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FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

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311–320 of 527 posts

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

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 real…

Immune means you won't get sick. Not getting sick just means you didn't catch it.

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

#312
post #296

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…

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).

> Yes

So then you agree with the vast majority of people that it is not a "political" decision to refuse to ban someone for wearing a "vote for Biden/Trump" shirt?

Cool. That is my point. Basically everyone would not call it political to refuse to ban someone for that.

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

#313

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…

> its nature takes stances on deeply political topics

Most of its employees job have nothing about politics. They imagined such relevancy themselves to create a greater significance/satisfaction from the daily mundane job.

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

#314
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?

You hate how polarized the disclosure had became, where not taking a stance is now the same as taking the stance for the opposite side.

I would say, FB did the right thing here, to not supporting a platform that actively politicizing itself.

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

#315
Yesterday, I introduced some of my pupils — in this case, a group of ten rowdy pre-teens — to the idea of decorum and vulgarity. There’s could well be a whiff of truth to a comparison between my class of children and this story about FB employees.

It feels very old fashioned, but are we not getting a little burned out by a world where people openly nail gun their identity politics to the mast?

When I were a lad (way back in the nineties) I was taught it was rude to talk about politics, religion, or money. This applied to anywhere one was in polite company, not just at home, and definitely not at work.

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

#316
post #291

Probably better to #deleteFacebook and give everyone access to their own Mastodon instance for ~$5/yr.

It costs a lot more than that to host a Mastodon instance. The system requirements for all of the dependencies are pretty heavy

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

#317
post #202

I wonder what the people who justify working for Facebook because they’re “changing it from the inside” think about this.

are there really people that naive at fb?

Yes, I've lost a couple friends over this unfortunately.

Maybe because it's so... insidious? There are engineers at Facebook that think Facebook is protecting free speech. It's so strange.

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

#318

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…

My point is that this what happens in real life. People will continue to engage in stuff that they want to engage in. Facebook doesn't force people to engage in anything.

I think it is far worse to attempt to condition people by showing them things *they wouldn't otherwise engage with". What is scarier, showing somebody something they want to engage in based on their past behaviour, or showing somebody something they wouldn't have otherwise seen if you hadn't gone out of your way to shove it down their throat?

People seem to want Facebook to make people more placid. Oh you have extreme views? Here's, let's condition that out of you by only showing you more moderate stuff. Oh you think x is bad? Let's not show you anything to do with x so that you'll hopefully forget about it and not engage with that part of your brain any more.

Like I've already said, this alternative is far more Orwellian and far more of a tool for social control, than simply optimising for engagement.

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

#319

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 I use Facebook to say in touch with old friends. If they want to share last Tucker's video, not sure why FB should block them if I don't block them.

I don't think it's a realistic concern that FB would block content from mass-market media for political reasons. They might block it for copyright, but there's no benefit in deplatforming material that's already been seen by tens of millions of cable viewers.

My problem with Facebook is that it acts as radicalization pipeline by channeling lies that are too crazy for mass market media into the minds of people who are susceptible to believe them.

For a recent example in America, Facebook was used to spread propaganda to Republican rural residents in Oregon by telling them that Democrats were coming to light wildfires in their towns. Oregon rural people responded by setting up their own vigilante checkpoints.

It goes without saying that the claim that Democrats were coming to set rural Oregon on fire was a lie, but that lie spread like wildfire through Facebook, and it was a lie that could have very easily resulted in fatal violence.

To make matters worse, many of the too-crazy-for-mass-media ideas spread on Facebook are the product of astroturf propaganda and are not organic. The problem is not people sharing videos of Tucker Carlson, or even individuals spewing racist diatribes; the problem is well-funded right wing propaganda groups using Facebook to distribute material that encourages people to hate--or even kill--their fellow citizens.

While I agree that judges should make the ultimate decision on what is acceptable speech, the judicial system just isn't fast enough to respond to the speed of Facebook-propagated propaganda. Society needs a better solution; we can't wait for a perfect one.

Facebook is pouring gasoline on the fires of social division. This is not just unethical but is extremely dangerous to social stability and it ought to be stopped.

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

This is a fair point, but I think the political aspect is an "emergent property" if you will, rather than an inherent one. If Facebook limits the filtering to engagement, then it isn't the fault of Facebook that political content is engaging. That's just human nature. Disasters, outrage, politics, polarizing topics - these are all popular topics both online and off-line, and apread quickly as town gossip well before…

it's not emergent, it's inherent. facebook is political because it was designed from the start to control information. that's coercive, designed literally to change people's behavior, whether covertly or overtly, which is the essence of power and the political. facebook employees cannot absolve themselves of responsibility by saying it's the machine that did it, or that other people were involved and complicit.

being political is not an incidental facet of facebook, it's a core intention.

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