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Comment by gortok | Hacker News Reader

Having listened to the book on Audible, I'm both shocked at the behavior of the executive team, and not surprised all at the same time. What bothers me about all of this is what it says about us. It says we're willing to give rich and powerful people a pass just because they make overtures towards something we care about.

We wouldn't give our children a pass like this, nor would we teach our children to act this way, but we're perfectly willing to allow fully grown adults to act like this.

Here's just one example, there are plenty more:

Cheryl Sandberg inviting the author of the book to sleep in her bed next to her on the company jet, and the petulent and vindictive behavior when the author said 'no'.

Everyone in the orbit of the executive team knew about this behavior, and everyone gave it a pass, even going so far as to defend it and to protect Cheryl. This behavior should be universally deplored, and yet is not.

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What it would be terrific is that people that have access to Sheryl Sandberg in public repeteadly ask her: "Do you still invite your employees to sleep on your private jet's bed?" as reminder about how fucked up her mind and demands are.

Same should be applied to the other nasty members of Zuck's inner past/present circle.

My inner guts tell me that all these freaks just try out these out of place demands to see if people without their money and power would actually knee and say "yes" to every request that comes out of their mouth.

By allowing powerful adults to act this way, we are in a sense teaching our children to act this way too.

Getting rich has been the American dream for a very long time. Unfortunately, many Americans only pretend to care that it matters how you get rich.

America doesn't own greed. Hardly.

But like the movie American Psycho the American presentation of greed is starkly in your face ... it's something horrifying to see

This right here, this is it. You've nailed the reason I stopped caring about what Trump is destroying. Yes, yes he's destroying gestures wildly at everything -- but god dammit we need to destroy a lot of this stuff. We need to rebuild institutions that have failed us, from your local DMV and/or public school all the way up to Congress, the Supreme Court, the Executive.

All of it has been so thoroughly corrupted that it needs to be destroyed and recreated.

Yes, once the orderly destroying is done, the sensible people can step in and recreate these institutions from scratch while everyone else waits patiently.

Or, everything just gets way worse, for almost everyone.

Well absolutely. Half the times we're tough on kids is in hopes they don't permanently turn into adults their behavior reminds of

And as kids learning from adults (although the subject matter is different) is exemplified in To Kill a Mockingbird.

As of today I am periodically embarrassed to be an American. Periodic in the sense that every once in a while the shameless behavior of elites feels like I ok'd in the presence of foreigners. Today's climate reminds that in our society i guess as always the suck-ups, butt kisserers, and hustle at all costs is alive and well in the top 10% of society.

Relatedly, this is ultimately why European courts went they way of the dodo. Moody kings, palace intrigue, the maneuvering for kinship to power, the gossip, the scandals whilst spending stupid money so aggravated people we quit.

I seriously dislike this current environment. And I can report not everybody is that way. They're still a few classy lads and ladies out there... but gosh the players are no longer afraid of sunlight at the same time

> Relatedly, this is ultimately why European courts went they way of the dodo. Moody kings, palace intrigue, the maneuvering for kinship to power, the gossip, the scandals whilst spending stupid money so aggravated people we quit.

European courts went the way of the dodo because the insane material affluence unlocked by industrialization definitely swayed the balance in favor of the merchant class over nobility. The average person under monarchy had absolutely no exposure to palace intrigue & gossip.

You make a good point; I agree.

The job of execs/middle managers seems to often be dual parenting: 1) coordinate the capable well-parented employees below them, and 2) pander to the usefully myopic spoiled brats above.

I would personally met the most spoiled brats dealing with big tech employees.

If this were true and you were their manager you would not have to deal with it. You could coach or remove them.

I don't think I get to remove employees for being from privileged families and having unrealistic expectations.

That chapter struck me as paranoia and hit piece.

What really happens there, if you ignore the author’s spin on it and concentrate on the facts is Sheryl is repeatedly asking her pregnant employee to please come stay in the big bed in the private jet and rest.

Then author has good points, such as Sheryl not taking into account she’s expecting ready deliverables. But she also spins it as if something sexual might happen there, or that Sheryl saying “you should have slept in the bed” in the end of the flight is a mafioso threat - and literally suggesting that Sheryl stopped trusting her because she didn’t take that offer.

(Worked at Meta for many years, not directly with Sheryl, and I am generally a fan of her, I think the book distorts at multiple times the messages she said)

HN guidelines say: Assume good faith. We should apply it to Sheryl here as well.

In Europe several of my acquaintances shared a bed with their professors/superior for various non-sexual reasons. It’s also a cultural thing.

definitely not a cultural thing in United States.

< In Europe...cultural thing.

Go on, which culture is that? Most "cultures" in Europe I know of it would be a breach of many stated and unstated rules and norms (Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, and Belgium).

Example Finland. Could you end up in a nude Sauna with your superior? Yes, especially if it is same sex.

Example Germany. Which law would be broken? Internal compliance rules, yes, that would be often the case.

> Example Finland

Example of a very different behavior than the claim above?

> Which law would be broken?

What is that supposed to mean? e.g. eating dogs or cats would be an even more significant taboo and its not even explicitly illegal in quite a few countries

Coming from a European, this is definitely not normal.

I would examine why your acquaintances are normalizing such creepy behaviour.

I agree it’s awkward. But I don’t find it creepy per se. It was a tradeoff to which all parties consented.

In one case there was just that one room available stranded in the middle of nowhere.

In other cases it was due to lack of financial resources.

I don't understand what is Europe-specific in those examples. Curious if it is any less awkward in any other culture?

I read it differently.

I agree the basic offer was probably sincerely from kindness. What seems creepy is her continued insistence, her inability to relate to the human in front of her.

I suspect she is just not used to anyone acting genuine towards her, let alone contradicting her. She always gets what she wants, even when it’s a whim.

I appreciate your nuanced reading.

Yes, it's possible that it came from a place of wanting to help.

And, after the offer was spurned, the kindness was immediately replaced with wrath, at "how dare she turn me down?"

So, both can be true: she can be kind and helpful, but also petty and vindictive, and unable to see other people's perspective. Being permanently surrounded by sycophants and yes-men/women will probably distort most people like that.

I think the overtures about things we care about more just provide plausible deniability and that when you dig down, people are more concerned about the risks of challenging the wealthy than they are about such window dressing.

Yes, all of this happens (and worse!) and still no boycott of Facebook. We have been turned into a country of dopamine deficient addicts.

And now these same companies are funding a useless war, killing innocent children, and soon, collapsing the world economy.

If you still use these platforms knowing what we know now you are just as complicit as every executive.

https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/

Hard to boycott something you quit using 10 years ago.

'We' as in the nation (world?) at large. FaceBook hasn't faced a large-scale boycott

I'm in your boat, but I've been thinking more lately around how we create competitors to the sorts of things that people claim "lock them in" to using Facebook (events and messenger are the ones I hear the most anecdotally).

Make these things reasonably self-sustaining monetarily (no ads) and just let it run.

Messenger does 3 things right:

1. Being able to discover people by name / surname, no phone number necessary. This is the most important privacy feature people care about, it's ironic that Meta had it from the get-go, while other platforms have barely caught up.

2. Used to have frictionless message sync, including in the event of a catastrophic loss of all devices, which put it far ahead of most apps (sadly nerfed by E2E).

3. A much better group implementation than Whatsapp / iMessage (no need to maintain a contacts list, no need to share phone numbers with everybody, you know who everybody is by name and surname). This is perfect for semi-professional groups where people are acquainted but not close with each other, especially when some members hold positions of power and don't wish to receive calls from irate people). Parents / teachers or blue-collar coworkers are perfect examples.

It's sad that all these apps are converging on the same set of features and mis-features, with nobody (except Telegram) really exploring the tradeoff space any more.

> sadly nerfed by E2E

Seriously, why? (Not you, I'm asking rhetorically to Facebook) This broke Messenger. People don't have each others' email addresses (FB has seen to that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433), it's Messenger. It was completely unforced and don't give me that malarky of "protecting messages"

The base tech of a "friend discovery network" isn't "hard" in the grand scheme of things. But getting those who don't put much thought into their tech to care enough to move out takes a gargantuan effort. Musk had to go full nazi to start seeing the bluesky adoption, and it still isn't the level of catastropic effect you'd think would happen if you heard about this 20 years prior.

Facebook is an addiction for many people. Mark Zuckerberg thinks Facebook users are "dumb fucks":

https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-im...

On the other side of every "useless war" is the what if question. Killing Hitler before WWII would have been seen as a cruel interference with German sovereignty.

Anyway it would be wise not to tie social network corporate affairs to the war. The two are not linked in a more significant way than a social network in general being linked to such affairs as a media.

Are we going to ignore how Zuckerberg dines with the president, donated a $1M to his inauguration fund, put Trump allies in high positions at Meta, loosened the moderation rules in Trump's favour, and got appointed to the president's Science and Tech Council only a few days ago?

If you are that deeply intertwined you can't claim ignorance and innocense on the inconvenient stuff - like the Iran War.

If you want to stay with WWII metaphors: if you contributed to putting Hitler in power and benefited from Hitler's favors, you were complicit to the Holocaust.

Before Zuckerberg loosened the moderation rules in Trump's favor he tightened them in favor of anti-Trump forces (and even using the terms "loosened" and "tightened" is assuming a frame that online speech that politically-benefits Trump in some way is inherently more worthy of moderation than speech that politically-harms Trump, which is itself an object-level political stance).

It's probably a mistake to characterize that as "Zuckerberg" himself making a decision - the sorts of people who worked at Facebook in the mid-2010s were overwhelmingly Democrats or Democrat-aligned people who found the sorts of things that Trump was saying, and that Trump's supporters were saying, immoral and horrifying; and often felt they had a moral duty to censor this speech on their platform in the name of protecting people they considered marginalized. This didn't necessarily need Zuckerberg's involvement himself, and I think he may have personally changed his mind about Meta's moderation policy during the Biden administration, although of course it's hard to be sure what is actually going on in the head of any specific public figure.

Trump is making a point of putting allies in high positions at Meta because in general it's now clear to everyone in American politics that being able to control the moderation policy of major social media platforms is politically important; because those platforms are where people who vote or otherwise make policy in your country do it. Every future administration in the US will attempt to do the same thing - the details might differ as the landscape of social media changes - and every single one will claim to be acting in the name of authentic free speech and safe, reasonable discourse.

I wish that practical free-software alternatives to every proprietary social media network were available, that by construction had no central organization that could be targeted by any branch of government to censor political speech. This is unfortunately a difficult technological and social problem to solve; we have a bunch of half-solutions that very few people actually use, and the bulk of the population continues to communicate on proprietary social media platforms.

Facebook has always moderated (in those languages where they do moderate at all) according to policies, and politicians are exempt.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/facebook-confirm...

Joel Kaplan was hired as the VP of global policy at Facebook in 2014, and he was hired for DEI reasons, i.e., specifically because he was Republican.

Before his role in the GWB White House, he participated in the Brooks Brothers riot that stopped the Florida vote recount in 2000.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/img-src-images-joelk...

> Facebook at the time was uncertain how to handle posts from the Trump campaign, The Wall Street Journal reported. Sources told the paper that Facebook employees were sharply divided over the candidate’s rhetoric about Muslim immigrants and his stated desire for a Muslim travel ban, which several felt were in violation of the service’s hate speech standards. Eventually, the sources said, CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in directly and said it would be inappropriate to intervene. Months later, Facebook finally issued its policy.

This is exactly what I'm talking about - Facebook in the late 2010s had a huge number of employees who thought it was morally important to censor speech that they thought harmed groups they considered marginalized (here, Muslims in general), using anti-hate-speech standards as a tool; and eventually higher-ups at the company felt they needed to come up with some reasonably politically-neutral public rhetoric, which amounted to "we won't censor things polticians say directly in the news". This stated policy still made a lot of pro-censorship people mad, hence this 2019 Ars Technica article attacking Facebook for it. Obviously Facebook (and various other social media companies) changed their stated and de-facto policies several times over the next several years in response to the changing political landscape in the US, which is a process still going on now.

Any attempt at all to define community standards for moderation that have some definition of what hate speech even is, is tantamount to making an object level poltical statement. I am opposed to the existence of any private social media platform that even attempts to do content-based moderation at anything approaching society-wide scale.

I want to know who was responsible for the "it's ok to call gay people etc mentally ill" policy. Kaplan? Zuck?

Not that it matters. FB's moderation and policies are so inconsistent it's unlikely they banned it before or would ban something now that supposedly goes against their TOS

Awful company and awful people

I haven't logged onto Facebook in some 6 years now, so I can't really do much more to boycott them.

That's the big issue of the post truth era. I imagine the number of people "using these platforms despite what we know" is minuscule. Most will never hear of this, and many who do know have probably left long before this for the other dozens of crimes against humanity Meta's performed.

Of the rest of this list. Youtube Premium is the only thing I'm still subscribed too. I actively unsubbed from Prime and am setting up to unsub from Google One.

> It says we're willing

That's not at all what it says. No one is "willing" to have this. The fact that this outcome exists is not a demonstration of this fact.

What it demonstrates is that the administrative enforcement system is broken. It simply does not work when capital exceeds an uncertain threshold or when the utility to the intelligence agencies is deemed to be of national importance.

It also demonstrates that our legislative system is entirely captured. It could fix this with a pen stroke. The people would loudly and eagerly support this. Yet no one has put pen to paper? Something deeper is clearly wrong here.

Blaming the public for being victims of this regime is insane.

Sandberg is famously not known for her ethics

> We wouldn't give our children a pass like this, nor would we teach our children to act this way, but we're perfectly willing to allow fully grown adults to act like this.

Speak to a group of K-12 teachers.

We (as a society/culture) are absolutely giving our children passes and teaching them to act this way.

> Speak to a group of K-12 teachers.

> We (as a society/culture) are absolutely giving our children passes and teaching them to act this way.

That depends upon where you teach. I've worked in schools where families who would put up with that type of behaviour were an anomaly. The school sends the same message.

Of course, one can argue that society is sending conflicting messages. Yet then my question would be: are those messages coming from people who are truly reflective of society? Those messages are certainly coming from the loudest voices, voices that are (more often than not) controlled by a few organizations that seem to have a moral compass that points towards the profit of the organization rather than social welfare. Even then I have to wonder whether the views of the organization reflect the views of the people it is composed of.

Yes, it does. I was speaking generally. I think if you selected teachers at random from the entire set of K-12 teachers in America, you'd find more who do have to deal with that behavior than don't.

That's the impression I have as well, but I am also cautious about accepting it. People tend to discuss the bad schools and ignore the good ones. They tend to focus upon the families who don't care for their kids (may they be poor or rich), and ignore the families who do care for their kids. It's easy to understand why. The kids who do act out need a disproportionate amount of attention to keep the system on track.

The negativity bias is a good point.

I wonder if it isn't so much the absolute number of kids who act out (at least initially) so much as it is the change in the way we've handled consequences? My understanding is in a lot of school systems, it's nearly impossible to hold a child back or to fail them, and that it's much harder to mete out discipline. Even if the number is holding steady, the rest of the class/families are still seeing that there are no consequences for not meeting standards and exhibiting problematic behavior, which is sort of the start of a slow moving poison.

> It says we're willing to give rich and powerful people a pass just because they make overtures towards something we care about.

This encapsulates the entire moral bankruptcy of "the Epstein class" so perfectly. I highly recommend reading the series about the Epstein class by Anand Giridharadas (Giridharadas didn't actually coin the term "Epstein class", apparently that was Ro Khanna, but he really was the first to popularize and clearly define it).

> It says we're willing to give rich and powerful people a pass just because they make overtures towards something we care about.

Nah, the "pass" only exists because we're not allowed by govt to shoot at billionaires

> Cheryl Sandberg inviting the author of the book to sleep in her bed next to her on the company jet, and the petulent and vindictive behavior when the author said 'no'.

Considering the timing... does that mean MeToo doesn't apply if the predator is also a woman?

Sexual advances from a position of power are simply not okay. (Weirdly as a society we appear to have accepted that an older woman predating younger men is somehow a cool thing: we call them cougars.)

Age gaps in relationships is not inherently negative. Being a cougar is not a bad thing. The issue here was that Sandberg was the author's manager. Age isn't an issue when all parties are adults.

> Age isn't an issue when all parties are adults.

I wouldn’t fully agree. All parties being adults doesn’t inherently remove the advantage very large age and experience gaps can give to one party over the other, especially when one is barely adult. 18 or 21 is just an arbitrary number, and one doesn’t suddenly become smart about these things just because the law says they are now legally full citizens, responsible for their acts and for themselves.

But I also agree it doesn’t make age gaps between adults inherently negative. It’s just… complicated.

Can we raise the age of adulthood from 18 to whatever acceptable age ends this discourse once and for all?

Probably not, because there's inevitably a transition period.

Sure, raise it past the transition period.

I’m tired of the pearl clutchers. Decide an age you’ll actually accept. That’s an adult. No more infantilization.

You're not understanding my argument. Within the current way we do things, whatever age you pick is the age the transition period starts for a big fraction of people. Just picking a higher age doesn't work.

If anything, based on the median in the US right now, we should be introducing more self-determination earlier.

> Within the current way we do things, whatever age you pick is the age the transition period starts for a big fraction of people.

My point precisely. Many people only start experiencing life as adults once they’ve been declared adults. Which kind of makes sense.

Maybe something more progressive than a random date would be better. Some countries already do it for some things (both in rights, responsibilities, and legal consequences), many also have specific framework for people who simply can’t be held responsible for themselves (with, often, abuses).

But it’s what we have.

Nothing to do with infantilizing anyone.

I’m probably stating the obvious, but some things are complex and don’t have good universal solutions. Which is part of why we have judges and lawyers, not just laws.

Not without impacting other political aspects. Remember we only lowered the voting age to 18 some 50 years ago to justify the ability to send more kids to a war we started. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

We seem perfectly fine splitting up some aspects of adulthood, like 21 for drinking.

It still strikes me that some places consider someone fully able to freely consent to enrol in the army, to the risk of getting permanently maimed or mentally scarred, and consider them fit to make life or death split-second decisions for both themselves and everyone around them under terror In highly stressful situations.

But can’t be allowed to have a beer or a whisky, and isn’t able to freely consent to sleep with someone five or ten years older.

I wonder what the official legal justification for this dichotomy is, if there is any.

Edit: after looking it up, there doesn’t seem to be one.

There's some issues with someone that has very little experience being an adult. Once they have a couple years out of school and a couple years of being able to drink (if relevant), it's basically all the same.

With how fast the world is moving (especially in non-US, recently-ish westernized countries that had a lot of catching up to do over the last twenty-forty years, think former eastern bloc), things aren't so clear-cut.

There's a difference between a person who grew up watching video cassettes on their neighbor's VCR, and a person who (barely) watched recaps over 1MB/s DSL. Two completely different childhoods, two completely different cultural experiences, less than 15 years of age difference, both people have had "a couple years out of school and a couple years of being able to drink."

It's not unworkable, but it's quite like a relationship with somebody from a far-away foreign country, maybe without the language barrier.

Sure there's a difference in the kind of things they're used to, but it's not giving anyone an advantage which is what the earlier posts were about. Maybe a small advantage to the younger one which is the opposite of the worry above.

>Age isn't an issue when all parties are adults.

there's exceptions to every rule but as a general statement that's about as false as it gets. With increasing age gap between partners divorce and breakup rates go up significantly. Cultures with strong aversion to age gaps, East Asia for example, have both low divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births.

The reason isn't extremely difficult to see, where someone is in life, what priorities they have and how responsible they are is significantly influenced by age, the rom-com industrial complex might have convinced people that relationships are about butterflies in the stomach, but in reality compatibility matters.

People in the C Suite should not be asking any employee to join them in bed whether they're that person's manager or not.

I think you're just using a narrower definition of "manager" than the person you responded to.

Fine with that, as long as we agree that it goes both ways and is judged same, equality and all. Otherwise deeply sexist to use kind words

It's a cool thing if you're the younger man getting sexual attention from a hot older woman. Declaring by fiat that this is not okay doesn't change what peoples' desires actually are, or what behavior done by other people they feel compelled to punish.

>We wouldn't give our children a pass like this, nor would we teach our children to act this way

Where do you live where this is the case? I'd love to move there!

I think that was more about trying, in a dumb way, to make the pregnant woman not work all night than sexual harassment.

The author was 8 months pregnant and was going to stay up for 12 hours doing stuff. This seemed more like a commanding boss trying to stop a workaholic from working.

Demanding that she sleep next to her on her bed does not sound like trying to stop a workaholic from working. It sounds creepy as hell.

It’s both. There was only one bed on the plane.

Were it me, I would give up my spot as it’s just weird to ask a coworker to sleep in the same bed.

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