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Mark in the Middle

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261–270 of 603 posts

Re: Mark in the Middle

#261

So, facebook employees are mad they're not allowed to censor things they disagree with that people post on facebook? I don't understand how facebook came to be responsible for policing political opinions anyway. In fact, I don't understand why employees at tech companies believe they have the right to police people's opinions period. I see it amongst commenters here too. What gives any of these people the right to po…

Fair point. But I mean in America that’s all about “buy now!”, “save now!”, “treat yourself!” and only now it’s changed?

I think what’s changed is you sit in front of it all day. So it FEELS like it’s increased, but really it’s just your time economy is being spent watching the nonsense flow.

You want a different experience? Live differently. Let the neuron receptors cool off.

...At some point a baseline has to be agreed upon. And it changes as generations roll over.

Raw logistics for the masses, de-coupled from daddies historical baseline of bawdy haggling, to prove how bold he is for expropriating others work, would be nice.

I get none of that and have to pander to other people brand building, job life is all about emotional culture worship.

I no longer believe in billionaires as necessary features of a society where the wealth is built on the emotional indoctrination of the masses to believe a dollar holds value.

Largely because it creates a social distortion effect that non godly men by any scientific measure are unique.

Are we about science or ideological worship?

I no longer need your products and services and don’t care if you have a job, those are your problems, not mine.

America no longer exists.

Russia isn’t real.

EU is just old people clustering in confusion, thinking like the old days when you had to go downtown to work.

That’s how I see it and you all should stay out of the way of that.

Cause I wanna believe only what I choose.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#262
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…

Trust me, the vocal minority there are extremely sheltered, self centered and live in a weird unreality. The majority of employees who come from the real world aren't that bad but also tend to keep quiet.

I often think that people who spend too long at the top of maslow's hierarchy of needs just end up losing touch with reality.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I…

> 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. I mean, mouthpiece can't possibly be the right term. Does anyone think they should forbid Fox News articles from being shared? If you don't want them moderating it away, and they aren't themselves recommending it, their role is pretty minor. The idea of Facebook is that when you pos…

Fox news maybe not, but plenty of those links are to even crazier places. Facebook should absolutely be deplatforming breitbart.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#264

Whatever you think of the opinion of some of the employees regarding FB's stance towards politics, they're just never going to get their way without a union. It's exactly right that FB is a monarchy and what we see here are akin to the political challenges you'd read about in a monarchy. The small collective actions seem to be a good step in that direction but still much, much smaller than you'd need to form a union.…

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

He's largely taking examples from public-sector unions, which have particularly problematic legal framework in the US.

Private unions can be essentialy seen as corporations, very much like any other firm, that sell labor. Such unions can in principle specialize, compete and offer unique advantages. Again – just like any other market firm. It's just that the US law makes that hard by setting them up for a narrow antagonistic role of fighting with labor management for goodies.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#265

Interesting how they reiterate over and over how right-wing media proliferates on the platform but imply that centrist/liberal propaganda does not. Is there evidence of this?

Article about it, with some data backing it up: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/how-facebook-became-... They censor anti-racists: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/24/facebook-whil... AFAIK their new News tab has far-right publications like Breitbart, but no leftist publications.

Please don't use a term like "anti-racist" for someone who says "Whites are $NegativeAdjective."

It's really disingenuous rhetoric.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#266
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Given that the common narrative around Facebook is that it, along with all other social media, is engaged in a leftist conspiracy to purge all conservative and right-wing speech from the internet, I'd say it would be.

[flagged]

>BLM/Soros

In no way extremist lmao. Soros is literally the boogeyman to conservatives I guess.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#267

I think this actually made Zuck's leadership look solid. Of course it's a little naive to say "we aren't political", but he's probably just doing that because it's the calculated thing to say. Almost every other company says things like that, except for a few ideological ones in Silicon Valley. I don't know how anyone takes these employees at FB seriously. They are complaining about the lack of free snacks? Anyone co…

To take things one level higher, I wonder why they answered this question at all. Most likely it was done to add some levity to the meeting, but more cynically, I wonder if it was done to point out just how juvenile some of the concerns are.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#268
post #180

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.

With /r/politics you get HEAVILY downvoted if you voice anything conservative or even just defending someone conservative from unjust accusations. So much so, that you can only post new comments every 10 minutes, while they keep on dogpiling you.

It's hard when people want liberal things like sources or data to back up "facts"

Re: Mark in the Middle

#269
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Provisioning servers or working on internal work flows shouldn't require my political engagement

I think GP's point, which I agree with, is that your proverbial devops person already is acting politically by racking those servers in service (ha) to a political entity (a corporation which affects the lives and tendencies of the body politic). There's no way for most folks to opt out of actions having political consequences, due to the interconnected nature of the world we live in.

Re: Mark in the Middle

#270

So, facebook employees are mad they're not allowed to censor things they disagree with that people post on facebook? I don't understand how facebook came to be responsible for policing political opinions anyway. In fact, I don't understand why employees at tech companies believe they have the right to police people's opinions period. I see it amongst commenters here too. What gives any of these people the right to po…

What I don’t understand is that if they are going to police opinions, they are acting as editors, not a platform. They should thus be held accountable for any improper editorial decisions that they make in the same way that a newspaper would be via civil suit.
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