FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that if a facebook employee wants to talk about poverty in underdeveloped countries on internal social media, then that's going to be ok, but if the discussion concerns people who were harmed because they followed bad medical advice that was spread by use of facebook, all of a sudden that's an unacceptable socal issue at work.

I'm confused with the question, given that you yourself gave the answer:

> The risk of running into both PR & legal trouble

You yourself stated a reason other than legal.

But even without PR, I'm surprised you're asking. Do you not believe they can be pushing these initiatives because they actually care about diversity? Or because they view it to be a competitive advantage over other companies? Or because they believe diversity will lead to better company performance? The last is one of the main stated goals in my company. I don't know if they themselves believe it, but it's clear that many, many people do.

> I tried to address this. Attitudes are changing over time. Being compliant yesterday doesn't necessarily mean you're compliant today, even if the law doesn't change wording.

I really, really do not see any group winning a court case against a company because they did not have special hiring events for people of their group. Perhaps in the future, but not any time soon. I do not for a second believe my company did this because they were concerned about the law.

If the company's normal recruitment practices is discriminatory towards a certain group, I can understand. That's not the case here. Moreover, even if it were, having such events would not protect them. You can't wipe discrimination in one part of the company by compensating in another. If your job application page has stuff that discriminates against, say, African Americans, then having special recruiting events for them will not alter the fact that you are discriminating.

> Also, we were talking about diversity training, and not affirmative action nor only hiring discrimination laws.

The thread is about discussions of diversity in the workplace, and were not limiting it to training.

FWIW, that's a claim that doesn't quite match my experience at work, nor of talking to some of the people who implement these programs. Though to be clear, we were talking about widespread mandatory company-wide meetings, not any old discussion on inclusion that happens to occur while at work. We may need to get more specific about which programs we're talking about, they're certainly not identical everywhere. It also doesn't seem to add up when I read our current laws, which are changing over time to emphasize.

> In order to achieve this, companies are activity discriminating against non-minorities, which some may call positive discrimination.

The historical term for this is affirmative action (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action), and the idea is to temporarily increase benefits for a disadvantaged group, not to intentionally decrease benefits for the advantaged group. Calling it discrimination, therefore, is a framing that isn't always true, and is somewhat political. It's not always true because things aren't always zero sum. If I choose to give someone a dollar, you don't lose a dollar.

If there really are a fixed number of jobs at a company that is 80/20 men, and the company decides 30% must go to women, then technically yes, that is a form of discrimination. But - just hypothetically - is it a negative discrimination if the reason that the company is 80/20 men in the first place is because it previously discriminated against women, and would have been 50/50 without several decades of history of unspoken discrimination?

It's important to also think about a few things- One, that unlike social prejudices, affirmative action is not intended to be permanent. It's intended to help boost people who've been unfairly and systematically disadvantaged, while they're disadvantaged, and only until things even out. After that, the boost should go away by design. Two, that some of those disadvantages in history have been really extreme, and the kind of discrimination you might imagine you feel when your company tries to hire more women isn't the same order of magnitude of what women and black people as a whole have gone through.

> Regardless, it's discrimination nonetheless and it's very common yet somehow nobody cares.

Is all discrimination bad always? I'm very discriminating about my partners. I'm not sure that nobody cares, I think some people are in favor of seeing that gender and racial injustices actually go away, since not doing anything about it hasn't worked yet.