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Yes. Agreed and I also think fb overplayed their hand and got too friendly with republicans. However when Zuckerberg goes on Joe Rogan assume things are carefu

Yes. Agreed and I also think fb overplayed their hand and got too friendly with republicans. However when Zuckerberg goes on Joe Rogan assume things are carefully planned and rehearsed; and a statement/story like this is intended and the politics of it is well understood. So I guess they are doubling down.

benreesman 4y ago
So let me start by saying that I think your reply is the kind of thing we need more of around here: I think you've created scope for a productive conversation about the specifics of what we want to encourage or discourage as a society. There are plenty of examples of these mega-FAANGS doing stuff that just sucks, and to the extent that a community like HN can be calm, concrete, and solution-oriented about that we have a lot of clout in aggregate. These companies absolutely cannot function without elite heavyweight hackers, and they absolutely cannot afford to pay "fuck the planet" wages to a group of people heavily skewed towards "made some serious money already". I think my point is that partisan political bias should be relatively low on HN's collective list of things that urgently need changing in hyper-tech: it's one of those examples of the arbitrarily selfish incentives aligning with roughly the "right" thing. FB/Mark had to cut Thiel loose because he was dragging them into extreme partisan politics. I strongly suspect that the dominant term there was the practical necessity, but I'm on board with the outcome.
someguydave 4y ago
What is your evidence of Facebook’s pro-republican bias?
- throwaway4good 4y ago
  I link to an example below. Actually I don’t think they are pro republican. It is just pure (dirty) business - in this case how to get their main competitor banned. Just as I don’t think Zuckerberg was a communist or anything of the sort when he went to China and asked Xi Jinping to be godfather for his children.
DubiousPusher 4y ago
Zuckerberg is admitting that they throttled the Hunter Biden story. How is that "good" for Republicans? And to be clear, my personal perspective highly aligns with your own and that of, benreesman. I think all these decisions are highly calculated and that partisanship and personal convictiom rank very low in CEO calculus. My firm belief which I've expressed elsewhere on HN is that if you want "good" bahavior out of corporations you must use the political system, preferably your functioning democracy, to compel it out of them.
- benreesman 4y ago
  "Good" is a bit tricky to define, but I take your meaning broadly. I think maybe the biggest obstacle to getting anything productive done in society is that we seem (in an almost fractal way, from like a nation-wide election down to an HN comment section) just so fucking committed to pretending that mechanism design doesn't work. It absolutely, 100% does. People as individuals, organizations composed of individuals, fucking viruses, the whole show: these things respond to incentives. Even the "higher" stuff is easily modeled as slightly more abstract incentives. These 2022 S&P 500 corporations are stupidly, absurdly, Ronald Reagan-spontaneous-hard-on "good" at cranking "shareholder value". Which is precisely the job we've set them and the executives tasked with running them. They're doing their job. That goal happens to align only coincidentally and peripherally with a more abstract goal I like a lot better: something like "the broader social good". Edit: On a second read, it might not have been clear that I was elaborating on your point, not arguing with it.

benreesman 4y ago

So let me start by saying that I think your reply is the kind of thing we need more of around here: I think you've created scope for a productive conversation about the specifics of what we want to encourage or discourage as a society. There are plenty of examples of these mega-FAANGS doing stuff that just sucks, and to the extent that a community like HN can be calm, concrete, and solution-oriented about that we have a lot of clout in aggregate. These companies absolutely cannot function without elite heavyweight hackers, and they absolutely cannot afford to pay "fuck the planet" wages to a group of people heavily skewed towards "made some serious money already". I think my point is that partisan political bias should be relatively low on HN's collective list of things that urgently need changing in hyper-tech: it's one of those examples of the arbitrarily selfish incentives aligning with roughly the "right" thing. FB/Mark had to cut Thiel loose because he was dragging them into extreme partisan politics. I strongly suspect that the dominant term there was the practical necessity, but I'm on board with the outcome.

someguydave 4y ago

What is your evidence of Facebook’s pro-republican bias?

throwaway4good 4y ago
I link to an example below. Actually I don’t think they are pro republican. It is just pure (dirty) business - in this case how to get their main competitor banned. Just as I don’t think Zuckerberg was a communist or anything of the sort when he went to China and asked Xi Jinping to be godfather for his children.

DubiousPusher 4y ago

Zuckerberg is admitting that they throttled the Hunter Biden story. How is that "good" for Republicans? And to be clear, my personal perspective highly aligns with your own and that of, benreesman. I think all these decisions are highly calculated and that partisanship and personal convictiom rank very low in CEO calculus. My firm belief which I've expressed elsewhere on HN is that if you want "good" bahavior out of corporations you must use the political system, preferably your functioning democracy, to compel it out of them.

benreesman 4y ago
"Good" is a bit tricky to define, but I take your meaning broadly. I think maybe the biggest obstacle to getting anything productive done in society is that we seem (in an almost fractal way, from like a nation-wide election down to an HN comment section) just so fucking committed to pretending that mechanism design doesn't work. It absolutely, 100% does. People as individuals, organizations composed of individuals, fucking viruses, the whole show: these things respond to incentives. Even the "higher" stuff is easily modeled as slightly more abstract incentives. These 2022 S&P 500 corporations are stupidly, absurdly, Ronald Reagan-spontaneous-hard-on "good" at cranking "shareholder value". Which is precisely the job we've set them and the executives tasked with running them. They're doing their job. That goal happens to align only coincidentally and peripherally with a more abstract goal I like a lot better: something like "the broader social good". Edit: On a second read, it might not have been clear that I was elaborating on your point, not arguing with it.