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

Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta

thetimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 615 posts

Re: Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta

#521

Post by gitaarik »

Aurornis wrote: post #162
surprisetalk wrote: post #10

This book was SO GOOD. It's bleak. I always imagined that rich/powerful people only created suffering if that suffering was required for certain goals. It's easier for me to bear injustice when it's a zero-sum game. But the story of Facebook is not that. Facebook didn't make ethical sacrifices for profit -- its executives just didn't care to understand the consequences of their actions. I wish those folks could feel…

> This book was SO GOOD. One of the (very valid, IMO) criticisms of the book is that the author tries to set herself apart from the culture she was deeply embedded within. I think it's becoming a trap to hold the author up as a hero when she was clearly part of it all to the very core. It was only after she got separated from the inner circle club that she tried to distance herself from it. So while reading it, be ca…

So in this way we should dismiss all whistleblowers?

Re: Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta

#522

Post by bullshitcaller »

lixtra wrote: post #503
strulovich wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That chapter struck me as paranoia and hit piece. What really happens there, if you ignore the author’s spin on it and concentrate on the facts is Sheryl is repeatedly asking her pregnant employee to please come stay in the big bed in the private jet and rest. Then author has good points, such as Sheryl not taking into account she’s expecting ready deliverables. But she also spins it as if something sexual might happ…

HN guidelines say: Assume good faith. We should apply it to Sheryl here as well. In Europe several of my acquaintances shared a bed with their professors/superior for various non-sexual reasons. It’s also a cultural thing.

Go on, which culture is that? Most "cultures" in Europe I know of it would be a breach of many stated and unstated rules and norms (Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, and Belgium).

Re: Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta

#523

Post by BeetleB »

ipython wrote: post #236
BeetleB wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt such clauses can prevent you from disclosing them to relevant authorities . Disclosing them to the public is a whole other matter.

It’s funny as I see this argument from people who at the same time excuse Snowden for publicly exposing government surveillance overreach when he had similar tools (disclosure to relevant authorities) available to him.

Legitimate whistleblowing has rules. I doubt publishing a book counts as whistleblowing.

Re: Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta

#524

Post by BeetleB »

amtamt wrote: post #224
BeetleB wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt such clauses can prevent you from disclosing them to relevant authorities . Disclosing them to the public is a whole other matter.

"disclosing them to relevant authorities" would not bring the message to those affected by such carelessness. I would think "Disclosing them to the public" brings more awareness in the public, and though might be illegal, serves better for public good. Legal is not always just or moral.

This whole thread is about legality. Nondisclosure clauses are purely a legal construct, not a moral one.

Re: Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta

#525

Post by BeetleB »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #192
BeetleB wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt such clauses can prevent you from disclosing them to relevant authorities . Disclosing them to the public is a whole other matter.

It’s kind of murky. NLRB under Biden seemed to say that yeah you can disclose this to the media, and broad non-disparagements are unenforceable. But it’s also kind of a toss up depending on the NLRB, courts, administration, etc. Trump’s NLRB has rescinded a bunch of that Biden-era guidance, so what is enforceable and what isn’t? Kind of hard to say at this point. Arbitration agreed with Meta, but who knows what court…

Well, the whole point is that courts won't weigh in, because of the arbitration agreement.

I took a negotiations course at university, and there was a section on arbitration vs the courts. There are plenty of good reasons to go with arbitration (employment contracts are not amongst them, though).

The one thing the professor highlighted was that if the arbiter was fundamentally unfair (e.g. civil rights violation), you're screwed. You can't then go to the court and make your case. There's no appeals process, etc.

I'm guessing there is no notion of "precedence" with arbitration, this being one of the reasons.

Re: Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta

#526

Post by [deleted] »

scrubs wrote: post #446
yoyohello13 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By allowing powerful adults to act this way, we are in a sense teaching our children to act this way too.

Well absolutely. Half the times we're tough on kids is in hopes they don't permanently turn into adults their behavior reminds of And as kids learning from adults (although the subject matter is different) is exemplified in To Kill a Mockingbird. As of today I am periodically embarrassed to be an American. Periodic in the sense that every once in a while the shameless behavior of elites feels like I ok'd in the prese…

[deleted]

Re: Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta

#527

Post by lixtra »

bullshitcaller wrote: post #522
lixtra wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN guidelines say: Assume good faith. We should apply it to Sheryl here as well. In Europe several of my acquaintances shared a bed with their professors/superior for various non-sexual reasons. It’s also a cultural thing.

Go on, which culture is that? Most "cultures" in Europe I know of it would be a breach of many stated and unstated rules and norms (Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, and Belgium).

Example Finland. Could you end up in a nude Sauna with your superior? Yes, especially if it is same sex.

Example Germany. Which law would be broken? Internal compliance rules, yes, that would be often the case.

Re: Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta

#529

Post by scrollop »

lixtra wrote: post #503
strulovich wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That chapter struck me as paranoia and hit piece. What really happens there, if you ignore the author’s spin on it and concentrate on the facts is Sheryl is repeatedly asking her pregnant employee to please come stay in the big bed in the private jet and rest. Then author has good points, such as Sheryl not taking into account she’s expecting ready deliverables. But she also spins it as if something sexual might happ…

HN guidelines say: Assume good faith. We should apply it to Sheryl here as well. In Europe several of my acquaintances shared a bed with their professors/superior for various non-sexual reasons. It’s also a cultural thing.

Coming from a European, this is definitely not normal.

I would examine why your acquaintances are normalizing such creepy behaviour.

Re: Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta

#530

Post by JuniperMesos »

crote wrote: post #462
shmichael wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other side of every "useless war" is the what if question. Killing Hitler before WWII would have been seen as a cruel interference with German sovereignty. Anyway it would be wise not to tie social network corporate affairs to the war. The two are not linked in a more significant way than a social network in general being linked to such affairs as a media.

Are we going to ignore how Zuckerberg dines with the president, donated a $1M to his inauguration fund, put Trump allies in high positions at Meta, loosened the moderation rules in Trump's favour, and got appointed to the president's Science and Tech Council only a few days ago? If you are that deeply intertwined you can't claim ignorance and innocense on the inconvenient stuff - like the Iran War. If you want to sta…

Before Zuckerberg loosened the moderation rules in Trump's favor he tightened them in favor of anti-Trump forces (and even using the terms "loosened" and "tightened" is assuming a frame that online speech that politically-benefits Trump in some way is inherently more worthy of moderation than speech that politically-harms Trump, which is itself an object-level political stance).

It's probably a mistake to characterize that as "Zuckerberg" himself making a decision - the sorts of people who worked at Facebook in the mid-2010s were overwhelmingly Democrats or Democrat-aligned people who found the sorts of things that Trump was saying, and that Trump's supporters were saying, immoral and horrifying; and often felt they had a moral duty to censor this speech on their platform in the name of protecting people they considered marginalized. This didn't necessarily need Zuckerberg's involvement himself, and I think he may have personally changed his mind about Meta's moderation policy during the Biden administration, although of course it's hard to be sure what is actually going on in the head of any specific public figure.

Trump is making a point of putting allies in high positions at Meta because in general it's now clear to everyone in American politics that being able to control the moderation policy of major social media platforms is politically important; because those platforms are where people who vote or otherwise make policy in your country do it. Every future administration in the US will attempt to do the same thing - the details might differ as the landscape of social media changes - and every single one will claim to be acting in the name of authentic free speech and safe, reasonable discourse.

I wish that practical free-software alternatives to every proprietary social media network were available, that by construction had no central organization that could be targeted by any branch of government to censor political speech. This is unfortunately a difficult technological and social problem to solve; we have a bunch of half-solutions that very few people actually use, and the bulk of the population continues to communicate on proprietary social media platforms.

Post reply on HN