Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague | Hacker News Reader

Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

reuters.com

344 pointsTangerineDream313 comments

I think a key phrase here is "he was dismissed for publicly challenging a colleague’s silence".

In other words, he publicly harassed a colleague who (for what could be any number of perfectly valid reasons) preferred not to publicly state their beliefs. That would seem to me to be an eminently reasonable reason to fire someone. If you go around publicly harassing your colleagues to publicly state their political opinions, you deserve to be fired.

Ok, since the article says both that the employee "wrote on Twitter that he was dismissed for publicly scolding a colleague" and "Facebook confirmed [this] characterization of his dismissal", I think we can syllogize our way to "Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague" as a fact that both sides have confirmed.

Indeed -- here is some additional context that the article doesn't provide:

The fired employee Tweeted today:

>In the interest of transparency, I was let go for calling out an employee’s inaction here on Twitter. I stand by what I said. They didn’t give me the chance to quit [0]

He then specifically cited [1] the Tweet in question that was the cause:

>I asked @Vjeux to follow @reactjs's lead and add a statement of support to Recoil's docs and he privately refused, claiming open source shouldn't be political.

>Intentionally not making a statement is already political. Consider that next time you think of Recoil. [2]

This is specifically targeting an individual front-end engineer at FB, which in my own estimation crosses the line from criticism of executives or general policy, to specifically trying to instigate public outrage against a co-worker. If such actions were directed at me, I would definitely consider it as contributing to a hostile work environment. It all strikes me as a modern-day example of "Havel's greengrocer" [3].

[0] https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1271522288752455680

[1] https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1271531477209976832

[2] https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...

He decides because he believes something strongly it permits him to publicly attack someone he works with... Imagine having to deal with this guy in a team when he has a strong opinion on something the team disagrees with ...

Agree. It's endemic of the political and cultural climate we're in right now, where mob rule is becoming the status quo. Personal politics should be just that, personal.

It's not mob rule it's those who run the outrage-triathlon where those with the highest blood pressure and boil over tops win. If they can't steam anybody up to join them from their effervescence alone they deserve to fall to the wayside and get out the way. The outrage train is coming.

We must ask ourselves daily, "what am I supposed to be outraged about now?"

> Agree. It's endemic of the political and cultural climate we're in right now, where mob rule is becoming the status quo.

I'm not sure we should mark this down as a political and cultural climate thing. I'm more convinced the guy was simply an asshole and it so happens that he felt strongly about politics.

The thing is... he's not the only one. It's been happening for a while now at Google and other big tech companies - if your personal ideological views don't conform with the majority's... prepare to be browbeaten into conformance.

Hence, many people are very secretive of their beliefs if they don't conform, and they may even "play along" like Winston does during the "Two Minutes Hate" (1984). Unlike 1984, we don't have a state or federal "thought police" but we kind of have something similar - a "thought mob" that patrols coworkers for evidence of thought crime.

It's always been this way.

Politics is intensely personal. It's not so much about conflicting ideas, but rather loudly delineating social groups and whose camp you're in.

Pushing beliefs to simplistic extremes and demanding declarations of beliefs is an efficient way to make clear where yourself and others stand socially. Truth has little to do with it.

Politics seems "stupid" because we're putting the cart before the horse.

I think what's different now is how many strangers you're exposed to. A century ago, analogues to context-less twitter rage pile-ons were likely smaller and rarer.

Politics by definition cannot be personal. It's the practice of resolving conflict within society; if you don't interact with society, there is no politics possible.

(Note: this doesn't mean I agree with the behaviour shown in this case - nobody says politics between colleagues must be done over Twitter.)

(edit: sad downvotes without actual logical counterpoint are sad.)

Politics at the workplace should be kept personal. Politics between colleagues should not be done at all.

> Politics between colleagues should not be done at all.

Hear, hear.

In fact, it's an age-old addage that politics and religion should never be discussion topics at work because of how easy these discussions can spiral down to hostile work environments due to assholes like this guy.

And this case is just yet another example reinforcing the addage.

I disagree. With that outlook, we would never have had the social movements that changed Europe for the better in the XIX and XX century. In modern terms, stuff like BLM influences who your colleagues are, how you treat them, and how you react to their demands for fairness.

> BLM influences who your colleagues are

Does someone need to 100% support BLM (the political movement) to make an acceptable colleague?

What if someone: opposes racism and thinks police's use of force should be more regulated, but disagrees with some BLM tactics/approach to achieving change?

For example, what if the destruction of property from the protests, or calls to defund the police, actually cause a backlash at the next election and it reduces the chances of anything actually being done. Is someone allowed to make a critique like that?

The bottom line is there actually needs to be a diversity of thought to solve problems, and if you silence anyone who isn't 100% behind your message your not going to make change.

> Does someone need to 100% support BLM (the political movement) to make an acceptable colleague?

No, and I never said as much.

My point is that stuff like BLM is relevant enough that should not be considered a taboo subject between reasonable adults on the workplace. Nobody should be forced or publicly shamed into agreeing on this or that action, and there are well-known ways of resolving this sort of disagreement (i.e. voting) while respecting each other.

I am not supporting what happened in this case, I am only disagreeing with people in the thread turning it into an excuse to never talk about politics on the workplace. If we don't face problems and talk about them, we will never solve them.

> I am only disagreeing with people in the thread turning it into an excuse to never talk about politics on the workplace.

If I was running a company, I would prefer employees not to talk about politics because it will create needless arguments that have nothing to do with the job at hand. If I am an employee, if there is a disagreement about something, how do I know there is not going to be a long-standing hatred from a colleague about my position on a topic that will manifest itself in unpredictable ways.

There are too many activists which make every topic good vs evil and life vs death.

No but the issue is a statement on the project’s page, which is a public good. Expressing support for a just and important movement for social progress like BLM is, in this respect, expected and thus asked. It has nothing to do with politics. It’s a social movement that the right is trying to vilify and turn into a political wedge issue, as well as cultural “Other”.

The world would be a better place if both Russia and Germany kept a lid on the practice of pressuring people into a political stance in the first half of the 20th century.

OTOH MLK did not have his followers pressure coworkers - they kept it in the public, not behind doors.

That's not how it went down - what happened between 1900-1950 was the culmination of more than a century of struggles in industrial relations (where labor had no power unless it organised), the rise of mass-media, and the end of monarchies as a viable system of government.

politics are profoundly personal but also pervades the whole human-organizational stack. conflict resolution might be one of its applications, but make no mistake, politics is primarily concerned with power and its application.

(human) politics requires just 2 people, not a whole societies’ worth; even zero people at the limit, since politics happens in and with other species too.

I can easily imagine dealing with a tweet that asks me to do something, and then another tweet that says that I didn't do the thing that was asked of me. That doesn't sound too bad to me. What am I missing?

Public shaming and the invocation of a mob against you?

> This is specifically targeting an individual front-end engineer at FB, which in my own estimation crosses the line from criticism of executives or general policy, to specifically trying to instigate public outrage against a co-worker.

More importantly, it sounds like he was bullying colleagues to force them to comply with his personal desires on how to do activism by proxy.

Worse, he was trying to force colleagues to risk losing their job in the process just so that they could cater to his whims.

"bullying" is definitely the word. And no one should be forced to take a political position, especially in a work context. There's a reason why our forbears left their politics at the workplace door.

Beyond that, I'd be nervous that a co-worker like this might advance to physical violence.

And he seems from replies and subsequent tweets to still be taking shots at the former coworker. I passively wonder if there wasn’t already some history between the two we just aren’t privy to

Or this guy could just be a total asshole. Think of it another way: If you so demand that everyone post messages of support for your political stance, those messages completely lose all meaning. Does anyone in North Korea really give that much of a shit about all the praise for their "Dear Leader"? No, they just don't want to be killed or sent to a prison camp.

Exactly!

Politics should be kept out of the workplace.

I'm sympathetic to this opinion just for worrying about clashing cultural expectations with co-workers. In communicating ideas in a way what may be obvious to me (because of my culture), it might not always obvious to someone else and easy to mis-interpret.

At best, you're never going to change somebody's mind in a political discussion (you can only change people who are not directly participating), and at worst, there's the risk of being raked over the coils by HR or even losing your job.

Maybe the workplace should stop spending millions of dollars a quarter on political lobbying, then.

Normally sure, but when politicians are using your platform (paying you) to further their own narratives, it's fair game.

Even still, there are appropriate channels and using a public platform to personally attack someone is a nuclear option that you should expect consequences on.

e.g. government employees initially raise concerns on policy privately, then resign and speak out when the discussions fail.

Personal politics, and hopefully politics in general, have nothing to do with the policies that result.

That depends on if you are a platform or a publisher.

"I disagree with what this platform I'm working on allows," is a valid statement an employee can bring up and unavoidably political when in reference to political speech or something that is being used to some political end. A section of some arbitrary law from the 90's doesn't define what an employee can be concerned about.

That seems like a fine way to state your political stance on the platform. But as has been brought up in other comments and the article, it is not the manner in which the dismissed employee did it.

Was a famous IBM motto in the thirties. You dont receive der Fuhrer's "The Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star", granted to 'honor foreign nationals who made themselves deserving of the German Reich.' by talking bad about political leaders now do you.

IBM commercial from 1934 'Übersicht hollerith lochkarten' https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/im...

IBM CEO photo-op with the leader https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/punched-cards/2/1...

Honestly I wasn't going to reply to any comments on the thread, but this is so odious and completely stupid I believe I should address it.

Not talking politics in the workplace doesn't mean not taking a stand outside of the workplace it just means you're at work to get work done not talk politics and I as a potential coworker frankly don't want to hear your politics in the workplace and, I'd have no problem letting you know that fact if you act in real life like you post, hyperbolic and unwaranted.

In fact, taking a stand for what you believe in is one of the fundamental rights the US protects and I think you should participate in any protest, march or riot you want to. I just think you shouldn't do it at work, and if you do, for people not to be surprised that it get's you fired at a few places because people don't want you disrupting their business.

> It all strikes me as a modern-day example of "Havel's greengrocer"

While partially agreeing, i would note that "Havel's greengrocer" was more about situation where boths sides consired that speech act just as expression of power relations and loyality, ignoring its meaning. In this case it is more a case of "true believer".

I initially thought it was about not taking a stance on BLM publically.

EDIT: It is indeed about that!

Why push for a statement on Recoil docs instead of on the front page of FB?

Because bullies pick on people smaller than them.

He called out a colleague, and then when the colleague reached out to him privately so they could discuss, called him out again for not conversing in public on Twitter.

I'm sympathetic to his motivations, but his behaviour was unprofessional and unwarranted.

I'm starting a new job soon and I'm trying to figure out how I'll handle these "silence is complicit" characters. My personal policy is to not discuss political/social issues at work.

Kill em with kindness.

“Thanks for letting me know how you feel about this, I consider this a valuable opinion and think deeply on it”.

Then go ahead and do whatever you were going to do anyway, but at least let them know you’ve heard and acknowledged what they had to say. Sometimes folks just want to be acknowledged, that doesn’t seem like too much of a burden.

I this this is a good approach that I've used before.

I think it starts to crumble when people start to demand you to do stuff like posting on your social media or showing them donation receipts.

I think the unfortunate reality is that some people are intolerant of others who are insufficiently supportive of certain causes, and the only way to deal with those people is not to deal with them. The subject of this thread seems to be one of those people.

I think the unfortunate reality is that this isn't about individual people expecting support for certain causes. What you're looking at is fundamentally a social phenomenon - a belief that's been spreading from person to person and community to community that every person in the social group must support the correct causes in the correct ways, that anyone who doesn't go along with this is actively going against the cause and must be shamed and shunned until they do. It's the social spread via peer pressure that gives this its power. This isn't a new thing, it's been spreading amongst the tech community and elsewhere for probably well over a decade at this point.

I agree that this type of toxic peer-pressure is spreading, and I have no idea what to do about it. It reminds me of what Louis Fischer and Arthur Koestler described in their respective essays in "The God That Failed".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_that_Failed

I would go even further and say s/tech/human/ and s/well over a decade/millenia/ :-)

Not necessarily insufficiently supportive, but insufficiently supportive in public mediums.

It’ll crumble if you allow them to continue pushing the matter and imposing upon you, enforce your personal boundaries and if they continue intruding, probably HR time or at least sidebar with your manager. Good luck in your new job otherwise!

I have found that having a serial killer resting face precludes me from these type of workplace bullies (only kinda joking).

Why not just ignore them?

But do you actually acknowledge them? I think this is fine if you're taking it to heart and actually internalizing the discussion a bit. Otherwise, it's disingenuous.

Edit: this is very basic EQ and active listening, not sure why it's controversial to have good social skills.

If you want genuine don't ask people questions where the answer can give them negative backlash at work.

Getting upset when someone wont be truthful on things with you on touchy subjects at work is like being upset when someone wont be truthful with you on touchy subjects when you're pointing a gun at them.

Acknowleding someone’s opinions and feelings can be as simple as being quiet, letting them speak, giving them room to express themselves without interruption, objection objection or reprisal. You don’t need to automatically alter your course of action just to merely recognize and acknowledge something someone’s said, sometimes just shutting up and being deferential is enough.

“Thank you for your opinion but I’m going another way” is no more of a failure than establishing any other decent and respectable boundaries between peoples.

Manners maketh the man (or woman, or however an individual chooses to self-identify).

OK, I think I'm getting this a bit more. I believe this is a healthy way to think about these topics. I just wasn't sure if you were encouraging people to participate in active listening or passive-aggressiveness. It's clear you're focused on the former which I find commendable.

I encourage seeking clarity and being secure in one's own emotional intelligence to ask questions when things are ambiguous, so I appreciate your asking. Happy to have helped find a mutual understanding. Sorry your comments were so negatively reacted to here.

Not a lawyer, just my thoughts:

Assuming you're in the US, it's my understanding that political affiliation is generally not a protected category. So if it's at-will employment at a private employer, it's probably legal to fire you for your political beliefs / actions (or "no reason" when it's really about political affiliation). If someone is engaging in behavior that bothers you, tell them to stop. If they don't, report them to HR. Make sure everything is in writing. But, be aware that HR might not be on your side; but at that point you really need to reconsider whether you want to work at a place where you are harassed and not supported by the company for not discussing politics.

There are state dependent laws. California for example: https://www.shouselaw.com/employment/political-retaliation.h...

Some high level laws by state: https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/political-aff...

Some cities have similar laws as well.

The City of Seattle "assure[s] equal opportunity to all persons, free from restrictions because of race, color, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, political ideology, age, creed, religion, ancestry, national origin, honorably discharged veteran or military status or the presence of any sensory, mental or physical disability."

https://library.municode.com/wa/seattle/codes/municipal_code...

This is how in soviet times and to extent how this works with china, unless you are vocally "independently" supportive of party line then you are hiding opposite dissenting view and need to be educated etc.

Unfortunately I've heard that drawing critical analogies to communist regimes is a "right-wing dog-whistle", so I'm hesitant to defend myself in public by pointing out these sort of parallels..

Usually this is spouted by people who know jack about communist regimes, much less witnessed one.

The way it works at my workplace is that in meetings with more than one person, we just say "times are tough and thanks for coping with the hard times and still getting the work done. We also recognize that times may be especially hard for some people." But in 1-on-1 convos some of my colleagues and I trust each other enough to say, for example, that we attended a protest.

Character: "Can you believe blah blah blah blah"

Response: "Crazy"

Only way to survive in a tech company.

I think other people gave you some ideas already.

I'd like to portray another question for you to consider: Do you think being able to have this policy is an inherently privileged position? For the record, I don't disagree with you. I have the same one.

I don't want to assume anything about you, so I'll speak about myself: I'm a het cis white male. I'm well-educated and well paid. Politics basically don't affect me unless it's taxes (which is why our industry ends up leaning so heavily libertarian." I am able to CHOOSE when to discuss political/social issues because i am able to CHOOSE when they affect me.

This is not the case for many others, including I bet your coworkers. If you are a woman, non-hetero, non-cis, or a racial minority, you don't get to choose whether politics/society affects your life - it is automatic. There is no clean separation for a lot of people between work and life and it spills over, and even if they intend to not bring it up, it sometimes will.

I say all this not to get you to change your policy, but to keep in mind why others may not be able to have the same one. What will naturally follow from that, is that people invariably look for allies. So if someone asks you to discuss a subject, one that violates your policy, you should really consider whether your policy actually makes sense in the world, or if it only helps you while actively harming those around you.

So if you're an ally, you should consider flexing your policy, and trying to help.

And if you're not, well...then your silence IS complicit, and you shouldn't be surprised if it affects your career accordingly.

The “silence is complicit” stuff does really annoy me. Shaming people for not having the same political beliefs is already one thing. But shaming them for having those beliefs, but not sharing them in arenas they’re not comfortable sharing them in is quite extreme.

This is interesting to consider in combination with the xkcd "showing you the door" free speech comic.

If staying silent is unacceptable and saying something "wrong" is unacceptable, then it's in your own self interest to learn the "acceptable views" (whether you agree or not) and mouth them whenever the Powers that Be demand it.

That's quite twisted.

I love XKCD, but that strip is philosophically and historically ignorant.

Free speech isn't the First Amendment. Free speech is a broad foundational principle of liberalism, and the First Amendment is just an encoding of this principle in the context of the U.S. government. But go back to Mill's "On Liberty" and you'll find that he was just as concerned about threats to free speech stemming from social disapprobation as those from the government.

Anyway, I prefer this modified version of the strip: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ECqxDQGVAAAXUgK?format=jpg&name=...

> then it's in your own self interest to learn the "acceptable views" (whether you agree or not) and mouth them whenever the Powers that Be demand it.

Wow, that sounds eerily like 1984:

"In the Two Minutes Hate [Winston] could not help sharing in the general delirium ... Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him."

Basically, if you have to do that, it means there is some implementation of thought police around you that you are hiding from.

People on hackernews really love taking the current social climate to it's 1984 extremes.

When the "acceptable views" being discussed are stuff like Black people shouldn't get murdered by the police at a disproportionately higher rate accounting for all other factors than White People.

FFS, it's not like there is a public debate about whether we should guillotine Jeff Bezos.

If you're finding yourself having to pretend to agree with the 'acceptable views' of the world today, maybe your views are actually shitty and unacceptable?

Thanks for your analysis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

This is the world we're moving towards. People have been more outspoken in these past few years about demanding "hard conversations" from family and peers. This mindset taking root in the workforce is the logical next step. You can't shut it down or else you're "part of the problem." You can't ignore it and be silent or else you're "part of the problem."

Yeah this is a strange and pretty misleading headline. Here’s the primary source tweet: https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1271522288752455680?s=21

I really think it crosses the line to being a dishonest headline. Reuters has to know that people will misunderstand it as an accusation that the employee was fired because he protested.

This is the MO of news journalism (well, at least a subset). There's a narrative that sells ("big corp = bad, fire person for complaining to zuck") but they still typically include a little detail in the article ("actually fired for harrassing coworker") below the lede.

I don't think I've ever seen a newspaper that hasn't done this.

[edit: if you want to see some articles about misleading headlines, see https://daily.jstor.org/the-incredibly-true-story-of-fake-he... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/youll-cry-when-you... ]

The original tweet is more telling. https://mobile.twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057

The first few replies are even more telling. When someone tells him that calling out a coworker is in bad taste, you get this gem

>oh no Arthur thinks I'm rude, how will I recover

https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1267927023596400642?s=20

I love that in, another Tweet, someone is giving Arthur shit for... not having his pronouns in his bio.

ETA: apparently the user giving Arthur shit is just trolling

What a petulant response lmao

Bullying. It's just adult bullying. ...and there is an uncomfortable number of people that are ok with it because the offender happens to be on "their side" politically.

This is the decay of modern political discourse.

Glad you pointed this out. Interestingly, the topic (don't harass your co-workers) was specifically discussed internally last week.

Agree completely. This whole harass people for not being vocal enough in their endorsement of the cause smacks of authoritarianism and I think will backfire spectacularly. People resent being made to say something out of fear.

I feel like “will” in that statement should be “has”

Yep. This guy is the textbook definition of toxic. There is nothing worse than people who want to inflict their own opinion on others. Yeah you can think of Trumps tweets what you want, censorship is a big thing too you know... The problem is not Trumps tweets, its that 40% of Americans are supporting Trump that should worry us. But then again, you can't inflict your own opinion on others. The only way to do something useful here is to educate people about how wrong they are in supporting Trump.

> 40% of Americans are supporting Trump that should worry us

Hmm, mob rule and "educating people why they are wrong" does one thing - it sends these people underground and it's why Trump might win again:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/03/secret-donal...

I'd rather have these ideas out in the open where people can defeat the arguments properly without ad-hominem, rather than shouting them down. And hell, maybe even learn something new.

>The only way to do something useful here is to educate people about how wrong they are in supporting Trump.

The only way? How about reconsidering your own position and offering people something they would like better?

> The only way? How about reconsidering your own position and offering people something they would like better?

What if people like the police having free reign to assault and even commit murder arbitrarily because of false associations with, say, safety?

“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.”

“Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’”

“That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”

- Barack Obama

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-ca...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM

Thanks for sharing that, this is the first time I've seen this quote.

I think most adults feel the same way about social media activism, but they probably don't think it's worth their time to call it out even if it annoys them. You would just be begging the social media mob to turn on you next.

Thanks for sharing this. This is very needed thing during these times.

Wow never read that. Reminds me of “he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her”. Then we had the crusades. Seems like this is history repeating itself.

This quote is awesome thanks for sharing

There's an important conversation to be had over how activism should operate, in which areas, about what's effective, what turns people off and leaves them hostile, and what measures are justified on what issues, versus what measures are completely disproportionate.

That said, this person stood up for their principles (rightly or wrongly) and lost their job because of it. Your quotation about people "casting stones" in a cavalier way, just to feel good about themselves without it actually risking them anything probably describes a lot of online "woke" flamewars but (to me) doesn't very well characterize what happened here.

I think there's a difference between "standing up for your principles" and "bullying".

The fired employee didn't make a political statement about what they believe - They harassed someone else's private choice, and then pressured them to publicly cow to his political will through social media.

As if anyone who doesn't publicly virtue signal with the movement is also the enemy.

"Your either with us or against us" -- Famously said by Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, George W Bush, and Recep Erdoğan. What wonderful company he's keeping.

It was malicious and ugly. ...and its becoming more commonly accepted on social media.

"He stood up for his principles" is an incorrect abstraction of what happened.

Huge difference between "I'm waving the BLM flag because I believe in it." vs "Hey look everyone, Pryce refused wave the same flag as I do, get the pitchforks!"

The other developer, for all we know, could be in total agreement with BLM!

> "He stood up for his principles" is an incorrect abstraction of what happened.

Absolutely, my phrasing here actually reductive to the point where it doesn't tell us whether he had moral standing to do so - (and that's by design; I actually don't know enough from this article, or others to know whether I agree with his behaviour or not, so I haven't weighed in on that). I'd agree that "standing up for their principles" describes segregationists too- i don't think it tells us who has the right side of an issue.

Whether Dail is right or wrong here is actually irrelevant to my critique above: my intended point was supposed to be:

that the comparison between this person (whose activism at their workplace cost them their job), versus Obama's critique (of people issuing issuing barely-thought-through rebukes online that they aren't invested in), is a pretty unhelpful comparison.

People asserting changes to what is or isn't acceptable in their workplace are absolutely risking blowback for it, and I maintain that's not remotely the same thing as the online brigading / mob justice / cancel-culture conducted by people who can often be trigger-happy as they stand to face no adverse consequences if their critiques are rejected.

I apologise if my phrasing above made this less than clear. It looks to have been interpreted as clearly siding with Dail's position on matters.

---

EDIT: Your choice of example is also interesting though: "Hey look everyone, Pryce refused wave the same flag as I do, get the pitchforks!" is a clever choice on a BLM-related issue; as regardless of what happens in Dails case, it actually quite well characterizes the President's position (and his support bases position) on kneeling in the NFL -and now other sports-, to the point where he has called for the firing of people who refuse to stand for the anthem (and/or) flag.

I didn't expect to agree with Facebook corporate but here I am. It's one thing to privately disagree with a coworker about their action or lack thereof with respect to a contemporary event. But to drag it into a public setting is a severe violation of boundaries and borderline harassment. It's a huge liability risk to FB -- to scold your colleagues in public for their desire to separate the political from the professional is workplace harassment and something that would probably get you fired anywhere.

With that said, I get the sense there is a large part of a story that is not being told here. Where was the manager? Has this employee had a history of maintaining appropriate professional boundaries with respect to communication? If Facebook doesn't have the appropriate paper trail, they could easily be sued for retaliation.

> borderline harassment

Possibly personal opinion here, but given the current charged (understatement) political environment and twitter's propensity for "scarlet lettering" people via mob harassment, I don't think this was borderline. This seems like a deliberate attempt to get a large group of people to harass a co-worker because of differing opinions about how and when to communicate political opinions.

It would be a personal opinion I share. But there are a lot of details I don't know. A whole range of possibilities I can imagine, from least like to most likely:

- The former employee may have genuinely thought that a public "conversation" could result in a positive outcome (perhaps believing "sunlight is the best disinfectant")

- The two may know each other previously - perhaps the former employee may have felt they had more of a mutual level of trust/familiarity than they actually had?

- The former employee may have been wanting to leave Facebook anyways and (cynically speaking) wanted to go out in a blaze of glory and resign in a high profile manner

- The former employee may be neurodivergent in some way and have difficulty navigating the subtle boundaries of spaces of privacy that exist along the spectrum of 1:1 to effectively "in public"

- The former employee, frustrated and angry and activated by the heat of the moment, willfully decided to sic the mob on the other person

Honestly, I don't know this person so it's hard to say. And I do know it is often the case the hindsight is 20/20. But, I wonder, in this former employee's entire time at Facebook, did their manager ever notice any of these kinds of aspects in that employee's interpersonal interactions or collaboration style? In my experience, hints of these things surface fairly quickly in the workplace, especially during the ramp-up phase or the first time some sort of an adverse situation is encountered, whether it be subpar code, a deadline that doesn't make sense and is hard to change, or a stakeholder that isn't exactly aligned with reality and isn't very easy to get there. If this former employee (consciously or unconsciously) takes such an adversarial approach to conflict resolution with a colleague, one wonders if this was the first time they have ever done that, or merely the first time they ever did this to such a degree.

But who knows. The past few weeks and months have been insane. Many people are seeing more psychological stress and social unrest now than they've seen in their entire lives. A lot of them are not prepared to handle these kinds of situations in a manner they won't regret. It's unfortunate that it has to turn out this way, but on the other hand, this kind of behavior really can't be condoned. It's emotional blackmail.

I really hope this former employee takes to heart a valuable lesson from this, but I have a feeling that the exact opposite will happen; to be fired so publicly, with the humiliation that comes with that, is the perfect accelerant to a radicalization that might already be in progress. I don't know where we go from here.

More people should do what you do when judging others.

On your last point: This is what I fear most as well, a permanent radicalization of this individual.

One important principle in management is that you must be extremely careful NEVER to humiliate someone in even the slightest way in front of audience (any meeting >3 people by my book). The mere suggestion that "something didn't go well" can trigger extremely hurt feelings, defensiveness, and antipathy depending on the size of the audience.

Well on the internet, everything occurs in front of potentially infinitely large audience. To admit that you are wrong is to endure humiliation before the whole world. To deal with this, people dig in their heals, and claim that "I was always right, and those who disagree with me are not only wrong and stupid, but evil to the highest degree."

It's heartbreaking watching watching the far left stab their nearest ideological neighbors and most important allies.

I will admit that the original comment came off as more judgey than I would have liked. And I completely agree that the firing being so public was not a good thing.

I enjoy reading thoughtful posts that canvas all the possibilities, rather than pressing another singular opinion.

This was intriguing, thank you.

Is the tweet not a good enough paper trail?

> “Intentionally not making a statement is already political,” Dale wrote in the tweet

No it’s not. And this reminds me of the Dictatorship of the small minority [0] from NN Taleb. There are small intolerant minorities who are extremely vocal on certain matters to the point their opinions resemble a dictatorship

[0] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Assuming no mitigating circumstances for not speaking out, it literally is acceptance and tacit perpetuation of the status quo which is most certainly political.

I'm not saying there were no mitigating circumstances nor condoning the person's behavior but they are clearly correct on that specific point.

"It's not the violence of the few that scares me, it's the silence of the many." Martin Luther King, Jr.

The mitigating circumstances are the un-nessicary stress and responsibilities of dealing with anyone who doesn't 100% agree with what you're saying. Unfortunately these are pervasive on pretty much any platform you are on, so there's no good way around it.

It's pretty necessary to deal with racism. It's life and death, in fact. The fewer who speak out, the more stress for everyone who abrogates their responsibility.

You completly ignored everything that I said

That's a baseless accusation. I specifically refuted what you said with an argument that even used the words of your own response. To be even more clear, there are no known mitigating circumstances here and your excuses are not mitigating circumstances. See previous comment for argument.

I want to be free to choose whether a political issue deserves my action or inaction in a work setting.

So please respect (not you but people who make such statements) individuals who rightfully choose not to get involved.

There isn’t just the “right” way of thinking. Which is what exactly is happening right now. “Either you think and act as we do or you are an ass*ole.”

Pluralism of thought shouldn’t even be in question in the 21st century.

They are involed, specifically in presrving the status quo. There is unfortunately no abstaining in the same way you can't abstain when you know a child is being abused.

Thinking, saying and acting how one does does not exempt them from being the consequences of doing so, specifically, being judged for it.

Disclaimer: I have no opinion whatsoever about what this guy did or didn't tweet, or whatever the reason may be that he's no longer at Facebook.

That being said, WOW that's some crap reporting: the only source mentioned in the article is what the guy himself wrote on Twitter. From the bottom: "Facebook and Dail did not immediately respond to requests for comment."

Reuters chose to spin that into "Facebook fires employee who..." Come on, a Journalism 101 teacher would go nuts over a student who wrote that headline with no credible sources.

i read articles bottom-up for this reason – you'll find whatever shred of facts to be found there.

Disappointing indeed. I had thought that the "wire services" like AP and Reuters largely stayed out editorializing but it seems not. I understand that framing will always come into play and that completely neutral "just the facts" is an elusive ideal, but still this example is really egregious.

edit: <nevermind, they changed it back>

Bullying for a good cause is still bullying. It feels like a lot of righteous bullies out there don’t want to put in the real effort of changing minds, so they take up their pitchforks in public forums. It’s hard work influencing people for the better, it takes a lot of empathy and a lot of patience.

I'm starting to wonder whether "for a good cause" is exactly the reason why this is happening. People are mistakenly believing that as long as the ends are just, the means couldn't possibly be wrong.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis

I'm so over this political posturing. I can't wait for ~2 weeks when everyone's going to go back to their lives like nothing happened (remember #OccupyWallStreet?).

People that actually change the world don't need to advertise it on Twitter. I have friends that volunteer in Watts and Compton every other weekend (and have done so for years) that don't need to share it on social media. I can't help but think that this current Twitter slacktivism really diminishes their genuine mission.

"I can't wait for ~2 weeks when everyone's going to go back to their lives like nothing happened"

Unfortunately, there is no going back here - it's partly the issues, but mostly a totally new culture of a) Twitter wars b) a new generation of people feeling that it's their 'duty' to (act out which I often believe lacks context) c) a press and pop culture climate considerably more clicky-baity and divided (just google cnn headlines from the 2000's, way more tame) d) corporate pressure to 'buy into' movements which is only going to really exacerbate the system.

I've said this before to strong disagreement but marketers jobs are to sell you aspiration - when that aspiration moves off the court and into the streets and politics, and you're gadget/shoes/apparel/cars are being sold with politics, it's not only deeply hypocritical, but it's going to come back and bite us.

I don't really see the underlying fundamentals moving in a positive direction.

People might argue that if 'the system were fairer' we wouldn't see this reaction, my response would be that there will always be something to argue about. The NYT was literally calling for 'Paw Patrol' to be cancelled due to indoctrination of children by 'coppaganda'. While this is an interesting idea, I feel there will always be threads to pull upon for people to be angry.

Let me offer a counterpoint or two:

First, it's not an accident that this happened two months into the COVID lockdowns. Seattle PD seems to be doing much better than 10 years ago, and yet nothing happened back then and we see lots of protests now. People get more anxious being afraid of the illness and from sitting indoors with 1/8th of the usual social contact, and with unclear job prospects, so they are more likely to act on this anxiety. The summer will turnt to fall, the Woodstock will end, the COVID will recede, the anxiety will subside, and the need to earn money will come front and center again.

Second, the kids will grow up and move on. Some people will never grow up, but it's not the same numbers. The next group of kids will have another cause to fight, for the simple reason that they will not be caught dead practicing anything done by the "old people". In fact a key element of all protests is the desire by the young to distance from the old in order to find their own place under the sun. This dynamic is fueling the protests now, and this same dynamic will undo the protest movement.

I appreciate your point that marketing is more about movements today that it was earlier. Still the capitalism has turned Che Guevara into a T-Shirt franchise, so it can go either way I guess.

It could still be that you're right and I'm wrong, but I think it bears listing all considerations.

I think the COVID point is very salient - there are a lot of people with a lot of spare time.

However - the kids will be replaced by other kids.

'Social Protest' - I believe is actually a form of normal rebellion.

As kids grow and they come into their own identities, at some point, they have to rebel against something. Kids who are abused rebel really early in life. Kids with their own identity rebel in HS. A lot of 'well-raised kids' don't rebel until University - and this rebellion takes a more intellectualized form.

'Youth in Revolt' is perennial, it's metastasizing now because of the possibility of outrage.

That said ... Baby Boomers were considerably more outspoken than their progeny so perhaps whatever comes after Gen Z will be more chill.

I'm surprised how little reporting has covered how lockdowns are a contributing factor to the protests. There's pent-up frustration with Trump adding to the anger, and Trump adding to it in reaction.

The thing is these really are issues that need to be talked about and addressed, and they really have fallen on deaf ears in the past because of lack of popular force. The people in charge just keep posturing, brushing it off, saying "yeah yeah we'll get to it", and waiting for the news cycle to move on. Nothing ever changes.

But the problem is that society at large, especially on the internet, apparently just sucks across the board at anything resembling actual discussion. It seems impossible to both a) give an issue national attention and b) have a remotely civil or productive public conversation about it.

I don't know what to do about it except to say we all deserve each other.

Sometimes I wonder if answer to all of these problems is to divide lands based on ideology, politics and other factors. People are then given a choice to migrate between them every 5 years or so.

Nations shouldn't be so big and migrating shouldn't be that hard. Just divide and divide until the group of people stop complaining.

Racists can live with racists. Progressives can live with progressives.

This is something I've thought as well, an easy example would be abortion - one group thinks that abortion is literally murdering a child, another thinks that it's an inalienable right that a woman has to preform any operation to her own body. There's no way to make both these people happy at the same time.

There are a lot of logistic issues, though, I doubt this will ever happen.

That just sounds like our current system of states

You'd face the small issue that forced migration is practically an act of war in most people's minds.

Interesting that you choose Watts and Compton. Almost like you choose two random neighborhoods you believe to be disadvantaged.

How exactly do your friends volunteer in this two places that just happen to show up in Dr Dre songs from the early 90’s?

First, he clearly says his friends chose. Second, is it not good enough that they're doing good deeds with any disadvantaged people? Third, these friends may a host of reasons to only return to a couple of places - they may have built relationships with the local residents, for example. And fourth, is every place mentioned in a hip hop song now "privileged" or something?

They are both in LA. It would be a stretch to believe someone volunteers in both of two far flung places ever weekend lol

>I can't wait for ~2 weeks when everyone's going to go back to their lives like nothing happened

I hope we never go back to our lives like nothing happened and I feel a responsibility to make sure I never do.

My friend, you may not be aware that there is an election in a few months. This chaos will continue to escalate all summer and into the fall. Then once Trump wins re-election your really gonna see some slacktavism.

sky_rw has a good point and the post does not deserve the downvotes.

There very well might be a direct connection between the upcoming election and the protests.

:shrug: people are mad because they don't want to admit that that Trump still has a real shot. Or they just assume that anybody who even tables the idea is racissss. Oh well.

in particular because our president refuses to be eclipsed in newspaper headlines so he's likely to keep doing things that keeps these protests relevant for the next few months. (unlike #occupy)

I’m not American, and I always wonder why it’s always about Trump. The police in the US reports to the mayor, governor, whatever, but not the president. George Floyd was killed in the city where mayor and governor are democrats. In Seattle where CHAZ is mayor and governor are democrats. In New York where police brutally attacked protestors they are also dems. Why Trump is responsible for anything? What Trump is doing exactly?

> What Trump is doing exactly?

He has been doing the same old Trump-y things, such as publicly praising violent crack-down of protests in places like Mineapolis as being "beautiful".

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/06/11/beautiful-...

This. Surprised anyone thinks things will die down soon.

Why would this open source project add something specific to the US even if just a banner?

People keep saying slogans like "injustice anywhere..." or silence is complicit ... but they mean just on this US/Western issue?

It seems like brigading people.

I think the advocates would agree that it's brigading. They're trying to create a climate where it's simply impossible to be neutral on their issue of choice, since they feel it's wrong to be neutral.

They don't have the numbers to impose the authoritarianism they seek (to fully remake things in the way they see fit), so the rampant threats and intimidation are meant to force joining. The best way to accomplish that, is to threaten a person's livelihood, which threatens their ability to exist. They started by just doing social ostracising, social threats of exclusion, and now they've moved on to targeting livelihoods.

Cancel culture is part of this livelihood targeting shift. Behave exactly the way we say, or you're "problematic" and we'll kill your life. And we'll cheer and dance like soulless monsters in the tweet threads while you suffer. It's going to get a lot more aggressive yet, until a line gets drawn by the companies that comply too easily with the cancel demands.

The malignant dictatorship of social media rage in the US is becoming insufferable. It's probably going to require government regulation to stop it.

> “The malignant dictatorship of social media rage in the US is becoming insufferable. It's probably going to require government regulation to stop it.”

you know you can just not tune in, right? it’s not coercive in any way, unlike said dictatorship or government regulation. amplification of voice is not a civil right.

As many employers will not hire you now without an extensive, positive social media history, and many people communicate with their friends and family almost exclusively over social media, it's questionable to call social media use optional. It's also extremely dubious to effectively support bullying because "you can just go somewhere else".

You can easily find yourself dragged into situation where activists at your workplace demand you sign a letter, or else you will be branded <all kinds of crap>. If you depend on these people in any way, you will be in trouble. And it's the social media that turned your coworkers that way.

These days you don't have to go to social media to find trouble - the social media comes to you.

folks just gotta learn how to say no gracefully. it's a useful workplace skill anyway.

as for the branding, you can say no without conceding either side. the target of this twitterer seems to have done it successfully, keeping their job and not conceding either way.

note that i'm not taking sides here either. just making a point about having the fortitude to put social media in its proper place.

further, if you can't take a principled stand under pressure (another useful skill), it might be an indication that the stand isn't principled, or at the very least, you need to find the foundational principles on which to stand.

You missed the point. I don't want to take any principled stands. That's not why I came to work.

I don't think the onus should be on the decliner to "gracefully" decline beyond a simple "No thanks", under threat of twitter mob.

Do you have an example of a similar banner that is specific only to the United States?

The best thing about running your own business is never having to deal with people like this. It's vastly under appreciated equity.

Depends on who are your customers, and how easily are they swayed with a twitstorm.

Quite. Plenty of people who've had their small businesses targeted by various social media bandwagons for non-business reasons in the past few years.

Sadly a valid point. However, I would submit that as a business you are less susceptible to the "silence is violence" attack than an individual would be. But who knows, the times they are a-changin.

> Open source shouldn't be political

The more times you can bring people of different opinions and beliefs together, the more good can be done in the world.

The activists of today just divide people, and cause more net pain in the world than the moderates.

Deep down I think these kinds of divisive activists are actually just fighting their own personal deamons and need a way to vent their anger, because their real personal problems in life are unchangeable.

The actual tweet for anyone who tried to go to the source material and found it protected.

http://archive.is/QBw9h

He publicly criticized a co-worker and when that co-worker tried to discuss it privately, he publicly criticized him again.

Open Source should not be politicized.

I would have fired the guy as well. He was harassing colleagues.

Well world has not really changed in thousand years. is it? If one can't sign letter to believe in one true God/Kind, they deserve to die.

The workplace is not a soapbox for personal political opinion. I'm surprised Facebook hasn't taken a harsher stance on employees publicly criticizing their leadership. It takes a special level of entitlement to be able to expect to represent oneself publicly as an employee of a company and criticize it…and not face disciplining by the company. It's a clear fireable offense. If I were leadership, I would make that clear and take the necessary steps to terminate each employee who violates that policy,

In general this is such a mess. Every four years these topics are framed in a such a divisive manner that the end result is that it rips friends, families and communities apart. I really loathe these times and it's becoming harder to avoid it.

Wow, talk about being a dick. "Intentionally not making a statement is already political." I am really curious, are these types of persons not able to see their own hypocrisy?

There isn't a lot of information, for what it's worth I would be interested in how "public" his confrontation was, depending on that this could be more of a knee-jerk "this person is yikes" vs. sinister "don't stray from the party line"

Extremely public: https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057 - so public in fact, he brought the private messages out publicly as well.

As much as I want to be sympathetic, if I was his co-worker I would feel very publicly harassed especially when the co-worker explicitly was conferring to him privately.

Sure shame the monolith that is FB, I would even say shame Zuckerberg he controls the place. But don't shame a fellow engineer who you work with, he didn't have any say in what FB was doing.

Also long term ineffective, if you promote a culture of shaming private conversations, then nothing happens because no one talks.

Setting all the drama aside he was fired for harassing a coworker. The news article’s headline is misleading.

I'm a bit disappointed at articles like this, that IMO really don't reflect what I'm seeing...

What I'm seeing is a lot of internal discussions, a lot of people challenging execs, a lot of people changing their profile pictures, etc.

Politics are always going to be a dividing subject, and I find it quite remarkable that we are all able to debate about these topics, and are even encouraged to do so. Sure, not everyone agree with some of the decisions the company is taking, but you gotta respect the transparency and the willingness to explain and discuss these decisions.

I don't think many companies would allow people to do this, and they would also probably get rid of people sharing too much.

He probably did more than that in which he was doing a lot more to show his displeasure, not that I’m disagreeing but you don’t just raise your hand and they fire you

>Dail said the tweet that prompted his firing, which he sent the day after that walkout, scolded a fellow engineer for declining to add a statement of support to developer documents he was publishing.

>“Intentionally not making a statement is already political,” Dail wrote in the tweet.

Yeah good riddance, imagine FORCING someone to say _anything_. And you twitter clowns are the good guys? Hardly.

I have no problem with this. If Facebook is a private company that could use its monopoly power to censor people and ban them arbitrarily, certainly it is a private company with the power to end relationships with employees who disrespect and harass their colleagues.

> Trump’s posts included the racially charged phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”

How is that racially charged?

It's a quote said in 1967 by Miami police Chief Walter Headley who was talking about how he will respond to protests against the police. For context, he also said he was against "young hoodlums, from 15 to 21, who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign. ... We don't mind being accused of police brutality"

The Chief got the phrase from the guy who used firehoses and dogs against children during the Birmingham, AL protests.

That sounds like the "Hitler liked dogs" argument. Just because that police chief sounds like a bad person from the quote doesn't mean that everything he said was bad. In fact, I think many Americans would be fine with the use of violent force to stop violent criminals

> That sounds like the "Hitler liked dogs" argument. Just because that police chief sounds like a bad person from the quote doesn't mean that everything he said was bad

This sounds like the “straw man” argument. Just because I made a specific point about a specific utterance does not mean that I was claiming that literally every single thing he said was intrinsically racist. In fact, I think many Americans would be fine with the idea that this was a massive stretch of what I just said.

But you knew that and decided to post anyway.

If you read "young hoodlums" and think of certain race maybe it's your own bias shining through. Where I grew up on Ohio the kids I considered "young hoodlums" didn't happen to be any specific race

Except Headley had used "hoodlums from the Negro districts" in the past, and it's pretty clear that it's being used similarly here.

Thank you for explaining that you, who grew up 1,700 miles away, decades later, and not a police chief with the literal legal ability to kill black people with impunity, did not have the exact same thought process as this particular person. That was very helpful and your insight contributed enormously to clarifying the point.

From context, it's pretty clear who he is talking about.

Oh I see. Well if it’s “pretty clear” then I guess that’s it then, discussion over.

No, no, I’m sure you have a valid point here. In addition, the people that talk about the (((globalists))) could really be talking about absolutely ANY ethnic group at all and making inferences based on the speaker’s past language and behavior and overt, documented, racism would be entirely silly.

The phrase has some history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_looting_starts,_the...

Is the history of that phrase commonly known? That long and detailed Wikipedia Article was only created after Trump said the phrase:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=When_the_looting_...

Yes, the history is fairly well known by people who lived in the late 1960s. It was reported in the press and major magazines.

I must admit, I didn’t know the origin of the phrase when Trump said it. I only learned about it after the fact, and passed on the link here.

If Trump didn't know, I suspect that he had adopted the phrase from someone in his circle who does know - can imagine him thinking 'sounds like a catchy way of threatening consequences; I'm going to bust that out next chance I get.'

When someone leads a nation of several hundred million people, it is expected that their public communication be thoroughly vetted. This is even true at a medium to large corporation for an executive.

This is an expectation. I don’t actually believe Trump has anyone filtering his speech and I don’t think he’s educated enough to understand the phrase he said, but with that said, yes, we should expect our leaders to be informed on the nature of the words they say especially in the context of a crisis or emergency.

I wish you weren't getting downvoted because I was wondering the same, and I'm happy someone asked so that I could learn the answer.

Seconded. Us non-Americans watching what's going on can't be expected to know something an unremarkable American cop said 50 years ago.

Is it such a well known phrase among Americans or something that most people just learned was a thing?

I was the one who asked the question and I've lived in the US all my life. I had never heard the phrase or knew that Trump said it until this conversation just now.

Even in the US it wasn't well known - most people just learned it was a thing.

We didn’t need to know it to read it as inherently racist. If you can’t interpret that, it’s a problem with reading comprehension.

If you wanna believe the man who said that.

Here's the actual tweet explaining it - https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12664341539328942...

How could Facebook have action on Trump tweets? I don't understand the title.

> Facebook fires employee who protested its inaction on Trump tweets

Why should facebook act on Trump tweets?

Twitter de-emphasized one because it violated their policy by advocating violence, and added a fact check to another that was blatantly and verifiably false. Neither was removed completely. Zuckerberg specifically said Facebook would do nothing of the sort.

Maybe the title should be "...employee who was a jerk" [but also protested Facebook's inaction on Trump tweets]

Not a single comment in this thread supports the employee.

There are few if you look around.

Sorry, too busy writing down everyone who doesn’t think “silence is complicity” just in case their resume comes by my desk someday.

HN crowd has lost my respect. Not from this instance alone. But as a culmination of years of inaction.

CA Labor Code section 1102 seems to prohibit firing employees for political activity:

"No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity."

Perhaps publicly criticizing the company you work for does not qualify as a political activity? But expressing support for or opposition to a candidate, law, or public policy presumably would. A company would presumably not be able to fire you for attending or expressing support for a protest or political rally.

You can attend a rally. You can’t harass and incite harassment against a coworker for not attending. The harassed coworker is the one whose political rights needed to be protected here.

Harassing a coworker on Twitter is not political activity.

Completely disagree, you’re spinning a narrative by leaving out context, and the original tweeter labeled it as political too.. so they disagree as well.

So here's a nuanced view I'm sure will get downvoted into the ground: both FB and the employee were right, but along different dimensions, and this outcome was not only inevitable, but desirable.

The employee, as a white male in tech, is absolutely morally right to use his privilege to call out other powerful white males for their silence.

And make no mistake, silence is complicity. Many smart philosophers have written about this, see MLK Jr. or Maya Angelou for more.

This is the core of being an ally. Use your privilege to make the hard ask from your peers that a less privileged person, who is decidedly not a peer, cannot.

FB, on the other hand, is also right in a different sense, to maintain internal expectations that singling out colleagues with your political opinion in public is ineffective at best and toxic harassment at worst. FB are signalling to the rest of their employees what behavior they will not tolerate.

In the end, this employee leveraged awareness several orders of magnitude more than had he not been fired (and will likely easily find a new job) and FB protected whatever they believe their culture to be (and whatever other HR lawsuits they believed themselves to be at risk for).

I want to push against this silence is complicity mindset.

Looking at your profile, I can point out countless atrocities that you don't explicitly denounce. Do I see you upset about how Israel has amped up its program of settler colonialism in Palestine in the past few weeks? How the PRC is running literal concentration camps in Xinjiang? Or, moving along to the USA, how men have extraordinarily high suicide rates? Or how the elderly are being sacrificed at the altar of economic growth in the midst of COVID-19? Or, thinking long term, the tens of millions of people who will die because of climate change?

I don't. And, for what it's worth, I wouldn't be surprised if you have "correct" points of view on all of those. But you're still being complicit in deprioritizing those things and prioritizing your own set of causes, at the expense of human lives. And if you're indeed complicit in a conspiracy of silence on them, you've got blood on your hands.

Brandon Dail was demanding someone add some kind of explicit support for BLM to a Github repo. Where does that stop? I can think of hundreds of very worthy causes that need more publicizing. Is what we ultimately need some long list of evils that every open source project needs to denounce before right-thinking people can choose to use them? And, if you choose to use e.g. Linux, can I denounce you for choosing to use software that is complicit in a conspiracy to terminate black men's lives?

People can prioritize and take action on different causes in whatever way they want to. It's fine to ask individuals to reprioritize, but you're not entitled to anything. And, tactically speaking, ever-increasing stridency of tone and denunciation of imagined enemies is not an effective way to gather support for a cause.

I don't have a platform the size that the recoil author has.

That's the difference.

So where it does it start and where does it end?

What threshold must you cross (in terms of platform size) for silence to equal complicity? Since it apparently doesn't apply to you, but it does apply to a GitHub repo.

Once you've made up your imaginary platform size threshold, which movements must people not be silent on, lest they find themselves complicit through silence? Is it ALL political movements? Those READMEs are gonna get pretty long if so. Is it only the "most important political issue at the moment" that needs to be voiced? Who decides what the most pressing issue is? Is there some sort of vote going on that I don't know about? When is it OK to start being silent again? If he puts up a BLM message in his repo and then takes it down the next day, is that OK? Or does he need to keep it in there forever (because presumably Black Lives always Matter, so he should keep it in there indefinitely, right?)

There are way, way too many things going on for silence to mean complicity.

Take any other humanitarian crisis, and ask yourself if anyone silent must be complicit. Think about it for a second. It's just not true. If someone in Germany were to not speak out against the Nazis rounding up Jews, but at the same time was hiding Jews in their basement, would that person be "complicit" in the Nazis crimes?

If you only donated $50 to cancer research whereas your coworkers donated $200, would that give me the right to tweet that out to everyone? It's okay if I attempt to coerce you thru public shaming, right? Bullying is okay if it's for a good cause?

As for Dail's victim, you don't know whether he has or hasn't helped in his own way. This Dail guy wanted to coerce a coworker to do something that RISKS HIM GETTING FIRED. He said no to Dail; this doesn't mean he hadn't or wasn't willing to help.

I don't like FB and I hate Zuck's stance, but no company would allow someone like Dail to continue bullying coworkers and creating a hostile work environment. I wouldn't be surprised if he already had a list of prior complaints. HR doesn't usually fire people based on a first-time offense.

If you are ever in charge of fundraiser or are looking for people to join a worthwhile cause that you support, try to understand that you'll gain more allies if you're not shitting on & shaming people to do what you want.

> And make no mistake, silence is complicity.

This is needlessly reductive and unhelpful. One can work to end racism and police brutality without supporting groups like BLM and/or making public declarations about the issues.

So, no. Silence is not complicity.

Silence is complicency, for racial hate crimes and actions, yes, i agree, you should t stand by and let bad shit happen.

This isn't silence though, this is rejecting an order to partake in a protest.

Even if it is silence, staying silent is still a right.

Harrassing people for silence is akin to harassing people exercising their freedom of speech.

Facebook: hardcore about unlimited freedom of speech, unless you want to unionize.

Then you can fuck right the fuck off.

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-union...

This is misleading as well. They aren’t autoblocking word “unionize” in their Facebook Workplace product. They give customers (employers who purchase this product) the ability to block any arbitrary word they want. And as an example, they brought up word “unionize”.

WTF, Facebook is not a platform for "unlimited freedom of speech". It has very strong moderation, and if you pay an inkling of attention to conservative or LGBT groups, too much. It's because neither of these groups are considered "advertiser friendly".

He shouldn’t have been fired I think, but he also shouldn’t be a tattle-tale against his co-workers. We need solidarity with our co-workers + an end to at-will employment.

Relatedly (but not specific to this situation), if we had stronger employment guarantees people probably wouldn’t taddle to try to get people fired as much. Win-win-win all around.

Solidarity is important but how can you get there if coworkers harass each other publicly?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com