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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

They need to be called out. The amount of virtue signaling these companies do in the US does not excuse their actions elsewhere.

This is not confined to the US either, countries in other parts of the world will engage in actions for the Chinese government they would not do at home or without great public fanfare about how they are against it.

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What is the difference between virtue signaling and marketing when a corporation is doing it?

I think virtue signaling would be saying something to stave off public criticism with no direct monetary benefit, and marketing would be like companies that support gay rights because it means they can sell a bunch of rainbow colored merchandise during pride month.

What motive would a company (of sufficient size) have to signal virtue if not in pursuit of profits? Companies without an all powerful strongman on top are amoral, and primarily in the U.S. are only concerned with their shareholders as opposed to all stake holders in the chain's long term value and health.

https://www.inc.com/maureen-kline/why-debate-over-stakeholde...

Some companies have real action behind their words, so while they may be saying "We're doing X" with a long term view of profits due to virtuous behavior, this should be viewed distinctly from saying "We're doing X" when there's not actually a long term strategy backing the statement

Patagonia sacrifices profit for its virtuous goals.

I think profits are still involved, but the virtue signaling would be about preventing loss of profits. For example, reddit making its logo black, or Activision adding a splash screen in CoD saying they support black people. They don't stand to make any extra money with their change, but they are less likely to have a twitter mob call for a boycott due to not supporting their cause.

It depends on the company - Disney needs to signal virtue because virtue is part of their brand and everyone knows who they are, Thomson Reuters is not that well known and only need to signal virtue to their valuable employees who might not want to stay at some place they found too scummy (but who knows, money is a great persuader), Monsanto - I don't know, I somehow feel virtue is not on-brand where they're concerned and signalling would make people uneasy.

Yet Disney celebrated Pride month even though they had to know that it would cause criticism from the “Focus on the Family” crowd.

https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2020/06/recognize-pri...

I think you could argue this is also about money. Disney parks have already won nearly every family in America. Most families would like to take their kids to Disney. Pride month probably only minorly affects that. Now how will Disney Parks keep showing a healthy growth rate? Well, they'll need to tap into new markets. What kind of tactics can they use to lure those new markets to the parks?

I just don't believe altruism or pure evil exists in these large orgs. I'm sure there are exceptions to prove the rule, but it's rare you'll see an action by a large corporation that can't be explained by money and growth.

But all of these reasons can be summarized as a pursuit of profit. While the surface reasons may differ the ultimate place they end up is the same.

There's almost always a direct monetary benefit to staving off criticism - it keeps people that might otherwise boycott buying your products. I think this is a difference without distinction - for most companies "virtue signalling" is marketing. This is apparent from their political contributions which rarely align with their stated positions.

Virtue signaling implies morals. Marketing doesn't.

I used to think that. Marketing is all about moralizing the product.

These companies are putting up quotes like:

"Silence is not an option" and

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"

While happily doing business with the CCP, and keeping mum about Chinese human rights abuses.

There's a simple economic explanation for this. There are more black (and BLM sympathizers of other races) customers in the US for these companies than there are Chinese customers and especially Chinese customers affected by CCP injustices. On the flip side the CCP gates access to the enormous Chinese market. Result: in the US signaling support for civil rights issues is probably a net win, while for China sucking up to the CCP is probably a net win. I don't think personal opinions factor into it much, especially for large publicly traded companies.

Yes, the person you're replying to probably knows _why_ the companies make the conflicting statements they do, and is choosing to give criticism to whomever made that decision.

Called out by the current government that dog whistles?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

I’ll take virtue signaling over dog whistling any day.

I bet he doesn’t call out Apple after Cook kissed the golden ring during the photo op last year.

Companies need to stop doing business if the leaked drone footage of Uygher Muslims is true. But this is likely a statement from Barr made because Trump himself is about as effective as a burnt noodle in a gunfight in terms of foreign policy right now. The best he can do is act through others.

You mean like the government stopped doing business with Saudi Arabia after 9/11 or how we didn’t support the Osama led Sandinistas in the 80s?

The US government can’t exactly stand up tsk tsking with any type of moral authority on anything.

Not taking a stand just because the US Government doesn't lead by example is foolish

Textbook whataboutism

Please keep this tired trope off HN. It's fallacious to begin with [1], and canned arguments are not what we're looking for on HN—if you think about it, comments like this are covered by the site guideline:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I’m calling out a government who could care less about foreign influence and only cares about the fact that tech companies won’t kiss the golden ring. I’m calling out the government’s motives.

Do you think they would call out the Koch brothers?

Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar. Where it leads is equal parts predictable, nasty, and dumb. We're trying for better than that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It’s a post about the government calling out tech companies for being influenced about China but it is inappropriate to call out the same government’s hypocrisy?

A post about the government is going to be political by definition.

Sure, but it doesn't have to be flamebait. We want curious conversation, not denunciatory rhetoric, and those two don't go together.

If you want to read more about how we moderate this sort of thing on HN, I've written lots about it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

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