The sooner this fucking election is over, the better. No more having to read about Marxism, Trump, Racists, Snowflakes and Trannies.

I downloaded nVidia Broadcast a while ago, it's really quite good.

Why does it sound good to anyone that Facebook employees should be prevented from discussing the ethical implications of the product they sell their labor to create? Facebook complete lack of accountability - internal or governmental - has to date:

- incited a genocide [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...]

- provided a bias for right wing content in a American election year (and fired the employee who blew the whistle on it) [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...]

- exacerbated a global pandemic, indirectly causing 1000s of deaths, by not policing Covid misinformation [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/19/facebook-...]

- is arguably a contributor to the global rise in authoritarianism [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/24/facebo...]

and that's really just the tip of the iceberg. If you buy into the notion that Mark Zuckerberg is a nice man in a hoodie trying to run a business that his employees are tearing down with some radical agenda then I'm sorry, but how naive are you? Facebook has a track record of ignoring the consequences of what happens on their platform in order to continue profiting. It's not a mistake, it's the point.

We should be cheering on tech workers challenging the ethics of the work they produce, not talking about how inconvenient it is for Facebook workers to start realizing how questionable the product they're building really is.

Institutional power doesn't have to be leveraged towards political ends, but if you profit directly from an institution choosing unethical behavior in pursuit of profits then you are also behaving unethically. It's completely reasonable to apply that standard to the best-paid of Facebook's employees, just as it is completely reasonable for those employees to petition against committing more unethical behavior.

Facebook themselves already admitted that they were used to further a genocide, so your dismissal is somewhat beside the point.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...

Maybe you're right and developers at FB don't see that they have any responsibility or input towards what FB does with the tech they build, but I hope not. It would be horrible to be that detached from the outcome of your work.

Lets say you're a delivery driver for a pizza parlor that is famous for the level of rat poison in its sauce. Do you continue to knowingly deliver the poison pizzas because you're not the one making the sauce? Afterall, who's going to deliver the poisonous pizzas?

Come on. This is right up there with, "I was just following orders."

Greg, a nobody who nobody likes says X thing - X isn't a big deal, and doesn't affect most people and about 45% of people would agree X shouldn't be said, even if it isn't a big deal.

Mark, a senior directo who everybody loves says Y thing - Y is a big deal, but only 10% of people would agree it shouldn't be said.

Guess which will get called out?

Seriously, haven’t they don’t studies that most of these revolutionaries are actually not very smart people. How does risking your life for a cause have anything to do with being correct about an issue?

My point is that the individual level outputs (which you'd need to accomplish what the OP was talking about) are essentially impossible to tune so precisely, given our current understandings of the models.

If the countermeasure is reasonable we implement it.

We've found this keeps people from festering. Heck.. one employee thought he was being underpaid. He was.

He put it in the issue tracking system and we now have a public skill system and renumeration scale.

Some features are work-specific, but it feels basically like you are using the Facebook interface, but just with all the content being from your coworkers about work stuff.

https://www.workplace.com/

Government's role is to make the ideologically agnostic machine of business align with our values. In the kind of competitive economy we have, it can only be this way. If we try to apply politics from within a business, we risk introducing instabilities and ineffeciencies, making the business less competitive–an existential threat to the values we incorporated into the business.

In Facebook, there are only "friends". So, if you don't like what they are always carrying on about, don't have them as a friend. Just like in real life.

What fixes things is organized political action.

That's about the extent of the claims that can actually be checked by the reader. Of the rest, I certainly agree with the warnings about poor security for voting machines and other election infrastructure, but that's been a commonplace on HN for a decade, and the most salient if by no means the most egregious example this cycle, the Iowa Primary, is totally dismissed. Also in other parts of the article we're assured without any sort of proof that no one hacked a voting machine in 2016. Can we be so sure? The narrative walks a narrow path. The Russians did bad things but not catastrophically terrible things (i.e. they prepared to discredit the election on social media but didn't change the results). Voting machines should be more secure but let's not even mention requirements for open code and hardware audits (about which I've been writing my legislators for many years). Federal efforts on election security since Trump took office have been paltry but everything before that was great. Did Goldilocks write this? Was she the confidential source who provided most of the information without attribution?

I'm glad that normal neoliberal Democrats will finally distance themselves from the Maddow noise, but I would have preferred actual progress by this date rather than just "yeah sorry we went loopy for 3.5 years". I'd also like some indication that the next president, whether he takes office in January or four years later, will do anything at all to make voting more secure and more accessible to citizens. As it is, I just expect more attacks on the First Amendment. News media firms won't complain; as you observe they're banking fat stacks with Trump to kick around. The concern that keeps me up at night is that they're cooking up a new Russia effigy with which to torment the public now that Covid-19 seems likely to remove Trump himself from public office.

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-phishing-email-that-hacked-...

Agreed. To take my advice, you would need to be hired as a contractor/consultant. Normal companies do this all the time.

I have worked for a lot of start-ups, including several that grew to become significant giants in their segment of the internet. Facebook has been the only one I worked at where there was a group of employees whose job was to create posters to hang up in all of the offices telling everyone else how important and worthwhile it was to work at FB -- looking back I think this level of internal propaganda should have been a warning sign.

Companies don't just have no reason to regulate language, they also have no serious authority to do so. The onus has always been and can only be on government legislators to address these issues in the most fundamental sense.

I'd like to see Facebook try to take on the Democrat/Republican eternal conflict in the US or the CCP in China on adopting a universal policy that they don't agree with, armed with powerful arguments like "the power of ethics compels me!" or "it's a Pandora's box because we're international!" or "stockholders care about our status!". Going above and beyond their most basic policy obligations has been a great way to attract the ire of political authorities who are now agitated over whether Facebook's policy is intentionally empowering or weakening their political enemies.

Any. Controversial is a continuous-valued, not binary, attribute.

How controversial is enough to justify a particular reaction? That's a political judgement, and in practice has as much to do with where you stand on the controversy as how much controversy there is.

2. I think it's disingenuous to imply that Facebook workers - and bear in mind we're not talking about the janitorial staff here, but tech workers who command salaries at and above $100K p.a. - must work at Facebook lest they be destitute. The greatest advantage of being a tech worker is the range of high salary positions available to you. That aside, I return to my previous point about this not being an abstract, culture wars style debate, but specific critique of company actions. It's not politics, but internal politics. Every company has internal debates about the strategic and ethical direction of the company - why not this one?

3. I understand that politics can be exhausting, especially in the highly polarized environment we live in, but I don't think that's sufficient reason to forbid internal critique of any company. Moreover I think the stakes are higher than we are comfortable with - Facebook has already ADMITTED that they provoked the Burmese genocide 2 years ago [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...].

To flip the question around: what makes YOU think that YOUR personal right to feeling relaxed at work is more important than an employee's right to ensure that they do not work on a product that can lead to mass murder? Moreover, is it really a political stance to demand that you are not complicit in unethical activity?

My timeline shows as strictly chronological, and only text and photos posted by my immediate friends. No groups, ads, publisher's bullshit, promoted things, no trending, no nothing. Just photos and plain text.

Incidentally, this is why Google+ failed -- it was a social network marketed to the kind of people that hate social networking :)

Are you sure that isn't exactly backwards? Because it definitely should be the other direction in my very strong opinion. One's morals or beliefs on ethics should inform their politics, not the other way around.

One way is based around a person's inner being, the other is molding their being and stances based on a sports team.

Nah.

Every Facebook employee I've met, every one that I'm reading, they are sincere about what they're angry about.

It's a bad look, to assume some Facebook employee's opinions are being co-opted by... fucking Google? Apple? That's ridiculous.

I'm not even going to speculate why anyone questions some random Facebook employee's sincerity.

Instead I offer: Imagine if someone told you, every opinion you had, all the time, talked over you or told you to shut the fuck up and said, "Oh you're getting co-opted by Google, this is exactly what they want you to do, 'destroy our culture.'" And then, in the same breath, that guy defends, breathlessly, some idiot outraged over the removal of master/slave nomenclature, or some idiot trying to mainsplain crackpot sex difference theories to his female coworkers.

C'mon, you'd be mad as hell, it's so utterly ridiculous.

People whose existences are deeply politicized (and they do indeed exist) are not often excited to have political conversations with people who say things like "'existence is political' thing is just a bullshit phrase."

I'm not trying to be a dick, but it took me a long time to realize that there were conversations I was not being made a part of because I was not receptive to, or dismissive of, those conversations.

It is a bullshit phrase though. They don't want to bring it up because any skepticism is viewed as a direct attack on their ideology, and their ideology is the core of their existence/identity, so, calling out the illogic of their ideology is a political attack on their existence.

They want to TELL you, they don't want a discussion.

I'm not sure about that. I agree that the world might be better, but I'm not sure they could just disable them. The next smaller competitor who won't will have more user engagement and grow. If something is a very effective advantage, I believe you can only remove it by coordinated action and enforce it on a global scale.

Modern weapons are terribly efficient at killing people. But if you're the only country that's removing them from your arsenal, you depend on the mercy of your neighbors.

I have no idea how you came to this conclusion.

That's like saying "if employees don't have total freedom of speech at work that means only corporations have freedom of speech".

And FB ceases to exist. A loud message will echo through silicon valley fit years to come.

The only ethical decision for the engineers to make is to quit. Thus all employees there are mathematically unethical. They are writing the code that executes the immoral decisions.

What is the plausible internal plan of the agitators and activists inside FB and other firms? They have none, beyond systematically ban more and more users who violate ever more bizarre and ad-hoc purity rules. That's not a plan.

Moreover, quitting over this stuff isn't a one way street.

Facebook is not an evil company. I wouldn't work there today but that's exactly because of their vicious internal partisan politics that make these firms so unfriendly to anyone who isn't strongly on the left. For anyone who thinks corporate diversity programmes are sexist against men, Brexit is a commendable move towards localism, that sometimes Trump actually might have a point, etc, Facebook is just not attractive to those people today.

It sounds like Zuck may be getting a grip on his workforce and professionalising it. If so, for every activist quitter they'll suddenly find they're more appealing to 10 more normal employees who just don't want their workplace to be a political battleground. Moreover people get more conservative as they age, and they also get more experienced. So they may suddenly discover they have access to more experienced senior engineers who were previously, uh, content with their current job.

I’ve seen this kind of thought pattern a few times and frankly the way you are thinking doesn’t match reality.

I work on a 1000+ person enterprise software project.

Less than 5% of those 1000+ understand our customers requirements and use cases in any real depth. This is despite trying for years to incentivise developers to have a broader understanding of our business.

Within that core 5% most decisions are driven by the 3-5 people who care about the particular area.

So for a 1000 person+ org you would need to corrupt 3-4 people to drive a hidden agenda.

This is for a project not trying to be secretive in any way.

To relate it back to Twitter you would probably need the right 3-4 people to push hard for content moderators to be hired in San Francisco instead of Bangalore in order to push hard left views.

I dare say it might be time for some employees at Facebook to pause and think about how their work may have an impact on the world.

I agree that there's no need to bring up politics in the break room (or worse, during active work) and risk alienating people. It's a bad idea, just like talking about or advocating for particular religious beliefs.

But if your company is being politically active in ways you find unethical, I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to just put their heads in the sand, ignore it, and get their work done. And not everyone has the luxury of quitting a job whenever their don't agree with the company's politics.

It used to be that people and organizations making unethical purchases were the ones we considered, and held, responsible. For a long time we've had good, positive movements centered on informing the buyer. We added expiration dates, ingredient lists, nutritional value information, crashworthiness scores and reliability ratings, country of origin labels, even ethical sourcing labels. Perhaps too much of a good thing caused information overload and resulting numbness? Somehow, between the Prohibition, the "war on drugs", and the supply side moral regulations, we've lost the spirit of "well informed free agents making decisions".

Most of the services (FB and the likes) we're discussing here are morally neutral by their nature, and it takes concerted efforts to make them non-neutral[1]. It is the particular use they are being put to that is moral or immoral. Let's not shift vast moral powers from the wide society to a narrow cadre, shall we? The economy is a neat distributed system. It's the popular democracy before democracy became popular. Let's not give it up.

--

[1] example of non-neutrality: the current trend of algorithmic manipulation

Everything has some political issue around it, but Facebook has politics baked into it because it's using political issues as a means of making money. They sell advertising to politicials, when they know the ads are lies. Their platform is filled with fake accounts pushing genocidal agendas from dictators, and in many cases facebook is sweeping it under the rug.

The way their platform is built is setup to manipulate people, and that platform is being used at scale to do so in ways facebook knows is fucking up the world. Its very existence is political at this point.

Food and water production has VERY big ethical issues. Palm oil, mass-slaughter of animals, deforestation, Nestle taking away water from locals, CO2 emmissions etc.

So yes, there are problems in the food and water industry, but I don't really get what your point is? Should we just close our eyes, ears and mouths and say "fuck it, not my problem"?

Eh, I don't really like that idea. For one, it only really addresses the problem of being exposed to content you find unenjoyable.

Honestly, sometimes I do wonder if consumer-level broadcast technology is the psychic equivalent of doing something like letting everyone fly planes without any training. It might be better to adopt communication technologies with a little more friction.

I bet a simple keyword filter for names of politicians could catch 90%.

I wonder if people would pay for it?

If Facebook limits the filtering to engagement, then it isn't the fault of Facebook that political content is engaging. That's just human nature. Disasters, outrage, politics, polarizing topics - these are all popular topics both online and off-line, and apread quickly as town gossip well before Facebook.

It is only when Facebook steps in and says that particular topics need to be exceptions to the filtering rules that apply to everything else, that they make themselves into a political actor.

For instance, let's say that the news feed showed you content based purely on number of likes. If political posts get lots of likes that isn't Facebook's problem. If the same ranking rules apply to all posts (# of likes) then they would remain neutral. As soon as Facebook says "content from x person will have their ranking artificially changed to reduce/increase engagement with it" thereby making an exception to the rule that applies to everything else, they have now become a political actor.

> I think "outrage" is an inappropriate response. We're talking about removing nomenclature that has been (and continues to be) used to oppress an entire segment of society.

In this specific case, outrage is appropriate because the nomenclature as used by git has nothing to do with "master/slave". It's a well-intentioned but misguided attempt at what you describe, unless you are making the preposterous claim that the word "master" should be purged from all contexts.

Of course, WRT this article and the discussion on it, if you try to point this out and discuss it at a company like Github (or mine) where the group making these decisions is convinced of their correctness you risk ostracization and career suicide. In fact, the statement you closed with

> People who are "outraged" that it cost them some time and work probably could stand to show some compassion for their fellow humans.

implies that you also are convinced of the correctness of this decision, and that anyone who objects to it is not compassionate (and by implication, not worthy of consideration). This is not a good approach to take if your goal is to educate.

Usually, when open source projects introduce a breaking backwards-incompatible change, they will first deprecate things and then wait some months to give people time to update. After this nomenclature had been in use for 10+ years, I can't help but wonder why there was no time to take the user-friendly path in this instance.

So to the people who are fixing the mess, it certainly feels more like you got kicked because someone else wanted to show off his/her moral superiority.

There existed a reasonable way to change the nomenclature, but it wasn't taken.

To elaborate: They don’t all pay well. Not even close. And none of them pay workers in other countries well, and they can outsource endlessly with no repercussions.

But they want to keep their home in the US (the world military empire) because it lets them do whatever they want. And they don’t pay migrants nearly the same because migrants are bound by their visas. But too much of that and the Americans will catch on.

Unionizing in this case is extremely unlikely. There is too much for the employees to lose. Instead, Facebook and the US Government will continue doing whatever they want.

And the inevitable outcome of building a what-calls-go-through machine is that there are many parties trying to influence the machine. Eg. faking caller ID, evading blocks with throwaway numbers, spamming no-response calls to figure out which numbers are valid to target, faking a robot voice to pretend to be a real person.

Practically every modern platform uses centralized systems to filter the noisy world down to something fit for purpose, and sometimes this intersects with political issues. That's no reason to expect a platform like Facebook to become even more political in their stance than the existing level of politicization that is almost impossible to avoid.

I looked at your blog; you seem like a talented, driven person. Why not apply those gifts to something meaningful? Why spend your limited working years building tools for this horrible company?

Facebook has done a lot of good, but IMO there is no question that it's done more harm.

And Zuckerberg is a crazy person. There are a lot of people I wouldn't want to ultimately report to, but Zuck is right next to Larry at this point.

It's the classic argument, "technology is neutral; how it's used determines the ethics". Well, yes, I agree with that, but here we have a company that's using it unethically, and has no desire or need to stop their bad behavior. And that bad behavior has been instrumental to their success. That's what matters.

Sorry, but this is misleading. Most such companies are actively complying with antidiscrimination laws. These diversity discussions/initiatives at work are almost always unrelated to those laws. It's not a case of "Hey, we suddenly realized we're not complying with laws, so let's launch these initiatives." Most such discussions don't have any content about the law or legal aspects because they are not about laws prohibiting discrimination.

How are these two things causally connected in your mind?

HN readers seem to have totally lost it w.r.t. COVID and misinformation. It's practically guaranteed that in any thread about misinformation/FB/Twitter/etc someone will state something about COVID that's true and then describe it as misinformation, or state something about it that's false and then decry the conspiracy theorists who don't believe it.

Then in your model of the world, how would one not take a political stance?

If everyone takes a political stance in your model by definition no matter what their intents or actions are then it's a rather useless definition.

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.

Publishers are liable for everything posted on their websites. Platforms are not - as long as they make good faith efforts to take down or prevent posting of illegal content.

Both are allowed to engage in moderation, curation or "censorship". Engaging in such does not make a website a publisher.

Not really, no. That is not usually what people mean, when they say "take a political stance".

We can extend this to other examples. Do you think that a grocery store should ban people from their stores, if the individual is wearing a pro Trump, or pro Biden Tshirt?

I think it would be pretty silly to condemn a grocery store, for refusing to ban people from their stores, if they were wearing a "Vote for Biden/Trump" shirt.

Most people would find it absolutely and completely ridiculous to ban people from stores for doing that.

That's simply not true. One can verify the truth or falsehood of your statement by applying the knife of logic. Draw your statement to its logical conclusion in order to determine if it results in absurdity.

Let's do that.

A person who has had their brain surgically removed will (quite probably) never mention politics or attempt to control other's communications about politics. According to your statement, that person's actions are political. Sorry, but that's absurd.

The problem is, Facebook doesn’t show people content that they want to see. They show people content that they will engage with. That’s a very important distinction.

HN algorithm/moderators actually explicitly do the opposite: if a thread gets too many comments too quickly, it’s ranked downward. The assumption is too many comments too quickly indicates a flamewar and the HN moderators want to keep a civil discussion. The approach Facebook takes is to “foster active discussion” which on the Internet typically means a flamewar. Noting generates engagement like controversial political views. So that’s what Facebook’s algorithm/moderators show to their users.

Facebook absolutely is a social conditioning tool, it’s designed from the ground up to show people content that stirs their emotions enough to click “like” or the mad face icon or even leave a comment and wait around until someone replies back.

  https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2593586717571940?id=673052479947730
  https://www.fastcompany.com/90538655/facebook-is-quietly-pressuring-its-independent-fact-checkers-to-change-their-rulings

Propaganda, misinformation and deception have always been human issue - mass media magnified them as it does everything else.

And I think we all have the right to critique social media, just like we can critique the news, books, movies, etc.

We don’t have to agree but the discussion is a valid one to have!

We get to help shape our society and world, after all :).

There is no shortage of sites that will take Facebook's place.

What is the legislation you propose to prevent Facebook, or the millions of other existing or soon-to-be existing apps, from doing harm to people?

I wouldn't, because not making a choice to act in a particular way is very different from making a choice to avoid as policy acting in that way, or, as was at issue upthread, “Taking a stance to not” act in a particular way. Taking a stance is (for this subject matter, at least) political. Inaction on its own is not.

The thesis here is that current hiring practices are biased (often implicitly and unintentionally) against women and POC. Since removing implicit bias is exceedingly difficult, actively requiring hiring managers to hire more people from underrepresented groups is a way to put your thumb on the scale in order to equalize them.

I can understand how you'd see that as discrimination against white men, and if you squint at it in just the right way, it really seems like it is, but what it's really doing is attempting to reduce an unfair advantage that white men have. No, it's not perfect, and I'm sure occasionally a white male does legitimately get discriminated against. But that's a small price to pay to lift a ton of other people out of the status quo of discrimination they're usually stuck in.

FWIW, that's a claim that doesn't quite match my experience at work, nor of talking to some of the people who implement these programs. Though to be clear, we were talking about widespread mandatory company-wide meetings, not any old discussion on inclusion that happens to occur while at work. We may need to get more specific about which programs we're talking about, they're certainly not identical everywhere. It also doesn't seem to add up when I read our current laws, which are changing over time to emphasize.

> In order to achieve this, companies are activity discriminating against non-minorities, which some may call positive discrimination.

The historical term for this is affirmative action (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action), and the idea is to temporarily increase benefits for a disadvantaged group, not to intentionally decrease benefits for the advantaged group. Calling it discrimination, therefore, is a framing that isn't always true, and is somewhat political. It's not always true because things aren't always zero sum. If I choose to give someone a dollar, you don't lose a dollar.

If there really are a fixed number of jobs at a company that is 80/20 men, and the company decides 30% must go to women, then technically yes, that is a form of discrimination. But - just hypothetically - is it a negative discrimination if the reason that the company is 80/20 men in the first place is because it previously discriminated against women, and would have been 50/50 without several decades of history of unspoken discrimination?

It's important to also think about a few things- One, that unlike social prejudices, affirmative action is not intended to be permanent. It's intended to help boost people who've been unfairly and systematically disadvantaged, while they're disadvantaged, and only until things even out. After that, the boost should go away by design. Two, that some of those disadvantages in history have been really extreme, and the kind of discrimination you might imagine you feel when your company tries to hire more women isn't the same order of magnitude of what women and black people as a whole have gone through.

> Regardless, it's discrimination nonetheless and it's very common yet somehow nobody cares.

Is all discrimination bad always? I'm very discriminating about my partners. I'm not sure that nobody cares, I think some people are in favor of seeing that gender and racial injustices actually go away, since not doing anything about it hasn't worked yet.

They don't work this way because it makes shareholder's the most money, not because it is the best experience for the user.

> Advertising plays a very small part in this. Most of what you would call "disinformation" is spread through reposts, which are not affected by advertising.

A completely false ad about a candidate of a different political party is much less likely to be called out or reported because it is only shown to a highly targeted group of people. This lack of accountability creates disinformation. These ads could not be ran as a billboard advertisement or in a non-personalized ad space.

All of the counter arguments always come down to this: Facebook would make less money. And, yes, of course that is going to be the case because if any of these changes would make them more money they would have implemented them themselves. It requires a public corporation to accept that they are making the world a worse place, and to choose to make less money to stop doing that.

"Crack dealers don't profit from drug addiction, they profit from the pleasurable effects of consuming crack. The fact that very addictive drugs are pleasurable to consume tells me more about people in general, rather than crack dealer's business model."

You don’t help, but you don’t report them to the secret police either.

That is a choice.

But, in general, businesses businesses should generally have a fairly wide latitude as to what the t-shirt slogans they allow customers to wear. (Though I think we can imagine various slogans a business might deem objectionable.)

At the same time, businesses can reasonably have a fairly narrow latitude as to what employees should wear, even barring an official dress code, with respect to even advocating for a specific candidate--and that may even get into matters of company campaigning.

Except they are. Your word list is an exceedingly literal straw-man interpretation of a law that is purposefully vague, and doesn’t prescribe which words you can use. You can’t assume that specific policies of a company aren’t there for legal reasons just because the law doesn’t state the exact same policy in the exact same words.

The spirit and the letter of the law, as I already pointed out, requires that employers take “reasonable” actions toward making all employees feel welcome. Society and business have collectively decided that certain words can or do make some people feel unwelcome. Because of that fact, and because companies don’t want their management sued for neglect, we have interpretations of what it means to be compliant that are predictive and speculative. That really does not mean that the initiatives are not about the law, in fact exactly the opposite. Asking people not to use certain words counts as one of those “reasonable” actions, and gives the company a paper trail of attempting to be compliant.

I didn't actually say that. I think many social media sites are net positives, like this one here. I think Facebook specifically is a net negative.

> How did you come to that conclusion?

Performing experiments on users' emotional state without their consent: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

Cambridge Analytica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

Facebook makes users feel worse about themselves: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23709009

You get the idea. None of this is new. Some communities are more toxic than others. Some businesses are less ethical than others. I believe Facebook is an unethical business led by an unethical man making a product that is more harmful than good for most people.

> Did you spare a thought for the people who's social lives revolve around spending time with friends online? You'd advocate for taking away these people's social networks because you're certain you know what's best for them?

I did not advocate that.

I don't agree that banning social networks would be productive or even possible, but this argument doesn't make sense. People had social lives before social networking. People had friends online before social networking. Social networking is not required for these things.

I have a peer who had similar meetings at their firm and the VP of Diversity and Inclusion went as far as to say attendance at such meetings would be tracked on an individual and ongoing basis.

I feel that in general, my company has a very traditional and apolitical work culture, so my imagination runs rampant with what things must be like at FB, Google, & social service sector workplaces.

I don't find it weird at all, I've noticed that often people get really upset about FB or GOOG doing something, while ignoring the other, so hence my questions.

I don't think that this is a coincidence, and I 100% disagree with the notion that this is because FB employees are well paid.

I honestly think that it's because shadow profiles essentially don't exist in any meaningful form (there's probably some logs for non-FB users, but I don't think that they are aggregatable to a specific individual without an account, mostly because that would be super low value and really hard).

In addition to what the parent says about PR, there are some actual good reasons:

1. Some companies are starting to understand and believe that having a diverse team is a competitive advantage when it comes to designing and marketing products intended for a diverse audience.

2. Some companies are starting to believe that it's just the right thing to do to try to increase diversity in their ranks, to attempt to combat systemic sexism and racism that historically has kept certain groups on the sidelines for some roles.

Whether you agree with these things or not, companies are increasingly believing in them, and that's at least a part of why they go far beyond what the law requires when it comes to anti-discrimination. I find it unlikely that a company would lose a court case for not pushing to hire more diverse candidates, or not having implicit-bias training, or not removing terms like master/slave or whitelist/blacklist from their internal lexicon. It does not seem like companies are doing this because they are afraid of running afoul of the law.

I'm confused with the question, given that you yourself gave the answer:

> The risk of running into both PR & legal trouble

You yourself stated a reason other than legal.

But even without PR, I'm surprised you're asking. Do you not believe they can be pushing these initiatives because they actually care about diversity? Or because they view it to be a competitive advantage over other companies? Or because they believe diversity will lead to better company performance? The last is one of the main stated goals in my company. I don't know if they themselves believe it, but it's clear that many, many people do.

> I tried to address this. Attitudes are changing over time. Being compliant yesterday doesn't necessarily mean you're compliant today, even if the law doesn't change wording.

I really, really do not see any group winning a court case against a company because they did not have special hiring events for people of their group. Perhaps in the future, but not any time soon. I do not for a second believe my company did this because they were concerned about the law.

If the company's normal recruitment practices is discriminatory towards a certain group, I can understand. That's not the case here. Moreover, even if it were, having such events would not protect them. You can't wipe discrimination in one part of the company by compensating in another. If your job application page has stuff that discriminates against, say, African Americans, then having special recruiting events for them will not alter the fact that you are discriminating.

> Also, we were talking about diversity training, and not affirmative action nor only hiring discrimination laws.

The thread is about discussions of diversity in the workplace, and were not limiting it to training.