Mark in the Middle | Hacker News Reader

Mark in the Middle

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So, facebook employees are mad they're not allowed to censor things they disagree with that people post on facebook?

I don't understand how facebook came to be responsible for policing political opinions anyway.

In fact, I don't understand why employees at tech companies believe they have the right to police people's opinions period.

I see it amongst commenters here too. What gives any of these people the right to police the opinions of others?

Actually, just people in general these days seem to believe it's their right to enforce their views on others...

It's pretty simple, although it may not be obvious. There are 2 different views about "what freedom/democracy is" that are presently doing battle in america, at least among inteligentsia

One, the worldview embedded into your comment, is that freedom is about the limits of discourse. Under this system, limiting discourse is inherently undemocratic, so if facebook "censor(s) things they disagree with" this is bad and we don't need any analysis of what specifically the discourse was to make our determination, which is why your comment abstracts over any value it could be. Full disclosure, I don't fully understand this worldview because it seems to enforce a particular discourse on Mark Zuckerberg, which seems a bit contradictory to me although I assume there must be some way philosophically to resolve this objection.

The other worldview is that certain kinds of discourse are inherently against freedom. For example, misinformation that might persuade voters into voting based on a false premise undermines a democratic system. Under this worldview, the question of what the discourse is, is the whole analysis, and we don't need any analysis of what Zuckerberg "disagrees with" to decide if it's right to limit. Obviously the people who will advocate for removing a discourse are people who don't like it, but that's separate from analysis of whether the discourse itself is a force against democracy.

These ideas are at cross purposes, and success of the one is often at the expense of the other. For this reason we seem reluctant to just lay out the underlying value systems the way I did here, which is unfortunate, because I think the fundamental disagreement is really important to discuss.

You're doing a poor job of explaining the first worldview. Which is okay, you've acknowledged that you have trouble understanding it.

This worldview has been called the "liberal consensus". What it holds is that the power to determine a discourse is inherently against freedom is corrupting, and by allowing an authority to determine that, it will inevitably be used as a weapon.

Goalposts will shift. We will, hmm, go from suspending accounts which promote the theory that COVID-19 is caused by 5G towers, to suspending the account of a virologist who issued a preprint suggesting that gain-of-function mutations in SARS2 point to a laboratory origin.

Look, both of those things might be false, but surely we can agree that if so they are false in a different way.

There were many experiments with official truth in the 20th century. The general consensus was that they were unpleasant to live under and did a poor job of actually separating truth from falsehood. Many of us don't care to repeat those experiments, the effect size was large.

If we had an oracle of truth, then censorship of falsehood would be easy and practical. We also wouldn't need democracy at all, we could just ask the oracle of truth what to do, and do it. But we don't have any such creature.

I think there's a non-splippery-slope way to position the worldview you're describing that might be more palatable to the values of a worldview based on limiting discourse based on content.

I believe the hardcore freedom of speech view has a few important underlying assumptions:

1) More information is better, and shining a light on something is better than trying to selectively hide it, because eventually the real truth comes out through persistent discourse. This is only really possible with the maximum amount of information, and especially all viewpoints laid out on the table with the least amount of obstruction.

2) People are broadly able to parse out untruths, or irrelevant positioning, or anything that is of low quality, and they will not be persuaded by it. This isn't true of everyone, but it is true of enough people; that's an inherent assumption of democracy. We live (or want to live) in a free market of ideas, where ideas can compete, and the market (what people are persuaded by) will be broadly rational and land on the best position in aggregate, even if some people are persuaded by bad or malicious arguments.

3) Limiting the visibility of any information detracts from the overall quality of discourse because it robs people of the ability to improve their thinking. It negates the possibility of refutation, because the untruth is hidden. Giving people all information, including misleading information, in the long-run leads to a population that can have better discourse and evaluation of all the information thrown their way.

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I think the above puts the ideas in the best possible light. However, I disagree with enough of these assumptions that I can't take this worldview myself. My main counter to these ideas is that, similar to (pure) free market proponents, it takes on a very idealistic view of rationality that doesn't match real behavior. In practice, people have to take shortcuts to understand things—it's inherent in human conciseness—and those shortcuts can be exploited. I don't believe this is something we can grow past on a large societal scale, because it's embedded in how we think. To improve the quality of discourse, we have to explicitly protect against these biases. There are a whole host of difficulties there, too, but I think they are more surmountable than all the downsides of allowing deliberate manipulation and misinformation to spread broadly.

> they are false in a different way.

In what different way? Has not both been scientifically refuted by reputable scientists? Just because one sounded more plausible doesn't mean it's not false.

To me, both needn't be banned, because I believe and agree with your premise, but I don't agree there's a difference.

Determining how discourse occurs, its rules and the dividing line correct and incorrect speech is built in to the democratic process, not some holy "rules of the game" handed down by God. Your misguided understanding of "liberal consensus" is actually a fundamentally authoritarian position, a doctrinal decree about what can and cannot be discussed.

The irony of course is that the "experiments with official truth in the 20th century" in the US were often defended on the grounds of protecting "liberal consensus" from opposing viewpoints. See the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals statement of principles, the trade group responsible for the Hollywood Blacklist:

"We believe in, and like, the American way of life: the liberty and freedom which generations before us have fought to create and preserve; the freedom to speak, to think, to live, to worship, to work, and to govern ourselves as individuals, as free men; the right to succeed or fail as free men, according to the measure of our ability and our strength.

Believing in these things, we find ourselves in sharp revolt against a rising tide of communism, fascism, and kindred beliefs, that seek by subversive means to undermine and change this way of life; groups that have forfeited their right to exist in this country of ours, because they seek to achieve their change by means other than the vested procedure of the ballot and to deny the right of the majority opinion of the people to rule."

I freely concede that I'm doing a poor job of defending it, because it isn't my view to defend. The part of it that I don't understand is limited to how it is self-consistent, which is not something I see addressed in your reply, although I could be mistaken.

But I think we are still saying talking points instead of getting to the core. I understand and I share the concern about an important voice being silenced. But I think the mechanism of that silence in the current environment is probably related to loudness of noise rather than quietness of signal. Obviously, it may be different at different situations and times in history. But I think if our goal is to hear quiet voices we ought to consider both sources of the issue pretty seriously. A philosophy that only considers the problem of transmitting and ignores the problem of receiving through a noisefloor seems an incomplete troubleshooting procedure to me.

Whereas you perceive a threat about the slide into censorship, I perceive a threat about the slide into unrest and violence. In reality, it seems likely we will get both: one of them first and the other following as a reaction. So I think our interests would really be best served by hammering out a workable compromise so as to hang together rather than separately.

I agree that we ought to return to the "liberal discourse", but we may perceive its makeup differently. Limitations on discourse have always been part and parcel of the institution. Some limitations have been very harmful. Others, like 'you can't threaten not to leave when you lose an election', have been very helpful. Liberal discourse is presently threatened because we have abandoned that sort of polite limitation, and it is by reintroducing it that we can recover the institution.

> If we had an oracle of truth, then censorship of falsehood would be easy and practical. We also wouldn't need democracy at all, we could just ask the oracle of truth what to do, and do it. But we don't have any such creature.

This is a bit of a strawman. I do empathize with the skepticism of authority in our present climate. However, you rely on some method to determine whether a person is doing censorship in the same way I rely on a method to determine if a person is doing misinformation. I expect it is a similar method, which is to say, imperfectly, based on values present in our historical age, individual biases, and so on. Which is the "same sort of stuff" that democracy otherwise uses to make any of its decisions.

I expect this dispute arises because, in your worldview, limiting the discourse is very exceptional, and doing it properly should require an exceptional method. Whereas from my perspective, laws, elections, jail, and wars are very serious, and we have processes to decide those.

>Goalposts will shift. We will, hmm, go from suspending accounts which promote the theory that COVID-19 is caused by 5G towers, to suspending the account of a virologist who issued a preprint suggesting that gain-of-function mutations in SARS2 point to a laboratory origin.

Why do you believe that only the the second viewpoint will suffer from this slippery slope? We also seen similar examples in the first worldview. A conversation can quickly go from being against illegal immigrants, to being against all immigrants, to being against a specific race of immigrants, to genocide of that race. We have already seen this laissez-faire approach from Facebook help contribute to genocide in Myanmar.

I think you're mischaracterizing the classical liberal consensus. That was best represented by John Stuart Mill, and his main point was not that censorshop will be used as a weapon -- it's simply that censorship infringes on liberty, and that the best cure for bad speech is more speech.

And the idea that the "general consensus" is against all forms of censorship is quite false. In America it is, but in Europe and other countries censorship of hate speech (e.g. racism, Nazism, etc.) is quite accepted as part of the general consensus.

And even in the US, "yelling fire in a crowded movie theater" isn't protected either. And arguably, spreading blatant viral lies on social media close to an election is akin to yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, since the national consequences could be so dire.

There are many intelligent arguments to be made that censorship of speech that is either a) primarily hate-directed rather than information-directed, or b) outrageously false but capable of swinging an election, could be outlawed, and neither of these would be incompatible with modern-day political liberalism, which is more commonly called "social democracy" to distinguish it from the classical liberalism that Mill did so much to defend.

And the idea that this would somehow depend on an "oracle of truth" is nonsense. Courts judge things like libel and defamation cases all the time. Sure, there are gray cases that could go either way, but drawing lines in gray areas is what courts have done ever since they existed in the first place. Holding Facebook moderators ultimately responsible to judges, for example, isn't inherently difficult to do if we wanted to.

>For example, misinformation that might persuade voters into voting based on a false premise undermines a democratic system.

So, what's different now vs when there was paid political campaigns and advertising on TV, radio, magazines etc.?

Partisan political ads have never been a source of reliable information as long as i've been alive.

I'm curious as to what elections you've participated in within your lifetime that wasn't full of campaigns full of misinformation or hell even an election where the candidate that won kept their word on everything they said.

My problem with this all is it feels just engineered and over reactionary.

Misinformation has existed as long as i've been alive in pretty easily accessible forms. There's always been tabloids next to checkout stands, there's always been bullshit news, ads pretending to be factual and mountains of garbage info heaped onto people and the same people that believed it then believe it now.

None of this is new and the only thing the internet changed about it all is now we can hear about whatever nonsense Joe Blow believes in.

I have a problem with it all because what people call 'misinformation' isn't always such, it's 'disagreeable information'.

Many of the things i've seen labelled as information.over the years, not your examples in particular, but in general, aren't even things with an objective correctness to them.

The whole second viewpoint relies on the idea that there is a morally superior group of people out there who know the correct ideas and everyone would just be better off if we just listen to them as any other ideas are just misinformation against the 'correct ideas'.

Again, this reminds me very much of the way things were when the church ran things. Just replace God and his commandments with the correct world view and beliefs.

This is very much the idea behind wrongthink and thoughtcrimes in 1984. That holding a non conforming belief makes one guilty and requires them to be punished by those that believe 'the correct thing'.

In the end, it all comes down to the idea that one group of people has the moral authority to decide what's right for everyone and should be allowed to crush any dissenting opinion.

And this, yes, I have a huge problem with. It's no different than what any other oppressive dictators have done to crush dissent.

Paid ads (including political ones) on TV are not allowed to make false statements. Networks have had that policy for a long time.

It's Facebook that is undermining that norm -- even though they have the same standard for ads from non-politicians.

There's a GOP pac head that is running for something just to dodge Facebook's policy about lying.

Your point of view is intrinsically liberal, and the latter point of view plays the victim and assumes people can't evolve to gain the intelligence needed to not fall for misinformation. You intrinsically think there are people who can't make decisions for themselves. Sounds like control

The absolute "freedom is simple, and restrictions are all bad" position is nonsense. Ignoring that there are people who would use their freedom to infringe on others is naive and childish.

If everyone has a gun, we aren't all safer, we're just all each at the mercy of whoever decides to pull the trigger first.

While the "should all discourse be free vs. should it all be regulated" axis exists and people can be in different places on that scale (and almost all people are somewhere in between the extremes), there's also an orthogonal question, namely, who should be the party that makes and/or enforces the regulations.

Personally, I am very much in favour of regulating some forms of speech (regulating doesn't necessarily have to mean prohibiting btw), but I am very wary if big, quasi-monopolistic private companies are being tasked to do so, because their incentive structure now will lead them to over-restrict in order to avoid potential legal issues. If it's just a newspaper comment section, that's fine because there is enough competition, but for things like Twitter/FB/YouTube, I find it problematic, and this is why I find some of the more recent laws in the EU to be somewhat dangerous; we're basically asking unelected, unsupervised people from Facebook et al. to intransparently enforce laws.

It seems like making Facebook a government regulated public utility is the only way to square this circle. Because otherwise we either unjustly infringe on Mark Zuckerberg's use of his private property (Facebook); or Mark Zuckerberg is the de-facto arbiter of global public opinion for a broad swath of the population.

> The other worldview is that certain kinds of discourse are inherently against freedom. ... Under this worldview, the question of what the discourse is, is the whole analysis.

You will mostly find this worldview on the political left of the spectrum, and more often than not you will find the discourse they find to be “against freedom” to be the one held by their political opponent.

And when they promote their view in the form of a policy, they are effectively trying to outlaw people having opinions differing from theirs.

Rather current examples: identity politics and diversity policies. If you simply disagree with the basis of their argument, that disagreement is considered “hateful” in itself and your speech must be banned, no matter how civil.

How can one have free discourse, when the one righteous part has decided that only they are allowed to speak? There’s no freedom here. Not even close.

I don't think it's "people these days;" I think it was the norm that has been disrupted by modern technology.

Network broadcast television operates under standards and practices, where certain things are not allowed for broadcast. That includes the news---even news stories are subject to S&P constraint.

Does network broadcast television "police political opinion" if it doesn't give a pedophile a half-hour of air time to plead their case?

The world of decentralized bidirectional near-lightspeed mass-communication, where there is often not a gatekeeper, is relatively new.

It's still an open question whether it's a net positive for society. I would say there have been a lot of positive consequences. Negative consequences are also stacking up quickly.

The problem is that facebook has partially replaced both broadcast television and private conversations people would have in person or on the phone.

Historically, nobody would batt and eye about a network policing the opinions represented in its programing. However, there would be uproar if a phone company controlled what was said in a call.

Facebook fills so many roles that a single solution does not exist.

Solutions exist, more likely Facebook is not interested in them, as it may affect their bottom line.

Very nuanced analysis! Fantastic.

In the past, the effects of freedom of speech were bounded by the cost of communication. Very few people could afford a soapbox with which to reach the world, so only certain messages were broadcast widely. Now everyone can send (and even amplify) messages quickly and easily.

Previously celebrities, politicians, the media, and advertisers had a wide channel. Now interest groups, state actors, echo chambers, and individuals with access to technology such as GPT-3 can do the same.

There's a lot of good, but also a lot of bad. We're now testing how humans respond to this deluge. It's fascinating (and somewhat worrying) to watch unfold.

My biggest fear is that state actors will inject information designed to polarize us, and that we'll respond exactly as they want.

I think it's worth noting that the wave of fascism that swept the world during the early 20th century coincided with radio and television being widely deployed.

This may be correlation that does not imply causation. But demagogues had, for the first time, a way to reach into people's homes directly with their messages all the time, if they had access to microphones, video cameras, and broadcast towers. And it was a mechanism that excluded the ability of any antithesis messages to reach people on those same channels (once the government had control of the channels). Mussolini and his ilk certainly knew how to take advantage of these tools.

>My biggest fear is that state actors will inject information designed to polarize us, and that we'll respond exactly as they want.

Are you being facetious with this? This has been a long documented behavior of Russia. The future you fear is already here.

I think the issue of political polarization is multifaceted, and social media and decentralized technological mediums are part of the cause.

Another one that may be worth mentioning is the elimination of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987. This doctrine used to hold news companies with a broadcast license to a certain standard which is now gone - effectively allowing them to report on things with whatever amount of slant and bias they choose.

> The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented. The demise of this FCC rule has been considered by some to be a contributing factor for the rising level of party polarization in the United States.

The main agenda for the doctrine was to ensure that viewers were exposed to a diversity of viewpoints. In 1969 the United States Supreme Court, in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, upheld the FCC's general right to enforce the fairness doctrine where channels were limited. However, the Court did not rule that the FCC was obliged to do so. The courts reasoned that the scarcity of the broadcast spectrum, which limited the opportunity for access to the airwaves, created a need for the doctrine.

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

So effectively, we have echo chambers on TV and social media fed by algorithms and analytics, wherein people can participate to confirm their biases and preconceptions without having them challenged.

> It's still an open question whether it's a net positive for society

Was TV a net positive for society? It's anybody's guess.

> I don't understand how facebook came to be responsible for policing political opinions anyway.

There's tons of software engineers, product designers, etc. on an ideological bent. If companies like Facebook and Netflix hire these types of people, even if they think they're on the same side, they shouldn't be surprised when their employees begin making collective demands.

> I see it amongst commenters here too. What gives any of these people the right to police the opinions of others?

Intellectual types tend towards seeing every issue in life as an engineering problem that can be solved with code or mathematics, so control over dangerous ideas makes sense to them and appeals to their ego sense that their intelligence gives them. It's just more apparent than ever because our environment rewards the ego in ways we didn't see even 5 years ago. We haven't even reached peak ego yet.

>so control over dangerous ideas makes sense to them

This is another concept that confuses me 'dangerous ideas'. How is that different than what the church did with things like witchcraft and paganism, those were 'dangerous ideas'.

What makes an idea dangerous?

If there's dangerous ideas are there safe ideas?

What makes an idea safe?

Can you give me and example of a safe idea vs a dangerous idea?

Who decides which ideas are safe and which ones are dangerous?

Is this a static thing? Like once an idea is declared either safe or dangerous, do they stay that way or can a safe idea become a dangerous idea or vice versa?

That's not even beginning to get into the definition of 'dangerous'.

It seems like a pretty vague and arbitrary term to me. Say for example, if I decided to go free climbing, I'd be in a lot of danger. I have no experience, for me that would be a dangerous thing to do. But, for my Buddy who's been climbing most of their life, it's not so dangerous.

So can one build up skills that let them deal with these dangerous ideas effectively, such as with other dangerous things or is the danger of ideas just beyond anyone to deal with?

Is there some kind of elite group of people who can handle these dangerous ideas that us normal folks can't?

I hope you see where i'm going with all this.

You start out "what is with people these days" and then you end up "oh hey people have been doing this forever, with heresy and religion and so on" so... no, I don't see where you're going with this.

Are you surprised that arguments about which messages get amplified and which do not happen? That they happened historically and that they happen now? That Facebook (and other pieces of modern technology) have reinvigorated this discussion because they change the economics and effort and reach of people's actions?

One difference today is that we're having much more of this with just words in the private space and fewer legal or governmental ramifications... you could've gotten in a lot of official, thrown-in-jail-or-killed trouble for having the wrong ideas in the past!

Could you stop speaking in "what even is a dangerous idea" questions and put forth your own arguments? What do you picture your ideal world looking like, in terms of person A thinking one thing, person B thinking another, and person A's actions after person B starts trying to convince persons C, D, E... to take up certain positions... Let's use one of the "obvious" historical examples of a dangerous idea: "people like this are evil and we must kill them."

> What makes an idea dangerous?

People are drinking bleach because they read on Facebook it will cure COVID-19 or their child's autism. Should Facebook delete those posts? Add an official warning disclaimer (counter-information)? Depend on other users to reply with counter-information in comments?

I don't have the time to get into the nuts and bolts of an argument, but just from a personal emotional opinion, fascism is a dangerous idea because it led to the genocide of my people, anti-semitism in general has led to even more genocide of my people over millenia and continues to be a significant lingering threat to myself and family. Id consider these dangerous ideas, but I'm not sure id they should be outright banned, but maybe not treated equally to less dangerous ideas like excersize and drinking water. I do think that can be handled at the social level without laws, and I think that a company has the right to decide amongst itself, how it wants to place itself in society.

Certain ideas that its morally right to eliminate some people who happened to be born a certain way seems to me to fall into that category of dangerous ideas, primary because it offers no appeal, no rectification, you cant convert/repent your way out of death.

In my conversations, such employees don't believe they have the right, they believe their political positions are objectively morally superior and hold an 'ends justifies the means' opinion on influence.

Very true. Their positions are so righteous and so moral that the 46%-ish population of the US are deplorables, evil, far right, racists, xenophobia, being violent by being silent, or white supremacists.

I still don't get it and I can't get away from 'printing press' analogies.

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" resulted in countless deaths but who owns that responsibly besides whoever wrote it, read it, and acted on the information within? You could blame it's publishers but that seems pretty off-track.

Also every company I've ever worked at has angry, self-righteous employees who disagree with upper management. We all think we're smarter than everyone else and most of us aren't afraid to share it.

Hypothesize a machine that allows you to change people's emotions directly, one that has seen mass adoption. Sure, people opt-in to using it, but once plugged in, it works as advertised: send the right commands to it, and people's emotions shift.

You could do a lot of good with one of those! The ultimate anti-anxiety treatment, the ultimate in letting people become the cooler heads they need to be for good ideas to prevail in tense situations.

You could also hack into it with almost no effort and turn a whole city into a bad knock-off of Resident Evil; hit the neurons that rabies hits, get people tearing and biting at each other.

Should people be allowed to install it?

I think it's possible that books were a great idea and a machine like the one I described (without proper constraints to put control in the hands of the owner) would be a terrible idea. There's probably some technology along the line between these where we say "Whoa, wait. What this could achieve is grand, but the way it gets there is, uh-oh."

The more powerful a technology is, the more obligation it implies upon the people holding control over its implementation and execution to consider moral and philosophical concerns of its use.

> Hypothesize a machine that allows you to change people's emotions directly, one that has seen mass adoption.

There absolutely are such machines and we call them computers.

> Should people be allowed to install it?

Communication is the powerful 'technology' that changes people's emotions directly. The mode of communication is a side-note. Tear down FB and none of this goes away - not because something rises from FB's ashes but because communication is a central facet of humanity.

There should be standards, even if they aren't defined by law. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was republished by Henry Ford as part of a series of anti-semitic articles. The decision to publish them was immoral and is evidence of Ford's racism. I'm sure employers at the Economist would be angry if it started to run articles that would be a better fit for the National Enquirer.

Facebook is kind of different, it argues that it's a platform not a publisher. They do have some ground to argue for looser guidelines. But their business model targeting engagement incentivises them to promote divisive and false information. I'd be much more comfortable with Facebook if they didn't promote extreme and dangerous content. What those standards should be is a thorny issue, but better moderation would be an improvement.

> There should be standards, even if they aren't defined by law

I don't necessarily disagree and I'm sure there were plenty of reputable publishers who wouldn't touch the protocols.

But should the agency who did published it have been hauled up before a congressional investigating committee?

I think Facebook has created this problem for itself in a lot of ways. They're dependent on a two generations of people who are trending populist (in either a liberal or conservative direction), and thus they're going to feel more empowered to organize in the workplace to effect political change.

Facebook has also lobbied super hard to maintain their status as the private regulators of two extremely large social media platforms and a social messaging platform, representing a substantial percentage of the US and global population.

Facebook has also insisted that it is a public square and platform for free speech, but Groups, algorithmic content, and an extremely successful paid advertising model have made that claim specious at best. In the public square, everyone gets to shout equally - sure some will have a slightly larger crowd, but it will be difficult to monopolize the attention of the entire square. Facebook's model necessarily advantages some speech over others, and can be influenced by money both directly and indirectly.

I agree everyone should have the right to their opinion, and no one should be able to enforce their opinion on another at the barrel end of a gun. Facebook has created a position where they (1) have the right, as a private company to censor their users; (2) as a "public square" (if you subscribe to that) they have a moral obligation not to censor their users; (3) a business model that benefits from promoting some speech over another; and (4) employees who can see the effect of this model, and disagree with it morally, socially, etc., and have no other means of redress.

I don't get it either. I think Zuckerberg is doing the right thing by refusing to cave. I also agree with you that he already gave up far too much by agreeing to "fact check" content in the first place.

> Actually, just people in general these days seem to believe it's their right to enforce their views on others...

Only a small number of people, who we used to call liberals, ever believed this.

Isiah Berlin:

> It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilisation: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognised, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. This may be so; but no sceptical conclusions seem to me to follow. Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. ‘To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions’, said an admirable writer of our time, ‘and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’ To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow such a need to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.

I hope we swing back the other way but it's worrying that so many people no longer see the value in pluralism of thought.

> Actually, just people in general these days

This is how people almost always behaved. In the Middle Ages the term "heresy" was used, today only slogans have changed, the social mechanisms are the same. Of course there is a group of opportunists, but there is also a large group that really believes their ideology (it used to be some religion) will do good.

This, rather incorrectly, presumes that the default mode of Facebook is "non-censorship," i.e. something resembling fairness in terms of what gets popular and what doesn't.

This is a huge farce, of course, it's all completely unfair pay to play and black-box algorithms.

Now, I could be wrong about this -- but it would be incumbent UPON THEM to prove that, by opening up and showing us how they do things. Barring that, I very much welcome insiders in Facebook applying pressure.

This is the way I see it. Ever since Facebook started "optimizing" the timeline order they have been showing you a distorted picture of the world. Honestly it would probably be enough to default everyone back to a world where nobody gets preferential treatment on your feed and everything is chronological.

Their entire existence is predicated on policing opinions for the highest bidder, or in a way that benefits the highest bidder. Should ethics and morality not be integrated into that model?

Yes, it's the new fad in US IT. Privileged workers making more than 100K a year demand they have a say in what their employer can or cannot publish. Same thing happened at Kickstarter, and is happening at Spotify regarding Joe Rogan's podcast. Employees demand having a say in the editorial policies of these websites and the power to interfere with contracts. I guess they tried that at Amazon too, but Bezos didn't fold and fired a few of them. I am all for collective bargaining and unions, but this has absolutely nothing to do with working conditions. These employees just want to use these platforms as their own propaganda outlets (and yes, it is a slippery slope).

Do you not believe in content moderation? When someone posts spam, or a virus, should it not be removed? If it should be, what about propaganda? What about dangerous disinformation?

What I don’t understand is that if they are going to police opinions, they are acting as editors, not a platform. They should thus be held accountable for any improper editorial decisions that they make in the same way that a newspaper would be via civil suit.

> if they are going to police opinions, they are acting as editors, not a platform.

This is a common misconception, but that's not what the law actually says. I'd encourage you to go read Section 230 yourself. It says a platform can't be held legally liable for:

"any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected"

The NYT and Fox News are publishers but they're only liable for the stuff they write and publish themselves. If someone on their comments section posts objectionable or illegal content they aren't liable for it. And they're free to moderate their comments section in any way they wish.

BTW consider the alternative if it wasn't this way. Activists could flood 2A message boards with "guns evil, ban them all" spam and the mods could do nothing to stop them lest they lose Section 230 protections. Trolls could harass users on forums for sensitive topics such as dealing with grief, cancer, PTSD or other traumas. Every online forum would become totally unusable.

They're already acting as editors thanks to the algorithmic feed. Thus people are trying to hold them accountable for any improper editorial decisions.

The simple solution would be to stop recommending posts - either from within our social circle, or from people and organizations we aren't affiliated with.

At that point, whatever damage is being done won't be undone, but facebook can genuinely say it is not maintinaing editorial control.

But, they won't do that, because their business model is based on editorial control. There's no way around their culpability.

What do you mean by "improper editorial decisions?"

It's their platform, they can remove or restrict what people post in any way they want. If you don't like it you don't have to use it.

Every platform "polices" content. If they didn't every site would be 80%+ spam and full of porn and hate.

I think it's very much agreed upon that we shouldn't market cigarettes/liquor/drugs to children since they're vulnerable. Apparently, we have a country full of adults who are unable to tell fact from fiction - shouldn't we protect them as well?

> What gives any of these people the right to police the opinions of others?

This seems to be a question of the times. "What right do I have to police you?" - goes for masks as well as ideas, innit?

> believe it's their right to enforce their views

IMO this is deeply ironic, since a lot of "social justice" is "stop telling me who I am", either directly or as the irritant at the center of the "pearl".

Like, Manifest Destiny was literally this backed up with guns. Jim Crow was this backed up by laws. McCarthyism was this by congressional committee.

What's novel here isn't enforcing views on others.

> "goes for masks as well as ideas"

Since physical actions don't equal thoughts/opinions, well, clearly no.

> "since a lot of "social justice" is "stop telling me who I am""

Except they flipped right around and started telling other people in the center and right who they are, at full volume. Hard to blame people for not taking them seriously.

> physical

As a friend says, "genocide is not an opinion". IMO it's clear one should police speech advocating for it; between here and there is a gray zone.

IMO that gray zone looks awfully similar (although def not to the same severity on the far side) to the one between here and "I have COVID and will not wear a mask."

> flip

Aye. Appearances (and recent events) aside, the "right" does not have monopoly on hypocrisy.

> why employees at tech companies believe they have the right to police people's opinions period

Two things about this: 1. When FB Answers was a thing. I was very quickly banned from it, through various obscure mechanisms. All I was doing was gently being a contrarian on newsworth/fad topics. Partly contrarian because I was read up on a lot of scientific literature and other times, I just had different opinions than the 'popular' one. There is a culture of control there, full stop. Especially when your valid and potentially correct opinion goes against FB employee. I knew immediately than FB Answers wasn't going to succeed because they wouldn't allow a plurality of perspectives. 2. Let's be fully clear about this. This is entirely Zuck's decision. He runs a tight ship with clear guidelines. Zuck is playing politics right now, full stop. Saying one thing publicly and saying another privately. This 'leaked' memo isn't something that Zuck had no idea that it would be leaked. It's calculated. It's a public statement. How enforced will this leaked memo be? Will that be leaked? Doubtful. Zuck is trying to skirt responsibility with this 1st amendment problem. If FB really allowed dissent then Alex Jones and others would be allowed on the platform.*

*I do think the worst ideas need to be allowed on a platform. It allows the possibility to discussions. There are cults around various topics but...that doesn't mean that those with scientific understanding have perfect rhetoric about everything they say. Everyone needs to refine and it's best done with allowing everyone to the table.

What's worse is that a lot of these people are terribly hypocritical and I don't think they realize it.

Censorship bad for this issue. Censorship good for what I don't agree with.

Discrimination bad in this case. Discrimination good for the sake of diversity!

Racism bad. But wait, positive racism is totally different and good!

Diversity is what we want! Except when it results in things I disagree with.

> In fact, I don't understand why employees at tech companies believe they have the right to police people's opinions period.

Of course they have the right to. Any website can make whatever rules they want about what's allowed. HN has rules too.

> people in general these days

Wait till you read some 19th century US history, you're in for a treat

Just joined FB and I can tell you that the company is a microcosm of what's happening in the larger U.S. right now but amplified by a very vocal majority that is hell bent on having Zuckerberg clamp down on every single item/topic they don't agree with. Other than that the company is awesome :-)

it's so refreshing reading your comment, I believe the same, looks like some people enjoy a hidden satisfaction doing that, on my opinion is the sensation of power to decide what's right or not (basically playing God) and as we know power corrupts people.

Right doesn't just magically exist, every right has to be fight for. These facebook employees are fighting for the right to censor thing their disagree with.

Sure, some people may disagree. If you disagree then you have to to fight it back.

I don't like being so hell-bent on ideologies either, but if I understand it correctly, a company has every right to be politically biased and therefore can moderate the hell out of its users' content? To be fair, of course, such moderation is really editorialization, right? If so, the companies should get less protection from Section 230, and people should be able to sue the companies left and right as well.

edit: s/censor/moderate

Facebook can do whatever it wants, including policing communications on its platform; it's a for-profit company.

You completely missed the point of GP's comment. They never said Facebook can't do whatever they want. Just that Facebook employees shouldn't feel like they get a say in it.

edit: btw I'm not saying it is GP's opinion that Facebook can do whatever they want. I have no idea what GP thinks about that. I'm only saying their argument wasn't specifically about that.

Why shouldn't employees get a say in the actions of their employers?

Sure, but then it shouldn't be allowed to hide behind Section 230.

For the 500 millionth time Section 230 does not say "censorship makes you a publisher". It says the exact opposite. An information service cannot be held liable for:

Translation: they can "censor" or moderate or remove spam to their heart's content, even beyond what's legally required.

> I don't understand how facebook came to be responsible for policing political opinions anyway.

Not only that, but they seem to be responsible for policing political opinions in the US alone.

Also, I never told them what citizenship I have in the process of creating my account. Why do I get so many US election reminders on Facebook but not election reminders for the 97 other democracies in the world?

This is a strawman argument. No one cares about other people having and sharing different opinions. However the argument for moderating content on Facebook is centered around misinformation, and incitement of violence. There has now been multiple instances where right-wing populists have posted fake information on Facebook with political consequences. In Myanmar this incited in genocide[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

This is a disingenuous argument that neglects to include the fact that 'misinformation' and 'violence' are stretched beyond the pale by ideologues in order to justify why something they disagree with politically should be removed on these platforms.

People certainly do falsely assert that things are more harmful than they are to justify taking them down. But it's not disingenuous to point out that there are many cases where disinformation really is deeply harmful (as in it results in death or bodily harm to many, many people).

people have been murdered because of misinformation on facebook: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

That's pretty unambiguous to me.

Because it's their platform not "ours", if you decided to start Twatbook for instance you could decide what was acceptable to post on your platform.

As long as Facebook picks and chooses what content it displays on my feed, it is not at all inconsistent for it to pick and choose what content it will not display on my feed.

Facebook isn't a dumb pipe. If it feels like it can fiddle with my feed to maximize its profit, its perfectly reasonable for its employees to demand that it does so in an ethical way.

Your argument would work if it were a dumb pipe (Like my phone line is.)

Some opinions are toxic due to their memetic power, their ability to rapidly spread amongst a population whilst evading critical reflection.

We're a global species. Technology made us become larger than the sum of our parts. It is our moral duty to police those opinions that are so polarizing, or so devoid of empathy, that they do harm.

"Policing" can be milder than all out censorship. Personalized feed algorithms can push us into filter bubbles, there's no reason why they can't police toxic views by injecting counter arguments or labeling (not censoring) rampant misinformation as such

You're actually advocating for censorship on a global scale. We've truly regressed.

Uh no. Changing the algorithms to not push you into filter bubbles isn’t censorship.

> our moral duty

Yes, but NOT by censorship, but with counterfactuals! And certainly not by a gigantic megacorporation like Facebook.

They are not the arbiters of speech and quite frankly it's too much to ask of them. And imo, anyone who is happy to be an arbiter of speech is somebody you should be very, very afraid of.

I think the question isn't about "can or can't" but about "should or shouldn't."

In my opinion, 24-year-old Stanford grads getting paid upwards of six figures directly out of college should not have any say in what people are or are not privy to seeing, hearing, or reading.

You mention it is "our" moral duty - who is the "our" here?

They are already deciding what appears on your feed via their recommendation algorithms. The question is if the algorithm they currently use could be "better" and what that would mean. Tweaking it to expose fewer people to ideas of white supremacy should be a no-brainer, but because there isn't a single person to point at who is "responsible" we argue in circles.

It's worth considering:

1) A distinction between 'opinions' 'facts' and 'hate speech'.

and 2) Media is an existential power, almost like a wing of government. If you control the media, you can control a nation. Which is why authoritarian states take a very active role.

FB and others already do have policies against very aggressive speech, for example, if you start calling people the 'N-word' - you'll get banned.

But where 1 and 2 collide is on the issue of factuality.

Take the pandemic: it would be quite easy for 'big name politicians' and others to outright lie about the nature of COVID. These lies perpetuate into behaviours and outcomes which are very bad for everyone.

I'm not sure if the statement 'COVID doesn't kill anyone' is much of an opinion, more or less statement of fact. (Edit: which is wrong of course, I hope that is obvious)

When you take this information and push it into the political arena, where facts are harder to discern ... it becomes a problem.

This ultimately is the crux of the issue.

We have no choice but to 'call out bad information' or it will hurt us severely. We did this traditionally by forcing some kind of consent and responsibility with the major news outlets - they were 'free' but responsibly managed.

Press owners, are kind of 'part of the elite' - they have a kind of status of responsibility.

Once there's no control, you have 'Democracy by TikTok' and it's not good.

It's an issue we have to deal with.

> "The community we serve tends to be, on average, ideologically a little bit more conservative than our employee base."

If I had to pick one sentence of the article which sums up the entire issue it would be this one.

Although a follow up would be the comforting level of maturity in Facebook's leadership, acknowledging that it isn't their role to bring politics into the workplace.

It is distressingly refreshing to see a company in the news for taking a stance like "In my work with Joel, I’ve found him to be ... very rigorous and principled in his thinking [and therefore I'm happy to work with him despite being a Republican]". It really is remarkable that Zuckerberg is in a position to have to defend that. From company employees of all people.

>acknowledging that it isn't their role to bring politics into the workplace.

This is very hard for me to square with Facebook. It's like working at the NY Times and saying "no politics in the work place." Almost any decision FB makes is by definition political. The top 10 most interacted pages on Facebook are political. COVID-19, in the US, is political.

It doesn't strike me as mature, it's deceitful. It's very easy to claim things are non-political when the outcomes do not affect you at all.

> Almost any decision FB makes is by definition political. The top 10 most interacted pages on Facebook are political. COVID-19, in the US, is political.

While this makes sense and I agree with you, I still think that some dev ops employee shouldn't be forced to engage in political debate because their company is politically involved. While the company may be, there are many positions that can be politically agnostic to the company. Provisioning servers or working on internal work flows shouldn't require my political engagement.

The notion that a medium can be above politics is, itself, a political opinion.

The antithesis is "The medium is the message."

Nothing remarkable in a company that makes lawnmowers.

Facebook is a company that uses its power to change what people think because so many view it as a source of truth. Doing it for money, or doing it for power, is essentially the same thing. If you are in position to manipulate the truth for benefits to you or your friends in high places you will, and he is.

If I worked at Facebook and felt the CEO was twisting truth for money, I'd leave, but the bribe to work there is so high.

If Zuckerberg truly was not a dictator wannabe, he'd give up voting control of the company, but of course he won't.

> Facebook is a company that uses its power to change what people think

I don't think that's a helpful way to look at it. Facebook is a platform that other people use to change what people think, and that's dangerous enough. Without any ill intent whatsoever from Facebook itself, that still creates serious issues with unintentional bias (e.g. via algorithms trained with poor data sets) and manipulation. Those are the problems we most need to address, because the number and power of people trying to manipulate Facebook from outside totally dwarfs the ability of anyone inside - including Mark - to do so even if they all wanted to. Framing it as "Facebook and all of its employees are evil" doesn't solve anything, and wouldn't even if it was true.

I've seen a fair bit of criticism of Zuckerberg, but all of the criticisms would probably be more true if there was a CEO appointed by a profit maximizing board instead.

Whenever someone says "don't bring politics into X" it's a cop-out. Doubly so for anything related to Facebook. Politics is how we solve all problems between competing interests as a society. You can't operate a business in this country (or any) which is divorced from politics. It's absurd for Zuck to suggest that his business should be immune to political forces.

Politics is how we solve all problems between competing interests as a society.

I've been trying to find ways of asking the question of "what do you mean 'political'" and if someone were to ask for my 'elevator pitch', I'd find myself in agreement with your definition above, but something tells me there will be clashes against this definition, because it is either too limiting to be effectively weaponized as a thought-terminating rebuke, or too expansive to allow for a firm encapsulation and therefore jettisoning of targeted forms of 'unpleasing and disturbing information'[1] (take this statement as far as a pleasant and idle thought will allow, I am not accusing one side of this while condoning it from another, it's not even about who or whom, it's just a man thinking through his keyboard.)

Star Trek introduces a black female lead "Star Trek is getting political". (I fear I may have opened pandora's box with that one)

Colin Kaepernick kneels in protest of police violence "Keep politics out of sports".

Pop_Culture_Icon_number42 argues for an improvement in how society conducts itself in terms of previously_under_addressed_social_scenario_27 "This pop star is getting too political".

To me, politics is inherently and by the function of what we allow, just as you said: an embracing of the necessity to solve problems where there are competing interests. To take issue with that, and rebuke a point of order as "getting political" is, perhaps-and at least in my mind-an unwitting show of the rebuker's hand.

But at the same time, I think about shit way too much.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/39004-we-have-currently-a-b...

Yep.

Also it can be (not saying that's the case here) used as a way to exclude undesirable politics while keeping desirable politics in place.

For example the "don't bring politics into sports" that was bandied about during the kneeling controversy in the NFL a few years ago. The National Anthem is political. All of the "support the troops" events during games (paid for by the taxpayers!) is political.

Yes and no. There are lines that can be crossed and defending a line-crosser is political.

This isn’t really a new line of thinking for Zuck, he has had to defend boards stacked with far more right members than typical in the valley for a long time. Peter Theil comes to mind along with their news chief from Bribart.

I don't view this as laudable. The debate that's occurring is a principled one and remaining stoically indifferent isn't virtuous, it's contemptible.

Well that's due to the entryist take over of the republican party by far right - this is no long the party of Lincoln Esinhower or even Nixon.

What sensible business leaders should have down was to put a stop to this - and freeze out the ultra hard line rightist's as they are poisoning the well for them.

A bit like how in the 50's when the communists wanted to take over some large UK unions moderate Unions work with MI5

"a bit more" lol

See this link if you're wondering what "a bit more" looks like: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10

Last 24hrs top-performing pages in the US, for anyone who can't click the link.

1. Dan Bongino

2. Dan Bongino

3. Breitbart

4. Fox News

5. Robert Reich

6. NPR

7. Ben Shapiro

8. Dan Bongino

9. Mark Levin

10. Bernie Sanders

This is curated by https://twitter.com/kevinroose

I had to look up most of those names but if you're wondering, looking back a couple weeks it's usually 9/10 or 10/10 right-wing talk hosts/sources.

It appears FB is essentially a right-wing mouth piece, idk if that is a controversial opinion, but the data appears that way, I think.

That’s interesting, thank you.

I would go even further in this argument - it's the small, altough very loud minority of FB (or other IT company) employees, living in their Twitter feeds and causing outrage totally disproportional to their group size. The "missing snacks" example in the article illustrates it beautifully. I would argue that it actually concerns more employees than content policy issues.

The irony is just delicious. It's just like the problem that very small minority of folks on FB have been given a megaphone to spread lies and hate.

All FB has to do is tone down the engagement algorithms. Put up a bunch of invisible walls.

10 years ago the concern was filter bubbles. Now we want invisible walls?

That is a cop out from Facebook and any social media company if there was any. The algorithmic feed that drives more engagement drives their user base to be more extreme.

It is also hypocritical of Facebook employees who were quiet when worse atrocities were happening in other parts of the world where their platform is "the only source of truth" (read Myanmar / Philippines).

> The algorithmic feed that drives more engagement drives their user base to be more extreme.

Just to clarify: more extreme is not necessary more right or conservative.

Yes. And a platform whose userbase is already conservative will become more extreme in that direction.

Who are these people they "serve"? Surely you don't imply that Facebook is a user driven website? One look at how they handle UI changes tells you that any claims to "serve" the users is extremely hollow.

UX / look and feel is one of those things where a company cannot win; ANY change, especially redesigns, will cause friction with their customers.

Ask people what they want with the UI and you get either small pet peeves (but none of them statistically significant), but generally a "leave it as is" answer. Even though the current version may not tick all the boxes from the company's point of view - things like engagement, advertising opportunities, etc.

> Even though the current version may not tick all the boxes from the company's point of view

Sure, clearly the company is not primarily serving the users. So the question is, who are these people that Mark is invoking?

The observation by itself is dead right.

When employees complain about far-right "conservatives" using FB to do X or Y they are right too and when I say: compared to most FB (vocal) employees' World views, +90% of the World's population are capitalist Hitler supporters, I think I'm right too.

Politics aside, many Facebook employees come across as rather childish, incapable of taking care of themselves. The big complaint is about lack of snacks! Zuck has to scold them by asking rhetorically whether they joined the company for the free food. And one employee asks if they can go live on an island by themselves, apparently like Lord of the Flies.

Of course one may fairly ask whether Facebook's hiring process produced this result. The staff skews... young. As an outsider, I get the sense that Facebook is more like a college dorm than a workplace. No coincidence I guess that Facebook started in a college dorm.

> The big complaint is about lack of snacks!

Free food, including meals. If Facebook is anything like Google, some single people were literally using that for every meal and snack 5/7 days per week. It's tasty, nutritious food, and you don't have to prepare it or do dishes. Sure, an adult should be able to take care of this on their own, but this is a major perk, not just a box of granola bars on a shelf. It might cost them $100 per week (~$5,000 per year) to match their food intake via cooking at home. Much more if they start ordering a lot of take-out. That's a fair chunk of compensation they're not getting anymore. This absence is not at the top of my list of pandemic or employer complaints but I can see how it might be near the top of someone else's.

Never mind the fact that Facebook probably pays better than 80% of tech companies

Never mind the fact that tech salaries are already insane

Never mind the fact that there is a global pandemic and corresponding economic uncertainty

Never mind the fact that millions of people are out of work, can't afford to feed their families, and facing one of the biggest eviction crises of all time while being completely abandoned by the government

Never mind all that - where is my free food?

The Towel Debacle for Microsoft wasn't about towels. I doubt this is about food.

We fight proxy wars all the time because we can't seem to bring ourselves to say what's really bothering us. All these other minor problems accumulate to make the unspeakable thing intolerable.

From what I've seen, I don't think $5K per year is a big chunk of a Facebook engineer's compensation. In any case, the bigger issue is that this situation exposes how utterly dependent these engineers are on their employer, not just for money but for basic life functionality. Only a tiny number of companies in the world offer this level of "service" to employees. What happens if and when they no longer work at Facebook? The company has seemingly turned its employees into helpless children, or at least never forced them to grow up after leaving college. If "continue to live like you're in the dorm" is a "perk", maybe it shouldn't be.

> The big complaint is about lack of snacks!

I don't think there's anything unusual about talking about that in a company-wide Q&A. It's minor, but people will want to know how they should adjust their budgets and how long. This is a good platform for such a question since it's something that affects everyone in the office.

> It's minor, but

"A major sell to candidates is our office perks include free food"

"with work from home, we’ve lost a huge financial part of our package"

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...

Perhaps they don't know how much food costs, having never gone to the grocery store. ("How much does a gallon of milk cost" is the classic political gotcha question.) Or they don't know how to cook. Those are possibilities.

Yes, it does seem like a college dorm. Sometimes it's even intentional, as in the design of the MPK campus. A lot of the perks serve the same purpose as a college dorm: eliminate the need (or even desire) to go off campus, maximizing time-on-task for the organizational purpose. That's not entirely a bad thing, though it does grate a bit for older employees such as myself (for two more days) sometimes.

The "live on an island" thing is different. It sounds like a reference to the policies around WFH and changing locations, though I'd left the Q&A by that point so I can't be sure. That's actually a pretty complex topic, so I'd be a bit cautious about oversimplifying or taking out of context.

> It sounds like a reference to the policies around WFH and changing locations

Yes, but that was also behind the snack complaints.

According to the article, everyone got monetary bonuses, but it seems the problem wasn't the cost of the food, it was not having "hired help" to stock and cater the food for you.

"Living on an island" is an allusion to Randism.

Trust me, the vocal minority there are extremely sheltered, self centered and live in a weird unreality. The majority of employees who come from the real world aren't that bad but also tend to keep quiet.

I often think that people who spend too long at the top of maslow's hierarchy of needs just end up losing touch with reality.

I went on site for an interview with FB a few years ago. College atmosphere is exactly as I'd describe it. Free cafe for the kids, they were brewing beer in one corner of the office, they were keen to point out all the stuff they had available for just hanging out with the bros. If you want to work at FB, show up on a skate board, with beat headphones and a zip down hoodie. Don't show up looking like someone that works in an office.

If you want to talk about childish, should we talk about the sort of answer Zuckerberg gave. Atleast the guy there for the snacks was getting snacks until recently, I'm worried about the guys who think they joined facebook because:

>you’re here for some combination of reasons around the mission of the company, the impact that we can have in the world, trying to make sure that that’s as positive as possible

> Atleast the guy there for the snacks was getting snacks until recently

IMO destroying civil society for snacks is a worse reason than destroying civil society intentionally. The pettiness of the tradeoff makes evil people look good by comparison.

To be honest I wish Zuckerberg would say "We're not censoring political posts, and if you don't like it, --> there's the door. Who's leaving first?"

Facebook engineers may love to beat their chests about social justice, but when push comes to shove, they are not about to walk away from those gold plated salaries & stock grants. Most of them could leave FB and get another job paying somewhere in the ballpark of $200k (if not much more) within weeks, or a couple months. But no, 200k is not enough, they need 250k + equity + food etc. etc..

So to social justice oriented facebook employees sticking around facebook: spare us the performative gnashing of teeth. You know what facebook is, either admit the $$$ make it worth holding your nose, or put your money where your mouth is & go get a different job.

Maybe I’m out of the loop a little bit I feel that the argument framed as political activism is a deflection.

Post 5g causes sickness or other theories... These aren’t political at all, they are just factually incorrect.

Framing them as political is a mistake and it seems to have worked so well, even here on HN.

Employees were mad specifically because he wouldn't take down the president's post threatening a violent crackdown on rioting & looting. Is it your perception that the main objection of employees was to explicitly counterfactual claims? That's not what I got from TFA

Also TFA makes clear that facebook takes down tons of posts, that's the biggest complaint they get from users, so it's not true that they are leaving everything up. Respectfully: did you read TFA?

Using conspiracy theories, bunk science, and outright lies to influence the lower-awareness majority _is_ political action, and evidently it is currently one of the more effective strategies.

Some might. Google had an exodus of some dozen to two-dozen high-performing engineers in the past 2 years resulting from multiple controversial management decisions.

I don't expect FB to see an exodus more than sub-1% over topics like this, but the company can feel outsized impact if the sub-1% are 10x engineers... Or decide you can air any dirty internal laundry you want once they're no longer buying your silence and there's good dirt to share.

I doubt the people who take time out of their workdays for political activism are, by and large, the "10x engineers".

I can't imagine why. 10x engineers tend to either find a blend of their work / life balance or are so productive and organized that they have surplus time-in-day to burn.

I wish he'd say this for a different reason: we'll find out whether you're correct or not very quickly.

In a way, I also wish I could be this cynical, because I wouldn't have to think about the complexities of human motivation, and that would be a lot easier. But I don't think money and status is all there is. Which is exactly why these outcries are happening: people are negotiating as best they can to maximize all the things that make them happy and keep them motivated, like working in a context that keeps them right with themselves, and good for them. Until Zuckerberg actually says what you're saying, there's a chance they can be successful, so I don't blame them for trying.

But you know, if he actually came out and said this, we'd find out pretty quickly if money is all there is.

Totally agree–eliminate the rhetorical hiding places ("I work here but I object strongly...) and let people either be honest about the fact that the money is worth the compromise (i.e. stop performing outrage) or actually be outraged enough to do something (walk out & get another job).

Personally I would not work at Facebook precisely because I object to the negative impact I think it has on society. I'm not condemning employees for objecting, I'm rolling my eyes at them objecting loudly but seemingly avoiding the personal sacrifice of actually refusing to contribute to facebook and foregoing the pecuniary benefits of those contributions.

I also personally make compromises. I cannot always work at my "dream job" that's "mission driven" etc., and I'm honest with myself about that. We all make compromises, we all draw our own line somewhere.

(also I know some FB workers who have left due objections to FB policy so it's definitely wrong to say "none of them do that")

I would love to work at a company these days that cares more about building interesting products instead of being constantly bombarded by social justice and political activism issues.

Honestly, if Zuck pushed out the SJW types, I'd love to work there for half my current salary. He's showing solid leadership right now and just needs to go slightly further.

I think this actually made Zuck's leadership look solid. Of course it's a little naive to say "we aren't political", but he's probably just doing that because it's the calculated thing to say. Almost every other company says things like that, except for a few ideological ones in Silicon Valley.

I don't know how anyone takes these employees at FB seriously. They are complaining about the lack of free snacks? Anyone complaining about a 'lack of free snacks' is someone you should certainly ignore.

Free snacks, and their quality, is a complex signal. They're some of the first things to go as cash tightens up, and they're a decent rubric as to how much leadership actively gives a fuck about employees. Or they're a garnish on a pile of shit.

It does definitely depend on the goals regarding company/employee relations: is this a job for which I'm paid money, or is it supposed to be more than that? If the former, how're the salaries - actually? If the latter, are they actually putting in effort to deserve it?

Like proper code indentation. Yeah, you can just fix it yourself pretty easily, but it signals things.

If you read the article, they're complaining about the lack of free snacks because they're WORKING FROM HOME. To be honest, I suspect it's a joke question.

Ehh. I could see it either way. "I joke but also I'm serious".

Food is my second biggest expense (after ofc rent) - decent lunch is $15-$20 (more with delivery) in my area. For the summer I worked in MV, it was that for a mediocre lunch (nothing good nearby).

15 * 5 * 52 = $3,900. If the company covers it, it's pre-tax to me; if I cover it that's more like $7k out of my salary.

(Plus the time to wrangle colleagues and figure out where, transit time, etc)

Having food supplied? Actually of pretty substantial value, even if it's not on the level of, say, American health insurance.

(Plus, you know, I can buy a house if I don't spend $5 on coffee everyday!)

If leadership actively cares about employees maybe they should eliminate free snacks altogether. Obesity kills about 300K Americans every year. The last thing that highly-paid tech workers with sedentary jobs need is more food.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/192032

Facebook (at HQ and some if not all satellite offices) provide multiple meals per day. When evaluating offers, I've priced similar perks at equivalent to an additional ~$10k of pre-tax income.

If I had priced a $10k perk into my salary and no longer got it, I'd be disappointed in Zuckerberg's dismissiveness here.

If you were still making an easy six figures during a global pandemic and the only cut was (temporarily) 10k in perks, complaining would not be the right move.

It's an unacknowledged cut. If your employer suddenly reduced your paycheck by N%, you'd probably want an explanation to go with it, pandemic or not.

To take things one level higher, I wonder why they answered this question at all. Most likely it was done to add some levity to the meeting, but more cynically, I wonder if it was done to point out just how juvenile some of the concerns are.

lol, this reminds me of a meeting the department I was in at the time (tech support) had with the head of operations years ago. When she opened the floor for serious questions/comments, the first thing some jackass brought up was his disappointment in the lack of free tea in the break room. The look on her face was priceless.

Premise:

Diversity is good.

Diversity means diversity of ideas.

Ergo, you will disagree vehemently with people, and this is a good thing under the framework of diversity.

Do not confuse disagreeing with someone as that person being morally sub-human, and if you are able to do this your life will be more pleasant.

Disagreement is a good thing, it is society’s mechanism for decision making in complex circumstances.

"Diversity is good."

No.

Diversity has benefits and costs - it is neither good nor bad.

People, or groups of people in a democracy, need to decide what level of diversity they would like to pursue.

Personally, as someone who can live anywhere, I've chosen (and continue to choose) a very diverse place (the United States - specifically California).

I like living with people who invent jazz music and snowboarding and the Internet and I am willing to pay costs like some decreased degree of social cohesion and trust.

Other people, or groups, might have a different cost/benefit analysis and that is not wrong - nor is it wrong to pursue those aims democratically.

The lynchpin is that every four years, a handful of the most disagreeable people rile up the rest to place one of two bets out of many, and if anyone doesn't bet the exact same way as their riler, they might as well be betting for the other riler, which is an intolerable act.

This is how the USA votes, and it's hard for people to separate what amounts to a behavior they must abide to 25% of their adult lives from the remaining time.

This is how we maintain our two parties: the GOP, and the people who don't have much else in common besides their dislike of the GOP.

The orthodoxy of the downvotes has spoken louder than any comment, that I have voted, somehow, for the wrong riler.

We are become reddit.

> Do not confuse disagreeing with someone as that person being morally sub-human

If your disagreement with that person is about whether someone else is considered less of a human than they are (by dint of race, wealth, sexuality, whatever), it's probably ok to consider them morally bankrupt on that basis.

No, it's actually not, because people have different moral foundations, and many people value loyalty/authority/sanctity over care/fairness. It doesn't mean they don't care about care/fairness, it just means they don't make it their moral priority.

If you refuse to engage with these people and view them all as sub-human there's no path forward for society.

You can't build a functioning society that embraces people who reject the humanity of its other members. Or rather, you can build a society that way, but the moment that opinion is accepted you are on the road to terrible persecution of that out-group, whoever they are.

A pluralistic society can handle many different viewpoints, but it cannot give them equal value or acceptance.

If someone has "moral foundations" that cause them to think that, for example, a particular race of people is not worthy of life, I will refuse to engage with them in reasonable debate. There's no midpoint between nazis and non-nazis; the nazis are wrong and should be handled by force.

This may or may not be the case with ICE, the GOP, etc. but fundamentally there are some people who should not be engaged with in this way.

Abortion is a great example here. One side thinks their opponents want total control over women's reproductive systems while the other side thinks their opponents are fine killing babies as long as they haven't actually made it through the birth canal yet.

Very few people think they aren't the good guys in their own narratives, and what's moral isn't an obvious choice in a lot of situations.

Hey hey. You're opposing loyalty, authority and sanctity to fairness. This is already a caricature of ideological positions different from yours.

Most people you violently disagree with have probably a different view of fairness than you do, and think that your opinions and goals are plainly unfair, as much as you think the same about them.

I'm so baffled by this comment. It's saying that there's no path forward when refusing to engage with people/viewing people as subhuman, as an argument for the benefit of people who view others as subhuman! WTF?

A lot of the developing world are still deeply homophobic. Are all those people morally bankrupt and unworthy of a place in the hallowed gardens of equality?

Maybe a point of view is crafted through a life's worth of conditioning and experience. We seem comfortable accepting that fact when considering social conditioning over other issues, but when it comes to conservatism we draw the line - they are the evil others.

Unable to see how they are the sum of their life's experiences we draw up the lines, dig in our heels and choose our side - and in doing so force the other group to take a side.

I have a lot of family who have views which would terrify liberals, but I know these people are also not evil but just have had their own life circumstances shape their views.

Maybe people need to travel outside their comfort zones a little more...

> Are all those people morally bankrupt and unworthy of a place in the hallowed gardens of equality?

I would say that places in the "hallowed gardens of equality" are for those who believe in equality, not those who consider any set of other people as lesser.

> and in doing so force the other group to take a side.

No-one forces anyone to be racist, homophobic, etc.

> have had their own life circumstances shape their views.

That sounds like the "economic anxiety" excuse for racism.

> I have a lot of family who have views which would terrify liberals, but I know these people are also not evil but just have had their own life circumstances shape their views.

Like what? What life experiences have shaped their views to make them terrifying to liberals? I'm genuinely curious because the people most likely to have actual lived experiences to support "views which would terrify liberals" are generally liberal and live in cities while those who have "views which would terrify liberals" don't generally have very many relevant lived experiences to speak of.

Sure - but they can still participate in society. Why shouldn't they?

A klansman like Robert Byrd turned his life around. This is after Al Gore's father and he filibustered the civil rights act. Byrd went on to mentor Hillary Clinton, and I assume Al Gore's father was an influence on his son - the Vice President of the United States and the first lady, who went on to become a Senator from New York and then almost became President of the United States. You have a candidate right now who has a murky past when it comes to school segregation - as highlighted by his own running mate!

The funny thing is - the Facebook employees fighting with Zuckerberg most likely support all of these people politically, yet the people who espouse similar views today are suddenly irredeemable?

This idea that you can cancel the morally bankrupt out of existence is rooted in some kind of blind weakness. If people don't want to engage with them, that's fine, sit down and let the rest of us clean up. I'm not afraid of engaging with white supremacists, they always lose anyway. Their ideas are weak, dumb and not at all compelling, and the more we let them speak, the weaker their allure will be. History has already proved this. Facebook isn't magic - their ideas are still trash.

> I'm not afraid of engaging with white supremacists, they always lose anyway.

The current state of the USA would disagree with you.

> the more we let them speak, the weaker their allure will be.

Except, somehow, they keep getting elected.

then you just label anyone who disagrees with you as having those beliefs. and then you get to smugly consider them subhuman and ban them without having a single thing break your bubble

There’s no discussion to be had when you’re FOR equality and the other side is arguing against it. There’s equality and fairness. The rest is garbage. There’s no need to meet in between and compromise. If you compromise with shtty ideas you are gonna get sht on your shirt.

>There’s no discussion to be had when you’re FOR equality and the other side is arguing against it.

Kind of like how there's a subset of a certain political party that believes fetuses have the same right to life as infants.

Or how some people believe someone who comes from a statistically high crime demographic, has $120 in their checking account and face tattoos has the same right to own a gun as someone from a low crime demographic who can take a weekend class, pay $200 and ace an interview with the police chief?

My point is that it's not as simple as you are stating it is. Whichever side of an issue you are on the other side believes that they are right and you are wrong and that you are the oppressors. They have good logical reasons to reach this conclusion and if you peel back the logic you get to fundamentally incompatble differences of opinion.

What is a "statistically high crime demographic"? Men? It's men, right? Statistically speaking the vast majority of violent crime is committed by men [0].

[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[flagged]

People will disagree about the definition of equality.

Good advice is to spend a reasonable amount of time on defining precisely what is meant by equality. You will likely find you are arguing past each other because your life experience has given you a different definition than someone else.

This is more true over internet communication, because most human-human communication is non-verbal, and text compresses this communication to oblivion.

Isn’t it weird you wouldn’t talk about politics in most settings especially among people you aren’t close to, but it’s ok to spam your 200 friends with political articles?

What I find most surprising is that all that political spam on Facebook drives engagement so much. At this point I barely get on it and never interact with my timeline, because half of it is shitty ads and the rest repetitive politics, and my mental model of people has most of us being turned off by it. Apparently not, though I do wonder if Facebook is somehow oversampling on a particular kind of engagement.

Don't be surprised that your (and likeminded people's) experience may not be representative of the world or even the country's at large. Poll after poll shows that 40% of the USA still supports Donald Trump.

Remember the famous (mis)quote "How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him"

Whom are you referring to? I talk about politics with anyone who is interested in it. (Of course, it's also important not to talk about politics with anyone not interested in it, but that's another matter.)

Is it socially acceptable to spam people with political articles? I don’t think so. I mute people who do too much of that.

"Facebook had given its employees $1,000 bonuses and said it would give them all top marks on their first-half performance evaluations, no matter how they had actually performed."

Giving everyone high performance evaluations isn't a perk. It's a disservice.

It simply means, they get their bonuses, nothing more.

Okay, it reads like everyone's review says "Exceeds", or whatever the top mark is. That's not fair to those that are actually "Exceeding".

It's tough question. I mostly agree with you, because I was the one who was exceeding during COVID.

But some people objectively could not because of stress and family distractions and living conditions (eg no separate office room).

Socialists (who drive most SV companies) consider that an unfair disadvantage (like being a woman, or being black, or being gay), thus that unfairness need to be compensated.

It is similar to a compensation for parenting: only parents get paid parenting days, while childless people don't get it, and it may be considered unfair.

The employees seem to only focus on the bad, but there is heck of a lot of good FB is doing. It’s. controversial place to work for, and they should understand it.

Verifiably false things should not be allowed. The assumption that everyone has the capacity (time, expertise,.. ) to tell apart truth from lies is a very big assumption. Even if it were true, it would not come for free for the individual.

No one would argue that in a restaurant it is on if half of the foods are spoiled because we could tell them apart from the good ones if we examined then closely. Why the same is not true for our brains?

I don't like this framing of liberals trying to censor conservatives. That's not the root of the problem. The problem is that Facebook is full of misleading or outright false content (both right and left leaning) and it is polarizing America at an unbelievable pace. You could censor literally everything remotely conservative or liberal and it still wouldn't fix anything. The uncensored side would just radicalize even faster and the censored side would find some other platform to radicalize on.

I don't know how you fix this, but something needs to be done because civil discourse is just about dead and our society is ripping at the seams.

Fascist countries won't have to deal with this problem because they are intentionally polarized and there is a "correct" side to be taken by the social media companies.

There's a reason the phrase "The center cannot hold" exists.

It's for times like this.

https://archive.is/UFwAr

I think coverage of Facebook is often too US-heavy and it really misses the point by making it into a US partisan issue - this article mentions Trump but doesn't mention Ethiopia. Here's a Vice Article about how hate speech on Facebook is currently pushing Ethiopia toward a genocide just like it did in Myanmar a few years ago: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xg897a/hate-speech-on-fac...

I struggle with this issue. On the one hand, I think clear incitement to violence is a line that free speech shouldn't cross, so Facebook really should have deleted posts calling for some people to be burned more quickly.

On the other hand, the idea that Facebook is culpable here seems to take for granted a large chunk of Ethiopians who'll just do what they're told by Facebook posts, which seems to give very little credit to the Ethiopian people or the ability of their government to maintain order. In that sense, it feels prejudiced and patronizing, like arguing that Facebook needs to police its Ethiopian presence because Ethiopia can't police itself.

Perhaps the real issue is just that - you give people far too much credit. We're essentially animals.

I mean look around you. You could say "no we can't tax sugar, cigarettes, and alcohol, because that gives the people too little credit to make good healthy choices!" And yet 42% of Americans are obese. Anti-science and anti-vax culture is very relevant. People believe Bill Gates wants to track their every move, and yet they walk around with phones and are signed into facebook trading their photoshopped memes from Russian troll farms.

We give ourselves way too much credit.

I think the implication is more that Facebook massively under-moderates and is basically unable to moderate in vast parts of the world. I think you'd see equally disastrous results if they had barely any moderators who could speak English or knew American culture and current events.

IMO Facebook should be able to police its own platform, so if it has a large presence in Ethiopia then it needs to police that part of its platform (ideally using employees based in Ethiopia). If it feels it can't effectively police Ethiopian Facebook without amplifying hateful/violent messages then they shouldn't be operating there.

It makes sense to me that Facebook should attempt to follow the laws of the various countries in which it operates -- though obviously vague laws prohibiting "sedition" or "promoting unrest" make this hard.

But it seems quite difficult to navigate less codified cultural topics. For example, the problems in Ethiopia turn on old lines of ethnic division. It's tough for me to imagine that Facebook will somehow arrive at a way to manage a problem that's troubled Ethiopia for so long, even (especially?) if it uses local employees as moderators.

> I think clear incitement to violence is a line that free speech shouldn't cross

but either way, according to most folks on this forum, Facebook doesn't have to allow free speech

Yeah, they have been doing lot of shady things in other countries way before US criticism of it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

Read the controversial section. Even that is missing a lot and the citations are removed.

Facebook has been used for genocide, mass cultural appropriation, raising anti-ism sentiment, etc by military, government and terrorists.

They don't employ enough moderators likely intentionally in many regions. African continent has less than a 100.

hm this is interesting how they incorporate audio snippets into blog quotations

> Mark Zuckerberg has faced criticism that Facebook is bad for democracy.

> Employees want him to take a harder line against the Trump Administration.

They employees want to support democracy by taking a stand against the democratic chosen president. I have a hard time coming up with words to describe my disbelief. Guess it's time for companies to enforce "absolutely no politics at work" rules. And you can add religion and sexuality to the blacklist as well. Guess old days "professionalism" was not without reason.

20 year old me would utterly despise current me. I find it funny.

Talking about undemocratic ...

While the President himself may have been chosen democratically, there is a reasonable position one can hold that says his actions in office are not democratic. And THOSE are not democratically chosen. We don't have to vote as a group on every word or policy Trump wants to pass. We don't get to vote against him blocking access to relevant people required to finish a DoJ investigation.

So, if their objection was that Facebook should alter the results of the election, yes that would be crazy.

But thats not the perspective afaik. You're throwing out basically all the actual context just to post this fairly narrow and worthless sentence that misses what they are actually protesting.

How many lies or simply misleading information has come out of Trumps admin and by extension the news sites/commentators that are widely shared as fact on Facebook? It seems reasonable that people working on the platform aren't super stoked they are contributing to poor COVID responses and fake/deadly "cures" among the myriad of other pieces of misinformation spread across the platform which heavily leans towards Trump.

So...yeah I think you're appropriating what they are saying so you can say something entirely unrelated.

> While the President himself may have been chosen democratically

The President was chosen lawfully, in an outcome which sits in the space where the lawful process produces results at odds with democratic norms.

If I had to guess it's because facebook has a larger portion of older conservative folks than other social media platforms?

If you look at /r/politics on reddit you see the opposite problem (over-representation - nearly 100% - liberal news sources) which is probably because older conservatives don't use reddit?

It can't be healthy for entire social media platforms to be completely dominated by one party or the other.

With /r/politics you get HEAVILY downvoted if you voice anything conservative or even just defending someone conservative from unjust accusations.

So much so, that you can only post new comments every 10 minutes, while they keep on dogpiling you.

It's hard when people want liberal things like sources or data to back up "facts"

Even then, they only ever want one side to provide sources and even if you do, they often outright ignore it/say its not valid.

> If you look at /r/politics on reddit you see the opposite problem (over-representation - nearly 100% - liberal news sources)

Is this actually true? I get that there's usually one or two left-leaning sources on there, but more than half of the stories on /r/politics (the top 30 stories, as of 9/24 in my browser) are from centrist / conservative-leaning news sources.

The real problem seems to be that the overton window has shifted so far right that "liberal" in the US means "super-hyper-conservative, but a fraction less conservative than today's GOP talking points".

MSNBC, USA Today, Politico, Washington Post, Newsweek, NY Times and more are all on the front page of /r/politics right now, represent slightly more than half of the stories in the first 30 entries, and not a single one of those sources are remotely "liberal" in any way.

Trying to redefine the political landscape according to your niche views is really pointless. Obviously the conversation is being conducted with the understanding that the US left/right/center are the reference points. There's no more point to this comment than there would be to a libertarian saying that Facebook shares are all from "statist" news sources.

> Obviously the conversation is being conducted with the understanding that the US left/right/center are the reference points.

Right. And by US reference points, /r/politics stories news sources are generally centrist or right-leaning. The comments and commenters may not be, but the stories and sources definitely are.

Even by US standards, MSNBC, USA Today, Politico, Washington Post, Newsweek, NY Times are all centrist or right-leaning news sources. And all of those have stories on the front page of /r/politics right now.

Facebook is a global platform. Within the global comparison the us Overton window is positioned very much to the right. Merkels Conservative party is left of many Democrats.

Id say the Overton window has also moved to the right in the us over the last 20 years or so, openly racist and (not so) crypto-fascist attitudes weren’t so mainstream then - Facebook is probably not helping this development.

Let me put is this way - of the top 30 stories as of right now (24 Sep 20) on /r/politics, regardless of source:

- 20 are anti-Trump articles

- 6 are pro-Biden articles

- 1 is anti-Police

- 1 is anti-Barrett

- 2 are misc. politics (covid, etc.)

Compare to the most popular articles shared on facebook mentioned by GP and you can see /r/politics is the polar opposite of facebook.

Anti-Trump isn't synonymous with left wing, nor is being pro-biden

Pro-human, Pro-democracy, Pro-equality. Not anti-Trump but I can see how it might appear like that. :)

The most material difference between the two is that Reddit is based on user voting and Facebook is based on an opaque algorithm controlled by Facebook's executive board.

>Reddit is based on user voting

and heavy moderation

User voting makes sure one side wins and the other loses. Moderation decides which one.

Facebook's like system instead creates cliques of like-minded (heh) people.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24581099.

/r/politics used to be more balanced. Especially if you sorted by controversial. But reddit as a whole has become very unfriendly to conservative viewpoints and so it has driven the moderate conservatives either off the platform or into /r/conservative.

You can post the same comment on /r/politics and /r/conservative and one will be highly upvoted and one will be mercilessly downvoted.

But that is the system working as intended. The whole point of reddit is that each subreddit is a community of likeminded individuals. It was never really set up for debate of opposing viewpoints. One main way it differs from HN, which makes a huge difference, is that on HN you cannot downvote without some karma, and you can never downvote people who reply to you.

It would be cool if reddit added those as options for a subreddit moderator, actually.

You can see /r/conservative is more than a little active. Maybe the problem is that /r/politics moderators want reliable sources?

I mean, if you take a look, /r/conservative isn't exactly a bastion of lucid discussion. Case in point:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/iytx49/locati...

Implying that protesters are out there burning down houses (they aren't) and that the huge increase in size and number of forest fires lately isn't a result of climage change (it is).

The real problem isn't that liberals are over-represented on /r/politics, but that most people who identify as "conservative" on Reddit and elsewhere have gone so far-right or conspiracy-theory or troll-hard that conservative outlets lately tend to be mass-producing more propaganda, right-wing content, or misinformation. If you're an actual conservative who hasn't been sucked up into this psychopath right-wing bubble, it's difficult to actually find content that isn't pandering to those who have by posting deliberately misleading or outright false articles.

I feel bad for anyone who believes in legitimate conservatism, because their viewpoints and political party have been so completely co-opted by the fascist far-right and alt-right that there's not much else for them to do but vote dem or join the lunatic fringe.

This is simply not true, if you try to explain the reasoning behind any "unwanted" policy or idea, you get downvoted. It doesn't matter if you advocate for it or not; you simply get shot down for making the enemy look less like a monster.

The "lunatic fringe" applies equally to the other end of the spectrum, by the way.

That thread looks like reasonable discussion of an alternative viewpoint but, much like the Facebook employees, you dismiss them because you presume the superiority of your own beliefs.

> "In my work with Joel, I’ve found him to be ... very rigorous and principled in his thinking [and therefore I'm happy to work with him despite being a Republican]"

The set of people for whom this is true is shrinking by the day; remaining Republican requires an increasingly bizarre set of intellectual contortions. For example, you'd have to believe that appointing a Supreme Court justice right at the end of your term is completely unreasonable for Obama and perfectly reasonable for Trump.

And every democrat thought the opposite and changed their tune too.

No one really has any strong beliefs about when the president gets to choose a supreme court justice, these beliefs just meld to fit whatever situation will get them a supreme court justice who will represent all the beliefs they do feel strongly about.

One year vs 45 days. Tell me that's not different. This is the Republican's own claim and precedent.

Historically this is pretty standard, I think 28 times there has been a vacancy in the SCOTUS in an election year. It has (almost?) always followed the pattern of:

- when same party, nominate and confirm

- when not same party, nominate no confirm

We all really need to expand our historical perspectives on many issues instead of being short sighted politically.

> Historically this is pretty standard, I think 28 times there has been a vacancy in the SCOTUS in an election year. It has (almost?) always followed the pattern of:

Do you have a citation?

NYTimes says that there have been only 16 [1], and for the 9 of them since the civil war, there has been no such unified-appoint/divided-no-appoint "tradition" [2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/19/us/politics/s...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/09/24/mcconnells-...

Supreme Court nominations: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/nominations/SupremeCourtN...

I suspect this is very much one of the major problems facing the US populus today.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24577397.

The Republicans, being politicians, lied about their motives in 2015 by reflex. Nobody was ever fooled by what they said - what they believe, as evidenced by their actions, is the best option is for them to choose who is on the court. That doesn't require any intellectual contortions to understand or support for Republican voters.

It isn't like the Democrats would behave much differently. There is no way Trump would have gotten any Supreme Court appointments with a Democrat Senate had they got a controlling vote in 2018 and a vacancy arisen. Any candidate would have been declared a raping bigot and the investigations would stretch out until around 3 days after a Biden inauguration. Incidentally, that was probably the strategic plan behind the Kavenaugh business; if they'd delayed the process until after the November election there was a real chance he could have been entirely borked.

It is routine politics. Distasteful, naked self interest, low on scruples. But nothing special to the Republican party.

Yes, the Democrats would absolutely not be so nakedly malevolent. Is this not overwhelmingly apparent?

You can go down that road forever though. There are plenty of intellectual contortions on the left. It's a question of choosing which ones are worse. I'm not a US citizen but if I were I'd be voting Republican because there's cynical opportunism, which is bad, and then there's open and hateful daily rhetoric against white men, which to me is worse. Pick your poison.

There is absolutely no meaningful equivalence on this axis between the American right and left. Your projection about white men is totally incoherent, laughable.

Interesting how they reiterate over and over how right-wing media proliferates on the platform but imply that centrist/liberal propaganda does not. Is there evidence of this?

Article about it, with some data backing it up:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/how-facebook-became-...

They censor anti-racists:

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

AFAIK their new News tab has far-right publications like Breitbart, but no leftist publications.

"White men are so fragile," she fired off, "

Not everyone would see that as anti-racism

Please don't use a term like "anti-racist" for someone who says "Whites are $NegativeAdjective."

It's really disingenuous rhetoric.

Looks like that "anti-racist" is upset that she can't post racist and sexist things about white men. Not exactly the example I'd give to show that FB is censoring liberals.

I'm not sure where they get their data but this list is usually like %70 conservative media figures. https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10

why the downvotes for asking this question?

Yes, there is at least some anecdotal evidence: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/how-mace...

> Earlier in the year, some in Veles experimented with left-leaning or pro–Bernie Sanders content, but nothing performed as well on Facebook as Trump content.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/facebook-... https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/

Yes: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10

US conservative content consistently dominates these rankings. Facebook is now primarily a US right-wing/conservative propaganda platform.

For what it is worth, it’s been shown that the most popular and most shared posts for years have been basically 80% extreme conservative ones. See here: https://twitter.com/facebookstop10?s=21

That said, this is no defense of left wing propaganda. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, just that by the numbers Facebook is mostly right wing users and that extreme right wing material is more popular.

Interestingly the popular right-wing material tends to be non-party related. Probably because sharing extreme right viewpoints on a generally conservative site is how you get clicks. It’s profitable, even if your organization has no horse in the race.

> by the numbers Facebook is mostly right wing users and that extreme right wing material is more popular.

Is that the case, or is it just that the extreme right wing posts get more traction than other posts. Like, are the extreme right wing posts more popular than all other posts combined, or are they getting e.g. on average 10 likes where other posts only get 7?

The source on Twitter seems to only look at pages (i.e. curated content), not what people share. Since they're doing it manually according to the bio, the sample must be pretty small.

Zuckerberg has the power and is being played like a violin by Trump.

And Trump is played by Putin, and Putin is played by green aliens.

Zuckerberg is the real kingmaker here or he could be.

Facebook is worse than you think. These abstract 'cancel culture' discussions are ignoring Facebook's substantial body count, role in algorithmically pushing people to hate groups for the sake of engagement, and disrupting attempts to hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable.

https://newrepublic.com/article/147486/facebook-genocide-pro...

https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/nation-world/zu...

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/09/debunked-antifa-wildfire-...

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xg897a/hate-speech-on-fac...

https://www.law360.com/articles/1305778/facebook-says-gambia...

https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in...

I will never understand the extreme intellectual fragility of cancel culture.

A lot of kids must have grown up never facing and learning to to deal with disagreement or what is it that have created such a thin skinned generation of seemingly well educated people?

I just finished reading "The Coddling of the American Mind", and it goes into the subject pretty well. A lot of it stems from parents not letting their kids be independent, so they never learn to deal with disagreements from dealing with other kids, then colleges cave to whatever demands they have because they just want to collect tuition money.

An article from four days ago: How Boomer Parenting Fueled Millennial Burnout -- https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/09/anne-hele...

The initial bit of the interview in the article:

> Anne Helen Petersen: There are two major factors. The first is conceiving of children as mini-adults—trying to cultivate behaviors, postures, and skills that are associated with adults, like being able to carry on conversations with adults or advocating for themselves when they feel something is unfair. I think we often admire that sort of precociousness without understanding what’s lost when you cultivate that in a child. The other component is thinking of childhood as a means to an end, and that end is getting into a good college. So instead of viewing childhood as simply childhood, parents are thinking, How can these various experiences—everything from playdates to piano lessons—lead to this larger résumé-building path to college?

> When childhood is treated that way, it can eliminate space for the formation of personality, independence, or confidence. Anything not oriented toward that goal of college—things like hobbies—gets lost. One of the saddest things I heard when talking to many Millennials is that when they reach a point of exhaustion with work, lift their head up, and look around them, they're like, What else is there? Do I have a personality? Do I know what I like? There's no there there, other than their ability to work, and I think that's really difficult.

I heard from a retired teacher that the change he saw over time in young people was somewhat due to they grew up in smaller families with 0-1 siblings, and didn't have to share rooms, toys, etc.

Like that time a professional athlete was blacklisted from his league for kneeling silently during the national anthem? Is that the cancel culture you're talking about?

I talk about all forms of cancel culture and don't care which side of the political ail it comes from.

Judith Butler --

> Interviewer: You weren't a signatory to the open letter on “cancel culture” in Harper’s this summer, but did its arguments resonate with you?

> JB: I have mixed feelings about that letter. On the one hand, I am an educator and writer and believe in slow and thoughtful debate. I learn from being confronted and challenged, and I accept that I have made some significant errors in my public life. If someone then said I should not be read or listened to as a result of those errors, well, I would object internally, since I don't think any mistake a person made can, or should, summarise that person. We live in time; we err, sometimes seriously; and if we are lucky, we change precisely because of interactions that let us see things differently.

> JB: On the other hand, some of those signatories were taking aim at Black Lives Matter as if the loud and public opposition to racism were itself uncivilised behaviour. Some of them have opposed legal rights for Palestine. Others have [allegedly] committed sexual harassment. And yet others do not wish to be challenged on their racism. Democracy requires a good challenge, and it does not always arrive in soft tones. So I am not in favour of neutralising the strong political demands for justice on the part of subjugated people. When one has not been heard for decades, the cry for justice is bound to be loud.

A lot of kids have grown up with "disagreement". The leading edge of this is trans people; if you're trans you'll find that basically everyone "disagrees" with that, sometimes to the point of violence. I think people are very used to dealing with that kind of "disagreement". What they would like is for it not to be based on prejudice, wrong assumptions, and cruelty, and to be able to get on with their lives without having to run into "disagreement" at every turn.

Given that there aren't "a lot" of transpeople I am not sure I understand your point is, care to elaborate?

> A lot of kids must have grown up never facing and learning to to deal with disagreement

You mean the "anti-maskers" who throw a fit for wearing a face covering for 30min when they have to go to the supermarket?

No because there’s no desire to build or maintain a relationship with the person. You just emotionally reduce them an NPC and do damage control until they are gone. Pretty much how social media works.

There are plenty of "pro-maskers" who have the same meltdowns. Videos are replete online. It's all just a symptom of a culture that can't handle treating each other like human beings. Like everything is an anonymous forum online.

Yeah, the way people like JK Rowling have been hounded for not agreeing on every point with some people is very depressing to see, considering that she has been quite supportive in the past of the very groups that are hounding her.

Mob like behaviour to hound someone for their beliefs just reeks of illiberalism.

Do you think it would be "illiberal" to hound someone for believing that white people are inherently superior to black people?

To keep things in context, JK Rowling has stated that she believes that biologically male people are inherently a danger to biologically female people.

This is fundamentally the paradox of tolerance: is it intolerant to be hostile to intolerant beliefs?

JK Rowling's essay explaining her stances on trans people:

> ... I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.

> When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.

https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-...

She has changed a lot since writing Harry Potter. It's obvious that she no longer believes in supporting marginalised groups or telling people that it's OK to be who you want to be. Her recent work is extremely political and designed to further marginalise people who are already marginalised - she's literally just had a book published that's about a serial killer who dresses as a woman to approach and attack other women, which isn't even slightly veiled as an attack on the trans community.

If that's how she thinks now then she has every right to be like that, but everyone else has the right to point out she's being an asshole.

As always, there's an XKCD for this - https://xkcd.com/1357/

He is Fucked if Biden wins - and I suspect the dual stock structure used to maintain control might get looked at by the SEC.

The Board need to tell him

" Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!"

And then he'll appoint Peter Thiel as his successor.

As an outsider (from a different continent), it doesn't seem at all likely that there is a chance for Biden winning.

It probably looks the same from where Zuck is sitting.

We might, of course, both be wrong :)

I think that’s a take without merit. It’s certainly not clear-cut.

Here’s The Economist and FiveThirtyEight both saying that they favor Biden to win (at the time of my posting this):

https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/

Polls currently favor him to win.

My money is on Biden receiving the most votes in the popular vote, but Trump still being in power next year, and a huge amount of litigation and riots in the meantime.

(Not sure why this got downvoted; Clinton won the popular vote last time, I see no reason that won't happen again?)

FWIW here's my take:

- No one voting for Hillary in 2016 is voting for Trump in 2020

- People voting for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein in 2016 are either not voting or voting for Biden in 2020

- Democrats who didn't vote in 2016 out of protest for Bernie Sanders not getting the nomination are either not voting again or they're voting for Biden in 2020

- People who voted for Trump in 2016 fall into three camps: they're either voting for Trump in 2020, voting for Biden in 2020, or not voting at all.

All in all it looks like Biden is going to get more votes than Hillary did in 2016 and Trump is going to get fewer votes than he did in 2016. Trump's incredible campaign gaffe in Minnesota has cost him that swing state and is swinging the rest of the swing states of the U.S. Midwest, which is where I live, to Biden.

Bottom line - Biden's path to the White House appears to be less shaky than Trump's path to the White House. However, Trump has made comments indicating that he's willing to make this election cycle very ugly and we may be looking at our first non-peaceful transition of power in American history.

I'm no political science expert or anything, that's just how things appear to me.

It's pretty wild to see the framing here. Employees want him to take a harder line? How many? His user base wants him to do the opposite? Do they? Mark is a centrist! Wow! That's quite a revelation!

>At another company, the CEO might have ignored such a question from his workforce or declined to take it at all.

A lesser CEO might have balked at the challenge! But our illustrious hero steeled himself for the task.

>With tens of thousands of employees and more than 3 billion constituents worldwide

Constituents? Why are we using euphamistic language? Is it because constituents sounds nice and fluffy whereas "User" would fit in a sentence "Donald Trump used facebook to threaten to shoot people, Facebook's CEO decided that this was an appropriate use of Facebook"

Sorry, as the article rightly points out, I'm biased, I oppose threats of violence. I'll leave true judgement to the enlightened centrists.

Whatever you think of the opinion of some of the employees regarding FB's stance towards politics, they're just never going to get their way without a union. It's exactly right that FB is a monarchy and what we see here are akin to the political challenges you'd read about in a monarchy. The small collective actions seem to be a good step in that direction but still much, much smaller than you'd need to form a union. We've seen recent unionization efforts in professional occupations that are shrinking - media & academia mainly. But I'm not sure political mishandling or ethical concerns about data are enough to overcome the fact that tech is growing and paying good wages. People need some self-interest at stake before they make the leap to something risky like that so we'll probably keep seeing this sort of employee flailing, be it leaks or small group actions or what have you.

Unions are absolutely detrimental to the society. Thank god we'll never have one for Software Engineers.

Great short explanation from Milton Friedman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzYgiOC9cj4

Yea Europe is a workers hell hole because of this. /S

He's largely taking examples from public-sector unions, which have particularly problematic legal framework in the US.

Private unions can be essentialy seen as corporations, very much like any other firm, that sell labor. Such unions can in principle specialize, compete and offer unique advantages. Again – just like any other market firm. It's just that the US law makes that hard by setting them up for a narrow antagonistic role of fighting with labor management for goodies.

Do you support child labor laws, weekends off, and reasonable working hours? Because if you do, I got news for you...

God, how dare workers collectively demand a safe working environment!

This aligns with how I have always seen Facebook, in contrast to Google for example.

In their business plan Google (now Alphabet) favors a "greater good" for society rather than purely revenue optimization, whereas Facebook centers on the revenue and does not shy away morally doubtful decisions (like selling user data without regard for their anonymity, which Google avoids by restricting sensitive access to closed-loop algorithms).

And that makes sense in that Google historically (and still now) favors attracting talents and great minds (who lean leftwards) to work in its teams, to build the best technology, whereas Facebook tries to focus on its market, and how to please users (quite 50/50 politically) as well as business partners (maybe rather revenue-focused guys than socially responsible guys).

Both approaches make sense, but I do prefer the Google approach.

> In their business plan Google (now Alphabet) favors a "greater good" for society rather than purely revenue optimization

What dream world are you living in and also where do you get this from? Google, like countless other companies in tech, is a for-profit company, that optimizes for revenue and revenue only. If they are doing anything for the "greater good", it's because it'll eventually drive up their revenue.

If they truly wanted to do something for the greater good, they'd turn Google/Alphabet into a non-profit. But alas, they are not.

I have no insight about what the parent comment said but Google at one point in the past did quit the Chinese market on principles, the success of their compatriots like Apple which were more flexible with their principles does show the opportunity they left.

There are several ways to build a business plan to make profit, and Google chose the one where they attract and retain an elite scientific and engineering staff in order to build awesome products, and so they respect the ideological lining of these staffs.

Facebook insists more, in a more conventional way for sure, on marketing and business negotiations.

Both approaches "increase revenue", of course, however not the same way, not with the same timeline (one of them is more long-term than the other), and, last but not least, not with the same heartburn when I read about it.

PS: greater good is not opposed to profit. Your physician gets your money to care for your health. He chose this job rather than, say, the military.

>In their business plan Google (now Alphabet) favors a "greater good" for society rather than purely revenue optimization

I did not expect such display of naivety on HN of all places.

Google stopped several projects it had collaborating with Defense, retracted from the Chinese market, stopped mining Gmail data... all of that illustrate my point.

So, it is a point of view supported by evidence, not "naivety".

As I said, I am not personifying these companies, just stressing the leverage of different mechanisms as business plans, and the one favored by Google is to attract and retain its elite staff, and to do so they have to behave.

> like selling user data without regard for their anonymity, which Google avoids by restricting sensitive access to closed-loop algorithms

Where can we find evidence that this is true in both cases?

I certainly see the differences between how G and FB presents themselves to the world. But I'm not sure that deepdown how they paint themselves actually make material differences in how, as major tech companies at center of contemporary society, they operate, or what drives their leadership (ie. profit).

> In their business plan Google (now Alphabet) favors a "greater good" for society rather than purely revenue optimization

No, they're not.

They just have better PR. They're both for profit companies with their share of controversies, but Google just has better PR.

PR is different from what the employees see from within.

Moreover, Google supported its "responsible" positions by carbon-neutral engagement, retracting from Chinese market, stopping mining email data, and more. I don't really understand why you would describe this as PR, if so then every decision is PR, and in this case "good PR" would amount to "good decisions" and I'm fine with that but not with the pejorative stench of the word PR (and because for most people it does not mean "decision").

Personifying moral decisions is the wrong approach nine times out of ten.

Incentives and structures are more important than the character of the people or business plans. Neither company (nor any big public company) chooses principles when it would lose them large sums of money.

Both Google and Facebook sell adds but they do it differently. Facebook is in business where the gravity constantly pulls towards the type of decisions that Facebook does. Sure, Zuck could do better decisions, but even if he would he has only narrow options.

That's why you need government policies that alter the incentives.

I am not really personifying it besides the introductory line:

I am explaining that the mechanism is that Google cares foremost about attracting and retaining a somewhat socially and ecologically responsible (one could say as well leftwards as a synonym) staff.

The fact that elite scientists and engineers are leaning to the left is a demographics fact, not some opinion from me. And it can even been explained by how the education system endows its pupils with a set of values, meant to make them better citizens i.e. more responsible, and finally that means more on the left.

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