I always liked the rules that one prominent local web design company has: they don't work with political or religious organizations. They don't seem to include state organizations in that, but I would. I think this removes lots of potential headache right away.
Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
421–430 of 1001 posts
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it. Here's the main part of what Naval says: "If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it." It's like the phone company.…
> If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it. Interestingly the underlying assumptions in most analyses like this is that everyone lives in US and obeys US laws. What if China goes after a political dissident through Facebook? Even worse, what if Facebook propaganda is used to incite genocide by the government of Myanmar? Where do you get the court order to take it down? U…
> Interestingly the underlying assumptions in most analyses like this is that everyone lives in US and obeys US laws.
Even better! Stop trying to act like global companies, and pick a jurisdiction to work out of. If Facebook is an American company (which they are), they are held to and follow US laws.
Maybe this means that Facebook doesn't remove Nazi propaganda because of the US 1st Amendment. What follows is actual proper competition, perhaps Germany bans Facebook, which means either a new German company GesichtBuch, can compete by being based in Germany and following german laws. Or, people enjoy Facebook and then rally their government for laws to be changed.
What we have now is companies trying to exist in every country, which means they have to follow the worst laws of every country.
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#423Someone at GitLab just made a suggestion to change the wording of the policy that I merged https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...
The new text is on a slippery slope: "Derogatory staments", "threats" and "discrimination" are all very subjective and up to the interpretation of whoever-has-power or feels offended by anything, and we've seen this go wrong so many times recently. It's almost a complete reversal from the previous statement.
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#424I personally think this is awesome. I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product. If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal mea…
You'd be surprised at what is "not illegal". Every community moderates. You can make an argument that some sites have moderated too much, or been too overtly political. But every community moderates, and has to. This can be demonstrated with a simple example. Guess what isn't illegal? Spam! It should be obvious that FB and Twitter etc have to take spam down though. Then there's abusive behaviour. Stalking, harassment…
good point, but from a tactical perspective, not moderating might have made sense, to force lawmakers' hands in passing stronger laws about spam, harrassment, propaganda, etc.
they'd have a regulatory shield and probably retain carrier status, rather than sticking their necks out by selectively moderating content.
a moderate amount of moderation is my preference, but i see the value in freer speech zones on the internet (that i can mostly ignore).
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#425Well, Gitlab just became even more irrelevant in my book.
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#426Without trying to be inflammatory in any manner, I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege to say one shouldn’t discuss politics at work. If you disagree I’m happy to discuss this viewpoint rather than being downvoted to oblivion. Lots of issues are deemed “political”, but imagine you fall into one of the marginalized groups: — lgbt: Don’t discuss the possibility about being fired for your sexuality becau…
Let's not forget office politics. In that case, you basically can't discuss anything at work.
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#427I personally think this is awesome. I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product. If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal mea…
Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it. Here's the main part of what Naval says: "If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it." It's like the phone company.…
That's a great way to lose advertisers. Case in point: Youtube's demonetization policy.
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a publisher might get you off in the States, but in a lot of countries publishers are held to be legally culpable for material they publish. So publishing nazis, online abuse, illegal content etc is a legal issue.
This is also true in the US. See my reply to the parent. The Naval quote is wrong.
He's exactly right on it. Facebook is not a court. If certain speech is illegal, how would they even decide? If certain speech is illegal, have a court label it illegal and send them an order to remove.
That concept exists within our system.
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#429I think this is a good decision. I actually hold similar beliefs to many of my coworkers in SF but I find it horrifying how common it is to dehumanize nearly half the country. I've lived in three major cities in the US, two on the east coast. San Francisco is the only city where co workers routinely disparaged people living in other states. I do not think employees in tech companies have the capability to be arbiters of anything cultural in this country. Leave that to governments.
Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it. Here's the main part of what Naval says: "If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it." It's like the phone company.…
The problem with at least Facebook and Twitter (and possibly Google) in this analysis is that their attention-grabbing model requires them to analyse and interfere with the data which is coming through their systems. The only way not to do that would be for FB timelines and Twitter feeds to be strictly sequential feeds which at some point in the past they may have been but they are not now. Once you start basing your…
Exactly. At face value, I'm firmly in favor of what Ravikant was saying, but even the simple example of a spam filter proves how it's impossible in practice: without basic spam filtering, something like Twitter would be absolutely unusable in the face of endless crypto and malware spam. At some level, Twitter/FB/et al have to do SOMETHING to shape/filter the volume of traffic they receive.