59 ms·
FB to curb internal debate over sensitive issues amid employee discord
- ganoushoreilly 6y agoGood. More companies should move this way rather than the other.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AlexandrB 6y agoWeird that an outspoken free speech advocate like Mark Zuckerberg would want to limit the speech of his employees.
- kurthr 6y agoEspecially since they presumably use FB for internal discussions... Why not use the same (weak) moderation mechanisms everyone else has? Not like you can avoid politics on your regular feed. I guess he realizes they don't work.
- JamesBarney 6y agoIt seems far easier to police the 50,000 people you write checks to, than a billion users.
- fatnoah 6y agoAFAIK, Facebook is not used for internal discussions. Unlike the Facebook we all have, there are no controls to block users, flag posts as "see fewer like this", etc. I've used those to great effect and see zero political content on my FB feed.
- bhupy 6y ago> Why not use the same (weak) moderation mechanisms everyone else has? Not like you can avoid politics on your regular feed. Because people don't typically use Facebook at work? It's a recreational tool. The issue is that for Facebook employees, they are working on building that recreational tool, and that hampers productivity and professionalism. > I guess he realizes they don't work. Or he realizes that they work for a service that's typically consumed during one's free time, and not as a direct component of one's employment.
- ugh123 6y agoI think the point is that employees that are taking advantage of free speech within the workplace are forcing others into the debate unwillingly, and this is causing strife and resentment. I applaud the move.
- sg47 6y agoJust like miscreants are taking advantage of free speech by spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories on FB the platform?
- themacguffinman 6y agoForcing others into debate and spreading conspiracy theories are two different matters. The former impinges on the basic freedom of speech and association for other people, while the latter affects no one's freedoms. The former is a matter of principle, the latter is a subjective judgement.
- sg47 6y agoWhere's the proof that others are being forced into debate?
- themacguffinman 6y agoUnsure what the GP was referring to, but the article suggests that the pressure comes from activists spamming work feeds: > “What we’ve heard from our employees is that they want the option to join debates on social and political issues, rather than see them unexpectedly in their work feed.” [said Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne] Others have organized to skip work in an act of defiance, affecting colleagues who are not engaged in their political cause: > a group of employees staged a virtual walkout in early June to protest Facebook’s decision to leave up a post from President Trump about social unrest Not exactly a "gun to your head" type of forced, but nonetheless these are actions designed to foment a political clash with other employees to engage with certain political causes when they may not want to concern themselves with that at all. What makes this particularly problematic in the workplace is that many employees rely on work feeds and teamwork to earn a livelihood for themselves and their families, so they cannot realistically avoid it.
- mhoad 6y agoI just got done reading this[1] and it's becoming harder and harder believe the idea that Facebook is just pro "free speech". Their actions aren't meeting their words at all. [1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-09-17/facebook-and-mark-zuckerberg-need-trump-even-more-than-trump-needs-facebook https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-09-17/facebook-...
- compiler-guy 6y agoAll but the most strident and radical free-speechers support time, place, and manner restrictions.
- patorjk 6y agoAt 3 paragraphs (131 words), that was a really short article. However, I agree with the subheading: "Mark Zuckerberg says employees shouldn’t have to confront social issues in their day-to-day work unless they want to" That sounds good to me. I've never had to talk about these kind of things at work. Are there work places where this is unavoidable?
- daok 6y agoYes. There are places where employees MUST go in these meetings that talk about social differences, inclusions, diversity, etc.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dahart 6y agoEveryone has to discuss diversity at work because there are laws prohibiting discrimination, that's a good thing. Not everyone has to discuss politics at work.
- ikiris 6y agoI'd love it if there was a difference between the two again.
- dahart 6y agoI think I know what you mean, and me too. But... mandatory diversity training at work is typically very bland, sticks to communicating what the rules are, and is very apolitical compared to forums, employee banter, or stuff you find on the news or Facebook or YouTube. Having been through a bunch of them at several companies, I wouldn't put them in the same camp as 'politics' at all.
- stagehn 6y agoIt is heavily political since there's no evidence of efficacy. You can see the heterodox academy piece that summarises the available evidence. Since it is not efficacious then I'm forced to conclude that the motive is political and ideological.
- satya71 6y agoHow about bringing the same rules to the wider FB? I just want to look at baby pictures and connect with friends. I don't want to be part of a machinery that spreads misinformation and conspiracy theories.
- drchopchop 6y agoI can't see how that is even possible at this point. You'd have to remove groups, pages, public profiles, and sharing, which would wreck the advertising and revenue ecosystem. Or, come up with magical AI which could detect politics/memes/disinformation and remove it instantly after it's been posted.
- quicklime 6y agoI’m sure they could develop a classifier that would catch most (~90%) of political content, and make it opt-in - if people want to see it they can, but it could be hidden by default. This would be my preferred approach, so that I can use it for connecting with people but avoid listening to everyone’s political outrage.
- londons_explore 6y agoYou could build this as a browser extension... Call it "de-politics", and have it scan the HTML of popular sites (facebook, twitter, etc) and simply collapse/hide all content matching some filter. I bet a simple keyword filter for names of politicians could catch 90%. I wonder if people would pay for it?
- wmf 6y agoGoogle's similar policy change leaked yesterday: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/16/google-content-moderation-internal-message-boards-memegen.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/16/google-content-moderation-in...
- teddyh 6y agoFrom a cursory reading it does not really sound similar; it sounds like Google is picking a side and doubling down on it. The description of the Facebook policy, on the other hand, suggests that Facebook are trying to suppress the drama, not picking a side in it.
- hirundo 6y agoIf we were to discuss politics at work at any length we would be at immediate risk of losing valuable people. We all pretty much know where we stand on politics, and it is not together. And many of us feel very strongly about our irreconcilable positions. But by carefully not talking about them (or engaging when someone less in tune starts) we get along just fine. That's not official policy but it is a good one.
- benjohnson 6y agoOur small company has a "No drama" policy. We have an astounding diverse team and we've learned to appreciate each other.
- ikiris 6y agoFor a lot of people, appreciating all people and letting them live their lives is "politics"
- pjc50 6y agoDoes it also have a sexual harrasment policy, or is the response to one employee reporting that another groped them going to be "you're fired"? As is traditional?
- watwut 6y ago> we've learned to appreciate each other. How do you know if people cant express anger at someone? It is not mock question. I recently found out that colleagues who pretended to have good relationships (because we dont talk negatively about others as cultural thing) had long term resentments against each other. And those resentments were influencing work under surface in negative way - until it blew up into dysfunction which is how I realized.
- benjohnson 6y agoWe have an issue system - instead of "Bob always leaves his mess to clean up" if you have a problem your supposed to put it in generic terms like "kitchen is sometimes left a mess" and then put a counter measure: "kitchen cleaning trainig and checklist". If the countermeasure is reasonable we implement it. We've found this keeps people from festering. Heck.. one employee thought he was being underpaid. He was. He put it in the issue tracking system and we now have a public skill system and renumeration scale.
- PunchTornado 6y agoPeople shouldn't be forced to join in political debates in the workplace. If you're not interested, you should be able to avoid climate change, racism, hate speech debates.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pklausler 6y agoI completely agree with your first sentence, but would not characterize any of your examples in your second as being inherently political as opposed to having been needlessly politicized.
- fivre 6y agoI've made attempts to reach out to some of my old friends there on the T&S team in light of some evidence really blatant Russian agitprop thriving and finding an audience there. Between this and the Zhang memo, however, it looks quite doubtful that I'd be able to do much more than reconnect and share a rather depressing lunch as they explain that their hands are tied because of executive will. The IRA and/or its successors or friends appear to have taken the same approach as Russian security services have with the rash of targeted murders in Europe, with a "this totally isn't our doing, but anyone slightly educated on the subject will recognize our hand, because we want them to be aware that it's us and we don't actually mind people knowing" wink wink nudge nudge threadbare veneer of disclaiming responsibility. Normally, I wouldn't really care: the 2016 stuff everyone made a fuss about on social media was largely ineffective and at best served as a smokescreen to distract from their very successful actions outside social media--Buff Bernie is a lasting meme treasure and nothing more. This go 'round, however, they've apparently learned from their mistakes, and I'm seeing.evidence that personal friends _are_ receiving and and are influenced by their messaging. I thankfully haven't really had to watch any family or friends succumb to the Fox News media poison, and thought my social circles largely insulated from that sort of problem, but I was apparently quite wrong--right about _what_ wouldn't influence people, but blind to the idea that other actors would follow the same model and create content that _would_ suck in their target audience. https://twitter.com/evelyndouek https://twitter.com/evelyndouek is a good source of reporting about Facebook and other social media cos' continued lackluster attempts to stand up potemkin independent review bodies, if you want more info on the space and can stomach more disheartening news.
- cltby 6y agoHow terrifying that sneaky Russians are able to effect arbitrary social change by just throwing $100k of FB ads at the problem! I thought I was a moderately intelligent and well-informed person, but after reading your comment, I now understand that no amount of reason or self-awareness can protect me from miniscule amounts of ad spend by foreign spies.
- fivre 6y agoThe point is that they're well-educated themselves, persistent, and capable of learning from their mistakes. Earlier attempts were childishly bad. The contemporary ones are better-crafted, and may not be reaching you--I don't know you and can't speak to that--but they are reaching people I know and care about.
- jgacook 6y agoGenerally I try and shy away from being too alarmist, but I am so disillusioned with the kind of tech worker HN's userbase seems to represent. I think it's a feckless attitude to think that working in one of the best-paid, global, most influential professions in the world right now means that your only obligation is to clock in on time, code whatever you're told to code, take no ownership of the effect your work may have on the general public and collect your fat paycheck at the end of the month. Why does it sound good to anyone that Facebook employees should be prevented from discussing the ethical implications of the product they sell their labor to create? Facebook complete lack of accountability - internal or governmental - has to date: - incited a genocide [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...] - provided a bias for right wing content in a American election year (and fired the employee who blew the whistle on it) [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-fire-employee-conservative-right-wing-breitbart-charlie-kirk-dimaond-and-silk-a9659301.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...] - exacerbated a global pandemic, indirectly causing 1000s of deaths, by not policing Covid misinformation [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/19/facebook-funnelling-readers-towards-covid-misinformation-study https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/19/facebook-...] - is arguably a contributor to the global rise in authoritarianism [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/24/facebook-authoritarian-platform-mark-zuckerberg-michael-bennet https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/24/facebo...] and that's really just the tip of the iceberg. If you buy into the notion that Mark Zuckerberg is a nice man in a hoodie trying to run a business that his employees are tearing down with some radical agenda then I'm sorry, but how naive are you? Facebook has a track record of ignoring the consequences of what happens on their platform in order to continue profiting. It's not a mistake, it's the point. We should be cheering on tech workers challenging the ethics of the work they produce, not talking about how inconvenient it is for Facebook workers to start realizing how questionable the product they're building really is.
- fivre 6y agoWe should indeed. I unfortunately don't know enough at Facebook well enough to have those conversations in person often, so internet will have to suffice. It's unfortunately very much in the interest of Facebook's leadership team to discourage it, however, as a clock in clock out, see and hear no evil labor culture is good for the leaders' personal wealth, so ethics be damned, number go up.
- itg 6y agoLooks like tech companies are finding out there's a good reason so many older companies discouraged talk of politics, religion, etc.
- iron0013 6y agoHow is this different from silencing employee objections to unethical corporate practices? It’s not merely “talking politics at work” to point out that, for example, your company’s practices are helping a political party steal an election. That’s an ethical concern, not a political one.
- paganel 6y ago> your company’s practices are helping a political party steal an election Nobody is stealing anything, as the rules are set right now influencing public opinion through media channels is not seen as "stealing". If the powers that be were to physically alter the votes and the voting process that would be another discussion, but almost everything presented in the media is fair game.
- pjc50 6y agoIf Facebook doesn't want to talk politics, it should stop making political donations to PACs.
- dejavuagain 6y agoThat's right. There is a goal to separate the employer and employee to absolve the proletariat of the moral connection between their actions day-to-day and the bourgeois who all share in the protections of the corporate veil. But this cannot be done, despite all attempts to quiet the cognitive dissonance. Every employee of an evil company is evil. Every political message lobbied for by the employer is the employee's political statement. Any claims to the contrary reek of hypocrisy.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/PdluY https://archive.is/PdluY
- drewcoo 6y agoHow has it worked at tabloid newspapers for longer than I care to remember? Same problem. This is not about tech.
- fgrtr3terwy 6y agoFacebook wants their employees to stop talking about politics, even though Facebook by its nature takes stances on deeply political topics. How exactly do you avoid political discussion when you're asking what constitutes hate speech, whether a US president should be allowed to violate Facebook's content guidelines, or to what extent governments can spread misinformation in other countries? If you work at Facebook, your work directly or indirectly supports Facebook's political decisions. Facebook just doesn't want you to talk about it. Because Mark and the executives make the decisions, and you're just supposed to follow orders. This is how it works at many other companies. But for a long time, Facebook was able to recruit people to work their by promising that they could 'change the world' and 'make a difference.' Side note: One of Facebook's board members apparently enjoys the company of white supremacists. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24444704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24444704 Will Facebook employees be allowed to talk about that? If you work at Facebook, how do you feel about that?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago"Curb" here doesn't seem to mean "ban". What Facebook wants is for employees to avoid the totalizing view of politics you're describing, where political discussion needs to occur in all places at all times and declaring a "no politics zone" constitutes taking a side.
- elliekelly 6y agoAnd that's an entirely reasonable stance for management to take at most companies. But not facebook. They've deliberately tailored the platform to be a monetized political outrage machine. Its like ESPN announcing they plan to "curb" sports talk in the office.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoIf Yankees and Red Sox fans regularly got into shouting matches on the ESPN software development mailing lists, I expect they'd be told to knock it off, and I wouldn't see that as a contradiction of the idea that sports is important.
- m0zg 6y agoGood for them. I haven't worked at FB, but I can only assume they're similar to Google in this regard, maybe worse, since their workforce tends to be younger on average. Things were already getting pretty unbearable when I left Google years ago, and (according to people I know who still work there) have taken a turn for _much_ worse in 2016. When recruiters email, I politely decline, without specifying why, but this is largely why. I actually liked working there when it came to _work_, but the environment was extremely politicized and oppressive. No differences of opinion were tolerated at all. You'd immediately be ratted out to HR for a mere suggestion that someone is too aggressive/uncivil in enforcing the dogma on internal Google+.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoInteresting to see young companies fall into line. There is a reason it is against norms to talk about these things in most companies, because it causes undo conflict usually far outside of the context of what is being worked on.
- ponker 6y agoVery glad to work somewhere where people just don’t talk politics or anything serious at work. I have kids and I don’t want to risk my job over saying the wrong thing. I don’t need you to be my partner in discovering myself, let’s just discuss our work, the weather, and the local sportsball results.
- throwitawayfb 6y agoI've just been given an offer from Facebook and I have a few days to decide to take the job or not. The ethical implications of what I'm doing are intense. On one hand, a near 400k total comp package is very nice, but on the other hand I don't want to make the world worse off. I think if I could make that kind of money working from home for another company it'd be an easier decision. Unfortunately, I have to play the hand I'm dealt.
- trhway 6y agoDon't sell yourself that cheap, ask for 600k. Once you get it, your doubts will disappear just like by magic.
- bendoernberg 6y agoHow much less would you make working at another, less evil company?
- throwitawayfb 6y agoUnknown. No other company has recruited me and made me an offer.
- jgacook 6y agoIf you're being offered a $400K comp package I can say with a lot of certainty that you have not been dealt a hand and are, in fact, a highly skilled worker with a great many options for employment, so sincere congratulations on your success! It's therefore hard to see how taking this offer would not be choosing to sell your ethics for money and success, given that you could likely land a well paid job anywhere.
- chmaynard 6y agoConsult a lawyer for advice on the legal implications of being directed to work on projects that either violate the law or your own ethical principles. The lawyer can help you draft an employment contract that protects you from retaliation if you object. If Facebook refuses to sign the contract, walk away.
- GoodJokes 6y agoNo clearer way to express that when you are at work you do not live in a democratic society. That is for "outside" of work. When you are at work you are subject to authoritarian principles and your time is not yours.
- GoodJokes 6y agoI mean, I don't want to say it, but this just sounds like Facebook (and most companies) have a fragility problem. A bunch of middle classy and upper middle class people that have never had to feel uncomfortable due to their place in a highly inequitable system.
- gabereiser 6y agoFB by its nature is political, as it supports its ad network. To say to employees you can’t be is really them admitting they aren’t equipped to deal with this crisis they themselves created.
- eli 6y agoI wonder what the people who justify working for Facebook because they’re “changing it from the inside” think about this.
- forgotmysn 6y agoare there really people that naive at fb?
- asdasfasdfasdf 6y agoYes, I've lost a couple friends over this unfortunately. Maybe because it's so... insidious? There are engineers at Facebook that think Facebook is protecting free speech. It's so strange.
- x3n0ph3n3 6y ago_Absolutely_ there are.
- secondcoming 6y agoI'm not surprised. US political 'discussions' are ruining the internet as it is, having to endure it in the workplace must be unbearable. Reddit is fucked from it, Twitter should be avoided by everyone and it's here on HN too. It's also on Slashdot even though it's dead, the San Fran office of The Register seems intent on pulling that site down too. The sooner this fucking election is over, the better. No more having to read about Marxism, Trump, Racists, Snowflakes and Trannies. I downloaded nVidia Broadcast a while ago, it's really quite good.
- themacguffinman 6y agoI'd be surprised if it stopped after this election. It's shaping up to be one of the most divisive elections ever. Whichever the outcome, at least one of the two large factions will have a lot to say, which leads to the other faction saying a lot about what they have to say.
- BTCOG 6y agoAll this rioting and yet nobody burned down the Facebook offices. A shame, could have brought about the radical change they expected.
- kerng 6y agoThis seems like a wrong move. The idea seems to disassociate employees from the problems of Facebook, and the problem the platform creates... When you work at Facebook you should know what's going on and what the company is doing and causing and trying to help fix it. It sounds like leadership is asking employees to put the head in the sand - shouldn't a leader propose the opposite? What happened to move fast and break things?
- htnsao 6y agoProbably better to #deleteFacebook and give everyone access to their own Mastodon instance for ~$5/yr.
- gorgoiler 6y agoYesterday, I introduced some of my pupils — in this case, a group of ten rowdy pre-teens — to the idea of decorum and vulgarity. There’s could well be a whiff of truth to a comparison between my class of children and this story about FB employees. It feels very old fashioned, but are we not getting a little burned out by a world where people openly nail gun their identity politics to the mast? When I were a lad (way back in the nineties) I was taught it was rude to talk about politics, religion, or money. This applied to anywhere one was in polite company, not just at home, and definitely not at work.
- Apofis 6y agoThey drive their own content moderators insane. This is just corporate protectionism.
- btbuildem 6y agoThe cognitive dissonance is nauseating -- on one side, a flaming sphincter of discord, pandering to the lowest common denominator. But they want the other side, the side that picks the diet and tunes the dilation to be disengaged, apolitical and obedient? I really am not sure you can have both, Zucky.
- fareesh 6y agoIf the climate is such that the employees are so passionate about politics, is it at all possible that zero employees have their thumb on the scale in terms of using their position to nudge towards their desired election result? That seems like a bigger issue. If I am an activist and I poison the enormous dataset that's being fed to a ML model, is anyone even going to notice?
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoThey would notice the size of the ETL job necessary to do this (and tbh, I don't think anyone understands the individual level outputs of any large ML model well enough to accomplish this).
- thu2111 6y agoEvidence suggests the opposite: they would write a self-congratulatory blog post about it. For example the work Google does on "de-biasing AI" is all about taking ML models and warping its understanding of the world to reflect ideological priorities. https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.06520 https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.06520
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoThat paper (and all other works in this space) are about population level inferences from the model. My point is that the individual level outputs (which you'd need to accomplish what the OP was talking about) are essentially impossible to tune so precisely, given our current understandings of the models.
- fareesh 6y agoI'm reading a leaked internal Facebook document published on theverge.com where it's suggested that they build a "troll classifier" based on the use of words like "reeee", "normie", "IRL", "Shadilay", "lulz". The have also suggested a "meme cache" - one of the memes shown is a Folgers coffee cup which says "Best part of waking up, Hillary lost to Trump". Based on this classifier and hits to the meme cache, "trolls" would experience things like auto-logout, limited bandwidth. Under "when to trigger this" they also suggest the period "Leading upto elections". So on the one hand this document seems well-intentioned because there's some bad behavior in these groups like raiding, doxxing, racism, etc. Rather than focusing on behaviour like doxxing and raids, the approach suggested seems to be directed at a specific group. Why? In the entire universe is it only this group that engages in this kind of behaviour? It also does a broad classification that lumps anyone sharing the same memes, or vocabulary with punitive action. Also they associate the election with this, which seems especially puzzling.
- unabst 6y agoZuckerburg touts free speech over Russia interfering with our elections or correcting the president or controlling the viral spread of disinformation, yet moves to control speech within the company due to inconveniences. “If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies.” ― Jon Stewart (Many said something similar, but I just love Jon Stewart)
- jondubois 6y agoI think they should be allowed to talk about politics. Verbal conflict is always good. The reason why political conflicts are not resolvable these days is because there is a strong element of financial self-interest which is preventing honest and rational discourse. On one side, some people have an interest in not accepting that their financial success is arbitrary and illegitimate. On the opposite side, some people feel that they have been locked out of an arbitrary wealth transfer and so they have a strong interest in not accepting that they're incompetent losers and that they deserve to be at the bottom of the food chain because they didn't time the market right (a highly speculative and irrational market too!). Or maybe they didn't pass the Facebook whiteboard test job interview questions several years back (which is also an arbitrary hiring process by many accounts)... So basically they missed out on a huge opportunity because of some fickle arbitrary reason. I don't think blocking discourse is going to improve things. History has shown time and time again that preventing free speech will stop people from finding compromises. The only solution to the worsening problems will be violence. If the elites keep suppressing speech, the result will be worse than WW2 and the elites will not stand a chance because it will be fought on their own turf... The elites won't even know who their enemy is. Their own friends and family members could be against them. They won't even realize it until it's too late. The right thing to do is to find political solutions. I personally think that UBI (Universal Basic Income) would solve most problems. It wouldn't fix the wealth gap immediately, but it would fix the mechanism which is suspected of causing arbitrary (centralizing) wealth transfer and that would at least level the playing field. UBI is a really good compromise. If the elites are so confident in their superior abilities, surely they have nothing to lose by leveling the playing field right? BTW, I currently earn 100% passive income so I'm actually saying this as someone who is on the winning side... I've come so close to complete failure - I leaped over the crevasse in the nick of time; the system's fickleness and arbitrariness are crystal clear to me. I'm currently standing on the winning side of a very deep precipice and I can see legions of talented people running straight into it.
- jyrkesh 6y ago> Ctrl+F -> "quit.", "quit " I see so much debate about what's right to do within FB, "how will people change the structure from the inside with this rule?", etc. QUIT. Just quit. Seriously. Make it public why you quit. Quit en masse. FB is not a good company. Your talents are useful in many other places. Yes, I'm privileged in saying this. No, I wouldn't feel comfortable quitting my job right now. But if you believe enough that FB is an evil company--as many of us have known for 10+ years now--you should not work there. If they are doing bad things, and they are not open to people fixing said bad things, stop helping them do bad things.
- greencabs 6y agoThey will, in fact, just hire somebody else. American companies have access to an unlimited supply of labor. Better to stick around and try to unionize. It may not happen in your lifetime, but the other fact is the United States is a corporate hellworld. Workers have no say in anything. Until that changes, the corporations won’t.
- ggm 6y agoI think argument this has considerable merit.
- dangus 6y agoI don’t know that this level of defeatism is justified. Quitting does help. Why does quitting help? Consider IBM. Their revenue is about 20% of its peak. It used to be seen as a monopoly power. Now we barely think about them. I think that IBM has made itself an unattractive place for employees where it used to be seen as an extremely prestigious place to work. And I think poor quality employees, along with average to mediocre management has squandered an incredible, dominant company over the past 20 years. Facebook will decline if all the most desirable employees just quit. It’s basically just math - those who know the most, interview best, and have the most accomplishments will be able to leave the fastest. Facebook will be left with the D team and they’ll get taken to the cleaners by competitors (as they already are with TikTok - and what’s the average age of the most engaged users of Facebook again?) Anyway, the point is, you quitting hits a company in precisely the right place - their wallet. Employee turnover is tracked and costs companies money. Higher turnover does bring about changes.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoThere will be always people that do not care and just want to get paid. FB won't have many problems finding people to do the job without moral objections.
- rguiliani 6y agoThis is authoritarianism plain and simple.
- booboolayla 6y agoI'd just like to state for the record that 90% of conversation on this topic is super-smart people arguing the best ways to censor opinions they find harmful politically or socially. I want to keep this comment for when the pancake turns over and political and social opinions these people hold become "non grata" and heavily censored.