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Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook
- rc_mob 2y agoI like to think that everyone on Hacker News stopped trusting facebook 15 years ago. No idea how true that is but, it's what I tell myself at night.
- z0r 2y agoI'm sure plenty of users here (most?) never trusted facebook :)
- nadermx 2y agoDid they ever trust it?
- techterrier 2y ago"dumb fucks" edit: added quotation marks
- beretguy 2y agoReference for younger people https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
- weberer 2y agoYeah, but for non-partisan reasons. Are these people going to stick with Signal in 4 years if their preferred party is back in charge?
- bhaney 2y agoBetter late than never
- chasing 2y agoAmericans in general need to get very used to having conversations only on secure channels.
- Vaslo 2y agoWhat do you recommend?
- i80and 2y agoSignal is the gold standard. Eschew the desktop app if you're particularly security-sensitive
- WolfeReader 2y agoWhat's wrong with the desktop app?
- taurknaut 2y agoWhile I like many people have been doing this for years, it's not clear what this will actually solve. What will strategically benefit us is banding together in public, not talking in hushed tones in private.
- ceejayoz 2y agoOrganizing publicly tends to require safe, advanced preparation in private.
- 9rx 2y agoA democracy is already organized. But I suppose that's the problem. People stopped believing in democracy.
- pjc50 2y agoDo not plan crimes over the internet. Your opsec is not good enough, and is only as good as the leakiest person in the group chat. Who may be an FBI agent. As Sam Bankman-Fried learned, only certain people have political cover to commit crimes.
- mupuff1234 2y agoJust left WhatsApp in favor of Signal.
- nine_zeros 2y agoDelete facebook and instagram. Use anything else. Much like moving away from twitter - nobody will really miss it.
- spiderfarmer 2y agoIt's never a good thing when the people who take on jobs in the public sector have to fear their own government. Especially when that government wilfully installs under-qualified and downright untrustworthy leadership.
- paganel 2y ago[flagged]
- regularjack 2y agoWhy would that be a good thing? Sounds like a bad thing to me
- paganel 2y agoIt may sound like a bad thing for the American citizens that cherish imperialism and for the compradors here in Eastern Europe who directly profit from said American imperialism, but for the rest of us, normal people (both in the US and in Eastern Europe and other such parts of the American Empire) seeing USAID and NED gone is a gift from Heaven.
- regularjack 2y agoYou still didn't explain why you think that.
- lazide 2y agoI’ve known a lot of gov’t workers over my not-super-short life. You will never find a group of people more distrusting of the gov’t, if not outright calling for it’s destruction. Honestly, similar to software engineers and software.
- spiderfarmer 2y agoThat might be a cultural issue then. From what I see in the USA people don’t even trust their own family members.
- _aleph2c_ 2y agoI guess these federal workers haven't heard of Edward Snowden.
- jhaddow 2y agoNow I’m worried about what kind of conversations they were having on Facebook
- throwpoaster 2y agoGood for them. Being just 15 years late on tech adoption seems pretty quick for government.
- TriangleEdge 2y agoDoesn't Facebook feed the beast with delicious personal data?
- TheAceOfHearts 2y agoMy Facebook feed is full of unhinged content from random pages I never followed or interacted with. I'd be fine with some edgy content, but there's limits to what I'd consider acceptable. Most recently I see these "memes" where it's literally just an image of Elon with a hand pointing a gun at him, and a caption saying suggesting he should be murdered. The most worrying part is that I don't know if this sentiment is actually widespread and a seriously held belief. It makes me worry that we might see a continued escalation of political violence this year.
- Molitor5901 2y agoI loathe the AI and suggested content. I only want to see the content posted by people I have explicitly followed, I do not want to see what some random group or person posted. The inability to turn this off is the reason I stopped using Facebook. If I want to seek out groups and people I will do so on my own, I do not want a fire hose flooding my personal feed.
- RandomBacon 2y agoFacebook feed of just your friends' posts in chronological order: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
- jader201 2y agoThat link is still 90% garbage I didn’t ask for.
- RandomBacon 2y agoWeird, it works perfectly on my desktop and laptop (I don't check FB on my phone).
- scarface_74 2y agoStill garbage with random groups I can follow
- _fat_santa 2y agoI find the reaction to DOGE quite fascinating and it's really exposed just how different some work cultures are. In tech we face layoffs constantly, so much so that's not a huge shock when a FAANG lays off hundreds or even thousands. We might get a couple of stories if the layoff is particularly large but the general consensus is "this is the way of the world, go find another job". Contrast that with the stories we are seeing about DOGE and the general reaction to layoffs and contraction of several govt agencies. I think the root of it lies in how both types of jobs are pitched. You get into tech knowing that you will most likely get laid off but you take the deal because compensation if very good in the field. This is in stark contrast to how a government job is pitched, you won't make the best salaries there, but it's a safe steady job with loads of benefits and you can easily build a career inside just a single agency. My personal feelings on this are mixed, on the one hand it always sucks to get laid off so I feel for the employees. But on the other hand, something like 40-50% of my paycheck goes out in taxes and I would prefer if my government actually spent it on things to improve my life versus dumb shit domestically or abroad.
- jisnsm 2y agoIt could be worse. I live in southern Europe and not only are civil servants virtually unfirable, they also have much better salaries and benefits than they would have in the private sector.
- steveBK123 2y agoIn the US civil servants are generally hard to fire, and get good benefits, but their salary is far lower than private sector in most cases.
- arlongparker 2y agoI think it’s very different in tech where we are compensated quite well and losing a job doesn’t mean falling off the face of capitalism. Most of us are able to have modest savings but most Americans are barely hanging on.
- 2y ago
- hsuduebc2 2y agoWell they never should. There was some bizzare impression that corporations have some principle's. They don't and they never will that's not their purpose.
- ARandomerDude 2y agoThis whole situation is absolutely stunning to watch. Sleazy government officials illegally order sleazy Facebook employees to censor people. Predictably, the government was caught because large groups of people conspiring to do something nefarious for extended periods of time ("conspiracies") are difficult to hide. When the government is caught illegally and unconstitutionally censoring its own people, the people get mad. And after all that, the sleazy media reports this as "poor, pitiful government workers just can't trust Facebook as a paragon of virtue anymore."
- pfraze 2y agoWhich conspiracy?
- lesuorac 2y ago> This whole situation is absolutely stunning to watch. It is but not for the reason you think it is. The twitter files are about a period of time where _Donald Trump was president_! People go on-and-on about how twitter shadow bans people and lies about it. They never did any of that! "Shadowban" has a specific meaning and by that meaning they weren't shadowbanning. It'd be like saying a missed field goal is a "roughing the receiver penalty". It's just not what the words mean. When Twitter was asked, by Congress, if they artificially lowered the rankings of posts Twitter said yes. There is nothing hidden about this besides that fact that nobody watches congressional testimony and your hivemind doesn't surface any highlights opposing the hivemind's view.
- neuroelectron 2y agoThe idea that Federal workers should be accountable and their communications recorded and managed by their bosses is very old fashioned. Federal workers need to be able to engage with their interests no matter who the president is.