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Ad Boycott of Facebook Keeps Growing

nytimes.com

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Re: Ad Boycott of Facebook Keeps Growing

#111

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

Veen wrote: post #69
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It surely feels like it at least when every single major javascript framework has a #BLM header. Isn't that expressing free speech? Or do you believe those headers have been coerced, and they feel forced to post one? I'm dubious that's the case, and I doubt it'll affect the frameworks future success whether they post one or not.

If a majority posts a banner, and one doesn't, it will be understood as opposition. As we've been hearing a lot of late: "Silence is pro-racist" and "Silence is violence". Under those conditions, not posting a banner would be to risk being considered a racist organization. This is not quite coercion, but nor is it possible to decline to post a banner without substantial and probably unjustified cost.

OK, there may be some pressure (which I still doubt the long term effect of - Twitter is a great way to amplify things that extreme views that aren't particularly real world), but as those are expressions of free speech and the free market reacting to those forces, I'm still confused on how this leads to some sort of dystopia where liberalism is dead and the people's party decides how everything happens. It seems more like public opinion has shifted and people are wailing against the changing times. It's not as though a "Red's Communist Emporium" would have flown in the 60's.

Re: Ad Boycott of Facebook Keeps Growing

#112

Post by bathtub365 »

neya wrote: post #94
tech-historian wrote: post #64

Serious questions: Are the people that work at Facebook proud to work there? What is morale like inside that place? When someone asks you what you do, and you say "I work for Facebook," what is their typical reaction? Not trying to be snarky. I'm genuinely curious how these perceptions/feelings might have changed over the past few years.

In Singapore, most of them are actually proud. I've been to their office a bunch of times and in fact, people treat it as something super prestigious, especially considering the office space is really nice with a beautiful view of the Marina. Sometimes, their employees will sound extremely arrogant and even look down upon you if you don't work for another equivalent giant (like Google Singapore). I guess different pa…

Singapore itself employs a surveillance apparatus against its citizens so I'd expect the cultural norms there may be affected by that.

Re: Ad Boycott of Facebook Keeps Growing

#113

Post by HeroOfAges »

moksly wrote: post #52

I wonder how much of it is Facebook being unwilling to be editorial and how much of it is then being unable to moderate a couple of billion users. Either way, they might not get a choice. The EU is going to regulate them more and more. My own country is passing a law to force platforms to remove child pornography within 24 hours of it being reported as an example of where it starts. Won’t be long before we make enabl…

No one has a problem with anyone making nazi groups planning hate crimes illegal. My biggest concern is Facebook deciding who is a "nazi" and what constitutes a hate crime. My belief (backed by scientific fact) that biological sex is real and immutable is enough to have me branded as a "nazi". The statement "males are not females" is enough to be considered hate speech. Saying, "males are not females" could be a hate crime.

Re: Ad Boycott of Facebook Keeps Growing

#115

Post by ciarannolan »

solarwind wrote: post #80
ciarannolan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were some of the issues with the 1619 Project?

The main thesis of the 1619 project was that the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. This is categorically false according to actual historians, and so the NYT had to issue a correction (some 7 months later). None of the leading scholars of the whole period from the Revolution to the Civil War were consulted on the project, yet now it…

Thanks. I guess I could have spent a few minutes reading the wiki, which has a pretty good section on it.

>The 1619 Project has been criticized by some American historians, including historians of the American Revolution Gordon Wood[6] and Sean Wilentz,[43] and Civil War experts Richard Carwardine[5] and James McPherson.[7] McPherson stated in an interview that he was "disturbed" by the project's "unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly, obviously, not an exclusively American institution, but existed throughout history." McPherson continued, "slavery in the United States was only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many centuries. And in the United States, too, there was not only slavery but also an antislavery movement."[7] Historian James Oakes criticized Hannah-Jones's assertion that "Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country."[44]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project#Criticism

Re: Ad Boycott of Facebook Keeps Growing

#116

Post by sneak »

bhupy wrote: post #104
Enginerrrd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because ethics =/= politics and I think it's a pretty universal judgement that Facebook has done some ethically dubious things in the past, and not much has changed from the policies that led them there in the first place.

Okay but ethics isn't universal either. There is no objective moral framework. "Not everybody shares your views" == "Not everybody shares your ethics". Let me try and steel-man this for you: if you believe in classical liberal principles of free speech, then you might probably be "proud" to work at FB, as well as of Zuckerberg's stance. Here's a better articulation of that: https://stratechery.com/2020/zuckerbergs-ch…

Ethics and morals are not the same thing. Morals are not universal.

Ethical frameworks were created specifically to be an objective standard.

Re: Ad Boycott of Facebook Keeps Growing

#117

Post by paulgb »

listenallyall wrote: post #107
mk4p wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you should ask - I just saw this: > You don’t realize the heavy conscious and mental burden that comes with being a Facebook employee until you quit https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1275363680767537154

Probably could replace "Facebook" with just about any company in that sentence. Having to uphold "company values", live by some boss's petty rules, take HR initiatives seriously, etc, is pretty much universally frustrating.

Not all companies equally, though, and I think that's the point here.

Re: Ad Boycott of Facebook Keeps Growing

#118

Post by fsociety »

searchableguy wrote: post #58
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It surely feels like it at least when every single major javascript framework has a #BLM header. Isn't that expressing free speech? Or do you believe those headers have been coerced, and they feel forced to post one? I'm dubious that's the case, and I doubt it'll affect the frameworks future success whether they post one or not.

> do you believe those headers have been coerced, and they feel forced to post one? https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1267893460423462912 https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057 Not taking any sides here.

And that guy is still calling people out for being racist because of “complicity” wowzers..

Re: Ad Boycott of Facebook Keeps Growing

#119

Post by jfengel »

camillomiller wrote: post #84
throwaway_jobs wrote: post #62

It seems the pandemic and unemployment is finally causing voodoo economics (trickle down economics) to reverse course and perhaps cause trickle up economics, where the multi-billion dollar corporations and rich alike will begin to feel the pinch of poverty on a massive scale trickle up. Unfortunately while taxpayers got their $1,200 Checks they were robbed blind of over $4T to the FED which went directly to stabilize…

I'm frankly flabbergasted by what's going on with the markets. If anyone thought stocks were still somehow a projection of reality and an indicator of expectations on the future of a company's performance, well, that's clearly not the case anymore. I am really scared that a real devastating collapse is still looming, but I frankly have no clue of when that could happen and what could actually trigger it.

It is baffling, and I've been expecting a crash for a decade... which is the problem. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

Right now it's kind of persistently slightly irrational. A quick-and-dirty measure of its sanity is the P/E ratio: how much money are the publicly listed companies actually making? Right now, the number is around 22[1], meaning a dollar invested in the market takes 22 years to pay itself back purely in terms of corporate profits.

That's a return of about 3%. Numbers over 20 are generally considered a sign that the market is overheated. They peaked at around 45 and 65 right before the 90s and 2000s crashes. So there is revenue there, and not entirely out of line with stock prices, but not entirely line with them either.

None of that takes coronavirus into account; that's current price with last quarter's earnings. But if you assume that coronavirus is only temporary (it may not be, but let's be optimistic for a second) it means that long term the numbers are calling for a crash... eventually. One of these days. Longer than you can remain solvent while shorting it.

Probably.

In other words, I've got no idea what's going on. The markets have been weirdly stable (in price-to-earnings terms) for the past decade, at a number that's too optimistic, before coronavirus. Surely the inevitable at-least-short-term loss of earnings should have corrected that, but it hasn't. So either people are thinking very long term, or they're just nuts.

[1] https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio

Re: Ad Boycott of Facebook Keeps Growing

#120

Post by greatwhitenorth »

tech-historian wrote: post #64

Serious questions: Are the people that work at Facebook proud to work there? What is morale like inside that place? When someone asks you what you do, and you say "I work for Facebook," what is their typical reaction? Not trying to be snarky. I'm genuinely curious how these perceptions/feelings might have changed over the past few years.

You can ask this question about most of the for profit businesses. Apple (Foxconn), Amazon(Warehouse issues), Microsoft(ICE), just a few examples. How many of those who are against Facebook are still using Apple products or buying from Amazon. You can't pick and choose your ethics.
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