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Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

reuters.com

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Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#331

Post by koheripbal »

pryce wrote: post #315
renaudg wrote: post #137

“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.” “Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I w…

There's an important conversation to be had over how activism should operate, in which areas, about what's effective, what turns people off and leaves them hostile, and what measures are justified on what issues, versus what measures are completely disproportionate. That said, this person stood up for their principles (rightly or wrongly) and lost their job because of it. Your quotation about people "casting stones"…

I think there's a difference between "standing up for your principles" and "bullying".

The fired employee didn't make a political statement about what they believe - They harassed someone else's private choice, and then pressured them to publicly cow to his political will through social media.

As if anyone who doesn't publicly virtue signal with the movement is also the enemy.

"Your either with us or against us" -- Famously said by Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, George W Bush, and Recep Erdoğan. What wonderful company he's keeping.

It was malicious and ugly. ...and its becoming more commonly accepted on social media.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#332

Post by vvG94KbDUtRa »

renaudg wrote: post #137

“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.” “Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I w…

This quote is awesome thanks for sharing

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#333

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

esperent wrote: post #165
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Recoil project were contributing to racism in the US, I think we all agree that would be a problem.

Connecting facial recognition software and racism seems to be earning you downvotes here. While racism is the hot button topic right now, widespread governmental and corporate (or indeed, private) use of facial recognition software is problematic for many reasons. Erosion of privacy, sexual and non-sexual harassment and stalking, racial profiling, gender profiling, profiling for membership of any other kind of group,…

Recoil isn't facial recognition software, it's a React state management library. That's why the employee's conduct was so toxic here; the project he demanded a statement from just has nothing to do with racism in the first place.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#334

Post by guerrilla »

hidiegomariani wrote: post #330
guerrilla wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming no mitigating circumstances for not speaking out, it literally is acceptance and tacit perpetuation of the status quo which is most certainly political. I'm not saying there were no mitigating circumstances nor condoning the person's behavior but they are clearly correct on that specific point. "It's not the violence of the few that scares me, it's the silence of the many." Martin Luther King, Jr.

I want to be free to choose whether a political issue deserves my action or inaction in a work setting. So please respect (not you but people who make such statements) individuals who rightfully choose not to get involved. There isn’t just the “right” way of thinking. Which is what exactly is happening right now. “Either you think and act as we do or you are an ass*ole.” Pluralism of thought shouldn’t even be in ques…

They are involed, specifically in presrving the status quo. There is unfortunately no abstaining in the same way you can't abstain when you know a child is being abused.

Thinking, saying and acting how one does does not exempt them from being the consequences of doing so, specifically, being judged for it.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#335

Post by DenisM »

toyg wrote: post #322
DenisM wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics at the workplace should be kept personal. Politics between colleagues should not be done at all .

I disagree. With that outlook, we would never have had the social movements that changed Europe for the better in the XIX and XX century. In modern terms, stuff like BLM influences who your colleagues are, how you treat them, and how you react to their demands for fairness.

The world would be a better place if both Russia and Germany kept a lid on the practice of pressuring people into a political stance in the first half of the 20th century.

OTOH MLK did not have his followers pressure coworkers - they kept it in the public, not behind doors.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#336

Post by fsociety »

baddox wrote: post #287
scarmig wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a platform for mobs of every sort, and if you have a mob of followers and you attack a colleague, publishing his contact info, you are de facto encouraging the mob to attack him, even if you play dumb after the fact.

There was no attack on a colleague (a public disagreement is not an attack). The person who was fired has less than a third the followers of the other person (and probably very significant overlap between the follower groups). There certainly was no publishing of contact info, unless you consider all public mentions on Twitter to be publishing contact info (which is preposterous). Your impression of what happened is…

You’re performing impressive mental gymnastics to say this person’s behavior did not harm psychological safety.

Instead of trying to prove there was no harm, and that being a maintainer of an open source project should make it okay if people do this to you.. think about the intent of what this person did.

Did they intend to create a safe environment? Or did they intend to bully someone into seeing their view, and doxed them on Twitter. A view that the original tweeter identified as political!

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#337

Post by fsociety »

renaudg wrote: post #137

“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.” “Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I w…

Wow never read that. Reminds me of “he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her”. Then we had the crusades. Seems like this is history repeating itself.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#338

Post by fsociety »

dahfizz wrote: post #202
musicale wrote: post #155

CA Labor Code section 1102 seems to prohibit firing employees for political activity: "No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity." Perhaps publicly criticizing the company you work f…

Harassing a coworker on Twitter is not political activity.

Completely disagree, you’re spinning a narrative by leaving out context, and the original tweeter labeled it as political too.. so they disagree as well.

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#339

Post by fastball »

achiang wrote: post #292
scarmig wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to push against this silence is complicity mindset. Looking at your profile, I can point out countless atrocities that you don't explicitly denounce. Do I see you upset about how Israel has amped up its program of settler colonialism in Palestine in the past few weeks? How the PRC is running literal concentration camps in Xinjiang? Or, moving along to the USA, how men have extraordinarily high suicide rates? O…

I don't have a platform the size that the recoil author has. That's the difference.

So where it does it start and where does it end?

What threshold must you cross (in terms of platform size) for silence to equal complicity? Since it apparently doesn't apply to you, but it does apply to a GitHub repo.

Once you've made up your imaginary platform size threshold, which movements must people not be silent on, lest they find themselves complicit through silence? Is it ALL political movements? Those READMEs are gonna get pretty long if so. Is it only the "most important political issue at the moment" that needs to be voiced? Who decides what the most pressing issue is? Is there some sort of vote going on that I don't know about? When is it OK to start being silent again? If he puts up a BLM message in his repo and then takes it down the next day, is that OK? Or does he need to keep it in there forever (because presumably Black Lives always Matter, so he should keep it in there indefinitely, right?)

There are way, way too many things going on for silence to mean complicity.

Take any other humanitarian crisis, and ask yourself if anyone silent must be complicit. Think about it for a second. It's just not true. If someone in Germany were to not speak out against the Nazis rounding up Jews, but at the same time was hiding Jews in their basement, would that person be "complicit" in the Nazis crimes?

Re: Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague

#340

Post by np_tedious »

packetslave wrote: post #51

Disclaimer: I have no opinion whatsoever about what this guy did or didn't tweet, or whatever the reason may be that he's no longer at Facebook. That being said, WOW that's some crap reporting: the only source mentioned in the article is what the guy himself wrote on Twitter. From the bottom: "Facebook and Dail did not immediately respond to requests for comment." Reuters chose to spin that into "Facebook fires emplo…

Disappointing indeed. I had thought that the "wire services" like AP and Reuters largely stayed out editorializing but it seems not. I understand that framing will always come into play and that completely neutral "just the facts" is an elusive ideal, but still this example is really egregious.
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