Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 527 posts

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

#471

Post by kelnos »

dylan604 wrote: post #95
pjc50 wrote: post #43

Earlier 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.

I mean, that reduces to basically anything that distracts me from work. Ideally there are no non-work conversations of any kind happening in an open floor plan office. And even work conversations should be kept to a minimum, and taken to a conference room if there's going to be any length and substance.

Why focus on political speech when it's really any non-work speech that's distracting and should be banned?

But we all know that's impossible to enforce, and we've developed unfortunate but necessary coping mechanisms, like noise-canceling headphones.

Or maybe, y'know, just give up on the open-office concept, which has always been a productivity destroyer. I imagine post-COVID office spaces will be much more conducive to quiet and productivity.

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

#472

Post by kelnos »

themacguffinman wrote: post #284
sg47 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the proof that others are being forced into debate?

Unsure what the GP was referring to, but the article suggests that the pressure comes from activists spamming work feeds: > “What we’ve heard from our employees is that they want the option to join debates on social and political issues, rather than see them unexpectedly in their work feed.” [said Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne] Others have organized to skip work in an act of defiance, affecting colleagues who are no…

It is kinda funny to me that FB internally has realized that their feed algorithm is awful, but has enough cognitive dissonance built up to not associate that with the public non-work FB as well.

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

#473

Post by rguiliani »

newcomputer wrote: post #355
munificent wrote: post #240

Earlier 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.

Lol. You are a privileged retard.

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

#475

Post by jakear »

luckylion wrote: post #396
Reedx wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once you realize how things work from the inside, you realize that the majority of people do want to make the world a better place It's hard to square that with the algorithmic feed, likes, etc, which are making the world worse every single day in favor of engagement metrics. We've known for many years how destructive these are. Facebook and Twitter could literally make the world a better place simply by disabling…

> Facebook and Twitter could literally make the world a better place simply by disabling those kind of features. Just remove them. I'm not sure about that. I agree that the world might be better, but I'm not sure they could just disable them. The next smaller competitor who won't will have more user engagement and grow. If something is a very effective advantage, I believe you can only remove it by coordinated action…

This doesn’t need to be a secret flipped switch. It could be a very public announcement, which lots of supporting data and arguments. Nobody is going to build a successful competitor to FB based off of “we’re doing the same thing that Facebook just very publicly stopped doing because they took a stand against its society-destroying implications”.

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

#476

Post by claudeganon »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #389
claudeganon wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you have to shut down Facebook. Just shut down targeted advertising, algorithmic filtering of content, and a lot of their surveillance practices (e.g. shadow profiles).

Should Google's targeted advertising also be prohibited? Should Google's algorithmic filtering of content also be prohibited? Should Doubleclick/Google's surveillance practices (which almost certainly include some kind of "shadow" profile) be prohibited? Also, people have been talking about shadow profiles for at least a decade now, and yet no disgruntled FB employee has revealed all. Why do you think that is?

Yes of course? Because Facebook employees are highly paid, I imagine. The reason why that whistleblower got so much coverage is that usually all it takes to keep some quiet is to pay them off.

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

#477

Post by dexen »

kelnos wrote: post #459
dexen wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upon reading your, and GP, it occurred to me that we've lost the idea that it is the buyer that is responsible for the purchases . It used to be that people and organizations making unethical purchases were the ones we considered, and held, responsible. For a long time we've had good, positive movements centered on informing the buyer. We added expiration dates, ingredient lists, nutritional value information, crashw…

> Most of the services (FB and the likes) we're discussing here are morally neutral by their nature I don't think that's the case. Is it moral to exploit human psychology when developing addictive features that pull people into the site over and over? Is it moral to sell user information to advertisers so they can emotionally manipulate you into buying crap you don't need? Is it moral to design interactions that evok…

I hear your objections, and I should have worded my idea better.

The gist was, a bare messaging+microblogging platform is, by its own nature, morally neutral[1]. Of course if the operator starts doing editorial decisions - like algorithmic timelines, or propping up/pushing down content, or manipulating user mood - then the operator clearly is making moral judgements & decisions.

Funny how respecting user privacy does, at least partly, absolve the operator from a lot of risks related to making moral judgements on a mass scale in a hurry.

--

[1] with the only caveat that, if somebody believes facilitating communication to be evil or good, then it would be considered respectively evil or good.

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

#478

Post by Reedx »

gfodor wrote: post #53
beefalo wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

History rhymes.

A witch-hunt or a witch purge is a search for people who have been labelled witches or a search for evidence of witchcraft, and it often involves a moral panic or mass hysteria...

In current language, "witch-hunt" metaphorically means an investigation that is usually conducted with much publicity, supposedly to uncover subversive activity, disloyalty, and so on, but with the real purpose of intimidating political opponents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt

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

#479

Post by vonmoltke »

kelnos wrote: post #451
fxtentacle wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"some idiot outraged over the removal of master/slave nomenclature" Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it. I belive you need to work on your example of a bad person ;) How about we go with? And then in the same breath that gal defends selling people's secrets for penni…

> Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it. I think "outrage" is an inappropriate response. We're talking about removing nomenclature that has been (and continues to be) used to oppress an entire segment of society. I think removing that is worth a little money and downti…

> > Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it.

> I think "outrage" is an inappropriate response. We're talking about removing nomenclature that has been (and continues to be) used to oppress an entire segment of society.

In this specific case, outrage is appropriate because the nomenclature as used by git has nothing to do with "master/slave". It's a well-intentioned but misguided attempt at what you describe, unless you are making the preposterous claim that the word "master" should be purged from all contexts.

Of course, WRT this article and the discussion on it, if you try to point this out and discuss it at a company like Github (or mine) where the group making these decisions is convinced of their correctness you risk ostracization and career suicide. In fact, the statement you closed with

> People who are "outraged" that it cost them some time and work probably could stand to show some compassion for their fellow humans.

implies that you also are convinced of the correctness of this decision, and that anyone who objects to it is not compassionate (and by implication, not worthy of consideration). This is not a good approach to take if your goal is to educate.

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

#480

Post by vonmoltke »

sigstoat wrote: post #33
t-writescode wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because ethical values are usually based on some political orientation Are you sure that isn't exactly backwards? Because it definitely should be the other direction in my very strong opinion. One's morals or beliefs on ethics should inform their politics, not the other way around. One way is based around a person's inner being, the other is molding their being and stances based on a sports team.

one of you is describing the world as it is, and the other the world as you think it ought to be.

I don't agree with that. I don't think people choose their ethics based on their politics, but I do think they compromise them in the name of political tribalism. It's a mistake to ascribe the personal ethics of a specific party member to the ethics of the party platform, particularly when there is limited choice of parties.
Post reply on HN