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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

#301

Post by IncRnd »

t-writescode wrote: post #101
xamuel wrote: post #93

Earlier 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…

> 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.

That's simply not true. One can verify the truth or falsehood of your statement by applying the knife of logic. Draw your statement to its logical conclusion in order to determine if it results in absurdity.

Let's do that.

A person who has had their brain surgically removed will (quite probably) never mention politics or attempt to control other's communications about politics. According to your statement, that person's actions are political. Sorry, but that's absurd.

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

#302

Post by freehunter »

nindalf wrote: post #75
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.

I have seen this question asked many times on such threads but have never seen a workable solution. Usually the response is something like "I'd shut the whole website down" or "I'd employ millions of moderators" or "I'd allow people to only post once a month" or "I would remove sharing links, only baby pictures allowed". Nothing practical. If you respond to any of these with examples of positive speech that would be…

Why is it our responsibility to figure out how Facebook can fix their algorithm? They employ thousands of the smartest engineers in the world and pay them absolutely ridiculous amounts of money. If they wanted to fix it, they would. As just random people on the Internet, it’s not our job to figure out how to fix it. It’s our job to complain about it enough to make them fix it themselves.

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

#303

Post by Talanes »

hartator wrote: post #116
Talanes wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some govs cut off your phone if you say certain keywords.

If the state is using your telecom to actively monitor you, would you call that telecom nonpolitical?

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

#304

Post by dragonwriter »

IncRnd wrote: post #301
t-writescode wrote: post #101

Earlier 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. That's simply not true. One can verify the truth or falsehood of your statement by applying the knife of logic. Draw your statement to its logical conclusion in order to determine if it results in absurdity. Let's do that. A person who has had their brain surgically removed will (quite probably) never mention politics or attempt…

Your conflation of passive inaction with an active choice to refrain from certain action is absurd.

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

#305

Post by vkou »

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…

> Why is that "by its nature"?

Because Facebook explicitly chooses how to construct the timeline it presents to its users, and becomes some of that timeline contains political content.

If Facebook were a dumb first-in-first-out aggregator, it wouldn't be political.

But it's not.

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

#306

Post by IncRnd »

dragonwriter wrote: post #304
IncRnd wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking a stance to not control what communication is allowed is a very political stance. That's simply not true. One can verify the truth or falsehood of your statement by applying the knife of logic. Draw your statement to its logical conclusion in order to determine if it results in absurdity. Let's do that. A person who has had their brain surgically removed will (quite probably) never mention politics or attempt…

Your conflation of passive inaction with an active choice to refrain from certain action is absurd.

1. People who live in the Congo may consciously choose not to become involved in Candian politics. It is absurd to think that is political.

2. You wrote: Your conflation of passive inaction with an active choice to refrain from certain action is absurd.

That is only meaningful as a circular definitio0n. Choosing not to act differs from an inability to act. Why? How would you define the difference between the action of not acting and the action of not acting, because of not making a choice to act?

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

#307

Post by dragonwriter »

IncRnd wrote: post #306
dragonwriter wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your conflation of passive inaction with an active choice to refrain from certain action is absurd.

1. People who live in the Congo may consciously choose not to become involved in Candian politics. It is absurd to think that is political. 2. You wrote: Your conflation of passive inaction with an active choice to refrain from certain action is absurd. That is only meaningful as a circular definitio0n. Choosing not to act differs from an inability to act. Why? How would you define the difference between the action o…

> How would you define the difference between the action of not acting and the action of not acting, because of not making a choice to act?

I wouldn't, because not making a choice to act in a particular way is very different from making a choice to avoid as policy acting in that way, or, as was at issue upthread, “Taking a stance to not” act in a particular way. Taking a stance is (for this subject matter, at least) political. Inaction on its own is not.

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

#308

Post by themacguffinman »

freehunter wrote: post #300
Thorentis wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indic…

That's no distinction at all, what people engage with is just one effective way of measuring what people want to see. HN simply optimizes for something else, that's no less of a social conditioning tool than optimizing for engagement, just in a different direction. You could say that it's designed from the ground up to show people content that stirs their curiosity enough to comment cautiously, or to hide content that stirs their emotions enough to engage strongly.

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

#309

Post by BeetleB »

dahart wrote: post #298
BeetleB wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Your whole argument is predicated on "The law is vague. Society has decided such phrases make people unwelcome, and thus companies can be penalized for it."

Unfortunately, the only way to know is to test it in the courts. We differ as to where society currently stands on such matters, and it is certainly not clear that were this to go to court, rulings will be made to penalize companies utilizing the lexicon in the manner that it has always been utilized. And of course, my company never said "We should stop using these words because we are interpreting the law this way (or we think society interprets the law this way)." The notion that there may be a lawsuit was not even mentioned with regards to these phrases.

Your argument is "law is intentionally vague, and society believes X". I agree on the former, and not the latter. Unfortunately, anyone can make any statement when it comes to vague laws, which is why having precedence in a court is important.

You've also not addressed the other examples in my comment. My company, which is compliant with the law on hiring based discrimination, is not going to get sued if they decide not to hold special recruiting events for people of certain protected classes. Your earlier comment asked whether "I am getting it from HR and/or company lawyers", and in this particular case, the answer is definitely "Yes". The need to hold such events has been widely discussed in the company, and it has been made clear that this is a proactive initiative, and not required at all of us. Much of the criticism about this particular part of the initiative within the company is very much about "this is not required by law". There is no way HR is going to claim it is.

Furthermore, I just noticed in your earlier reply:

> You are suggesting that companies are wasting their money for no reason, and consciously running training programs that are unnecessary? Why would "most" companies do that?

I suggested no such thing. Companies do a lot of things that are not required by law. I didn't say all such things are a waste and are "for no reason".

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

#310

Post by stale2002 »

adamsea wrote: post #294
stale2002 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 y…

> Or wearing a t-shirt

Or wearing a "vote for Trump/Biden" t shirt.

In that situation basically everyone would agree that it would be ridiculous to say that the grocery store should ban people for wearing that t-shirt.

I think that most people would not call refusing to ban someone for wearing this t-shirt as a "political" decision.

Most people would agree that it is not political to refuse to ban someone for wearing a "vote for Trump/Biden" shirt.

If you do call that political, to refuse to ban someone for that, basically everyone would disagree with you.

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