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I imagine many FB employees also envisioned themselves working their way to levels of seniority where they could nudge policy and practices towards the better (

by btown 5y ago

I imagine many FB employees also envisioned themselves working their way to levels of seniority where they could nudge policy and practices towards the better (however they might define that). After all, one might have said, there’s no other place where an individual’s career in tech can have greater impact on so many people’s lives. Now, seeing how even senior people on dedicated integrity teams had little ability to steer the ship, and being constantly reminded of this by friends outside FB even if it had previously been whispered internally, must be sobering for many of these folks.

throwawaysea 5y ago
What sort of ship steering do you think these employees wanted? More moderation and censorship? Or less? Or just different? Or is it more around reducing engagement based goals that drive addiction to social media? Or is it around targeting children?
- btown 5y ago
  I suppose part of the problem is that even the employees likely don't know what sort of ship-steering they want, and hoped to gradually get enough context to eventually be able to see an optimal path forward. But unless conversations are happening constantly, that day will always be years in the future. And Facebook's internal framing that "those conversations should always play second fiddle to engagement" has effectively quashed any hopes of productive context-aware consensus. The question on everyone's mind, of course, is: did leadership intentionally prevent these conversations and from-research-to-practice pipelines from occurring, or was their ineffectiveness simply an unintended side effect of the laser focus on engagement? Based on the anecdotes shared with media of how much of the balance was driven by public-relations considerations, one imagines that the perception skews towards the former. And that's not a good place to be from a retention perspective.

by btown 5y ago

throwawaysea 5y ago

What sort of ship steering do you think these employees wanted? More moderation and censorship? Or less? Or just different? Or is it more around reducing engagement based goals that drive addiction to social media? Or is it around targeting children?

btown 5y ago
I suppose part of the problem is that even the employees likely don't know what sort of ship-steering they want, and hoped to gradually get enough context to eventually be able to see an optimal path forward. But unless conversations are happening constantly, that day will always be years in the future. And Facebook's internal framing that "those conversations should always play second fiddle to engagement" has effectively quashed any hopes of productive context-aware consensus. The question on everyone's mind, of course, is: did leadership intentionally prevent these conversations and from-research-to-practice pipelines from occurring, or was their ineffectiveness simply an unintended side effect of the laser focus on engagement? Based on the anecdotes shared with media of how much of the balance was driven by public-relations considerations, one imagines that the perception skews towards the former. And that's not a good place to be from a retention perspective.