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Facebook wants their employees to stop talking about politics, even though Facebook by its nature takes stances on deeply political topics. How exactly do you a

• 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 ago
    And 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 ago
      If 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.
      • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
        Even so, in the grand scheme of things sports is utterly inconsequential, politics isn’t. If your team won the Super Bowl or your nation took home a lot of gold at the Olympics, how does that affect you materially?
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
        • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
          The reason to avoid political discussions is that they're often as toxic as the worst sports arguments, not that the underlying topics don't matter. No matter how important the underlying issue is, having my coworkers call each other nasty names won't resolve it.
          • gabereiser 6y ago
            this, I’ve worked at places where we could talk politics and have disagreements and it’s totally fine. It’s when those discussions become toxic it’s an issue and management would rather avoid those hard conversations all together. Having said that, I have also worked places where it’s been banned. I also remember certain mailing lists just as toxic for non-political (maybe political in the engineering world) reasons. I think it all comes down to how you foster discussions about discourse.
            • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
              A problem with suppressing unrelated discussion (like politics and public policy) for all the right reasons such as those mentioned above, is that the suppression alone can be validly interpreted as the bosses/mods/admins reinforcing the status-quo if the workers/employees/users already feel oppressed or marginalised. Advancing progressive politics necessarily requires upsetting the status-quo, whereas if someone is a social-regressive then simply adhering to the status-quo suits their agenda just fine. ...so then some places want to avoid that image so they do allow discussion on controversial topics with the constraint that people debate things civilly - so far so good - except those same places want to void an image of partisanship - and in the spirit of freedom-of-speech they'll allow discussion on any topic (again, provided it's done civilly). ...which leads to that place or community falling victim of the paradox of intolerance (as, by their own rules, those communities must allow for the advocacy of genocide and unspeakable crimes provided they're advanced by an individual who conducts themselves with politeness, while their debate opponent might be a gay, black disabled Ethiopian Jew who is rightfully concerned for their own life and future who may utter a swear-word a bit too loudly and suffer censure for doing so). As far as I can tell, the most workable solution to that is for the bounds of the Overton Window to be explicitly declared by the bossses/mods/admins - and in doing-so instantly open themselves up to accusations of partisanship, especially if extremists take advantage of people acting in good-faith. I believe in most places the current Overton Window permits discussion and advancement of communist utopian ideals but not far-right ethnonationalism - assuming those two are somehow equivalent - and if Facebook - or any other place - had a similar declared Overton Window policy then it can be said they're biased towards the left, which is great fodder for the pundits on America's most popular right-wing TV news channel.
    • heartbeats 6y ago
      Don't get high off your own supply.
  • Talanes 6y ago
    They can be a "no politics zone" when they agree to "no politics money."
• xamuel 6y ago
  >Facebook by its nature takes stances on deeply political topics. Why is that "by its nature"? I don't think that's "by its nature" at all. Phone companies and ISPs facilitate communication between people, but that doesn't necessitate they take political stances on what communication to allow. Why should Facebook? If certain language should be restricted, then laws should be written restricting said language and Facebook should comply with those laws. Nothing about Facebook's nature forces them to go beyond that and act as de facto language legislators.
  • joshuamorton 6y ago
    Perhaps this demonstrates why facebook is fundamentally different from an isp. Facebook doesn't "facilitate" communication in the same way a computer "facilitates" communication. It facilitates communication in the same way that a forum or book club or group of people facilitates communication. Groups require some moderation to remain popular. Facebook is driven to moderate by the market.
  • t-writescode 6y ago
    > Phone companies and ISPs facilitate communication between people, but that doesn't necessitate they take political stances on what communication to allow Taking a stance to not control what communication is allowed is a very political stance. It just so happens that, I believe in those cases, it's also a legally mandated stance; but, if it weren't a legally mandated stance, it would absolutely be a political stance, whatever they ended up saying. Where a private company decides to limit free speech (or not limit free speech) is, 100%, a political stance when the laws have not been written that make that decision for them. Even if we maintain a law around protecting companies that just host other people's content vs curating and publishing content, it could be seen as a political decision whether a given website and company choose to be on the publisher vs public content stance. I'm forgetting the word for publisher vs ... whatever it is where they take no responsibility for what people post on the site; but I hope my point is clear.
    • novok 6y ago
      In these debates, people seem to pretend that if facebook or others don't stay politically neutral as possible premptively, that pissed off politicians will not do it for them, badly, in hundreds of countries. It's why social media companies have the kid gloves with politically powerful people. A segment of social media company staff also don't like that reality and want their social to censor the political parties / discussions they don't like and thus they toe the line and give unsatisfying non-answers at all hands and to the media.
• lacker 6y ago
  How exactly do you avoid political discussion when you're asking what constitutes hate speech Just like any corporate decision, you have a small number of people who are relevant to making the decision, and they discuss among themselves. It isn't productive to have 10,000 people who are all angry if Facebook doesn't make the decision their way, and they each spend an hour complaining about it on Facebook, while claiming that they're doing work because they're discussing a corporate decision.
  • cyrux004 6y ago
    Make that official them. Remove the BS "culture at FB" about being open and inclusive and your opinion matters stuff both internally and externally
• cltby 6y ago
  > 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? These issues are not part of your job description. You were hired to write Javascript, not to set corporate strategy. Sit in your seat, content yourself with the $500K/yr you're being paid by your betters, and refrain from sharing with everyone else your facile moralism.
  • dwaltrip 6y ago
    No one is forced to work for Facebook.
  • skj 6y ago
    Betters, haha
    • jessaustin 6y ago
      Some commentators have not worked in the sector.
• hartator 6y ago
  > Facebook by its nature takes stances on deeply political topics I use Facebook to say in touch with old friends. If they want to share last Tucker's video, not sure why FB should block them if I don't block them.
  • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    Imagine if it wasn’t a Fox News talking head, but an incendiary video built on falsehoods being spread to incite violence - or what if it’s 2011 again and ISIS beheading videos are being shared and supposing the evidence showed they were causing ISIS recruitment to increase?
    • hartator 6y ago
      I would still have a proper judge made a decision than Facebook. I can easily block people that share BS on Facebook but I don't want Facebook to make that decision for me. That overrides my own choice to follow them in the first place.
      • eli 6y ago
        What is a “proper judge”? You mean you want the courts to moderate your social platform?
        • stale2002 6y ago
          > You mean you want the courts to moderate your social platform? In situations regarding literal terrorist propaganda, and active calls for violence (Which were the examples given), which are already illegal? Yes. The courts are the proper place for determining how literal terrorism/imminent threats of violence should be handled. I don't think this is controversial, to say that people who make imminent calls to violence, as has been already defined as being illegal by the court system, should be handled by the law. Most everything else should be not blocked by the platform, though.
        • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
• pesenti 6y ago
  Facebook employee here. You can definitely continue talking about any company business or decisions, even if they have political relevance, as you did before. This change only applies to discussions completely unrelated to work.
  • gilrain 6y ago
    Sure. You don't boil the frog all at once.
• jgacook 6y ago
  Well put! My parents are very much of the "no politics at work" generation and I really question why that cultural strain has carried itself into 2020 since it only serves company board members/executives and categorizes rank and file employees as automaton code monkeys who should "shut up and type". Armchair thought: in this odd period of history where, ostensibly, capitalism "won" as the political system of choice and "the end of history" was declared we have entered an alarming stage of hyper-capitalism mixed with growing discontent/civil unrest. More than ever there seems to be a breathless determination by upper-middle class professionals to not rock the boat in any way in the hopes that these mega-corporations will continue to prop up the stock market, pay out outrageous salaries, and keep the gravy train running. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance where we can see how much damage the big players in tech are wreaking on global society - there's ample evidence - but to recognize and face it would sully the deeply held ideal that tech is some kind of great, benevolent force in our society (more cynically: confronting it would also mean confronting that fact that we as tech workers have ethical responsibilities to society at large that we have at best ignored, at worst defied). Practically, it's not. Yes, you can catch up on how your cousin's new baby is doing, but you can't disentangle that from the extremist propaganda, disinformation, and real harm that these platforms incur by leveraging human psychology against us. Taking the view that ethics and work are separate silos is hopelessly naive. Almost every profession requires constant awareness and ethics in order to be a benevolent force: doctors, lawyers, builders, scuba gear manufacturers, car designers all have a responsibility to their end user and I can't see how tech is any different. I doubt people would react the same way if this were GM instead of Facebook and their employees were up in arms after learning the car they had been designing and building had a track record of blowing up and killing people.
  • sidlls 6y ago
    Counterargument: a workplace is, at best, a poor environment in which to advocate for one's political causes. Most people engaged in labor for a company do so because they are not financially independent--that is, they have to in order to simply live. The larger the organization the more likely the employee base will span incompatible political views. Also, very vocal proponents (regardless of what political view they're advocating) will tend to dominate and effectively marginalized the more soft-spoken: a poor outcome in other contexts; why not this one? On a more personal side: I honestly cannot stand when most people discuss politics in the Slack at work. The vast majority of comments are snarky, are unsupported (by data) opinions, or are caustically dismissive of opposing views. It's bad enough when people holding political views I disagree with engage in that behavior, but it's much worse when people I do otherwise agree with do. And it happens in just about equal measure, as far as I've experienced. Work is already stressful enough without adding to it with political fights.
• anonymousab 6y ago
  >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? Probably gotta just do what Mark thinks is right and, should that not be clear, guess what he would think is right. And suffer the consequences yourself should you guess wrong.
• shard972 6y ago
  > 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? Are we just going to allow people to throw around such loaded statements based on flimsy correlations and association?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• tanilama 6y ago
  > its nature takes stances on deeply political topics Most of its employees job have nothing about politics. They imagined such relevancy themselves to create a greater significance/satisfaction from the daily mundane job.
• ThomPete 6y ago
  i dont think they want them to stop, they want thrm to focus on the job not take advantage of their well payed and flexible jobs to be activist.