FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord • Hacker News Board

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#101

Post by t-writescode » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:28 PM UTC

xamuel wrote: post #93

fgrtr3terwy wrote: post #85

Facebook wants their employees to stop talking about politics, even though Facebook by its nature takes stances on deeply political topics. How exactly do you avoid political discussion when you're asking what constitutes hate speech, whether a US president should be allowed to violate Facebook's content guidelines, or to what extent governments can spread misinformation in other countries? If you work at Facebook, y…

>Facebook by its nature takes stances on deeply political topics. Why is that "by its nature"? I don't think that's "by its nature" at all. Phone companies and ISPs facilitate communication between people, but that doesn't necessitate they take political stances on what communication to allow. Why should Facebook? If certain language should be restricted, then laws should be written restricting said language and Face…

> Phone companies and ISPs facilitate communication between people, but that doesn't necessitate they take political stances on what communication to allow

Taking a stance to not control what communication is allowed is a very political stance. It just so happens that, I believe in those cases, it's also a legally mandated stance; but, if it weren't a legally mandated stance, it would absolutely be a political stance, whatever they ended up saying.

Where a private company decides to limit free speech (or not limit free speech) is, 100%, a political stance when the laws have not been written that make that decision for them.

Even if we maintain a law around protecting companies that just host other people's content vs curating and publishing content, it could be seen as a political decision whether a given website and company choose to be on the publisher vs public content stance.

I'm forgetting the word for publisher vs ... whatever it is where they take no responsibility for what people post on the site; but I hope my point is clear.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#102

Post by travisoneill1 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:28 PM UTC

jsabo wrote: post #72

patorjk wrote: post #5

At 3 paragraphs (131 words), that was a really short article. However, I agree with the subheading: "Mark Zuckerberg says employees shouldn’t have to confront social issues in their day-to-day work unless they want to" That sounds good to me. I've never had to talk about these kind of things at work. Are there work places where this is unavoidable?

That depends on if your existence is political I suppose. Ask some of your LGBT colleagues, especially trans colleagues, if they feel like can just leave politics at the door.

I have worked with many LGBT colleagues who never bring up politics at work. This "existence is political" thing is just a bullshit phrase that the obnoxious people who can't go an hour without bringing that crap up use to justify it.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#103

Post by seattle_spring » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #76

rsynnott wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd give that about 10 minutes before someone started claiming that their baby was immune to covid, and then you're right back where you started.

> claiming that their baby was immune to covid Some people are indeed immune to covid, babies too, most probably. I've personally heard of numerous cases of persons not getting the virus at all while their spouse was in intensive therapy or worse.

My wife had the cold once and I didn't get it. Must mean I'm immune to the common cold.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#104

Post by lacker » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:31 PM UTC

patorjk wrote: post #5

At 3 paragraphs (131 words), that was a really short article. However, I agree with the subheading: "Mark Zuckerberg says employees shouldn’t have to confront social issues in their day-to-day work unless they want to" That sounds good to me. I've never had to talk about these kind of things at work. Are there work places where this is unavoidable?

I was working at Facebook during the 2016 election and it was pretty unavoidable.

A big part of the problem was just that everyone was using Facebook for work all the time. So quite often, there would be some enormous thread arguing about whether X or Y was the right policy, was Trump violating the rules and should be kicked off Facebook, or was Facebook's anti-Trump policies violating freedom of speech, or was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting, etc etc.

And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week, could you provide feedback on it. Type X of hardware is being deprecated next quarter. So you really have to be checking Facebook-for-work consistently for professional reasons. You have to scroll past the political debates all the time.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#105

Post by dntrkv » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #83

dntrkv wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious how you think it's possible for FB to prevent the spread of disinformation? Everyone likes to pretend like Facebook has the ability to just stop disinformation, when in reality, even defining "disinformation" is basically impossible. Sure, you can bring up examples of blatant lies, but most of the effective disinformation is a lot more subtle and depends on what side of the issues you are on.

Facebook's algorithms exploit the brain's attractiveness to decisiveness. They've know this and have chosen not to take action, except for small amounts so Mark can tell congress they are improving things. Source https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-di... So besides straight up changing the algorithms to promote non-decisive content, these are a couple things I think could help: - Limit the sprea…

Facebook doesn't profit from divisiveness, they profit from engagement. The fact that divisive posts encourage more engagement tells me more about people in general, rather than Facebook's business model.

> Limit the spread of information in general in favor of content created by the people you follow

I don't think that's what people want from their social networks nowadays. FB, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc all do not work this way anymore. Suggesting that Facebook revert their app to what it was 10 years ago is not a serious suggestion because there are many other apps that will fill that void. If it's not FB, another app will take its place and give people the outrage they're looking for.

> Un-personalize advertising

Advertising plays a very small part in this. Most of what you would call "disinformation" is spread through reposts, which are not affected by advertising.

Sure, there might be some hostile actors out their spending money on pushing propaganda to the masses. But from my experience, people actively seek this nonsense out, the algorithms just make it easier for them to find it.

In my eyes, the real problem is that most people aren't equipped with the right tools to identify bullshit. Simple things like an inability to gauge scale. e.g. "9,000,000 gallons of oil has been spilled from pipelines in the last 10 years" Is that a lot? I have no idea, but what I can do is compare that against other forms of oil transportation. Most people won't do that work though, they will go straight to outrage.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#106

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

satya71 wrote: post #8

How about bringing the same rules to the wider FB? I just want to look at baby pictures and connect with friends. I don't want to be part of a machinery that spreads misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Agreed, except maybe with an option to filter out the baby pictures. I never want to see those. Becoming a parent made me want to see them even less (my child is the best and the prettiest and that's all I need). :).

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#107

Post by qppo » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

satya71 wrote: post #8

How about bringing the same rules to the wider FB? I just want to look at baby pictures and connect with friends. I don't want to be part of a machinery that spreads misinformation and conspiracy theories.

I distinctly remember during the 2012 election, my friends began posting political materials extensively. Which makes sense because of the Obama campaign's unprecedented spend on social media.

Pre-2012 Facebook was awesome. Now the feed is almost exclusively bullshit from people I don't know.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#108

Post by m0zg » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

Good for them. I haven't worked at FB, but I can only assume they're similar to Google in this regard, maybe worse, since their workforce tends to be younger on average. Things were already getting pretty unbearable when I left Google years ago, and (according to people I know who still work there) have taken a turn for _much_ worse in 2016. When recruiters email, I politely decline, without specifying why, but this is largely why. I actually liked working there when it came to _work_, but the environment was extremely politicized and oppressive. No differences of opinion were tolerated at all. You'd immediately be ratted out to HR for a mere suggestion that someone is too aggressive/uncivil in enforcing the dogma on internal Google+.

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#109

Post by cyrux004 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

lacker wrote: post #97

fgrtr3terwy wrote: post #85

Facebook wants their employees to stop talking about politics, even though Facebook by its nature takes stances on deeply political topics. How exactly do you avoid political discussion when you're asking what constitutes hate speech, whether a US president should be allowed to violate Facebook's content guidelines, or to what extent governments can spread misinformation in other countries? If you work at Facebook, y…

How exactly do you avoid political discussion when you're asking what constitutes hate speech Just like any corporate decision, you have a small number of people who are relevant to making the decision, and they discuss among themselves. It isn't productive to have 10,000 people who are all angry if Facebook doesn't make the decision their way, and they each spend an hour complaining about it on Facebook, while claim…

Make that official them. Remove the BS "culture at FB" about being open and inclusive and your opinion matters stuff both internally and externally

Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

#110

Post by Talanes » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

xamuel wrote: post #93

fgrtr3terwy wrote: post #85

Facebook wants their employees to stop talking about politics, even though Facebook by its nature takes stances on deeply political topics. How exactly do you avoid political discussion when you're asking what constitutes hate speech, whether a US president should be allowed to violate Facebook's content guidelines, or to what extent governments can spread misinformation in other countries? If you work at Facebook, y…

>Facebook by its nature takes stances on deeply political topics. Why is that "by its nature"? I don't think that's "by its nature" at all. Phone companies and ISPs facilitate communication between people, but that doesn't necessitate they take political stances on what communication to allow. Why should Facebook? If certain language should be restricted, then laws should be written restricting said language and Face…

I cannot say something into one end of the telephone, and depending on the content of my message, not have it delivered on the other end. That's the difference.