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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

#431

Post by dejavuagain »

vl wrote: post #422
daveFNbuck wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they have an unlimited supply of labor and we're living in a corporate hellworld, why do they pay so well and include so many perks? They sure seem to be acting like a company that's competing for a limited talent pool.

Because it makes business sense to hire best of the best. Football clubs have unlimited supply of players, yet they pay ridiculous amounts of money to their players.

You're assuming the best of the best decide where to work based on compensation. Also consider the number of pro players is miniscule compared to the number of engineers at fb. It's a false analogy because of the law of diminishing returns and population dynamics.

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

#432

Post by strken »

greencabs wrote: post #402
sidlls wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except they are. They aren't. In fact, the discussions I've seen at companies in the bay area go far beyond the minimum requirements of the law. They aren't about preventing discrimination, they're about actively increasing diversity (in some areas, but not all).

They are about protecting the company. https://classunity.org/racism-and-responsibilization-in-whit...

Protecting the company makes them sound like a defensive measure, when they seem equally an offensive measure to get ahead of the competition: "use our product, or come work for us, and feel good about yourself!"

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

#433

Post by dejavuagain »

thu2111 wrote: post #423
dangus wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know that this level of defeatism is justified. Quitting does help. Why does quitting help? Consider IBM. Their revenue is about 20% of its peak. It used to be seen as a monopoly power. Now we barely think about them. I think that IBM has made itself an unattractive place for employees where it used to be seen as an extremely prestigious place to work. And I think poor quality employees, along with average to…

Quitting doesn't help. For it to mean anything, there has to be a plausible alternative plan that the quitters are supporting. What is the plausible internal plan of the agitators and activists inside FB and other firms? They have none, beyond systematically ban more and more users who violate ever more bizarre and ad-hoc purity rules. That's not a plan. Moreover, quitting over this stuff isn't a one way street. Face…

Facebook exactly is an evil company. No question about it. To its very core. Anyone who works there is paid money to propagate an evil impact on the world and thus, all employees who work there are evil.

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

#434

Post by dejavuagain »

pjc50 wrote: post #51

If Facebook doesn't want to talk politics, it should stop making political donations to PACs.

That's right. There is a goal to separate the employer and employee to absolve the proletariat of the moral connection between their actions day-to-day and the bourgeois who all share in the protections of the corporate veil.

But this cannot be done, despite all attempts to quiet the cognitive dissonance. Every employee of an evil company is evil.

Every political message lobbied for by the employer is the employee's political statement. Any claims to the contrary reek of hypocrisy.

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

#435

Post by roenxi »

peterlk wrote: post #66
hirundo wrote: post #12

If we were to discuss politics at work at any length we would be at immediate risk of losing valuable people. We all pretty much know where we stand on politics, and it is not together. And many of us feel very strongly about our irreconcilable positions. But by carefully not talking about them (or engaging when someone less in tune starts) we get along just fine. That's not official policy but it is a good one.

This is exactly the argument for privacy. Privacy is about agreed lines because we know that there are some places where we just won't get along. The "if you have nothing to hide" argument assumes that you want to see the things that I'm hiding. In this case, people are hiding their political affiliation (or at least their explicitly expressed opinions) because we know that if it was shared, all of our lives would be…

Privacy is slightly different - it has a temporal aspect. Eg, religion on a census, for obvious reasons looking back at last century.

The consensus against retrospective punishment is a lot weaker than people might expect, and who knows what new social crimes the future will bring.

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

#436

Post by greencabs »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #410
greencabs wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will, in fact, just hire somebody else. American companies have access to an unlimited supply of labor. Better to stick around and try to unionize. It may not happen in your lifetime, but the other fact is the United States is a corporate hellworld. Workers have no say in anything. Until that changes, the corporations won’t.

If they have an unlimited supply of labor and we're living in a corporate hellworld, why do they pay so well and include so many perks? They sure seem to be acting like a company that's competing for a limited talent pool.

In short: to keep doing whatever they want without you opening your mouth.

To elaborate: They don’t all pay well. Not even close. And none of them pay workers in other countries well, and they can outsource endlessly with no repercussions.

But they want to keep their home in the US (the world military empire) because it lets them do whatever they want. And they don’t pay migrants nearly the same because migrants are bound by their visas. But too much of that and the Americans will catch on.

Unionizing in this case is extremely unlikely. There is too much for the employees to lose. Instead, Facebook and the US Government will continue doing whatever they want.

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

#437

Post by EVdotIO »

gbpz wrote: post #87
gfodor wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is the reason things have changed so much: Step 1: first, identify truly evil people (like self-avowed white supremacists) Step 2: find a unfalsifable or weak method to associate non-evil people with the evil ones. Step 3: once this method becomes part of the zeitguist, infer the association implies agreement. Step 4: once agreement is assumed when stating the association, imply the person's agreement is in…

People fall for it. It's horrid, but smart from a tactical perspective. I wonder if there are resources on creating divisions. It's a very interesting social science topic.

Read up on rhetoric, hard sales tactics and CIA/KGB sabotage. Here's a fun little one from the OSS that's still used in 2020:

(8) If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on.

https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/...

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

#438

Post by fareesh »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #394
fareesh wrote: post #363

If the climate is such that the employees are so passionate about politics, is it at all possible that zero employees have their thumb on the scale in terms of using their position to nudge towards their desired election result? That seems like a bigger issue. If I am an activist and I poison the enormous dataset that's being fed to a ML model, is anyone even going to notice?

They would notice the size of the ETL job necessary to do this (and tbh, I don't think anyone understands the individual level outputs of any large ML model well enough to accomplish this).

I'm reading a leaked internal Facebook document published on theverge.com where it's suggested that they build a "troll classifier" based on the use of words like "reeee", "normie", "IRL", "Shadilay", "lulz".

The have also suggested a "meme cache" - one of the memes shown is a Folgers coffee cup which says "Best part of waking up, Hillary lost to Trump".

Based on this classifier and hits to the meme cache, "trolls" would experience things like auto-logout, limited bandwidth.

Under "when to trigger this" they also suggest the period "Leading upto elections".

So on the one hand this document seems well-intentioned because there's some bad behavior in these groups like raiding, doxxing, racism, etc.

Rather than focusing on behaviour like doxxing and raids, the approach suggested seems to be directed at a specific group. Why? In the entire universe is it only this group that engages in this kind of behaviour?

It also does a broad classification that lumps anyone sharing the same memes, or vocabulary with punitive action.

Also they associate the election with this, which seems especially puzzling.

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

#439

Post by evgen »

luckylion wrote: post #421
4ggr0 wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird example to pick... Food and water production has VERY big ethical issues. Palm oil, mass-slaughter of animals, deforestation, Nestle taking away water from locals, CO2 emmissions etc. So yes, there are problems in the food and water industry, but I don't really get what your point is? Should we just close our eyes, ears and mouths and say "fuck it, not my problem"?

> Palm oil, mass-slaughter of animals, deforestation, Nestle taking away water from locals, CO2 emmissions etc. Not at all what I was aiming at. The problem people have with FB isn't how they produce the product, but who uses it. The problem with food and water in the equivalent scenario, would be in who consumes it. If you let everyone consume it "woah, that's a political choice". But it really isn't. It's the defau…

> The problem people have with FB isn't how they produce the product, but who uses it.

No, the problem is that the product they produce is _specifically designed_ to be used in this manner because conflict and argument increases "engagement" and for a large portion of the employee base their bonus depends on performing work that leads to this outcome.

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

#440

Post by pjc50 »

benjohnson wrote: post #24
hirundo wrote: post #12

If we were to discuss politics at work at any length we would be at immediate risk of losing valuable people. We all pretty much know where we stand on politics, and it is not together. And many of us feel very strongly about our irreconcilable positions. But by carefully not talking about them (or engaging when someone less in tune starts) we get along just fine. That's not official policy but it is a good one.

Our small company has a "No drama" policy. We have an astounding diverse team and we've learned to appreciate each other.

Does it also have a sexual harrasment policy, or is the response to one employee reporting that another groped them going to be "you're fired"? As is traditional?
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