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?
I was working at Facebook during the 2016 election and it was pretty unavoidable. A big part of the problem was just that everyone was using Facebook for work all the time. So quite often, there would be some enormous thread arguing about whether X or Y was the right policy, was Trump violating the rules and should be kicked off Facebook, or was Facebook's anti-Trump policies violating freedom of speech, or was it ra…
FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
441–450 of 527 posts
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#442On one side, some people have an interest in not accepting that their financial success is arbitrary and illegitimate. On the opposite side, some people feel that they have been locked out of an arbitrary wealth transfer and so they have a strong interest in not accepting that they're incompetent losers and that they deserve to be at the bottom of the food chain because they didn't time the market right (a highly speculative and irrational market too!). Or maybe they didn't pass the Facebook whiteboard test job interview questions several years back (which is also an arbitrary hiring process by many accounts)... So basically they missed out on a huge opportunity because of some fickle arbitrary reason.
I don't think blocking discourse is going to improve things. History has shown time and time again that preventing free speech will stop people from finding compromises. The only solution to the worsening problems will be violence.
If the elites keep suppressing speech, the result will be worse than WW2 and the elites will not stand a chance because it will be fought on their own turf... The elites won't even know who their enemy is. Their own friends and family members could be against them. They won't even realize it until it's too late.
The right thing to do is to find political solutions. I personally think that UBI (Universal Basic Income) would solve most problems. It wouldn't fix the wealth gap immediately, but it would fix the mechanism which is suspected of causing arbitrary (centralizing) wealth transfer and that would at least level the playing field.
UBI is a really good compromise. If the elites are so confident in their superior abilities, surely they have nothing to lose by leveling the playing field right?
BTW, I currently earn 100% passive income so I'm actually saying this as someone who is on the winning side... I've come so close to complete failure - I leaped over the crevasse in the nick of time; the system's fickleness and arbitrariness are crystal clear to me. I'm currently standing on the winning side of a very deep precipice and I can see legions of talented people running straight into it.
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Forcing"? Is there actual force involved, or is it just more speech?
If you are at work in an open floor plan just trying to do your job while some of your co-workers are carrying on about whatever, you are pretty much forced to have to listen to it. You are now no longer achieving 100% of what you could be doing because your brain is distracted. That's before you even attempt to participate.
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work at FB. I wouldn’t want to be working alongside people who think I’m a mercenary abdicating my moral precepts. And I wouldn’t expect that of my colleagues. So my guess is that you could get away with it easily, but you‘d be doing a disservice to yourself and your team.
No, I certainly wouldn't think of my coworkers as mercenaries for hire, as that's a very simplistic worldview that I don't subscribe to. My net concern is: Will me working at FB be a net good, neutral, or bad for society? I'm fine with neutral, I just don't want it to be a net bad.
I have worked for a lot of start-ups, including several that grew to become significant giants in their segment of the internet. Facebook has been the only one I worked at where there was a group of employees whose job was to create posters to hang up in all of the offices telling everyone else how important and worthwhile it was to work at FB -- looking back I think this level of internal propaganda should have been a warning sign.
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#445If 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.
How do you know if people cant express anger at someone? It is not mock question. I recently found out that colleagues who pretended to have good relationships (because we dont talk negatively about others as cultural thing) had long term resentments against each other. And those resentments were influencing work under surface in negative way - until it blew up into dysfunction which is how I realized.
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such as ... food production? "But your food is consumed by literal fascists"... water supply? "Did you know that evil people also drink the water you are providing and hydrate their bodies so they can do more evil things?" For people who believe that everything is political, there are no projects with less moral ambiguity, it's just more or less openly visible.
If you provide catering services to ICE maybe you'd have people getting political about who's eating your food. If you're producing water and only allowing hate groups to consume it, sure maybe you'll have this happen, but otherwise these examples are strawmen. Everything has some political issue around it, but Facebook has politics baked into it because it's using political issues as a means of making money. They se…
I don't really take issue with that, Germany even has that codified, and we're very far from being free-speech-absolutists. Media companies are compelled by law to air political ads by all political parties without checking them, judging them or commentary. Short of being obviously illegal, there's nothing they can do which lead to our center-left state media being told by the supreme court to air the far-right (actually far right, with skin heads, boots and all the stops, not just anti-low-skill-immigration conservatives) NPD's spot.
> Their platform is filled with fake accounts pushing genocidal agendas from dictators, and in many cases facebook is sweeping it under the rug.
But not really. They exist, but the platform isn't "filled" with them. The vast majority on FB is not political.
I'm sure that FB would be quite okay with not having politics at all. Sure, people are on the platform, but they'd rather have engagement around cat pictures, celebrity news and similar things, because people shouting at others about their ideology aren't buying sneakers. They're not a political advertising company that relies on political ads as their primary funding.
Banning political speech is simply not an option, because some people sometimes want to argue about politics, and you're going to have to fight your users if you don't allow that. You never want to fight your users.
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
political views !== who you think deserves human rights
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…
Note that I didn't say anything about white supremacists or nazis above. This is the party platform, and people who support that party either support -- or at least aren't strongly enough against -- these policies. And I really can't tolerate the attitude of "I want lower taxes and less regulation and smaller government so much that I'm going to vote in people who want to deny certain people their rights". I don't think these people are nazis, but I am continually disappointed that they make choices to enrich themselves at the expense of others. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, and many voters end up misunderstanding the effects of some policies to the point that they're actually voting against their own interests anyway.
I won't claim that the other party is all rainbows and virtue, or that they don't pull dirty tricks when they get the chance, but at least they generally don't try to take people's civil (and voting!) rights away or advance laws based on religious beliefs that discriminate against minority groups. It's telling that nearly all of the things I dislike about the Democrat party platform (expansion of surveillance state, willingness to invade foreign nations, lack of respect for due process, war on drugs, tough on crime) just happens to be shared across both parties, and often the Republican party takes a much more extreme stance on those issues.
I will also absolutely agree with you that cancel culture has gotten out of hand to the point of having a chilling effect on discussion that could be productive, critical, and worthwhile. And many people do make the awful, lazy, polarizing associations that you describe ("white supremacists are far-right so all conservatives must be white supremacists"). It's lame and I hate it. But let's not pretend that means that there aren't serious issues with the right's attitude toward civil rights, freedom from religion, equity and equality, social justice, criminal justice, and other things. If you vote Republican, you're voting for those things, even if you don't actively support them. We certainly shouldn't ostracize or alienate people who we don't agree with, or refuse to talk to them, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't call out people for supporting reprehensible policy.
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a business wants its employees to leave politics at the door, the business should too. If Facebook is going to have departments for government affairs, public policy, and lobbying, then it is entirely reasonable for employees to be politically active too. Otherwise, you're basically saying corporations should participate in the political process but individuals should not. And that's exactly how we got the Earth i…
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.
I'm lucky that I'm in a place financially and career-wise that I can just quit and find a new job if I disagree with my company's politics, but many others don't have that luxury. Their choices are either to talk about it and try to get their company to change, or feel awful keeping quiet.
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I agree that there's no need to bring up politics in the break room (or worse, during active work) and risk alienating people. It's a bad idea, just like talking about or advocating for particular religious beliefs.
But if your company is being politically active in ways you find unethical, I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to just put their heads in the sand, ignore it, and get their work done. And not everyone has the luxury of quitting a job whenever their don't agree with the company's politics.
Re: FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a business wants its employees to leave politics at the door, the business should too. If Facebook is going to have departments for government affairs, public policy, and lobbying, then it is entirely reasonable for employees to be politically active too. Otherwise, you're basically saying corporations should participate in the political process but individuals should not. And that's exactly how we got the Earth i…
That's not how it works. The business is employing you, not the other way around. They are the ones who set the standards for behavior in the workplace, not you, the employee. If you don't like it, you are free to move on.
It's a two-way street. You are providing your services to the company in exchange for compensation. It's an unequal relationship, to be sure, but the company needs employees to exist and survive.
> If you don't like it, you are free to move on.
If only life were that simple, and if jobs were so plentiful and easy to come by that people could be so picky. Sure, a lot of tech workers are in a great place financially such that they can quit in protest (and lose their health insurance, among other things), but most workers don't have that luxury.