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FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Yankees and Red Sox fans regularly got into shouting matches on the ESPN software development mailing lists, I expect they'd be told to knock it off, and I wouldn't see that as a contradiction of the idea that sports is important.

Even so, in the grand scheme of things sports is utterly inconsequential, politics isn’t. If your team won the Super Bowl or your nation took home a lot of gold at the Olympics, how does that affect you materially?

The reason to avoid political discussions is that they're often as toxic as the worst sports arguments, not that the underlying topics don't matter. No matter how important the underlying issue is, having my coworkers call each other nasty names won't resolve it.

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

#152
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not getting it is not the same thing as immune.

What is it, then?

Later edit: To add to my comment, what do you call sleeping in the same bed, eating from the same plate and having direct physical contact with a person who gets the virus and ends up in IC or dead while the other person tests negative for the virus?

Let's not forget that ever since February we've all known that this virus is particularly easy to transmit/get, so you cannot say "that person got really lucky, that's why he/she hasn't got it".

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

#153
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, you were probably immune to that particular cold strain. Or you weren't in close contact with your wife during that timeframe, but that wasn't the case for the persons I've written about.

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

#154
post #93

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…

At various points in time, Facebook has made it possible to target political ads toward based on your known interest in pseudoscience or antisemitism [1]. Giving access to this degree of targeting (even if the categories are algorithmically generated) is inherently political.

[1] https://www.getrevue.co/profile/themarkup/issues/probing-fac...

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

#155
post #32

Generally I try and shy away from being too alarmist, but I am so disillusioned with the kind of tech worker HN's userbase seems to represent. I think it's a feckless attitude to think that working in one of the best-paid, global, most influential professions in the world right now means that your only obligation is to clock in on time, code whatever you're told to code, take no ownership of the effect your work may…

I'm convinced that discussing ethics or politics inside Facebook or Twitter will have literally zero effect. Employees should either quit or get back to work.

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

#156
Very glad to work somewhere where people just don’t talk politics or anything serious at work. I have kids and I don’t want to risk my job over saying the wrong thing. I don’t need you to be my partner in discovering myself, let’s just discuss our work, the weather, and the local sportsball results.

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

#157
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone has to discuss diversity at work because there are laws prohibiting discrimination How are these two things causally connected in your mind?

Are you implying they're not connected, that discrimination and diversity are unrelated? Your wording makes it sound like some kind of political debate trap you're setting. FWIW, I'm uninterested in arguing here why and whether there should be such laws, or justifying efforts to prevent discrimination. The existence of these laws is a fact, and you're free to study the history and legal precedents for why they exist.…

No. He's implying that the fact something is a law doesn't mean your employer should lecture you about it.

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

#158
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Forcing"? Is there actual force involved, or is it just more speech?

If you are at work in an open floor plan just trying to do your job while some of your co-workers are carrying on about whatever, you are pretty much forced to have to listen to it. You are now no longer achieving 100% of what you could be doing because your brain is distracted. That's before you even attempt to participate.

Facebook has been remote for most of the year and will continue to be remote until next summer, so this is clearly not the case here since this decision is coming now.

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

#159

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…

Well put!

My parents are very much of the "no politics at work" generation and I really question why that cultural strain has carried itself into 2020 since it only serves company board members/executives and categorizes rank and file employees as automaton code monkeys who should "shut up and type".

Armchair thought: in this odd period of history where, ostensibly, capitalism "won" as the political system of choice and "the end of history" was declared we have entered an alarming stage of hyper-capitalism mixed with growing discontent/civil unrest. More than ever there seems to be a breathless determination by upper-middle class professionals to not rock the boat in any way in the hopes that these mega-corporations will continue to prop up the stock market, pay out outrageous salaries, and keep the gravy train running. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance where we can see how much damage the big players in tech are wreaking on global society - there's ample evidence - but to recognize and face it would sully the deeply held ideal that tech is some kind of great, benevolent force in our society (more cynically: confronting it would also mean confronting that fact that we as tech workers have ethical responsibilities to society at large that we have at best ignored, at worst defied).

Practically, it's not. Yes, you can catch up on how your cousin's new baby is doing, but you can't disentangle that from the extremist propaganda, disinformation, and real harm that these platforms incur by leveraging human psychology against us. Taking the view that ethics and work are separate silos is hopelessly naive. Almost every profession requires constant awareness and ethics in order to be a benevolent force: doctors, lawyers, builders, scuba gear manufacturers, car designers all have a responsibility to their end user and I can't see how tech is any different. I doubt people would react the same way if this were GM instead of Facebook and their employees were up in arms after learning the car they had been designing and building had a track record of blowing up and killing people.

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

#160
post #74
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has to discuss diversity at work because there are laws prohibiting discrimination, that's a good thing. Not everyone has to discuss politics at work.

I'd love it if there was a difference between the two again.

I think I know what you mean, and me too. But... mandatory diversity training at work is typically very bland, sticks to communicating what the rules are, and is very apolitical compared to forums, employee banter, or stuff you find on the news or Facebook or YouTube. Having been through a bunch of them at several companies, I wouldn't put them in the same camp as 'politics' at all.
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