Facebook fired an employee who posted evidence of preferential treatment | Hacker News Reader

Facebook fired an employee who posted evidence of preferential treatment

buzzfeednews.com

152 pointsRaitoBezarius83 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24077359

I saw a video recently where someone was discussing Facebook's "moat". Essentially, among Big Tech, it has the least defensible moat, which I think is true.

https://youtu.be/4SrxqfKn9Bw?t=1605

I think Facebook has very little choice right now. Libra could have been a moat, but it is more or less dead now. They are being cornered into being more pro-conservative, because otherwise their moat (engagement, which is what advertisers pay for) will collapse by the time COVID is done. They need to walk the fine line between proving their engagement and hoping that advertisers would actually want to show ads to the group which is engaged.

> because otherwise their moat (engagement, which is what advertisers pay for) will collapse by the time COVID is done.

What makes you say this? I don’t quite follow.

I read that small businesses' ad spending account for over 90% of Facebook revenue.

If there is one thing you don't want to be right now, it is a small business owner fighting to bring employees back to work in an unsafe environment while operating at reduced capacity. What's the incentive for the employee to return to work? Jim Cramer said it well on CNBC when he asked how he can compete with the federal government to bring people back to work:

https://youtu.be/qG_Nq7kIojI?t=367

This is Jim Cramer we are talking about. He can probably even afford to overpay (and outbid the federal government) for a while to bring back his restaurant staff. Regular small businesses don't enjoy such advantages.

When these small businesses start rolling over one by one, there will just be a lot fewer small businesses left. And those who do survive will probably shrink their ad budgets.

I once heard a funny comment: Google shows you ads for stuff you know you want to buy. Facebook shows you ads for stuff you didn't know you want to buy (search intent of course). I would say search intent will drive ad spend for the foreseeable future. Plus, if it is a secular bear market for small businesses, ad rates on Google would also come down for those small businesses which do make it out alive at the end of COVID.

That all makes sense, I guess I don’t follow how the recession of the advertising market would reduce engagement on FB. Sure, FB would probably see a revenue decline, but the users would still engage whether or not there would be ads on the site.

And while I agree that ad budgets are probably about get slashed across the board, I see more companies shifting from older, more expensive ad spending strategies towards online and Facebook. They’re in the most competitive position in the aggregate advertising market, way cheaper and more effective than traditional advertising channels.

I question whether advertisers really care about public ethical issues, and won't just quietly restore Ad spending when covid is over.

Virtue signaling is cheap.

Is there any evidence that they've specifically cut more from Facebook than from other social media platforms?

If marketing departments do the work to direct their efforts and funds to other advertising channels, they may keep using them even after the virtue signaling -- or earnest signaling -- expires.

Continuity in marketing metrics can also be important.

I don't think they have any moat at all. People always claim that Facebook's hold over the population is absolute and that the gravity and sheer volume of users will make it impossible for upstarts to make a dent.

And yet every new highschool cohort has a new social media app.

These are simple CRUD apps and anyone can make them. The tech is only getting more accessible. Look at the ages of people launching these things. Young people get young people.

Facebook is for grandmas yelling at liberals. TikTok is exiting and fresh. In four years, it'll be something new.

Of the many failed attempts to make social media apps, the ones I'm most aware of seem to have all failed due to mismanagement (vine, voat, yikyak).

Look at the proliferation of dating apps. Not even Tinder is the end-all be-all. There are new entries in that field all the time, and it's hyper adjacent to social media.

I don't think either industry is a good place to build a moat. You have to keep buying the upstarts to win.

The title buzzfeed came up with is misleading as the article isn't really about an employee getting fired or their evidence. Its more a general editorial on Facebook and the US election.

Did you read the entire article?

The engineer joined the company in 2016 and most recently worked on Instagram. He left the company on Wednesday. One employee on an internal thread seen by BuzzFeed News said that they received permission from the engineer to say that the dismissal “was not voluntary.”

It contains that information over two paragraphs but it took a lot of reading to get there. It doesn't appear to be about that issue at all.

It is mildly off-topic, but it is not intended to derail this conversation. Did anyone else notice that Buzzfeednews and Yahoo news gotten somewhat decent ( as in, Yahoo actually had an in-depth analysis that wasn't all talking points ).

Buzzfeed (News) has been doing some decent investigate reporting for a while:

https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/the-investigations-and-rep...

From my basic understanding is that Buzzfeed != Buzzfeed News. News is apparently a well run organization and it’s a shame that it uses the same brand for this very reason.

Yes but Buzzfeed News has also been caught asking Buzzfeed to report a story so Buzzfeed news can do the "According to Buzzfeed...." kind of game.

I hadn't heard of this, can you link a news story or something about it?

I'm sure they must have had a conversation on the trade-off of having a "known name" attached to their investigative journalism wing and that very "known name" causing them to be negatively associated with vacuous listicles. Maybe once Buzzfeed News becomes a brand strong enough to stand on its own it'll be spun off as a separate organization altogether.

IIRC, one of the reasons Buzzfeed News exists was to counter the negative associations with the Buzzfeed brand and its vacuous listicles.

Buzzfeed News has always been decent in the sense that it is a serious journalism outfit.

When was Buzzfeednews not decent? (Perhaps you are thinking of Buzzfeed?)

It feels like you have to squint fairly hard at this point to continue to see Facebook in the same terms that they define themselves as just being interested in "presenting the marketplace of ideas".

This seems to be the latest in a pretty long series of actions that seem contrary to that idea and that something else might be the real motivating factor.

"CERTIFICATE OF INCORPORATION OF FACEBOOK, INC. ARTICLE III: The purpose of the Corporation is to engage in any lawful act or activity for which corporations may be organized under the Delaware General Corporation Law."

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512...

Facebook is no different than any other Delaware corporation. Facebook exists to do anything and everything that will profit its shareholders. Everything else is just PR.

This language is not exclusive to Delaware corporations, or even corporations. It is standard practice when incorporating any kind of business entity.

Source: if you look at the articles of incorporation for my solely-owned and operated LLC, you'd find an identical purpose statement.

Facebook seems to have a conservative bias. I've never used it myself though, so I can't completely say. I'm also not saying whether or not they should, but they seem to.

Zuckerburg regularly hangs out with conservative political figures, but not liberal or letist ones. [0]

They censor the left regularly [1]. Also, is there even any leftist publications in the FB news tab?

They let the right slide by on things regularly though. They don't censor racism. [2] And they apparently have a bias that allows right publications to break their rules.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-holding-priv...

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/24/facebook-whil...

[2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-employ...

There was also this business about removing fact-checking of a bunk climate science article at the behest of a Republican congressman:

https://heated.world/p/fact-check-of-viral-climate-misinform...

My interpretation of this is not that Facebook has a conservative bias (what does it even mean for a company to have a bias?), but that Facebook's leaders are well aware that the company are extremely vulnerable to regulation, and that keeping the current administration sweet is a good way of evading regulation. If the US enters 2021 with a Democratic administration not hamstrung by a Republican congress, i would expect the apparent bias to evaporate or reverse.

> My interpretation of this is not that Facebook has a conservative bias (what does it even mean for a company to have a bias?)

It would mean that the company's actions benefit members of one side of the political spectrum more than the other.

We're free to speculate about why a company's actions might do that and whether it's deliberate or an emergent consequence of some other intention, but I think it's fairly straightforward to define what bias would mean.

Good job FB, don’t let woke liberals silence opponents

It sounds like the issue is that fact-checkers are being overridden sometimes when they flag right-wing news sources. I think that if you asked a right-wing person, they would tell you that many of these fact-checker organizations have a distinct left-wing bias. Maybe they (the fact-checkers) aren’t infallible and get it wrong sometimes?

If the basic work of fact-checking itself justifies removing right wing content the problem isn't the fact checkers.

What about the fact checkers who rated the EFF as wrong on the warrantless surveillance issues?

I don't care enough to have a horse in this particular comment race, but your comment is an obvious example of whataboutism. Not a solid foundation for any argument, regardless of the content. Something to consider. Plus the op specifically mentioned falability in fact checkers.

> Whataboutism, also known as whataboutery, is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument.

I'm directly providing a counter example. Most people here are very well equipped to understand the nuance of the warrantless surveillance issue and why the fact checker was quite wrong - part of why it's a meaningful case.

Funny enough, your first statement is an example of the bandwagon fallacy. "Well I'm just a neutral party but..."

Well, since none of the overridden fact checks were described in the article (which seems like a failure of journalism to me) we can’t really know. Anyways Facebook is a private company, they can do whatever they want, right?

Another aspect is that a lot of non-left, or right-leaning viewpoints have been categorized into "naughty idea" territory, despite a lot of reasonable people holding them. E.g. Things such as: Being against mass-migration from 3rd world countries to the west, wanting racially homogenous societies, removing welfare, building a wall, racial profiling, there being no gender pay-gap, protesting spreads the virus, BLM are agitators, etc. All non-inherently "evil" ideas, but we've moved into a territory where they're seen as hateful and as such the mainstream is primed to attack them. That is now manifesting (or stared in?) the internet, and we're seeing the consequences everywhere as a result.

We actually seem to be creeping past "holding those viewpoints results in cancellation" into "not actively condemning those viewpoints results in cancellation".

If presenting these viewpoints misrepresents the views of your employer, they're fully entitled to cancel you.

Judy Woodruff couldn't drop the n-word in anger on national TV and expect to keep her job.

Wanting racially homegeneous societies is an "evil idea" because to create one, you have to remove groups of people from a society based on their race.

Isn't it what liberals want to do the other way around, when they say that there are too many whites here, too many whites there... gradually pushing for quotas, etc ?

I agree with you, people shouldn't be removed, ejected, forced to move, etc from a society based on their race or at all for any matter (though we kinda collectively agreed that that's okay for criminals? Separate discussion I guess.). What is evil is forcing people to do things against their will, period. But people wanting to be in groups similar to them isn't inherently evil, and I think we need to get past that in conversation. E.g. right now I would definitely prefer to be with people I share common nationality, interest, culture with.

I fear we're in dangerous territory where all such distinctions and nuance are lost in the shouting, essentially making us all "evil" in some way or another.

Eastern Europe is still homogeneous and they are being vilified for wanting to keep it that way.

Eastern Europe has never been homogeneous, except in myth. There have been waves of different peoples coming through since the ice ages, and there has been mingling all along.

The population of Hungary is 98.3% ethnic Hungarians. Other Eastern European countries are similar.

Baffled that you’re being downvoted; there’s plenty of arguments for and against those ideas. It’s difficult to come a consensus when the debates surrounding them increasingly turn to shouting matches, Internet rumours and “cancellation”

You're baffled that the person suggesting that creating a racially pure ethnostate is a reasonable idea worthy of discussion is being downvoted? Really? This was literally, not in any sense being hyperbolic, the goal of Hitler and the Nazis. What baffles me is how this talking point has apparently become normalized enough not to be immediately shouted down by every user on this website.

They've suggested that there's a variety of ideas that are no longer discussable for fear of being seen as hateful or evil. You've chosen just one of their many examples and immediately jumped to Nazism and Hitler, in doing so you're proving the parents point.

> You've chosen just one of their many examples and immediately jumped to Nazism and Hitler

It's not exactly a jump to get from "wanting racially homogenous societies" to Nazism; it's more like a short shuffle.

The problem with most of your "reasonable ideas" (except racially homogenous societies which is straight up racist) is that they have consistently been used for racist reasons in history. I think if you hold almost any of these (except perhaps the first), you should take a good long look in the mirror and research the history behind these.

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