As a Facebook Employee who watched this thing unfold:
His arguments and reasoning were edited for tone and posted by others and HR did not take any of that down.
He wasn't fired for what he said, but how he said it. His post was vicious and demeaning toward other FB employees. It directly attacked the character and ethical constitution of specific employees in the company.
That said, HR did later revoke open access to some of the specific details he used to make his case (conversations around investigating and escalating user reports). FB gives employees access to much more than most companies, so the sort of things HR made secret would not be visible at most US companies.
Although I think at FB there are many things you can't say, his actual beliefs were not bold or rare. Many people say similar things all the time. But you can't go around attacking people like that.
It wasn't vicious or demeaning. It was rather bluntly showing that senior leadership (Joel Kaplan basically) bends the rules for their political buddies.
He wasn't fired for how he said it. The post was taken down for that.
He was fired because he demonstrated that leadership is dishonest. They rewrote norms on the fly to justify firing over normal access to non-user data.
>HR did later revoke open access to some of the specific details he used to make his case (conversations around investigating and escalating user reports).
Aren't these essentially identical aside from the timeline?
HR did not take down the reposts (edited for tone) of the fired employee's claims and arguments, including high-level descriptions of specific escalation incidents. HR did remove access to actual "tasks" (similar to email threads at other companies).
So, they didn't remove the post, just access to things he specifically cited (for everybody?) ? I don't mean to split hairs here but could you perhaps elaborate on why they would do that?
Edit: Or at least your opinion on why they would do that.
If his cited sources (which presumptively were somewhat important to the point he was making) should (or would have, which may be subjective. I don't know because I'm not a Facebook employee and have no direct knowledge of the now-secret information) have been secret, then it stands to reason that it would have been more difficult for him to make his point.
If that's the case, it sounds like they've changed an entire policy organization-wide to stop more posts like this, or they've made no global policy changes and selectively hidden information that would support his point. Either way I'm curious about this culture of openness and what defines its limits.
But that content is not typically hidden at Facebook? And it's hidden now, precisely when it would provide evidence as to whether or not the alleged executive conduct happened? And you... have no opinion about that? Really?
How confident are you that you know how things work "at nearly any other company?" Is this something that someone told you, or do you have some way of knowing this yourself?
Don’t know that specific story but the culture at FB is pretty open and people ask hard questions all the time on workplace and at Q&As. So it’s sad to see some people abusing this knowing that not that many companies are open to such internal dialogues. Tragedy of the common.
Of the handful of people I know who work at FB, all of them are super smart and motivated. Half of them have expressed a lot of anxiety, stress, and imposter syndrome to me over their reviews. I’ve seen this at other companies when a project is failing but I hear about it at FB from A players who are working on successful projects. It gives me the impression the managers must be brutal - like they just push harder than other companies and make people feel they aren’t good enough to get more output. These are my impressions as an outsider. Does it seem fair to you?
Is that because leadership rewards such behavior? I wonder if pressure would be the same If working 12hr days is discouraged and emphasis placed on collaboration and team delivery.
Leadership sets the tone and culture so it's always leadership's fault if culture is toxic.
Re-evaluate life choices if a 400k salary makes you commit suicide? He should have had enough money to do whatever for quite some time. Its tragic that he didn't but there are literally billions of people worse off all around the world and nobody talks about them.
pretty sure it’s more complicated than that eg H1B status means leave the country if you’re fired, and to assume you cannot he stressed about a job or life because you make a nice salary is a very naive take.
As a Facebook employee: Facebook has a real left leaning political bias.
Nah, I am just kidding, this is the internet and you can write anything on it. The bias thing is real tough to anyone who can read words with more than 3 syllables without using a finger.
It seems non-ideal, that the top comment thread comes from a new throwaway account, making assertions that might as well be corporate PR damage control messages, in the moment they'll have the most persuasive impact, with no accountability.
Though the comment might well be entirely legitimate and honest, HN participants are collectively giving the top comment, on a corporate PR emergency, to what I imagine is exactly what an underhanded PR operative might do.
I think this suggests that HN -- which I believe is managed with some of the best intentions and methods out there right now -- has some of the same vulnerabilities as the subject of this story.
There are quite a few throwaway accounts in this thread claiming to be Facebook employees, arguing different sides of the issue. They can't all be PR. In my experience—and we can confirm this in some cases—people are mostly who they say they are.
Of course manipulation is possible, and bad, but so are insinuations of manipulation without evidence, and the latter are (by every indication I've seen) orders of magnitude more common. That's why the site guidelines ask you not to post like this.
In the long run, if manipulation ends up dominating forums like HN, the only real solution is to do what we ought to all be doing anyway: have a culture in which arguments are answered by better arguments. Since that's the only long-term immunity, we might as well develop it now.
While using throwaway account doesn't necessarily mean the comment is manipulation, I personally have an issue with unsubstantiated comments from anonymous poster with no credible past history on HN.
If I am to take the comment I need something that would give some credibility to it, like having some way to verify the claims or if that is not possible, have a real person that puts their word behind the claim.
There is a reason why it is not possible for anonymous witness to testify in court and the reason is that anonymous person can say whatever they want with no responsibility for their words. It is exactly that responsibility and accountability that gives credibility to the witness.
No question it's suboptimal, but the alternatives have problems too. It's not hard to understand why a legit user would choose to post that way. I can tell you from many years of experience with this that most people turn out to be who they say they are, and readers tend to be off by 10x or more in guessing about this. That may change, but I don't think we're seeing indications of that yet.
I don't agree, and the reason is that posting unsubstantiated, unverifiable claims, anonymously, on a serious topic is tantamount to spreading rumors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumor).
The damaging power of rumor comes from the fact that you can't tell whether the information is true or not, but you pass it anyway. The act of passing the rumor is already causing damage even if you don't act on the information in any other way.
For you this might seem innocuous but many people have been completely broken by a simple rumor and that's why I have always been taught that spreading or allowing to spread rumors is always a bad thing to do.
Often people want to post something about the situation at their job, and they're afraid to do so with their regular account. Such comments contain real information based on inside knowledge, the kind that HN readers love to get access to. That's the opposite of rumors. Indeed those comments frequently contain more and better information than would ever appear under the regular account.
It's also true that such comments can be counterfeited, which is where this gets complicated. But HN would be worse off without that class of comments. It's a legit use for throwaway accounts.
Are they verifiable? I don't think that's the best standard to apply to internet comments. The vast majority aren't. You have to assess credibility, but I wouldn't call that verification. In the case of a throwaway account, the only public information for assessing credibility is the content of the comments themselves, but that's not all that different from the usual situation on the internet. Admins have it a bit easier because there is other data we can also look at.
Which is part of why this seems a hard problem: how do we distinguish the sincere and informative comments from the insincere and manipulative, in the short window it matters most?
If we can't, then can we proactively discourage bad actors a different way? Or somehow sufficiently right harm done and unjust advantage taken, after the fact?
You can have an alt account where you build a reputation but do not divulge personal information.
That way if you got something important to say there is a backstory to verify.
Of course this can be gamed and personas can be built as a weapon for future conflicts but at least the option is available for me and you to communicate with some credibility without opening us up to offline attacks. (I was originally writing IRL, but online is Real Life IMO, it is just that some parts of my online life doesn't point back a single identity.)
There are a number of people here who run two accounts, like me. It is mostly a good thing IMO and totally OK with the mods as long as the alt accounts follow the rules and doesn't change too often. This is my third in a decade or so I think.
> But you can't go around attacking people like that.
You can, and sometimes you should.
What looks embarrassing for the person they do this and then act surprised when the people they attacked retaliate, especially if those people are wealthier and / or better connect.
"His arguments and reasoning were edited for tone and posted by others and HR did not take any of that down. He wasn't fired for what he said, but how he said it. His post was vicious and demeaning toward other FB employees. It directly attacked the character and ethical constitution of specific employees in the company." - I thought free speech meant one could say whatever they wanted. Why is HR being the arbiter of decency here?
"Although I think at FB there are many things you can't say, his actual beliefs were not bold or rare. Many people say similar things all the time. But you can't go around attacking people like that." - that's what people do 'on' Facebook all the time and no action is taken.
"Free speech means congress isn’t allowed to silence the media."
Wrong. The First Amendment means that Congress isn't allowed to silence the media. The First Amendment and "free speech" are entirely different entities, with really not much shared between them. The First Amendment is a law and what it does and doesn't mean has been quite precisely specified by the Supreme Court. "Free speech" is a more loosely-specified concept, and is much broader than the First Amendment. One could easily believe (as I and many others do) that free speech is very valuable, so valuable that it deserves even stronger protections than those granted by the First Amendment.
Due to the seemingly consistent inability of many people to understand the broader concept you expressed there I feel the need to spell it out in a bit more detail.
Free speech: the freedom to speak one's mind (this can apply in any context).
Any and all consequences for speaking one's mind are a direct assault on one's freedom of speech in the relevant context, by definition.
The first amendment protects individuals who speak their minds from government imposed consequences for doing so. This is meant to prevent the government from curtailing their freedom to express themselves.
"Freedom of speech, not freedom from consequence" means (in the context of the US) that even if there aren't any governmental consequences for speaking your mind there might still be social ones.
Hypothetical situation: People debate the merits of a non-governmental entity (for example, an employer) placing various restrictions on speech in some context (say, in the work place). Someone comes along and glibly points out that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence". Said commenter has _completely_ missed the point.
Is the implication of violence/aggression in said speech is a justified consequence?
> Said commenter has _completely_ missed the point
I'm I understanding this correctly, this is because it is against the principle of free speech, and people might conflate it with 1A? Isn't it preconditioned on everyone being on the same page about free speech? We've seen people having extreme opinions being shunned by the the rest of the cohort. How does this group then maintain cohesion, rather is it even possible to do so?
> Is the implication of violence/aggression in said speech is a justified consequence?
I'm not quite sure what you're asking here, but note that I was speaking to definitions (ie I wasn't debating the merits of any particular situation). Employing relevant terms in a mutually understood manner is a prerequisite for the productive conversation of a topic.
> this is because it is against the principle of free speech, and people might conflate it with 1A?
You misunderstand. In the hypothetical situation, the merits (or extent, or mechanics, etc) of free speech (ie the principle) in some specific social context (ex at work) are being discussed. Someone shows up to the party and unhelpfully points out what the current legal realities are. But the legal status isn't what's under discussion - in context, it's an off topic comment that serves only to derail the conversation.
"Free speech means congress isn’t allowed to silence the media"
That's the narrow redefinition of free speech that's currently in vogue with people who want to crack down on free speech. The whole time I was growing up, until quite recently in fact, free speech meant the freedom to speak your mind. The idea that people would routinely get fired for voicing their opinions, which is the world the new ideologues want to create for us, would have seemed shockingly unfree.
The classic cliché of the limits of free speech is "yelling fire in a crowded theater". That's where society used to draw the limit. Those lines are being way, way, way moved, and the people moving them are pretending that they're just reiterating the old standard. It's a radical shift, and everyone who doesn't subscribe to this orthodoxy can feel it, even if they're too vulnerable to be able to stand up to the priests.
I completely agree with the sentiment of what you expressed.
However, I have to nitpick for accuracy. Despite becoming a cliche, "yelling fire in a crowded theater" was never actually the standard in the US. Currently it's "imminent lawless action". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action)
I just mean that culturally it's the classic example that people would always bring up to illustrate the limits of free speech. The legal standard is a different question of course. But that's part of the issue here. Free speech isn't just a narrow legal question. It's a cultural value, and it's under assault in a way we've never seen in our lifetimes. The fact that "yelling fire in a crowded theater" was never actually the legal standard (which is interesting by the way!) supports this point.
Whacking their knees with a crowbar wouldn't stop them from speaking either, but we don't do that when someone expresses a wrong view, nor should we try to get them fired. Free speech as a cultural value requires that people actually be free to speak. If one fears losing one's livelihood, one is not free to speak. That's obvious.
For a long time, it was the left who championed this. Noam Chomsky, an archetype of the left, has always been one of the biggest free-speech advocates in the US, and takes a far more expansive view than "free speech only means the government can't put you in prison". He advocated for Walt Rostow, a technocrat whom he had condemned in print as a war criminal, to be allowed to teach at MIT. But he's a libertarian socialist, and the left has taken an authoritarian turn.
The social-media driven ideological lust for driving wrong-speakers out of their jobs (and inflicting anything else the mob can muster) is clearly a recent development in America, and you have to go back at least to McCarthyism to find anything comparable.
To preface I'm going to be loose with the actual decision of Citizens United:
Ironically, since the Supreme Court ruled restrictions on spending money was a violation of the first amendment, one could argue that losing your paycheck, and your ability to spend money you would have otherwise had, is a form of losing their speech.
I'm not sure I believe any of that but I think it is an interesting idea.
True, it also means to leave people to their opinion. The reduction to government is certainly short sighted at least.
People reiterating it to justify banning people have to live with the fact that they too might get excluded.
We have certainly dogmatic speech rules around racism and sexism while most people don't really perpetuate it, but can still be penalized if some schmuck thinks you have crossed a line of imagined decency.
Companies are really bad at policing speech, of course it would be restrictive. People demanding more of it should just be ignored because they haven't thought it through.
I would argue that this is the fault of the 2-party system rather than of said 63M people. The choice was between Clinton and Trump, there was not really a sane option. Maybe if Sanders was a candidate..
> The choice was between Clinton and Trump, there was not really a sane option.
Yeah, that's not true. If you believe the last 4 years would have been the same or worse under Clinton, I don't know what to tell you - you're suffering from Clinton Derangement Syndrome and are utterly disconnected from reality.
Am I though? It was her husband that bombed Serbia (as far as I know trump did not start any full scale war unlike the previous 3 presidents - see libya, iraq, afghanistan, yugoslavia, etc), her husband that did the whole encryption export bullshit (and she was in the gov in both cases), she herself supported the TPP. Maybe with her there would be slightly less concentration camps at the border with mexico and net neutrality would remain a thing but I can't really think of many more things that she would do better.
Regardless, it is not whether about "the last 4 years would have been the same or worse under Clinton" but rather whether "the last 4 years would have been significantly better with clinton". If I was given the option between horse poop and elephant poop I would choose neither.
EDIT: Maybe she would have defended syria during the Turkish invasion but I seriously doubt it.
> rather whether "the last 4 years would have been significantly better with clinton".
The fact that you can question whether almost literally anyone else as President would be "significantly better" than the trash fire that is the current US situation is astonishing.
> If I was given the option between horse poop and elephant poop I would choose neither.
The thing is, in politics, you don't get to "choose neither" because you get one or the other and that choice, regardless of how pure and glowy you feel inside about your moral high ground, has direct and lasting consequences for everyone in the country (and, to some extent, outside it too.)
>The fact that you can question whether almost literally anyone else as President would be "significantly better" than the trash fire that is the current US situation is astonishing.
Depends where you live I guess. I have quite a few friends in the Middle East or in Damascus who are happy to not have been bombed. There's absolutely no doubt that Hillary was much more of a war hawk than trump has been. I'd even say he has been the least hawkish president in the past 40 years.
> than the trash fire that is the current US situation
Everyone that I know has been saying that for their own country for ages, I personally believe that the US is doing much better when compared with certain European nations (such as Britain for example). As I mentioned before comparatively with the past presidents Trump (at least in my limited european view) has done less evil (I mentioned it before, cancelled TPP and did not declare any war). If you disagree I would be glad if you could explain how Clinton specifically would do better.
> you don't get to "choose neither"
I do, I get to vote for a 3rd party that will at least vote for sane choices in the parlement.
> regardless of how pure and glowy you feel inside about your moral high ground
I do not appreciate your tone (including from the previous post: "you're suffering from Clinton Derangement Syndrome and are utterly disconnected from reality"). Surely we can acknowledge our differences in opinion and have a civilized debate without this.
> has direct and lasting consequences for everyone in the country
And so would voting for your preferred candidate. There would be no point on voting if it made absolutely no difference.
> If you disagree I would be glad if you could explain how Clinton specifically would do better.
It's impossible to argue a counterfactual but: she wouldn't have bungled her way into letting 160,000+ people die from COVID-19; I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have colluded with the Russians; Wouldn't have seen the illegal occupancy of government positions by unconfirmed nominees; Wouldn't have the Emoluments Clause in shreds; Doesn't have a charity that's been found to be little more than a funnel to their own pockets; Almost certainly wouldn't have started a catastrophically stupid trade war with China; Wouldn't have alienated Europe (except for the right wing countries); Wouldn't have pulled out of WHO, etc.
I mean, I could go on for hours listing the things that any rational person would have avoided doing if they were elected.
> Surely we can acknowledge our differences in opinion and have a civilized debate without this.
No, not really, if you honestly believe that Clinton is even within orders of magnitude as horrific as Trump.
> she wouldn't have bungled her way into letting 160,000+ people die from COVID-19
She might have done somewhat better, sure, but the economy would suffer even more in return (which implies homelessness, debt, etc). It is not an easy choice to make regardless.
> colluded with the Russians
I do not find anything wrong with this.
> Wouldn't have seen the illegal occupancy of government positions by unconfirmed nominees; Wouldn't have the Emoluments Clause in shreds
I do not know anything about these so I will take your word.
> Doesn't have a charity that's been found to be little more than a funnel to their own pockets
This is not relevant to him being a president unless if he has been using public money to funnel money to himself by using it.
> Almost certainly wouldn't have started a catastrophically stupid trade war with China
Said trade war has been going on for a while (and was started by china), most HN commenters seem to take the US side in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24077339 for example. In addition I was under the impression that the Democratic party has anti-china policies too.
> Wouldn't have alienated Europe
That again had happened before Trump came to power, although admittedly Trump worsened it. Still, I think that this is a minor issue.
> Wouldn't have pulled out of WHO
I do not find anything wrong with this either. WHO is quite responsible for the current state regarding covid and I am pretty sure that they continue their anti-mask propaganda.
Honestly, all of these seem like minor things when considering what I mentioned before (which I would rather not keep repeating but here they are: the TPP and the various invasions that Clinton or her Husband started or assisted). At the same time I doubt that she would be able to resolve the NK situation.
> No, not really, if you honestly believe that Clinton is even within orders of magnitude as horrific as Trump.
I do not get it. You do not gain anything by insulting your debate "opponents", so why do this? In addition this is just an opinion, so what if I believe that? Even if I end up being proven wrong is it really that bad?
I agree with you to a degree, but would argue there has always been a distinction about what is allowable as civil speech in the workplace, e.g if I cuss out a co-employee I would expect to be fired, even though I was just freely expressing myself. What I find disturbing is the firing of individuals for what they say outside of the workplace e.g on social media, and then due to internet outcry the person is fired. This is far too close to your workplace being able to decide what you are allowed to think, for me to be comfortable with, and it is becoming a norm.
> free speech meant the freedom to speak your mind
As long as you were white, reasonably well-off, and probably male, yes. It did not mean that for almost everyone else.
Also "speaking your mind" has never been (and never should be) consequence free. There was just no recourse for the majority to apply consequences until recently.
> The idea that people would routinely get fired for voicing their opinions [...] would have seemed shockingly unfree.
I'm pretty sure people have been fired for voicing their opinions all the time - it just wasn't white folk, especially men. And not just fired - plenty of people have been killed for voicing their opinion in the USA since day 1. Just not really white folk, especially men.
> That's where society used to draw the limit.
Because society used to be a lot more lopsided in terms of diversity, power balance, etc. Now the balance has shifted and some of the people who previously had all the power do not like it one bit.
> As long as you were white, reasonably well-off, and probably male, yes. It did not mean that for almost everyone else.
There's some truth to that, but the solution is obviously to extend the same freedom to everyone, not dive into authoritarianism.
> There was just no recourse for the majority to apply consequences until recently
It is not at all the majority who are "applying consequences". It is a small vanguard of extremists, most of whom conspicuously belong to the classes they criticize.
> There was just no recourse for the majority to apply consequences until recently
And this was a good thing. Before that the majority applied said consequences via witch trials.
> I'm pretty sure people have been fired for voicing their opinions all the time - it just wasn't white folk, especially men. And not just fired - plenty of people have been killed for voicing their opinion in the USA since day 1. Just not really white folk, especially men.
Said people did not have the freedom of speech. It would be great if we changed that so that it applies to everyone.
I think I'm learning to scan-read articles, opinion pieces, HN comments and the moment a reference to "white men" and "people who had/have all the power" crops up I know it's going to be some critical theory nonsense.
White men have zero power in today's society. They get discriminated against all the time, often by other "white men" (=caucasians+indians+chinese+etc) who have adopted some weird religion in which they're meant to atone for the sins of their ancestors and worship black people because of their skin colour.
You aren't the majority, by the way. It may feel like that because people with your views are by far the most aggressive at shutting other people down or firing them for not agreeing with your beliefs, but that's not the actual same thing as being in the majority.
There is going to be blowback against this kind of modern day Bolshevism.
> GP is talking about cultural power, not political power.
And yet where do the life and death decisions get made? In political arenas, not cultural ones.
> - being told they're the root of all evil
For a long time, they were. (Trust me, I'm English, I'm painfully aware of this.) Many of them in power still are - just look at the GOP, for example, or UKGOV.
> - being told they can't "punch down"
I mean, "punching down" is bad no matter who does it.
> - being told colourblind-ness is racist
Because it's still picking a side - "I don't want to get involved" is just an implicit picking of the side with the most power.
> And yet where do the life and death decisions get made? In political arenas, not cultural ones.
Look at the UK government demographics. The cabinet especially is more diverse than the actual general population.
> For a long time, they were. (Trust me, I'm English, I'm painfully aware of this.) Many of them in power still are - just look at the GOP, for example, or UKGOV.
I'm English too and this is a complete mischaracterisation of our cultural history.
You can't judge the past by today's standards. To do so is childish and un-empathic. Remember, the British were the one to end slavery because our culture battled with this opposing idea (it goes against our core belief in individual freedom) for a long time.
Not to mention, every single culture on Earth would've done exactly the same if they had the chance.
> I mean, "punching down" is bad no matter who does it.
You're missing my point.
Saying that white people are punching down is racist, because it implies a hierarchy where white people are on top. It's a white supremacist viewpoint, albeit with a guilty conscience.
> Because it's still picking a side - "I don't want to get involved" is just an implicit picking of the side with the most power.
No - you don't get to judge people for staying out of this shit flinging contest going on in today's politics. Most people just do not care and they never will.
I will concede that the current UKGov is less white male than it has been but UK politics has always been much more progressive in that regard.
> You can't judge the past by today's standards.
In some aspects, absolutely. In things like "did they invade, subjugate, enslave, and pillage?", you absolutely can. Just because they didn't have porcelain toilets and lightbulbs doesn't mean what the British Empire got up to was ok, for example.
> every single culture on Earth would've done exactly the same if they had the chance
Not exactly a justification.
> Saying that white people are punching down is racist, because it implies a hierarchy where white people are on top.
In terms of political, cultural, etc. power, they are, that's the point - you don't pick on people with less power than you (see also: British Empire.)
> you don't get to judge people for staying out of this shit flinging contest going on in today's politics.
Of course you do. "It has been said that for evil men to accomplish their purpose it is only necessary that good men should do nothing." (Reverend Charles Frederic Aked, 1916)
> In some aspects, absolutely. In things like "did they invade, subjugate, enslave, and pillage?", you absolutely can. Just because they didn't have porcelain toilets and lightbulbs doesn't mean what the British Empire got up to was ok, for example.
I'm not going to excuse these things. What I will let slide is that it was individuals who did this, not "white males". I think associating race and gender with a particular ideology is deeply harmful to our culture, especially when those people were products of their time. They didn't know any differently.
> In terms of political, cultural, etc. power, they are, that's the point - you don't pick on people with less power than you (see also: British Empire.)
I guess we just disagree. I don't believe a person of colour has any more or less 'power' than me, solely based on racial divide. What is a problem in our society is class divide, but that isn't related to race. Or are you going to suggest I'm move privileged than Will Smith (or another rich/famous/powerful person of colour)?
I think GP is trying to say that Facebook routinely takes the stance that they shouldn't be the arbiter of acceptable speech. So it's notable that they are actively policing speech in this instance.
If you extend HR policies to your users, you won't have too much left after a while. And that isn't what free speech means at all. It is trivial that there a consequences to speech as there are consequences for trying to police speech.
"Free speech means congress isn’t allowed to silence the media." - Exactly but Facebook the platform can but they choose not to because it's convenient for them regardless of whether someone spreads misinformation or maligns another person.
> Exactly but Facebook the platform can but they choose not to because it's convenient for them regardless of whether someone spreads misinformation or maligns another person.
You've gone way off topic, missed the point of the people you're responding to, and seem to have some agenda regarding Facebook that's not relevant to this discussion, which is about Facebook as an employer.
Can we just acknowledge for a moment what it’d be like to have a colleague who’s desperately trying to prove that your work is a “big conspiracy” when you’re honestly all just trying to do your best.
I see so many of these stories of weirdly rogue political activist type employees recently surprised when they their employer doesn’t like that they’re purposely trying to undermine them and their employees work. I’m sure Facebook isn’t perfect, but I know enough good people who work there to know they’re not all out to “get” us.
This smells like sour grapes* from an employee who focused more on their plans to take down their employer than their actual job.
*ed: previously written as “sour apples”...it’s been a long day.
> This smells like sour apples from an employee who focused more on their plans to take down their employer than their actual job.
The story didn't read as "sour apples" to me but rather an employee pointing out evidence that contradicts the "two strikes" policy Zuckerberg explained at the company Q&A. It's tough to write that off as "Facebook isn't perfect".
A google employee had also similarly pointed out evidence in an internal company memo few years ago. That employee was promptly fired and last I heard, he is struggling to make a living and ends meet in the US.
That employee argued that people, such as people like me, were inherently less competent than others due to aspects of their gestation. Frankly I wouldn’t want to work with someone with such an attitude, and based on his writing vice versa.
If he actually cannot get a job due to his stated opinions, well, frankly I’m not surprised. Why would you hire someone who publically says up front he scorns many of his potential coworkers?
edit: you've already been lumped on, no need to reply to more of the same here.
Now that the dust has settled a bit on the memo, I'm curious about this take:
>That employee argued that people, such as people like me, were inherently less competent than others due to aspects of their gestation.
I didn't get that much of a dichotomy from the memo. To me he focused much more on interests than competency or capability, and he went through some effort to indicate that the effect was limited, including this summary at the top:
>Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
Then followed with a little chart showing two distributions with a lot of overlap.
I felt like the story of the memo overtook the memo itself, which seemed to be a ham-fisted attempt at exploring how we prioritize various metrics with diversity and inclusion. It was obviously premature as well, based on his own charts the effects he was discussing wouldn't come into play until we're approaching something much more even than we have today.
Ultimately the way Google handled it seemed rather cowardly. Damore's personal story adds a little complexity to the situation and I really feel that he touched a third rail that might not have been as obvious to him at the time.
I think there's something to be learned from that difference though, which is what drove me to ask about it. It's easy to assume that zero of it was in good faith and discredit everyone that echoes that sentiment as a deliberate manipulator. I just have a hard time accepting that. I do believe there is a lot of deliberate manipulation, but there are also a lot of folks that are frustrated and disappointed based on their own lived experience and I can see how the memo could be read entirely differently.
Squaring off over unfalsifiable claims about intent and impact isn't going to get us anywhere, in the Damore case it's literally 'he said/she said'. We need to navigate it piece by piece and try to apply a balance of reason and empathy to try to get to a place of understanding.
> I can see how the memo could be read entirely differently
Sure, but you can't hold the original author responsible for how it is being rewritten and reinterpreted in other people's minds. It's not a reasonable expectation that everyone should write everything with concern for how every cultural intersection might interpret it. That simply can't scale.
100%. I really could not agree more with you. I just feel that having the same stalemate of intent vs impact over and over isn't going to yield any new results. If I'm able to understand what puts the blinders up in tricky discussions, I'm better equipped to get past them and a little bit closer to unpacking the next layer.
I thought at first you meant gender, but then I looked up the word and it means "the process or period of developing inside the womb between conception and birth" and now I'm not sure.
I know many people comment on any topic second hand, but I read what he wrote and I’m quite familiar with the meaning.
It’s the same as when people protest building housing: “oh it will not align with the character of our neighborhood”. I know what they are really talking about, and I know full well what he was talking about — he was making the same argument, in the same terms, as plenty have before him. I assume he read those arguments before, himself.
Is it possible to make an argument to those ends without being accused of being a racist/sexist/etc in your mind? Is there any way that someone could convince you that they were sincere?
> oh it will not align with the character of our neighborhood
Is there no situation where this is obviously, trivially true? If someone wants to replace a traditional cottage in the middle of an Irish village with a glass and steel modernist masterpiece, would you accept the argument then?
Probably not; I suspect that gumby would say that the position is inherently sexist, no matter how sincerely held.
I read the memo as sincerely asking whether the data showed a sexist conclusion. Either it is inherently sexist to ask the question, or it isn't. If it is, then... what? Is it inherently sexist to note that men are faster than women? (Yes, I am aware that there are 12-year-old girls who can beat me in the 100 meters. No, that doesn't invalidate my point.) Then is reality sexist? Or is it only sexist to notice? Or to admit that you noticed?
If it isn't inherently sexist to ask the question, then we start into judgment on whether he asked it in good faith. That's a different question, on which I will not pass judgment. But I suspect that what's happening is that people have decided that it is sexist to ask the question, and therefore he couldn't have asked it in good faith.
I agree that many people seem to find asking a question in the first place to be inherently * ist. Personally, I think that by refusing to ask questions we make it impossible to find better solutions and leave openings for other belief systems to thrive. (If the only people explaining a difference are the Nazis because everyone else says there's no difference, well then anyone who goes looking for the cause is going to find what the Nazis what you to find. Easier to twist a narrative when you don't have any competition)
I think to some degree what is being argued is that a genuinely sincere concern along this line relies on assumptions perpetuate social inequality and continued oppression of humans. It is similar to a constant suspicion of men around children perpetuates continued discomfort of men to be strong, loving, present father figures to their children whom they genuinely care for, and from this a concern based on assumptions harms the family structure overall.
Perhaps - but if every time that someone argues in an unapproved direction they're called a * ist, it's irritating to tell the difference between someone genuinely trying to help and Richard Spencer.
And anything that says * ism might be a smaller problem than thought, that * ism is getting better, or that our current efforts to reduce * ism are ineffective... Well, that's an unapproved direction.
Also, if I know there's no way to convince someone of something, I'm generally going to stop caring about what they think. (Because it's always going to be the same, and nothing I can do will change that)
I agree but I simultaneously find this rhetoric difficult because it also means that people who are actively being targets of bigotry cannot respond to bigoted assumptions with any amount of anger or calling out. It in some ways perpetuates that assumption I mentioned that continues systems of inequality continuing- people who are being delivered unjust outcomes may not even respond in the way a privileged human would if they were forced under the same conditions.
I don't think anyone alive would have the time to read all the arguments that are predicated on or further the idea that men and woman, broadly speaking, have different natures. That kind of a fundamental distinction that all of Western civilization is built on. It's legitimate to try to explore and understand to what extent those differing natures may play a role in the various levels of representation we see for men and women in various industries.
Right after the (somewhat-carefully-worded) memo was punished, the author showed his hand by appearing as a guest on the YouTube show of Stefan Molyneux who, even then, was well-known for his white nationalism and "men's rights" activism.
I actually watched that interview and he just said the same thing he said in the memo. Damore went on a lot of alternative media platforms such as Joe Rogan.
In any case your underlying argument is really bizarre.
If I wrote a long memo about how there are too many immigrants in America, and afterwards accepted an interview request from VDare, people would be right to wonder whether my private views were a little more racist than the memo let on.
It's racist to assume that someone is an immigrant because of their appearance. It's not racist to say that you think rates of immigration are too high. You can oppose immigration but have nothing but delight for the diversity of culture across the planet. A xenophilic restrictionist, as Eric Weinstein describes it.
In fact extreme xenophilic restrictionism is the norm in Japan. There's almost universal support by the Japanese people for their extremely restrictive immigration policy—probably the most restrictive first world country. But no sane person could call the Japanese people racist. They love other cultures—no, they adore them. They are incredibly welcoming to tourists from across the planet and delight in the sharing of culture.
I don't know what strange romantic picture of Japan you've managed to paint in your head, but the real-world country has well-documented and very current issues with pervasive racism and xenophobia.
>There's almost universal support by the Japanese people for their extremely restrictive immigration policy
Can you point to some statistics on that, please?
>probably the most restrictive first world country
If you can get hired by a Japanese company (and some do accept applications from overseas), they will sponsor your work visa. There's none of this H1-B style nonsense. After you're in Japan, if you've been there continuously for five years (which, mind you, is a smaller period of time than any country I can name OTOH), you can apply for citizenship, and again as far as I know, it's not a ridiculous waiting list/lottery style process. In what way is this nearly as restrictve as you're saying?
It's also not difficult at all to get into Japan by applying to an English teaching company (eikaiwa or ALT jobs) from overseas (where they recruit from), and all you need is any Bachelor's degree. You'll have a valid work visa and you can be shipped out within months. Try doing the same as a Japanese teacher applying to teach in the US (or many other countries, for that matter). Browse tech job listings for Japanese companies on major job boards in the West. Almost all of them note that they'll be happy to sponsor your work visa.
This game of prettying up the language to make it seem nice and friendly, while maintaining the otherness that daily affects people (groups which the other reply to you here has pointed out) with language like "xenophilic restrictionist" does nobody favours.
And if there is support for such policies, and in particular bent on nihonjinron notions and race perceptions, I must be insane, but I'm going to go ahead and call "the Japanese people" racist. Being "incredibly welcoming to tourists" doesn't mean anything if you want to work and live there. It misses the whole point of the discussion, and waves away systemic issues with a gloss of "they're good to tourists". We're not talking about tourists. I don't care how much they are able to enjoy Western comedians. I care how receptive they are to people integrating and living in their society like everyone else, as the Japanese constitution guarantees should be possible.
At the risk of stirring the pot a little (and only because I couldn't think of a better analogy), you may as well say no country has race problems, because after all, members of the majority race might frequently listen to music by, and watch films featuring, the minority race. That doesn't mean anything in terms of how the minority race is treated, and it's a farcically ignorant point to make. So sorry if I see the same sort of logic in nebulous feelgood terms like "xenophilic restrictionism".
I don't think anyone really considers the memo itself to be a scientific fact. The scientific papers cited and arguments contained therein people might take as scientific facts.
It was a pretty scientific memo. It cited a lot of scientific research.
The sort of people who argue against his memo always end up looking foolish because they never argue against anything that was actually said. No specific claims are ever brought up except lying strawmen like "he said women can't program", a claim not found in the memo.
Instead it's all just slurs, insults, attacks on his character, guilt-by-association and so on. There's never any actual depth to it, it's all "don't look at the bad man".
Damore's arguments must be good, because in years of this coming up nobody has ever once managed to make an intellectual argument against the stuff in his memo.
I think the most bizarre thing about the last few years to me is very certainly this thing where people are huge pieces of shit convince others that THEY are the victim when they were horrible human beings and got everything they deserved.
I am someone who is not very familiar with the case, why are you saying that Damore was a "huge piece of shit" and that he was a "was a horrible human beings and got everything he deserved"? I thought that he just made a statistical argument regarding preferences.
It is startling and frankly concerning to me that the parent post is being voted down. Clearly there are some people who don’t want to confront difficult questions, or acknowledge that this might be more pervasive than we feel comfortable admitting.
Honestly, as bigoted and creepy as the diversity memo is; I found Google's response just as creepy.
It would be one thing if they called the diversity memo out as disruptive and bigoted, but they said it had "wrong opinions." That just reeks of authoritarianism.
I'm more afraid of authoritarianism from a major company than a bigot.
The memo wasn't bigoted or creepy, it didn't even say anything particularly remarkable, though I do agree it failed to pay sufficient deference to the cultural moment. But the assertion that it was hateful or bigoted went unchallenged in all of the reporting around it.
If you haven't read it yourself, I encourage you to challenge yourself with an open mind and give it a read.
> I encourage you to challenge yourself with an open mind and give it a read
I did. It relies on junk science to justify bigotry.
And that's why Google's response concerns me. (I encourage you to look it up too.) It uses the words "wrong opinion" instead of calling out the junk science. But it also abandoned employees who may have mild concerns about the processes that Google was following.
Thus, Google handled the situation poorly because it didn't discredit the "diversity memo." It assumed that everyone disagreed with the memo, which clearly isn't the case.
---
Junk science: Think of debunked science like eugenics that were used to justify past bigotry.
Go on then, cite a paragraph directly from Damore's memo that "relies on junk science." I'm waiting. I dare say I'll be waiting a while. Hopefully it inspires you to actually read it for yourself instead of parrot what a few other people have said.
Or at the very least, if you'd prefer the lazier option, listen to what some other people who've read the memo said about it.
He and his buddies had and endless list of grievances involving political this and that. Nothing seemed to happen that wasn't somehow 'political.' They surrounded themselves in this thicket of 'logic' where the simplest explanation was impossible and conspiracies were the most obvious answer to them. Thankfully it was long before social media as we know it.
He was fired for leaving some nasty bigoted comments in code.
But for the record I have no idea who these folks at Facebook are or their motivations.
If the guy I'm thinking of made the news, you wouldn't know either.
Did you read the story? The details seem pretty damning to me.
> I’m sure Facebook isn’t perfect, but I know enough good people who work there to know they’re not all out to “get” us.
Yeah, I don't think you read the article. That's what's happening: a bunch of employees are blowing the whistle on what seems to be executive abuse of the fact check program.
As the FB employee in this thread commented - this person vilified others and was fired for that, not his attempts to "bring down the man".
Large scale platforms like this are hard to manage. I can see many cases where people doing their best can be misconstrued as an evil conspiracy.
Eg.
- Users and companies with large fan bases are open to brigading. Previously companies have been taken off the platform suddenly because of militant FB groups.
- A new rule is instituted "anyone with more than X followers get Tier-1 support in reviewing and reinstating their account following a take down."
- Engineer on some team mildly close to the team who runs the takedown/reinstatement systems sees that a Right Wing commentator is getting Tier-1 support and fast turn around reinstatement.
- Said engineer tries to vilify the people who wrote the policy and those who are carrying it out, tries to go public with a conspiracy that "FB is prioritizing reinstating Right Wing users". Instead they've really just lost the trust of their peers, failed to understand the space properly, and now brought their employer into disrepute - they should be fired.
This stuff happens all the time, and is usually just chalked up to "its a hard problem to get right, and we're trying to get better every day". When people over react and make out like Zuck is pulling strings to rule the universe i have a hard time understanding when he sleeps.
The fact check program is itself executive abuse and should be ended. Given how many "fact checkers" are simply leftist pro-establishment types, and how many "fact checks" they produce are simple re-statements of whatever someone was claiming without bothering to address any raised criticisms, it doesn't surprise me at all that it's a flashpoint internally. These sort of people simply define anything that's not left wing as "misinformation", so the claim by the FB employee is on its surface meaningless.
Zuckerberg should never have given way on fact checking. I wonder if he understands it was a mistake. Facebook is meant to be a social network, it's inherently a graph oriented organisation in which graph nodes are all roughly equal. Fact checking is the exact opposite: a hierarchy with Facebook at the top and delegated "truth arbiters" a layer lower, that try to dominate the social graph.
The cited example of the Breitbart video is a good example. The video is a video of doctors. There are tons of scientists, government advisors and indeed whole governments saying they don't see any need for masks, children can go back to school or never even left (as in Sweden), etc. You don't need to go far to find them. That children aren't infectious is by now widely accepted in the scientific community. For Facebook to censor the President for making such a statement makes them look absurd, and totalitarian. Given the long term accusations of fraud surrounding mail voting that were never addressed, it's not a big surprise Trump is worrying about the integrity of the election process.
There are not "tons of scientists, government advisors" saying they don't see the need for masks. That is very much a minority opinion which is not supported by mainstream science.
I'm curious also by your claim that children aren't infectious. That is not widely accepted by the scientific community. It sounds like you're taking some minor positions and pretending like they're mainstream.
> It sounds like you're taking some minor positions and pretending like they're mainstream.
Indeed. And if the grandparent got all their "news" from paid feeds and shared content on Facebook (given the right seeding and demographics), they might genuinely believe these are mainstream positions.
Which is exactly the problem people are worried about in the linked article.
> Which is exactly the problem people are worried about in the linked article.
The problem with that is no amount of flagging and removing is going to fix the problem and that is why I don't even see the point, the left and right are so divided that those on the extremes will fall for anything being blinded by their emotional hatred for the other.
I mean we are at the point where the extreme left believes for a fact that via a thoroughly refuted dossier, that the sitting president paid Russian hookers to pee on him.
The extreme right is just as bad, believing that their is a global cabal of elite leftist that are raping children with a presidential candidate being one of them.
No amount of blocking content is going to repair the fact that people are no longer listening and that is the problem one side wants the other side filtered so that they can be the only voice shouting in the dark, thinking if the other side cannot talk then they are by default going to listen, but the reality is almost everybody has stopped listening, no amount of censorship is going to fix that.
This is a strawman and false equivalence. The "extreme left" believes the President definitely sexually assaulted at least one woman and additionally probably raped someone. The first part having been admitted to several times. Noone believes that 100% of the Steele dossier is true. The QAnon crowd is a minority of the "extreme right", although it is concerning how fast conspiracies spread, including "left conspiracies" like anti-vax or anti-GMO.
Fact checks might help slow crazy conspiracies a little bit. I think it is worth for this reason, although I believe in content warnings+disclaimers instead of takedowns because of Streisand effects.
Finally, again, the Steele dossier is not even a "left conspiracy". It is a side-product of rumor spreading games that the intelligence community plays, that got leaked. I think it is a bad example for the point your seem to be making.
> It is a side-product of rumor spreading games that the intelligence community plays
It was a hit piece, who funding is now well known, it was political from the start. What it was not, and would not qualify as is an intelligence report and was never formulated for the purpose of intel. It is no different than the hit pieces being produced by the right to paint Biden as a pedophile. So I don't see it as a Strawman as the point was people are so far gone on their version of the truth that no amount of censoring or labeling is going to pull them back from the edge. Both sides are doing it, and at this point there is no gradient of less-bad.
OK, that's just silly. Read a newspaper? Watch a routine 1 hour news program from any of the major networks? No pee tape. No pizzagate (well, except when that nut started shooting up the restaurant over it). I'm sure you think there's "bias" but there are no lies.
There are many journalistic organizations who genuinely care about reporting the truth. And they "filter" and "censor" themselves to do it all the time, because in that world it's called "good journalism". They get stuff wrong, and when they do they tell us about it.
And the issue at hand here is that Facebook is trying to apply some of the same controls to the news it presents to its users, via most of the same processes (i.e. by trusting journalists). And stuff leaks through, and sometimes Facebook itself seems to be uneven in the application of its own rules.
So I don't get your point. Why is it OK for The Times to spike its reporting on the pee tape because it can't find good sourcing but when Facebook to do the same it's somehow an impossibility?
> I'm sure you think there's "bias" but there are no lies
Sure there is bias, Fox news is plenty biased so is CNN. and there are plenty of lies, a lie by omission is still a lie. Not to mention burying retractions in blurbs and page 10 even if they do a retraction. Make no mistake about it, I blame both sides equally so I am not advocating for one sides bias over another. My point is simply that people have stopped listening so all the meandering in the world will not "get them". Most everyone has chosen a side and the few of us left in the middle are stuck in a shit storm, that we don't want and we damn sure don't want to hear either sides dogma as it has become the stuff of religious fanatics, so we are not listening either.
The actual scientific evidence for masks is not as strong as you claim. Please read this analysis by the University of Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine. We need to do more research.
Strictly speaking we're both in violent agreement that really high quality studies are required for the evidence to be solid.
Please note that I did not say there was scientific evidence for masks, but that wearing masks is good is the mainstream scientific position (which changed only very recently).
More importantly- this is a situation where we don't have unambiguous data, but the mainstream position is consistent with the current data and reasonable thinking about disease prevention.
The discussion upthread was about people arguing that masks aren't needed or don't work. This is review paper cautioning that the science behind mask effectiveness isn't as settled as we'd want. It shows good evidence for medical PPE being effective, but it found one study that showed cloth masks were actually harmful, and it points out that the applicability to covid isn't as strong as we'd like either.
There's nothing in there that should serve to argue against the general consensus that masks are a good idea. They are, within the bounds of the evidence at hand, effective in the opinions of most experts. And that includes the authors of the paper you wrote.
You just wrote yourself that there is no consensus, even amongst scientists who have been extremely willing to recommend extreme measures from the start. The review paper showed the science isn't settled: that's literally the definition of no consensus.
The concept of scientific consensus is horribly abused. Look at the reply to my post. It's not about anything concrete, it just asserts everyone agrees with the poster. That's a lie, and obviously so. Yet simply by claiming it's true, some will believe it, as it's an unfalsifiable statement. Indeed you yourself believe it, even whilst reading a paper that says there's no consensus.
None of that is necessarily inconsistent with there being political bias though - which could exist despite everyone’s best intentions. Disagreeable people are sometimes right, as much as it might be hard to see it or admit it. [edit - tone]
Do note that “potential” was added by me when I edited title because the original didn’t fit. I tried to come up with something appropriate but you shouldn’t comment off my title.
They are not "weirdly rogue political activist type employees". They are normal people reacting to the abnormality that is Facebook. I mean which tech company has ever produced the kind of polarization, fake news, Brexit and Trump type events all over the globe?
If Intel or IBM or AT&T had produced these type of outcomes you can bet your ass "weirdly rogue political activist type employees" wld suddenly start popping up all over the place.
Facebook will continue to be a highly abnormal place to work for anyone who isn't mildly conformist.
Intel and AT&T might not have provided a platform which some people used for political propaganda but they have done other much worse things (ME, proprietary software/firmware/etc, anti-net-neutrality, anti-competition, etc).
Is this satire? You’re describing literally every left wing activist that accuses their employer of systemic bias, racism, pay disparity, interference in elections, etc.
Transparently it seems the right type of activists are celebrated and the wrong vilified. That’s fine, but let’s not act like this is principled.
There have been plenty of toxic people i've worked with who seem to think their job is to "point out all the unfairness in the world", when really they're just hired to pull stories off a backlog and write code.
I get that there are good whistle blowers. I also have first hand experience (a growing list recently) of people who decide to vilify their coworkers under the guise of "justice" and "taking down the man" when really most people ("evil VPs" included) are just trying to do their best and get through the day. They on the other hand are horrible to work with, and usually very unproductive. When threatened with performance management for their lack of delivery, they then tend to become hostile and see the whole charade as a conspiracy against them, when really no one trusts them or wants to work with them as they are assholes.
There have been plenty of toxic people i've worked with who seem to think their job is to "point out all the unfairness in the world", when really they're just hired to pull stories off a backlog and write code.
If you believe your employer is doing something wrong, potentially illegal, and bad for society as a whole then ignoring it because that's not in your job description means you're a huge failure as a human being.
If any/everything is potentially offensive, don't be surprised if we are going towards a future market where the easily offended are MUCH less employable.
To be clear, the employee in question believes Facebook is giving preferential treatment to conservative-leaning pages. I'm not sure if that alone makes it fair to call them a left-wing activist, but this isn't an example of left-wing privilege either.
Honestly, to a cooperation, any feudal or totalitarian system is much closer in nature then a democracy, with libertarian or even anarchistic organizational forms. Thats just how it is. I would be suprised if there was any cooperation whos ruling class is not secretly rooting for the dictators of this earth.
Inauspicious first couple of comments. Might want to burn this one and move on to the next account on the list. Try starting more subtly next time; ease in with a few banal comments on a Rust thread or something
I just replied to your comment upthread saying that this is not ok, but I need to add more.
You've been using HN primarily for ideological warfare for a long time now. Your recent comments in particular have been breaking the site guidelines egregiously and repeatedly. You've pulled this "sleeper account" attack before as well (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859828).
If you keep breaking the site guidelines, we are going to ban you. Actually, you're well into bannable territory as it is. I'm shocked at how much and you badly you've crossed the line. We've cut you way more slack than most people get here.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on. For all its many flaws, this is a community, and to participate in a community while constantly destroying the commons is incongruent. People who use this place need to take care of it, not burn it. That goes for everyone, regardless of what their political views are or how intensely they feel them, and that includes you.
Just genuine curiosity because I like this site and like how active you are in constructively moderating it: Why not simply ban people who have crossed the line this badly for this long? It certainly doesn't seem heavy handed or unfair.
Comments like the one you're replying to serve an additional purpose of indicating acceptable posting standards to readers. Dang may happen to err on the side of forgiving, and imho that helps form some of the character of HN.
The idea that commenters should "make HN good because we all want it to be good" is quite positive, and that sentiment seems to be reflected here far more than banhappy reddit.
Sometimes people change. It's good to try different approaches, since one might persuade where a different one fails to persuade. For example, some people respond to arguments about rules while others respond to arguments about protecting the commons.
It's better to err on the side of patience generally, and feels more in keeping with the values of the site. There's are also judgment calls about things like who seems more likely to respond to persuasion, how much history the account has, whether it's related to previous abusive accounts, and things like that.
This website holds a great deal of power beyond the community itself, so it is appropriate to have some community members represent non-community interests. Many people not in the community believe that Hacker News is no longer salvageable.
HN commenters represent whatever interests they wish—standing up for minorities, for example. There's no problem doing that. All people need to do is stay within the site guidelines, and most commenters do. So this is not the issue.
As for HN being "no longer salvageable" - people have been saying these things for 10 years or more. Of course it could have become true after 10 years—I don't want to be complacent. Sometimes the wolf eventually shows up. But there needs to be some evidence beyond simply repeating the things people repeat.
Right-wingers think HN is overrun by Marxists and left-wingers think it's overrun by Nazis. Both sides agree that the mods do a bad job and the site is destroying itself fast. They've been saying that for years. The decisive element here is the passions of the perceiver, not the object being perceived. That's why people's perceptions are so contradictory: what they're perceiving is an inverse of their own identifications. Usually this is based on a few data points that they overgeneralize. I've written about this a lot: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 for a summary, and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... for endless descriptions of the bias at work.
Of course it doesn't follow that criticisms are invalid. We try to be open and often adjust in response. But criticisms have to rise above a certain noise level—they need to clear the "randomness plus cognitive bias equals narrative" bar. When you say "Many people not in the community believe that Hacker News is no longer salvageable," it's not clear to me whether you're talking about serious critics or, say, Twitter ideologues, who have been saying that about HN since at least 2013. Most of that is driven by fashion. For example, small groups bond by snarking about, or denouncing, larger groups. That's all normal social dynamics (and internet dynamics), but I've learned the hard way that if you take those statements literally, it's crazymaking, because they're not really about what they purport to be about. That's not a reliable way to improve or, if you like, "salvage" HN.
All of which is a long way of saying that if you, or anyone, wants to discuss problems with HN, that's great, but we need specifics and links.
2. Send very clear and very loud signals that transphobia is not welcome here, such as by making a clear, pinned front page post about it. There are going to be a number of people who are going to complain about this policy and talk about "free speech" and "marketplace of ideas" &c, and to them make it very clear that either they get with the program or are no longer welcome here.
Sorry, but "good people" who are involved with all the evil things Facebook does by working for them aren't good people. I know it's hip to absolve yourself of responsibility by saying "I just work here" or "I didn't work on that", but all these rationalizations don't fly as long as you're one of the quiet majority that does nothing to fight what Facebook does.
Seriously, techies seem to act on the same amoral plane as business executives and I wonder how you people manage to sleep at night.
Please don't morally posture over other people on this forum, first because it's bad for conversation, and second because we're all guilty, even those who don't work for Facebook.
I find it difficult to believe that the average Facebook employee is exposed to less media coverage about their own company than a member of the general public is. So the remaining possibilities are that the employee either agrees with the policy (in which case, we can question their judgment), or they're just trying to keep food on the table (in which case, we should wonder about how healthy the job market is).
There are more options than you've presented. There is also that the employee has perfectly valid and logical reasons for believing the policy isn't evil. In other words, the issue is you see the policies as evil with no possibility to see otherwise.
I use facebook to connect with my family and friends. I've unfollowed all overly political friends. I get no real or fake news in my facebook feed. If I worked at facebook I'd be proud of helping people to stay connected.
There’s no question that there are good things about Facebook, but I think a fully contemplative person would need to balance those things against the harms Facebook allows to exist on their platform. It’s not a black and white question of good vs evil, as much as it is “does what this company does (or not do), on balance, comport with my values of right or wrong?” Evidence of wrong-doing and questionable judgment by the company’s leaders is abundant. And at some point you can’t continue to work for a company without being complicit in its sins; after all, a company hires someone because they need them to help execute the company’s decisions.
What if you replaced “Facebook” with “the US federal government”?
Can you continue to work for the digital service without being complicit in the government’s sins? There is plenty of evidence of wrong-doing and questionable judgement by the government’s leaders, for sure.
Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?
The Government is subject to a Constitution that has an amendment process, and laws are made by elected leadership who can be voted out by the people.
Facebook is not a democracy, and given the corporate structure and differing voting rights of shareholders, it is practically impossible to replace the current leadership even if a majority of shareholders wanted to.
Moreover, the Government is immense and highly diverse in its missions compared to Facebook. I don't think anyone reasonably believes the sins of the CIA should be borne by, say, U.S. Forest Service park rangers. If Facebook had a public service mission that, among other things, provided essential services to the public like food and housing, perhaps the discussion would be different.
> Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?
Some might say that this is the desired outcome, but eventually management might see the writing on the wall and change the way they do business. Indeed, this is one of the key mechanisms of unionized labor - to bring management to the table for negotiation through the threat of work stoppage (striking).
I think the government is indeed massive with a diverse set of goals, but I think employees at Facebook may see their workplace the same way:
- They could work on something “good”, like trust and safety, community moderation tools, emergency response, etc.
- They could work on something user-driven or “neutral”, like Events or Groups which are used to organize anything from BLM protests to Trump rallies.
If they’re not actively designing privacy anti-patterns or trying to make the news feed more addictive, quitting would not really affect those problem areas.
I think organizing at the workplace is a great idea, and the threat of work stoppage could be a very real one if enough employees organize. But the idea of telling people to quit their jobs and distance themselves from the problem is very different from telling them to start organizing to fix the problem.
If you still think in 2020 after all the scandals about political manipulation, psychological experiments and dark patterns that Facebook's helping people stay connected you are an incredibly naive person.
You are so uninformed that it will take you days of continuous research even to form a cogent opinion about this topic.
As others have said, there are other possibilities. Some good, some neutral, perhaps some bad (but in ways unrelated to how Facebook itself is considered bad).
A great many are there to build their skills and/or resumes, which is a lot more than just putting food on the table. There aren't many places where one can learn so much so quickly about certain technologies (like VR/AR) or how to run things at that kind of scale, and most of those (e.g. Google, Amazon) have their own ethical issues. Many other companies, including some HN darlings, were founded by ex-FB employees. Some of them are doing good things, for practically any definition of "good" you might apply.
Others are there because they believe in the good Facebook does as well as the bad. As you said, they're likely exposed to more information about what the company does, which means a lower percentage is of the "jealous columnist at NYT" variety. Facebook helps connect people and businesses in positive ways as well as negative. You might think the ratio is not high enough, but others can quite reasonably disagree and/or think it's worth their time to work on improving that ratio.
There are many other possible reasons as well. "Evil or trapped" is not a useful simplification.
A good way to look at this is to consider someone working for RJ Reynolds in the 70s. The pay is good, you are working on a product that people just seem to _love_, and everyone at the company seems pretty enthusiastic and committed. There is a little thrill to tell people where you work and have them tell you that they use your company's product.
Yes, some people may have concerns about the product and its long-term consequences to individual health and society, but those are just alarmist freaks and we can ignore them.
Yes, there are also those internal reports that you might have seen or heard about in chatter around the water cooler, but you are not an expert in that subject so really what do you know? And the experts the execs bring around on office tours seem to be OK with things.
Yes, everyone at the company uses the product and while you were not a heavy user of the product before joining you can't avoid it in meetings and daily work. You seem to be recognizing some of the negative symptoms of the product in your daily life a lot more these past few months, but that recent project you worked on was pretty cool and in your last evaluation you got high marks for 'impact' so it can't all be bad, right?
Everyone who works at FB (ok, let's say IC2 and above) knows what is going on. Everyone who has been there for more than two or three years feels the relentless pressure to increase 'engagement' no matter the cost. Most are a bit unsure about the whole 'vision' thing Mark keeps talking about and they have enough self-awareness to see the cult-like aspects of the company, but the pay is very good and it can be a thrill at times to have access to either the audience or systems of such size and scope (e.g. let's count the files in /tmp across 1 million+ systems just because hypershell lets us...)
At what point in your career at RJ Reynolds do you realize that you are actually doing evil and check off box 2? At what point do you admit to yourself that what you do day to day has negative long-term consequences for society? When you do realize this what do you do?
(Disclaimer: worked at FB a while ago for a long enough period of time that the actions of sociopathic management eventually overwhelmed the 'protecting these systems protects activists and persecuted people from their evil governments' story I told myself and so I bailed.)
At the end of the day, you need enough people to care. But plenty are happy with finishing the work, or absolving all the messiness of real world and focus on the engineering work, which is simply more pleasant (and fits to their liking). Work is hard enough, why adding extra stress unless the company is doing something obviously illegal?
So you think that this person was the absolutely last good person at Facebook, and that every one of the other 48,000+ are evil? Do you also believe that every single US government employee, including Dr. Fauci and the inspectors general who regularly report on wrongdoing, must be evil because they're involved with what the Trump administration does? And what on Earth makes you think the majority at Facebook is quiet about any topic least of all this one? Interesting notions, to say the least.
It seems to me that there are three stories here. One is that some small group of employees were violating policy by preventing certain users from being flagged or banned when they should have been. One is that an employee caught them. The third is that the employee was fired - apparently for conduct around the disclosure rather than the disclosure itself, but that's beside the point. The point is that it's absurd to assume that the first and third stories are totally representative of how every single person remaining at Facebook is, while the one that connects them is assumed to be an anomaly that could never possibly happen again.
Yep, listening to one employee out of thousands who claims something outrageous is just like listening to that one "scientist" who claims climate change is a hoax or the one "doctor" who claims vaccines are dangerous. If there was truly a hoax, I'd expect a good proportion of the workers there to be outraged about it.
This is a rough situation. The guy was pulling on an important thread to unravel a complex issue and get us all transparency. And then he wrote a company wide memo that called Mark a "robber baron, slaver, and plunderer", directly blamed Mark for covid deaths due to his implied support of Trump, and levied a bunch of other personal attacks.
I can't imagine any person at any company who wouldn't get fired after publicly speaking to the CEO that way.
It's a shame, because if this guy had an emotional intelligence he could have personally driven change. Now he's a martyr at best.
It’s weird coming into this thread after just finishing Schindler’s List. It’s like the polar opposite of how to effectively operate in an evil system.
For anyone who believes they’re participating in an evil system: quit, whistleblow, or sabotage. Don’t be like this guy.
Whistleblowing would be working with the media or regulators to get out as much information as possible. Sabotaging is staying at the company and thwarting their efforts. What he did (calling attention internally to messages that were already available for employees to see) barely counts as either of those. Sure, you could say he effectively quit.
Your attempts to draw parallels between the nazis and facebook by invoking schindlers list hasn’t gone unnoticed. FB has its flaws, but isnt half as bad as what you are trying to paint it to be. Not everyone who disagrees with your point of view is a nazi.
Jeez, my point isn’t that Facebook is equivalent to Nazism. It’s that Oskar Schindler and this guy both thought they were part of a bad organization, and one was way more effective at handling it than the other. Are you familiar with his story?
This, exactly. There are effective and non-effective ways to do a thing. Sometimes the non-effective ways are actively harmful to others trying to do the same thing. That's all true whether "the thing" is good, bad, or neutral. Whatever good this person might have done, they also inflicted some damage on their own cause by letting their emotions run away with them.
You see this everywhere in engineering (and maybe other industries notorious for having smart but low-EQ people). Someone has what could potentially be a good point, but they blow it with their tone-deaf or unintentionally insulting delivery. It can be any message, political charged or not. Think of that guy we all know who is really smart but just can't seem to do a code review without making it personal.
I can't believe there's an actually a debate at all about what's going on here.
There are multiple sources indicating that conservative sites work in concert to amplify, at best, specious content and at worst, complete misinformation.
Facebook selectively enforces discipline on these sites because:
1. Conservative information (Fox News, Charlie Kirk, Breitbart, etc.) is consistently shared more than other content
2. They don't want the optics of making it seem like they're censoring conservative voices because they're afraid of the blowback, so they're hiding behind the veil of "It's not our job"
3. They don't want to lose the ad spend running up to the election season nor do they want to lose the vanity metrics of DAU/MAU/etc because they're a publicly traded company
Zuck is a feckless coward, full stop. And while I don't know his personal political leanings, this non-policy certainly has the earmarks of Thiel and Joel Kaplan all over it.
I have a completely unfounded theory that the coalition constituting the current "right wing" are a cherry picked selection of the most easiest to advertise to people in society.
Furthermore the actual goal of a "right wing media" is to collect reliable, large, consistent easy to sell to audiences for advertisers and isn't necessarily committed to any particular agenda.
Also political opinions and grandstanding is cheap content, expensive journalism isn't required, so it keeps the costs low.
All the other consequences, just like they are for tobacco and oil companies, are swept under the rug. This is the content associated with the lowest cost, best audience, highest profit business model.
I sold bumper stickers in the early 2000s, all kinds of politics. The conservatives were easier; larger volume, longer time window (they sold over a longer time), the ramp up time was shorter, and the stickers were way easier to come up with. Much easier business.
Again, this is all from in my head, I'm not a researcher and don't have a paper trail here, but it's a fun idea and seems to match reality.
Those aren't even all separate points. At the end of the day, Facebook is beholden to republican (not really "right wing" per se) advertising dollars more than it is to spending on opposing points.
This is just for demographic reasons: Facebook has to compete hard for eyeballs among young/urban/techie/minority users. Those folks are fickle with their tastes and willing to try more platforms. And they're less sensitive to advertising in general. Facebook has lots of them, but they certainly aren't dominant in that market.
But old white folk? They're all on Facebook. Really, they're ALL on Facebook. Facebook probably has 90%+ of all social media advertising revenue in this demographic. And they skew heavily republican.
So who's interests are they going to serve? When Facebook's executives feel pressure to put their fingers on the fact check scale, in which direction are they going to tilt it?
Facebook make an irrelevant amount of money from political advertising.
If they didn't really believe that it was important to allow on their platform, then they would have banned it years ago, as it causes them nothing but bad press and blowback.
I'd want to see numbers about that before I believe it; I don't think it's true. Certainly from looking over the shoulders of my older relatives, political and issue ads make up a very large percentage of the paid content they see.
Yeah, for less than 25% of each four year period, and only in swing states (so I suspect probably Florida and Ohio get most of it).
Seriously, I definitely saw some numbers (maybe from the FT) and it was like less than 1% political advertising revenue. That's maybe 10-15 times smaller than gaming, and maybe 30 times smaller than ecommerce.
Also, note that pages have posts that look incredibly like ads (the Sponsored thing is pretty subtle), so it can be hard to actually measure which (of any) of the posts are ads.
That is a surprise. Is there data that this has also been the case before the increased efforts to moderate content?
All criticism aside, I think Facebook does a better job at providing a platform for users. Yes, I don't like a lot of content either, but if I compare it to Twitter, I think FB did much better.
The reason (basically) is because Republicans in the states trend older and by extension, less technically savvy. Since content that both incites strong emotion and allows that person to represent themselves a certain way tends to be the most shared, highly clickbait/inflammatory/misinformation right-wing content rules the roost.
1) Why is this? Is it because both sides share it vs just typical echo chamber sharing? I know it's not "shared more because more people believe it" as the US is pretty close to 50/50.
TLDR is that if you know certain subjects will get your base talking about something else that you aren't allowed to promote (such as a conspiracy theory), you promote the hell out of real news stories about those subjects knowing your base will a) share and b) discuss the conspiracy theories in the comments.
It's a very clever way to use money to boost the conversation around untrue claims, while technically neither the ad buyer nor seller are responsible since it's the users doing the lying. And I don't know what the solution is, fact checking every user comment isn't feasible..
(speculation) Because right now, one side loves Trump/Shapiro/Crowder/etc... and the other side just hates Trump (majority don't care either way, of course). Notice how nobody is focused on the Dem side anymore? So of course these pages get more engagement if everyone is over there.
Ha. And here I actually respect Zuck for not banning all the conservatives like Jack did. They just tried to cancel Facebook, so, why the hell would Zuck give into demands now?
"slants far left" and "banned all conservatives" are incredibly different claims. If you mean "slants far left", but say "banned all conservatives", nobody is going to take anything you say you seriously.
You must be a brilliant person. You know everything that’s going on at Facebook without working there. You personally know Mark Zuckerberg’s character and you haven’t even met him! Can we find out who this poster is and put him in charge. His ability to figure out what’s going on in a company he doesn’t work for by reading news articles is amazing. /s
In all seriousness, your absolute confidence in your own conclusions is exactly why people are afraid of censorship.
So what you are saying is that facebook itself acts like a neutral platform without boosting, demoting, or censoring certain political posts, right? If so I do not see what the issue is with that.
> Facebook selectively enforces discipline on these sites because:
Does facebook enforce discipline on sites from the other site that spread misinformation? (e.g. snopes) If not I do not think that it is really selective.
The issue of 'amplifying narratives' is not at all exclusive to any 'side' and the misinformation is everywhere, it just takes on different forms.
I believe that the issue of the 'right wing side' in this case is possibly as you've indicated - in that there is just more sensitivity around it.
The Valley is Left/Anarcho/Libertarian with 'traditionally minded' immigrants, and so there's more suspicion in certain camps of legit bias on 'one side'. I think this is where the sidedness of the issue might derive.
Taking this together with the recent house hearings and with other material, like AOC's questioning of Zuckerberg, it seems like leftist people (a) are distrustful of the tech giants' business and wealth and don't really believe it's been beneficial; and yet (b) trust them to regulate speech and want them to do so more aggressively. It's not logical.
Seems like your (b) is mistaken, they want them to regulate speech (the "aggressively part let's leave aside) and do so within clear parameters. It seems fairly clear that they are not trusted to regulate the speech but rather expected to and are to be closely monitored for how they do so.. the hearings themselves are evidence of that.
I'd disagree with this part pretty strongly. What clear parameters are you thinking of, besides "get rid of my enemies"? Can you formulate a "no endorsing violence" policy that keeps the current protests/riots while banning Trump's latest idiocy, or one for "no racial discrimination" that keeps White Fragility and bans "they're not sending their best... Murderers, rapists" or similar? That kicks off Infowars or Richard Spencer while leaving Malcolm X or Ta-Nehisi Coates? Sure, the political right tends to cross those lines further - but it's often a case of degree and direction, not kind.
I think it's either a really hard line to draw in a viewpoint-neutral fashion, or a huge political fight. (Whether you choose to ban Trump without the Left, or you try to ban both, people will be furious)
>Can you formulate a "no endorsing violence" policy that keeps the current protests/riots while banning Trump's latest idiocy
Yes, it’s quite simple and I’m wondering if you are intentionally or accidentally being obtuse by trying to frame the current protests as riots. There were plenty of peaceful protests all over the country - no endorsing violence simply means not highlighting peaceful protests over violent ones. It’s not rocket science except to those grasp at straws in order to equate civilians walking in the streets to Trump implying police shoot civilians.
It's logical if you look at it this way: We want you to regulate the speech the way we tell you to (b), and if you don't, we'll use your shady business practices against you and take away your wealth (a). It's a basic play the government loves to play - stick and carrot, if you behave, you get beneficial regulations, if you don't, we'll regulate you into the ground.
How else would elected officials play against those who could essentially fund your opponent with collective billions of dollars?
"Government" is made up of many actors and groups, and the fundraising dynamic is that a) corporation gives to incumbent to get favors or b) gives to opponent to remove regulatory pressure from an incumbent not willing to play ball.
What you are seeing is the natural result of corporate control over elections and consequently, politicians.
The way I see it, because the government cannot censor speech AOC wants companies like Facebook to do it. Very dishonest. I would expect calls from people against any censorship, not for it.
I know I'm splitting hairs, but the us government effectively censors obscenity, defamation, whistleblowers, inciting violence, copyrighted material etc.
I don't see how that article is relevant at all. What does AOC blocking people on Twitter have to do with the alleged claim that AOC wants Facebook to censor speech?
Show me something AOC has _said_, not a meme of a dubious quote with her face on it.
Blocking people on twitter is a "fundamental" situation? I'd love to hear what you call Trump sending in the military to clear protesters.
And again, I'd also like you to explain the logical leap between "AOC blocked some people on Twitter" to "AOC wants the power to tell Facebook who to censor".
I'm not prepared to argue this applies to her in the same way, but maybe the person who you're responding to thinks it is parallel, so perhaps more dialogue than just scoffing would be appropriate.
The context of my comment was not reading the qz.com link. So now it seems redundant.
But now that I have read it, I'm confused even more about the responses.
Blocking people on Twitter is arguably (because the courts are saying so) a violation of the constitution. For an elected official at least.
If someone wants to regulate speech, and they have tried and been prevented from doing so on first amendment grounds, it seems likely motivation to search for a legal alternative method to achieve their goals.
Is AOC against Facebook regulating content then?
I don't think I see the motivation/goal attributed to her as illegitimate. Maybe everyone is taking for granted that it's a "loophole".
>(a) are distrustful of the tech giants' business and wealth and don't really believe it's been beneficial
This is a stance I wish non lefties picked up on tbh.
Even if you're rather right wing or liberal it should be obvious that larger companies being able to pay less taxes and being able to get more benefits than your local business or startup is unfair.
Or that anticompetitive practices that squash smaller competitors, give unfair advantage and/or establish monopsonies is terrible for entrepreneurship, social mobility and the free market in general.
yet it's self-proclaimed 'capitalist to the bone' that I see defending it's erosion of it's dynamics and benefits.
“Facebook employees want CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain what the company would do if the leader of the free world uses the social network to undermine the results of the 2020 US presidential election”
this is so silly, and later when the article claims “misinformation”, it’s a tricky situation to claim you know the 100% truth about everything and anything that goes against what you believe is considered misinformation that will undermine an election... totally ignoring the possibility that you might actually not be correct and that things aren’t as black and white as you think they are
Why is it "silly" exactly? Are you saying that Facebook wouldn't allow itself to be used this way, that the government wouldn't try, or that it's not possible? Are you contending that the results of an election are not "black and white"?
Clearly the results of an election are not always black-and-white, otherwise there wouldn't be contested elections.
"Undermine" is obviously a subjective judgement, not an objective one. Which in turn makes it difficult to legislate "prevent people from using social networks to undermine elections" in an objective way.
And this is now my personal opinion, but legislation that cannot be enforced with some amount of objectivity is a recipe for disaster down the road.
it’s silly to assume that you are so sure of what you believe that you can call something that doesn’t align with your beliefs to be “misinformation” or an attempt to “undermine election results” when things are not black and white, both sides of a polarizing topic have truth to them, that’s why it’s always those topics that get this type of treatment, nobody is going around saying the sky is purple or the sun is a cube
As an example of bias, I've recently seen on Facebook a post that instructed the readers to shoot law enforcement people in the face. Not exaggerating, those are the exact words, "shoot him in the face". Facebook told me this is well within the "community standards". Yet for example Zuckerberg personally promised to ban any page that promotes protests against COVID lockdown. So, calling for protesting lockdown - ban, calling for murdering the police - OK. Sounds like a bias.
Of course this happens because if Facebook actually nukes pages like Breitbart, right-wingers will claim this is evidence of Facebook's leftist bias. I see this claim on my feed all the time already.
There is nothing Facebook can do that won't cause a riot. But if there's truly no acceptable action for Facebook and similar platforms, maybe the only option in the long-run is for them to cease to exist.
Not really true. Content policy can take a lot of different forms. There’s a purely compliant approach — only respecting the legal requirements, like illegal content — and then there’s an approach of being Big Brother, taking a censorship role. Facebook seems to want to be at least a little bit of a censor.
I believe there are no examples of platforms with any significant reach that can possibly take a purely compliance approach. Speech permissible by law in many jurisdictions is well beyond what is tolerable in public forums - or tolerable in your office meeting room.
There is no such thing as "tolerable" - there is only what one can tolerate. To phrase it that way asks the question who claims they're incapable of tolerating what.
"Intolerable speech" makes it sound like it's the speech's fault.
>"Fire in a crowded theater" is intolerable speech, and so is publicly calling for executions. It's enshrined in jurisprudence.
Directly threathening to execute someone maybe. But "Fire in a crowded theater" has not been part of jurisprudence for... 40 years. The US has very, very limited free speech restrictions.
If someone walked into their place of work and spent the whole day shouting obscenities and racial slurs I think their speech would be deemed intolerable.
Tolerable in public forums according to whom? You? Why should your level speech tolerance get enshrined in FB content policy? The process of lawmaking is how we come to an agreement on the bounds of acceptability. Don't like those bounds? Change the law. Don't use social network insiders to do it for you.
This article is about Facebook trying not to be a censor, and consequently getting slammed for not acting strongly enough against "Fake News". Changing to lower or higher levels of censorship will just result in different amounts of yelling from one side or the other. The middle of the road is a no-mans-land where you get shelled by both sides of the political spectrum.
The “middle of the road” is actually impossible — there’s no Goldilocks level of censorship. Once your policy becomes less permissive than the legal minimum you are inciting a whole world of criticism.
I mean, that's basically another way of stating the same point I'm making, except that I think "legal minimum" is also non-viable for similar reasons (unless you're 4chan apparently). I can't see any safe ground, any way that for-profit social media can scale sustainably.
Social media neutrality isn't a 'both political sides bad' problem but rather an issue that ties into differences in strategies between conservative and non-conservative political blocs.
Conservatives, not just in the United States but globally, pour vast resources into using social media platforms to propagate ideas that are objectively false and to embed those ideas into the minds of vulnerable people. There is no equivalent effort by non-conservatives in any English-speaking country. Non-conservatives see ample ammunition in the actual behavior of their opponents and see no need to use falsehoods to help their cause. Compare: Trump claiming that Biden will destroy the suburbs by letting non-whites liven in them vs anti-Trump forces using actual pictures of actual children in actual cages. Also compare: the lies used to manufacture support for Brexit vs. the actual truths about what would happen.
Rampant dishonesty is seen by many, particularly non-conservatives, as social cheating and social media platforms that enable it are condemned by non-conservatives for pro-conservative bias.
On the other hand, social media networks that do not tolerate political lies will, purely because most political lying is done by conservatives, more heavily restrict pro-conservative ideas and be condemned by conservatives for anti-conservative bias.
There's no way to square the circle of responding to habitual conservative dishonesty without favoring either conservatives or non-conservatives any more than there's a way to be neutral in the face of a wildfire: you either put it out or you don't.
If you moderate by common decency values, massive chunks of conservative voices would be off Reddit, FB, Twitter - and then they will evolve to dodge the new filters, or cause filters to create collateral damage.
Deplatforming these voices also plays into their strategy of calling themselves victims. Since most people don’t know the ins and outs of frequency of rule breaking, and the disproportionate amount of false information in conservative circles, people assume (wrongly) that it can’t be “that bad.”
I wish someone had a cost benefit analysis on what is the most effective way to resolve this, but right now social media firms are forced to treat outright conspiracy theories at the same level as science and research.
Perhaps it’s a civilization level issue - we have the technology and structures to create platforms - servers, networks, computer science theories.
We don’t have a solution or science for handling the structures that come on top of it, like what is the societal cost of keeping crazy theories on a network, vs the cost or methods required to stamp it out, and the philosophical arguments that support or prohibit such action.
It's an civilization-level issue that social media (particularly Facebook) has amplified but did not create.
It is a serious civilizational health issue that conservative political blocs in many countries have adopted electoral strategies based on spreading information that is objectively false. If social media platforms did not enable this, conservatives would simply find different avenues to lie.
Expecting for-profit social media platforms to combat the rise of rampant dishonesty as a political strategy in nominally democratic countries isn't ideal, but it's the only tool we have to mitigate the damage.
I think that the 3 posts above are quite biased. I do not doubt that the conservatives are doing a lot of lying but this is true for the other side of the camp as well. Take Snopes for example, or people systematically mis-quoting certain historical figures (such as churchill) or even modern figures (such as stallman or damore), or the propaganda against wikileaks and snowden, or the anti-science sentiment that goes regarding research results that they do not like, etc.
> If you moderate by common decency values, massive chunks of conservative voices would be off Reddit, FB, Twitter
So would the far left. People do not particularly enjoy being baselessly accused, cancelled, and have people call for violence on them.
(not to mention that in the past certain things which we consider as decent such as homosexuality would be considered indecent)
> but right now social media firms are forced to treat outright conspiracy theories at the same level as science and research.
They really are not. More like they are being pushed to censor posts based on what a 3rd party deems are wrongthink or incorrect.
Dangerous fact-free argumentation from non-conservatives is generally pushed by fringe voices with limited connections to established figures and major funding sources. DNC and Dem PAC money isn't used to push left-antivax views, for example.
In contrast, fact-free argumentation from conservatives has the backing of both established figures and big money. To keep this as non-controversial as possible, consider Trump's continued promotion of an anti-malaria drug as a COVID-19 treatment. This misinformation is both false and has the potential to kill people. Consider also the GOP's long-running strategy to de-legitimize elections by overstating the extent of voter fraud, which has now resurfaced as opposition to mail-in ballots. This misinformation is both false and deeply dangerous in a democracy.
There is no left-right equivalency here and america's long-running slow motion political crisis isn't going to get any better until people are willing to admit this.
I specifically did not claim that it's a "both sides bad" issue, just that both sides will be outraged no matter what Facebook does. Beyond that we appear to be looking in the same direction, even if I don't fully agree.
I would argue that it is censoring. By being more lenient to right wing sources compared to other sources who carry out the same infraction you create a bias and are censoring in favour of those right wing sources.
Facebook is perfectly happy to censor legal content; try posting a picture of a topless woman, or even of a woman breast-feeding without a covering. Try posting a short video of consenting adults having sex.
I think it's very illuminating that so many people accept these speech restrictions without question or fuss (although breast-feeding advocacy groups have fought the good fight on their pictures), but, as soon as FB blocks an article falsely claiming that Joe Biden will dynamite churches if he becomes president or whatever, it's suddenly Very Important That Facebook Not Practice Censorship.
Can we all imagine for a minute how conservatives would react if Facebook took a 100% compliance approach to speech and allowed anyone to post porn into their newsfeed?
It's well beyond Facebook too, it's actually silicon valley culture by and large, big tech has been increasingly capitulating and adopting stances and policies of the Chinese Communist Party over American values and interests. With COVID19, Twitter and Youtube are great examples where espousing any views in disagreement with the World Health Organization will get your content censored and possibly your account banned.
The other post asking for examples is downvoted, but I think your statement could really use some. I can only think of one highly visible one, and it's interesting how much it reminds me of this one, though on the opposite side. But more examples would be illuminating.
I can't reply to the flagged reply anymore, but I see now that I was thinking of this thread as "within the tech industry", while they were thinking of it more broadly. Looking up-thread, I see that that my more narrow interpretation isn't necessarily the right one.
Avoid Michael Eisen's twittersphere. You will be a better person for it (he is right that C.elegans is a very boring but useful model organism. The two main phenotypes it has are "dumpy" and "uncoordinated".
>Ironically the left has gone so mentally insane they are also cannibalising centre left now
American political alignment definitions never cease to amuse me.
I checked your twitter link tho and right of the bat the first is someone making a menu with watermelon water & cool aid for black history month and then lying it was set up by black colleagues. If there was no malintent they shouldn't be fired based on that but I'd seriously doubt their mental capacities and worry bout em drawing a blackface caricature on the chalkboard outside with the same supportiveness.
followed by ... some idiots organising segregated yoga classes asking white people to stay away and getting so much slack for it they closed down. You'd think that would show the opposite of what's intended by the OP.
And whilst i have no intent of getting a subscription to a tabloid what I did see of the second link seems to imply a few retards got mad on twitter?
I'd say among both libs and conservatives alike there's a huge drive to find loads of random specs of stupidity in a nation of hundreds of millions to be outraged about which serves to both vilify and build a strawman of the opposition whilst fuelling a victim-complex.
It really works well too from a political perspective.
While some of the incidents in the list are regrettable, much of the list is about trans issues. That's where the game is given up (trans issues are where the game is always given up) and it becomes obvious that the maintainer of the list is a bigot.
The list also has a bunch of references to Quillette, which is white supremacism for people that have a college degree.
Note it appears a majority of Facebooks top ten posts are from right wing sources. [1] This is not me suggesting a bias on the part of FB, but it‘s a clear data point against the now common talking point that “the right” are persecuted victims, not fairly represented on the Internet.
With regards to right wing pages who contact Facebook to get their flags resolved, the article seems to suggest it's inappropriate that they reached out directly -- but the business relationship is between Facebook and the user with a profile, not the user with a profile and a 3rd party.
These and other interventions appear to be in violation of Facebook’s official policy, which requires publishers wishing to dispute a fact check rating to contact the Facebook fact-checking partner responsible.
[...]
Instead of appealing to the fact-checker they immediately call their rep at Facebook...
This is a little like when my package gets lost, and -- very rarely -- the shipper tells me to contact the post office instead of simply claiming the insurance and refunding me. These shippers often don't give me the receipt I need to show the post office that it was insured -- because telling me to contact the post office is just another way to say, not my problem. The post office is likely to say: please contact the shipper...
If the user isn't happy with what Facebook did -- regardless of whose advice Facebook took -- they have every right to contact Facebook.
The very first amendment of the U.S.'s constitution outlies that the government cannot censor the expression of speech.
There's a big difference between a private company determining what is hosted on their servers vs. the U.S. government forcing a private company to censor speech.
> The very first amendment of the U.S.'s constitution outlies that the government cannot censor the expression of speech.
Turns out, they don't need to. Due to the fact that most people do not exercise any real control over the devices they use to read most expression, all they have to do is be able to regulate trade between app publishers and the {App,Play} Store.
This is how the US government is presently engaging in censorship of apps published by ByteDance (and soon Tencent). They can prohibit Apple/Google from transacting with the publisher, and because Apple/Google control the phones of the end users, the end users are effectively prohibited from reading the content published by that publisher.
First, only Apple devices have the issue of limited store access, which is a tangential antitrust problem unto itself.
Second, despite the claims of the president, the white house does not have the power to block TikTok or Bytedance from the public. The president can only block armed forces from installing apps on their owned devices.
The Epic Games store and Fortnite is precisely the counterexample to anyone saying there's a single store on Android devices.
Whatever sweetheart deal Epic worked out with Google in the end doesn't discredit that they successfully sold hundreds of thousands of copies outside of the the Google Play store.
This argument also intentionally ignores the existence of the Amazon app store on Android.
> Whatever sweetheart deal Epic worked out with Google in the end doesn't discredit that they successfully sold hundreds of thousands of copies outside of the the Google Play store.
They specifically state that they failed due to the constraints and had to back to the store.
> This argument also intentionally ignores the existence of the Amazon app store on Android.
Yeah sure, there's a few other minor stores but they are nowhere near the size of the Play Store.
Additionally we could compare to other markets, if you compare the number of companies which can host your website and the number of companies which can host your app, the numbers are going from hundreds of thousands to less than 10 for apps even by counting almost irrelevant stores.
What happens when that applies to ISPs determining what goes over their wires? We have a privately owned public square at this point. Further entrenching that power seems unwise.
This isn't about what is, but what should be. What makes Facebook different from FedEx that it should censor messages between willing participants?
Also, I note that you didn't list MasterCard, which has been known to cut perfectly legal businesses loose... and that's a very small industry. You have what? Visa/MasterCard, AMEX and Discover, pretty much.
Because Facebook is not an ISP nor a FedEx. They do not provide a service that ships information.
Now, you can muddy the semantics by saying, "Isn't every website an information shipper?" and even then the answer is still no, that still does not make them a common carrier.
There are what people want Facebook to be, which is some system supporting of their own political views, but the bad faith arguments to project Facebook into being an ISP are not sound.
You didn't answer the question from OP. "What makes Facebook different from FedEx that it should censor messages between willing participants?" Of course Facebook isn't a UPS or a mail carrier, etc, we know that.
Whether Facebook is an ISP or not isn't material to whether it should be a common carrier.
Facebook's social function is as a distributor of broadcast information and carrier of peer-to-peer information for two billion people. Further, network effects mean that Facebook's size makes it a natural monopoly.
There is no shortage of historical evidence that unregulated natural monopolies are bad news for everyone except their owners, and, given that Facebook's function is the distribution of information, the natural path for regulation in a free society is a common carrier designation.
> There's a big difference between a private company determining what is hosted on their servers vs. the U.S. government forcing a private company to censor speech.
So are media networks like CNN, MSNBC, Fox etc. They are private too. But they are still regulated. They can't post whatever they want and are held liable for any news that they present to their audience. Social media companies aren't regulated in the same way. They have more powers than the Government because they can literally censor anyone's speech they want. They can ban anyone they want. If they are left-leaning they can ban right-leaning content. If they are right-leaning they can ban left-leaning content. They are also not regulated like media networks because they are given immunity from liability through Section 230. They can never be held liable for what is posted on their platform. It is like having the cake and eating it too. Heck, they can even censor the US President's tweets and videos. This makes them extremely powerful. It is surprising to me that US citizens are perfectly fine with this setup.
I'm sorry, you're wrong. They are not regulated. The standard for a traditional news agent is they cannot publish known lies about a living person, because that exposes them to civil liability. A news program can choose to say whatever they think about anybody - the President, any candidate, whatever, and as long as nobody can prove that they knew it was a lie, they're fine. There's no obligation to show the President's content there either. They can choose not to show right-leaning or left-leaning content. They also have the same protections on the comments section. Any reliability or nonpartisanship in US news media comes solely from a cultural sense of ethics, not any legal framework.
They are. It is called "The Communications Act of 1934" in the United States. They are completely regulated by the FCC in US. They are regulated differently in different countries. In US, as an example, they have rules on political advertising. They have "equal time" rules where every political candidate "must" be given equal time and opportunity to air their viewpoints. No such regulations exist for social media companies.
They can be held liable for fake news or slander. Social media platforms cannot. Only the content posted in the editorial is considered personal opinion and not the position of the News Organization. That is the only page/section in the newspaper/news that does not expose the News Organization to liability/slander. That is why you have a separate "Editorial Section" in a newspaper where the editor can give his/her opinions without exposing the newspaper to liability. But of late, the news agencies have started using other pages for giving their opinions too (from harmless clickbait to downright slander) which is again a very risky choice to make. This exposes them to liability/slander. This is why regulation is so important. To ensure what is legally allowed and not allowed. News agencies are bound by such regulations. Social media organizations are not.
If news agencies publishes a hit piece on me that is obviously false, I can sue the news organization for slander. The news organization cannot claim that it believed the news reporter/agent who passed on wrong information about me and get away with it. The ultimate publisher is the news agency. Period. That is why the organization can be sued.
But if a user posts a hit piece on me in a social media platform I cannot sue the platform for allowing the user to post slanderous material. Because the platform shields itself from liability by taking advantage of the provisions of Section 230. This is because it calls itself a "platform" and not a "publisher". This is fine by me as long as it remains a platform. But once it starts censoring opinions (like Twitter/Facebook deleting Trump's tweet) then it no longer is a platform. It is now behaving as a publisher. Then why should it be protected by Section 230?
> because that exposes them to civil liability
Exactly. They are regulated. Even if a news agent publishes a fake story, the organization is responsible for it. They cannot carry it forward without verification because if they do, they end up becoming liable. Not the news agent. That is the whole point. The recent case that comes to mind is when Nick Sandmann was falsely accused of being racist against a Native American by all left-leaning media organizations (CNN, Washington Post etc). When the fact were completely different (if you watch the video in its entirety). He sued these media organizations and won. They had to settle the 250 million $ lawsuit. Can he sue Facebook/Twitter which carried this story more than any of the media organizations did? Nope. That is the reason why I say that social media organizations enjoys powers that neither the US Government nor the Media enjoys.
> There's no obligation to show the President's content there either. They can choose not to show right-leaning or left-leaning content
Yes that is right. But when they do show the President, then they have to let him have his say. They cannot either censor him or change what he meant. If they do that then they open themselves up to defamation/liability depending on what they actually did. Social media companies do not have any such issues as they are unregulated.
> by taking advantage of the provisions of Section 230. This is because it calls itself a "platform" and not a "publisher". This is fine by me as long as it remains a platform. But once it starts censoring opinions (like Twitter/Facebook deleting Trump's tweet) then it no longer is a platform. It is now behaving as a publisher. Then why should it be protected by Section 230?
The whole point of Section 230 is to allow platforms to moderate their content without becoming liable for it.
> The classic example involves Yelp, explains Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the United States Naval Academy and author of The Twenty-Six Words That Created The Internet, a book about Section 230. If someone posts a defamatory restaurant review on Yelp, Section 230 ensures that the restaurant can sue the person who wrote the review, but not Yelp itself. It protects everything from Facebook and YouTube to the recently deplatformed 8chan.
> Section 230 also says that platforms can’t be held liable if they take down any content they or their users consider “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
> The whole point of Section 230 is to allow platforms to moderate their content without becoming liable for it.
I am not against Section 230. I am against platforms misusing Section 230. They are a platform until they behave like one. When the platform itself starts behaving like a publisher rather than a platform then why should provisions of Section 230 apply?
> Section 230 also says that platforms can’t be held liable if they take down any content they or their users consider “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
So was Trump's video about kids being "almost immune" to Coronavirus "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable"? Which one was it? Are you seriously telling me that the President of the United States video about kids being "almost immune" to Coronavirus is in some violation of policy while porn/gore content that is posted on these platforms not? I have personally reported so many of these videos and they still haven't been removed. And if political issues are the reason for censorship then what about the other politicians in US and around the World who say as bad or worse things as Trump? Will same rules be applied there as well or not? If not, why not?
> In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
Then will these rules be applicable to everyone? In that case, I can give you a million tweets and comments that are "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable" which haven't been removed yet. Nor has Youtube removed "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable" videos from its platform.
It is clear bias at play here. If you try to tell me that it is not then you need to take a hike.
The law was designed to allow platforms to remove content without being legally liable for all of the content. If you disagree with that then you disagree with all of S230, and you need to campaign to have it removed and replaced.
> So was Trump's video about kids being "almost immune" to Coronavirus "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable"? Which one was it
It was "otherwise objectionable", because it's factually incorrect. Children do get covid-19, children do spread covid-19. They're unlikely to be harmed by covid-19, but that's not the claim he made, is it?
> > In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
> Then will these rules be applicable to everyone?
I genuinely don't understand how you don't understand this. "not obliged to host it" means "they don't have to host it", it doesn't mean "they have to search out everything that violates their policies and remove it".
Kids get the virus and in most cases their immune system handles it easily and clears it. We commonly call that "having immunity". You people have fucking brainworms.
> The law was designed to allow platforms to remove content without being legally liable for all of the content. If you disagree with that then you disagree with all of S230, and you need to campaign to have it removed and replaced.
There is no need to campaign really. I am not an American but US laws govern these social media companies that operate in India too. I have experienced first hand how these social media companies operate here in India and know their biases clearly.
> It was "otherwise objectionable", because it's factually incorrect
I don't understand "otherwise objectionable" to mean "factually incorrect". There are people who genuinely get a wrong idea of some process or procedure because not everyone is technically well versed. If I tomorrow say that stuxnet virus harmed my PC the technical minded you might say that it is factually incorrect because stuxnet is a worm and not a virus. So would you then censor my right to say it incorrectly? Do you want me to communicate to you perfectly and if not, that communication must be censored? Any reasonable person will allow that much of leeway. Not everyone can have perfect communication skills. Not everyone can be well versed in everything.
Anyways the point is that "otherwise objectionable" is too broad a term. For me, killing animals for food is objectionable. For you something else might be objectionable. That sort of power is not reasonable by any means for a platform to have. For instance, Twitter did not censor Ilhan Omar when she tweeted falsehood against Nick Sandmann and other Covington students. She later deleted that tweet when the true story came out into the open. But the damage was done. An innocent student's life was put at risk. All because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"In her tweet, Omar wrote that the male students were "protesting a woman's right to choose & yelled 'it's not rape if you enjoy it' " and "taunting 5 Black men before they surrounded Phillips and led racist chants.""
Did Twitter act on it? Nope. Why did it not when it was not just factually incorrect but also put a child's life at risk?
But truth be told I don't want Twitter to act on any content that is not illegal (like child pornography, terrorism, scams etc). In true spirit of Section 230, I want her tweets to remain for as long as she desires so people see for themselves what she represents. I want Trump's tweets to remain for as long as he desires so people see for themselves what he represents. Now that is a free platform right there.
I don't want social media companies to baby sit me. I don't want social media companies to tell me what to see and what not to see unless that material is banned/disallowed by law. I don't want my viewpoints censored because it doesn't match with the ones running the platform. Is that too much to ask for?
> They're unlikely to be harmed by covid-19, but that's not the claim he made, is it?
"Almost immune" qualifies as "unlikely to be harmed". Unless we both are referring to different dictionaries. This is nitpicking to be honest with you. It is only because it was Trump who said it that it is being made into a huge issue. Just like everyone took objection to Trump calling it Wuhan/China Virus when every outlet (CNN, MSNBC, Fox etc) was calling it by that name way before Trump even said it. Because "orange man bad".
> I genuinely don't understand how you don't understand this. "not obliged to host it" means "they don't have to host it", it doesn't mean "they have to search out everything that violates their policies and remove it".
It means precisely that. They have to search out everything that violates their policies and remove it. Because they said they are incapable of doing that, activist groups demanded them to provide tools which can be used to report such violations. But those tools are pretty much useless as I have repeatedly tried removing videos that blatantly violate their own policies but to no avail. Pornographic and Gore content is not allowed on Youtube according to Youtube's own guidelines. Yet those videos don't get removed and instead get "Age restricted". Because clearly they want that ad money more than following the rule of law.
Equal time is effectively defunct. Fairness doctrine was overturned in Meredith v FCC. The last remaining aspect of the Comms act of 1934 was the Zapple doctrine, covering explicitly candidates, and that was removed in 2014. There's no remaining regulation.
As for Section 230 protections for civil liability: Instead of suing the platform where the content was posted for slander, you'd sue the individual that posted it. S230 protections do not extend to where the platform's own speech (ex, Twitter's blog), and they don't shield the actual speaker, where you can still recover damages. Your own example goes to this end - Twitter didn't publish anything, CNN did, and he was able to convince a court that it was slander, so he was able to recover from CNN.
My impression (albeit, based partly upon my poor understanding of the world as a child) is that there used to be more general US clarity about the goodness/badness of propaganda, censorship, the press, etc.
I've heard that part of that clarity was because Cold War holding the US in contrast to the Soviets was itself a bit of perception management or PR. I could speculate on other factors, but I'm sure some historians and social scientists understand it vastly better.
Anecdotally, I do remember a time when, say, TV news programs would at least set some good examples of reasoning, not lower themselves closer to the transparently bad Fox News or talk radio behavior, which seemed to be to be even more ridiculous than what we'd been told the Soviets did. (Of course, the US has a history of abuse by those who control presses, but the institution still seemed to have merit.)
And I don't recall hearing of anything, even a decade ago, like apparently large numbers of people acting against their own other interests, solely for the adversarial sports team fan idea of "owning the libs". And also some inexplicably self-defeating behavior from elements of "the other side" (though I don't think that notion of "sides" is accurate or complete.)
I've been wondering whether the US populace used to be better at critical thinking. It's felt that way, but maybe the examples I'm aware of aren't representative.
Where we are now, talking about dotcoms being asked to gatekeep speech, I have only an ordinary citizens' understanding of many of policy issues, but I do have an experienced technologist's understanding that some of these dotcoms haven't been pinnacles of trustworthiness, integrity, etc. And the civic-minded American me wouldn't trust any of those dotcoms very far at all, with something that seems so fundamentally important to what I've grown up believing are bedrock principles of the US.
Government has a monopoly on legal use of violence so a monopoly on accepted expression would be the logical next step for power hungry people. That's why it's undesirable.
I haven't used Facebook for at least 5 years now. I use WhatsApp occasionally, so you can in fact, be blocked on Facebook and live. You cannot be blocked from participating in society and be free.
Facebook is a private company and is subject to competition. The government is not. We might have worried about Prodigy and CompuServe restricting speech (and we literally did, and that got us Section 230), but they're irrelevant now. We might have worried about MySpace, but it's irrelevant now. But the decisions the US government made in the 1990s and 2000s are incredibly relevant today, despite multiple changes in which party had the upper hand.
The Constitution places restrictions on what the government can do because government overreach is a particular, unique problem. It also provides for popular election to the government for the same reason - and nobody says that it's bad that we can't elect Facebook's leaders.
Now, perhaps the argument is that Facebook has grown too large and too powerful, to the point where Facebook censorship is worse than government censorship. If that's happened, that means we should have regulated Facebook a long time ago (and if we don't, we're on our way to your favorite cyberpunk dystopia where corporations are the real governments), and we should get around to doing so. But it hardly means that we should give in, treat Facebook like a government, and start saying "Facebook shall make no policy" any more than it means that we should vote for Facebook's CEO.
> Who can harass Facebook employees the most will probably win the shouting match.
Or who spends the most on ads.
> Citing “partner sensitivity," the rep noted that PragerU runs a lot of ads, and argued that the content in question qualified as opinion and was therefore exempt from being fact-checked.
So what's stopping the grocery store from denying you service because they don't like the poltical campaign bumper sticker on your car? This is not a good precedent.
Maybe it's cause I'm european, but if it were up to me: yes, in a heartbeat. The closer to (local) monopoly a company comes, the more it advertises itself as a universal provider, the less choice it should have in its customers. The easiest way to do this would be a radical expansion of the notion of protected class to cover at the least exercise of any fundamental right (such as speech).
To be explicit since for some reason people here are afraid to come out and say this: yes, I want to take that freedom away from American businesses and I would if I could. (I'd take it away from European businesses too.) That's what a law is - that's what every law is.
Agree with grocery stores, disagree with Facebook. It should be fungible, ie. required by law to expose APIs for interoperability with other social networks, but it isn't. Imagine if you needed a separate credit card per store you visited.
Before Visa and Mastercard became widespread, it was common for some stores to only accept their own proprietary charge cards. Even today, stores aren't legally required to accept particular cards. Some don't take American Express or Discover. Others only accept cash.
Right but cash is this for stores. If there's a special kind of cash that's only accepted at one store, I don't know if that's legal but I feel it either isn't or at least shouldn't be.
If Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A announce tomorrow morning that they are refusing service to all people who voted for a Democratic candidate in the last few election cycles (something that's within the realm of plausibility), what would be your initial reaction?
You did not answer the question - Do you want to take that freedom away from American businesses?
Political party is not a protected class, so those businesses are well in their right to do so (despite being sued by shareholders for eliminating half their revenue).
It's the same way that those businesses reserve the right to kick out Nazis and alt-right scum.
>Are you saying you want to take that freedom away from private businesses?
>You did not answer the question - Do you want to take that freedom away from American businesses?
Yes, I absolutely am. I am proposing that we legally enshrine political ideology as a protected class, as has been the common custom in the US until very recently. Freedom of speech is the most fundamental human right, and it needs to be protected in all venues, both public and private. Infringing on corporate personhood is a small price to pay for a free and open society.
Edit: (comment thread is too deep and not able to reply directly)
The recent trend of trying to silence political opponents represents an existential threat to our democracy. I'm really baffled how others in this thread are not able to see why that is. Nowhere in this discussion have I claimed to be persecuted, or have I even established what my political leanings are.
Political ideology is a choice, and as such, not protected by the civil rights act of 1964.
You can wish you were a victim of persecution for your political choice, but it is still your choice, and as such, people can also choose to not employ or serve you for your decision.
Opinions and ideology might be mutable but they are not a choice. You get convinced into them, this is not something that you can just choose.
Anyway, I would argue that simply protecting immutable characteristics without also protecting certain actions does not make sense. For example it makes no sense to protect sexual orientation but not the action of holding your partner's hand in public or publically saying that you are of a certain orientation - after all your employer/person that you are doing business with would likely not know your sexual orientation without doing either of the above actions.
> legally enshrine political ideology as a protected class
“Political ideology” is infinitely extensible. To enshrine it as a protected class removed all meaning from the latter.
> as has been the common custom in the US until very recently
The Revolutionary War was a political question. How were Loyalists treated? Following that, how did Federalists and Jeffersonians interact in the social sphere? More recently, how did the labour union debate get peacefully resolved? Or American participation in WWI get non-violently debated?
My initial reaction - I've been trying to get all my Democratic-voting friends to stop paying money to Chick-fil-A. If they want to do it for me, great.
Now, I might think that Chick-fil-A is making a bad business decision, but part of what it means to be in America is that you have the freedom to make bad decisions.
Certainly, as someone who has voted Democrat, is religious, and is not white, I believe that the three of those are of quite different levels of voluntary choice on my behalf and I don't think that laws/social norms that apply to the most involuntary of those should apply without change to the most voluntary of those.
> what's stopping the grocery store from denying you service because they don't like the poltical campaign bumper sticker on your car?
The principle of free speech restrains them. Nothing does—nor should—stop them.
Civil freedom of speech is difficult to enshrine into law. It balances against other freedoms in a complex, unpredictable way. (For example, the freedom of assembly. If someone says something distasteful, one should be free to not associate with them.) But it has its place as a cultural value.
It is also sensitive to context. A bumper sticker on an employee’s car is quite different from one on a customer’s.
Nothing, and that's a good thing, because now that wearing masks is a partisan political issue, grocery stores should feel entirely within their rights to ban people who refuse to wear masks even if they claim political grounds, and they should not be forced by the government to let people in.
In America, the default is that private businesses, even those who provide a service to the public, get to choose who they engage in business with and how, with no interference from the government. There are very narrow exceptions (Civil Rights Act, ADA, antitrust, etc.) when absolutely necessary.
The first amendment was written when the idea of a corporation as large and powerful as Facebook was unthinkable. We need better protection for free speech that applies to corporate platforms (or perhaps to just apply the same common carrier rules we apply to the phone system to other platforms).
The East India Trading Company preceded the writing of the First Amendment by some distance, and that company for some period accounted for fully 1/2 of all global trade.
Giant corporate entities with incentives intertwined and power competing with established governments have been a thing long before Facebook rose to prominence and long before the US Constitution was ratified.
If you think the Dutch West Indies Corporation ever had even a patch on the cultural influence that Facebook has though the behaviour of it’s algorithm, you’re being utterly delusional.
> the Dutch West Indies Corporation ever had even a patch on the cultural influence that Facebook has though the behaviour of it’s algorithm
Sorry, where are the armed men operating directly under Facebook’s officers’ command, raining down atrocity and terror on entire subcontinents of humans?
The Dutch West Indies Corporation ate entire countries for breakfast, and wasn't hiding it either. While tech companies can certainly play a role in communication when overthrowing governments, they aren't usually rolling in to other countries and taking over whatever they want.
The British East India was also founded around the same time. Their cultural impact was at the time certainly as vast as Facebook's, the company literally passed laws in India.
> - But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgement with absolutely no due process is obviously okay???
That's literally the opposite of what is alleged to be happening. Facebook's fact check policy is notionally implemented by third party fact checkers over whom Facebook exerts no control. But the contention in the article is that Facebook executives then intervene in the process to UN-flagging content that fits their personal political bent.
> - Government taking out fake news is actually bad??
Government definitely shouldn't be the one to decide what is and isn't fake news [0].
> - But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgement with absolutely no due process is obviously okay???
Since it's a private company I feel it's ok. Personally I'm more right-wing / libertarian oriented and I feel my Twitter account got banned because of me expressing more right-wing views. I tried to ask Twitter employees what was the offending post that got me banned, but never got a response. At that point I stopped using Twitter altogether.
I feel Jack Dorsey himself is more open to different view points, but perhaps many of his employees are more left-wing oriented and might feel it's their mission to curtail right-wing views, but this is just my gut feeling that I can't proof.
Since it's a private company I feel it's ok they operate like that. But at the same time I won't bother with Twitter anymore (I also don't use Facebook by the way).
A day ago, "Facebook removed from Trump’s official account the post of a video clip from a Fox News interview in which he said children are “almost immune” from covid-19." (source WP)
Is this really misinformation, or a false statement, worthy of censoring a presidents speech. For one, "almost immune", is not the same as claiming "immune". So its not even like its even a false statement, anymore than saying I "almost caught" a fish, when you didn't.
The implication is that children have low infection rate.
Regardless of the truth value, of "almost immune", removing the post, also robs people of valuable information, like for example, if Trump is leaning to have schools open in September.
My question is why censor the US President? Let people know what Trump says and make their own judgement. I hate this sort of political censorship by social media giants. At the same time, you can literally find porn and gore on these sites which aren't taken down automatically. What with advancements in AI and all it should be easy to remove right? Nope. These are the videos that linger on even after you report them. And they have ads running on them too.
If they think people are fools and won't notice it they are so wrong. It is only going to amplify voices for an alternative platform. My fear is that it will create platforms divided on political biases rather than a truly free platform where people from all sides can participate. This sort of polarization is not healthy.
Eye-opening how many HN comments are framing this guy as a demented political extremist. He’s a whistleblower exposing one of the most frightening threats to modern democracy that exists.
We are beyond the speculation point here. Facebook has demonstrated that it has the capability to spread misinformation and sway political opinion very effectively and never for the right reasons. The pandemic is the most recent example of Facebook’s fuckery: post something that tells people that Covid is caused by 5G and that Bill Gates wants to implants microchips in you? You might get a small disclaimer on your FB post saying that “parts of it” “may be” inaccurate. You are constantly fed anything to keep you engaged with the platform and increasing Facebook’s bottom line.
Zuckerburg has just spun to Congress that Facebook is going to extreme lengths to moderate their platform - this employee’s testimony is proof that Facebook doesn’t care in the least or worse, they may be actively trying to help along candidates who will be politically lenient towards their behavior. We just discovered a “bug” caused Republican ads to show at a more frequent rate than Democratic ads - I don’t know what’s more worrying: that a bug on Facebook could swing the election or that it wasn’t a bug at all.
People need to stop with the “I know good people at Facebook” B.S. It’s beside the point. Facebook is a rogue actor that has enormous social and political power to completely mislead the general public into practically any belief. They have continued to demonstrate that they cannot be trusted with this power. This man should be praised as a whistleblower for exposing the charade that is an unregulated Facebook. We need more like him in tech to show people how serious the problem is. Give me a break with the analyses on whether he should have been fired or not and recognize the scope of the problem he is trying to warn is about. The quality of our democracy is absolutely at stake.
Not just Facebook but Twitter and social media as whole. We are are all voluntarily choosing to support technology that beams us deception, mistruths, and lies of omission at all times. Worse, we like it because of our own vanity. Aldous Huxley warned about a society where people voluntarily enter into a totalitarian society because they are both easily deceived and receive cheap instant gratification from those in control. Seems like we are about here.
> Eye-opening how many HN comments are framing this guy as a demented political extremist. He’s a whistleblower exposing one of the most frightening threats to modern democracy that exists.
Clearly you're a demented political extremist as well.
For this employee’s sake, I hope they have adequate legal representation, and that they intend to sue.
> While there are signs Facebook will stand up to Trump in cases where he violates its rules — as on Wednesday when it removed a video post from the president in which he claimed that children are “almost immune” to COVID-19 — there are others who suggest the company is caving to critical voices on the right. In another recent Workplace post, a senior engineer collected internal evidence that showed Facebook was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content.
> The company responded by removing his post and restricting internal access to the information he cited. On Wednesday the engineer was fired, according to internal posts seen by BuzzFeed News.
Depending on which media outlet you turn to Facebook is trying to skew the election towards Trump or Biden. Depending on your political bias you get the story that fits your narrative. Perhaps our framing is off?
I'm sorry, but Damore claimed that women biologically lacked the ability to fill as leadership and programmer roles as men, which broke his employment agreement with Google to not perpetuate stereotypes, hence he was fired.
The window dressing and weak-worded arguments in his memo may have you thinking otherwise, but he was fired specifically for this reason, and even he confirmed as much to the press.
Edit:
For all the Damore apologists replying, here's the statement in question that he made:
>>I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership"
And also states that "women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading" due to biological reasons such as "higher agreeableness".
Indeed, Damore was careful to respect the difference between individuals and distributions. Of course everyone immediately ignored that and behaved like he'd been talking about the former.
>I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why
we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
> stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
That's not the same as saying that women are incapable of anything. Your pattern recognition engine has problems.
The people who read the above statement by Damore and think he meant that women can't be in tech/leadership positions is just confirming their own world view of full equality of outcomes.
So much so that they cannot even have a discussion with rational evidence and neutrality, of whether there are systemic biological differences that, in the aggregate, cause these unequal representations. The premise is dismissed immediately, and labelled bigotry or anti-feminist, discriminatory, sexist, and all manner of other derogatory terms.
I'm sorry that most of the other replies to your comment end with sass or sarcasm. However, you are misunderstanding that quote if you think it implies that women are biologically incapable of anything, or that _all_ women are biologically _less_ capable of anything. And by that I don't mean you're misunderstanding the intent or the subtext (what he really meant), I mean you are definitely not understanding the literal meaning of the quote.
Nobody is claiming that Damore said it applies to all women, in fact, he hides his argument behind an appeal to averages. He says that no individual women is less capable than men, but on average, women are. The same way that a racist would say, "I'm not saying all black men are criminals, but on average, they go to prison more."
This is what I was referring to about weak-wording earlier. Damore claims that he's pro-diversity, then makes anti-diversity arguments. He gives the tone of a peer reviewed paper, but really it's a word doc with cherry picked citations. He claims that it's not all women, just distributed averages (so the typical woman) on a whole.
> The same way that someone would say, "I'm not saying all black men are criminals, but on average, they go to prison more."
This is unfortunate but also true. Which is exactly what Damore might say about the distribution of this or that attribute among women being shifted from that of men. I don't see the point of lining up a true statement with Damore's when I believe you are claiming his statement is false.
I also don't see what makes the wording "weak." There's nothing weak about trying to describe something in a nuanced way. And it's perfectly possible to be pro-diversity while also claiming what Damore has claimed, in the same way that it's possible to support BLM while also believing that more black people go to prison (your example).
> He claims that it's not all women, just distributed averages (so the typical woman) on a whole.
Please just say this next time. This is the hypothesis that Damore actually backed, and if it turned out to be true it wouldn't prove anything about any individual woman. It wouldn't even prove anything about any select subset of women, insofar as that subset was not selected randomly. It's positively tame compared to the claim that so many are quick to mis-attribute to Damore: "All women are less capable of X, Y, or Z"
>"I'm not saying all black men are criminals, but on average, they go to prison more."
Is that the underlying causation behind this 'fact' is that there is systemic bias against black men from law enforcement and the rest of society.
This is why we have diversity programs.
James Damore's argument is that diversity programs are moot because he says there is no systemic bias against women. Just as if a racist were arguing against diversity programs because they say there is no systemic bias against black men, because really, on average black men "just go to prison more".
Whether or not it's the average or the individual is a red herring. The point is Damore misrepresents data to argue against systemic bias - data which is inherently culpable to the same systemic bias he is arguing against.
> ...the underlying causation behind this 'fact' is that there is systemic bias against black men from law enforcement and the rest of society.
How is this rhetoric any better than Damore's? At best we can do studies that demonstrate the existence of bias, but we're nowhere near able to say that surely that bias is "the underlying cause of black people going to prison more" or that "this is why we have diversity problems". You're at least as bad as Damore. You want to believe that something is a certain way so you take inconclusive data and pretend like one hypothesis is not merely superior, but obviously, completely true.
> data which is inherently culpable to the same systemic bias...
How can data be culpable? And what data would this argument not invalidate? Has data every been collected by an fully un-biased society? Or can I, taking Damore's side, just throw out any data that shows that bias was the cause of a certain outcome and claim that, "this research is invalidated by the systemic bias in our society to attribute diversity problems to systemic bias."
> Is that the underlying causation behind this 'fact' is that there is systemic bias against black men from law enforcement and the rest of society.
No. The underlying causation by large consensus in the research community is that high crime rate is heavily caused by low social economic status.
Discrimination by law enforcement is not the primary cause of low social economic status. Racism in society contribute to lower social economic status for people of color but it too is not the main causation. Parents social economic status has the single largest impact on any individual social economic status and historical racism is the primary reason why African Americans as an demographic has lower social economic status than white Americans and why as a result, on average, African Americans commit more crime than white people. Programs which does not acknowledge and understand the critical relationship between social economic status and crime are unlikely to have any direct effect on crime or the rate in which African Americans end up in jail.
Which is why a lot of people in current time is arguing against diversity programs that tries to fix the problem by attacking the legal system. Its highly questionable if such programs can ever have any meaningful effect. A strategy that is more likely to succeed would be to address the social economic status issue through desegregation, social security, social economic support to parents, improving the education system in low social economic areas, access to health care, minimum wages, and other strategies that focus on the bottom 20% in the wealth hierarchy.
Different people can share the same goals but have distinctly different views on the causation and best strategy to achieve it. It does not mean it is a red herring or that they pretend to be against the goal. It just mean they have different ideas on how to reach it.
Yet none of what you wrote supports an interpretation of "women are incapable of X" which is factually false and intellectually dishonest. Claiming he supports such a position is just dogwhistling.
>Damore claims that he's pro-diversity, then makes anti-diversity arguments
You choose to see any criticism of diversity (even constructive) as an ideological attack.
Beware of stating "he hides his argument"! A hidden argument is very hard to distinguish from an argument they didn't make in the first place, especially when it matches your preconceived belief. That's usually a sign that you're letting ideology blind you to observation, and serves in that sense a similar role to so-called "dogwhistles" that somehow tend to end up more audible and salient to one's enemies than allies.
It's the same as the Richard Stallman case, some person (deliberately?) misinterperts words to suit their ideological agenda, and gets reported as news. Intellectual dishonesty at it's worst.
The "abilities" mention in there is pretty tantalizing, since as far as I can tell, "ability" isn't actually mentioned anywhere else. The memo instead prefers mentions of a few personality-type differences that are less controversial, combined with some "maybes" about how these differences benignly explain the gender imbalances at the company. Biological IQ difference gets only a passing mention as "science denial by The Left." One wonders about the other kinds of "biological" differences that were edited out before the document was posted.
The preceding post overstates how strong the memo was in its rhetoric, but the whole thing is kind of a mess: it simultaneously argues that women are worse at negotiating salaries and raises and also that there is also no pay gap for equal work, it allows as how diversity might be important, but only for those "soft" UX-adjacent roles like design and testing (which are not really "tech" as opposed to software engineering), posits alternative "solutions" based around catering to its identified inherent differences for women but also undercuts each one, and just generally veers off onto wild tangents like the spending of taxpayer money, "violent leftist protests at universities," the superiority of capitalism over communism, and more.
One does get the impression that Damore came from a certain ideological milieu, yes. However, it still seems since he went out of his way to only make claims that he would actually defend, it seems wrong to round him off to one's suspicion of his intentions anyways. Limiting yourself to sourced, defensible claims should not be this pointless, or else fewer and fewer people will see the point in doing so.
>I'm sorry, but Damore claimed that women were biologically incapable of leadership and programmer roles
>I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
im sorry but im not seeing the connection between these two statements here
If I said women are biologically not as tall as men, does that mean women biologically incapable of being as tall as men? Or does that just mean that given a tall person, it's more likely to be a male?
Maybe a math example?
Let Female ~ N(161.8, sigma), Male ~ N(170.0, sigma)
Let's say someone is Tall if height > 170.0 cm
Then P(Male|Tall) > P(Female|Tall).
The entire argument is that given 1000 people, where 800 are men and 200 are women. Suppose that 1/10 is an exceptional engineer. There are going to be 80 men and 20 men who are exceptional. Suppose we want to only hire exceptional people. Trying to achieve 80 men and 80 women (equality) using the same pool will result in 60 unqualified women being hired. Now whether these incentives will result in the pool being rebalanced is a more nuanced discussion, but from a realist point of view, there is no reason to hire unqualified people.
Being tall isn't usually regarded as an ability. Also, if I remember correctly, he was talking about differences in the long tail, not differences in the mean.
If you're looking for biological long-tail distribution differences, sports world and Olympic record differences are probably your best argument. A combination of sexism and biological differences are to blame for there being very few female players in the NFL, NBA, and MLB, despite none of them currently having rules against female players. (I'm only aware of Ann Meyers Drysdale.)
In any case, virtually nobody argues against natural physical ability differences between men and women. Damore was clearly talking about mental abilities, so pointing out physical ability differences are a straw-man argument.
The population argument stands, whether differences exist or not.
Secondly, if you accept physical differences exist but refuse to accept mental difference exist? Physical difference are mental differences, biology is physical. If you accept physical differences then by definition you accept mental differences exist.
There are barely any white players in the NBA, is that the result of racism or more due to biological factors?
> Secondly, if you accept physical differences exist but refuse to accept mental difference exist.
If you're arguing about mental abilities, you should site studies about mental abilities. Yes, the mind is physical, but it's much more malleable than the musculo-skeletal system, so analogies break down quickly.
> There are barely any white players in the NBA, is that the result of racism or more due to biological factors?
Likely a combination of both biological and social factors.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm not saying you're right. I'm saying your arguments need improvement.
I'm confused as to which statements you think are nonnsense. I count 5 statements in my post:
1. There exist studies of mental abilities
2. The mind is physical
3. The mind it's much more malleable than the musculo-skeletal system
4. The malleability of the mind makes analogies to the musculo-skelatal system fall apart quickly
5. The prevalence of African Americans in the NBA is likely a combination of both biological and social factors
My best guess is that you think it's nonsense that analogies between non-mental and mental abilities break down quickly because of the malleability of the human mind. If you feel that way, feel free to try and make some insightful inferences by analogy between physical abilities and mental abilities. I just don't think it's a fruitful avenue to explore.
For instance, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of naturally strong people who with 3 months training can bench press more than I could after 10 years of training. I doubt there many people out there who are smart enough to go from no computer training to programming better than your average 10 year veteran developer in 3 months. It's silly to use studies about weight training to make inferences about the effectiveness of mental training.
But, maybe you have other sorts of analogies in mind that make much more sense.
Edit: after looking up Debra Soh's book, it seems you've confused critique of arguments for critique of conclusions. I haven't made any statements one way or the other about if men and women differ mentally. I've just pointed out bad arguments. Faulty arguments don't necessarily even mean that the underlying reasoning is faulty. And faulty reasoning doesn't imply the conclusions are wrong.
I get this a lot, where people think I'm disagreeing with their conclusions just because I'm trying to get them to make better arguments and/or clean up their reasoning. I care less about this particular argument than I do about people learning to think and argue clearly. I get that it's a weird attitude, but I think the world is better off with us all reasoning and arguing better.
With all due respect, I don't think your assertion is correct that the Damore memo claimed that "women [are] biologically incapable of leadership and programmer roles".
Instead, what the memo said was that statistically, women have a different distribution of traits than men, and this difference in distribution may lead to, on average, women being less predisposed to software engineering roles as they exist today. It did not say that women are incapable of being software engineers. Instead the message is that women who are happy in a software engineering role (and therefore women who will work as software engineers) are going to be further out on the bell curve than men who are happy as software engineers, and so there will be fewer of them.
The memo also suggested some ways to improve gender diversity without discrimantory hiring practises (based on the assumption that these statistical trait differences are in fact the main cause of gender ratio differences), which I think was a positive contribution to the discussion.
Overall I think the memo made some good points (although it is maybe a little long-winded and could be more rigorously cited). I'd encourage you to read it in full if you haven't just to understand what it's saying. There is a PDF at https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I... .
Edit: I do agree that claiming that women may have different abilities, as opposed to simply preferences, is problematic and oversteps the bounds of professionalism. This claim was limited to two words in one place in the document ("and abilities"), but I don't think that's the major bent of the document.
is it just me or would it be very hard to work at Facebook these days without constantly experiencing cognitive dissonance day in and day out?
feels like the only way to enjoy working there is to either be someone who only cares about the money and prestige and/or convince yourself that the criticisms against Facebook are invalid
I can assure you that what you’re imagining Facebook to be has nothing to do with how Facebook is on the inside. There are way more of these debates and internal discussions, which reflects that Facebook’s employees have pretty diverse point of views.
Unrelated but anybody found the timing uncanny between the Instagram TikTok competition being launched the same week that Trump starts talking about banning it? That and all the heat Facebook/Zuckerberg have been taking to enable political ads (compared to Twitter/Dorsey), plus private dinners with the current administration that is very protectionist? Anyways, it's interesting to see how the US government will handle all this foreign established tech companies to handle their data by messing with the free market.
His arguments and reasoning were edited for tone and posted by others and HR did not take any of that down. He wasn't fired for what he said, but how he said it. His post was vicious and demeaning toward other FB employees. It directly attacked the character and ethical constitution of specific employees in the company.
That said, HR did later revoke open access to some of the specific details he used to make his case (conversations around investigating and escalating user reports). FB gives employees access to much more than most companies, so the sort of things HR made secret would not be visible at most US companies.
Although I think at FB there are many things you can't say, his actual beliefs were not bold or rare. Many people say similar things all the time. But you can't go around attacking people like that.
He wasn't fired for how he said it. The post was taken down for that. He was fired because he demonstrated that leadership is dishonest. They rewrote norms on the fly to justify firing over normal access to non-user data.
Calling people by those things in a work environment might not be the best strategy to demonstrate process irregularities.
&
>HR did later revoke open access to some of the specific details he used to make his case (conversations around investigating and escalating user reports).
Aren't these essentially identical aside from the timeline?
Edit: Or at least your opinion on why they would do that.
I have no opinion about why content was hidden. At nearly any other company the same content would have always been secret.
If his cited sources (which presumptively were somewhat important to the point he was making) should (or would have, which may be subjective. I don't know because I'm not a Facebook employee and have no direct knowledge of the now-secret information) have been secret, then it stands to reason that it would have been more difficult for him to make his point.
If that's the case, it sounds like they've changed an entire policy organization-wide to stop more posts like this, or they've made no global policy changes and selectively hidden information that would support his point. Either way I'm curious about this culture of openness and what defines its limits.
Of the handful of people I know who work at FB, all of them are super smart and motivated. Half of them have expressed a lot of anxiety, stress, and imposter syndrome to me over their reviews. I’ve seen this at other companies when a project is failing but I hear about it at FB from A players who are working on successful projects. It gives me the impression the managers must be brutal - like they just push harder than other companies and make people feel they aren’t good enough to get more output. These are my impressions as an outsider. Does it seem fair to you?
Leadership sets the tone and culture so it's always leadership's fault if culture is toxic.
Nah, I am just kidding, this is the internet and you can write anything on it. The bias thing is real tough to anyone who can read words with more than 3 syllables without using a finger.
Though the comment might well be entirely legitimate and honest, HN participants are collectively giving the top comment, on a corporate PR emergency, to what I imagine is exactly what an underhanded PR operative might do.
I think this suggests that HN -- which I believe is managed with some of the best intentions and methods out there right now -- has some of the same vulnerabilities as the subject of this story.
Of course manipulation is possible, and bad, but so are insinuations of manipulation without evidence, and the latter are (by every indication I've seen) orders of magnitude more common. That's why the site guidelines ask you not to post like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
In the long run, if manipulation ends up dominating forums like HN, the only real solution is to do what we ought to all be doing anyway: have a culture in which arguments are answered by better arguments. Since that's the only long-term immunity, we might as well develop it now.
Hopefully, a marketplace of ideas will be sufficient in practice here.
If I am to take the comment I need something that would give some credibility to it, like having some way to verify the claims or if that is not possible, have a real person that puts their word behind the claim.
There is a reason why it is not possible for anonymous witness to testify in court and the reason is that anonymous person can say whatever they want with no responsibility for their words. It is exactly that responsibility and accountability that gives credibility to the witness.
The damaging power of rumor comes from the fact that you can't tell whether the information is true or not, but you pass it anyway. The act of passing the rumor is already causing damage even if you don't act on the information in any other way.
For you this might seem innocuous but many people have been completely broken by a simple rumor and that's why I have always been taught that spreading or allowing to spread rumors is always a bad thing to do.
It's also true that such comments can be counterfeited, which is where this gets complicated. But HN would be worse off without that class of comments. It's a legit use for throwaway accounts.
Are they verifiable? I don't think that's the best standard to apply to internet comments. The vast majority aren't. You have to assess credibility, but I wouldn't call that verification. In the case of a throwaway account, the only public information for assessing credibility is the content of the comments themselves, but that's not all that different from the usual situation on the internet. Admins have it a bit easier because there is other data we can also look at.
If we can't, then can we proactively discourage bad actors a different way? Or somehow sufficiently right harm done and unjust advantage taken, after the fact?
That way if you got something important to say there is a backstory to verify.
Of course this can be gamed and personas can be built as a weapon for future conflicts but at least the option is available for me and you to communicate with some credibility without opening us up to offline attacks. (I was originally writing IRL, but online is Real Life IMO, it is just that some parts of my online life doesn't point back a single identity.)
There are a number of people here who run two accounts, like me. It is mostly a good thing IMO and totally OK with the mods as long as the alt accounts follow the rules and doesn't change too often. This is my third in a decade or so I think.
You can, and sometimes you should.
What looks embarrassing for the person they do this and then act surprised when the people they attacked retaliate, especially if those people are wealthier and / or better connect.
"Although I think at FB there are many things you can't say, his actual beliefs were not bold or rare. Many people say similar things all the time. But you can't go around attacking people like that." - that's what people do 'on' Facebook all the time and no action is taken.
Free speech does not mean you can say whatever you want without consequences.
Arguably, one purpose of HR is to help employees work well together. It is in their literal job description to be arbiter of decency.
Wrong. The First Amendment means that Congress isn't allowed to silence the media. The First Amendment and "free speech" are entirely different entities, with really not much shared between them. The First Amendment is a law and what it does and doesn't mean has been quite precisely specified by the Supreme Court. "Free speech" is a more loosely-specified concept, and is much broader than the First Amendment. One could easily believe (as I and many others do) that free speech is very valuable, so valuable that it deserves even stronger protections than those granted by the First Amendment.
Free speech: the freedom to speak one's mind (this can apply in any context).
Any and all consequences for speaking one's mind are a direct assault on one's freedom of speech in the relevant context, by definition.
The first amendment protects individuals who speak their minds from government imposed consequences for doing so. This is meant to prevent the government from curtailing their freedom to express themselves.
"Freedom of speech, not freedom from consequence" means (in the context of the US) that even if there aren't any governmental consequences for speaking your mind there might still be social ones.
Hypothetical situation: People debate the merits of a non-governmental entity (for example, an employer) placing various restrictions on speech in some context (say, in the work place). Someone comes along and glibly points out that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence". Said commenter has _completely_ missed the point.
Is the implication of violence/aggression in said speech is a justified consequence?
> Said commenter has _completely_ missed the point
I'm I understanding this correctly, this is because it is against the principle of free speech, and people might conflate it with 1A? Isn't it preconditioned on everyone being on the same page about free speech? We've seen people having extreme opinions being shunned by the the rest of the cohort. How does this group then maintain cohesion, rather is it even possible to do so?
I'm not quite sure what you're asking here, but note that I was speaking to definitions (ie I wasn't debating the merits of any particular situation). Employing relevant terms in a mutually understood manner is a prerequisite for the productive conversation of a topic.
> this is because it is against the principle of free speech, and people might conflate it with 1A?
You misunderstand. In the hypothetical situation, the merits (or extent, or mechanics, etc) of free speech (ie the principle) in some specific social context (ex at work) are being discussed. Someone shows up to the party and unhelpfully points out what the current legal realities are. But the legal status isn't what's under discussion - in context, it's an off topic comment that serves only to derail the conversation.
That's the narrow redefinition of free speech that's currently in vogue with people who want to crack down on free speech. The whole time I was growing up, until quite recently in fact, free speech meant the freedom to speak your mind. The idea that people would routinely get fired for voicing their opinions, which is the world the new ideologues want to create for us, would have seemed shockingly unfree.
The classic cliché of the limits of free speech is "yelling fire in a crowded theater". That's where society used to draw the limit. Those lines are being way, way, way moved, and the people moving them are pretending that they're just reiterating the old standard. It's a radical shift, and everyone who doesn't subscribe to this orthodoxy can feel it, even if they're too vulnerable to be able to stand up to the priests.
However, I have to nitpick for accuracy. Despite becoming a cliche, "yelling fire in a crowded theater" was never actually the standard in the US. Currently it's "imminent lawless action". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action)
Also, firing someone stops them from receiving a paycheck, not from speaking.
For a long time, it was the left who championed this. Noam Chomsky, an archetype of the left, has always been one of the biggest free-speech advocates in the US, and takes a far more expansive view than "free speech only means the government can't put you in prison". He advocated for Walt Rostow, a technocrat whom he had condemned in print as a war criminal, to be allowed to teach at MIT. But he's a libertarian socialist, and the left has taken an authoritarian turn.
The social-media driven ideological lust for driving wrong-speakers out of their jobs (and inflicting anything else the mob can muster) is clearly a recent development in America, and you have to go back at least to McCarthyism to find anything comparable.
I'm not sure I believe any of that but I think it is an interesting idea.
People reiterating it to justify banning people have to live with the fact that they too might get excluded.
We have certainly dogmatic speech rules around racism and sexism while most people don't really perpetuate it, but can still be penalized if some schmuck thinks you have crossed a line of imagined decency.
Companies are really bad at policing speech, of course it would be restrictive. People demanding more of it should just be ignored because they haven't thought it through.
4 years ago, 63M people voted for an explicitly racist and sexist candidate in the US Presidential Elections. Yeah, they do "really perpetuate it".
Yeah, that's not true. If you believe the last 4 years would have been the same or worse under Clinton, I don't know what to tell you - you're suffering from Clinton Derangement Syndrome and are utterly disconnected from reality.
Regardless, it is not whether about "the last 4 years would have been the same or worse under Clinton" but rather whether "the last 4 years would have been significantly better with clinton". If I was given the option between horse poop and elephant poop I would choose neither.
EDIT: Maybe she would have defended syria during the Turkish invasion but I seriously doubt it.
The fact that you can question whether almost literally anyone else as President would be "significantly better" than the trash fire that is the current US situation is astonishing.
> If I was given the option between horse poop and elephant poop I would choose neither.
The thing is, in politics, you don't get to "choose neither" because you get one or the other and that choice, regardless of how pure and glowy you feel inside about your moral high ground, has direct and lasting consequences for everyone in the country (and, to some extent, outside it too.)
Depends where you live I guess. I have quite a few friends in the Middle East or in Damascus who are happy to not have been bombed. There's absolutely no doubt that Hillary was much more of a war hawk than trump has been. I'd even say he has been the least hawkish president in the past 40 years.
Everyone that I know has been saying that for their own country for ages, I personally believe that the US is doing much better when compared with certain European nations (such as Britain for example). As I mentioned before comparatively with the past presidents Trump (at least in my limited european view) has done less evil (I mentioned it before, cancelled TPP and did not declare any war). If you disagree I would be glad if you could explain how Clinton specifically would do better.
> you don't get to "choose neither"
I do, I get to vote for a 3rd party that will at least vote for sane choices in the parlement.
> regardless of how pure and glowy you feel inside about your moral high ground
I do not appreciate your tone (including from the previous post: "you're suffering from Clinton Derangement Syndrome and are utterly disconnected from reality"). Surely we can acknowledge our differences in opinion and have a civilized debate without this.
> has direct and lasting consequences for everyone in the country
And so would voting for your preferred candidate. There would be no point on voting if it made absolutely no difference.
It's impossible to argue a counterfactual but: she wouldn't have bungled her way into letting 160,000+ people die from COVID-19; I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have colluded with the Russians; Wouldn't have seen the illegal occupancy of government positions by unconfirmed nominees; Wouldn't have the Emoluments Clause in shreds; Doesn't have a charity that's been found to be little more than a funnel to their own pockets; Almost certainly wouldn't have started a catastrophically stupid trade war with China; Wouldn't have alienated Europe (except for the right wing countries); Wouldn't have pulled out of WHO, etc.
I mean, I could go on for hours listing the things that any rational person would have avoided doing if they were elected.
> Surely we can acknowledge our differences in opinion and have a civilized debate without this.
No, not really, if you honestly believe that Clinton is even within orders of magnitude as horrific as Trump.
She might have done somewhat better, sure, but the economy would suffer even more in return (which implies homelessness, debt, etc). It is not an easy choice to make regardless.
> colluded with the Russians
I do not find anything wrong with this.
> Wouldn't have seen the illegal occupancy of government positions by unconfirmed nominees; Wouldn't have the Emoluments Clause in shreds
I do not know anything about these so I will take your word.
> Doesn't have a charity that's been found to be little more than a funnel to their own pockets
This is not relevant to him being a president unless if he has been using public money to funnel money to himself by using it.
> Almost certainly wouldn't have started a catastrophically stupid trade war with China
Said trade war has been going on for a while (and was started by china), most HN commenters seem to take the US side in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24077339 for example. In addition I was under the impression that the Democratic party has anti-china policies too.
> Wouldn't have alienated Europe
That again had happened before Trump came to power, although admittedly Trump worsened it. Still, I think that this is a minor issue.
> Wouldn't have pulled out of WHO
I do not find anything wrong with this either. WHO is quite responsible for the current state regarding covid and I am pretty sure that they continue their anti-mask propaganda.
Honestly, all of these seem like minor things when considering what I mentioned before (which I would rather not keep repeating but here they are: the TPP and the various invasions that Clinton or her Husband started or assisted). At the same time I doubt that she would be able to resolve the NK situation.
> No, not really, if you honestly believe that Clinton is even within orders of magnitude as horrific as Trump.
I do not get it. You do not gain anything by insulting your debate "opponents", so why do this? In addition this is just an opinion, so what if I believe that? Even if I end up being proven wrong is it really that bad?
As long as you were white, reasonably well-off, and probably male, yes. It did not mean that for almost everyone else.
Also "speaking your mind" has never been (and never should be) consequence free. There was just no recourse for the majority to apply consequences until recently.
> The idea that people would routinely get fired for voicing their opinions [...] would have seemed shockingly unfree.
I'm pretty sure people have been fired for voicing their opinions all the time - it just wasn't white folk, especially men. And not just fired - plenty of people have been killed for voicing their opinion in the USA since day 1. Just not really white folk, especially men.
> That's where society used to draw the limit.
Because society used to be a lot more lopsided in terms of diversity, power balance, etc. Now the balance has shifted and some of the people who previously had all the power do not like it one bit.
There's some truth to that, but the solution is obviously to extend the same freedom to everyone, not dive into authoritarianism.
> There was just no recourse for the majority to apply consequences until recently
It is not at all the majority who are "applying consequences". It is a small vanguard of extremists, most of whom conspicuously belong to the classes they criticize.
And this was a good thing. Before that the majority applied said consequences via witch trials.
> I'm pretty sure people have been fired for voicing their opinions all the time - it just wasn't white folk, especially men. And not just fired - plenty of people have been killed for voicing their opinion in the USA since day 1. Just not really white folk, especially men.
Said people did not have the freedom of speech. It would be great if we changed that so that it applies to everyone.
White men have zero power in today's society. They get discriminated against all the time, often by other "white men" (=caucasians+indians+chinese+etc) who have adopted some weird religion in which they're meant to atone for the sins of their ancestors and worship black people because of their skin colour.
You aren't the majority, by the way. It may feel like that because people with your views are by far the most aggressive at shutting other people down or firing them for not agreeing with your beliefs, but that's not the actual same thing as being in the majority.
There is going to be blowback against this kind of modern day Bolshevism.
Look around. Who's in charge? It's still white men. It's going to be white men for at least another decade, I reckon.
> They get discriminated against all the time
They really don't.
> You aren't the majority, by the way.
Oh, when it comes to privilege I am and that's why I understand it.
- affirmative action which sees white males as "above" other races, so "compensates" for others
- being told they're the root of all evil
- being told they can't "punch down" - even though this is a white supremacist viewpoint because it's putting one race over all others
- being told colourblind-ness is racist
I want to be peers with all races and genders, not divided over silly lines.
And yet where do the life and death decisions get made? In political arenas, not cultural ones.
> - being told they're the root of all evil
For a long time, they were. (Trust me, I'm English, I'm painfully aware of this.) Many of them in power still are - just look at the GOP, for example, or UKGOV.
> - being told they can't "punch down"
I mean, "punching down" is bad no matter who does it.
> - being told colourblind-ness is racist
Because it's still picking a side - "I don't want to get involved" is just an implicit picking of the side with the most power.
Look at the UK government demographics. The cabinet especially is more diverse than the actual general population.
> For a long time, they were. (Trust me, I'm English, I'm painfully aware of this.) Many of them in power still are - just look at the GOP, for example, or UKGOV.
I'm English too and this is a complete mischaracterisation of our cultural history.
You can't judge the past by today's standards. To do so is childish and un-empathic. Remember, the British were the one to end slavery because our culture battled with this opposing idea (it goes against our core belief in individual freedom) for a long time.
Not to mention, every single culture on Earth would've done exactly the same if they had the chance.
> I mean, "punching down" is bad no matter who does it.
You're missing my point.
Saying that white people are punching down is racist, because it implies a hierarchy where white people are on top. It's a white supremacist viewpoint, albeit with a guilty conscience.
> Because it's still picking a side - "I don't want to get involved" is just an implicit picking of the side with the most power.
No - you don't get to judge people for staying out of this shit flinging contest going on in today's politics. Most people just do not care and they never will.
I will concede that the current UKGov is less white male than it has been but UK politics has always been much more progressive in that regard.
> You can't judge the past by today's standards.
In some aspects, absolutely. In things like "did they invade, subjugate, enslave, and pillage?", you absolutely can. Just because they didn't have porcelain toilets and lightbulbs doesn't mean what the British Empire got up to was ok, for example.
> every single culture on Earth would've done exactly the same if they had the chance
Not exactly a justification.
> Saying that white people are punching down is racist, because it implies a hierarchy where white people are on top.
In terms of political, cultural, etc. power, they are, that's the point - you don't pick on people with less power than you (see also: British Empire.)
> you don't get to judge people for staying out of this shit flinging contest going on in today's politics.
Of course you do. "It has been said that for evil men to accomplish their purpose it is only necessary that good men should do nothing." (Reverend Charles Frederic Aked, 1916)
I'm not going to excuse these things. What I will let slide is that it was individuals who did this, not "white males". I think associating race and gender with a particular ideology is deeply harmful to our culture, especially when those people were products of their time. They didn't know any differently.
> In terms of political, cultural, etc. power, they are, that's the point - you don't pick on people with less power than you (see also: British Empire.)
I guess we just disagree. I don't believe a person of colour has any more or less 'power' than me, solely based on racial divide. What is a problem in our society is class divide, but that isn't related to race. Or are you going to suggest I'm move privileged than Will Smith (or another rich/famous/powerful person of colour)?
Facebook’s HR department does want to be the arbiter of acceptable speech for facebook employees communicating with each other inside the company.
These are quite different situations, IMO.
You've gone way off topic, missed the point of the people you're responding to, and seem to have some agenda regarding Facebook that's not relevant to this discussion, which is about Facebook as an employer.
Can we just acknowledge for a moment what it’d be like to have a colleague who’s desperately trying to prove that your work is a “big conspiracy” when you’re honestly all just trying to do your best.
I see so many of these stories of weirdly rogue political activist type employees recently surprised when they their employer doesn’t like that they’re purposely trying to undermine them and their employees work. I’m sure Facebook isn’t perfect, but I know enough good people who work there to know they’re not all out to “get” us.
This smells like sour grapes* from an employee who focused more on their plans to take down their employer than their actual job.
*ed: previously written as “sour apples”...it’s been a long day.
The story didn't read as "sour apples" to me but rather an employee pointing out evidence that contradicts the "two strikes" policy Zuckerberg explained at the company Q&A. It's tough to write that off as "Facebook isn't perfect".
If he actually cannot get a job due to his stated opinions, well, frankly I’m not surprised. Why would you hire someone who publically says up front he scorns many of his potential coworkers?
Now that the dust has settled a bit on the memo, I'm curious about this take:
>That employee argued that people, such as people like me, were inherently less competent than others due to aspects of their gestation.
I didn't get that much of a dichotomy from the memo. To me he focused much more on interests than competency or capability, and he went through some effort to indicate that the effect was limited, including this summary at the top:
>Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
Then followed with a little chart showing two distributions with a lot of overlap.
I felt like the story of the memo overtook the memo itself, which seemed to be a ham-fisted attempt at exploring how we prioritize various metrics with diversity and inclusion. It was obviously premature as well, based on his own charts the effects he was discussing wouldn't come into play until we're approaching something much more even than we have today.
Ultimately the way Google handled it seemed rather cowardly. Damore's personal story adds a little complexity to the situation and I really feel that he touched a third rail that might not have been as obvious to him at the time.
And that story was mostly fictional. The memo itself bares little resemblance to most of the reporting about it.
Squaring off over unfalsifiable claims about intent and impact isn't going to get us anywhere, in the Damore case it's literally 'he said/she said'. We need to navigate it piece by piece and try to apply a balance of reason and empathy to try to get to a place of understanding.
Sure, but you can't hold the original author responsible for how it is being rewritten and reinterpreted in other people's minds. It's not a reasonable expectation that everyone should write everything with concern for how every cultural intersection might interpret it. That simply can't scale.
From what I understand it was about preferences not competencies.
I thought at first you meant gender, but then I looked up the word and it means "the process or period of developing inside the womb between conception and birth" and now I'm not sure.
It’s the same as when people protest building housing: “oh it will not align with the character of our neighborhood”. I know what they are really talking about, and I know full well what he was talking about — he was making the same argument, in the same terms, as plenty have before him. I assume he read those arguments before, himself.
> oh it will not align with the character of our neighborhood
Is there no situation where this is obviously, trivially true? If someone wants to replace a traditional cottage in the middle of an Irish village with a glass and steel modernist masterpiece, would you accept the argument then?
I read the memo as sincerely asking whether the data showed a sexist conclusion. Either it is inherently sexist to ask the question, or it isn't. If it is, then... what? Is it inherently sexist to note that men are faster than women? (Yes, I am aware that there are 12-year-old girls who can beat me in the 100 meters. No, that doesn't invalidate my point.) Then is reality sexist? Or is it only sexist to notice? Or to admit that you noticed?
If it isn't inherently sexist to ask the question, then we start into judgment on whether he asked it in good faith. That's a different question, on which I will not pass judgment. But I suspect that what's happening is that people have decided that it is sexist to ask the question, and therefore he couldn't have asked it in good faith.
And anything that says * ism might be a smaller problem than thought, that * ism is getting better, or that our current efforts to reduce * ism are ineffective... Well, that's an unapproved direction.
Also, if I know there's no way to convince someone of something, I'm generally going to stop caring about what they think. (Because it's always going to be the same, and nothing I can do will change that)
Right after the (somewhat-carefully-worded) memo was punished, the author showed his hand by appearing as a guest on the YouTube show of Stefan Molyneux who, even then, was well-known for his white nationalism and "men's rights" activism.
In any case your underlying argument is really bizarre.
In fact extreme xenophilic restrictionism is the norm in Japan. There's almost universal support by the Japanese people for their extremely restrictive immigration policy—probably the most restrictive first world country. But no sane person could call the Japanese people racist. They love other cultures—no, they adore them. They are incredibly welcoming to tourists from across the planet and delight in the sharing of culture.
Is this a joke? Japan has well-known issues with race relations and its historical and current treatment of its minority indigenous populations.
Can you point to some statistics on that, please?
>probably the most restrictive first world country
If you can get hired by a Japanese company (and some do accept applications from overseas), they will sponsor your work visa. There's none of this H1-B style nonsense. After you're in Japan, if you've been there continuously for five years (which, mind you, is a smaller period of time than any country I can name OTOH), you can apply for citizenship, and again as far as I know, it's not a ridiculous waiting list/lottery style process. In what way is this nearly as restrictve as you're saying?
It's also not difficult at all to get into Japan by applying to an English teaching company (eikaiwa or ALT jobs) from overseas (where they recruit from), and all you need is any Bachelor's degree. You'll have a valid work visa and you can be shipped out within months. Try doing the same as a Japanese teacher applying to teach in the US (or many other countries, for that matter). Browse tech job listings for Japanese companies on major job boards in the West. Almost all of them note that they'll be happy to sponsor your work visa.
This game of prettying up the language to make it seem nice and friendly, while maintaining the otherness that daily affects people (groups which the other reply to you here has pointed out) with language like "xenophilic restrictionist" does nobody favours.
And if there is support for such policies, and in particular bent on nihonjinron notions and race perceptions, I must be insane, but I'm going to go ahead and call "the Japanese people" racist. Being "incredibly welcoming to tourists" doesn't mean anything if you want to work and live there. It misses the whole point of the discussion, and waves away systemic issues with a gloss of "they're good to tourists". We're not talking about tourists. I don't care how much they are able to enjoy Western comedians. I care how receptive they are to people integrating and living in their society like everyone else, as the Japanese constitution guarantees should be possible.
At the risk of stirring the pot a little (and only because I couldn't think of a better analogy), you may as well say no country has race problems, because after all, members of the majority race might frequently listen to music by, and watch films featuring, the minority race. That doesn't mean anything in terms of how the minority race is treated, and it's a farcically ignorant point to make. So sorry if I see the same sort of logic in nebulous feelgood terms like "xenophilic restrictionism".
I would disagree with that. You will see many sane people pointing out the racism against koreans, chinese, tourists, western residents, etc in Japan.
Kind of like how he soon after sued Google for discrimination for being "white male conservative" (which has not aged well).
What does it mean to you?
By suing Google for discrimination against white conservative men, Damore fits this fairly well. That, and the alt-right podcasts he went on.
When they're not conservative opinion pieces, they're cherry picked articles, even going to far as to misrepresent the data they support.
The sort of people who argue against his memo always end up looking foolish because they never argue against anything that was actually said. No specific claims are ever brought up except lying strawmen like "he said women can't program", a claim not found in the memo.
Instead it's all just slurs, insults, attacks on his character, guilt-by-association and so on. There's never any actual depth to it, it's all "don't look at the bad man".
Damore's arguments must be good, because in years of this coming up nobody has ever once managed to make an intellectual argument against the stuff in his memo.
It would be one thing if they called the diversity memo out as disruptive and bigoted, but they said it had "wrong opinions." That just reeks of authoritarianism.
I'm more afraid of authoritarianism from a major company than a bigot.
If you haven't read it yourself, I encourage you to challenge yourself with an open mind and give it a read.
I did. It relies on junk science to justify bigotry.
And that's why Google's response concerns me. (I encourage you to look it up too.) It uses the words "wrong opinion" instead of calling out the junk science. But it also abandoned employees who may have mild concerns about the processes that Google was following.
Thus, Google handled the situation poorly because it didn't discredit the "diversity memo." It assumed that everyone disagreed with the memo, which clearly isn't the case.
---
Junk science: Think of debunked science like eugenics that were used to justify past bigotry.
Go on then, cite a paragraph directly from Damore's memo that "relies on junk science." I'm waiting. I dare say I'll be waiting a while. Hopefully it inspires you to actually read it for yourself instead of parrot what a few other people have said.
Or at the very least, if you'd prefer the lazier option, listen to what some other people who've read the memo said about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZZSYPs1_ng
He and his buddies had and endless list of grievances involving political this and that. Nothing seemed to happen that wasn't somehow 'political.' They surrounded themselves in this thicket of 'logic' where the simplest explanation was impossible and conspiracies were the most obvious answer to them. Thankfully it was long before social media as we know it.
He was fired for leaving some nasty bigoted comments in code.
But for the record I have no idea who these folks at Facebook are or their motivations.
If the guy I'm thinking of made the news, you wouldn't know either.
Eventually I just stopped talking with them as that’s all they could talk about.
> I’m sure Facebook isn’t perfect, but I know enough good people who work there to know they’re not all out to “get” us.
Yeah, I don't think you read the article. That's what's happening: a bunch of employees are blowing the whistle on what seems to be executive abuse of the fact check program.
Large scale platforms like this are hard to manage. I can see many cases where people doing their best can be misconstrued as an evil conspiracy.
Eg.
- Users and companies with large fan bases are open to brigading. Previously companies have been taken off the platform suddenly because of militant FB groups.
- A new rule is instituted "anyone with more than X followers get Tier-1 support in reviewing and reinstating their account following a take down."
- Engineer on some team mildly close to the team who runs the takedown/reinstatement systems sees that a Right Wing commentator is getting Tier-1 support and fast turn around reinstatement.
- Said engineer tries to vilify the people who wrote the policy and those who are carrying it out, tries to go public with a conspiracy that "FB is prioritizing reinstating Right Wing users". Instead they've really just lost the trust of their peers, failed to understand the space properly, and now brought their employer into disrepute - they should be fired.
This stuff happens all the time, and is usually just chalked up to "its a hard problem to get right, and we're trying to get better every day". When people over react and make out like Zuck is pulling strings to rule the universe i have a hard time understanding when he sleeps.
Zuckerberg should never have given way on fact checking. I wonder if he understands it was a mistake. Facebook is meant to be a social network, it's inherently a graph oriented organisation in which graph nodes are all roughly equal. Fact checking is the exact opposite: a hierarchy with Facebook at the top and delegated "truth arbiters" a layer lower, that try to dominate the social graph.
The cited example of the Breitbart video is a good example. The video is a video of doctors. There are tons of scientists, government advisors and indeed whole governments saying they don't see any need for masks, children can go back to school or never even left (as in Sweden), etc. You don't need to go far to find them. That children aren't infectious is by now widely accepted in the scientific community. For Facebook to censor the President for making such a statement makes them look absurd, and totalitarian. Given the long term accusations of fraud surrounding mail voting that were never addressed, it's not a big surprise Trump is worrying about the integrity of the election process.
I'm curious also by your claim that children aren't infectious. That is not widely accepted by the scientific community. It sounds like you're taking some minor positions and pretending like they're mainstream.
Indeed. And if the grandparent got all their "news" from paid feeds and shared content on Facebook (given the right seeding and demographics), they might genuinely believe these are mainstream positions.
Which is exactly the problem people are worried about in the linked article.
The problem with that is no amount of flagging and removing is going to fix the problem and that is why I don't even see the point, the left and right are so divided that those on the extremes will fall for anything being blinded by their emotional hatred for the other.
I mean we are at the point where the extreme left believes for a fact that via a thoroughly refuted dossier, that the sitting president paid Russian hookers to pee on him.
The extreme right is just as bad, believing that their is a global cabal of elite leftist that are raping children with a presidential candidate being one of them.
No amount of blocking content is going to repair the fact that people are no longer listening and that is the problem one side wants the other side filtered so that they can be the only voice shouting in the dark, thinking if the other side cannot talk then they are by default going to listen, but the reality is almost everybody has stopped listening, no amount of censorship is going to fix that.
Fact checks might help slow crazy conspiracies a little bit. I think it is worth for this reason, although I believe in content warnings+disclaimers instead of takedowns because of Streisand effects.
Finally, again, the Steele dossier is not even a "left conspiracy". It is a side-product of rumor spreading games that the intelligence community plays, that got leaked. I think it is a bad example for the point your seem to be making.
It was a hit piece, who funding is now well known, it was political from the start. What it was not, and would not qualify as is an intelligence report and was never formulated for the purpose of intel. It is no different than the hit pieces being produced by the right to paint Biden as a pedophile. So I don't see it as a Strawman as the point was people are so far gone on their version of the truth that no amount of censoring or labeling is going to pull them back from the edge. Both sides are doing it, and at this point there is no gradient of less-bad.
OK, that's just silly. Read a newspaper? Watch a routine 1 hour news program from any of the major networks? No pee tape. No pizzagate (well, except when that nut started shooting up the restaurant over it). I'm sure you think there's "bias" but there are no lies.
There are many journalistic organizations who genuinely care about reporting the truth. And they "filter" and "censor" themselves to do it all the time, because in that world it's called "good journalism". They get stuff wrong, and when they do they tell us about it.
And the issue at hand here is that Facebook is trying to apply some of the same controls to the news it presents to its users, via most of the same processes (i.e. by trusting journalists). And stuff leaks through, and sometimes Facebook itself seems to be uneven in the application of its own rules.
So I don't get your point. Why is it OK for The Times to spike its reporting on the pee tape because it can't find good sourcing but when Facebook to do the same it's somehow an impossibility?
Sure there is bias, Fox news is plenty biased so is CNN. and there are plenty of lies, a lie by omission is still a lie. Not to mention burying retractions in blurbs and page 10 even if they do a retraction. Make no mistake about it, I blame both sides equally so I am not advocating for one sides bias over another. My point is simply that people have stopped listening so all the meandering in the world will not "get them". Most everyone has chosen a side and the few of us left in the middle are stuck in a shit storm, that we don't want and we damn sure don't want to hear either sides dogma as it has become the stuff of religious fanatics, so we are not listening either.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-...
Just to be clear, I am not advising anyone to avoid wearing a mask.
Please note that I did not say there was scientific evidence for masks, but that wearing masks is good is the mainstream scientific position (which changed only very recently).
I read your article. It's pretty limited in its analysis. I'm going by this popular science article from my alma mater (I have a PhD in biophysics), https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-abou...
The article you cited doesn't include a number of the articles my article mentions (http://files.fast.ai/papers/masks_lit_review.pdf, https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00818 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342198360_Associati..., https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/15/E410, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/17/masks-sal...,
More importantly- this is a situation where we don't have unambiguous data, but the mainstream position is consistent with the current data and reasonable thinking about disease prevention.
There's nothing in there that should serve to argue against the general consensus that masks are a good idea. They are, within the bounds of the evidence at hand, effective in the opinions of most experts. And that includes the authors of the paper you wrote.
You just wrote yourself that there is no consensus, even amongst scientists who have been extremely willing to recommend extreme measures from the start. The review paper showed the science isn't settled: that's literally the definition of no consensus.
The concept of scientific consensus is horribly abused. Look at the reply to my post. It's not about anything concrete, it just asserts everyone agrees with the poster. That's a lie, and obviously so. Yet simply by claiming it's true, some will believe it, as it's an unfalsifiable statement. Indeed you yourself believe it, even whilst reading a paper that says there's no consensus.
They are not "weirdly rogue political activist type employees". They are normal people reacting to the abnormality that is Facebook. I mean which tech company has ever produced the kind of polarization, fake news, Brexit and Trump type events all over the globe?
If Intel or IBM or AT&T had produced these type of outcomes you can bet your ass "weirdly rogue political activist type employees" wld suddenly start popping up all over the place.
Facebook will continue to be a highly abnormal place to work for anyone who isn't mildly conformist.
Transparently it seems the right type of activists are celebrated and the wrong vilified. That’s fine, but let’s not act like this is principled.
I get that there are good whistle blowers. I also have first hand experience (a growing list recently) of people who decide to vilify their coworkers under the guise of "justice" and "taking down the man" when really most people ("evil VPs" included) are just trying to do their best and get through the day. They on the other hand are horrible to work with, and usually very unproductive. When threatened with performance management for their lack of delivery, they then tend to become hostile and see the whole charade as a conspiracy against them, when really no one trusts them or wants to work with them as they are assholes.
If you believe your employer is doing something wrong, potentially illegal, and bad for society as a whole then ignoring it because that's not in your job description means you're a huge failure as a human being.
do you work at FB? how can you smell anything? are you sure you're not projecting?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You've been using HN primarily for ideological warfare for a long time now. Your recent comments in particular have been breaking the site guidelines egregiously and repeatedly. You've pulled this "sleeper account" attack before as well (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859828).
If you keep breaking the site guidelines, we are going to ban you. Actually, you're well into bannable territory as it is. I'm shocked at how much and you badly you've crossed the line. We've cut you way more slack than most people get here.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on. For all its many flaws, this is a community, and to participate in a community while constantly destroying the commons is incongruent. People who use this place need to take care of it, not burn it. That goes for everyone, regardless of what their political views are or how intensely they feel them, and that includes you.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24190744
The idea that commenters should "make HN good because we all want it to be good" is quite positive, and that sentiment seems to be reflected here far more than banhappy reddit.
It's better to err on the side of patience generally, and feels more in keeping with the values of the site. There's are also judgment calls about things like who seems more likely to respond to persuasion, how much history the account has, whether it's related to previous abusive accounts, and things like that.
They'll just make another account and start over.
By explaining what the person is doing wrong, maybe Dang can help them be a more productive member of the HN community.
As for HN being "no longer salvageable" - people have been saying these things for 10 years or more. Of course it could have become true after 10 years—I don't want to be complacent. Sometimes the wolf eventually shows up. But there needs to be some evidence beyond simply repeating the things people repeat.
Right-wingers think HN is overrun by Marxists and left-wingers think it's overrun by Nazis. Both sides agree that the mods do a bad job and the site is destroying itself fast. They've been saying that for years. The decisive element here is the passions of the perceiver, not the object being perceived. That's why people's perceptions are so contradictory: what they're perceiving is an inverse of their own identifications. Usually this is based on a few data points that they overgeneralize. I've written about this a lot: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 for a summary, and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... for endless descriptions of the bias at work.
Of course it doesn't follow that criticisms are invalid. We try to be open and often adjust in response. But criticisms have to rise above a certain noise level—they need to clear the "randomness plus cognitive bias equals narrative" bar. When you say "Many people not in the community believe that Hacker News is no longer salvageable," it's not clear to me whether you're talking about serious critics or, say, Twitter ideologues, who have been saying that about HN since at least 2013. Most of that is driven by fashion. For example, small groups bond by snarking about, or denouncing, larger groups. That's all normal social dynamics (and internet dynamics), but I've learned the hard way that if you take those statements literally, it's crazymaking, because they're not really about what they purport to be about. That's not a reliable way to improve or, if you like, "salvage" HN.
All of which is a long way of saying that if you, or anyone, wants to discuss problems with HN, that's great, but we need specifics and links.
1. Be significantly less tolerant towards transphobic comments on this site, such as this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23937722
2. Send very clear and very loud signals that transphobia is not welcome here, such as by making a clear, pinned front page post about it. There are going to be a number of people who are going to complain about this policy and talk about "free speech" and "marketplace of ideas" &c, and to them make it very clear that either they get with the program or are no longer welcome here.
Seriously, techies seem to act on the same amoral plane as business executives and I wonder how you people manage to sleep at night.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1) The company is actually doing evil things
2) The employee is aware of the purported evil things the company is doing, and agrees with that claim
Now we can debate all we want how evil Facebook is or not, but how many employees do you think check off box 2?
I use facebook to connect with my family and friends. I've unfollowed all overly political friends. I get no real or fake news in my facebook feed. If I worked at facebook I'd be proud of helping people to stay connected.
Here on HN we are happy to call out the NYT and Bloomberg when they are wrong, but is that only when their articles don't align with our prior biases?
Can you continue to work for the digital service without being complicit in the government’s sins? There is plenty of evidence of wrong-doing and questionable judgement by the government’s leaders, for sure.
Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?
Facebook is not a democracy, and given the corporate structure and differing voting rights of shareholders, it is practically impossible to replace the current leadership even if a majority of shareholders wanted to.
Moreover, the Government is immense and highly diverse in its missions compared to Facebook. I don't think anyone reasonably believes the sins of the CIA should be borne by, say, U.S. Forest Service park rangers. If Facebook had a public service mission that, among other things, provided essential services to the public like food and housing, perhaps the discussion would be different.
> Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?
Some might say that this is the desired outcome, but eventually management might see the writing on the wall and change the way they do business. Indeed, this is one of the key mechanisms of unionized labor - to bring management to the table for negotiation through the threat of work stoppage (striking).
- They could work on something “good”, like trust and safety, community moderation tools, emergency response, etc.
- They could work on something user-driven or “neutral”, like Events or Groups which are used to organize anything from BLM protests to Trump rallies.
If they’re not actively designing privacy anti-patterns or trying to make the news feed more addictive, quitting would not really affect those problem areas.
I think organizing at the workplace is a great idea, and the threat of work stoppage could be a very real one if enough employees organize. But the idea of telling people to quit their jobs and distance themselves from the problem is very different from telling them to start organizing to fix the problem.
You are so uninformed that it will take you days of continuous research even to form a cogent opinion about this topic.
A great many are there to build their skills and/or resumes, which is a lot more than just putting food on the table. There aren't many places where one can learn so much so quickly about certain technologies (like VR/AR) or how to run things at that kind of scale, and most of those (e.g. Google, Amazon) have their own ethical issues. Many other companies, including some HN darlings, were founded by ex-FB employees. Some of them are doing good things, for practically any definition of "good" you might apply.
Others are there because they believe in the good Facebook does as well as the bad. As you said, they're likely exposed to more information about what the company does, which means a lower percentage is of the "jealous columnist at NYT" variety. Facebook helps connect people and businesses in positive ways as well as negative. You might think the ratio is not high enough, but others can quite reasonably disagree and/or think it's worth their time to work on improving that ratio.
There are many other possible reasons as well. "Evil or trapped" is not a useful simplification.
Yes, some people may have concerns about the product and its long-term consequences to individual health and society, but those are just alarmist freaks and we can ignore them.
Yes, there are also those internal reports that you might have seen or heard about in chatter around the water cooler, but you are not an expert in that subject so really what do you know? And the experts the execs bring around on office tours seem to be OK with things.
Yes, everyone at the company uses the product and while you were not a heavy user of the product before joining you can't avoid it in meetings and daily work. You seem to be recognizing some of the negative symptoms of the product in your daily life a lot more these past few months, but that recent project you worked on was pretty cool and in your last evaluation you got high marks for 'impact' so it can't all be bad, right?
Everyone who works at FB (ok, let's say IC2 and above) knows what is going on. Everyone who has been there for more than two or three years feels the relentless pressure to increase 'engagement' no matter the cost. Most are a bit unsure about the whole 'vision' thing Mark keeps talking about and they have enough self-awareness to see the cult-like aspects of the company, but the pay is very good and it can be a thrill at times to have access to either the audience or systems of such size and scope (e.g. let's count the files in /tmp across 1 million+ systems just because hypershell lets us...)
At what point in your career at RJ Reynolds do you realize that you are actually doing evil and check off box 2? At what point do you admit to yourself that what you do day to day has negative long-term consequences for society? When you do realize this what do you do?
(Disclaimer: worked at FB a while ago for a long enough period of time that the actions of sociopathic management eventually overwhelmed the 'protecting these systems protects activists and persecuted people from their evil governments' story I told myself and so I bailed.)
It seems to me that there are three stories here. One is that some small group of employees were violating policy by preventing certain users from being flagged or banned when they should have been. One is that an employee caught them. The third is that the employee was fired - apparently for conduct around the disclosure rather than the disclosure itself, but that's beside the point. The point is that it's absurd to assume that the first and third stories are totally representative of how every single person remaining at Facebook is, while the one that connects them is assumed to be an anomaly that could never possibly happen again.
All Cops Are Bastards: the idea that it isn’t possible, by definition, for there to be such a thing as a good cop.
Presumably F for Facebookers.
I can't imagine any person at any company who wouldn't get fired after publicly speaking to the CEO that way.
It's a shame, because if this guy had an emotional intelligence he could have personally driven change. Now he's a martyr at best.
For anyone who believes they’re participating in an evil system: quit, whistleblow, or sabotage. Don’t be like this guy.
That's a bit offensive to all the others who are driving positive changes without acting crazy. We only see the bad apples.
If other people are behaving in a way that better drives change, how would the above offend them?
There are multiple sources indicating that conservative sites work in concert to amplify, at best, specious content and at worst, complete misinformation.
Facebook selectively enforces discipline on these sites because:
1. Conservative information (Fox News, Charlie Kirk, Breitbart, etc.) is consistently shared more than other content
2. They don't want the optics of making it seem like they're censoring conservative voices because they're afraid of the blowback, so they're hiding behind the veil of "It's not our job"
3. They don't want to lose the ad spend running up to the election season nor do they want to lose the vanity metrics of DAU/MAU/etc because they're a publicly traded company
Zuck is a feckless coward, full stop. And while I don't know his personal political leanings, this non-policy certainly has the earmarks of Thiel and Joel Kaplan all over it.
Furthermore the actual goal of a "right wing media" is to collect reliable, large, consistent easy to sell to audiences for advertisers and isn't necessarily committed to any particular agenda.
Also political opinions and grandstanding is cheap content, expensive journalism isn't required, so it keeps the costs low.
All the other consequences, just like they are for tobacco and oil companies, are swept under the rug. This is the content associated with the lowest cost, best audience, highest profit business model.
I sold bumper stickers in the early 2000s, all kinds of politics. The conservatives were easier; larger volume, longer time window (they sold over a longer time), the ramp up time was shorter, and the stickers were way easier to come up with. Much easier business.
Again, this is all from in my head, I'm not a researcher and don't have a paper trail here, but it's a fun idea and seems to match reality.
This is just for demographic reasons: Facebook has to compete hard for eyeballs among young/urban/techie/minority users. Those folks are fickle with their tastes and willing to try more platforms. And they're less sensitive to advertising in general. Facebook has lots of them, but they certainly aren't dominant in that market.
But old white folk? They're all on Facebook. Really, they're ALL on Facebook. Facebook probably has 90%+ of all social media advertising revenue in this demographic. And they skew heavily republican.
So who's interests are they going to serve? When Facebook's executives feel pressure to put their fingers on the fact check scale, in which direction are they going to tilt it?
If they didn't really believe that it was important to allow on their platform, then they would have banned it years ago, as it causes them nothing but bad press and blowback.
Seriously, I definitely saw some numbers (maybe from the FT) and it was like less than 1% political advertising revenue. That's maybe 10-15 times smaller than gaming, and maybe 30 times smaller than ecommerce.
That is a surprise. Is there data that this has also been the case before the increased efforts to moderate content?
All criticism aside, I think Facebook does a better job at providing a platform for users. Yes, I don't like a lot of content either, but if I compare it to Twitter, I think FB did much better.
TLDR is that if you know certain subjects will get your base talking about something else that you aren't allowed to promote (such as a conspiracy theory), you promote the hell out of real news stories about those subjects knowing your base will a) share and b) discuss the conspiracy theories in the comments.
It's a very clever way to use money to boost the conversation around untrue claims, while technically neither the ad buyer nor seller are responsible since it's the users doing the lying. And I don't know what the solution is, fact checking every user comment isn't feasible..
Woah, twitter banned all of the conservatives? How did Trump take being banned?
In all seriousness, your absolute confidence in your own conclusions is exactly why people are afraid of censorship.
> Facebook selectively enforces discipline on these sites because:
Does facebook enforce discipline on sites from the other site that spread misinformation? (e.g. snopes) If not I do not think that it is really selective.
Considering https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24079172 for example it does not seem that they have a right wing bias.
I believe that the issue of the 'right wing side' in this case is possibly as you've indicated - in that there is just more sensitivity around it.
The Valley is Left/Anarcho/Libertarian with 'traditionally minded' immigrants, and so there's more suspicion in certain camps of legit bias on 'one side'. I think this is where the sidedness of the issue might derive.
As to the materiality of it ... who knows ...
I'd disagree with this part pretty strongly. What clear parameters are you thinking of, besides "get rid of my enemies"? Can you formulate a "no endorsing violence" policy that keeps the current protests/riots while banning Trump's latest idiocy, or one for "no racial discrimination" that keeps White Fragility and bans "they're not sending their best... Murderers, rapists" or similar? That kicks off Infowars or Richard Spencer while leaving Malcolm X or Ta-Nehisi Coates? Sure, the political right tends to cross those lines further - but it's often a case of degree and direction, not kind.
I think it's either a really hard line to draw in a viewpoint-neutral fashion, or a huge political fight. (Whether you choose to ban Trump without the Left, or you try to ban both, people will be furious)
Yes, it’s quite simple and I’m wondering if you are intentionally or accidentally being obtuse by trying to frame the current protests as riots. There were plenty of peaceful protests all over the country - no endorsing violence simply means not highlighting peaceful protests over violent ones. It’s not rocket science except to those grasp at straws in order to equate civilians walking in the streets to Trump implying police shoot civilians.
"Government" is made up of many actors and groups, and the fundraising dynamic is that a) corporation gives to incumbent to get favors or b) gives to opponent to remove regulatory pressure from an incumbent not willing to play ball.
What you are seeing is the natural result of corporate control over elections and consequently, politicians.
Show me something AOC has _said_, not a meme of a dubious quote with her face on it.
And again, I'd also like you to explain the logical leap between "AOC blocked some people on Twitter" to "AOC wants the power to tell Facebook who to censor".
https://www.ncsl.org/blog/2019/07/23/potus-cant-block-critic...
I'm not prepared to argue this applies to her in the same way, but maybe the person who you're responding to thinks it is parallel, so perhaps more dialogue than just scoffing would be appropriate.
>because the government cannot censor speech AOC wants companies like Facebook to do it.
Ok, AOC shouldn't be allowed to block people on Twitter. What does that have to do with the original claim?
But now that I have read it, I'm confused even more about the responses.
Blocking people on Twitter is arguably (because the courts are saying so) a violation of the constitution. For an elected official at least.
If someone wants to regulate speech, and they have tried and been prevented from doing so on first amendment grounds, it seems likely motivation to search for a legal alternative method to achieve their goals.
Is AOC against Facebook regulating content then?
I don't think I see the motivation/goal attributed to her as illegitimate. Maybe everyone is taking for granted that it's a "loophole".
Well, OK lol
This is a stance I wish non lefties picked up on tbh. Even if you're rather right wing or liberal it should be obvious that larger companies being able to pay less taxes and being able to get more benefits than your local business or startup is unfair. Or that anticompetitive practices that squash smaller competitors, give unfair advantage and/or establish monopsonies is terrible for entrepreneurship, social mobility and the free market in general.
yet it's self-proclaimed 'capitalist to the bone' that I see defending it's erosion of it's dynamics and benefits.
this is so silly, and later when the article claims “misinformation”, it’s a tricky situation to claim you know the 100% truth about everything and anything that goes against what you believe is considered misinformation that will undermine an election... totally ignoring the possibility that you might actually not be correct and that things aren’t as black and white as you think they are
Why is it "silly" exactly? Are you saying that Facebook wouldn't allow itself to be used this way, that the government wouldn't try, or that it's not possible? Are you contending that the results of an election are not "black and white"?
"Undermine" is obviously a subjective judgement, not an objective one. Which in turn makes it difficult to legislate "prevent people from using social networks to undermine elections" in an objective way.
And this is now my personal opinion, but legislation that cannot be enforced with some amount of objectivity is a recipe for disaster down the road.
There is nothing Facebook can do that won't cause a riot. But if there's truly no acceptable action for Facebook and similar platforms, maybe the only option in the long-run is for them to cease to exist.
"Intolerable speech" makes it sound like it's the speech's fault.
US only, other nations probably have larger lists of free speech exclusions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Directly threathening to execute someone maybe. But "Fire in a crowded theater" has not been part of jurisprudence for... 40 years. The US has very, very limited free speech restrictions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
The recent discussions about applying the first amendment to companies like Facebook have some logic behind.
Conservatives, not just in the United States but globally, pour vast resources into using social media platforms to propagate ideas that are objectively false and to embed those ideas into the minds of vulnerable people. There is no equivalent effort by non-conservatives in any English-speaking country. Non-conservatives see ample ammunition in the actual behavior of their opponents and see no need to use falsehoods to help their cause. Compare: Trump claiming that Biden will destroy the suburbs by letting non-whites liven in them vs anti-Trump forces using actual pictures of actual children in actual cages. Also compare: the lies used to manufacture support for Brexit vs. the actual truths about what would happen.
Rampant dishonesty is seen by many, particularly non-conservatives, as social cheating and social media platforms that enable it are condemned by non-conservatives for pro-conservative bias.
On the other hand, social media networks that do not tolerate political lies will, purely because most political lying is done by conservatives, more heavily restrict pro-conservative ideas and be condemned by conservatives for anti-conservative bias.
There's no way to square the circle of responding to habitual conservative dishonesty without favoring either conservatives or non-conservatives any more than there's a way to be neutral in the face of a wildfire: you either put it out or you don't.
If you moderate by common decency values, massive chunks of conservative voices would be off Reddit, FB, Twitter - and then they will evolve to dodge the new filters, or cause filters to create collateral damage.
Deplatforming these voices also plays into their strategy of calling themselves victims. Since most people don’t know the ins and outs of frequency of rule breaking, and the disproportionate amount of false information in conservative circles, people assume (wrongly) that it can’t be “that bad.”
I wish someone had a cost benefit analysis on what is the most effective way to resolve this, but right now social media firms are forced to treat outright conspiracy theories at the same level as science and research.
Perhaps it’s a civilization level issue - we have the technology and structures to create platforms - servers, networks, computer science theories.
We don’t have a solution or science for handling the structures that come on top of it, like what is the societal cost of keeping crazy theories on a network, vs the cost or methods required to stamp it out, and the philosophical arguments that support or prohibit such action.
It is a serious civilizational health issue that conservative political blocs in many countries have adopted electoral strategies based on spreading information that is objectively false. If social media platforms did not enable this, conservatives would simply find different avenues to lie.
Expecting for-profit social media platforms to combat the rise of rampant dishonesty as a political strategy in nominally democratic countries isn't ideal, but it's the only tool we have to mitigate the damage.
> If you moderate by common decency values, massive chunks of conservative voices would be off Reddit, FB, Twitter
So would the far left. People do not particularly enjoy being baselessly accused, cancelled, and have people call for violence on them.
(not to mention that in the past certain things which we consider as decent such as homosexuality would be considered indecent)
> but right now social media firms are forced to treat outright conspiracy theories at the same level as science and research.
They really are not. More like they are being pushed to censor posts based on what a 3rd party deems are wrongthink or incorrect.
In contrast, fact-free argumentation from conservatives has the backing of both established figures and big money. To keep this as non-controversial as possible, consider Trump's continued promotion of an anti-malaria drug as a COVID-19 treatment. This misinformation is both false and has the potential to kill people. Consider also the GOP's long-running strategy to de-legitimize elections by overstating the extent of voter fraud, which has now resurfaced as opposition to mail-in ballots. This misinformation is both false and deeply dangerous in a democracy.
There is no left-right equivalency here and america's long-running slow motion political crisis isn't going to get any better until people are willing to admit this.
I think it's very illuminating that so many people accept these speech restrictions without question or fuss (although breast-feeding advocacy groups have fought the good fight on their pictures), but, as soon as FB blocks an article falsely claiming that Joe Biden will dynamite churches if he becomes president or whatever, it's suddenly Very Important That Facebook Not Practice Censorship.
Can we all imagine for a minute how conservatives would react if Facebook took a 100% compliance approach to speech and allowed anyone to post porn into their newsfeed?
Oops somebody said the thing out loud.
https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404649522343936
I think you are being disingenuous perhaps, unless I don't understand your context.
Wormgate was for instance about a scientist insulting a roundworm, and because a worm is small it really means they are insulting minorities.
They are not fired, yet.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/worm-joke-causes-science-twitt...
American political alignment definitions never cease to amuse me.
I checked your twitter link tho and right of the bat the first is someone making a menu with watermelon water & cool aid for black history month and then lying it was set up by black colleagues. If there was no malintent they shouldn't be fired based on that but I'd seriously doubt their mental capacities and worry bout em drawing a blackface caricature on the chalkboard outside with the same supportiveness. followed by ... some idiots organising segregated yoga classes asking white people to stay away and getting so much slack for it they closed down. You'd think that would show the opposite of what's intended by the OP.
And whilst i have no intent of getting a subscription to a tabloid what I did see of the second link seems to imply a few retards got mad on twitter? I'd say among both libs and conservatives alike there's a huge drive to find loads of random specs of stupidity in a nation of hundreds of millions to be outraged about which serves to both vilify and build a strawman of the opposition whilst fuelling a victim-complex. It really works well too from a political perspective.
The list also has a bunch of references to Quillette, which is white supremacism for people that have a college degree.
Note it appears a majority of Facebooks top ten posts are from right wing sources. [1] This is not me suggesting a bias on the part of FB, but it‘s a clear data point against the now common talking point that “the right” are persecuted victims, not fairly represented on the Internet.
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
You have to look at the long tail of content and the distribution over all content. How many smaller right wing creators are censored vs left wing?
These and other interventions appear to be in violation of Facebook’s official policy, which requires publishers wishing to dispute a fact check rating to contact the Facebook fact-checking partner responsible.
[...]
Instead of appealing to the fact-checker they immediately call their rep at Facebook...
This is a little like when my package gets lost, and -- very rarely -- the shipper tells me to contact the post office instead of simply claiming the insurance and refunding me. These shippers often don't give me the receipt I need to show the post office that it was insured -- because telling me to contact the post office is just another way to say, not my problem. The post office is likely to say: please contact the shipper...
If the user isn't happy with what Facebook did -- regardless of whose advice Facebook took -- they have every right to contact Facebook.
- Fake news is bad
- Government taking out fake news is actually bad??
- But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgement with absolutely no due process is obviously okay???
Now it becomes a shouting match to get Facebook to ban posts/people they don't like.
Who can harass Facebook employees the most will probably win the shouting match.
There's a big difference between a private company determining what is hosted on their servers vs. the U.S. government forcing a private company to censor speech.
Turns out, they don't need to. Due to the fact that most people do not exercise any real control over the devices they use to read most expression, all they have to do is be able to regulate trade between app publishers and the {App,Play} Store.
This is how the US government is presently engaging in censorship of apps published by ByteDance (and soon Tencent). They can prohibit Apple/Google from transacting with the publisher, and because Apple/Google control the phones of the end users, the end users are effectively prohibited from reading the content published by that publisher.
It's an end run around the constitution.
Second, despite the claims of the president, the white house does not have the power to block TikTok or Bytedance from the public. The president can only block armed forces from installing apps on their owned devices.
Android is also problematic on that aspect, even Epic Games gave up on distributing Fortnite outside the Play Store.
If the most well known game in the world can't make it outside the Play Store, who could?
Whatever sweetheart deal Epic worked out with Google in the end doesn't discredit that they successfully sold hundreds of thousands of copies outside of the the Google Play store.
This argument also intentionally ignores the existence of the Amazon app store on Android.
They specifically state that they failed due to the constraints and had to back to the store.
> This argument also intentionally ignores the existence of the Amazon app store on Android.
Yeah sure, there's a few other minor stores but they are nowhere near the size of the Play Store.
Additionally we could compare to other markets, if you compare the number of companies which can host your website and the number of companies which can host your app, the numbers are going from hundreds of thousands to less than 10 for apps even by counting almost irrelevant stores.
Even though consumers will simply move to another ISP just like they are free to move to another website.
So I'm not sure what part of it happening before makes it seem unlikely to happen again.
ISPs shouldn’t even be able to see what goes over their wires.
Facebook is not an ISP.
And no, Facebook is a website and app(s), not a common carrier.
Also, I note that you didn't list MasterCard, which has been known to cut perfectly legal businesses loose... and that's a very small industry. You have what? Visa/MasterCard, AMEX and Discover, pretty much.
Now, you can muddy the semantics by saying, "Isn't every website an information shipper?" and even then the answer is still no, that still does not make them a common carrier.
There are what people want Facebook to be, which is some system supporting of their own political views, but the bad faith arguments to project Facebook into being an ISP are not sound.
Facebook's social function is as a distributor of broadcast information and carrier of peer-to-peer information for two billion people. Further, network effects mean that Facebook's size makes it a natural monopoly.
There is no shortage of historical evidence that unregulated natural monopolies are bad news for everyone except their owners, and, given that Facebook's function is the distribution of information, the natural path for regulation in a free society is a common carrier designation.
Both are private ownership of public spaces.
So are media networks like CNN, MSNBC, Fox etc. They are private too. But they are still regulated. They can't post whatever they want and are held liable for any news that they present to their audience. Social media companies aren't regulated in the same way. They have more powers than the Government because they can literally censor anyone's speech they want. They can ban anyone they want. If they are left-leaning they can ban right-leaning content. If they are right-leaning they can ban left-leaning content. They are also not regulated like media networks because they are given immunity from liability through Section 230. They can never be held liable for what is posted on their platform. It is like having the cake and eating it too. Heck, they can even censor the US President's tweets and videos. This makes them extremely powerful. It is surprising to me that US citizens are perfectly fine with this setup.
They are. It is called "The Communications Act of 1934" in the United States. They are completely regulated by the FCC in US. They are regulated differently in different countries. In US, as an example, they have rules on political advertising. They have "equal time" rules where every political candidate "must" be given equal time and opportunity to air their viewpoints. No such regulations exist for social media companies.
They can be held liable for fake news or slander. Social media platforms cannot. Only the content posted in the editorial is considered personal opinion and not the position of the News Organization. That is the only page/section in the newspaper/news that does not expose the News Organization to liability/slander. That is why you have a separate "Editorial Section" in a newspaper where the editor can give his/her opinions without exposing the newspaper to liability. But of late, the news agencies have started using other pages for giving their opinions too (from harmless clickbait to downright slander) which is again a very risky choice to make. This exposes them to liability/slander. This is why regulation is so important. To ensure what is legally allowed and not allowed. News agencies are bound by such regulations. Social media organizations are not.
If news agencies publishes a hit piece on me that is obviously false, I can sue the news organization for slander. The news organization cannot claim that it believed the news reporter/agent who passed on wrong information about me and get away with it. The ultimate publisher is the news agency. Period. That is why the organization can be sued.
But if a user posts a hit piece on me in a social media platform I cannot sue the platform for allowing the user to post slanderous material. Because the platform shields itself from liability by taking advantage of the provisions of Section 230. This is because it calls itself a "platform" and not a "publisher". This is fine by me as long as it remains a platform. But once it starts censoring opinions (like Twitter/Facebook deleting Trump's tweet) then it no longer is a platform. It is now behaving as a publisher. Then why should it be protected by Section 230?
> because that exposes them to civil liability
Exactly. They are regulated. Even if a news agent publishes a fake story, the organization is responsible for it. They cannot carry it forward without verification because if they do, they end up becoming liable. Not the news agent. That is the whole point. The recent case that comes to mind is when Nick Sandmann was falsely accused of being racist against a Native American by all left-leaning media organizations (CNN, Washington Post etc). When the fact were completely different (if you watch the video in its entirety). He sued these media organizations and won. They had to settle the 250 million $ lawsuit. Can he sue Facebook/Twitter which carried this story more than any of the media organizations did? Nope. That is the reason why I say that social media organizations enjoys powers that neither the US Government nor the Media enjoys.
> There's no obligation to show the President's content there either. They can choose not to show right-leaning or left-leaning content
Yes that is right. But when they do show the President, then they have to let him have his say. They cannot either censor him or change what he meant. If they do that then they open themselves up to defamation/liability depending on what they actually did. Social media companies do not have any such issues as they are unregulated.
You can read more about Media Regulation in the United States here: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/americangovernment/chapter...
The whole point of Section 230 is to allow platforms to moderate their content without becoming liable for it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/13/610/section-230-...
> The classic example involves Yelp, explains Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the United States Naval Academy and author of The Twenty-Six Words That Created The Internet, a book about Section 230. If someone posts a defamatory restaurant review on Yelp, Section 230 ensures that the restaurant can sue the person who wrote the review, but not Yelp itself. It protects everything from Facebook and YouTube to the recently deplatformed 8chan.
> Section 230 also says that platforms can’t be held liable if they take down any content they or their users consider “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
I am not against Section 230. I am against platforms misusing Section 230. They are a platform until they behave like one. When the platform itself starts behaving like a publisher rather than a platform then why should provisions of Section 230 apply?
> Section 230 also says that platforms can’t be held liable if they take down any content they or their users consider “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
So was Trump's video about kids being "almost immune" to Coronavirus "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable"? Which one was it? Are you seriously telling me that the President of the United States video about kids being "almost immune" to Coronavirus is in some violation of policy while porn/gore content that is posted on these platforms not? I have personally reported so many of these videos and they still haven't been removed. And if political issues are the reason for censorship then what about the other politicians in US and around the World who say as bad or worse things as Trump? Will same rules be applied there as well or not? If not, why not?
> In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
Then will these rules be applicable to everyone? In that case, I can give you a million tweets and comments that are "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable" which haven't been removed yet. Nor has Youtube removed "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable" videos from its platform.
It is clear bias at play here. If you try to tell me that it is not then you need to take a hike.
The law was designed to allow platforms to remove content without being legally liable for all of the content. If you disagree with that then you disagree with all of S230, and you need to campaign to have it removed and replaced.
> So was Trump's video about kids being "almost immune" to Coronavirus "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable"? Which one was it
It was "otherwise objectionable", because it's factually incorrect. Children do get covid-19, children do spread covid-19. They're unlikely to be harmed by covid-19, but that's not the claim he made, is it?
> > In other words, they are not obliged to host anything they don’t want to.
> Then will these rules be applicable to everyone?
I genuinely don't understand how you don't understand this. "not obliged to host it" means "they don't have to host it", it doesn't mean "they have to search out everything that violates their policies and remove it".
There is no need to campaign really. I am not an American but US laws govern these social media companies that operate in India too. I have experienced first hand how these social media companies operate here in India and know their biases clearly.
But the US Government is already exploring it: https://www.project-disco.org/innovation/072920-what-is-sect...
and here: https://gosar.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=...
> It was "otherwise objectionable", because it's factually incorrect
I don't understand "otherwise objectionable" to mean "factually incorrect". There are people who genuinely get a wrong idea of some process or procedure because not everyone is technically well versed. If I tomorrow say that stuxnet virus harmed my PC the technical minded you might say that it is factually incorrect because stuxnet is a worm and not a virus. So would you then censor my right to say it incorrectly? Do you want me to communicate to you perfectly and if not, that communication must be censored? Any reasonable person will allow that much of leeway. Not everyone can have perfect communication skills. Not everyone can be well versed in everything.
Anyways the point is that "otherwise objectionable" is too broad a term. For me, killing animals for food is objectionable. For you something else might be objectionable. That sort of power is not reasonable by any means for a platform to have. For instance, Twitter did not censor Ilhan Omar when she tweeted falsehood against Nick Sandmann and other Covington students. She later deleted that tweet when the true story came out into the open. But the damage was done. An innocent student's life was put at risk. All because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"In her tweet, Omar wrote that the male students were "protesting a woman's right to choose & yelled 'it's not rape if you enjoy it' " and "taunting 5 Black men before they surrounded Phillips and led racist chants.""
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/426635-omar-deletes-tweet...
and this:
https://twitter.com/NRCC/status/1088163426172633095
Did Twitter act on it? Nope. Why did it not when it was not just factually incorrect but also put a child's life at risk?
But truth be told I don't want Twitter to act on any content that is not illegal (like child pornography, terrorism, scams etc). In true spirit of Section 230, I want her tweets to remain for as long as she desires so people see for themselves what she represents. I want Trump's tweets to remain for as long as he desires so people see for themselves what he represents. Now that is a free platform right there.
I don't want social media companies to baby sit me. I don't want social media companies to tell me what to see and what not to see unless that material is banned/disallowed by law. I don't want my viewpoints censored because it doesn't match with the ones running the platform. Is that too much to ask for?
> They're unlikely to be harmed by covid-19, but that's not the claim he made, is it?
"Almost immune" qualifies as "unlikely to be harmed". Unless we both are referring to different dictionaries. This is nitpicking to be honest with you. It is only because it was Trump who said it that it is being made into a huge issue. Just like everyone took objection to Trump calling it Wuhan/China Virus when every outlet (CNN, MSNBC, Fox etc) was calling it by that name way before Trump even said it. Because "orange man bad".
> I genuinely don't understand how you don't understand this. "not obliged to host it" means "they don't have to host it", it doesn't mean "they have to search out everything that violates their policies and remove it".
It means precisely that. They have to search out everything that violates their policies and remove it. Because they said they are incapable of doing that, activist groups demanded them to provide tools which can be used to report such violations. But those tools are pretty much useless as I have repeatedly tried removing videos that blatantly violate their own policies but to no avail. Pornographic and Gore content is not allowed on Youtube according to Youtube's own guidelines. Yet those videos don't get removed and instead get "Age restricted". Because clearly they want that ad money more than following the rule of law.
As for Section 230 protections for civil liability: Instead of suing the platform where the content was posted for slander, you'd sue the individual that posted it. S230 protections do not extend to where the platform's own speech (ex, Twitter's blog), and they don't shield the actual speaker, where you can still recover damages. Your own example goes to this end - Twitter didn't publish anything, CNN did, and he was able to convince a court that it was slander, so he was able to recover from CNN.
In a hypothetical world, Facebook could decide that masks wouldn't work.
And there's nothing we can do about it except screaming at facebook?
That doesn't sound good.
I've heard that part of that clarity was because Cold War holding the US in contrast to the Soviets was itself a bit of perception management or PR. I could speculate on other factors, but I'm sure some historians and social scientists understand it vastly better.
Anecdotally, I do remember a time when, say, TV news programs would at least set some good examples of reasoning, not lower themselves closer to the transparently bad Fox News or talk radio behavior, which seemed to be to be even more ridiculous than what we'd been told the Soviets did. (Of course, the US has a history of abuse by those who control presses, but the institution still seemed to have merit.)
And I don't recall hearing of anything, even a decade ago, like apparently large numbers of people acting against their own other interests, solely for the adversarial sports team fan idea of "owning the libs". And also some inexplicably self-defeating behavior from elements of "the other side" (though I don't think that notion of "sides" is accurate or complete.)
I've been wondering whether the US populace used to be better at critical thinking. It's felt that way, but maybe the examples I'm aware of aren't representative.
Where we are now, talking about dotcoms being asked to gatekeep speech, I have only an ordinary citizens' understanding of many of policy issues, but I do have an experienced technologist's understanding that some of these dotcoms haven't been pinnacles of trustworthiness, integrity, etc. And the civic-minded American me wouldn't trust any of those dotcoms very far at all, with something that seems so fundamentally important to what I've grown up believing are bedrock principles of the US.
I haven't used Facebook for at least 5 years now. I use WhatsApp occasionally, so you can in fact, be blocked on Facebook and live. You cannot be blocked from participating in society and be free.
The Constitution places restrictions on what the government can do because government overreach is a particular, unique problem. It also provides for popular election to the government for the same reason - and nobody says that it's bad that we can't elect Facebook's leaders.
Now, perhaps the argument is that Facebook has grown too large and too powerful, to the point where Facebook censorship is worse than government censorship. If that's happened, that means we should have regulated Facebook a long time ago (and if we don't, we're on our way to your favorite cyberpunk dystopia where corporations are the real governments), and we should get around to doing so. But it hardly means that we should give in, treat Facebook like a government, and start saying "Facebook shall make no policy" any more than it means that we should vote for Facebook's CEO.
Or who spends the most on ads.
> Citing “partner sensitivity," the rep noted that PragerU runs a lot of ads, and argued that the content in question qualified as opinion and was therefore exempt from being fact-checked.
Are you saying you want to take that freedom away from private businesses?
To be explicit since for some reason people here are afraid to come out and say this: yes, I want to take that freedom away from American businesses and I would if I could. (I'd take it away from European businesses too.) That's what a law is - that's what every law is.
Both have competitors who can supply fungible services to the market, some of which are typically very close, sometimes "just a click away".
I'm sure there is already something that is illegal for companies to do or say or censor.
Why not adding one more thing which is fake news?
It's a possible idea that doesn't sound far-fetched.
Political party is not a protected class, so those businesses are well in their right to do so (despite being sued by shareholders for eliminating half their revenue).
It's the same way that those businesses reserve the right to kick out Nazis and alt-right scum.
>You did not answer the question - Do you want to take that freedom away from American businesses?
Yes, I absolutely am. I am proposing that we legally enshrine political ideology as a protected class, as has been the common custom in the US until very recently. Freedom of speech is the most fundamental human right, and it needs to be protected in all venues, both public and private. Infringing on corporate personhood is a small price to pay for a free and open society.
Edit: (comment thread is too deep and not able to reply directly)
The recent trend of trying to silence political opponents represents an existential threat to our democracy. I'm really baffled how others in this thread are not able to see why that is. Nowhere in this discussion have I claimed to be persecuted, or have I even established what my political leanings are.
You can wish you were a victim of persecution for your political choice, but it is still your choice, and as such, people can also choose to not employ or serve you for your decision.
Also, why did you just create a throwaway just to make that comment?
Anyway, I would argue that simply protecting immutable characteristics without also protecting certain actions does not make sense. For example it makes no sense to protect sexual orientation but not the action of holding your partner's hand in public or publically saying that you are of a certain orientation - after all your employer/person that you are doing business with would likely not know your sexual orientation without doing either of the above actions.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employmen...
That's what genuine, old school liberalism looks like, kids.
“Political ideology” is infinitely extensible. To enshrine it as a protected class removed all meaning from the latter.
> as has been the common custom in the US until very recently
The Revolutionary War was a political question. How were Loyalists treated? Following that, how did Federalists and Jeffersonians interact in the social sphere? More recently, how did the labour union debate get peacefully resolved? Or American participation in WWI get non-violently debated?
Now, I might think that Chick-fil-A is making a bad business decision, but part of what it means to be in America is that you have the freedom to make bad decisions.
Certainly, as someone who has voted Democrat, is religious, and is not white, I believe that the three of those are of quite different levels of voluntary choice on my behalf and I don't think that laws/social norms that apply to the most involuntary of those should apply without change to the most voluntary of those.
The principle of free speech restrains them. Nothing does—nor should—stop them.
Civil freedom of speech is difficult to enshrine into law. It balances against other freedoms in a complex, unpredictable way. (For example, the freedom of assembly. If someone says something distasteful, one should be free to not associate with them.) But it has its place as a cultural value.
It is also sensitive to context. A bumper sticker on an employee’s car is quite different from one on a customer’s.
In America, the default is that private businesses, even those who provide a service to the public, get to choose who they engage in business with and how, with no interference from the government. There are very narrow exceptions (Civil Rights Act, ADA, antitrust, etc.) when absolutely necessary.
The First Amendment was adopted in 1791 [1]. The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602 [2]. The British East India Company even earlier [3].
Massively powerful global corporations pre-date the United States by a century.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_Unite...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company#/media/Fi...
Giant corporate entities with incentives intertwined and power competing with established governments have been a thing long before Facebook rose to prominence and long before the US Constitution was ratified.
You are projecting presentism to assume that the 'founding fathers' were ignorant to large corporations.
Sorry, where are the armed men operating directly under Facebook’s officers’ command, raining down atrocity and terror on entire subcontinents of humans?
The salt monopoly and taxes was at the centre of one of the most important events in Indian history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_March
That's literally the opposite of what is alleged to be happening. Facebook's fact check policy is notionally implemented by third party fact checkers over whom Facebook exerts no control. But the contention in the article is that Facebook executives then intervene in the process to UN-flagging content that fits their personal political bent.
Is their process rigorous, public, and auditable?
It seems like just another private org that can determine what is true or false.
If someone has to do the job, I'd rather my government do it.
Government definitely shouldn't be the one to decide what is and isn't fake news [0].
> - But facebook taking out fake news based on its own judgement with absolutely no due process is obviously okay???
Since it's a private company I feel it's ok. Personally I'm more right-wing / libertarian oriented and I feel my Twitter account got banned because of me expressing more right-wing views. I tried to ask Twitter employees what was the offending post that got me banned, but never got a response. At that point I stopped using Twitter altogether.
I feel Jack Dorsey himself is more open to different view points, but perhaps many of his employees are more left-wing oriented and might feel it's their mission to curtail right-wing views, but this is just my gut feeling that I can't proof.
Since it's a private company I feel it's ok they operate like that. But at the same time I won't bother with Twitter anymore (I also don't use Facebook by the way).
---
[0]: https://euobserver.com/opinion/141458
BuzzFeed itself is a leftist clickbait organization that's completely incapable of reporting news in an unbiased way.
Is this really misinformation, or a false statement, worthy of censoring a presidents speech. For one, "almost immune", is not the same as claiming "immune". So its not even like its even a false statement, anymore than saying I "almost caught" a fish, when you didn't.
The implication is that children have low infection rate.
Regardless of the truth value, of "almost immune", removing the post, also robs people of valuable information, like for example, if Trump is leaning to have schools open in September.
If they think people are fools and won't notice it they are so wrong. It is only going to amplify voices for an alternative platform. My fear is that it will create platforms divided on political biases rather than a truly free platform where people from all sides can participate. This sort of polarization is not healthy.
We are beyond the speculation point here. Facebook has demonstrated that it has the capability to spread misinformation and sway political opinion very effectively and never for the right reasons. The pandemic is the most recent example of Facebook’s fuckery: post something that tells people that Covid is caused by 5G and that Bill Gates wants to implants microchips in you? You might get a small disclaimer on your FB post saying that “parts of it” “may be” inaccurate. You are constantly fed anything to keep you engaged with the platform and increasing Facebook’s bottom line.
Zuckerburg has just spun to Congress that Facebook is going to extreme lengths to moderate their platform - this employee’s testimony is proof that Facebook doesn’t care in the least or worse, they may be actively trying to help along candidates who will be politically lenient towards their behavior. We just discovered a “bug” caused Republican ads to show at a more frequent rate than Democratic ads - I don’t know what’s more worrying: that a bug on Facebook could swing the election or that it wasn’t a bug at all.
People need to stop with the “I know good people at Facebook” B.S. It’s beside the point. Facebook is a rogue actor that has enormous social and political power to completely mislead the general public into practically any belief. They have continued to demonstrate that they cannot be trusted with this power. This man should be praised as a whistleblower for exposing the charade that is an unregulated Facebook. We need more like him in tech to show people how serious the problem is. Give me a break with the analyses on whether he should have been fired or not and recognize the scope of the problem he is trying to warn is about. The quality of our democracy is absolutely at stake.
Aldous Huxley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alasBxZsb40
That doesn't seem like an argument anyone would want to make.
Clearly you're a demented political extremist as well.
> While there are signs Facebook will stand up to Trump in cases where he violates its rules — as on Wednesday when it removed a video post from the president in which he claimed that children are “almost immune” to COVID-19 — there are others who suggest the company is caving to critical voices on the right. In another recent Workplace post, a senior engineer collected internal evidence that showed Facebook was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content.
> The company responded by removing his post and restricting internal access to the information he cited. On Wednesday the engineer was fired, according to internal posts seen by BuzzFeed News.
Depending on which media outlet you turn to Facebook is trying to skew the election towards Trump or Biden. Depending on your political bias you get the story that fits your narrative. Perhaps our framing is off?
Sounds like this guy actually went after certain people.
James damore just asked a question.
Relevant: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
I'm sorry, but Damore claimed that women biologically lacked the ability to fill as leadership and programmer roles as men, which broke his employment agreement with Google to not perpetuate stereotypes, hence he was fired.
The window dressing and weak-worded arguments in his memo may have you thinking otherwise, but he was fired specifically for this reason, and even he confirmed as much to the press.
Edit:
For all the Damore apologists replying, here's the statement in question that he made:
>>I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
No he didn't. You can't just make things up dude.
If you are so sure of that, you can probably find an actual source written by Damore for everyone to see it with their own eyes?
"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership"
And also states that "women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading" due to biological reasons such as "higher agreeableness".
>I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
If you're a Damore apologist, usually now is the time that you say, "That's not what he really meant."
Edit: To catch my drift, see the patronizing responses devoid of evidence from the apologists.
That's not the same as saying that women are incapable of anything. Your pattern recognition engine has problems.
So much so that they cannot even have a discussion with rational evidence and neutrality, of whether there are systemic biological differences that, in the aggregate, cause these unequal representations. The premise is dismissed immediately, and labelled bigotry or anti-feminist, discriminatory, sexist, and all manner of other derogatory terms.
Nobody is claiming that Damore said it applies to all women, in fact, he hides his argument behind an appeal to averages. He says that no individual women is less capable than men, but on average, women are. The same way that a racist would say, "I'm not saying all black men are criminals, but on average, they go to prison more."
This is what I was referring to about weak-wording earlier. Damore claims that he's pro-diversity, then makes anti-diversity arguments. He gives the tone of a peer reviewed paper, but really it's a word doc with cherry picked citations. He claims that it's not all women, just distributed averages (so the typical woman) on a whole.
This is unfortunate but also true. Which is exactly what Damore might say about the distribution of this or that attribute among women being shifted from that of men. I don't see the point of lining up a true statement with Damore's when I believe you are claiming his statement is false.
I also don't see what makes the wording "weak." There's nothing weak about trying to describe something in a nuanced way. And it's perfectly possible to be pro-diversity while also claiming what Damore has claimed, in the same way that it's possible to support BLM while also believing that more black people go to prison (your example).
> He claims that it's not all women, just distributed averages (so the typical woman) on a whole.
Please just say this next time. This is the hypothesis that Damore actually backed, and if it turned out to be true it wouldn't prove anything about any individual woman. It wouldn't even prove anything about any select subset of women, insofar as that subset was not selected randomly. It's positively tame compared to the claim that so many are quick to mis-attribute to Damore: "All women are less capable of X, Y, or Z"
>"I'm not saying all black men are criminals, but on average, they go to prison more."
Is that the underlying causation behind this 'fact' is that there is systemic bias against black men from law enforcement and the rest of society.
This is why we have diversity programs.
James Damore's argument is that diversity programs are moot because he says there is no systemic bias against women. Just as if a racist were arguing against diversity programs because they say there is no systemic bias against black men, because really, on average black men "just go to prison more".
Whether or not it's the average or the individual is a red herring. The point is Damore misrepresents data to argue against systemic bias - data which is inherently culpable to the same systemic bias he is arguing against.
How is this rhetoric any better than Damore's? At best we can do studies that demonstrate the existence of bias, but we're nowhere near able to say that surely that bias is "the underlying cause of black people going to prison more" or that "this is why we have diversity problems". You're at least as bad as Damore. You want to believe that something is a certain way so you take inconclusive data and pretend like one hypothesis is not merely superior, but obviously, completely true.
> data which is inherently culpable to the same systemic bias...
How can data be culpable? And what data would this argument not invalidate? Has data every been collected by an fully un-biased society? Or can I, taking Damore's side, just throw out any data that shows that bias was the cause of a certain outcome and claim that, "this research is invalidated by the systemic bias in our society to attribute diversity problems to systemic bias."
No. The underlying causation by large consensus in the research community is that high crime rate is heavily caused by low social economic status.
Discrimination by law enforcement is not the primary cause of low social economic status. Racism in society contribute to lower social economic status for people of color but it too is not the main causation. Parents social economic status has the single largest impact on any individual social economic status and historical racism is the primary reason why African Americans as an demographic has lower social economic status than white Americans and why as a result, on average, African Americans commit more crime than white people. Programs which does not acknowledge and understand the critical relationship between social economic status and crime are unlikely to have any direct effect on crime or the rate in which African Americans end up in jail.
Which is why a lot of people in current time is arguing against diversity programs that tries to fix the problem by attacking the legal system. Its highly questionable if such programs can ever have any meaningful effect. A strategy that is more likely to succeed would be to address the social economic status issue through desegregation, social security, social economic support to parents, improving the education system in low social economic areas, access to health care, minimum wages, and other strategies that focus on the bottom 20% in the wealth hierarchy.
Different people can share the same goals but have distinctly different views on the causation and best strategy to achieve it. It does not mean it is a red herring or that they pretend to be against the goal. It just mean they have different ideas on how to reach it.
Google pays women more than men..
>Damore claims that he's pro-diversity, then makes anti-diversity arguments
You choose to see any criticism of diversity (even constructive) as an ideological attack.
That is the real issue.
The preceding post overstates how strong the memo was in its rhetoric, but the whole thing is kind of a mess: it simultaneously argues that women are worse at negotiating salaries and raises and also that there is also no pay gap for equal work, it allows as how diversity might be important, but only for those "soft" UX-adjacent roles like design and testing (which are not really "tech" as opposed to software engineering), posits alternative "solutions" based around catering to its identified inherent differences for women but also undercuts each one, and just generally veers off onto wild tangents like the spending of taxpayer money, "violent leftist protests at universities," the superiority of capitalism over communism, and more.
>I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
im sorry but im not seeing the connection between these two statements here
do you know what equal representation means?
Maybe a math example?
Let Female ~ N(161.8, sigma), Male ~ N(170.0, sigma)
Let's say someone is Tall if height > 170.0 cm
Then P(Male|Tall) > P(Female|Tall).
The entire argument is that given 1000 people, where 800 are men and 200 are women. Suppose that 1/10 is an exceptional engineer. There are going to be 80 men and 20 men who are exceptional. Suppose we want to only hire exceptional people. Trying to achieve 80 men and 80 women (equality) using the same pool will result in 60 unqualified women being hired. Now whether these incentives will result in the pool being rebalanced is a more nuanced discussion, but from a realist point of view, there is no reason to hire unqualified people.
If you're looking for biological long-tail distribution differences, sports world and Olympic record differences are probably your best argument. A combination of sexism and biological differences are to blame for there being very few female players in the NFL, NBA, and MLB, despite none of them currently having rules against female players. (I'm only aware of Ann Meyers Drysdale.)
In any case, virtually nobody argues against natural physical ability differences between men and women. Damore was clearly talking about mental abilities, so pointing out physical ability differences are a straw-man argument.
Secondly, if you accept physical differences exist but refuse to accept mental difference exist? Physical difference are mental differences, biology is physical. If you accept physical differences then by definition you accept mental differences exist.
There are barely any white players in the NBA, is that the result of racism or more due to biological factors?
If you're arguing about mental abilities, you should site studies about mental abilities. Yes, the mind is physical, but it's much more malleable than the musculo-skeletal system, so analogies break down quickly.
> There are barely any white players in the NBA, is that the result of racism or more due to biological factors?
Likely a combination of both biological and social factors.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm not saying you're right. I'm saying your arguments need improvement.
Our brains work in very much the same way but their configuration is incredibly different.
Hell its development is primed on all sorts of hormones our whole lives to behave for a certain outcome.
1. There exist studies of mental abilities
2. The mind is physical
3. The mind it's much more malleable than the musculo-skeletal system
4. The malleability of the mind makes analogies to the musculo-skelatal system fall apart quickly
5. The prevalence of African Americans in the NBA is likely a combination of both biological and social factors
My best guess is that you think it's nonsense that analogies between non-mental and mental abilities break down quickly because of the malleability of the human mind. If you feel that way, feel free to try and make some insightful inferences by analogy between physical abilities and mental abilities. I just don't think it's a fruitful avenue to explore.
For instance, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of naturally strong people who with 3 months training can bench press more than I could after 10 years of training. I doubt there many people out there who are smart enough to go from no computer training to programming better than your average 10 year veteran developer in 3 months. It's silly to use studies about weight training to make inferences about the effectiveness of mental training.
But, maybe you have other sorts of analogies in mind that make much more sense.
Edit: after looking up Debra Soh's book, it seems you've confused critique of arguments for critique of conclusions. I haven't made any statements one way or the other about if men and women differ mentally. I've just pointed out bad arguments. Faulty arguments don't necessarily even mean that the underlying reasoning is faulty. And faulty reasoning doesn't imply the conclusions are wrong.
I get this a lot, where people think I'm disagreeing with their conclusions just because I'm trying to get them to make better arguments and/or clean up their reasoning. I care less about this particular argument than I do about people learning to think and argue clearly. I get that it's a weird attitude, but I think the world is better off with us all reasoning and arguing better.
Instead, what the memo said was that statistically, women have a different distribution of traits than men, and this difference in distribution may lead to, on average, women being less predisposed to software engineering roles as they exist today. It did not say that women are incapable of being software engineers. Instead the message is that women who are happy in a software engineering role (and therefore women who will work as software engineers) are going to be further out on the bell curve than men who are happy as software engineers, and so there will be fewer of them.
The memo also suggested some ways to improve gender diversity without discrimantory hiring practises (based on the assumption that these statistical trait differences are in fact the main cause of gender ratio differences), which I think was a positive contribution to the discussion.
Overall I think the memo made some good points (although it is maybe a little long-winded and could be more rigorously cited). I'd encourage you to read it in full if you haven't just to understand what it's saying. There is a PDF at https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I... .
Edit: I do agree that claiming that women may have different abilities, as opposed to simply preferences, is problematic and oversteps the bounds of professionalism. This claim was limited to two words in one place in the document ("and abilities"), but I don't think that's the major bent of the document.
Stop lying for political purposes.
feels like the only way to enjoy working there is to either be someone who only cares about the money and prestige and/or convince yourself that the criticisms against Facebook are invalid