“Zuck off”: Doctors, nurses, scientists rail against Zuckerberg | Hacker News Reader

“Zuck off”: Doctors, nurses, scientists rail against Zuckerberg

arstechnica.com

31 pointselsewhen20 comments

I would have loved it if the Zuckerberg endowment was an annual donation to the hospital's bottom line. Then we'll see whether the doctors and nurses are willing to put their money where their mouths are, and make some real responsible choices about which is their priority.

San Francisco supervisors, on the other hand, are complete political morons. They can spout pure bullshit and not face any consequences from the voters and electoral system designed to incentivize such idiocy.

Disclosure: I used to work at one of Priscilla and Mark's charitable organizations, many years ago. I left for a number of reasons, chief among them was the realization that Facebook is not run in an ethical manner, and that it has a negative effect on its users.

Here in 2020, there should be absolutely nobody who's deluded about how Facebook does business and makes money. So, if you're a scientist or doctor and you're just now speaking up because something something Trump, that means you were fine taking dirty money, as long as it's not dirty in one particular way. I suggest you do what I did: either take Priscilla and Mark's money and keep quiet, or go work somewhere else.

Facebook pays more than many. Is there an ethical premium it is forced to include?

That might indeed be the case, though to be clear, I'm referring to Priscilla and Mark's charities, which are operationally independent of Facebook.

This is quite a claim. How is Facebook not run in an ethical manner?

Look at all the resistance to avoiding censoring destructive and untrue comments and ads that resonate with people and are very destructive. This happened in multiple countries world wide. If you have a service that can lead to great harm, you need to own up to and try to deal with destruction. This is quite different than 'I don't like conservatives so I want to censor them'.

Any web search in google news will find articles like these. It's not a recent problem. Because facebook has so many users it we know in Brazil that the government uses social media like twitter and facebook to spread stories to inflame certain tensions.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/28/facebook-is-failing-to-pre...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/world/asia/facebook-sri-l...

One example of many: manipulating people’s feed as a non-consensual experiment on affecting mood.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/30/contro...

Emitting Silence and/or leaving sound like good ways to remove your values from the equation rather than to encourage the change you'd like to see. Is that the intended effect? How does one become an actor for good if one shuts up or quits when affiliated with an org that is misbehaving? In my opinion, leaving in protest is entirely ineffectual without consistent vocalizations of shortcomings and calls for change, which makes it a poor choice for maintaining institutions of importance.

The mechanism is the same as when people stop buying a crappy product. It's a mostly free market for labor, especially technical and scientific, and one should vote with their feet.

This comparison assumes that the issues with the org are known or self evident. In many cases such as crappy products, the reasons will be evident for buyers (though just choosing not to buy doesn't help future buyers from experiencing the same problems as you; that's why voting via reviews is so important). But even in consumer goods, voting with your feet/wallet falls through when the discussion is no longer specifically about a marketed service or product. If you are getting screwed and don't raise a stink about bad customer service, for example, nothing will get done about it, and many people will likely have to re-live your experience unnecessarily. So I disagree that vote with your feet/wallet is a good strategy here.

From the article, this just sounds political. The people protesting just happen to be doctors, nurses and scientists.

And as per the article, it would be interesting to see if the people protesting are willing to give back the money and all the equipment it bought.

I hope Zuckerberg keeps standing up to all these outrage mobs. Courage is contagious and inspiring.

Is this sarcasm?

No. Practically every institution, academic, corporate, media, entertainment etc. has been bending over to the demands of the woke mob.

Good to see someone put their foot down and say NO.

The courage to do business as usual. The most heroic sort of courage there is. (This IS sarcasm.)

It's actually worse than this. They studied the sort of wrong they were doing, then kept doing it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-di...

Business as usual? How many clients have pulled their ad contracts in the past month due to his stance?

They're confused.

Twitter's the hate speech one. FB is more about freedom of expression.

But I won't be caught using either.

They are both equally bad.

Twitter has already identified the problem, Facebook apparently needs a few month longer. Both are not doing nearly enough.

If Twitter wasn't so fascist about the content their users post maybe they would be a profitable company.

At least Facebook is neutral.

Twitter has decided to fight some hate, and blatantly ignore some other hate. It has an agenda.

>They are both equally bad.

What I said above aside, when considering the size of the Facebook tumor, I have to agree. They are about equal bad.

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