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Facebook fired an employee who posted evidence of preferential treatment

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Re: Facebook fired an employee who posted evidence of preferential treatment

#61

Post by echelon »

ergodicity001 wrote: post #31

I saw a video recently where someone was discussing Facebook's "moat". Essentially, among Big Tech, it has the least defensible moat, which I think is true. https://youtu.be/4SrxqfKn9Bw?t=1605 I think Facebook has very little choice right now. Libra could have been a moat, but it is more or less dead now. They are being cornered into being more pro-conservative, because otherwise their moat (engagement, which is what…

I don't think they have any moat at all. People always claim that Facebook's hold over the population is absolute and that the gravity and sheer volume of users will make it impossible for upstarts to make a dent.

And yet every new highschool cohort has a new social media app.

These are simple CRUD apps and anyone can make them. The tech is only getting more accessible. Look at the ages of people launching these things. Young people get young people.

Facebook is for grandmas yelling at liberals. TikTok is exiting and fresh. In four years, it'll be something new.

Of the many failed attempts to make social media apps, the ones I'm most aware of seem to have all failed due to mismanagement (vine, voat, yikyak).

Look at the proliferation of dating apps. Not even Tinder is the end-all be-all. There are new entries in that field all the time, and it's hyper adjacent to social media.

I don't think either industry is a good place to build a moat. You have to keep buying the upstarts to win.

Re: Facebook fired an employee who posted evidence of preferential treatment

#63

Post by joexner »

commandlinefan wrote: post #41
zo1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another aspect is that a lot of non-left, or right-leaning viewpoints have been categorized into "naughty idea" territory, despite a lot of reasonable people holding them. E.g. Things such as: Being against mass-migration from 3rd world countries to the west, wanting racially homogenous societies, removing welfare, building a wall, racial profiling, there being no gender pay-gap, protesting spreads the virus, BLM are…

We actually seem to be creeping past "holding those viewpoints results in cancellation" into "not actively condemning those viewpoints results in cancellation".

If presenting these viewpoints misrepresents the views of your employer, they're fully entitled to cancel you.

Judy Woodruff couldn't drop the n-word in anger on national TV and expect to keep her job.

Re: Facebook fired an employee who posted evidence of preferential treatment

#64

Post by devalgo »

jtr1 wrote: post #49
devalgo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stefan Molyneux is a pig but your characterization of Damore is low effort and more or less completely wrong. If you read the memo it is a relatively straightforward review of standard Biology and Psychology research. There's virtually nothing controversial in it. If you have issues with it you have issues with science. Which given the "decolonize" science lunacy recently isn't surprising. China is laughing all the w…

Damore's evidence was by turns cherry picked, misinterpreted, and unrepresentative of mainstream understanding in the fields it came from. You can read plenty of those researchers complaining about his use of their work. His synthesis is about as scientific as phrenology.

>articles that were both cherry picked and misinterpreted

Which ones?

Your edit is even more misleading and incoherent than your original comment.

Re: Facebook fired an employee who posted evidence of preferential treatment

#65

Post by BTinfinity »

zo1 wrote: post #34
jerkstate wrote: post #8

It sounds like the issue is that fact-checkers are being overridden sometimes when they flag right-wing news sources. I think that if you asked a right-wing person, they would tell you that many of these fact-checker organizations have a distinct left-wing bias. Maybe they (the fact-checkers) aren’t infallible and get it wrong sometimes?

Another aspect is that a lot of non-left, or right-leaning viewpoints have been categorized into "naughty idea" territory, despite a lot of reasonable people holding them. E.g. Things such as: Being against mass-migration from 3rd world countries to the west, wanting racially homogenous societies, removing welfare, building a wall, racial profiling, there being no gender pay-gap, protesting spreads the virus, BLM are…

Baffled that you’re being downvoted; there’s plenty of arguments for and against those ideas. It’s difficult to come a consensus when the debates surrounding them increasingly turn to shouting matches, Internet rumours and “cancellation”

Re: Facebook fired an employee who posted evidence of preferential treatment

#66

Post by ChomskyNormal4m »

equality_1138 wrote: post #22
aaomidi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you're already getting downvoted? It's funny because the same people who support James Damore are also anti unionizing which would give them a stronger voice....

What's funny? Unionizing in the advertising/tech industry to push a political agenda is acting like sheep! How does anyone get fooled into this kind of philosophy? Mob rules? Look at the big picture and think for yourself for a change.

It's funny how the managers, executives, board of directors, stockholders, business associations and their lobbyists all act together, pushing the political agenda - acting as a mob, as sheep - coming to a consensus - but we who are actually doing the work are lectured to isolate ourselves from one another, and not be a sheep who join a mob.

Re: Facebook fired an employee who posted evidence of preferential treatment

#67

Post by kmonsen »

zo1 wrote: post #34
jerkstate wrote: post #8

It sounds like the issue is that fact-checkers are being overridden sometimes when they flag right-wing news sources. I think that if you asked a right-wing person, they would tell you that many of these fact-checker organizations have a distinct left-wing bias. Maybe they (the fact-checkers) aren’t infallible and get it wrong sometimes?

Another aspect is that a lot of non-left, or right-leaning viewpoints have been categorized into "naughty idea" territory, despite a lot of reasonable people holding them. E.g. Things such as: Being against mass-migration from 3rd world countries to the west, wanting racially homogenous societies, removing welfare, building a wall, racial profiling, there being no gender pay-gap, protesting spreads the virus, BLM are…

The problem with most of your "reasonable ideas" (except racially homogenous societies which is straight up racist) is that they have consistently been used for racist reasons in history. I think if you hold almost any of these (except perhaps the first), you should take a good long look in the mirror and research the history behind these.

Re: Facebook fired an employee who posted evidence of preferential treatment

#68

Post by iagovar »

site-packages1 wrote: post #4

I saw this yesterday. There were a shocking number of people bringing up and defending people like James Damore, the misogynist Google memo guy who guest starred on white power podcasts like Stefan Molyneux's. I don't like to be an an echo chamber, but I feel like praising that sort of thing is definitely in the relm of "far right" and makes me wonder if that's the sort of people HN is attracting?

It wasn't a mysoginist memo, don't be so low effort. He isn't a scientist but he actually bring up stuff that was already being discussed when I studied sociology and AFAIK it's far from being settled.

Re: Facebook fired an employee who posted evidence of preferential treatment

#69

Post by kapnobatairza »

devalgo wrote: post #38
site-packages1 wrote: post #4

I saw this yesterday. There were a shocking number of people bringing up and defending people like James Damore, the misogynist Google memo guy who guest starred on white power podcasts like Stefan Molyneux's. I don't like to be an an echo chamber, but I feel like praising that sort of thing is definitely in the relm of "far right" and makes me wonder if that's the sort of people HN is attracting?

Stefan Molyneux is a pig but your characterization of Damore is low effort and more or less completely wrong. If you read the memo it is a relatively straightforward review of standard Biology and Psychology research. There's virtually nothing controversial in it. If you have issues with it you have issues with science. Which given the "decolonize" science lunacy recently isn't surprising. China is laughing all the w…

"your characterization of Damore is low effort and more or less completely wrong".

Your characterization of Damore is equally low effort. The memo is not simply a "relatively straightfoward review of standard Biology and Psychology research". Even if I were to agree that those parts of it were non-controversial, those parts of it are not the point or intention of the memo.

You are completely ignoring the arguments Damore actually makes, that were built on faulty premises and selected studies that validate his worldview. Some of his statements might be non-controversial in isolation, but have been constructed to build a specific narrative about diversity and inclusion. You are also completely ignoring the context in which this memo was distributed, surfaced, and the channels through which it was ultimately publicized.

Damore clearly had an agenda and his own bias against what he perceived as PC-culture at Google. Trying to frame him as some neutral observer of the behavioral psychology of Googlers is ignorant, if not disingenuous.

Re: Facebook fired an employee who posted evidence of preferential treatment

#70

Post by twic »

Miner49er wrote: post #11

Facebook seems to have a conservative bias. I've never used it myself though, so I can't completely say. I'm also not saying whether or not they should, but they seem to. Zuckerburg regularly hangs out with conservative political figures, but not liberal or letist ones. [0] They censor the left regularly [1]. Also, is there even any leftist publications in the FB news tab? They let the right slide by on things regula…

There was also this business about removing fact-checking of a bunk climate science article at the behest of a Republican congressman:

https://heated.world/p/fact-check-of-viral-climate-misinform...

My interpretation of this is not that Facebook has a conservative bias (what does it even mean for a company to have a bias?), but that Facebook's leaders are well aware that the company are extremely vulnerable to regulation, and that keeping the current administration sweet is a good way of evading regulation. If the US enters 2021 with a Democratic administration not hamstrung by a Republican congress, i would expect the apparent bias to evaporate or reverse.

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