Probably better to #deleteFacebook and give everyone access to their own Mastodon instance for ~$5/yr.
FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
291–300 of 527 posts
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like Rush says in Free Will, "If you choose not to decide, You still have made a choice".
Taking that logic at face value, it would mean "if you choose not to take a political stance, then you still have made a choice". Okay, so you've chosen not to make a decision. Yet I don't see how having made the choice implies you've still made a decision ("you have still taken a political stance"). If anything it seems like you just argued against the point?
This is an extreme example. But. Imagine someone knocks on your door and says “please help, the secret police are after me.”
You don’t help, but you don’t report them to the secret police either.
That is a choice.
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#293Facebook 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…
[deleted]
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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. Not really, no. That is not usually what people mean, when they say "take a political stance". We can extend this to othe…
[EDIT: actually what’s probably quite relevant is all the stories about high schools sending young women home because they don’t approve of their outfits even if said outfit doesn’t violate a dress code.]
Imagine someone walks into a grocery store naked.
Or wearing a t-shirt with a explicit image of a man and a woman having sex. Or two men having sex.
Or a t-shirt which says / shows something extremely inflammatory yet not illegal.
I could imagine various stores making various decisions in all of these cases, all of which would be the folks working in that store expressing their beliefs!
Humans are inherently social and thus inherently political (politics in the sense of politics as the negotiation and management of a community).
Or imagine someone walks into a grocery store and doesn’t wear a mask! Lol :):/:(.
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone has to discuss diversity at work because there are laws prohibiting discrimination Sorry, but this is misleading. Most such companies are actively complying with antidiscrimination laws. These diversity discussions/initiatives at work are almost always unrelated to those laws. It's not a case of "Hey, we suddenly realized we're not complying with laws, so let's launch these initiatives." Most such discussi…
What are the initiatives about then, if not the laws and/or prohibiting discrimination? Do these companies agree with your claim, are you getting that from HR and/or company lawyers, or is this an opinion? I've never been to a diversity training program that did not talk about the laws, and I've been to many. You are suggesting that companies are wasting their money for no reason, and consciously running training pro…
I am speaking specifically to diversity initiatives visible to all employees, as opposed to those that are specific to managers or HR.
The law doesn't require us to banish the phrase "master/slave" from our lexicon, yet it is part of our diversity initiative.
The law doesn't require us to banish the words "whitelist/blacklist" from our lexicon, yet it is part of our diversity initiative.
The law requires we do not discriminate based on a protected category (gender, race, etc). We have always been compliant. However, the law does not require us to hold special recruiting events for underrepresented folks when we are already compliant, but yet that is a major part of my company's diversity initiative.[1]
There are pay disparity laws. We were fully compliant before they became the law. They are not part of the diversity initiative and usually not discussed.
The law doesn't prohibit us from saying "Merry Christmas!" but our diversity initiative addresses this.
The list goes on and on.
Note: I am not saying I'm against such initiatives. Merely noting that at least for my company (and jurisdiction), these initiatives are not about what the law requires. We have always had employee expectations training for all employees, and it already covered things required by law, long before the company dove into these initiatives.
It may be that your company's diversity initiative is about legal compliance, but for many company's, it is a lot more than that (by a lot, I mean the majority of the initiative is not required by law).
> The risk of running into both PR & legal trouble
There's a world of a difference between PR trouble and legal trouble. Your comment originally was about the legal side, and so is my response. I do believe that most diversity initiatives are about PR, and not about the law, which was why I responded.
[1] These are invite-only, and so it's not open to all groups - just the ones we picked.
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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. Not really, no. That is not usually what people mean, when they say "take a political stance". We can extend this to othe…
Yes, but a lot of companies would absolutely do so for employees--rather than customers--certainly including grocery stores even if they didn't otherwise have dress codes (which they likely do).
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
How could it not be the fault of Facebook when Facebook designed the algorithms that are creating all of the divisiveness on Facebook? If I build a bridge intending it to stay up and it happens to fall down 6 months later, I'm responsible for it. Facebook created an algorithm that divides people politically and that surfaces content that is provably fictional. So they should be held responsible for it regardless of t…
Truth is not the point of social media. Facebook isn't an encyclopaedia. Humans already gravitate towards groups that validate their opinions. It makes sense for Facebook to show people content they want to see. It is incredibly Orwellian to say "Facebook should only show people content which corrects their wrong views". Facebook isn't a social conditioning tool. I find the alternative to "misinformation" much scarie…
Facebook has a fact-checking program. That program has third-party fact-checkers. Facebook has been documented as pressuring those third-party fact-checkers to change their rulings.
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2593586717571940?id=673052479947730
https://www.fastcompany.com/90538655/facebook-is-quietly-pressuring-its-independent-fact-checkers-to-change-their-rulings
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the initiatives about then, if not the laws and/or prohibiting discrimination? Do these companies agree with your claim, are you getting that from HR and/or company lawyers, or is this an opinion? I've never been to a diversity training program that did not talk about the laws, and I've been to many. You are suggesting that companies are wasting their money for no reason, and consciously running training pro…
I am speaking specifically to diversity initiatives visible to all employees, as opposed to those that are specific to managers or HR. The law doesn't require us to banish the phrase "master/slave" from our lexicon, yet it is part of our diversity initiative. The law doesn't require us to banish the words "whitelist/blacklist" from our lexicon, yet it is part of our diversity initiative. The law requires we do not di…
> these initiatives are not about what the law requires.
Except they are. Your word list is an exceedingly literal straw-man interpretation of a law that is purposefully vague, and doesn’t prescribe which words you can use. You can’t assume that specific policies of a company aren’t there for legal reasons just because the law doesn’t state the exact same policy in the exact same words.
The spirit and the letter of the law, as I already pointed out, requires that employers take “reasonable” actions toward making all employees feel welcome. Society and business have collectively decided that certain words can or do make some people feel unwelcome. Because of that fact, and because companies don’t want their management sued for neglect, we have interpretations of what it means to be compliant that are predictive and speculative. That really does not mean that the initiatives are not about the law, in fact exactly the opposite. Asking people not to use certain words counts as one of those “reasonable” actions, and gives the company a paper trail of attempting to be compliant.
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
Because Facebook, by it's nature, is designed to filter content. It turned everyone and everything into a content generator, even down to the level of "Jimmy liked a post by Burger King!". It gives everyone access to this unfathomable ocean of content, and then filters it down to something a person can consume. Some of filtering is based on what the user wants to see, some of it is based on some notion of how "good"…
Phones lines do have that problem, just with a weaker effect on a smaller scale. Phone call spam/fraud is notoriously rampant, to the point where many carriers & developers create centralized systems to detect and filter calls down to something a person can tolerate. These systems are scored by spam reports and other metrics that I'm not privy to, some of it is T-Mobile or Google deciding what calls should be auto-blocked and what shouldn't (mostly driven by their desire to keep people using telephony, otherwise they wouldn't bother).
And the inevitable outcome of building a what-calls-go-through machine is that there are many parties trying to influence the machine. Eg. faking caller ID, evading blocks with throwaway numbers, spamming no-response calls to figure out which numbers are valid to target, faking a robot voice to pretend to be a real person.
Practically every modern platform uses centralized systems to filter the noisy world down to something fit for purpose, and sometimes this intersects with political issues. That's no reason to expect a platform like Facebook to become even more political in their stance than the existing level of politicization that is almost impossible to avoid.
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
How could it not be the fault of Facebook when Facebook designed the algorithms that are creating all of the divisiveness on Facebook? If I build a bridge intending it to stay up and it happens to fall down 6 months later, I'm responsible for it. Facebook created an algorithm that divides people politically and that surfaces content that is provably fictional. So they should be held responsible for it regardless of t…
Truth is not the point of social media. Facebook isn't an encyclopaedia. Humans already gravitate towards groups that validate their opinions. It makes sense for Facebook to show people content they want to see. It is incredibly Orwellian to say "Facebook should only show people content which corrects their wrong views". Facebook isn't a social conditioning tool. I find the alternative to "misinformation" much scarie…
>It makes sense for Facebook to show people content they want to see.
The problem is, Facebook doesn’t show people content that they want to see. They show people content that they will engage with. That’s a very important distinction.
HN algorithm/moderators actually explicitly do the opposite: if a thread gets too many comments too quickly, it’s ranked downward. The assumption is too many comments too quickly indicates a flamewar and the HN moderators want to keep a civil discussion. The approach Facebook takes is to “foster active discussion” which on the Internet typically means a flamewar. Noting generates engagement like controversial political views. So that’s what Facebook’s algorithm/moderators show to their users.
Facebook absolutely is a social conditioning tool, it’s designed from the ground up to show people content that stirs their emotions enough to click “like” or the mad face icon or even leave a comment and wait around until someone replies back.