Zuckerberg Asks Employees to Stop Crossing Out “Black Lives Matter” at FB HQ | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg Asks Employees to Stop Crossing Out “Black Lives Matter” at FB HQ

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92 pointscoloneltcb71 comments

Great response from Zuckerberg. This is something that easily could have been dealt with in a much more ham-handed way or through middle management...to have the CEO take a stand is very helpful.

I think he states the position well. "Black Lives Matter" is meant to be a concise motto that is founded on the belief that society does not equally value its African-American citizens. It does not preclude lives of ethnic groups having value.

Perhaps the "All Lives Matter" group would argue that their stance is equally amicable...sure, it's just as well-intentioned. But what BLM and, apparently Zuckerberg believe is that this response insinuates that the BLM advocates are unfounded in their beliefs that blacks aren't equally valued by society.

Usually people in the "All Lives Matter" group seem upset at the inherent divisiveness of the "Black Lives Matter" slogan. I've never had a discussion with anyone in either camp that believes the system is fair towards black people. The actual divisiveness seems to happen when discussing if the system is also unfair to non-black people, like poor whites, who some argue are more likely to be shot by police than black people, which the "Black Lives Matter" doesn't seem to concern itself with.

Do you know of a useful slogan that concerns itself with all problems at once?

The theory behind the objection seems to be that black people must help white people fix problems that white people experience before we can even talk about the problems that black people experience. That seems crazy to me.

Even if the US hadn't uniquely maltreated black people for centuries, black people are just 12% of the population. Why shouldn't they be able to call attention to the problems they experience without white people saying, "But what about meeeeeeee?!?"

Yes, there are a lot of things wrong that we should fix. But when somebody tries to discuss problem A and somebody else immediately leaps in to say, "Why don't you care about B?" I often suspect that the point is not to fix problem B, it's to stop the discussion of problem A.

A useful slogan that concerns itself with all problems at once? Off the top of my head "Police enforcement in the US is out of control?"

And I think we immediately stopped seeing eye to eye right here "The theory behind the objection seems to be that black people must help white people fix problems that white people experience before we can even talk about the problems that black people experience. That seems crazy to me." No white person is saying "help me fix my problems first". They're saying, this is a single problem we all face and we should all work to fix it. They might even go further and say race is a bullshit social construct used to oppress and separate people and that their is no "us" and "them" only us.

There are a lot of cop unions, police officials, and the politicians whom they support, who would highly highly disagree with you.

You see your problem as "police enforcement in the US is out of control". Other people see different problems. You saying, "We should all work to fix my problem because I am sure your problem is the same as mine" is effectively saying, "help me fix my problem before I will listen to you about your problem". Because your notion that you understand the problems of black people better than they themselves do is definitely a sign that you aren't listening.

And sure, the American notion of race is a bullshit social construct, but it is one that white people created, put into law, and enforced. And of course used as a tool to gain power. So if white people would like race not to be an issue anymore, they should get other white people to stop making it a thing. Telling black people to stop noticing the racial bias directed against them by white people will not actually end the bias, it just hides the evidence.

[1] e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Well when I see cops shooting people for the diciest of reasons, and enforcing laws with little discretion and maximum force, I'm not convinced that I'm wrong by the argument "Black lives matter". People are free to believe what they want, but obviously there is a messaging problem with "BLM".

You don't have to be convinced to be respectful. It is certainly not their job and probably not their goal to convince you.

Also, it's not obvious at all that there's a messaging problem. I get that a bunch of white people don't like the message. But a bunch of white people will dislike anything black people do to push back against a system that harms them.

For decades white people have been telling black activists that they're doing it wrong. And their main cited evidence is that white people are uncomfortable. MLK got a lot of that, and he responded to it here:

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

I certainly agree that the "Black Lives Matter" slogan makes me, a white person, uncomfortable. But as far as I'm concerned, that's just what it should be doing. If other people are being maltreated by a system that I have the power to change, that shouldn't feel warm and fuzzy.

"You don't have to be convinced to be respectful. It is certainly not their job and probably not their goal to convince you."

Sorry? If they want to create political change in a democratic society, it is their job to convince him.

No, not at all.

Think about the technology adoption curve, as seen in Crossing the Chasm. It's not the job, or even the goal, of a person creating a new technology to convince everybody. At any moment, a small portion of people are open to changing their minds on a given thing. Mostly, they do what they grew up with, or what the people around them are doing.

The same is generally true socially. Consider this graph:

http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod...

Now subtract the death rate from that graph. If you do, you'll see that a relatively small number of people changed their minds at any given point. Much of the change comes because old bigots died off, taking their retrograde opinions to the grave with them.

So basically, an activist who wants to change minds, like a technology marketer, shouldn't focus their efforts on convincing everybody. Persuasive efforts are best spent on the people who are most ready to change. Which in my experience is generally the person listening carefully, not the guy who runs up to shout, "No, you're doing it all wrong. Do it my way."

"Black Lives Matter" is not an argument, its a rallying cry. They serve substantially different purposes. (Activists in the BLM movement make many arguments, but "Black Lives Matter" isn't one of them -- insofar as it has a structural relationship to the arguments, its a statement of a key uniting element of the moral foundation on which the arguments are based.)

> A useful slogan that concerns itself with all problems at once? Off the top of my head "Police enforcement in the US is out of control?"

Your proposal is not a slogan that "concerns itself with all problems at once", or even "all the problems that BLM addresses, plus some other problems". It is one which overlaps the problem domain addressed by Black Lives Matter, but does not encompass it.

BLM isn't just about law enforcement. In fact, the proximate trigger for its creation was the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin killing, it just happens to have come to wide attention through the movement's responses to police killings.

"Black Lives Matter ... goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes.... to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state." [0]

[0] http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/

Here's a suggestion: "no police state"

I won't argue that the motto isn't exclusive to some degree. Everything in life is, even if they aren't logically so. For example, you could love Picasso more than Van Gogh, but still love the latter. If you're a museum curator, though, you only have limited space...the fact that you choose to pick Picasso artworks doesn't mean that Van Gogh is terrible, and yet, you had to prioritize.

The BLM group don't hate non-blacks. But they believe the disenfranchisement of blacks needs to be re-prioritized. While it's not a zero-sum game, sure, in the short term, tradeoffs are made...if next year's recruitment is 20% black...that 18% had to out of some other demographic.

So, in my rosy-lens world, the two groups aren't in conflict, but it's realistic to recognize the tradeoffs. But what isn't acceptable, in my opinion, is for either group to make this into a false-dichotomy...that's why I like Zuckerberg's message...it's not an easy topic, but just crossing shit out escalates discord in a way that is not warranted, as if the people writing "Black Lives Matter" were just one step away from drawing swastikas.

To your point about poor white people being just as disenfranchised as the average black person...I don't disagree with that. I grew up in the Midwest to refugee parents and in my lesser moments was annoyed that I got grouped in with the affluent Chinese and Korean families, as if all Asians had equal opportunity to get great grades and live out the stereotype of the golden minority. On the other hand, I realize that while I may not have started off financially well, there were far fewer barriers for me in terms of other people throwing up obstacles...and that was probably because the Asian community, overall, has positive stereotypes associated with it (in terms of general society...obviously not so much in other areas). This was not the case for the few blacks I knew. You could come from a well-off family and still be followed around in stores or targeted for a stop-and-frisk. I'm not sure growing up middle-class but in what might feel like a surveillance state is better than growing up poor, yet encouraged.

So I wouldn't say the BLM people don't care about the other kinds of disenfranchisement. They just believe they need to focus on one kind to be successful. Think about Occupy Wall Street...a lot of their general ideas were things many people would like, but because its organizers didn't want to be exclusive, that meant casting a very wide umbrella and attracting people whose goals did not gel well with OWS, making the group seem very diffuse. And so OWS was mocked for being weak and daydreamy.

The most successful groups are the focused groups. Ask the unions and the gun rights groups.

Any change which results in fewer black people getting shot by police is also likely to result in fewer poor white people getting shot by police.

> Usually people in the "All Lives Matter" group seem upset at the inherent divisiveness of the "Black Lives Matter" slogan.

That's not been my experience. To the extent that ALM has been accompanied by any substantive clues about peoples broader views, in my experience, its been coupled with dismissal of the seriousness of the specific incidents BLM have complained about, and suggestions that other concerns, most often specifically violence against white police officers, are more important than the issues BLM addresses.

Spent my high school years in a poor, rural county in southeastern Virginia that was mostly black. All of these folks were descended from slaves, and there was never a doubt in my mind that white oppression in the past had created numerous, deep disadvantages for my friends and classmates who had the misfortune of being part of families who had suffered from the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

That being said, I've always found that black ethnocentrism has a similar effect to white ethnocentrism: it causes further division and worsens the problem it claims to try to solve.

The statement "Black Lives Matter" offends me, because it makes the assumption that because I'm not black, I don't think black lives matter, and therefore have to be told that they do. Most of my friends growing up were black. My best friend was closer to me than my brothers, was best man at my wedding, and I at his. It also over-simplifies a complex problem, that has at its root the fact that the hostile relationship between blacks and police is not one-directional. It was started by white police with decades of oppression, but the current situation is a cycle perpetuated by the thought that police are the enemy. If you have been told your whole life that police are the enemy, then you are going to behave differently when they approach you than someone else. If the police are in a community where everyone has been taught this, they will behave in a way that ends up supporting this belief, and the seeds of conflict are sown.

Ethnocentrism has never, ever helped unify people. My personal experience growing up and socializing in a mostly black social environment left me with the impression that there is a minority of black Americans who, similar to a minority of white Americans, are ethnocentric and racist towards those who don't share their race. The difference is that the black variety of ethnocentric activists are openly tolerated and encouraged by white people who have never in their life spent ten minutes under the roof of a black person's home, let alone attended black churches or been involved in family events such as Thanksgiving dinners, weddings, funerals, etc.

Racism is a part of the human condition, as is its direct precursor, ethnocentrism. Pretending that it's different depending on the person's complexion tells me that these white folks view black Americans as different than themselves, almost less human. I hold all humans, no matter how difficult their background, to a higher standard.

I'm not sure it's ethno-centrist so much as ethno-corrective

> The statement "Black Lives Matter" offends me, because it makes the assumption that because I'm not black, I don't think black lives matter, and therefore have to be told that they do.

Why do you think it's about you?

> because it makes the assumption that because I'm not black, I don't think black lives matter, and therefore have to be told that they do.

It absolutely does not make that assumption.

I think the solution is to stop taking offense. The point isn't to say other injustices don't matter - it's to shine a spotlight on a particular type of injustice that needs attention.

And you can't say it hasn't helped. People are more aware of problems between the police and the black community than they were even a few years ago.

> The statement "Black Lives Matter" offends me, because it makes the assumption that because I'm not black, I don't think black lives matter

No. Statements don't make assumptions. People make assumptions. And you are the particular person making these assumptions. Personally, I make different ones.

The way I (as another white person) read it is as a wake-up call. I think it wouldn't work as a slogan if white people truly thought that black lives didn't matter. It's a reminder to me that although black lives do matter to me, the system I participate in (and benefit from) treats black lives as worth less.

To me, "Black Lives Matter" is just the opposite of ethnocentric thinking. It's a way to expose existing ethnic bias so we can fight ethnocentric systems. Until people admit there's a problem, we can't fix the problem. When I hear (or say) "Black Lives Matter", I think it's a way of pointing out the ongoing disadvantages that are carried forward from our deeply egregious past.

well said

That being said, I've always found that black ethnocentrism has a similar effect to white ethnocentrism: it causes further division and worsens the problem it claims to try to solve.

Or, it can be something you just don't have to worry about. I think I'd leave it up to the constituency in question as to whether their position is too "ethnocentric" or is otherwise less than ideal for them in some way.

The statement "Black Lives Matter" offends me, because it makes the assumption that because I'm not black, I don't think black lives matter, and therefore have to be told that they do.

Words are imperfect, in general. In this case, it's just saying, born out of a need to address a very serious problem. The bottom line is that it isn't about you. So you don't have to think about it, let alone get offended by it, if you don't want to.

> The statement "Black Lives Matter" offends me, because it makes the assumption that because I'm not black, I don't think black lives matter, and therefore have to be told that they do.

There is no such assumption embodied in the statement, and to assume there is requires the extreme vanity of assuming that the slogan must be a message about you. Rather, the message is that the manner in which black people are treated overall in society demonstrates that society at large acts as if black lives do not matter, and this needs to be corrected. It does not assume that this behavior is either universal among or exclusive to non-blacks (BLM expressly concerns itself with ways in which the black community, including other "black liberation" movements, marginalize certain segments of the black community.)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is asking his employees to stop being ignorant and racist (my words, not his)

It's pretty hard to take an article seriously when the author starts it like that. I wish the people reporting on these issues would leave the hyperbole out.

At least it's clearly identified as paraphrasing.

But if you clicked through to that point and were served ads, they kind of already won. At least short term.

I'm happy I have a habit of clicking through to the HN comments before reading the article, then.

"There are specific issues affecting the black community in the United States, coming from a history of oppression and racism..."

For anyone looking to read more on this subject, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness", was a helpful resource for me. (http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindn...)

The article disapprovingly states that 55% of Facebook is white as if that's a disproportionate amount, even though 63% of the USA population identifies as non-hispanic white. What's up with that

And now it got crossed off the front page of Hacker News... sad.

@Dang - was this flagged by users? Seems crazy that it had 30 points in 20 minutes and now it's gone.

Zuckerberg's statement on this seemed really well written. The "Black Lives Matter" vs. "All Lives Matter" has been discussed endlessly, but he had another great point about crossing out the Black Lives Matter being essentially the same as silencing free speech.

The submission was flagkilled.

I vouched for it since despite what people may think about BLM, Zuckerberg's response is important and relevant.

I really would like to know the rationale behind the people trying to flagkill it

I think its probably the exact same rationale as crossing out "Black Lives Matter".

Though if I'm being more charitable, most likely some people see this as a political article which shouldnt be on HN (whether you feel that way is probably correlated to your opinion of Black Lives Matter).

That is indeed quite charitable, given that the story is about Facebook, startup culture, and the direct actions of one of the most prominent people in tech.

If somebody only objects to political articles when it's politics they don't like, I'd be curious as to how they resolve claiming to be against politics while energetically politicizing something.

I was tempted to flag it, since it is just taking Gizmodo's article and adding a bit of Techcrunch idiocy to it, like the statement that Facebook is "notoriously white". Facebook is slightly less white than the US population.

The topic of the article is fine for HN, in my opinion, despite being political, but that doesn't mean we should settle for a crappy article. Hence, the temptation to flag this one and let a better submission get the focus.

> I was tempted to flag it, since it is just taking Gizmodo's article and adding a bit of Techcrunch idiocy to it, like the statement that Facebook is "notoriously white". Facebook is slightly less white than the US population.

"Notorious" means famous for something seen in a negative light.

It doesn't actually mean that you have the trait in a unusual degree, only that you are particularly well-known and negatively reacted to for the trait.

It may be inaccurate to describe Facebook as "notoriously white", but the fact that they are somewhat less white, proportionally, than the US population doesn't actually demonstrate that. (It might be a basis for arguing that, if they are notoriously white, the notoriety is not deserved, but that's a different issue.)

Thanks! Looks like it's back.

Flagkilling this post strikes me as an interesting statement about how divisive race can be - even for this demographic (i.e. mostly well-educated tech people)

As a side note, it would be very interesting to see some information and statistics about the flagging on HN.

What you're seeing is the usual tug of war between upvotes and flags that happens with controversial stories on hot topics.

Is there anyway to decrease the opacity? Knowing when a tug of war is happening vs when a story is just not important/not popular is compelling/valuable/meaningful.

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-downvoti...

I'm not just a moralist(though I think it's obvious there are moral points here) I'm building an HN clone.

That might even cause more of a tug of war, tbh...I don't feel transparency would really help in these cases, though I say that only because in my anecdotal survivor-bias-affected short-term memory, just as many controversial social issues posts are allowed to stay up on top as are flagkilled. And I don't think there's an "ideal" balance, in that everyone has a different ideal balance.

But anything that makes it obvious that a flamewar is going on would just exacerbate it. Seems to be the case with Reddit. For me, my own "flag" is if a post has as many comments as upvotes...in fact, I assumed that this was something that would auto-downmod a front page submission.

Transparency would show how people are using the feature and we could have an honest discussion about the appropriateness based on that.

Instead we have to draw our own conclusions which incentivizes a cynical spiral that "the other guys are abusing it so I should too".

What you're describing reads to me as "abuse of the flagging feature".

Is the point of the flagging feature to be a nuclear downvote when you disagree with something?

The community disagrees with itself about what belongs on HN. Any time flags you disagree with win out over upvotes is going to feel like "abuse of the flagging feature".

I'm not aware of any alternative to the current voting/flagging system that would balance the concerns more effectively. Certainly any solution will include cases that leave many users unsatisfied.

> Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is asking his employees to stop being ignorant and racist (my words, not his)

Gee, I wonder why this submission was flagged, with a lead sentence like this.

Primary source is Gizmodo (http://gizmodo.com/mark-zuckerberg-asks-racist-facebook-empl...), but Gizmodo submission is heavily linkbait.

> The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. CHOMSKY.

I agree people shouldn't cross out black lives matter.

However, if you're going to let them write "black lives matter," you should also allow people to write "all lives matter."

If our society has reached a point of guilt, where we can no longer acknowledge that all lives matter, and doing so is "racist," that means blacks (and allies) will have become the new de facto racist group.

"If our society has reached a point of guilt, where we can no longer acknowledge that all lives matter, and doing so is 'racist,' that means blacks (and allies) will have become the new de facto racist group."

This took a minute to sink in. Everyone should contemplate this statement for a minute. For me the phrase All Lives Matter seems very guiltless and brings feelings of unity, while Black Lives Matter brings feelings of division. Just seems like it is doing nothing to unite people on the cause... like a bad marketing campaign trying to guilt people into joining a cause.

what he should do is ask employees to stop writing any such things at FB hq in the first place.

Individual Political messages like that don't belong in the workplace.

It's sort of the Raison d'être of the wall in the first place...

I totally agree with you. Political opinions are formed over a long time, and are a function of our experiences, prejudices, reading, ignorance etc...all very hard to change.

So its best to not have political discussions in a work place setting. These kind of provisions invariably just end up causing a lot of heart burn, and nothing more.

PS: I personally liked Zuckerberg's gesture as I know why it is important to have specific/loaded statements which hint at history, than motherhood/generic statements, which mean nothing, and often are the refuge of bigots. But at the same time, I have seen nobody (or very few) change their positions in arguments, and are just the cause of heart burns. God, how many people I unfriended on FB (when I was using it) just cause they hurt me real bad (in some cases, I regretted later on...that's why Facebook is a net negative IMHO, but I digress, Sorry).

1 point by wkimeria 6 hours ago

Kudos to him. The tendency of people to refuse to understand what "Black Lives Matter" means is infuriating. I love Arthur Chu's Tweet some time ago on this

https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/538015166634680320?...

'Do people who change #BlackLivesMatter to #AllLivesMatter run thru a cancer fundraiser going "THERE ARE OTHER DISEASES TOO"'

The Black Lives Matter vs. All Lives Matter debate is one where two friendly colleagues can easily realize they hate each other.

I'm surprised FB wants any part of it.

No surprise that an organization engaging in large-scale behavioral engineering ('click here') has a warped view of free speech.

I don't know how to reconcile 'we've never had rules about what people can write' with 'my clear communication that this is unacceptable' (or even with taking down photos of breastfeeding women).

His interpretation is that BLM doesn't mean all lives don't matter, therefore the crossouts are inappropriate. (1) I'm not sure social justice movements want to be interpreted by nasdaq CEOs. And (2) crossing out isn't censorship, it's debate.

Given that this whole company is about people writing on each other's walls, you'd want them to have a more nuanced attitude towards graffiti.

I'm not black or white. I'm not impressed with "black lives matter" or zuckerberg or "all lives matter" or whatever. The rule should be don't cross out what others have written... write your own thing. jeez. freakin' high school.

I have to wonder why this dropped off the front page. I feel like stories like this get "crossed out" of HN. Anyone from HN wanna chime in?

There's a post with 10 votes that's 53 minutes old at #11. This one is at 32 votes 35 minutes old.

Ok, it's back on the front page now. Could HN have less opaque flagging?

And now it's gone.

HN doesn't compute story rank from points and timestamp alone.

Is the algorithm public?

No. A version of HN's source code is included with the public release of Arc, but HN's algorithm has many extensions that aren't public. It has to be that way, because it would be too easy to game the system otherwise.

dang, that violate's Kerckhoffs's principle: "A system should be secure even if everything about the system is public knowledge." Security through obscurity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle

Yes, but we don't know how to secure an internet forum in that sense.

You mentioned that you're working on an HN clone. Perhaps you'll figure this out.

Kerckhoff's Principle holds only if the adversary's cost are unbounded. In reality, there's almost always a cost ceiling tied in some way to the value of the target.

In other words: you are welcome to spend unlimited hours and dollars finding and exploiting the flaws in HN's ranking model simply to prove a point, but hopefully, you have better things to do. Similarly, the HN team has better things to do than investing resources to defeat the (unlikely) adversaries who harness both skill and irrationality.

(This wrinkle of Kerckhoff's Principle comes up a lot in systems security work, which is why I was moved to comment about it.)

Kerckhoff is only directly relevant to cryptosystems, but the related notion of "security by obscurity" comes up again and again.

And it's usually a sign that the one trying to shut down a discussion with this argument is wrong. :-)

Usual forum scenario: changing your SSH port to a non-standard port is security by obscurity and doesn't do anything. Usual reply: it doesn't cost me anything (except a few minutes of my time), but may keep a non-sophisticated attacker out – think some automated script kiddie software.

It's possible users could have flagged it.

I posted an Ask HN[1] but it has been mysteriously edited. Now I'd really like someone from HN to chime in.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176843

That post wasn't "mysteriously edited", it got killed by a spam filter.

The answer to your question is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176881.

Thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com