That sounds good to me. I've never had to talk about these kind of things at work. Are there work places where this is unavoidable?
However, I'm sure it's easier for my jobs since they were for a retail company and an engineering firm.
Otherwise, you're basically saying corporations should participate in the political process but individuals should not. And that's exactly how we got the Earth into the increasingly shitty state it is currently in.
Is your claim that we really need more corporate control over politics in the US and less citizen participation?
The fact of the matter is political conversations have high risk of annoying/frustrating/alienating their participants. To have these conversations at work is just making employees less productive and asking for a controversy.
I dare say it might be time for some employees at Facebook to pause and think about how their work may have an impact on the world.
As Facebook, I'd rather pay for some yoga classes so that people don't have time to think about their actions.
I agree that there's no need to bring up politics in the break room (or worse, during active work) and risk alienating people. It's a bad idea, just like talking about or advocating for particular religious beliefs.
But if your company is being politically active in ways you find unethical, I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to just put their heads in the sand, ignore it, and get their work done. And not everyone has the luxury of quitting a job whenever their don't agree with the company's politics.
I'm lucky that I'm in a place financially and career-wise that I can just quit and find a new job if I disagree with my company's politics, but many others don't have that luxury. Their choices are either to talk about it and try to get their company to change, or feel awful keeping quiet.
I have no idea how you came to this conclusion.
That's like saying "if employees don't have total freedom of speech at work that means only corporations have freedom of speech".
It's a two-way street. You are providing your services to the company in exchange for compensation. It's an unequal relationship, to be sure, but the company needs employees to exist and survive.
> If you don't like it, you are free to move on.
If only life were that simple, and if jobs were so plentiful and easy to come by that people could be so picky. Sure, a lot of tech workers are in a great place financially such that they can quit in protest (and lose their health insurance, among other things), but most workers don't have that luxury.
How are these two things causally connected in your mind?
As far as I can tell, this is the first comment in the thread to suggest we're talking about widespread mandatory "social justice" meetings that are political in nature and unrelated to the workplace's legal obligations. That's not what I got from @daok's comment or anything in between, and there are widespread mandatory diversity training programs in the U.S. that explain all the comments above, from my perspective.
I've never seen that (mandatory meetings unrelated to work) myself, across employment at 2 multinational corporations, several mid-sized companies, and a handful of startups. The mandatory diversity training programs in most companies are there to meet the legal obligations of discrimination law, whether they tell you that or not. Usually they tell you that.
I have a peer who had similar meetings at their firm and the VP of Diversity and Inclusion went as far as to say attendance at such meetings would be tracked on an individual and ongoing basis.
I feel that in general, my company has a very traditional and apolitical work culture, so my imagination runs rampant with what things must be like at FB, Google, & social service sector workplaces.
That's interesting, and I might be out of touch with this year's corporate response to the riots.
https://classunity.org/racism-and-responsibilization-in-whit...
Sorry, but this is misleading. Most such companies are actively complying with antidiscrimination laws. These diversity discussions/initiatives at work are almost always unrelated to those laws. It's not a case of "Hey, we suddenly realized we're not complying with laws, so let's launch these initiatives." Most such discussions don't have any content about the law or legal aspects because they are not about laws prohibiting discrimination.
I've never been to a diversity training program that did not talk about the laws, and I've been to many. You are suggesting that companies are wasting their money for no reason, and consciously running training programs that are unnecessary? Why would "most" companies do that?
> Most such companies are actively complying with antidiscrimination laws.
Complying with US discrimination law means that companies are providing "reasonable accomodations" for people in historically discriminated categories, and for anyone who might file a complaint in the future. Educating the employees about acceptable behavior is a pretty obvious way to avoid getting sued.
> It's not a case of "Hey, we suddenly realized we're not complying with laws, so let's launch these initiatives."
The risk of running into both PR & legal trouble over diversity complaints has risen over time, due to increasing levels of education, increasing exposure to cases of discrimination and abuse, and generally increasing awareness of diversity issues.
The law doesn't require us to banish the phrase "master/slave" from our lexicon, yet it is part of our diversity initiative.
The law doesn't require us to banish the words "whitelist/blacklist" from our lexicon, yet it is part of our diversity initiative.
The law requires we do not discriminate based on a protected category (gender, race, etc). We have always been compliant. However, the law does not require us to hold special recruiting events for underrepresented folks when we are already compliant, but yet that is a major part of my company's diversity initiative.[1]
There are pay disparity laws. We were fully compliant before they became the law. They are not part of the diversity initiative and usually not discussed.
The law doesn't prohibit us from saying "Merry Christmas!" but our diversity initiative addresses this.
The list goes on and on.
Note: I am not saying I'm against such initiatives. Merely noting that at least for my company (and jurisdiction), these initiatives are not about what the law requires. We have always had employee expectations training for all employees, and it already covered things required by law, long before the company dove into these initiatives.
It may be that your company's diversity initiative is about legal compliance, but for many company's, it is a lot more than that (by a lot, I mean the majority of the initiative is not required by law).
> The risk of running into both PR & legal trouble
There's a world of a difference between PR trouble and legal trouble. Your comment originally was about the legal side, and so is my response. I do believe that most diversity initiatives are about PR, and not about the law, which was why I responded.
[1] These are invite-only, and so it's not open to all groups - just the ones we picked.
Except they are. Your word list is an exceedingly literal straw-man interpretation of a law that is purposefully vague, and doesn’t prescribe which words you can use. You can’t assume that specific policies of a company aren’t there for legal reasons just because the law doesn’t state the exact same policy in the exact same words.
The spirit and the letter of the law, as I already pointed out, requires that employers take “reasonable” actions toward making all employees feel welcome. Society and business have collectively decided that certain words can or do make some people feel unwelcome. Because of that fact, and because companies don’t want their management sued for neglect, we have interpretations of what it means to be compliant that are predictive and speculative. That really does not mean that the initiatives are not about the law, in fact exactly the opposite. Asking people not to use certain words counts as one of those “reasonable” actions, and gives the company a paper trail of attempting to be compliant.
Unfortunately, the only way to know is to test it in the courts. We differ as to where society currently stands on such matters, and it is certainly not clear that were this to go to court, rulings will be made to penalize companies utilizing the lexicon in the manner that it has always been utilized. And of course, my company never said "We should stop using these words because we are interpreting the law this way (or we think society interprets the law this way)." The notion that there may be a lawsuit was not even mentioned with regards to these phrases.
Your argument is "law is intentionally vague, and society believes X". I agree on the former, and not the latter. Unfortunately, anyone can make any statement when it comes to vague laws, which is why having precedence in a court is important.
You've also not addressed the other examples in my comment. My company, which is compliant with the law on hiring based discrimination, is not going to get sued if they decide not to hold special recruiting events for people of certain protected classes. Your earlier comment asked whether "I am getting it from HR and/or company lawyers", and in this particular case, the answer is definitely "Yes". The need to hold such events has been widely discussed in the company, and it has been made clear that this is a proactive initiative, and not required at all of us. Much of the criticism about this particular part of the initiative within the company is very much about "this is not required by law". There is no way HR is going to claim it is.
Furthermore, I just noticed in your earlier reply:
> You are suggesting that companies are wasting their money for no reason, and consciously running training programs that are unnecessary? Why would "most" companies do that?
I suggested no such thing. Companies do a lot of things that are not required by law. I didn't say all such things are a waste and are "for no reason".
No, my argument is predicated on my experience and discussions with company HR and lawyers at multiple companies. It sounds like your experience differs, and that's fine. My explanation for why the words you chose aren't specifically listed in the law is because the law is intentionally vague, and not prescriptive about which words you can use. The law is stating a goal, and companies are interpreting how to achieve that goal, because they have no other choice.
> Your argument is "law is intentionally vague, and society believes X". I agree on the former, and not the latter.
I feel like this is getting unnecessarily argumentative, and I'm guilty of escalating it. But I did not say, and didn't intend to mean that all of society agrees. However, it's sort of a fact and not a debatable point whether certain groups of people and businesses have decided that some words are sensitive. That's exactly why it's showing up in diversity programs.
> I didn't say all such things are a waste and are "for no reason".
Okay, I apologize for mis-interpreting. You have said multiple times that it is "not about the law" and you haven't offered an alternative explanation. If the reason has nothing to do with the law, then what is it, and why are companies saying it has to do with the law? What is the goal behind the proactive initiatives?
> You've also not addressed the other examples in my comment. My company, which is compliant with the law on hiring based discrimination, is not going to get sued if they decide not to hold special recruiting events for people of certain protected classes.
I tried to address this. Attitudes are changing over time. Being compliant yesterday doesn't necessarily mean you're compliant today, even if the law doesn't change wording. Growing awareness means that what's "reasonable" is a moving target. Also, we were talking about diversity training, and not affirmative action nor only hiring discrimination laws. Your company might get sued in the future if it doesn't take reasonable actions along the way to prevent people from feeling marginalized or ostracized, even though it believes it's in line with the law today. That has already happened at other companies, and one reason companies are trying to be proactive.
I'm confused with the question, given that you yourself gave the answer:
> The risk of running into both PR & legal trouble
You yourself stated a reason other than legal.
But even without PR, I'm surprised you're asking. Do you not believe they can be pushing these initiatives because they actually care about diversity? Or because they view it to be a competitive advantage over other companies? Or because they believe diversity will lead to better company performance? The last is one of the main stated goals in my company. I don't know if they themselves believe it, but it's clear that many, many people do.
> I tried to address this. Attitudes are changing over time. Being compliant yesterday doesn't necessarily mean you're compliant today, even if the law doesn't change wording.
I really, really do not see any group winning a court case against a company because they did not have special hiring events for people of their group. Perhaps in the future, but not any time soon. I do not for a second believe my company did this because they were concerned about the law.
If the company's normal recruitment practices is discriminatory towards a certain group, I can understand. That's not the case here. Moreover, even if it were, having such events would not protect them. You can't wipe discrimination in one part of the company by compensating in another. If your job application page has stuff that discriminates against, say, African Americans, then having special recruiting events for them will not alter the fact that you are discriminating.
> Also, we were talking about diversity training, and not affirmative action nor only hiring discrimination laws.
The thread is about discussions of diversity in the workplace, and were not limiting it to training.
Sure, I do think companies care about diversity, and are interested in the competitive advantages. But the only mandatory meetings on diversity I've ever had were about communicating policy that is attempting to adhere to the law, even if in a proactive sense. The goal of the law is to care about diversity and is founded on a belief that a diverse society has a competitive advantage, so I don't necessarily see a hard line between complying with the law and actually caring about diversity.
> I really, really do not see any group winning a court case against a company because they did not have special hiring events for people of their group.
I don't see that either, and it's not something I claimed. We weren't talking about affirmative action, you're moving the goal post. We were talking about widespread mandatory diversity programs.
In addition to what the parent says about PR, there are some actual good reasons:
1. Some companies are starting to understand and believe that having a diverse team is a competitive advantage when it comes to designing and marketing products intended for a diverse audience.
2. Some companies are starting to believe that it's just the right thing to do to try to increase diversity in their ranks, to attempt to combat systemic sexism and racism that historically has kept certain groups on the sidelines for some roles.
Whether you agree with these things or not, companies are increasingly believing in them, and that's at least a part of why they go far beyond what the law requires when it comes to anti-discrimination. I find it unlikely that a company would lose a court case for not pushing to hire more diverse candidates, or not having implicit-bias training, or not removing terms like master/slave or whitelist/blacklist from their internal lexicon. It does not seem like companies are doing this because they are afraid of running afoul of the law.
I will just add that I agree that pushing to hire more diverse candidates isn't likely to cause a law suit for most companies. It might for a large company that is lopsided and clearly discriminating, but it'd take evidence which is hard to get. That's really outside the scope of what I thought we were talking about, though, because pushing to hire diversity isn't something that requires all employees to actively participate in the process.
The other two, avoiding implicit bias training and not removing sensitive words, in combination those could cause problems - and I know of companies where they have caused problems. If people actually use words that make multiple employees feel uncomfortable, and the company management has a record of complaints and no record of action to resolve the complaints, there is real liability there in today's world.
By and large I think there's probably a lot more agreement here under the surface than it looks like. My mistake might be failing to clarify that I'm not saying legal reasons are the only reasons. There are other reasons, I'm just saying the legal reasons are usually there, and are important. This is probably getting less true over time, where legal reasons were what it took to get some companies to actually do something, and today growing awareness means that companies are more likely to think it's the right thing to do, more likely to agree with the law, and more willing to begin taking action without any specific legal concern. I guess maybe it's quite a good sign that people here are disagreeing with me because it means things have been going the right direction, compared to my work experience over the last couple of decades.
They aren't. In fact, the discussions I've seen at companies in the bay area go far beyond the minimum requirements of the law. They aren't about preventing discrimination, they're about actively increasing diversity (in some areas, but not all).
https://classunity.org/racism-and-responsibilization-in-whit...
It indeed would look bad if I said any such thing. Fortunately, I did not.
FWIW, that's a claim that doesn't quite match my experience at work, nor of talking to some of the people who implement these programs. Though to be clear, we were talking about widespread mandatory company-wide meetings, not any old discussion on inclusion that happens to occur while at work. We may need to get more specific about which programs we're talking about, they're certainly not identical everywhere. It also doesn't seem to add up when I read our current laws, which are changing over time to emphasize.
> In order to achieve this, companies are activity discriminating against non-minorities, which some may call positive discrimination.
The historical term for this is affirmative action (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action), and the idea is to temporarily increase benefits for a disadvantaged group, not to intentionally decrease benefits for the advantaged group. Calling it discrimination, therefore, is a framing that isn't always true, and is somewhat political. It's not always true because things aren't always zero sum. If I choose to give someone a dollar, you don't lose a dollar.
If there really are a fixed number of jobs at a company that is 80/20 men, and the company decides 30% must go to women, then technically yes, that is a form of discrimination. But - just hypothetically - is it a negative discrimination if the reason that the company is 80/20 men in the first place is because it previously discriminated against women, and would have been 50/50 without several decades of history of unspoken discrimination?
It's important to also think about a few things- One, that unlike social prejudices, affirmative action is not intended to be permanent. It's intended to help boost people who've been unfairly and systematically disadvantaged, while they're disadvantaged, and only until things even out. After that, the boost should go away by design. Two, that some of those disadvantages in history have been really extreme, and the kind of discrimination you might imagine you feel when your company tries to hire more women isn't the same order of magnitude of what women and black people as a whole have gone through.
> Regardless, it's discrimination nonetheless and it's very common yet somehow nobody cares.
Is all discrimination bad always? I'm very discriminating about my partners. I'm not sure that nobody cares, I think some people are in favor of seeing that gender and racial injustices actually go away, since not doing anything about it hasn't worked yet.
The thesis here is that current hiring practices are biased (often implicitly and unintentionally) against women and POC. Since removing implicit bias is exceedingly difficult, actively requiring hiring managers to hire more people from underrepresented groups is a way to put your thumb on the scale in order to equalize them.
I can understand how you'd see that as discrimination against white men, and if you squint at it in just the right way, it really seems like it is, but what it's really doing is attempting to reduce an unfair advantage that white men have. No, it's not perfect, and I'm sure occasionally a white male does legitimately get discriminated against. But that's a small price to pay to lift a ton of other people out of the status quo of discrimination they're usually stuck in.
The fact is that women simply represent a small percentage of the overall workforce in engineering. The only way you can get parity in representation is to get parity in the underlying workforce. The only way to do that is to encourage women to pursue a career in this industry, but that's not something you can change overnight and I doubt companies care enough to invest in something that may pay off in 20 years.
I'm all for doing things that aren't discriminatory and removing unconscious biases in interviews, job descriptions, and whatever, but that will not move the needle. It's a supply issue.
Discrimination is discrimination, no matter how you want to dress it up, and it's never OK.
I'll add that some of my best colleagues have been women. I much rather not work in a sausage fest, but I also don't want to work in a world where active discrimination is supported.
Let’s agree on this 100% and then ask the question: how do we get rid of discrimination? If we have some implicit social bias that is causing a measurable difference in outcome for women, how can we get rid of the bias? If we take it on face value as truth that all discrimination is bad, the no discrimination at all is the ideal. I assume we both agree on that completely. In the mean time, before we’re able to fully eliminate all discrimination, which is better: negative discrimination against women resulting in the outcome of fewer women working and lower pay, or that plus an offset positive discrimination that boost the outcome for women so that there are more in the workforce and the pay is closer to equal?
We can try to push outcomes to be closer to equitable, but the most important question there, I think, is: will the affirmative action actually help remove the original implicit bias against women?
> The fact is that women simply represent a small percentage of the overall workforce in engineering.
That has changed over time, and is different depending on where you live. It went up from 0 a century ago to an average of something like 35% in the 70s, and has declined since then to like 20%. In some countries, the balance is closer to 50% and in a few places, its over 50% - spots in India for example. Isn’t that alone evidence indicating things have not settled, that we can’t rest on some notion that the workforce balance today represents the natural state of things? That we are obligated to ask why, and make sure men aren’t accidentally contributing to the discrepancy? (Especially given that in the past there is a documented history of that happening.)
> The only way to do that is to encourage women to pursue a career in this industry
What if the reason women are choosing not to pursue engineering is because there are still biases, and they know it? Then how would you encourage them?
> Discrimination is discrimination, no matter how you want to dress it up
What if the job you’re talking about being offered to a woman is subsidized and would not have been offered to a man either way? Is that still discrimination?
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...
I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that if a facebook employee wants to talk about poverty in underdeveloped countries on internal social media, then that's going to be ok, but if the discussion concerns people who were harmed because they followed bad medical advice that was spread by use of facebook, all of a sudden that's an unacceptable socal issue at work.
Nah.
Every Facebook employee I've met, every one that I'm reading, they are sincere about what they're angry about.
It's a bad look, to assume some Facebook employee's opinions are being co-opted by... fucking Google? Apple? That's ridiculous.
I'm not even going to speculate why anyone questions some random Facebook employee's sincerity.
Instead I offer: Imagine if someone told you, every opinion you had, all the time, talked over you or told you to shut the fuck up and said, "Oh you're getting co-opted by Google, this is exactly what they want you to do, 'destroy our culture.'" And then, in the same breath, that guy defends, breathlessly, some idiot outraged over the removal of master/slave nomenclature, or some idiot trying to mainsplain crackpot sex difference theories to his female coworkers.
C'mon, you'd be mad as hell, it's so utterly ridiculous.
Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it.
I belive you need to work on your example of a bad person ;)
How about we go with? And then in the same breath that gal defends selling people's secrets for pennies on the dollar and willingly accepting that they'll likely have very real negative consequences for your users once the private data in your database invariably gets leaked onto the internet.
Oh wait, that wouldn't leave much left at Facebook, wouldn't it?
So let's just question the moral integrity of anyone working at Facebook. Seems reasonable, given what egregious privacy infringements their work enables.
I think "outrage" is an inappropriate response. We're talking about removing nomenclature that has been (and continues to be) used to oppress an entire segment of society. I think removing that is worth a little money and downtime, if it comes to that. People who are "outraged" that it cost them some time and work probably could stand to show some compassion for their fellow humans.
Usually, when open source projects introduce a breaking backwards-incompatible change, they will first deprecate things and then wait some months to give people time to update. After this nomenclature had been in use for 10+ years, I can't help but wonder why there was no time to take the user-friendly path in this instance.
So to the people who are fixing the mess, it certainly feels more like you got kicked because someone else wanted to show off his/her moral superiority.
There existed a reasonable way to change the nomenclature, but it wasn't taken.
And that's where the question of empathy and compassion comes in.
As a random white dude, the "pain" I face by dealing with problems around these name changes is completely minimal and trivial when compared to the emotional pain they cause people in certain groups that actually have a lived experience of oppression.
Regardless, I do agree that if there is crazy scrambling and short timelines to change these names, that's a problem in your org. There should not be reckless urgency to get this done; it should be done just as any other major change should be: with planning and risk assessments. Where I work, we are doing it slowly and with an eye toward not causing downtime. If your org is not doing that, then I agree that you have a valid complaint. But this complaint should be directed at the bad process, not at the work itself.
> I think "outrage" is an inappropriate response. We're talking about removing nomenclature that has been (and continues to be) used to oppress an entire segment of society.
In this specific case, outrage is appropriate because the nomenclature as used by git has nothing to do with "master/slave". It's a well-intentioned but misguided attempt at what you describe, unless you are making the preposterous claim that the word "master" should be purged from all contexts.
Of course, WRT this article and the discussion on it, if you try to point this out and discuss it at a company like Github (or mine) where the group making these decisions is convinced of their correctness you risk ostracization and career suicide. In fact, the statement you closed with
> People who are "outraged" that it cost them some time and work probably could stand to show some compassion for their fellow humans.
implies that you also are convinced of the correctness of this decision, and that anyone who objects to it is not compassionate (and by implication, not worthy of consideration). This is not a good approach to take if your goal is to educate.
I'll agree that git's use of "master" is not as egregious as "master/slave" in database terminology, but it's still not great.
There are two prevailing uses of the term "master". One refers to the quality of being exceptionally good at a particular skill. By and large, I don't think most people have a problem uses of "master" where that's the intended meaning. But "master" in the sense of "leader" or "controlling" isn't great, even if (in the case of git's "master" naming) there isn't a corresponding "slave" role.
> if you try to point this out and discuss it at a company like Github (or mine) where the group making these decisions is convinced of their correctness you risk ostracization and career suicide
I agree that this is bad. These sorts of responses have a chilling effect on reasonable conversations and discussion. But in some ways I do understand why this happens; people who are directly affected by terminology like this are getting really tired of having the same conversations over and over about something that evokes significant emotional pain every time it's brought up. Again, it's not great, but I think it's understandable. And it's frankly hard to understand why using a word like "master" in technical terminology is somehow so important that it's even worth getting into repetitive discussion after discussion about it, especially when doing so causes some people pain. That's where the concerns about empathy and compassion come into play, because the people who constantly fight against this change do not seem to be even trying to look at this from someone else's point of view. (And I say this as someone who initially was resistant to these changes, but have since realized that I was wrong to do so.)
You only get one-sided discussions because going against the grain will be career suicide.
Greg, a nobody who nobody likes says X thing - X isn't a big deal, and doesn't affect most people and about 45% of people would agree X shouldn't be said, even if it isn't a big deal.
Mark, a senior directo who everybody loves says Y thing - Y is a big deal, but only 10% of people would agree it shouldn't be said.
Guess which will get called out?
Seriously, haven’t they don’t studies that most of these revolutionaries are actually not very smart people. How does risking your life for a cause have anything to do with being correct about an issue?
Lets say you're a delivery driver for a pizza parlor that is famous for the level of rat poison in its sauce. Do you continue to knowingly deliver the poison pizzas because you're not the one making the sauce? Afterall, who's going to deliver the poisonous pizzas?
Come on. This is right up there with, "I was just following orders."
Maybe you're right and developers at FB don't see that they have any responsibility or input towards what FB does with the tech they build, but I hope not. It would be horrible to be that detached from the outcome of your work.
A big part of the problem was just that everyone was using Facebook for work all the time. So quite often, there would be some enormous thread arguing about whether X or Y was the right policy, was Trump violating the rules and should be kicked off Facebook, or was Facebook's anti-Trump policies violating freedom of speech, or was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting, etc etc.
And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week, could you provide feedback on it. Type X of hardware is being deprecated next quarter. So you really have to be checking Facebook-for-work consistently for professional reasons. You have to scroll past the political debates all the time.
Some features are work-specific, but it feels basically like you are using the Facebook interface, but just with all the content being from your coworkers about work stuff.
Notifications are exactly like facebook notifications, so you'll get an email that says "open workplace to see this". To use the tool effectively, you need to have it open at all times. It's a weird in-between state of slack and email, where it's somewhat async and somewhat sync. You'll get overwhelmed with notifications and will want to have "inbox zero", which is considerably more difficult than in email, where you can optimize your workflow. The sidebar will have a list of groups you're in with read/notification counts that make absolutely no sense.
It also has chat functionality that can't be turned off, and it's not group based. It's like being forced to use gchat for all communications.
It has a "organization tree" feature that requires employees to fill in their own reporting structure. This also can't be turned off.
If you want your employees to spend all day chatting in forums inside of facebook, workplace is the product for you.
> was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting
This is sort of what I was thinking about in my original comment. I would hate to have to discuss political affiliation, or make public judgements on other people/issues.
> And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week,
I miss so much in my news feed already, using it for work would make me nuts.
I would say, FB did the right thing here, to not supporting a platform that actively politicizing itself.
Many:
Education. Healthcare. Corrections, law, and law enforcement. Social work. Public utilities and subsidized housing. Etc.
People whose existences are deeply politicized (and they do indeed exist) are not often excited to have political conversations with people who say things like "'existence is political' thing is just a bullshit phrase."
I'm not trying to be a dick, but it took me a long time to realize that there were conversations I was not being made a part of because I was not receptive to, or dismissive of, those conversations.
This is a tactic that needs to be called out more often.
It's of course not universally true that's the case for everyone, but I think it's worth thinking about. If your attitude is dismissive of someone's lived experience, it's not likely that they're going to go out of their way to include you in conversations about it; on the contrary, I'd expect them to explicitly exclude you in order to protect themselves.
It is a bullshit phrase though. They don't want to bring it up because any skepticism is viewed as a direct attack on their ideology, and their ideology is the core of their existence/identity, so, calling out the illogic of their ideology is a political attack on their existence.
They want to TELL you, they don't want a discussion.
For people who believe that everything is political, there are no projects with less moral ambiguity, it's just more or less openly visible.
Everything has some political issue around it, but Facebook has politics baked into it because it's using political issues as a means of making money. They sell advertising to politicials, when they know the ads are lies. Their platform is filled with fake accounts pushing genocidal agendas from dictators, and in many cases facebook is sweeping it under the rug.
The way their platform is built is setup to manipulate people, and that platform is being used at scale to do so in ways facebook knows is fucking up the world. Its very existence is political at this point.
I don't really take issue with that, Germany even has that codified, and we're very far from being free-speech-absolutists. Media companies are compelled by law to air political ads by all political parties without checking them, judging them or commentary. Short of being obviously illegal, there's nothing they can do which lead to our center-left state media being told by the supreme court to air the far-right (actually far right, with skin heads, boots and all the stops, not just anti-low-skill-immigration conservatives) NPD's spot.
> Their platform is filled with fake accounts pushing genocidal agendas from dictators, and in many cases facebook is sweeping it under the rug.
But not really. They exist, but the platform isn't "filled" with them. The vast majority on FB is not political.
I'm sure that FB would be quite okay with not having politics at all. Sure, people are on the platform, but they'd rather have engagement around cat pictures, celebrity news and similar things, because people shouting at others about their ideology aren't buying sneakers. They're not a political advertising company that relies on political ads as their primary funding.
Banning political speech is simply not an option, because some people sometimes want to argue about politics, and you're going to have to fight your users if you don't allow that. You never want to fight your users.
Food and water production has VERY big ethical issues. Palm oil, mass-slaughter of animals, deforestation, Nestle taking away water from locals, CO2 emmissions etc.
So yes, there are problems in the food and water industry, but I don't really get what your point is? Should we just close our eyes, ears and mouths and say "fuck it, not my problem"?
Not at all what I was aiming at. The problem people have with FB isn't how they produce the product, but who uses it.
The problem with food and water in the equivalent scenario, would be in who consumes it. If you let everyone consume it "woah, that's a political choice". But it really isn't. It's the default, deviating from it is a political choice.
No, the problem is that the product they produce is _specifically designed_ to be used in this manner because conflict and argument increases "engagement" and for a large portion of the employee base their bonus depends on performing work that leads to this outcome.
It used to be that people and organizations making unethical purchases were the ones we considered, and held, responsible. For a long time we've had good, positive movements centered on informing the buyer. We added expiration dates, ingredient lists, nutritional value information, crashworthiness scores and reliability ratings, country of origin labels, even ethical sourcing labels. Perhaps too much of a good thing caused information overload and resulting numbness? Somehow, between the Prohibition, the "war on drugs", and the supply side moral regulations, we've lost the spirit of "well informed free agents making decisions".
Most of the services (FB and the likes) we're discussing here are morally neutral by their nature, and it takes concerted efforts to make them non-neutral[1]. It is the particular use they are being put to that is moral or immoral. Let's not shift vast moral powers from the wide society to a narrow cadre, shall we? The economy is a neat distributed system. It's the popular democracy before democracy became popular. Let's not give it up.
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[1] example of non-neutrality: the current trend of algorithmic manipulation
I don't think that's the case. Is it moral to exploit human psychology when developing addictive features that pull people into the site over and over? Is it moral to sell user information to advertisers so they can emotionally manipulate you into buying crap you don't need? Is it moral to design interactions that evoke outrage and disagreement in order to increase engagement? Is it moral to track user activity across the web, outside the company's site?
I don't think any of these things are moral. These practices might not be necessary for a site like FB (then again they might), but this is the model they all seem to choose. And that's what actually matters.
The gist was, a bare messaging+microblogging platform is, by its own nature, morally neutral[1]. Of course if the operator starts doing editorial decisions - like algorithmic timelines, or propping up/pushing down content, or manipulating user mood - then the operator clearly is making moral judgements & decisions.
Funny how respecting user privacy does, at least partly, absolve the operator from a lot of risks related to making moral judgements on a mass scale in a hurry.
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[1] with the only caveat that, if somebody believes facilitating communication to be evil or good, then it would be considered respectively evil or good.
It's the classic argument, "technology is neutral; how it's used determines the ethics". Well, yes, I agree with that, but here we have a company that's using it unethically, and has no desire or need to stop their bad behavior. And that bad behavior has been instrumental to their success. That's what matters.
If you're writing accounting software for paper suppliers or something equally banal with few ethical implications, then sure, there's no need (and less reason) to have water cooler conversations about pro-genocide agitprop or whatever.
EDIT to add that of course not all departments at Facebook make the sort of decisions that have a marked social impact. More referring to the content policy teams, and the news feed algo teams, and so on.
The problem is distinguishing ethics from politics. These are very hard to disentangle, because ethical values are usually based on some political orientation. And I don't want Facebook to be making political decisions on my behalf, as a user. And I don't even want internal employee discussions to be derailed by political considerations.
So how do you distinguish ethics from politics? I don't think it's possible, unless the company defines its own ethical values, a priori, and only considers those when making decisions.
If you read the article, I think that this is precisely what Facebook's new policy is trying to do by putting a fence around "social issues."
Are you sure that isn't exactly backwards? Because it definitely should be the other direction in my very strong opinion. One's morals or beliefs on ethics should inform their politics, not the other way around.
One way is based around a person's inner being, the other is molding their being and stances based on a sports team.
The company's products are in no way social media platforms.