Just received an extraordinary email from Expensify CEO | Hacker News Reader

Just received an extraordinary email from Expensify CEO

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56 pointsBerislavLopac35 comments

I am not sure how can he send this email as company CEO. You can have your personal opinion and can share them from your personal email address/social networking site. But expressing his political opinion from official email/business is plain wrong.

I think this company is going to be in lot of trouble for forcing thier view on all of their customers and dropping emails to their offical mailboxes

Am I missing something?!

Edit:

For people who are down voting without an explanation showing the immaturity level. I work for X company, customer of Expensify, received this email. This is total invasion of privacy. Neither I belong to US nor care about US politics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Sauce for the goose (large corporations) is sauce for the gander (SMEs).

Even with my relatively restricted [0] views on free speech, I don’t see why a company CEO should be banned from expressing political views through their company.

[0] Despite me being very pro free-speech by U.K. standards, the responses I get here demonstrate that I’m still a long way from the degree of free speech that American culture embodies.

I wouldn't be surprised if this email breaches EU GDPR laws in some form.

I would be surprised if it did violate GDPR. Which bit of your personal information was acquired, traded, or otherwise disclosed improperly?

Wondering if you’d say the same way if google / facebook sent out similar message as they too have your email.

The trouble with GDPR is that it's legalese, but there's good reason to believe that this email breaches UK, and likely EU law, and a case could be made in court, probably article 21: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-21-gdpr/

In the UK: https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/be-data-aware/political...

"You have an absolute right under the Data Protection Act to object to marketing from any organisation and the processing of your information for direct purposes. However, a candidate, political party or referendum campaigner does have a right to send a Freepost mailing, as mentioned above."

And under GDPR it's all about consent: https://www.superoffice.com/blog/gdpr-marketing/

"Data permission is about how you manage email opt-ins –people who request to receive promotional material from you. You can’t assume that they want to be contacted. In the future, they need to express consent in a ‘freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous’ way, which is reinforced by a ‘clear affirmative action’."

Specifically, nothing in Expensify's EULA or settings allows me to opt out of the CEO's political views.

Companies are immortal (*so long as they don't get themselves killed or eaten), massively wealthy juggernauts that dominate this planet.

How companies orient themselves politically is extremely important. How they choose to align themselves with the other happenings & governings of the world is one of the most defining ways the world is shaped.

I feel like CEOs probably SHOULD express political views. They should be subject to scrutiny, should have the authority of their wealth & power made visible, and reciprocally, be questioned.

He expects that a Trump second term and GOP control of government will be an existential threat to his company and the country. Sadly this is a well substantiated prediction.

Luckily in the US we have the first amendment to ensures that expressing your opinion in public like this is never “plain wrong”. There may always be negative consequences depending the the reception, but it’s never illegal.

> You can have your personal opinion and can share them from your personal email address/social networking site. But expressing his political opinion from official email/business is plain wrong.

I'm not sure how I feel about this Expensify situation. I don't immediately see that there is a line that was crossed, that it was "plain wrong". It seems convenient, perhaps, to insist on moral silence from the world, but I'm not sure that this (imo absolutely tiny as can be) inconvenience is wrong, or something we shouldn't do? Why do you think it is?

You ask "Am I missing something?!" but I have taken a big strong bold position of denial, of refusal, & I don't understand what or why you feel that way? Especially so strongly?

> I think this company is going to be in lot of trouble for forcing thier view on all of their customers and dropping emails to their offical mailboxes

Oh I hope some customers try to react a ruckus. Some people are going to be loud, going to be obnoxious, going to trumpet loudly that they demand their safe, neutral spaces.

Alas, those people live on planet earth, with other people, and short of going off into the woods, I don't think they should nor will get the emotional isolation they seem to be demanding of the world from it. They have been thrown into the world, & they have choices about what kind of person they want to be as they meet the world.

I don't think this is "forcing their views". This is sharing, this is communication. It's a human activity. It's why the tribes of humanity rose above the animals, because we shared, because we communicated, because we created sense & values where there were none. This is modest, this is reasonable. This is small.

> This is total invasion of privacy.

It absolutely is not in any way at all an invasion of privacy. You have your private world to yourself still. That you have had to glimpse some of the real world is a different matter.

Yikes. No matter what your opinion on his opinion, the CEO of a financial company sending an email like this looks bad. Whatever happened to the concept of trying to keep politics and business separate? Is every company going to have to publicly declare their political affiliation now?

Not to mention that insisting that someone vote for your candidate or else is almost by definition anti-democratic.

Politics and business aren't separate, or else industry lobbyists wouldn't be a thing.

The link has nothing to do with industry lobbying.

Lobbying is, literally, representing the interests of your group to politicians in order to get your concerns addressed by the government. When the group is one or more businesses, we call it industry lobbying.

This is representing the interests of a business to the electorate, in order to get their concerns addressed. Since the electorate is the appropriate governmental body in charge of selecting a new President, this is precisely industry lobbying.

It's public lobbying. Public lobbying by companies is less common than lobbying aimed at legislators, but it does happen; see Lyft's recent Prop 22 messaging, for instance.

If you actually read the email there is no “or else” or any other implied threat in there. So it’s rather disingenuous to add the implication when you simply don’t agree that the current political regime of Trumpism is steadily devolving the US into theocratic totalitarianism and a possible civil war. Given a plot to kidnap a Governor and a refusal to agree to a peaceful transfer of power, one must be in deep denial to not see the justification for this warning.

This comment is really bizarre and I’m not sure how to respond. I’ll just point out that the plot to kidnap the governor had more ties to the anarchist left than to Trump.

Cite your sources, please.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/21/viral-imag...

A video clip shows another suspect, Brandon Caserta, standing in front of an anarchist flag saying Trump is a "tyrant.”

The right wing media seems to want to associate the actions with the Left or BLM, which seems like a reach. But I don’t see how someone calling Trump a tyrant can possibly be associated with Trump himself.

You are citing a source in support of this statement:

"I’ll just point out that the plot to kidnap the governor had more ties to the anarchist left than to Trump."

and your source does not back that up, and now you are saying "seems like a reach" about the subject of your own statement.

- One member of the group attended a BLM rally.

- Anarchism is traditionally associated with the left (broadly, that is, not the Democratic (big D) left) and one of the members called Trump a tyrant with an anarchist flag in the background.

Trump can't simultaneously be an anarchist and a tyrant. That makes no sense.

I also remind you that I merely said "there is more evidence" than "it is directly connected."

From your source:

Boogaloo movement more likely, experts say

Cooter, who recently dug into this issue on Twitter, told us she’s seen "zero evidence that (the suspects) are antifa."

She speculated that some people are conflating anarchy and antifa to try to divert attention away from the suspects’ militia connections.

The plot to kidnap the governor was made by people that are associated with the far right. How in the world is that closer to anarchist left than to Trump?

The Wolverine Watchmen are a far right militia group; they are anti-govt anarchists. Their dog whistles are the Confederacy, Original-13, etc.; members are known to parrot QAnon.

Still unclear to me how that makes them associated with Trump, especially when one of their members explicitly says Trump is a tyrant.

Imagine a far left group did the same thing and also called Obama a tyrant. Is Obama responsible for them? I don't think so.

I never said anything about Trump.

Just want to point out the diversion tactics used here. This response throws a tangential, obscure point, while avoiding addressing the central topic that Trump incites and encourages violence from his podium, (“lock her up”, standby to white supremacists etc etc) thereby destabilizing the country where businesses could thrive.

What?

The comment I replied to is suggesting Trump is a theocratic authoritarian. We had this same rhetoric four years ago. It's clearly absurd.

I don't like Trump, didn't vote for him, and won't be voting for him, but this constant over-reactive nonsense is really unhelpful. Biden is a weak candidate, perhaps the weakest in decades. Everyone that doesn't vote for him isn't some kind of right wing lunatic fringe figure intent on destroying democracy.

> Whatever happened to the concept of trying to keep politics and business separate?

Er, what lead you to believe that was a thing?! Who, precisely, did you think was paying all those Washington (and Brussels, and so on) lobbyists?

Why is this thread flagged? I was looking for discussion on the topic in the first page.

Corporations lobby for their own interests all the time. It's unusual that Expensify is going for a Presidential election rather than specific legislation, but these are unusual times.

Narcissism dressed up as virtue.

Seems like the CEO of this company decided that trying to avert a threat to democracy was worth the damage it might cause. It's reasonable to disagree with that - it's a difficult judgement call. But, people seem to be caught up in pointing out why a CEO wouldn't normally want to send this kind of email, not focusing on the more interesting point which is whether or not the threat from Trump justifies this kind of breaking of norms. In a way, breaking those norms is a feature, not a bug - it highlights how seriously he's taking this message that he would risk damage to his company to deliver it.

One can easily state the opposite and claim that voting against Biden would make sure that an era of massive corruption can come to an end. So what‘s the point of having this email posted here? I don’t find such articles little helpful.

> So what‘s the point of having this email posted here? I don’t find such articles little helpful.

Expensify is a startup, the CEO is sending out spam to users of the product

I’m sure both those topics are valid for HN

What do think this does for their business?

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