If we were to discuss politics at work at any length we would be at immediate risk of losing valuable people. We all pretty much know where we stand on politics, and it is not together. And many of us feel very strongly about our irreconcilable positions. But by carefully not talking about them (or engaging when someone less in tune starts) we get along just fine. That's not official policy but it is a good one.
This is exactly the argument for privacy. Privacy is about agreed lines because we know that there are some places where we just won't get along. The "if you have nothing to hide" argument assumes that you want to see the things that I'm hiding. In this case, people are hiding their political affiliation (or at least their explicitly expressed opinions) because we know that if it was shared, all of our lives would be harder.
How do you know if people cant express anger at someone? It is not mock question. I recently found out that colleagues who pretended to have good relationships (because we dont talk negatively about others as cultural thing) had long term resentments against each other. And those resentments were influencing work under surface in negative way - until it blew up into dysfunction which is how I realized.
Does it also have a sexual harrasment policy, or is the response to one employee reporting that another groped them going to be "you're fired"? As is traditional?
At 3 paragraphs (131 words), that was a really short article. However, I agree with the subheading: "Mark Zuckerberg says employees shouldn’t have to confront social issues in their day-to-day work unless they want to"
That sounds good to me. I've never had to talk about these kind of things at work. Are there work places where this is unavoidable?
If a business wants its employees to leave politics at the door, the business should too. If Facebook is going to have departments for government affairs, public policy, and lobbying, then it is entirely reasonable for employees to be politically active too.
Otherwise, you're basically saying corporations should participate in the political process but individuals should not. And that's exactly how we got the Earth into the increasingly shitty state it is currently in.
When your company is the place the rest of the planet gather to discuss these very topics, it's not easy to not have to talk about them just in discussing what topics your platform is being used.
Everyone has to discuss diversity at work because there are laws prohibiting discrimination, that's a good thing. Not everyone has to discuss politics at work.
What this means in intent and practice is that you are not allowed to discuss social issues that the hierarchy and those that align with the hierarchy find objectionable.
I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that if a facebook employee wants to talk about poverty in underdeveloped countries on internal social media, then that's going to be ok, but if the discussion concerns people who were harmed because they followed bad medical advice that was spread by use of facebook, all of a sudden that's an unacceptable socal issue at work.
I wonder if free-speech or political protection in workplace can be abused by competitors to destroy your culture as proposed by people in the comments. Is there a chance of that happening or does it already happen?
All this means is that you value your career over the political statement you want to make. The point you want to contribute isn't all that important to you. This is why it's worthwhile listening to people who speak out when there is a cost to themselves - they believe in what they're saying enough to sacrific something for it.
Facebook is not your average workplace. If your platform is profiting off of active political misinformation, you have an obligation to not only discuss these issues, but solve them. If you determine that you can't solve them, it's time to stop accepting the money.
Most employees at Facebook are doing nothing of the sort. They are working on databases and internal tools and changing the color of buttons. If you work on an integrity team then yes, you'll have to discuss such issues, but most employees don't.
I was working at Facebook during the 2016 election and it was pretty unavoidable.
A big part of the problem was just that everyone was using Facebook for work all the time. So quite often, there would be some enormous thread arguing about whether X or Y was the right policy, was Trump violating the rules and should be kicked off Facebook, or was Facebook's anti-Trump policies violating freedom of speech, or was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting, etc etc.
And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week, could you provide feedback on it. Type X of hardware is being deprecated next quarter. So you really have to be checking Facebook-for-work consistently for professional reasons. You have to scroll past the political debates all the time.
> was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting
This is sort of what I was thinking about in my original comment. I would hate to have to discuss political affiliation, or make public judgements on other people/issues.
> And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week,
I miss so much in my news feed already, using it for work would make me nuts.
That depends on if your existence is political I suppose. Ask some of your LGBT colleagues, especially trans colleagues, if they feel like can just leave politics at the door.
I have worked with many LGBT colleagues who never bring up politics at work. This "existence is political" thing is just a bullshit phrase that the obnoxious people who can't go an hour without bringing that crap up use to justify it.
If your very existence is so wrapped up in political and gender/sexuality issues that you can't stand not talking about them at work, maybe you're not emotionally prepared to join the workforce.
Such as ... food production? "But your food is consumed by literal fascists"... water supply? "Did you know that evil people also drink the water you are providing and hydrate their bodies so they can do more evil things?"
For people who believe that everything is political, there are no projects with less moral ambiguity, it's just more or less openly visible.
If you work for a large social network with huge social responsibilities, discussions about ethics ought to be unavoidable, in my opinion.
If you're writing accounting software for paper suppliers or something equally banal with few ethical implications, then sure, there's no need (and less reason) to have water cooler conversations about pro-genocide agitprop or whatever.
EDIT to add that of course not all departments at Facebook make the sort of decisions that have a marked social impact. More referring to the content policy teams, and the news feed algo teams, and so on.
> If you work ... with huge social responsibilities, discussions about ethics ought to be unavoidable, in my opinion.
The problem is distinguishing ethics from politics. These are very hard to disentangle, because ethical values are usually based on some political orientation. And I don't want Facebook to be making political decisions on my behalf, as a user. And I don't even want internal employee discussions to be derailed by political considerations.
So how do you distinguish ethics from politics? I don't think it's possible, unless the company defines its own ethical values, a priori, and only considers those when making decisions.
If you read the article, I think that this is precisely what Facebook's new policy is trying to do by putting a fence around "social issues."
I work for an accounting software mega-corp in silicon valley. Our CEO sends company wide emails regarding every notable social issue event. After the George Floyd murder we've been told we need to openly discuss racial issues at work. Managers have been told that they must have these conversations, since if they don't, employees may think that they don't care.
The company's products are in no way social media platforms.
From a cursory reading it does not really sound similar; it sounds like Google is picking a side and doubling down on it. The description of the Facebook policy, on the other hand, suggests that Facebook are trying to suppress the drama, not picking a side in it.
I've just been given an offer from Facebook and I have a few days to decide to take the job or not. The ethical implications of what I'm doing are intense. On one hand, a near 400k total comp package is very nice, but on the other hand I don't want to make the world worse off. I think if I could make that kind of money working from home for another company it'd be an easier decision. Unfortunately, I have to play the hand I'm dealt.
I’m obviously biased since I work there, but I had the exact same concerns before starting two years ago. In reality things are much more different that what HN makes it sound like. There’s all sorts of people, and not everyone agree, and much like the current climate in the US people are getting more and more polarized. I think it’s pretty awesome that everyone in the company is free to express themselves and debate and openly challenge management during Q&As and other events, but I also recognize that at some point the debates can turn toxic and I can see why we would want to avoid that. Once you realize how things work from the inside, you realize that the majority of people do want to make the world a better place, and that it’s easy to pick on things that didn’t work quite well and forget all of the positive sides that social networks have brought to the world. You can tell me that I’m drinking the kool aid but IMO internally things are really not at all like HN likes to portray it everyday.
> Once you realize how things work from the inside, you realize that the majority of people do want to make the world a better place
It's hard to square that with the algorithmic feed, likes, etc, which are making the world worse every single day in favor of engagement metrics. We've known for many years how destructive these are.
Facebook and Twitter could literally make the world a better place simply by disabling those kind of features. Just remove them. It doesn't get easier than that to substantially improve the world, yet it's not being done.
I don't think the question is really about how the internal politics of Facebook work. The question is whether you should devote years of your limited working time and your talent to make the world a worse place to live in (which I think FB almost certainly does).
It's great that y'all discuss this sort of thing internally, but at the end of the day, FB and similar platforms have increased polarization, addicted users, eroded privacy, and allowed state actors to influence elections. And that's the incredibly short list.
Whatever internal discussions you're having, they're not working. I'd posit that they can't work, because FB's entire business model is predicated on user-hostile, polarizing behavior, whether anyone internally will admit it or not.
It frankly does not matter one bit what things are like internally when externally we can see the harm FB has caused, and there is zero evidence that harm is going to stop.
As someone who also feels they’re evil (left 5+ years ago), I will grant that it’s not all bad like many here like to think. I imagine many small businesses and nonprofits derive a lot of value from their community building and targeted advertising, which is (maybe) a good thing.
That being said, it’s a good idea to understand why the pay is so high (and it’s not because they’re nice people who only want the best for their employees):
You will be expected to leave moral qualms at the door. This an unwritten rule at many companies, but Facebook had to write it. That says something.
You will be expected to work for it. Hard. The people I know at Facebook easily put in 1.5-2x the hours I do at a FAANG-ish (late nights and weekends seem to be the norm), but get paid roughly 1.5-2x what I do. If that’s a tradeoff you’re willing to make, go for it. I however am making more money than I know what to do with, and thus value all the time I’m not working (hobbies, travel, side projects, etc) way more than the money I’d make from working during that time.
At the end of the day you aren’t going to singlehandedly destroy the fabric of society all that much in your first year, so you’re fine making the above sacrifices for a year or two for some quick cash then fucking off to pursue some real interests, go for it. But I sincerely warn you against sacrificing too much of your life (youth especially) and morals for money —- it really isn’t as valuable as it’s cracked up to be.
If you're being offered a $400K comp package I can say with a lot of certainty that you have not been dealt a hand and are, in fact, a highly skilled worker with a great many options for employment, so sincere congratulations on your success!
It's therefore hard to see how taking this offer would not be choosing to sell your ethics for money and success, given that you could likely land a well paid job anywhere.
> Unfortunately, I have to play the hand I'm dealt.
Usually you see someone say something like this when they're presented with truly awful options. Seeing it used to refer to a $400k comp package is a bit jarring.
And if you've made it through FB's hiring process and they've given you an attractive offer, I find it hard to believe you don't have other options that don't involve a big ethical quandary, or wouldn't if you interviewed around more.
I used to loathe Facebook and like Google. These days both seems about the same. Facebooks policy to leave people alone deeply resonates with me even though I still dislike them intensely for what they did to WhatsApp.
And for what it is worth, Facebook unlike Google hasn't insulted me for a decade with the ads they show.
I work at FB. I wouldn’t want to be working alongside people who think I’m a mercenary abdicating my moral precepts. And I wouldn’t expect that of my colleagues. So my guess is that you could get away with it easily, but you‘d be doing a disservice to yourself and your team.
No, I certainly wouldn't think of my coworkers as mercenaries for hire, as that's a very simplistic worldview that I don't subscribe to. My net concern is: Will me working at FB be a net good, neutral, or bad for society? I'm fine with neutral, I just don't want it to be a net bad.
Consult a lawyer for advice on the legal implications of being directed to work on projects that either violate the law or your own ethical principles. The lawyer can help you draft an employment contract that protects you from retaliation if you object. If Facebook refuses to sign the contract, walk away.
Someone should make a museum of bizarre advice found on HN.
No normal company is going to sign _any_ contract provided by a prospective full-time employee (except perhaps if you are a sought after celebrity being hired at a VP level or above), so it would just be a waste of time and money for someone to take your advice.
Even if the hiring manager personally wanted to, there is no process for doing this. They don't have lawyers standing by to review such contracts. It would probably be hard to even find out who would have the authority to sign such a contract.
Further, retaliating against whistle-blowers is already illegal, as is ordering employees to break laws, so I don't know what additional protection you imagine you would get from such a contract.
Interesting to see young companies fall into line. There is a reason it is against norms to talk about these things in most companies, because it causes undo conflict usually far outside of the context of what is being worked on.
Good for them. I haven't worked at FB, but I can only assume they're similar to Google in this regard, maybe worse, since their workforce tends to be younger on average. Things were already getting pretty unbearable when I left Google years ago, and (according to people I know who still work there) have taken a turn for _much_ worse in 2016. When recruiters email, I politely decline, without specifying why, but this is largely why. I actually liked working there when it came to _work_, but the environment was extremely politicized and oppressive. No differences of opinion were tolerated at all. You'd immediately be ratted out to HR for a mere suggestion that someone is too aggressive/uncivil in enforcing the dogma on internal Google+.
If the climate is such that the employees are so passionate about politics, is it at all possible that zero employees have their thumb on the scale in terms of using their position to nudge towards their desired election result?
That seems like a bigger issue. If I am an activist and I poison the enormous dataset that's being fed to a ML model, is anyone even going to notice?
They would notice the size of the ETL job necessary to do this (and tbh, I don't think anyone understands the individual level outputs of any large ML model well enough to accomplish this).
Evidence suggests the opposite: they would write a self-congratulatory blog post about it.
For example the work Google does on "de-biasing AI" is all about taking ML models and warping its understanding of the world to reflect ideological priorities.
I'm reading a leaked internal Facebook document published on theverge.com where it's suggested that they build a "troll classifier" based on the use of words like "reeee", "normie", "IRL", "Shadilay", "lulz".
The have also suggested a "meme cache" - one of the memes shown is a Folgers coffee cup which says "Best part of waking up, Hillary lost to Trump".
Based on this classifier and hits to the meme cache, "trolls" would experience things like auto-logout, limited bandwidth.
Under "when to trigger this" they also suggest the period "Leading upto elections".
So on the one hand this document seems well-intentioned because there's some bad behavior in these groups like raiding, doxxing, racism, etc.
Rather than focusing on behaviour like doxxing and raids, the approach suggested seems to be directed at a specific group. Why? In the entire universe is it only this group that engages in this kind of behaviour?
It also does a broad classification that lumps anyone sharing the same memes, or vocabulary with punitive action.
Also they associate the election with this, which seems especially puzzling.
Readit News
The consensus against retrospective punishment is a lot weaker than people might expect, and who knows what new social crimes the future will bring.
How do you know if people cant express anger at someone? It is not mock question. I recently found out that colleagues who pretended to have good relationships (because we dont talk negatively about others as cultural thing) had long term resentments against each other. And those resentments were influencing work under surface in negative way - until it blew up into dysfunction which is how I realized.
Dead Comment
That sounds good to me. I've never had to talk about these kind of things at work. Are there work places where this is unavoidable?
Otherwise, you're basically saying corporations should participate in the political process but individuals should not. And that's exactly how we got the Earth into the increasingly shitty state it is currently in.
However, I'm sure it's easier for my jobs since they were for a retail company and an engineering firm.
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I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that if a facebook employee wants to talk about poverty in underdeveloped countries on internal social media, then that's going to be ok, but if the discussion concerns people who were harmed because they followed bad medical advice that was spread by use of facebook, all of a sudden that's an unacceptable socal issue at work.
Dead Comment
You only get one-sided discussions because going against the grain will be career suicide.
A big part of the problem was just that everyone was using Facebook for work all the time. So quite often, there would be some enormous thread arguing about whether X or Y was the right policy, was Trump violating the rules and should be kicked off Facebook, or was Facebook's anti-Trump policies violating freedom of speech, or was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting, etc etc.
And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week, could you provide feedback on it. Type X of hardware is being deprecated next quarter. So you really have to be checking Facebook-for-work consistently for professional reasons. You have to scroll past the political debates all the time.
> was it racist for an employee to say they supported Trump during a meeting
This is sort of what I was thinking about in my original comment. I would hate to have to discuss political affiliation, or make public judgements on other people/issues.
> And you use the same interface for important things like, announcing hey this database service team is launching a new API next week,
I miss so much in my news feed already, using it for work would make me nuts.
I would say, FB did the right thing here, to not supporting a platform that actively politicizing itself.
Many:
Education. Healthcare. Corrections, law, and law enforcement. Social work. Public utilities and subsidized housing. Etc.
Dead Comment
For people who believe that everything is political, there are no projects with less moral ambiguity, it's just more or less openly visible.
If you're writing accounting software for paper suppliers or something equally banal with few ethical implications, then sure, there's no need (and less reason) to have water cooler conversations about pro-genocide agitprop or whatever.
EDIT to add that of course not all departments at Facebook make the sort of decisions that have a marked social impact. More referring to the content policy teams, and the news feed algo teams, and so on.
The problem is distinguishing ethics from politics. These are very hard to disentangle, because ethical values are usually based on some political orientation. And I don't want Facebook to be making political decisions on my behalf, as a user. And I don't even want internal employee discussions to be derailed by political considerations.
So how do you distinguish ethics from politics? I don't think it's possible, unless the company defines its own ethical values, a priori, and only considers those when making decisions.
If you read the article, I think that this is precisely what Facebook's new policy is trying to do by putting a fence around "social issues."
The company's products are in no way social media platforms.
It's hard to square that with the algorithmic feed, likes, etc, which are making the world worse every single day in favor of engagement metrics. We've known for many years how destructive these are.
Facebook and Twitter could literally make the world a better place simply by disabling those kind of features. Just remove them. It doesn't get easier than that to substantially improve the world, yet it's not being done.
Whatever internal discussions you're having, they're not working. I'd posit that they can't work, because FB's entire business model is predicated on user-hostile, polarizing behavior, whether anyone internally will admit it or not.
It frankly does not matter one bit what things are like internally when externally we can see the harm FB has caused, and there is zero evidence that harm is going to stop.
That being said, it’s a good idea to understand why the pay is so high (and it’s not because they’re nice people who only want the best for their employees):
You will be expected to leave moral qualms at the door. This an unwritten rule at many companies, but Facebook had to write it. That says something.
You will be expected to work for it. Hard. The people I know at Facebook easily put in 1.5-2x the hours I do at a FAANG-ish (late nights and weekends seem to be the norm), but get paid roughly 1.5-2x what I do. If that’s a tradeoff you’re willing to make, go for it. I however am making more money than I know what to do with, and thus value all the time I’m not working (hobbies, travel, side projects, etc) way more than the money I’d make from working during that time.
At the end of the day you aren’t going to singlehandedly destroy the fabric of society all that much in your first year, so you’re fine making the above sacrifices for a year or two for some quick cash then fucking off to pursue some real interests, go for it. But I sincerely warn you against sacrificing too much of your life (youth especially) and morals for money —- it really isn’t as valuable as it’s cracked up to be.
It sounds like, from reading your comment a couple times, you know what is right but are tempted to ignore that and take the cash.
It's therefore hard to see how taking this offer would not be choosing to sell your ethics for money and success, given that you could likely land a well paid job anywhere.
Usually you see someone say something like this when they're presented with truly awful options. Seeing it used to refer to a $400k comp package is a bit jarring.
And if you've made it through FB's hiring process and they've given you an attractive offer, I find it hard to believe you don't have other options that don't involve a big ethical quandary, or wouldn't if you interviewed around more.
I used to loathe Facebook and like Google. These days both seems about the same. Facebooks policy to leave people alone deeply resonates with me even though I still dislike them intensely for what they did to WhatsApp.
And for what it is worth, Facebook unlike Google hasn't insulted me for a decade with the ads they show.
As a screw in the Facebook machine, your significance is trivial. This is true regardless of your intention.
Get over the ethnical drama I would say. Big tech is about as ethnical as banks. In another word, the companies don't care, and they are probably not.
Sounds like there's nothing left to abdicate.
No normal company is going to sign _any_ contract provided by a prospective full-time employee (except perhaps if you are a sought after celebrity being hired at a VP level or above), so it would just be a waste of time and money for someone to take your advice.
Even if the hiring manager personally wanted to, there is no process for doing this. They don't have lawyers standing by to review such contracts. It would probably be hard to even find out who would have the authority to sign such a contract.
Further, retaliating against whistle-blowers is already illegal, as is ordering employees to break laws, so I don't know what additional protection you imagine you would get from such a contract.
That seems like a bigger issue. If I am an activist and I poison the enormous dataset that's being fed to a ML model, is anyone even going to notice?
For example the work Google does on "de-biasing AI" is all about taking ML models and warping its understanding of the world to reflect ideological priorities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.06520
The have also suggested a "meme cache" - one of the memes shown is a Folgers coffee cup which says "Best part of waking up, Hillary lost to Trump".
Based on this classifier and hits to the meme cache, "trolls" would experience things like auto-logout, limited bandwidth.
Under "when to trigger this" they also suggest the period "Leading upto elections".
So on the one hand this document seems well-intentioned because there's some bad behavior in these groups like raiding, doxxing, racism, etc.
Rather than focusing on behaviour like doxxing and raids, the approach suggested seems to be directed at a specific group. Why? In the entire universe is it only this group that engages in this kind of behaviour?
It also does a broad classification that lumps anyone sharing the same memes, or vocabulary with punitive action.
Also they associate the election with this, which seems especially puzzling.