we could talk politics and have disagreements and it’s totally fine. It’s when those discussions become toxic it’s an issue and management would rather avoid those hard conversations all together. Having said that, I have also worked places where it’s been banned. I also remember certain mailing lists just as toxic for non-political (maybe political in the engineering world) reasons. I think it all comes down to how you foster discussions about discourse.

DaiPlusPlus5y ago

A problem with suppressing unrelated discussion (like politics and public policy) for all the right reasons such as those mentioned above, is that the suppression alone can be validly interpreted as the bosses/mods/admins reinforcing the status-quo if the workers/employees/users already feel oppressed or marginalised.

Advancing progressive politics necessarily requires upsetting the status-quo, whereas if someone is a social-regressive then simply adhering to the status-quo suits their agenda just fine.

...so then some places want to avoid that image so they do allow discussion on controversial topics with the constraint that people debate things civilly - so far so good - except those same places want to void an image of partisanship - and in the spirit of freedom-of-speech they'll allow discussion on any topic (again, provided it's done civilly).

...which leads to that place or community falling victim of the paradox of intolerance (as, by their own rules, those communities must allow for the advocacy of genocide and unspeakable crimes provided they're advanced by an individual who conducts themselves with politeness, while their debate opponent might be a gay, black disabled Ethiopian Jew who is rightfully concerned for their own life and future who may utter a swear-word a bit too loudly and suffer censure for doing so).

As far as I can tell, the most workable solution to that is for the bounds of the Overton Window to be explicitly declared by the bossses/mods/admins - and in doing-so instantly open themselves up to accusations of partisanship, especially if extremists take advantage of people acting in good-faith.

I believe in most places the current Overton Window permits discussion and advancement of communist utopian ideals but not far-right ethnonationalism - assuming those two are somehow equivalent - and if Facebook - or any other place - had a similar declared Overton Window policy then it can be said they're biased towards the left, which is great fodder for the pundits on America's most popular right-wing TV news channel.

SpicyLemonZestOP5y ago

You're not entirely wrong, but I think the endpoints you're picking obscure the problem. Few people mourn the loss of ethnonationalist discussion, but Facebook's Overton window is going to exclude a lot of mainstream right-wing and centrist thought that goes beyond identity politics. (For example, I wouldn't advise Facebook employees to tell their coworkers about opinions like "welfare programs are bad" or "all responsible people should own a firearm".) That's not just "fodder for the pundits" - it's a real problem if huge swaths of the political spectrum are unwelcome as employees of a major communications platform.