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Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague
- draw_down 6y agoI'm sure the free speech brigade will be along any second now, to plead this person's cause. Yep, aaaaany second now.
- sdinsn 6y agoYou don't have freedom of speech protections against your private employer. You only have protection against government action. And there is no government action in this story.
- guerrilla 6y agoWhich is really a shame indeed.
- draw_down 6y agoFair enough, this story got more attention than I was expecting. Happy to be wrong!
- kyrra 6y agoIt's called compelled speech, which the first amendment says is illegal. (Yes yes, the first amendment is entirely about the government and speech, but it's somewhat of an American belief to then try to apply first amendment protections across our society, even if we're not legally bound by it.) About compelled speech: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/933/compelled-speech https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/933/compelled-s...
- fzeroracer 6y agoI have a strong feeling that if the employee was instead protesting Facebook's spying on people he'd be lauded as a hero on here. Or if he posted a particularly long manifesto against diversity policies. Regardless I can understand why he was fired, since being particularly inflammatory like that will probably lead you to losing your job anywhere. Though that also depends on how high in the food chain you are.
- Avicebron 6y agoThere isn't a lot of information, for what it's worth I would be interested in how "public" his confrontation was, depending on that this could be more of a knee-jerk "this person is yikes" vs. sinister "don't stray from the party line"
- zachrip 6y agoExtremely public: https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057 https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057 - so public in fact, he brought the private messages out publicly as well.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Avicebron 6y agoAs much as I want to be sympathetic, if I was his co-worker I would feel very publicly harassed especially when the co-worker explicitly was conferring to him privately. Sure shame the monolith that is FB, I would even say shame Zuckerberg he controls the place. But don't shame a fellow engineer who you work with, he didn't have any say in what FB was doing. Also long term ineffective, if you promote a culture of shaming private conversations, then nothing happens because no one talks.
- nsainsbury 6y agoI think a key phrase here is "he was dismissed for publicly challenging a colleague’s silence". In other words, he publicly harassed a colleague who (for what could be any number of perfectly valid reasons) preferred not to publicly state their beliefs. That would seem to me to be an eminently reasonable reason to fire someone. If you go around publicly harassing your colleagues to publicly state their political opinions, you deserve to be fired.
- _rn 6y agoYeah this is a strange and pretty misleading headline. Here’s the primary source tweet: https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1271522288752455680?s=21 https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1271522288752455680?s=21
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI really think it crosses the line to being a dishonest headline. Reuters has to know that people will misunderstand it as an accusation that the employee was fired because he protested.
- dekhn 6y agoThis is the MO of news journalism (well, at least a subset). There's a narrative that sells ("big corp = bad, fire person for complaining to zuck") but they still typically include a little detail in the article ("actually fired for harrassing coworker") below the lede. I don't think I've ever seen a newspaper that hasn't done this. [edit: if you want to see some articles about misleading headlines, see https://daily.jstor.org/the-incredibly-true-story-of-fake-headlines/ https://daily.jstor.org/the-incredibly-true-story-of-fake-he... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/youll-cry-when-you-realize-how-easily-media-can-manipulate-you-180953183/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/youll-cry-when-you... ]
- underwater 6y agoThe original tweet is more telling. https://mobile.twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057 https://mobile.twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057
- JohnBerea 6y ago> Trump’s posts included the racially charged phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” How is that racially charged?
- dceddia 6y agoThe phrase has some history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_looting_starts,_the_shooting_starts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_looting_starts,_the...
- JohnBerea 6y agoIs the history of that phrase commonly known? That long and detailed Wikipedia Article was only created after Trump said the phrase: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=When_the_looting_starts,_the_shooting_starts&offset=&limit=500&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=When_the_looting_...
- dceddia 6y agoI must admit, I didn’t know the origin of the phrase when Trump said it. I only learned about it after the fact, and passed on the link here.
- dekhn 6y agoYes, the history is fairly well known by people who lived in the late 1960s. It was reported in the press and major magazines.
- codezero 6y agoWhen someone leads a nation of several hundred million people, it is expected that their public communication be thoroughly vetted. This is even true at a medium to large corporation for an executive. This is an expectation. I don’t actually believe Trump has anyone filtering his speech and I don’t think he’s educated enough to understand the phrase he said, but with that said, yes, we should expect our leaders to be informed on the nature of the words they say especially in the context of a crisis or emergency.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- neximo64 6y agoDear Mark Zuckerberg, Please use the power you have over the facebook platform, including that overseas in countries in Africa, and India to change the outcome of the US election this year so Trump loses. Then after the other countries too. With great power comes great responsibility, Zuck.
- ycombonator 6y agoSetting all the drama aside he was fired for harassing a coworker. The news article’s headline is misleading.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sergiotapia 6y ago>Dail said the tweet that prompted his firing, which he sent the day after that walkout, scolded a fellow engineer for declining to add a statement of support to developer documents he was publishing. >“Intentionally not making a statement is already political,” Dail wrote in the tweet. Yeah good riddance, imagine FORCING someone to say _anything_. And you twitter clowns are the good guys? Hardly.
- freen 6y agoFacebook: hardcore about unlimited freedom of speech, unless you want to unionize. Then you can fuck right the fuck off. https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-unionize/ https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-union...
- filoleg 6y agoThis is misleading as well. They aren’t autoblocking word “unionize” in their Facebook Workplace product. They give customers (employers who purchase this product) the ability to block any arbitrary word they want. And as an example, they brought up word “unionize”.
- cameronbrown 6y agoWTF, Facebook is not a platform for "unlimited freedom of speech". It has very strong moderation, and if you pay an inkling of attention to conservative or LGBT groups, too much. It's because neither of these groups are considered "advertiser friendly".
- baby 6y agoI'm a bit disappointed at articles like this, that IMO really don't reflect what I'm seeing... What I'm seeing is a lot of internal discussions, a lot of people challenging execs, a lot of people changing their profile pictures, etc. Politics are always going to be a dividing subject, and I find it quite remarkable that we are all able to debate about these topics, and are even encouraged to do so. Sure, not everyone agree with some of the decisions the company is taking, but you gotta respect the transparency and the willingness to explain and discuss these decisions. I don't think many companies would allow people to do this, and they would also probably get rid of people sharing too much.
- _b3dj 6y ago> “Intentionally not making a statement is already political,” Dale wrote in the tweet No it’s not. And this reminds me of the Dictatorship of the small minority [0] from NN Taleb. There are small intolerant minorities who are extremely vocal on certain matters to the point their opinions resemble a dictatorship [0] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nemothekid 6y agoAlmost every day on HN I read that multiple flavors of "FB/Palantir/Google/MS engineers who do nothing while Zuckerberg/USG/China invades more and more of our privacy are complicit in the cog that is Zuckerberg's ambition", but when it comes to race relations, suddenly engineers should be allowed to work in silence. I understand there's nuance, but I only hope the hivemind considers this nuance the next time they pile on Amazon engineers who decide to build facial recognition databases for the NSA.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoIf the Recoil project were contributing to racism in the US, I think we all agree that would be a problem.
- esperent 6y agoConnecting facial recognition software and racism seems to be earning you downvotes here. While racism is the hot button topic right now, widespread governmental and corporate (or indeed, private) use of facial recognition software is problematic for many reasons. Erosion of privacy, sexual and non-sexual harassment and stalking, racial profiling, gender profiling, profiling for membership of any other kind of group, cute Facebook apps tied to shadowy political organizations, even crazy dystopian inventions like the Chinese social credit scheme. This tech needs to be very strongly regulated, and soon. Anyone working in this field, and creating this type of software for companies with a historically weak moral compass, _should_ think deeply about their involvement.
- blahblahblogger 6y agoWhy would this open source project add something specific to the US even if just a banner? People keep saying slogans like "injustice anywhere..." or silence is complicit ... but they mean just on this US/Western issue? It seems like brigading people.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI think the advocates would agree that it's brigading. They're trying to create a climate where it's simply impossible to be neutral on their issue of choice, since they feel it's wrong to be neutral.
- adventured 6y agoThey don't have the numbers to impose the authoritarianism they seek (to fully remake things in the way they see fit), so the rampant threats and intimidation are meant to force joining. The best way to accomplish that, is to threaten a person's livelihood, which threatens their ability to exist. They started by just doing social ostracising, social threats of exclusion, and now they've moved on to targeting livelihoods. Cancel culture is part of this livelihood targeting shift. Behave exactly the way we say, or you're "problematic" and we'll kill your life. And we'll cheer and dance like soulless monsters in the tweet threads while you suffer. It's going to get a lot more aggressive yet, until a line gets drawn by the companies that comply too easily with the cancel demands. The malignant dictatorship of social media rage in the US is becoming insufferable. It's probably going to require government regulation to stop it.
- clairity 6y ago> “The malignant dictatorship of social media rage in the US is becoming insufferable. It's probably going to require government regulation to stop it.” you know you can just not tune in, right? it’s not coercive in any way, unlike said dictatorship or government regulation. amplification of voice is not a civil right.
- 6y ago
- dvt 6y agoI'm so over this political posturing. I can't wait for ~2 weeks when everyone's going to go back to their lives like nothing happened (remember #OccupyWallStreet?). People that actually change the world don't need to advertise it on Twitter. I have friends that volunteer in Watts and Compton every other weekend (and have done so for years) that don't need to share it on social media. I can't help but think that this current Twitter slacktivism really diminishes their genuine mission.
- sky_rw 6y agoMy friend, you may not be aware that there is an election in a few months. This chaos will continue to escalate all summer and into the fall. Then once Trump wins re-election your really gonna see some slacktavism.
- stevehawk 6y agoin particular because our president refuses to be eclipsed in newspaper headlines so he's likely to keep doing things that keeps these protests relevant for the next few months. (unlike #occupy)
- lightgreen 6y agoI’m not American, and I always wonder why it’s always about Trump. The police in the US reports to the mayor, governor, whatever, but not the president. George Floyd was killed in the city where mayor and governor are democrats. In Seattle where CHAZ is mayor and governor are democrats. In New York where police brutally attacked protestors they are also dems. Why Trump is responsible for anything? What Trump is doing exactly?
- rumanator 6y ago> What Trump is doing exactly? He has been doing the same old Trump-y things, such as publicly praising violent crack-down of protests in places like Mineapolis as being "beautiful". https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/06/11/beautiful-trump-says-of-aggressive-tactics-used-on-minneapolis-protesters-including-tear-gas/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/06/11/beautiful-...
- yowlingcat 6y agoI didn't expect to agree with Facebook corporate but here I am. It's one thing to privately disagree with a coworker about their action or lack thereof with respect to a contemporary event. But to drag it into a public setting is a severe violation of boundaries and borderline harassment. It's a huge liability risk to FB -- to scold your colleagues in public for their desire to separate the political from the professional is workplace harassment and something that would probably get you fired anywhere. With that said, I get the sense there is a large part of a story that is not being told here. Where was the manager? Has this employee had a history of maintaining appropriate professional boundaries with respect to communication? If Facebook doesn't have the appropriate paper trail, they could easily be sued for retaliation.
- throwaway1777 6y agoIs the tweet not a good enough paper trail?
- jedimastert 6y ago> borderline harassment Possibly personal opinion here, but given the current charged (understatement) political environment and twitter's propensity for "scarlet lettering" people via mob harassment, I don't think this was borderline. This seems like a deliberate attempt to get a large group of people to harass a co-worker because of differing opinions about how and when to communicate political opinions.
- yowlingcat 6y agoIt would be a personal opinion I share. But there are a lot of details I don't know. A whole range of possibilities I can imagine, from least like to most likely: - The former employee may have genuinely thought that a public "conversation" could result in a positive outcome (perhaps believing "sunlight is the best disinfectant") - The two may know each other previously - perhaps the former employee may have felt they had more of a mutual level of trust/familiarity than they actually had? - The former employee may have been wanting to leave Facebook anyways and (cynically speaking) wanted to go out in a blaze of glory and resign in a high profile manner - The former employee may be neurodivergent in some way and have difficulty navigating the subtle boundaries of spaces of privacy that exist along the spectrum of 1:1 to effectively "in public" - The former employee, frustrated and angry and activated by the heat of the moment, willfully decided to sic the mob on the other person Honestly, I don't know this person so it's hard to say. And I do know it is often the case the hindsight is 20/20. But, I wonder, in this former employee's entire time at Facebook, did their manager ever notice any of these kinds of aspects in that employee's interpersonal interactions or collaboration style? In my experience, hints of these things surface fairly quickly in the workplace, especially during the ramp-up phase or the first time some sort of an adverse situation is encountered, whether it be subpar code, a deadline that doesn't make sense and is hard to change, or a stakeholder that isn't exactly aligned with reality and isn't very easy to get there. If this former employee (consciously or unconsciously) takes such an adversarial approach to conflict resolution with a colleague, one wonders if this was the first time they have ever done that, or merely the first time they ever did this to such a degree. But who knows. The past few weeks and months have been insane. Many people are seeing more psychological stress and social unrest now than they've seen in their entire lives. A lot of them are not prepared to handle these kinds of situations in a manner they won't regret. It's unfortunate that it has to turn out this way, but on the other hand, this kind of behavior really can't be condoned. It's emotional blackmail. I really hope this former employee takes to heart a valuable lesson from this, but I have a feeling that the exact opposite will happen; to be fired so publicly, with the humiliation that comes with that, is the perfect accelerant to a radicalization that might already be in progress. I don't know where we go from here.
- packetslave 6y agoDisclaimer: I have no opinion whatsoever about what this guy did or didn't tweet, or whatever the reason may be that he's no longer at Facebook. That being said, WOW that's some crap reporting: the only source mentioned in the article is what the guy himself wrote on Twitter. From the bottom: "Facebook and Dail did not immediately respond to requests for comment." Reuters chose to spin that into "Facebook fires employee who..." Come on, a Journalism 101 teacher would go nuts over a student who wrote that headline with no credible sources.
- packetslave 6y agoedit: <nevermind, they changed it back>
- tonymet 6y agoi read articles bottom-up for this reason – you'll find whatever shred of facts to be found there.
- np_tedious 6y agoDisappointing indeed. I had thought that the "wire services" like AP and Reuters largely stayed out editorializing but it seems not. I understand that framing will always come into play and that completely neutral "just the facts" is an elusive ideal, but still this example is really egregious.
- m_ke 6y agoFew things to consider: 1. Peter Thiel sits on Facebook's board and was one of its first investors. 2. Thiel donated 1.25 million to Trump's campaign right before the election when it looked like he had no chance of winning. 3. Thiel also donated millions of dollars to Mercer's Super PAC which was funding Cambridge Analytica (which Mercer cofounded with Bannon). 4. Thiel is looking to start a conservative news channel with Mercer. 5. Thiel is an author of great pieces like "The Case Against Affirmative Action" and "The Diversity Myth". 6. Mercer has great opinions like: "...Mercer, for his part, has argued that the Civil Rights Act, in 1964, was a major mistake. According to the onetime Renaissance employee, Mercer has asserted repeatedly that African-Americans were better off economically before the civil-rights movement. (Few scholars agree.) He has also said that the problem of racism in America is exaggerated. The source said that, not long ago, he heard Mercer proclaim that there are no white racists in America today, only black racists. " 7. Theil's Founders Fund has great libertarian projects like Palantir, Space X and Anudril, which have picked up billions worth of government contracts over under this administration. https://www.axios.com/peter-thiel-the-bridge-between-trump-and-facebook-78512519-4023-4b34-bb53-e781e536da0c.html https://www.axios.com/peter-thiel-the-bridge-between-trump-a... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/technology/peter-thiel-donald-j-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/technology/peter-thiel-do... https://mashable.com/2018/03/22/facebook-peter-thiel-cambridge-analytica/ https://mashable.com/2018/03/22/facebook-peter-thiel-cambrid... https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-case-against-affirmative-action https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-case-against-affirmativ... https://www.amazon.com/Diversity-Myth-Multiculturalism-Political-Intolerance/dp/0945999763 https://www.amazon.com/Diversity-Myth-Multiculturalism-Polit... https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-reclusive-hedge-fund-tycoon-behind-the-trump-presidency https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-reclusive-... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-25/peter-thiel-s-palantir-wins-role-in-823-million-government-contract https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-25/peter-thi...
- dvt 6y agoI'm not sure why your default position is that conservatism is anti-minority. It just seems intellectually lazy. Thiel is a pretty hardcore libertarian, so it makes sense that he looks at the world through a lens of personal responsibility, as opposed to group tribalism. It's merely a question of first principles. If you disagree, that's fine (and plenty of people do), but accusing him of being racist (or racist-adjacent) is silly. I expect a tad more insight out of HN comments.
- sadsadsadsad 6y agoah, liberal mental illness.
- java_script 6y agoHe shouldn’t have been fired I think, but he also shouldn’t be a tattle-tale against his co-workers. We need solidarity with our co-workers + an end to at-will employment. Relatedly (but not specific to this situation), if we had stronger employment guarantees people probably wouldn’t taddle to try to get people fired as much. Win-win-win all around.
- ohnope 6y agoSolidarity is important but how can you get there if coworkers harass each other publicly?
- sky_rw 6y agoThe best thing about running your own business is never having to deal with people like this. It's vastly under appreciated equity.
- DenisM 6y agoDepends on who are your customers, and how easily are they swayed with a twitstorm.
- paragraft 6y agoQuite. Plenty of people who've had their small businesses targeted by various social media bandwagons for non-business reasons in the past few years.
- sky_rw 6y agoSadly a valid point. However, I would submit that as a business you are less susceptible to the "silence is violence" attack than an individual would be. But who knows, the times they are a-changin.
- davikr 6y agoHow could Facebook have action on Trump tweets? I don't understand the title.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- java_script 6y agoHis Facebook tweets, duh. Catch yourself up before commenting please, go Google it on Bing.
- SirensOfTitan 6y agoBullying for a good cause is still bullying. It feels like a lot of righteous bullies out there don’t want to put in the real effort of changing minds, so they take up their pitchforks in public forums. It’s hard work influencing people for the better, it takes a lot of empathy and a lot of patience.
- notSupplied 6y agoI'm starting to wonder whether "for a good cause" is exactly the reason why this is happening. People are mistakenly believing that as long as the ends are just, the means couldn't possibly be wrong.
- umvi 6y ago"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis
- wyldfire 6y agoMaybe the title should be "...employee who was a jerk" [but also protested Facebook's inaction on Trump tweets]
- renaudg 6y ago“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.” “Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’” “That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.” - Barack Obama https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-cancel-culture.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-ca... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM
- pkukkapalli 6y agoThanks for sharing that, this is the first time I've seen this quote. I think most adults feel the same way about social media activism, but they probably don't think it's worth their time to call it out even if it annoys them. You would just be begging the social media mob to turn on you next.
- dk8996 6y agoThanks for sharing this. This is very needed thing during these times.
- pryce 6y agoThere's an important conversation to be had over how activism should operate, in which areas, about what's effective, what turns people off and leaves them hostile, and what measures are justified on what issues, versus what measures are completely disproportionate. That said, this person stood up for their principles (rightly or wrongly) and lost their job because of it. Your quotation about people "casting stones" in a cavalier way, just to feel good about themselves without it actually risking them anything probably describes a lot of online "woke" flamewars but (to me) doesn't very well characterize what happened here.
- koheripbal 6y ago
- musicale 6y ago> Facebook fires employee who protested its inaction on Trump tweets Why should facebook act on Trump tweets?
- _bxg1 6y agoTwitter de-emphasized one because it violated their policy by advocating violence, and added a fact check to another that was blatantly and verifiably false. Neither was removed completely. Zuckerberg specifically said Facebook would do nothing of the sort.
- DailyHN 6y agoNot a single comment in this thread supports the employee.
- thrwaway69 6y agoThere are few if you look around.
- bluntfang 6y agoi noticed the astroturfing as well.
- messick 6y agoSorry, too busy writing down everyone who doesn’t think “silence is complicity” just in case their resume comes by my desk someday.
- DailyHN 6y agoHN crowd has lost my respect. Not from this instance alone. But as a culmination of years of inaction.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- musicale 6y agoCA Labor Code section 1102 seems to prohibit firing employees for political activity: "No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity." Perhaps publicly criticizing the company you work for does not qualify as a political activity? But expressing support for or opposition to a candidate, law, or public policy presumably would. A company would presumably not be able to fire you for attending or expressing support for a protest or political rally.
- dahfizz 6y agoHarassing a coworker on Twitter is not political activity.
- fsociety 6y agoCompletely disagree, you’re spinning a narrative by leaving out context, and the original tweeter labeled it as political too.. so they disagree as well.
- 1123581321 6y agoYou can attend a rally. You can’t harass and incite harassment against a coworker for not attending. The harassed coworker is the one whose political rights needed to be protected here.
- m3kw9 6y agoHe probably did more than that in which he was doing a lot more to show his displeasure, not that I’m disagreeing but you don’t just raise your hand and they fire you
- newbie578 6y agoWow, talk about being a dick. "Intentionally not making a statement is already political." I am really curious, are these types of persons not able to see their own hypocrisy?
- jeddf 6y agoThey worked together but this was just a public discussion about a change to an open source projects' docs site. The response was private so he shared publicly because it's relevant info for the community. Everyone is screaming harassment, I don't see any evidence of that. Everyone's in the comments talking about professionalism, this isn't the time for professionalism. BLACK LIVES MATTER! Scream it from the rooftops. "black Americans are arrested at 2.6 times the per-capita rate of all other Americans" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United... Slavery is alive and well in America.
- cosmicexplorer 6y ago"The response was private so he shared publicly because it's relevant info for the community." Made me feel very positive to see this comment in the replies, thank you! It was very difficult to focus the discussion on Twitter to why the engineer would feel sharing publicly was necessary in the first place, despite potentially losing their job.
- stephc_int13 6y agoI would have fired the guy as well. He was harassing colleagues.
- geodel 6y agoWell world has not really changed in thousand years. is it? If one can't sign letter to believe in one true God/Kind, they deserve to die.
- dk8996 6y agoIn general this is such a mess. Every four years these topics are framed in a such a divisive manner that the end result is that it rips friends, families and communities apart. I really loathe these times and it's becoming harder to avoid it.
- achiang 6y agoSo here's a nuanced view I'm sure will get downvoted into the ground: both FB and the employee were right, but along different dimensions, and this outcome was not only inevitable, but desirable. The employee, as a white male in tech, is absolutely morally right to use his privilege to call out other powerful white males for their silence. And make no mistake, silence is complicity. Many smart philosophers have written about this, see MLK Jr. or Maya Angelou for more. This is the core of being an ally. Use your privilege to make the hard ask from your peers that a less privileged person, who is decidedly not a peer, cannot. FB, on the other hand, is also right in a different sense, to maintain internal expectations that singling out colleagues with your political opinion in public is ineffective at best and toxic harassment at worst. FB are signalling to the rest of their employees what behavior they will not tolerate. In the end, this employee leveraged awareness several orders of magnitude more than had he not been fired (and will likely easily find a new job) and FB protected whatever they believe their culture to be (and whatever other HR lawsuits they believed themselves to be at risk for).
- waheoo 6y agoSilence is complicency, for racial hate crimes and actions, yes, i agree, you should t stand by and let bad shit happen. This isn't silence though, this is rejecting an order to partake in a protest. Even if it is silence, staying silent is still a right. Harrassing people for silence is akin to harassing people exercising their freedom of speech.
- scarmig 6y agoI want to push against this silence is complicity mindset. Looking at your profile, I can point out countless atrocities that you don't explicitly denounce. Do I see you upset about how Israel has amped up its program of settler colonialism in Palestine in the past few weeks? How the PRC is running literal concentration camps in Xinjiang? Or, moving along to the USA, how men have extraordinarily high suicide rates? Or how the elderly are being sacrificed at the altar of economic growth in the midst of COVID-19? Or, thinking long term, the tens of millions of people who will die because of climate change? I don't. And, for what it's worth, I wouldn't be surprised if you have "correct" points of view on all of those. But you're still being complicit in deprioritizing those things and prioritizing your own set of causes, at the expense of human lives. And if you're indeed complicit in a conspiracy of silence on them, you've got blood on your hands. Brandon Dail was demanding someone add some kind of explicit support for BLM to a Github repo. Where does that stop? I can think of hundreds of very worthy causes that need more publicizing. Is what we ultimately need some long list of evils that every open source project needs to denounce before right-thinking people can choose to use them? And, if you choose to use e.g. Linux, can I denounce you for choosing to use software that is complicit in a conspiracy to terminate black men's lives? People can prioritize and take action on different causes in whatever way they want to. It's fine to ask individuals to reprioritize, but you're not entitled to anything. And, tactically speaking, ever-increasing stridency of tone and denunciation of imagined enemies is not an effective way to gather support for a cause.
- kenneth 6y agoThe workplace is not a soapbox for personal political opinion. I'm surprised Facebook hasn't taken a harsher stance on employees publicly criticizing their leadership. It takes a special level of entitlement to be able to expect to represent oneself publicly as an employee of a company and criticize it…and not face disciplining by the company. It's a clear fireable offense. If I were leadership, I would make that clear and take the necessary steps to terminate each employee who violates that policy,
- loraa 6y agoYou're an idiot if you bring that bullshit liberal elite attitude to work with you. You shitty little opinion stays home. Glad he got fired.
- baryphonic 6y agoI have no problem with this. If Facebook is a private company that could use its monopoly power to censor people and ban them arbitrarily, certainly it is a private company with the power to end relationships with employees who disrespect and harass their colleagues.
- alslsls 6y ago> Open source shouldn't be political The more times you can bring people of different opinions and beliefs together, the more good can be done in the world. The activists of today just divide people, and cause more net pain in the world than the moderates. Deep down I think these kinds of divisive activists are actually just fighting their own personal deamons and need a way to vent their anger, because their real personal problems in life are unchangeable.
- MattGaiser 6y agoThe actual tweet for anyone who tried to go to the source material and found it protected. http://archive.is/QBw9h http://archive.is/QBw9h He publicly criticized a co-worker and when that co-worker tried to discuss it privately, he publicly criticized him again.
- propogandist 6y agoOpen Source should not be politicized.