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Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

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Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#91
post #28

What's with the cynicism in this posts? They're trying to make a point and bring awareness. Who cares how hard it is. At least they're doing something. To give them credit they're making a political statement at work when we're told not to talk politics at work.

On Reddit there were a lot of "why don't they just quit their job" comments. I am just rolling eyes really hard. To be fair, when I was younger, before I had all these adult responsibilities, that would have probably been my answer as well.

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#92
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You carefully cherry picked one aspect of my argument and didn't address the arson of occupied buildings with children inside. That's one example, there's also kidnapping, rape and serious assault with deadly weapons to point at. Someone was nearly stoned to death on the street with bricks by rioters for protecting a business.

I didn’t cherry pick, I’m simply not defending assaults on people. Any violence by protesters against humans (other than in self defense) is not okay. That said, violence by police against civilians is far worse. It shouldn’t happen in response to property damage, but it especially shouldn’t happen unprovoked — and we’ve been seeing a lot more of that than violence from protesters.

Do you believe in an "eye for an eye"? If not, how could you say that there's been more violence from police than protesters? By my count, more people have died in the resulting riots than the initial incident.

That doesn't mean police are "less bad". It means they fucked up badly, and then rioters and looters are responding badly to a bad situation (including with attempted murder, rape, assault, property destruction, arson, etc).

In fact, numerous businesses owned by black people were unfortunately torched during the rioting. What part of that is justice? Further, what good does it do to black neighborhoods to have their houses burnt down, critical supplies interrupted in the middle of a pandemic and other such egregious behaviour?

Anarchists are using this situation to cause chaos and destruction.

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#93
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You carefully cherry picked one aspect of my argument and didn't address the arson of occupied buildings with children inside. That's one example, there's also kidnapping, rape and serious assault with deadly weapons to point at. Someone was nearly stoned to death on the street with bricks by rioters for protecting a business.

> That's one example, there's also kidnapping, rape and serious assault with deadly weapons to point at. So you've pointed out what the police have been up to, and why people are out rioting.

Please point out exactly where I justified police behavior or said they're all innocent, or downplayed the initial incident. I saw the video, it's disgusting.

But torching a residential building with children inside as a response? How is that okay?

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He can and does use television now. Television takes longer to setup and doesn't reach the same people. You can't go on TV to share a one sentence thought but you can easily do that on Twitter. So long as you think there's at least one person who he reaches by social media that he wouldn't reach with traditional media, it seems you are obligated to conclude that banning him from social media would reduce his reach, o…

No one is claiming that it wouldn’t reduce his reach, just that a “small group of Silicon Valley engineers” cannot unilaterally “control and censor” his communication. He would still be perfectly able to have his message heard by literally any citizen who wanted to hear it — in fact, he is the US least susceptible to censorship.

The claim I'm responding to asks if the President would have trouble getting a message out, and obviously the answer is yes for some types of messages.

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He can and does use television now. Television takes longer to setup and doesn't reach the same people. You can't go on TV to share a one sentence thought but you can easily do that on Twitter. So long as you think there's at least one person who he reaches by social media that he wouldn't reach with traditional media, it seems you are obligated to conclude that banning him from social media would reduce his reach, o…

The President of the United States could set up a Mastodon or Pleroma instance or what-have-you. It's not like Twitter and Facebook are the only entities with the ability to put short messages on the Internet. And yes, this would reduce his reach. So would a newspaper or TV channel not publishing something he said, and yet we'd be incredibly weirded out if newspapers and TV channels were required to publish every mun…

Twitter and Facebook are clearly not like newspapers though. So long as you agree that it would reduce his reach, you agree with the point I've made here.

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think — if Facebook and Twitter hypothetically decided to ban him — that the President of the United States would have trouble getting a message out?

De-platforming is a key part of the Alt-Left's strategy of controlling opposition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming

Did you read your own link? Deplatforming has been used for decades, by the right wing as well as the left:

> The University of California, for example, had a policy known as the Speaker Ban codified in university regulations under President Robert Gordon Sproul, mostly, but not exclusively, targeting Communists. One rule stated that "the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda." This rule was used in 1951 to block Max Schachtman, a socialist, from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley.

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#97
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's one example, there's also kidnapping, rape and serious assault with deadly weapons to point at. So you've pointed out what the police have been up to, and why people are out rioting.

Please point out exactly where I justified police behavior or said they're all innocent, or downplayed the initial incident. I saw the video, it's disgusting. But torching a residential building with children inside as a response? How is that okay?

> But torching a residential building with children inside

"But the children!" It was vacant. Nice try, though.

No one is condoning this specific act, but I'm not going to damn everything else because if it. That's absolutely silly.

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#98
post #62
post #3

Walkouts will achieve nothing, but the tragic part of the story is Silicon Valley engineers are sitting on a massive amount of power to affect real change IF they collectively organize, which they have various irrational hang ups about doing. Zuckerberg does not care if 50% of his engineers skip a video meeting. He would greatly care if he found out 50%+ of his SREs were going on strike. But the word union is stigmat…

Do teachers wield massive political power?

Teachers unions are very influential - especially in state and local elections (ex. described here as "political juggernauts" https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2018/02/14/are-teachers-u...)

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#99
post #6
post #3

Walkouts will achieve nothing, but the tragic part of the story is Silicon Valley engineers are sitting on a massive amount of power to affect real change IF they collectively organize, which they have various irrational hang ups about doing. Zuckerberg does not care if 50% of his engineers skip a video meeting. He would greatly care if he found out 50%+ of his SREs were going on strike. But the word union is stigmat…

Some of us have been in unionized industries prior. It also lead to promotion based on years served. Pay scales. And the protection of low performers. Right now engineers have incredible leverage. What do they gain by a union. Don’t like what Facebook is doing. Quit and work elsewhere. There’s plenty of jobs available

Here's a few lists of reasons for why SWEs might want a union:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15248774

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8498324

commandlinefan 3 months ago [–]

Well, there’s a lot of philosophizing on here about what a hypothetical future with unionized programmers might look like; some good, some bad. We already know what a future without one will look like: open offices, JIRA ticket quotas, unpaid overtime, permanent contract work, whiteboard coding interviews, penalties for experience and education and zero training.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22359605

And a rather prophetic comment:

LarryDarrell 10 months ago [–]

My worry is that without premature organization, the next recession is going to make the "tech worker shortage" a permanent thing of the past. We'll never have as much negotiating power as we do now.

If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384298

Re: Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The President of the United States could set up a Mastodon or Pleroma instance or what-have-you. It's not like Twitter and Facebook are the only entities with the ability to put short messages on the Internet. And yes, this would reduce his reach. So would a newspaper or TV channel not publishing something he said, and yet we'd be incredibly weirded out if newspapers and TV channels were required to publish every mun…

Twitter and Facebook are clearly not like newspapers though. So long as you agree that it would reduce his reach, you agree with the point I've made here.

It would reduce his reach but it would not prevent him from writing these messages and publishing them, or interested people from finding them (pretty much everyone would know they can follow @donaldtrump@whitehouse.gov from one of the free speech Mastodon instances or whatever within a day), so I don't really see what the problem is. It's just that he wouldn't be promoted by Twitter.
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