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Hundreds of Facebook employees walk out as Zuckerberg plans town hall tomorrow
- dreamcompiler 6y agoIt's probably time for TheFacebook to die. Or just become a zombie like Yahoo. But here's the sad thing: Nobody will be sad when it happens. If Apple died I'd be sad. Likewise Stitchfix and Digital Ocean and Github and Airbnb. Hell, maybe even Microsoft a little bit. But not Facebook or Google. If I started a company one of my goals would be to create a lasting culture providing enough real value that at least a few people other than the employees would be sad when it died.
- nednar 6y agoHasn't FB always been the company where pragmatism and competitiveness trumps justice, moral and general decency? Why did these 600 people start working there in the first place? I'm confused. No judgement, just trying to understand.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y agoPrivate companies must never be the arbiters of truth on the internet. Zuckerberg is doing the right thing, against huge internal resistance. You'd think Americans, out of all countries, would understand this.
- bttrfl 6y agoFB/Google/Twitter/... are already the arbiters of the truth through their algorithms deciding what to show to people. I don't think they should censor posts though, instead they should make their algorithms transparent and reduce the reach of posts and ads.
- humanrebar 6y agoI think it's fair for private companies to provide curation as a service. I don't think it's a good business model to be both a curator and a platform at the same time outside of maintaining an overall level of safety and decency (pornography, snuff, overt racism, etc.). I don't see why it's wrong for facebook to stay out of it other than reporting violent language to relevant law enforcement. Seems like assault is already a felony.
- jlebar 6y agoIf you say something, and I say, here's some evidence that you're wrong, does that make me an arbiter of the truth on the Internet? I mean, how is what you did (saying something) any different from what I did (also saying something)?
- ManlyBread 6y agoYou are merely trying to have a discussion; you aren't a third party with a power to alter or silence the ones you deem to be wrong
- MrBuddyCasino 6y agoIn that scenario you're a regular participant in a discussion, presumably as another user of a platform, standing on equal footing with others. This NOT what this is about! If you're the owner of the platform, and prominently inject your POV, thats starting to get problematic. I understand the impulse to do that, but people aren't thinking about the 2nd order effects.
- jlebar 6y agoSo the difference is prominence, highlighting this one particular reply because it was written by the platform itself? I'm still not seeing how this is a big deal. What are the second-order effects?
- rramach 6y agoYes, I agree. This issue is super-nuanced and I believe Mark has spent years (since the 2016 election fiasco) looking into this as well as being advised by top minds to arrive at his current position. These employees are acting emotionally now but will realize the value of Mark's position over time (in my opinion).
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago> These employees are acting emotionally now but will realize the value of Mark's position over time Classical liberalism has never been a majority position. The reason it exists is due to smart people thinking hard about the problem of governance, and imposing its rules top-down. But maybe thats just me being european.
- sktrdie 6y agoHonest question: what power does Zucherberg have with regards to allowing or not a post of the president? I mean even if he asks people to delete it, the president surely will demand him to put it back online.
- adammunich 6y agoHis freedom to remove that post I believe would qualify as protected under the bill of rights.
- RickJWagner 6y agoCan I state the obvious? People are acting just plain crazy these days. I hope it ends soon.
- GaryNumanVevo 6y agoA strike would be more effective in my opinion. Organize and take the site down. Keep it down for a few hours. That's easily a few hundred million in lost profits.
- ponker 6y agoCan’t imagine lower stakes than an employee making $400K not dialing in for a day and not even having to take a PTO day to do it.
- skinnymuch 6y agoYour account may be shadowbanned. I vouched for this comment though. It describes what I feel. Not that the workers perhaps aren’t doing anything else. But solely this action doesn’t mean much at all.
- ditonal 6y agoWalkouts 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 stigmatized even though doctors/lawyers/police/actors/teachers unions all wield massive political power, engineers accept their market based compensation and micro kitchens and decide that’s enough then are shocked that on political issues they get pushed around by the execs and VCs. If you want to have any voice in what your work does in the world, step 1 is collective organization of Silicon Valley engineers, anything besides that is smoke and mirrors and a waste of time.
- Apocryphon 6y agoJust invent a union and rebrand it as a guild. That could have greater appeal. Alternatively, shore up the ACM with lobbying power and give it teeth, similar to the AMA/ABA/APA.
- max_ 6y agoI have the exact same sentiment! SV engineers have an abundance of resources. Ranging from financial to intellectual. These are are often people who are powerful in the sense that they have alot of whats required to counter the broken issues in tech.
- jonnypotty 6y agoYou can't have a union of silicon valley engineers who weild power by deciding what is and isn't acceptable to say online. The problem is that the judgement is to do with perceived 'impact'. No normal person is going to be prevented from saying 'when the looting starts the shooting starts', you prevent trump from saying this because its 'dangerous'. The situation is awful. Its a cluster fuck of people with too much power welding it in unprincipled ways. Fb employees walking out in some display of outrage at the companies behaviour when what they should ACTUALLY do is NOT WORK FOR FACEBOOK I don't understand. These are not impoverished coal miners with no choice where to work. Get a different job you idiots. Stop working for an obviously not ethical company. You're part of the problem, don't pretend to be virtuous by 'protesting', you're achieving nothing apart from making yourself look stupid.
- edoceo 6y agoI support this walkout. As a small business owner all I've been able to do was purge my FB page profiles. I'm proud of them for taking a bigger step than I'm able to make. Working people of all countries unite. Seize the means of production!
- buboard 6y agothey are not interested in the means of production, they just want the salary
- edoceo 6y agoAnd the health care, and 401k, and vacation time, and training (all of which we provide)
- klipt 6y ago> Seize the means of production! Many employers give away the means of production via RSUs, and the standard advice is to sell them and buy index funds so that you're diversified across multiple means of production. Don't know if Marx would approve, but it seems clearly better to me that Microsoft workers can own some Amazon and vice versa, so if one company goes down the workers don't end up losing everything (as they would if they only owned the company they work for).
- MattGaiser 6y ago> Seize the means of production! You realize that means your business too?
- davidw 6y ago“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thrwaway69 6y agohttps://tatianamac.com/posts/white-guyde/ https://tatianamac.com/posts/white-guyde/
- alacombe 6y agoAlso, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".
- idlewords 6y agoNote that this so-called walkout consists of people already at home taking a personal day and changing their autoreply email.
- buboard 6y agothanks, i always wondered how these work. so people would normally walk out of the office, and go home? Do they walk down the stairs instead of taking an elevator? How far out do they walk? What if it's raining out? Would they answer emails before leaving? would they leave after lunch? do they leave all together? Do they use corporate buses to go home? I feel these are important subtleties
- idlewords 6y agoThe key point is that a typical walkout is a public act where you leave work and then demonstrate. It is a situation where people can see you and where you can see the other people walking out with you. You can even do things like picket or articulate demands! This is... not that.
- anon102010 6y agoThey actually don't have to take a personal day - they get a day off work paid by facebook as a regular day. They can go on strike from home, set their auto-reply, and not even have to use vacation time.
- ironman1478 6y agoThe real protest will be to quit unless one genuinely thinks they can make a change in the ideology of a company (so somebody in upper management or with some pull). If you are a senior or lower engineer, I don't imagine this has any effect on anything. Just look on "who's hiring" every month here. Lots of local companies (and many remote) that pay good salaries and work towards great goals. If somebody disagrees with facebook's ideals, there is no shortage of jobs out there for them to apply for that pay well and have a net positive effect on the world (as far as I can tell, I could be wrong about some of these companies).
- erik_seaberg 6y agoJournalists are quoting Trump's statement as newsworthy. Everyone knows what he said. What's the point of censoring it ineffectually?
- vore 6y agoIt's not about censoring or not censoring. It's about Facebook actually giving a shit about the state of the world it's in, and not just Mark Zuckerberg's incessant handwringing about "feeling disgust" but... doing nothing about it. Too long have abhorrent actions by Donald Trump gone completely unchecked by major platforms and, if Facebook won't even do the token step of doing something about a clearly racist and disgusting message, then they are truly spineless and complicit.
- PixyMisa 6y agoSo get a Facebook account and disagree with Trump. That is up to you. It is not up to them.
- vore 6y agoI'm pretty sure that's the equivalent of screaming into the void.
- Kiro 6y agoOpen your eyes and you will see a world filled with equally terrible or worse leaders. Once Facebook opens the box they need to draw an arbitrary line for every country in the whole world.
- vore 6y agoGiven how Facebook has literally been used to incite genocide in Myanmar and how quickly they had to backpedal on that, they've already been drawing these lines. If they're as opposed to violence as they say, it shouldn't matter if it's a leader or not.
- humanrebar 6y ago
- tayo42 6y agoWhat'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.
- vinhboy 6y agoOn 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.
- lopis 6y agoIt's still true though. Engineers, specially, have had the power of voting with their CVs for a long time. The only reason Facebook is able to pay ridiculous salaries today is because engineers voted with their CVs continuously for the past 10 years.
- tayo42 6y agoReddit's been terrible lately. the "discussion" on there is dominated by extremes and immaturity, im worried it's not just young kids that don't know better. A rant for another time though...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cambalache 6y agoThey dont have a god-given right to have all their actions applauded just because they work for a FAANG. For many people this amounts at best to an empty gesture, and at worst a hypocritical take because if you were OK with all the fiascos of that terrible terrible organization you wont get now brownie points by setting today a BLM signature in your OOO reply.
- tayo42 6y ago
- 0zymandias 6y agoSocial media is a dead end. The results are depression and misinformation. Unless you believe truth can easily be determined, there is no tweak that Zuck and Jack can do to fix their platforms. At least Zuck is honest about it.
- ipsum2 6y ago> Social media is a dead end. The results are depression and misinformation. Honest question. Is Reddit any different? Hacker News? Your average bulletin board?
- humanrebar 6y agoReddit is not different with respect to this. HN, mostly, so far, but it does consider certain things more or less off topic, so it's not trying to be a general platform as such.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- buboard 6y agoSure is. I doubt there s anyone who got depressed because their reddit karma was low. Posting an instagram selfie, however, and getting no likes -- that's tough. "Social media" is a misnomer, in reality it's skinner boxes for humans
- propelol 6y agoReddit is better because people are more anonymous and don't have to mix their real life with their online life.
- ipsum2 6y agoWhy? Misinformation on Facebook and Twitter are spread by bots AFAIK. How does being anonymous help decrease misinformation?
- pmorici 6y agoSome of those tweets that the article quotes sound like something straight out of the Onion. People are asking these social media companies to put themselves in an impossible position.
- danaris 6y agoSocial media companies have put themselves there, by becoming de facto "public squares" for general communication, while still being de jure private companies with a civic responsibility to the truth and to human rights.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoThis is probably the wrong time for Facebook software engineers to try to flex their muscles. Most large firms have put their hiring on hold due to COVID-19. A lot of engineering talent is now on the market looking for jobs due to layoffs by startups and many other companies. Facebook is gearing up for remote work which will expand the talent pool beyond Silicon Valley. The situation on the ground has changed a lot in the last few months. I am not sure how much real leverage they will have from the walkout.
- ergothus 6y agoThey'll find out how much of the rhetoric the company feeds them is true or not. They'll know for themselves when they deemed it important to draw a line. As a matter of calculation, the timing isn't ideal. None of them seem to be saying it is a matter of calculated timing to leverage their market value though.
- davidkamMN 6y agoAnyone has the right to walk out. But FB also has the right to not promote those people.
- kennethh 6y agoI think Facebook's way of handling the political messages by not interfering is much better than Twitters. I do not want some random person inserting a fact note which corresponds with their view of the world. Facts are very seldom only one sided and it should be up to the readers to comment the tweet or do a google search.
- Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 6y agoWhat is their end goal here? I certainly don’t want Mark Zuckerberg or any of his employees making decisions on what is considered newsworthy, especially on really important stuff like this. Even if you don’t personally like what is being said, the fact that it _is_ being said - and who is saying it - is an important point for people to know. The next time, it may be your own opinions that they’ll censor: Facebook has far more reach, and has much less journalistic pretensions than any of Murdoch’s properties... you really really don’t want them to start getting involved in politics.
- jlebar 6y agoIsn't the context also important for people to know? Like, if the President of the United States is saying something that's factually incorrect and might cause people e.g. not to register to vote (because they expect every Californian will be getting a ballot), is that context not also significant? Or, hypothetically -- but really if you think at this point that this is a stretch, come on -- if Trump claims without evidence on November 3 that he was the victim of massive voter fraud and the election was stolen, and calls for his supporters to take up arms against their state and local governments, should that be broadcast without context or commentary?
- koheripbal 6y agoIt all comes down to who you trust to get the "correct" information from. Elected officials or corporations? This isn't about Trump. We have a robust mechanism to remove elected officials - not corporations.
- jimmydorry 6y agoFacebook should provide the platform and stop there. When they act as publishers and start editorialising or adding "platform opinions" to the user generated content, they can rightly be asked why they endorse everything else on their site that isn't "edited" or "added to". We need to think real hard about what we want in 5 years and beyond from now... not just what we want now. Breaching the divide of platform and publisher for anything beyond light moderation to keep the platform usable, no matter how well intentioned, is bound to have a devastating result on future political expression.