7 ms·

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Tells Employees to Respect Diverse Views of Colleagues

40 points by Leary 8y ago

benatkin 8y ago
This seems to be a reference to James whats-his-name. He's really had a lasting impact.
- nwah1 8y ago
  Damore
- dvtrn 8y ago
  Or this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18143802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18143802
- Radim 8y ago
  OP paywalled, but what's funny is that your comment could be read in two completely opposing ways: 1. Zuckerberg tells employees not to mistreat diverse views like Google did with Damore 2. Zuckerberg tells employees not to mistreat diverse views like Damore did at Google I find there's a bi-modal distribution in how people interpret Damore's memo. It's like that blue-gold dress debate again: 1. evil sexist falsehood propaganda by a closet neo-nazi, meant to hurt 2. a well-sourced, accurate and well-meaning text by a nerd, meant to help I read Damore's memo and reached my own conclusion (which is irrelevant to my point so I won't even state it), but isn't this dichotomy fascinating?
  - mcintyre1994 8y ago
    His memo just seemed to me like the view a Republican holds on a polarising topic - so it's not surprising it splits into two polarised bimodal responses in my opinion.
    - benatkin 8y ago
      To me, there seem to be reactionaries on both the left wing and the right wing - the horseshoe effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
      - cm2187 8y ago
        I think part of the problem is largely calling "right wing", "alt-right", "bigot" any view one disagrees with.
      - bachbach 8y ago
        Horseshoe Theory is not true. Your supporting link says it has no substance - it's a simple meme that is wrong. This subject annoys me because I am convinced that not only does the Horseshoe Theory have no predictive power - but also that it denies something which really is true - that political violence can come out of the Center aka from Liberalism. This is a huge blindspot in modern political culture. Conflict coming out of the Center would be a true Black Swan event.
  - andai 8y ago
    If you assume the most ignorant of motivations and the worst of intentions, it relieves you of the responsibility to consider the person's perspective in earnest. I mean, it does no such thing, but that's how it feels, internally, and that's what generally happens.
dvtrn 8y ago
Ms. Sandberg has previously posted an internal message calling Mr. Kaplan’s appearance at the hearing “a mistake.” So if this is the stance Zuckerberg and Sandberg are taking, has that internal message been retracted? I'm in no position to demand or even suggest that some sort of consistency in conviction is warranted here-Sandberg is free to comment or not as she pleases, but it sure would be nice to see for once in these strange and heated times. Seems to me you either respect Kaplan's decision to be present for his friend, redact statements that his personal political decisions were a 'mistake', or fire him as VP of Global Public Policy and admit it was because his appearance at the SJC hearings made for bad optics, and saving face matters more than consistent convictions and that this appeal to employees is proof. Or do nothing and let people infer everything in between.
- lgleason 8y ago
  I think their reaction to him being there shows the anti-conservative bias still at Facebook. The statement from Zuck on respecting other views is a vein attempt at appeasing conservative concerns now that Trump + the Congress and Senate are rightfully beginning to scrutinize them, Google, Twitter etc.. If they actually meant what they said they could have simply released a statement saying that Kaplan is attending as a friend of Kavenaugh, his presence there was not at all related to his job at Facebook nor does his presence or personal opinions the opinions of Facebook etc....... If anything supporting Kaplan's choice to attend both publicly and privately would have given Facebook some ammunition to say that they are taking tolerance towards other political views seriously... At this point they are continuing to provide more ammunition to the people calling for the revocation of safe harbor, breakup of the company, increased regulation etc..
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  It's not a 'personal' decision to appear on TV in front of hundreds of millions of people when you're a representative of the company. High profile actions will be interpreted as representing the interest of the company. He can personally support Kav, have dinner with him, maybe not hide anything about his support or friendship ... but making public statements, such as appearing on TV is a whole other dimension given his role. FB execs should not be involved in any kind of political controversy unless it directly affects FB. So I think it's not hypocritical for Sandberg to indicate that it was a mistake, I think it was.
mcintyre1994 8y ago
Vox had quite an interesting take from the left on how it's a bit odd that Facebook are taking threats from Republicans to punish them for alleged bias seriously. The example they used was Hollywood, Republicans hate Hollywood for being too liberal, they have an endless decades long culture war over it, but whenever a Republican comes into power they make sure to force other countries to enforce copyright laws that Hollywood wants and do precisely nothing to damage them. Just like Trump just did with Canada.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  Was it this one? https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/12/17848026/facebook-thinkprogress-weekly-standard https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/12/17848026/f...
  - mcintyre1994 8y ago
    It was on their 'The Weeds' podcast, on the latest episode called 'Alexa, raise the minimum wage'. It was in a segment discussing Kevin Roose's daily Twitter updates about the top performing Facebook stories on Kavanaugh/Ford. It looks like the latest one he did was October 4th (https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1047614324225847296 https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1047614324225847296): Sources of today's top performing Facebook posts about Kavanaugh, per @crowdtangle: 1. Fox News 2. Ben Shapiro 3. CNSNews ("News the Lefty Media Doesn't Want You to Have") 4. Breitbart About Dr. Ford: 1. Fox News 2. CNN 3. Daily Caller 4. Breitbart
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- econnor 8y ago
  And Europe
writepub 8y ago
I remember a time in America when a Republican & Democrat could peacefully disagree with dignity, and follow that up with an evening out as friends
- rabidrat 8y ago
  I remember a time when Republicans and Democrats shared a consistent view of reality.
  - DanielBMarkham 8y ago
    This is closer to the truth. I remember when the net first came up, I'd watch my friends in both parties argue online. They'd do some research, agree on the underlying facts, then things would progress. They might never come to agreement, but they began a discussion on the terms of the discussion, which was progress. If done well, everybody could part as friends. This is the dialectic. It's what friends do. It's designed to understand the issue by understanding one another better. This is how productive conversations are supposed to happen. But folks caught on to that, so they started flooding the internet with a lot of rhetoric. Now, if you disagree, there are a hundred sites on your side that are quite happy to provide you with all the emotional ammunition you need. This is argumentation, what lawyers do. It's designed to win at all costs. Conversations are battles to be won. Combine that with some nice rhetorical tricks and there's really no need to discuss facts anymore. Take a look at what education a lot of the talking heads on TV have had. They were trained in rhetoric, the legal profession. That's no accident.
    - goatlover 8y ago
      > This is argumentation, what lawyers do. It's designed to win at all costs. Conversations are battles to be won. Combine that with some nice rhetorical tricks and there's really no need to discuss facts anymore. Sounds like what the ancient Greek sophists taught. That rhetoric was a useful tool for winning debates and being persuasive, particularly in politics.
      - 8y ago
tempodox 8y ago
A billionaire tells his underlings to not mess up his money-making machine. I‘m touched.
- samat 8y ago
  This belongs to n-gate.com :)
  - tempodox 8y ago
    I suddenly found myself channeling him, I swear :)
reggiesmith 8y ago
That’s why liberal “diversity” doesn’t add up logically. Diversity supporters are basically saying “we welcome all points of views and all backgrounds, unless they are different from ours.” Which is the exact opposite of diversity. I would respect diversity if they applied it without bias. That means including people you don’t like. Google’s executive team complaining about Trump winning the election (as we saw in the leaked video) totally violates diversity principles. It sends the message: we do not like employees who are Trump supporters. No Google employee would want to show his support for Trump inside the company, after such a company meeting. True diversity means complete separation of company and politics. It’s ironic that the people wanting to promote diversity are the same people who are going to doom it.
- temp34034 8y ago
  > That’s why liberal “diversity” doesn’t add up logically. Your first error was to think that "diversity" has anything to do with "ideas",no it's diversity excluding diversity of thoughts, it is pure newspeak coming from interesectionality school, a extreme ideology in my book. When Apple's diversity chief, a black woman, was fired because of the outcry generated by her saying that a room full of white people could be deemed diverse because they could come from different background, It absolutely demonstrated my point. It never meant diversity of opinions. But it's a positive word so who would be against diversity? see what these people are doing here? same with "inclusiveness", "safe spaces" (who doesn't want to be safe? but we're not talking about physical safety here), "micro-agressions" and what not. It is extremely cunning. The jargon is misleading, on purpose. These propaganda tactics are not new, they've been extremely successful because they take advantage of our sheer ignorance about what intersectionality is, a racist and sexist ideology, claiming to fight racism and sexism. https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-just-six-months/ https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j...
dawnerd 8y ago
I don’t see why a company can’t be biased. It wasn’t that long ago the right was championing a companies right to not bake a cake for a gay couple. It seems a bit hypocritical that they support a companies right unless that company is left leaning.
- waterhouse 8y ago
  Sometimes a company appears to hold itself neutral for a long time, and people get used to it and expect it to remain that way. When this suddenly changes, especially after the company has developed a dominant position in its niche, people tend to start complaining. Then some other people will often say, "Well, they never said they were neutral or that they upheld principles of free speech". Sometimes this is, upon further research, demonstrably wrong. In one case of this, one of the founders of Reddit, after some redditors complained about some admin intervention, said "Reddit was never meant to be a bastion of free speech". Some users then started collecting places where representatives of Reddit (including founders and CEOs) had said just that: https://www.reddit.com/r/BOFS https://www.reddit.com/r/BOFS In the case of Facebook specifically, I find a bunch of stories from just this July, with an example headline "Mark Zuckerberg stands up for free speech on Facebook, even for Holocaust deniers". Is it illegal to break implicit (or even explicit) promises to users? If money hasn't changed hands and there isn't any legal contract, then maybe not. (I've heard of laws about "common carrier" status, but don't know if that applies.) But users are quite within their rights to consider it a betrayal and to complain loudly.
- gaius 8y ago
  I don’t see why a company can’t be biased. It’s totally OK for a company to be biased, absolutely. But that company cannot reasonably expect to benefit from the privileges of common carrier status. Facebook wants to play both sides. It must be made to choose one or the other. Example: it's OK for a newspaper to take an editorial position because the editor and ultimately the owners of the paper take responsibility for whatever they publish and can be held responsible by the courts if they don't. Facebook does not want to take responsibility for what it publishes, it wants to be protected like the postal service - but still take a position.
- 8y ago
joananand 8y ago
The article shows how diversity is fundamentally flawed. Diversity as currently applied says: “We welcome all points of view and all backgrounds unless they differ from our own.” Which is the exact opposite of diversity.
danieltillett 8y ago
What I find most fascinating is how powerless Mark looks.
_cerv 8y ago
I told a friend that the genrerized differences between the end goals of main stream Republicans and Democrats were about as different as Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. Before I could even explain why, he responded with that I was a monster of a human to even put “the party that locks children up and votes for rapists” close to the goals of the Democrats. I was called a shit bag “Repug” and told to kill myself. We haven’t talked since. I also voted for Hillary, for pragmatic reasons. If it’s tough to maintain friendships with differing views in this day and age, doing so in the workplace where the environment allows this to be a bit more in the open will be a tough HR friendly pill to swallow.
- presscast 8y ago
  >I told a friend that the genrerized differences between the end goals of main stream Republicans and Democrats were about as different as Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. I too find this very hard to believe. I'd be interested in hearing your argument.
  - sheepmullet 8y ago
    Both parties are pro-war, pro-big business, big government blood suckers. Neither party is concerned about privacy. Lots of other things in common as well.
    - presscast 8y ago
      That's not really an argument, that's an unargued statement of opinion.
      - sheepmullet 8y ago
        It’s the start of a conversation. Which parts do you disagree with and what evidence would convince you otherwise? You can tell me the political party you support and I can show you how they have strong pro-war elements.
        8y ago
sidcool 8y ago
Is this with respect to PHP still being used at FB? /s
- anothergoogler 8y ago
  With short tags and error_reporting(0)!

40 points by Leary 8y ago

benatkin 8y ago

This seems to be a reference to James whats-his-name. He's really had a lasting impact.

nwah1 8y ago
Damore
dvtrn 8y ago
Or this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18143802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18143802
Radim 8y ago
OP paywalled, but what's funny is that your comment could be read in two completely opposing ways: 1. Zuckerberg tells employees not to mistreat diverse views like Google did with Damore 2. Zuckerberg tells employees not to mistreat diverse views like Damore did at Google I find there's a bi-modal distribution in how people interpret Damore's memo. It's like that blue-gold dress debate again: 1. evil sexist falsehood propaganda by a closet neo-nazi, meant to hurt 2. a well-sourced, accurate and well-meaning text by a nerd, meant to help I read Damore's memo and reached my own conclusion (which is irrelevant to my point so I won't even state it), but isn't this dichotomy fascinating?
- mcintyre1994 8y ago
  His memo just seemed to me like the view a Republican holds on a polarising topic - so it's not surprising it splits into two polarised bimodal responses in my opinion.
  - benatkin 8y ago
    To me, there seem to be reactionaries on both the left wing and the right wing - the horseshoe effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
    - cm2187 8y ago
      I think part of the problem is largely calling "right wing", "alt-right", "bigot" any view one disagrees with.
    - bachbach 8y ago
      Horseshoe Theory is not true. Your supporting link says it has no substance - it's a simple meme that is wrong. This subject annoys me because I am convinced that not only does the Horseshoe Theory have no predictive power - but also that it denies something which really is true - that political violence can come out of the Center aka from Liberalism. This is a huge blindspot in modern political culture. Conflict coming out of the Center would be a true Black Swan event.
- andai 8y ago
  If you assume the most ignorant of motivations and the worst of intentions, it relieves you of the responsibility to consider the person's perspective in earnest. I mean, it does no such thing, but that's how it feels, internally, and that's what generally happens.

dvtrn 8y ago

Ms. Sandberg has previously posted an internal message calling Mr. Kaplan’s appearance at the hearing “a mistake.” So if this is the stance Zuckerberg and Sandberg are taking, has that internal message been retracted? I'm in no position to demand or even suggest that some sort of consistency in conviction is warranted here-Sandberg is free to comment or not as she pleases, but it sure would be nice to see for once in these strange and heated times. Seems to me you either respect Kaplan's decision to be present for his friend, redact statements that his personal political decisions were a 'mistake', or fire him as VP of Global Public Policy and admit it was because his appearance at the SJC hearings made for bad optics, and saving face matters more than consistent convictions and that this appeal to employees is proof. Or do nothing and let people infer everything in between.

lgleason 8y ago
I think their reaction to him being there shows the anti-conservative bias still at Facebook. The statement from Zuck on respecting other views is a vein attempt at appeasing conservative concerns now that Trump + the Congress and Senate are rightfully beginning to scrutinize them, Google, Twitter etc.. If they actually meant what they said they could have simply released a statement saying that Kaplan is attending as a friend of Kavenaugh, his presence there was not at all related to his job at Facebook nor does his presence or personal opinions the opinions of Facebook etc....... If anything supporting Kaplan's choice to attend both publicly and privately would have given Facebook some ammunition to say that they are taking tolerance towards other political views seriously... At this point they are continuing to provide more ammunition to the people calling for the revocation of safe harbor, breakup of the company, increased regulation etc..
sonnyblarney 8y ago
It's not a 'personal' decision to appear on TV in front of hundreds of millions of people when you're a representative of the company. High profile actions will be interpreted as representing the interest of the company. He can personally support Kav, have dinner with him, maybe not hide anything about his support or friendship ... but making public statements, such as appearing on TV is a whole other dimension given his role. FB execs should not be involved in any kind of political controversy unless it directly affects FB. So I think it's not hypocritical for Sandberg to indicate that it was a mistake, I think it was.

mcintyre1994 8y ago

Vox had quite an interesting take from the left on how it's a bit odd that Facebook are taking threats from Republicans to punish them for alleged bias seriously. The example they used was Hollywood, Republicans hate Hollywood for being too liberal, they have an endless decades long culture war over it, but whenever a Republican comes into power they make sure to force other countries to enforce copyright laws that Hollywood wants and do precisely nothing to damage them. Just like Trump just did with Canada.

dvtrn 8y ago
Was it this one? https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/12/17848026/facebook-thinkprogress-weekly-standard https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/12/17848026/f...
- mcintyre1994 8y ago
  It was on their 'The Weeds' podcast, on the latest episode called 'Alexa, raise the minimum wage'. It was in a segment discussing Kevin Roose's daily Twitter updates about the top performing Facebook stories on Kavanaugh/Ford. It looks like the latest one he did was October 4th (https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1047614324225847296 https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1047614324225847296): Sources of today's top performing Facebook posts about Kavanaugh, per @crowdtangle: 1. Fox News 2. Ben Shapiro 3. CNSNews ("News the Lefty Media Doesn't Want You to Have") 4. Breitbart About Dr. Ford: 1. Fox News 2. CNN 3. Daily Caller 4. Breitbart
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
econnor 8y ago
And Europe

writepub 8y ago

I remember a time in America when a Republican & Democrat could peacefully disagree with dignity, and follow that up with an evening out as friends

rabidrat 8y ago
I remember a time when Republicans and Democrats shared a consistent view of reality.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  This is closer to the truth. I remember when the net first came up, I'd watch my friends in both parties argue online. They'd do some research, agree on the underlying facts, then things would progress. They might never come to agreement, but they began a discussion on the terms of the discussion, which was progress. If done well, everybody could part as friends. This is the dialectic. It's what friends do. It's designed to understand the issue by understanding one another better. This is how productive conversations are supposed to happen. But folks caught on to that, so they started flooding the internet with a lot of rhetoric. Now, if you disagree, there are a hundred sites on your side that are quite happy to provide you with all the emotional ammunition you need. This is argumentation, what lawyers do. It's designed to win at all costs. Conversations are battles to be won. Combine that with some nice rhetorical tricks and there's really no need to discuss facts anymore. Take a look at what education a lot of the talking heads on TV have had. They were trained in rhetoric, the legal profession. That's no accident.
  - goatlover 8y ago
    > This is argumentation, what lawyers do. It's designed to win at all costs. Conversations are battles to be won. Combine that with some nice rhetorical tricks and there's really no need to discuss facts anymore. Sounds like what the ancient Greek sophists taught. That rhetoric was a useful tool for winning debates and being persuasive, particularly in politics.
    - 8y ago

tempodox 8y ago

A billionaire tells his underlings to not mess up his money-making machine. I‘m touched.

samat 8y ago
This belongs to n-gate.com :)
- tempodox 8y ago
  I suddenly found myself channeling him, I swear :)

reggiesmith 8y ago

That’s why liberal “diversity” doesn’t add up logically. Diversity supporters are basically saying “we welcome all points of views and all backgrounds, unless they are different from ours.” Which is the exact opposite of diversity. I would respect diversity if they applied it without bias. That means including people you don’t like. Google’s executive team complaining about Trump winning the election (as we saw in the leaked video) totally violates diversity principles. It sends the message: we do not like employees who are Trump supporters. No Google employee would want to show his support for Trump inside the company, after such a company meeting. True diversity means complete separation of company and politics. It’s ironic that the people wanting to promote diversity are the same people who are going to doom it.

temp34034 8y ago
> That’s why liberal “diversity” doesn’t add up logically. Your first error was to think that "diversity" has anything to do with "ideas",no it's diversity excluding diversity of thoughts, it is pure newspeak coming from interesectionality school, a extreme ideology in my book. When Apple's diversity chief, a black woman, was fired because of the outcry generated by her saying that a room full of white people could be deemed diverse because they could come from different background, It absolutely demonstrated my point. It never meant diversity of opinions. But it's a positive word so who would be against diversity? see what these people are doing here? same with "inclusiveness", "safe spaces" (who doesn't want to be safe? but we're not talking about physical safety here), "micro-agressions" and what not. It is extremely cunning. The jargon is misleading, on purpose. These propaganda tactics are not new, they've been extremely successful because they take advantage of our sheer ignorance about what intersectionality is, a racist and sexist ideology, claiming to fight racism and sexism. https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-just-six-months/ https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j...

dawnerd 8y ago

I don’t see why a company can’t be biased. It wasn’t that long ago the right was championing a companies right to not bake a cake for a gay couple. It seems a bit hypocritical that they support a companies right unless that company is left leaning.

waterhouse 8y ago
Sometimes a company appears to hold itself neutral for a long time, and people get used to it and expect it to remain that way. When this suddenly changes, especially after the company has developed a dominant position in its niche, people tend to start complaining. Then some other people will often say, "Well, they never said they were neutral or that they upheld principles of free speech". Sometimes this is, upon further research, demonstrably wrong. In one case of this, one of the founders of Reddit, after some redditors complained about some admin intervention, said "Reddit was never meant to be a bastion of free speech". Some users then started collecting places where representatives of Reddit (including founders and CEOs) had said just that: https://www.reddit.com/r/BOFS https://www.reddit.com/r/BOFS In the case of Facebook specifically, I find a bunch of stories from just this July, with an example headline "Mark Zuckerberg stands up for free speech on Facebook, even for Holocaust deniers". Is it illegal to break implicit (or even explicit) promises to users? If money hasn't changed hands and there isn't any legal contract, then maybe not. (I've heard of laws about "common carrier" status, but don't know if that applies.) But users are quite within their rights to consider it a betrayal and to complain loudly.
gaius 8y ago
I don’t see why a company can’t be biased. It’s totally OK for a company to be biased, absolutely. But that company cannot reasonably expect to benefit from the privileges of common carrier status. Facebook wants to play both sides. It must be made to choose one or the other. Example: it's OK for a newspaper to take an editorial position because the editor and ultimately the owners of the paper take responsibility for whatever they publish and can be held responsible by the courts if they don't. Facebook does not want to take responsibility for what it publishes, it wants to be protected like the postal service - but still take a position.
8y ago

joananand 8y ago

The article shows how diversity is fundamentally flawed. Diversity as currently applied says: “We welcome all points of view and all backgrounds unless they differ from our own.” Which is the exact opposite of diversity.

danieltillett 8y ago

What I find most fascinating is how powerless Mark looks.

_cerv 8y ago

I told a friend that the genrerized differences between the end goals of main stream Republicans and Democrats were about as different as Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. Before I could even explain why, he responded with that I was a monster of a human to even put “the party that locks children up and votes for rapists” close to the goals of the Democrats. I was called a shit bag “Repug” and told to kill myself. We haven’t talked since. I also voted for Hillary, for pragmatic reasons. If it’s tough to maintain friendships with differing views in this day and age, doing so in the workplace where the environment allows this to be a bit more in the open will be a tough HR friendly pill to swallow.

presscast 8y ago
>I told a friend that the genrerized differences between the end goals of main stream Republicans and Democrats were about as different as Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. I too find this very hard to believe. I'd be interested in hearing your argument.
- sheepmullet 8y ago
  Both parties are pro-war, pro-big business, big government blood suckers. Neither party is concerned about privacy. Lots of other things in common as well.
  - presscast 8y ago
    That's not really an argument, that's an unargued statement of opinion.
    - sheepmullet 8y ago
      It’s the start of a conversation. Which parts do you disagree with and what evidence would convince you otherwise? You can tell me the political party you support and I can show you how they have strong pro-war elements.
      - 8y ago

sidcool 8y ago

Is this with respect to PHP still being used at FB? /s

anothergoogler 8y ago
With short tags and error_reporting(0)!