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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

#351

Post by searchableguy »

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…

I want people to pay. It will

- Reduce majority of bots by making them unsustainable.

- Provide direct money to improve moderation and make platforms liable.

- Make journalism cater to individuals rather than ad networks.

- Remove toxicity because trolls won't pay after getting banned regularly. No need for other fingerprinting methods.

- Reduce the number of users and silo them automatically.

Free business models are anti-competitive and result in worse service for the users by making platforms accountable to advertisers (other companies) than consumers.

Force facebook to introduce minimum payment based on purchasing power. Outlaw free/freemium models in software or limit them to a time period (3-6 months).

This won't apply to non-profit services. And open source will be fine since it will only apply to services or for-profit companies.

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

#352

Post by tha0x4 »

jsabo wrote: post #72
patorjk wrote: 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?

That depends on if your existence is political I suppose. Ask some of your LGBT colleagues, especially trans colleagues, if they feel like can just leave politics at the door.

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

#353

Post by tanilama »

throwitawayfb wrote: post #168

I've just been given an offer from Facebook and I have a few days to decide to take the job or not. The ethical implications of what I'm doing are intense. On one hand, a near 400k total comp package is very nice, but on the other hand I don't want to make the world worse off. I think if I could make that kind of money working from home for another company it'd be an easier decision. Unfortunately, I have to play the…

Not intense at all.

As a screw in the Facebook machine, your significance is trivial. This is true regardless of your intention.

Get over the ethnical drama I would say. Big tech is about as ethnical as banks. In another word, the companies don't care, and they are probably not.

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

#354

Post by tha0x4 »

ketzo wrote: post #280
travisoneill1 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked with many LGBT colleagues who never bring up politics at work. This "existence is political" thing is just a bullshit phrase that the obnoxious people who can't go an hour without bringing that crap up use to justify it.

Correction: they never brought up politics to you . You don't know that they weren't political in their discussions with other colleagues. Perhaps it is worth considering why that might be the case. People whose existences are deeply politicized (and they do indeed exist) are not often excited to have political conversations with people who say things like "'existence is political' thing is just a bullshit phrase." I…

[dead]

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

#355

Post by newcomputer »

munificent wrote: post #240
reader_mode wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a straw man argument, just because an employee isn't allowed to bring politics to work doesn't mean they can't be politically active on their own time.

So individuals can do recreational politics but corporations are free to sink as much of their resources into it as they want? Is your claim that we really need more corporate control over politics in the US and less citizen participation?

Individuals are also free to sink as much of their resources into it as they want.

The fact of the matter is political conversations have high risk of annoying/frustrating/alienating their participants. To have these conversations at work is just making employees less productive and asking for a controversy.

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

#356

Post by dntrkv »

munificent wrote: post #130
dntrkv wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning a harmful substance, and banning a platform for communication are not comparable. There is no shortage of sites that will take Facebook's place. What is the legislation you propose to prevent Facebook, or the millions of other existing or soon-to-be existing apps, from doing harm to people?

> Banning a harmful substance, and banning a platform for communication are not comparable. OK, consider gambling. That is simply a kind of software that enables people to engage in behavior that turns out to be harmful for a large number of them. And, because of that fact, it is heavily regulated. > What is the legislation you propose to prevent Facebook, or the millions of other existing or soon-to-be existing apps…

I am not concerned about hurting the poor corporation. What I am concerned about is having actual laws in place, not enforcement based on outrage. If Facebook is doing thing X, we decide we shouldn't allow thing X, we make thing X illegal. If FB continues to do thing X, we apply the law to them. We don't just dish out punishments for vague "You're hurting America" crimes. You need to define the thing you want banned, and it can't be "Facebook."

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

#357

Post by clomond »

xnyan wrote: post #331
patorjk wrote: 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?

What this means in intent and practice is that you are not allowed to discuss social issues that the hierarchy and those that align with the hierarchy find objectionable. 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 fo…

I.e. it’s all good as long as you don’t rock the boat.

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

#358

Post by searchableguy »

xnyan wrote: post #331
patorjk wrote: 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?

What this means in intent and practice is that you are not allowed to discuss social issues that the hierarchy and those that align with the hierarchy find objectionable. 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 fo…

I wonder if free-speech or political protection in workplace can be abused by competitors to destroy your culture as proposed by people in the comments. Is there a chance of that happening or does it already happen?

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

#359

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

gabereiser wrote: post #205
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this, I’ve worked at places where we could talk politics and have disagreements and it’s totally fine. It’s when those discussions become toxic it’s an issue and management would rather avoid those hard conversations all together. Having said that, I have also worked places where it’s been banned. I also remember certain mailing lists just as toxic for non-political (maybe political in the engineering world) reasons.…

A problem with suppressing unrelated discussion (like politics and public policy) for all the right reasons such as those mentioned above, is that the suppression alone can be validly interpreted as the bosses/mods/admins reinforcing the status-quo if the workers/employees/users already feel oppressed or marginalised.

Advancing progressive politics necessarily requires upsetting the status-quo, whereas if someone is a social-regressive then simply adhering to the status-quo suits their agenda just fine.

...so then some places want to avoid that image so they do allow discussion on controversial topics with the constraint that people debate things civilly - so far so good - except those same places want to void an image of partisanship - and in the spirit of freedom-of-speech they'll allow discussion on any topic (again, provided it's done civilly).

...which leads to that place or community falling victim of the paradox of intolerance (as, by their own rules, those communities must allow for the advocacy of genocide and unspeakable crimes provided they're advanced by an individual who conducts themselves with politeness, while their debate opponent might be a gay, black disabled Ethiopian Jew who is rightfully concerned for their own life and future who may utter a swear-word a bit too loudly and suffer censure for doing so).

As far as I can tell, the most workable solution to that is for the bounds of the Overton Window to be explicitly declared by the bossses/mods/admins - and in doing-so instantly open themselves up to accusations of partisanship, especially if extremists take advantage of people acting in good-faith.

I believe in most places the current Overton Window permits discussion and advancement of communist utopian ideals but not far-right ethnonationalism - assuming those two are somehow equivalent - and if Facebook - or any other place - had a similar declared Overton Window policy then it can be said they're biased towards the left, which is great fodder for the pundits on America's most popular right-wing TV news channel.

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

#360

Post by CaptainZapp »

dntrkv wrote: post #62
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't that only happening because of FB allowing disinformation to spread so easily?

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.

> Curious how you think it's possible for FB to prevent the spread of disinformation?

For example by doing something when they are warned for years by multiple entities that FB is used as a tool to support genocide, like in Myanmar.

It seems that only when such things blow up publicly and the stench of bad publicity gets too bad they send out Zuckerbot announcing his usual platitudes to then get back to business as usual. And that's far from the only example were their product was used for oppression by authoritarian regimes.

This company could do a hell of a lot more to counter this. But they just don't give a shit, unless publicity gets too bad.

edit : word change

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