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Mark in the Middle

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Re: Mark in the Middle

#171

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

croissants wrote: post #73
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #50

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 c…

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.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#172

Post by notional »

josefresco wrote: post #152
jsiepkes wrote: post #3

> "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.

"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.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#173

Post by bzb5 »

hatenberg wrote: post #53
blueterminal wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is. 50% of youth unemployment in Spain for example.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#174

Post by mrfusion »

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?

Re: Mark in the Middle

#175

Post by [deleted] »

josefresco wrote: post #152
jsiepkes wrote: post #3

> "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.

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

[deleted]

Re: Mark in the Middle

#176

Post by tylerhou »

verdverm wrote: post #94
pjc50 wrote: post #68

> "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 te…

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-...

Re: Mark in the Middle

#177

Post by jjice »

nemothekid wrote: post #159
roenxi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

> 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 eas…

> 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.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#178

Post by JakeTheAndroid »

trabant00 wrote: post #5

> 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 religi…

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.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#179

Post by scottlamb »

_qulr wrote: post #87

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…

> 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.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#180

Post by umvi »

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.

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