8 ms·

Is it possible to be an unabashed openly conservative / Republican in a company like Facebook or Twitter or Google? One gets the impression that it's a club fo

Is it possible to be an unabashed openly conservative / Republican in a company like Facebook or Twitter or Google? One gets the impression that it's a club for one kind of animal only.

benreesman 4y ago
At FB I unabashedly made a bunch of obnoxious (to partisans at least, maybe to everyone) criticisms of the fucking stupid Red Team/Blue Team thing. I took grief from colleagues/peers directly (which is clearly in bounds) but if anyone retaliated in terms of my career I never saw a shred of evidence about it. FB had the stated mission of "Making the World More Open and Connected": I posted a bunch of pretty-fucking-non-mainstream shit on my personal account and FB's leadership was always scrupulous about leaving my "personal" Internet presence completely out of it in a way I found very consistent with that mission statement. In fairness I was a pretty equal-opportunity partisan politics attack dog, maybe it just canceled out. For a counter-point, Apple seems to have been willing to set their ads business back by years to whack someone over a critically-acclaimed book that had been published for years before the auto da fe was held: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-hiring-antonio-garcia-martinez-chaos-monkeys-facebook https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-h..., so maybe there's some dice involved.
- fareesh 4y ago
  It's good to hear that they allow the team to have their own personal views publicly expressed without impacting their work. I did, however, notice that you said that you were an equal opportunity partisan politics attack dog and maybe it cancelled out. I guess I could just reframe my question to you and ask whether you ever saw someone who was equally vocal but partisan on the red team. If you saw only vocal people from the blue team, I'd call that a bit telling. If you saw partisan folks from the red team who were similarly vocal then that fully answers my question.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    I'd very much like to be able to give you a more definite answer, but the problem is that I saw a lot of people self-censor around a lot of topics, only some of them political. It's possible that people were afraid of peer-censure, it's possible that they were afraid of official retaliation (though I never saw such a thing), and it's possible that they just didn't want to create trouble for themselves in some vague sense. Few people want to pick a fight with all their colleagues after all. I worked for big tech in SFBA and NYC: the median of rank-and-file people like me were at a place on the political/social/cultural spectrum that would be called "extreme" in my region of origin (Southern California). And there clearly isn't a bright line between "contributor" and "leadership". And there clearly isn't a bright line between "find this person distasteful" and "pass them over for opportunity". I can absolutely picture that right-leaning folks would have felt outnumbered and/or disinclined to speak freely, I absolutely cannot picture leadership sanctioning career damage over it. I supported/managed a high-impact group in a critical niche of about 35 people at my maximum seniority. If anyone had gotten held back for a promotion or something because of supporting a liberal or conservative candidate politically I would have come down like the wrath of God on that, and I believe my superiors would have backed that all the way. I appreciate that's a lot of "believe" and "think" and "imagine", but it's just impossible for me to prove a negative, so I've tried to answer with some nuance and at some length to convey a useful intuition.
dmix 4y ago
> “We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company,” Dorsey said. “They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right.” https://www.vox.com/2018/9/14/17857622/twitter-liberal-employees-conservative-trump-politics https://www.vox.com/2018/9/14/17857622/twitter-liberal-emplo...
- benreesman 4y ago
  I've met Jack a couple of times, which is a damned-sight short of actually knowing him in any substantial way, but as SV tech billionaires go he seemed both well-intentioned and rather down to Earth. If I've had any gripe with Twitter's high-profile/political content moderation policiy over the last decade it's that special privileges afforded to important officials should be attached to their official Twitter accounts. `@POTUS` or `@WhiteHouse` or whatever having "special" standards is at least an arguable point. Extending any special treatment to the private accounts (that, not coincidentally, those folks get to keep, or at least hope to keep, after leaving office) is pretty dubious.
IntelMiner 4y ago
I'm curious how, from a logically consistent conservative viewpoint this can be 'fixed' The ideas that spring to mind fly smack in the face of conservative ideology - Private companies are allowed to hire who they wish. In our capitalist world the free market would provide for "conservative alternatives" and it does ("truth social" versus twitter for instance) - Mandating some kind of 'quota' for conservative employees to be hired seems to fly in the face of the premise of businesses being freed from regulation and intervention by the government - Free speech protects against the government intruding on it, conservative speech included. Extending this to private companies would be a disastrous overreach of unchecked legal power - Algorithmically "forcing" conservative views would be seen as censorship of otherwise organic views. Conservatives claim (rightly or wrongly) the opposite happens, so logically they would be upset if the opposite were to happen It seems like the only truly reasonable path is to expect "conservatives" to build their own platforms. Cater to their own audiences. If they are as large a group as they say they are, then the people who execute on this would become the barons of conservative thought and economics
- fareesh 4y ago
  I don't think it's a problem that needs fixing. I think of it like this - Twitter labels accounts that are Russian government accounts so that the public is aware of where the information they are seeing is coming from. That same benefit in the context of misinformation / selective publishing would go to the public if it was known that companies lean a certain way. For example the public knows that Fox leans right and MSNBC leans left.
  - IntelMiner 4y ago
    The media doesn't "lean left or right" for the most part. The media acts as a magnifying glass to foment public opinion. The father of modern journalism Walter Lippmann penned a book about this very thing literally 100 years ago (also it's in the public domain now, it's a great read!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book) To even imply MSNBC is "left leaning" is absolutely hilarious however. Though I suppose people so easily forget their Nazi comparison of Bernie Sanders https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2020-03-03/ty-article/msnbc-anchor-retires-after-sanders-nazi-analogy-sparks-controversy/0000017f-f3fe-d887-a7ff-fbfeec130000 https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2020-03-03/ty-article/msnbc-...
prof-dr-ir 4y ago
I think it should be viewed like this: in the eyes of many, Trump is a man who boasted about sexual harassment. Continuing to support such a man is borderline incompatible with holding basic values that one might hope every employee has. This viewpoint is really difficult to argue with. You can say that such transgressions are perhaps outweighed by any advantages of his presidency that you perceived, but that will not convince many on the left. Indeed, just look at the Cuomos and Franken to see that harassers are simply no longer tolerated on the left - these days such men are simply disqualified without pardon. I think this fundamental incompatibility of basic values is an important reason why it is difficult to be a Trump supporter at many companies and universities nowadays. (I conflated being "conservative / Republican" with being a Trump supporter. Feel free to ignore my comment if that is not what you intended.)
- fareesh 4y ago
  One could simply support a candidate for their choice of SCOTUS judges or recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel or opposition to TPP. It's not necessary that a voter endorses everything that the candidate has ever done in their life. I find this standard to be largely driven by the media. The President has a governing role, and different people are affected by it differently. If he is a terribly rude and obnoxious jerk - sure that can be a part of one's judgment, but it's not necessary that everyone has the same hierarchy
  - prof-dr-ir 4y ago
    You are trying to make the point I was anticipating. One might have been a supporter of someone like Trump or Cuomo for all kinds of reasons, but for many it's simply over once a certain line is crossed. As I said, it is a difficult point to argue against because their transgressions concern what many consider really basic values.
    - fareesh 4y ago
      I could see this kind of luxury when there is a plurality of candidates but can one afford this when the presidential election in the USA is A choice between two opposites?
UncleMeat 4y ago
I know a number of very loud Republicans at Google who post regularly on internal discussion boards.

Is it possible to be an unabashed openly conservative / Republican in a company like Facebook or Twitter or Google? One gets the impression that it's a club for one kind of animal only.

benreesman 4y ago

At FB I unabashedly made a bunch of obnoxious (to partisans at least, maybe to everyone) criticisms of the fucking stupid Red Team/Blue Team thing. I took grief from colleagues/peers directly (which is clearly in bounds) but if anyone retaliated in terms of my career I never saw a shred of evidence about it. FB had the stated mission of "Making the World More Open and Connected": I posted a bunch of pretty-fucking-non-mainstream shit on my personal account and FB's leadership was always scrupulous about leaving my "personal" Internet presence completely out of it in a way I found very consistent with that mission statement. In fairness I was a pretty equal-opportunity partisan politics attack dog, maybe it just canceled out. For a counter-point, Apple seems to have been willing to set their ads business back by years to whack someone over a critically-acclaimed book that had been published for years before the auto da fe was held: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-hiring-antonio-garcia-martinez-chaos-monkeys-facebook https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-h..., so maybe there's some dice involved.

fareesh 4y ago
It's good to hear that they allow the team to have their own personal views publicly expressed without impacting their work. I did, however, notice that you said that you were an equal opportunity partisan politics attack dog and maybe it cancelled out. I guess I could just reframe my question to you and ask whether you ever saw someone who was equally vocal but partisan on the red team. If you saw only vocal people from the blue team, I'd call that a bit telling. If you saw partisan folks from the red team who were similarly vocal then that fully answers my question.
- benreesman 4y ago
  I'd very much like to be able to give you a more definite answer, but the problem is that I saw a lot of people self-censor around a lot of topics, only some of them political. It's possible that people were afraid of peer-censure, it's possible that they were afraid of official retaliation (though I never saw such a thing), and it's possible that they just didn't want to create trouble for themselves in some vague sense. Few people want to pick a fight with all their colleagues after all. I worked for big tech in SFBA and NYC: the median of rank-and-file people like me were at a place on the political/social/cultural spectrum that would be called "extreme" in my region of origin (Southern California). And there clearly isn't a bright line between "contributor" and "leadership". And there clearly isn't a bright line between "find this person distasteful" and "pass them over for opportunity". I can absolutely picture that right-leaning folks would have felt outnumbered and/or disinclined to speak freely, I absolutely cannot picture leadership sanctioning career damage over it. I supported/managed a high-impact group in a critical niche of about 35 people at my maximum seniority. If anyone had gotten held back for a promotion or something because of supporting a liberal or conservative candidate politically I would have come down like the wrath of God on that, and I believe my superiors would have backed that all the way. I appreciate that's a lot of "believe" and "think" and "imagine", but it's just impossible for me to prove a negative, so I've tried to answer with some nuance and at some length to convey a useful intuition.

dmix 4y ago

> “We have a lot of conservative-leaning folks in the company as well, and to be honest, they don’t feel safe to express their opinions at the company,” Dorsey said. “They do feel silenced by just the general swirl of what they perceive to be the broader percentage of leanings within the company, and I don’t think that’s fair or right.” https://www.vox.com/2018/9/14/17857622/twitter-liberal-employees-conservative-trump-politics https://www.vox.com/2018/9/14/17857622/twitter-liberal-emplo...

benreesman 4y ago
I've met Jack a couple of times, which is a damned-sight short of actually knowing him in any substantial way, but as SV tech billionaires go he seemed both well-intentioned and rather down to Earth. If I've had any gripe with Twitter's high-profile/political content moderation policiy over the last decade it's that special privileges afforded to important officials should be attached to their official Twitter accounts. `@POTUS` or `@WhiteHouse` or whatever having "special" standards is at least an arguable point. Extending any special treatment to the private accounts (that, not coincidentally, those folks get to keep, or at least hope to keep, after leaving office) is pretty dubious.

IntelMiner 4y ago

I'm curious how, from a logically consistent conservative viewpoint this can be 'fixed' The ideas that spring to mind fly smack in the face of conservative ideology - Private companies are allowed to hire who they wish. In our capitalist world the free market would provide for "conservative alternatives" and it does ("truth social" versus twitter for instance) - Mandating some kind of 'quota' for conservative employees to be hired seems to fly in the face of the premise of businesses being freed from regulation and intervention by the government - Free speech protects against the government intruding on it, conservative speech included. Extending this to private companies would be a disastrous overreach of unchecked legal power - Algorithmically "forcing" conservative views would be seen as censorship of otherwise organic views. Conservatives claim (rightly or wrongly) the opposite happens, so logically they would be upset if the opposite were to happen It seems like the only truly reasonable path is to expect "conservatives" to build their own platforms. Cater to their own audiences. If they are as large a group as they say they are, then the people who execute on this would become the barons of conservative thought and economics

fareesh 4y ago
I don't think it's a problem that needs fixing. I think of it like this - Twitter labels accounts that are Russian government accounts so that the public is aware of where the information they are seeing is coming from. That same benefit in the context of misinformation / selective publishing would go to the public if it was known that companies lean a certain way. For example the public knows that Fox leans right and MSNBC leans left.
- IntelMiner 4y ago
  The media doesn't "lean left or right" for the most part. The media acts as a magnifying glass to foment public opinion. The father of modern journalism Walter Lippmann penned a book about this very thing literally 100 years ago (also it's in the public domain now, it's a great read!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book) To even imply MSNBC is "left leaning" is absolutely hilarious however. Though I suppose people so easily forget their Nazi comparison of Bernie Sanders https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2020-03-03/ty-article/msnbc-anchor-retires-after-sanders-nazi-analogy-sparks-controversy/0000017f-f3fe-d887-a7ff-fbfeec130000 https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2020-03-03/ty-article/msnbc-...

prof-dr-ir 4y ago

I think it should be viewed like this: in the eyes of many, Trump is a man who boasted about sexual harassment. Continuing to support such a man is borderline incompatible with holding basic values that one might hope every employee has. This viewpoint is really difficult to argue with. You can say that such transgressions are perhaps outweighed by any advantages of his presidency that you perceived, but that will not convince many on the left. Indeed, just look at the Cuomos and Franken to see that harassers are simply no longer tolerated on the left - these days such men are simply disqualified without pardon. I think this fundamental incompatibility of basic values is an important reason why it is difficult to be a Trump supporter at many companies and universities nowadays. (I conflated being "conservative / Republican" with being a Trump supporter. Feel free to ignore my comment if that is not what you intended.)

fareesh 4y ago
One could simply support a candidate for their choice of SCOTUS judges or recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel or opposition to TPP. It's not necessary that a voter endorses everything that the candidate has ever done in their life. I find this standard to be largely driven by the media. The President has a governing role, and different people are affected by it differently. If he is a terribly rude and obnoxious jerk - sure that can be a part of one's judgment, but it's not necessary that everyone has the same hierarchy
- prof-dr-ir 4y ago
  You are trying to make the point I was anticipating. One might have been a supporter of someone like Trump or Cuomo for all kinds of reasons, but for many it's simply over once a certain line is crossed. As I said, it is a difficult point to argue against because their transgressions concern what many consider really basic values.
  - fareesh 4y ago
    I could see this kind of luxury when there is a plurality of candidates but can one afford this when the presidential election in the USA is A choice between two opposites?

UncleMeat 4y ago

I know a number of very loud Republicans at Google who post regularly on internal discussion boards.