I think a key phrase here is "he was dismissed for publicly challenging a colleague’s silence".
In other words, he publicly harassed a colleague who (for what could be any number of perfectly valid reasons) preferred not to publicly state their beliefs. That would seem to me to be an eminently reasonable reason to fire someone. If you go around publicly harassing your colleagues to publicly state their political opinions, you deserve to be fired.
Ok, since the article says both that the employee "wrote on Twitter that he was dismissed for publicly scolding a colleague" and "Facebook confirmed [this] characterization of his dismissal", I think we can syllogize our way to "Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague" as a fact that both sides have confirmed.
Indeed -- here is some additional context that the article doesn't provide:
The fired employee Tweeted today:
>In the interest of transparency, I was let go for calling out an employee’s inaction here on Twitter. I stand by what I said. They didn’t give me the chance to quit [0]
He then specifically cited [1] the Tweet in question that was the cause:
>I asked @Vjeux to follow @reactjs's lead and add a statement of support to Recoil's docs and he privately refused, claiming open source shouldn't be political.
>Intentionally not making a statement is already political. Consider that next time you think of Recoil. [2]
This is specifically targeting an individual front-end engineer at FB, which in my own estimation crosses the line from criticism of executives or general policy, to specifically trying to instigate public outrage against a co-worker. If such actions were directed at me, I would definitely consider it as contributing to a hostile work environment. It all strikes me as a modern-day example of "Havel's greengrocer" [3].
He decides because he believes something strongly it permits him to publicly attack someone he works with... Imagine having to deal with this guy in a team when he has a strong opinion on something the team disagrees with ...
Agree. It's endemic of the political and cultural climate we're in right now, where mob rule is becoming the status quo. Personal politics should be just that, personal.
It's not mob rule it's those who run the outrage-triathlon where those with the highest blood pressure and boil over tops win. If they can't steam anybody up to join them from their effervescence alone they deserve to fall to the wayside and get out the way. The outrage train is coming.
We must ask ourselves daily, "what am I supposed to be outraged about now?"
> Agree. It's endemic of the political and cultural climate we're in right now, where mob rule is becoming the status quo.
I'm not sure we should mark this down as a political and cultural climate thing. I'm more convinced the guy was simply an asshole and it so happens that he felt strongly about politics.
The thing is... he's not the only one. It's been happening for a while now at Google and other big tech companies - if your personal ideological views don't conform with the majority's... prepare to be browbeaten into conformance.
Hence, many people are very secretive of their beliefs if they don't conform, and they may even "play along" like Winston does during the "Two Minutes Hate" (1984). Unlike 1984, we don't have a state or federal "thought police" but we kind of have something similar - a "thought mob" that patrols coworkers for evidence of thought crime.
Politics is intensely personal. It's not so much about conflicting ideas, but rather loudly delineating social groups and whose camp you're in.
Pushing beliefs to simplistic extremes and demanding declarations of beliefs is an efficient way to make clear where yourself and others stand socially. Truth has little to do with it.
Politics seems "stupid" because we're putting the cart before the horse.
I think what's different now is how many strangers you're exposed to. A century ago, analogues to context-less twitter rage pile-ons were likely smaller and rarer.
That's not mob rule, that's completely and absolutely how the legal US government operates. Overturning the electoral college would require a constitutional amendment, which is no trivial task.
Mob rule is entirely different: it refers to rule imposed from outside the law, possibly by a large group.
Also, the "fewer votes" really only applies to the presidency, not the senate, house, or governors.
Yes, we all know how an archaism in our system allows for what is now the most powerful branch of government to be controlled by the minority in this country.
Power discrepancies and mob rule are different things.
[edit: though it's correct that the Senate, like the EC, is not "popular", as every state has two senators, rather than a proportionate amount, like representatives]
That point in your edit is actually a pretty big deal. We're already in a situation where a majority of the Senate represents less than 20% of the country's population. Some people will (correctly) retort that the Senate was never intended to be popular in the way you used the word, but -- just like the Electoral College -- the significant concentration of population in urban areas is something that the founders almost certainly didn't foresee.
While "mob rule" may be an unfair term, not only did more people vote for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, there have been more votes cast for Democrats than Republicans as a whole not only in Senate races over the last decade but in House races, too -- the Republican majority there is protected by gerrymandering.
> That's not mob rule, that's completely and absolutely how the legal US government operates.
Those aren't mutually exclusive. Middle school civics class explanations of the electoral college are fine. You can understand the reasons the electoral college was created and still oppose the fact that there have been multiple recent cases where the electoral college went against the popular vote. And, not that it's particularly relevant, but I highly doubt the very people who designed the electoral college would approve of its use when it seems to routinely elect someone who lost the popular vote.
Oh, I'm personally against the electoral college (have been since I was a kid). However, it's still not mob rule, by the virtue of the fact that mob rule is necessarily non-legal, while the electoral college is the essence of "legal".
And the people who set up electoral college (the authors of the constitution) explicitly added a mechanism to change the system via amendments (it's just very hard to get one passed).
Clearly, the college was a compromise the authors of the constitution felt that had to make to create the US. I bet a lot of them didn't like it.
When you say routinely: only 5 presidents have been elected without the majority of the popular vote, spread throughout a couple hundred years.
> However, it's still not mob rule, by the virtue of the fact that mob rule is necessarily non-legal, while the electoral college is the essence of "legal".
Okay. I'm not attached to the particular semantics of "mob rule," but if you define it deliberately such that it doesn't apply in this scenario, then of course it doesn't apply. I just meant, very simply, that it's rule by someone other than who the people expressed their desire to be ruled by.
> I just meant, very simply, that it's rule by someone other than who the people expressed their desire to be ruled by.
That's not what the term means. It's practically the opposite of one of the meanings of the word, which is a pejorative for majoritarian rule. An absolute autocrat is about as far as you can get from mob rule, and yet it's "rule by someone other than who the people express their desire to be ruled by".
You’re not really grokking “mob rule”. “Mob rule” can easily even be putting someone in charge that a majority of people want. The point is that it’s done outside of the legal system.
Indeed, it comes from Latin “mobile vulgus”, which means roughly “easily swayed common people”. “mobile” is of course the origin of the English word “mobile”, but the thing being easily moved here is the crowd’s feelings and opinions. “vulgus” is source of the English word “vulgar”, but less pejorative - the masses, the crowd, the common or ordinary people, the non-elite
> I highly doubt the very people who designed the electoral college would approve of its use when it seems to routinely elect someone who lost the popular vote.
That's literally why they invented the electoral college. To add indirection between the popular vote and the presidency.
It could be argued the electoral college is designed to prevent mob rule by preventing would be presidents from getting elected just by pandering to the “mobs” of people living in high population states like California and Texas
Though it doesn't prevent Presidents from getting elected by pandering to the mobs living in Oklahoma and Kentucky.
The issue with fighting mob majority rule with minority rule is that there's no reason a minority is itself any better or non-moblike than a majority. It's trivial for me to select a different minority whose votes are allowed to count that gives totally opposite results than what exists now. The one advantage of having government be determined by a majority of all people is that you can't slice and dice "all people" to be a particular biased subset of people to get particular outcomes.
On the contrary, I think the electoral college was introduced precisely to ensure that the person who won the election was not who would win the popular vote.
That's certainly not the case. The electoral college was designed such that each state's legislature chooses how to attribute their electoral college votes. Many states in the first few presidential elections just had their state legislatures assign the votes.
But still, I find it difficult to believe that the people who designed the electoral college would think it's okay that we held a national election, we got to see who wins the popular vote, and we still choose a different person for President.
As I understand it, many of the founding fathers explicitly feared that general populace would vote poorly and wanted people who were educated and had access to sufficient information to make a decision to do so on their behalf.
basically they wanted smart people amenable to debate and not be corrupted by a foreign nation to pick a president that doesn't have the nation's best interest at heart. or a vile person.
considering they do not do that anymore and vote based on popular vote per state it's a vestigial tail of our democracy. also, considering they were supposed to not cap the number of house of representative members and the delegates were based on this number also means that it's corrupted even more so than it was.
I was also told the following rationale: If elections are decided entirely by popular vote, then candidates are incentivized to campaign in population centers, and have no incentive to ever visit sparsely populated states. (Like, bringing your margin from 70% to 85% of 4 million people is worth more than going from 0% to 100% of 400k people.)
Except it's simply not true. Instead candidates focus on a set of fairly high-population swing states, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania.
That only makes sense if you believe that land area is the appropriate unit to attempt to equalize political influence over, rather than people. If you think the people are who should have political influence in a democracy, rather than units of land, then it should be desirable that politicians campaign to as many people as they reasonably can.
It's not equalizing political influence between states (that is, bringing them into equality), just bringing them somewhat away from inequality. (Also, states don't have equal land area, it's more like political districts.) The electoral college gives votes as a linear combination of "per political district" and "per people", with 435/538 = 80.8% being "per people".
Also, I guess it's the fact of "winner takes all within a state" that disincentivizes candidates from simply drumming up more support within states they've already won, more so than the distribution of votes per state.
I think it is largely irrelevant, except that it can be useful to debunk people whose arguments depend on false claims about what the founding fathers believed.
No, only the current President received less of the popular vote. The government is more than just the President. Congressbeings are elected via direct election in their districts.
The Electoral College is working as designed. It was never intended to implement a direct democracy.
Politics by definition cannot be personal. It's the practice of resolving conflict within society; if you don't interact with society, there is no politics possible.
(Note: this doesn't mean I agree with the behaviour shown in this case - nobody says politics between colleagues must be done over Twitter.)
(edit: sad downvotes without actual logical counterpoint are sad.)
> Politics between colleagues should not be done at all.
Hear, hear.
In fact, it's an age-old addage that politics and religion should never be discussion topics at work because of how easy these discussions can spiral down to hostile work environments due to assholes like this guy.
And this case is just yet another example reinforcing the addage.
I disagree. With that outlook, we would never have had the social movements that changed Europe for the better in the XIX and XX century. In modern terms, stuff like BLM influences who your colleagues are, how you treat them, and how you react to their demands for fairness.
Does someone need to 100% support BLM (the political movement) to make an acceptable colleague?
What if someone: opposes racism and thinks police's use of force should be more regulated, but disagrees with some BLM tactics/approach to achieving change?
For example, what if the destruction of property from the protests, or calls to defund the police, actually cause a backlash at the next election and it reduces the chances of anything actually being done. Is someone allowed to make a critique like that?
The bottom line is there actually needs to be a diversity of thought to solve problems, and if you silence anyone who isn't 100% behind your message your not going to make change.
> Does someone need to 100% support BLM (the political movement) to make an acceptable colleague?
No, and I never said as much.
My point is that stuff like BLM is relevant enough that should not be considered a taboo subject between reasonable adults on the workplace. Nobody should be forced or publicly shamed into agreeing on this or that action, and there are well-known ways of resolving this sort of disagreement (i.e. voting) while respecting each other.
I am not supporting what happened in this case, I am only disagreeing with people in the thread turning it into an excuse to never talk about politics on the workplace. If we don't face problems and talk about them, we will never solve them.
> I am only disagreeing with people in the thread turning it into an excuse to never talk about politics on the workplace.
If I was running a company, I would prefer employees not to talk about politics because it will create needless arguments that have nothing to do with the job at hand. If I am an employee, if there is a disagreement about something, how do I know there is not going to be a long-standing hatred from a colleague about my position on a topic that will manifest itself in unpredictable ways.
There are too many activists which make every topic good vs evil and life vs death.
No but the issue is a statement on the project’s page, which is a public good. Expressing support for a just and important movement for social progress like BLM is, in this respect, expected and thus asked. It has nothing to do with politics. It’s a social movement that the right is trying to vilify and turn into a political wedge issue, as well as cultural “Other”.
The world would be a better place if both Russia and Germany kept a lid on the practice of pressuring people into a political stance in the first half of the 20th century.
OTOH MLK did not have his followers pressure coworkers - they kept it in the public, not behind doors.
That's not how it went down - what happened between 1900-1950 was the culmination of more than a century of struggles in industrial relations (where labor had no power unless it organised), the rise of mass-media, and the end of monarchies as a viable system of government.
politics are profoundly personal but also pervades the whole human-organizational stack. conflict resolution might be one of its applications, but make no mistake, politics is primarily concerned with power and its application.
(human) politics requires just 2 people, not a whole societies’ worth; even zero people at the limit, since politics happens in and with other species too.
I can easily imagine dealing with a tweet that asks me to do something, and then another tweet that says that I didn't do the thing that was asked of me. That doesn't sound too bad to me. What am I missing?
> This is specifically targeting an individual front-end engineer at FB, which in my own estimation crosses the line from criticism of executives or general policy, to specifically trying to instigate public outrage against a co-worker.
More importantly, it sounds like he was bullying colleagues to force them to comply with his personal desires on how to do activism by proxy.
Worse, he was trying to force colleagues to risk losing their job in the process just so that they could cater to his whims.
"bullying" is definitely the word. And no one should be forced to take a political position, especially in a work context. There's a reason why our forbears left their politics at the workplace door.
Beyond that, I'd be nervous that a co-worker like this might advance to physical violence.
And he seems from replies and subsequent tweets to still be taking shots at the former coworker. I passively wonder if there wasn’t already some history between the two we just aren’t privy to
Or this guy could just be a total asshole. Think of it another way: If you so demand that everyone post messages of support for your political stance, those messages completely lose all meaning. Does anyone in North Korea really give that much of a shit about all the praise for their "Dear Leader"? No, they just don't want to be killed or sent to a prison camp.
I'm sympathetic to this opinion just for worrying about clashing cultural expectations with co-workers. In communicating ideas in a way what may be obvious to me (because of my culture), it might not always obvious to someone else and easy to mis-interpret.
At best, you're never going to change somebody's mind in a political discussion (you can only change people who are not directly participating), and at worst, there's the risk of being raked over the coils by HR or even losing your job.
Even still, there are appropriate channels and using a public platform to personally attack someone is a nuclear option that you should expect consequences on.
e.g. government employees initially raise concerns on policy privately, then resign and speak out when the discussions fail.
"I disagree with what this platform I'm working on allows," is a valid statement an employee can bring up and unavoidably political when in reference to political speech or something that is being used to some political end. A section of some arbitrary law from the 90's doesn't define what an employee can be concerned about.
That seems like a fine way to state your political stance on the platform. But as has been brought up in other comments and the article, it is not the manner in which the dismissed employee did it.
Was a famous IBM motto in the thirties. You dont receive der Fuhrer's "The Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star", granted to 'honor foreign nationals who made themselves deserving of the German Reich.' by talking bad about political leaders now do you.
Honestly I wasn't going to reply to any comments on the thread, but this is so odious and completely stupid I believe I should address it.
Not talking politics in the workplace doesn't mean not taking a stand outside of the workplace it just means you're at work to get work done not talk politics and I as a potential coworker frankly don't want to hear your politics in the workplace and, I'd have no problem letting you know that fact if you act in real life like you post, hyperbolic and unwaranted.
In fact, taking a stand for what you believe in is one of the fundamental rights the US protects and I think you should participate in any protest, march or riot you want to. I just think you shouldn't do it at work, and if you do, for people not to be surprised that it get's you fired at a few places because people don't want you disrupting their business.
> It all strikes me as a modern-day example of "Havel's greengrocer"
While partially agreeing, i would note that "Havel's greengrocer" was more about situation where boths sides consired that speech act just as expression of power relations and loyality, ignoring its meaning. In this case it is more a case of "true believer".
Ooof. I'd hate to be around that guy if he was organizing a fundraiser. If he's passionate about a cause and notices that you didn't donate as much as he had hoped, does it give him the right to publicly shame you for it? It doesn't matter if it's for a good cause or not, that's 100% harassment.
His tweet wasn't meant to encourage ppl to join his cause, his tweet was targeted at one person and meant to solicit others to attack. I wouldn't be surprised if FB already had complaints about that Dail guy being abrasive and difficult to work with.
Nobody's going to spell it out. If you announce someone doesn't support <popular movement> as much as you'd expect them to on a public forum, that will likely cause backlash. In that case either you did it in purpose, or caused it by not thinking of consequences of your actions.
That seems to imply that all public disagreement about a popular or controversial movement is "public shaming" and thus that you would oppose all such discussion.
The difference here is the discussion/post itself is almost irrelevant. Anyone can do it. You just can't do it to a coworker without work-policy based consequences.
If you want to do public shaming and cause backlash, nobody can stop you.
Just like it is a mistake to project every instance of subtle, overt, or systemic racism on all white people but here we are, talking about privilege differences between classes in the first world while the third is pointing and laughing at our stupidity.
Yes, it was a private reply, which the facebook employee then outed publicly on twitter.
>I asked @Vjeux to follow @reactjs's lead and add a statement of support to Recoil's docs and he privately refused, claiming open source shouldn't be political.
Why is that not okay? Do you think that is sensitive private information? Or do you believe that no content of any private conversation should ever be publicized?
They could be privately supportive of Black Lives Matter, donate to bail funds, spread the word under anonymized accounts, etc. But they might also work/live in a deeply conservative office/neighborhood. Forcing their hand at going public with their support could get them fired, or get their ass kicked the next time they go to the bar or get pulled over by a cop.
And "find another job, then" isn't always practical, especially with marriage+kids+debt.
And yes, you should always ask for consent before making a private reply public.
I'm supportive of Black Lives Matter, but I don't think what OP did was ok.
> They could be privately supportive of Black Lives Matter...
Of course they could. This person didn't claim anything to the contrary. The complaint was not about the webmaster's personal beliefs, but rather about the webmaster's decision in their capacity as webmaster.
> Forcing their hand at going public with their support could get them fired
The request was to change the website of an open source project, not for the webmaster to personally declare anything about their beliefs. Of course it is possible (though unlikely) that there is some threat to the webmaster's safety or livelihood that would prevent them from taking certain actions regarding the project's website, but in that case, the responsibility over the project's website should probably be more evenly distributed.
He called out a colleague, and then when the colleague reached out to him privately so they could discuss, called him out again for not conversing in public on Twitter.
I'm sympathetic to his motivations, but his behaviour was unprofessional and unwarranted.
Imagine someone went to Gab (or whatever the right wing mob platform du jour is) and denounced a colleague and published their contact info on it. There's no explicit call to contact or harass the person.
I’m not too familiar with Gab, but are you implying that Twitter is exclusively a platform for left wing mobs? If so, you are mistaken, and this coarse impression of what Twitter is should not be projected onto every single tweet.
Twitter is a platform for mobs of every sort, and if you have a mob of followers and you attack a colleague, publishing his contact info, you are de facto encouraging the mob to attack him, even if you play dumb after the fact.
There was no attack on a colleague (a public disagreement is not an attack). The person who was fired has less than a third the followers of the other person (and probably very significant overlap between the follower groups). There certainly was no publishing of contact info, unless you consider all public mentions on Twitter to be publishing contact info (which is preposterous). Your impression of what happened is mistaken.
You’re performing impressive mental gymnastics to say this person’s behavior did not harm psychological safety.
Instead of trying to prove there was no harm, and that being a maintainer of an open source project should make it okay if people do this to you.. think about the intent of what this person did.
Did they intend to create a safe environment? Or did they intend to bully someone into seeing their view, and doxed them on Twitter. A view that the original tweeter identified as political!
No, you contact the website admin and discuss the suggestion in the communication medium of their preference. After all, you are making the request to them. Not the other way around.
I'm starting a new job soon and I'm trying to figure out how I'll handle these "silence is complicit" characters. My personal policy is to not discuss political/social issues at work.
“Thanks for letting me know how you feel about this, I consider this a valuable opinion and think deeply on it”.
Then go ahead and do whatever you were going to do anyway, but at least let them know you’ve heard and acknowledged what they had to say. Sometimes folks just want to be acknowledged, that doesn’t seem like too much of a burden.
I think the unfortunate reality is that some people are intolerant of others who are insufficiently supportive of certain causes, and the only way to deal with those people is not to deal with them. The subject of this thread seems to be one of those people.
I think the unfortunate reality is that this isn't about individual people expecting support for certain causes. What you're looking at is fundamentally a social phenomenon - a belief that's been spreading from person to person and community to community that every person in the social group must support the correct causes in the correct ways, that anyone who doesn't go along with this is actively going against the cause and must be shamed and shunned until they do. It's the social spread via peer pressure that gives this its power. This isn't a new thing, it's been spreading amongst the tech community and elsewhere for probably well over a decade at this point.
I agree that this type of toxic peer-pressure is spreading, and I have no idea what to do about it. It reminds me of what Louis Fischer and Arthur Koestler described in their respective essays in "The God That Failed".
It’ll crumble if you allow them to continue pushing the matter and imposing upon you, enforce your personal boundaries and if they continue intruding, probably HR time or at least sidebar with your manager. Good luck in your new job otherwise!
But do you actually acknowledge them? I think this is fine if you're taking it to heart and actually internalizing the discussion a bit. Otherwise, it's disingenuous.
Edit: this is very basic EQ and active listening, not sure why it's controversial to have good social skills.
If you want genuine don't ask people questions where the answer can give them negative backlash at work.
Getting upset when someone wont be truthful on things with you on touchy subjects at work is like being upset when someone wont be truthful with you on touchy subjects when you're pointing a gun at them.
Acknowleding someone’s opinions and feelings can be as simple as being quiet, letting them speak, giving them room to express themselves without interruption, objection objection or reprisal. You don’t need to automatically alter your course of action just to merely recognize and acknowledge something someone’s said, sometimes just shutting up and being deferential is enough.
“Thank you for your opinion but I’m going another way” is no more of a failure than establishing any other decent and respectable boundaries between peoples.
Manners maketh the man (or woman, or however an individual chooses to self-identify).
OK, I think I'm getting this a bit more. I believe this is a healthy way to think about these topics. I just wasn't sure if you were encouraging people to participate in active listening or passive-aggressiveness. It's clear you're focused on the former which I find commendable.
I encourage seeking clarity and being secure in one's own emotional intelligence to ask questions when things are ambiguous, so I appreciate your asking. Happy to have helped find a mutual understanding. Sorry your comments were so negatively reacted to here.
Assuming you're in the US, it's my understanding that political affiliation is generally not a protected category. So if it's at-will employment at a private employer, it's probably legal to fire you for your political beliefs / actions (or "no reason" when it's really about political affiliation). If someone is engaging in behavior that bothers you, tell them to stop. If they don't, report them to HR. Make sure everything is in writing. But, be aware that HR might not be on your side; but at that point you really need to reconsider whether you want to work at a place where you are harassed and not supported by the company for not discussing politics.
The City of Seattle "assure[s] equal opportunity to all persons, free from restrictions because of race, color, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, political ideology, age, creed, religion, ancestry, national origin, honorably discharged veteran or military status or the presence of any sensory, mental or physical disability."
This is how in soviet times and to extent how this works with china, unless you are vocally "independently" supportive of party line then you are hiding opposite dissenting view and need to be educated etc.
Unfortunately I've heard that drawing critical analogies to communist regimes is a "right-wing dog-whistle", so I'm hesitant to defend myself in public by pointing out these sort of parallels..
The way it works at my workplace is that in meetings with more than one person, we just say "times are tough and thanks for coping with the hard times and still getting the work done. We also recognize that times may be especially hard for some people." But in 1-on-1 convos some of my colleagues and I trust each other enough to say, for example, that we attended a protest.
I'd like to portray another question for you to consider: Do you think being able to have this policy is an inherently privileged position? For the record, I don't disagree with you. I have the same one.
I don't want to assume anything about you, so I'll speak about myself: I'm a het cis white male. I'm well-educated and well paid. Politics basically don't affect me unless it's taxes (which is why our industry ends up leaning so heavily libertarian." I am able to CHOOSE when to discuss political/social issues because i am able to CHOOSE when they affect me.
This is not the case for many others, including I bet your coworkers. If you are a woman, non-hetero, non-cis, or a racial minority, you don't get to choose whether politics/society affects your life - it is automatic. There is no clean separation for a lot of people between work and life and it spills over, and even if they intend to not bring it up, it sometimes will.
I say all this not to get you to change your policy, but to keep in mind why others may not be able to have the same one. What will naturally follow from that, is that people invariably look for allies. So if someone asks you to discuss a subject, one that violates your policy, you should really consider whether your policy actually makes sense in the world, or if it only helps you while actively harming those around you.
So if you're an ally, you should consider flexing your policy, and trying to help.
And if you're not, well...then your silence IS complicit, and you shouldn't be surprised if it affects your career accordingly.
It’s absolutely relevant. Whether it’s a public open source project or a fight over sports in a pub, there is a line you cannot cross if the other person is a co-worker. Context is everything.
That is not coercion or appealing to community shaming. Those are both terms that have meanings. Telling people to consider the actions of the developers of a software project is not coercion or an appeal to community shaming.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter. No one's rights were violated. Apparently you have a different definition of what constitutes appropriate public speech for employees than Facebook does, but so what? You're not his employer. This guy said something and got fired for it. That is the system working how everyone wants it to.
What are we discussing? Whether Facebook was justified in firing him? By definition if they didn't fire him for a prohibited reason, it was justified, right? Is your argument that it was "unfair" to fire him for an act of speech?
Mentioning a private conversation on Twitter that didn’t go your way is 100% aggressive. There is no purpose other than to drum up harassment for the person you mentioned.
The purpose is to inform interested people of the reason for the action (or lack thereof). That is the purpose of communication. Beyond that, you are only speculating about secret intentions, with absolutely no evidence.
There is no legitimate reason to inform the public of someone else’s private conversations in this scenario. It’s not the public’s business to begin with.
I’m not speculating about secret intentions. It is the only reason to call out a private conversation that didn’t go your way.
The “silence is complicit” stuff does really annoy me. Shaming people for not having the same political beliefs is already one thing. But shaming them for having those beliefs, but not sharing them in arenas they’re not comfortable sharing them in is quite extreme.
This is interesting to consider in combination with the xkcd "showing you the door" free speech comic.
If staying silent is unacceptable and saying something "wrong" is unacceptable, then it's in your own self interest to learn the "acceptable views" (whether you agree or not) and mouth them whenever the Powers that Be demand it.
I love XKCD, but that strip is philosophically and historically ignorant.
Free speech isn't the First Amendment. Free speech is a broad foundational principle of liberalism, and the First Amendment is just an encoding of this principle in the context of the U.S. government. But go back to Mill's "On Liberty" and you'll find that he was just as concerned about threats to free speech stemming from social disapprobation as those from the government.
> then it's in your own self interest to learn the "acceptable views" (whether you agree or not) and mouth them whenever the Powers that Be demand it.
Wow, that sounds eerily like 1984:
"In the Two Minutes Hate [Winston] could not help sharing in the general delirium ... Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him."
Basically, if you have to do that, it means there is some implementation of thought police around you that you are hiding from.
People on hackernews really love taking the current social climate to it's 1984 extremes.
When the "acceptable views" being discussed are stuff like Black people shouldn't get murdered by the police at a disproportionately higher rate accounting for all other factors than White People.
FFS, it's not like there is a public debate about whether we should guillotine Jeff Bezos.
If you're finding yourself having to pretend to agree with the 'acceptable views' of the world today, maybe your views are actually shitty and unacceptable?
This is the world we're moving towards. People have been more outspoken in these past few years about demanding "hard conversations" from family and peers. This mindset taking root in the workforce is the logical next step. You can't shut it down or else you're "part of the problem." You can't ignore it and be silent or else you're "part of the problem."
If there culprit wasn't trying to get their victim publicly ostracized, they would have kept their concerns private. And they did it by framing their victim as complicit, via silence. After all, as we've recently been lectured to, silence is violence.
There is literally no other justification for their actions (apart from possibly some form of mental illness, but I'm not a doctor and unqualified to guess at that)
I really think it crosses the line to being a dishonest headline. Reuters has to know that people will misunderstand it as an accusation that the employee was fired because he protested.
This is the MO of news journalism (well, at least a subset). There's a narrative that sells ("big corp = bad, fire person for complaining to zuck") but they still typically include a little detail in the article ("actually fired for harrassing coworker") below the lede.
I don't think I've ever seen a newspaper that hasn't done this.
Bullying. It's just adult bullying. ...and there is an uncomfortable number of people that are ok with it because the offender happens to be on "their side" politically.
Agree completely. This whole harass people for not being vocal enough in their endorsement of the cause smacks of authoritarianism and I think will backfire spectacularly. People resent being made to say something out of fear.
Yep. This guy is the textbook definition of toxic. There is nothing worse than people who want to inflict their own opinion on others. Yeah you can think of Trumps tweets what you want, censorship is a big thing too you know... The problem is not Trumps tweets, its that 40% of Americans are supporting Trump that should worry us. But then again, you can't inflict your own opinion on others. The only way to do something useful here is to educate people about how wrong they are in supporting Trump.
I'd rather have these ideas out in the open where people can defeat the arguments properly without ad-hominem, rather than shouting them down. And hell, maybe even learn something new.
“I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.”
“Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’”
“That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”
Thanks for sharing that, this is the first time I've seen this quote.
I think most adults feel the same way about social media activism, but they probably don't think it's worth their time to call it out even if it annoys them. You would just be begging the social media mob to turn on you next.
Wow never read that. Reminds me of “he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her”. Then we had the crusades. Seems like this is history repeating itself.
There's an important conversation to be had over how activism should operate, in which areas, about what's effective, what turns people off and leaves them hostile, and what measures are justified on what issues, versus what measures are completely disproportionate.
That said, this person stood up for their principles (rightly or wrongly) and lost their job because of it. Your quotation about people "casting stones" in a cavalier way, just to feel good about themselves without it actually risking them anything probably describes a lot of online "woke" flamewars but (to me) doesn't very well characterize what happened here.
I think there's a difference between "standing up for your principles" and "bullying".
The fired employee didn't make a political statement about what they believe - They harassed someone else's private choice, and then pressured them to publicly cow to his political will through social media.
As if anyone who doesn't publicly virtue signal with the movement is also the enemy.
"Your either with us or against us" -- Famously said by Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, George W Bush, and Recep Erdoğan. What wonderful company he's keeping.
It was malicious and ugly. ...and its becoming more commonly accepted on social media.
"He stood up for his principles" is an incorrect abstraction of what happened.
Huge difference between "I'm waving the BLM flag because I believe in it." vs "Hey look everyone, Pryce refused wave the same flag as I do, get the pitchforks!"
The other developer, for all we know, could be in total agreement with BLM!
> "He stood up for his principles" is an incorrect abstraction of what happened.
Absolutely, my phrasing here actually reductive to the point where it doesn't tell us whether he had moral standing to do so - (and that's by design; I actually don't know enough from this article, or others to know whether I agree with his behaviour or not, so I haven't weighed in on that). I'd agree that "standing up for their principles" describes segregationists too- i don't think it tells us who has the right side of an issue.
Whether Dail is right or wrong here is actually irrelevant to my critique above: my intended point was supposed to be:
that the comparison between this person (whose activism at their workplace cost them their job), versus Obama's critique (of people issuing issuing barely-thought-through rebukes online that they aren't invested in), is a pretty unhelpful comparison.
People asserting changes to what is or isn't acceptable in their workplace are absolutely risking blowback for it, and I maintain that's not remotely the same thing as the online brigading / mob justice / cancel-culture conducted by people who can often be trigger-happy as they stand to face no adverse consequences if their critiques are rejected.
I apologise if my phrasing above made this less than clear. It looks to have been interpreted as clearly siding with Dail's position on matters.
---
EDIT: Your choice of example is also interesting though: "Hey look everyone, Pryce refused wave the same flag as I do, get the pitchforks!" is a clever choice on a BLM-related issue; as regardless of what happens in Dails case, it actually quite well characterizes the President's position (and his support bases position) on kneeling in the NFL -and now other sports-, to the point where he has called for the firing of people who refuse to stand for the anthem (and/or) flag.
I didn't expect to agree with Facebook corporate but here I am. It's one thing to privately disagree with a coworker about their action or lack thereof with respect to a contemporary event. But to drag it into a public setting is a severe violation of boundaries and borderline harassment. It's a huge liability risk to FB -- to scold your colleagues in public for their desire to separate the political from the professional is workplace harassment and something that would probably get you fired anywhere.
With that said, I get the sense there is a large part of a story that is not being told here. Where was the manager? Has this employee had a history of maintaining appropriate professional boundaries with respect to communication? If Facebook doesn't have the appropriate paper trail, they could easily be sued for retaliation.
Possibly personal opinion here, but given the current charged (understatement) political environment and twitter's propensity for "scarlet lettering" people via mob harassment, I don't think this was borderline. This seems like a deliberate attempt to get a large group of people to harass a co-worker because of differing opinions about how and when to communicate political opinions.
It would be a personal opinion I share. But there are a lot of details I don't know. A whole range of possibilities I can imagine, from least like to most likely:
- The former employee may have genuinely thought that a public "conversation" could result in a positive outcome (perhaps believing "sunlight is the best disinfectant")
- The two may know each other previously - perhaps the former employee may have felt they had more of a mutual level of trust/familiarity than they actually had?
- The former employee may have been wanting to leave Facebook anyways and (cynically speaking) wanted to go out in a blaze of glory and resign in a high profile manner
- The former employee may be neurodivergent in some way and have difficulty navigating the subtle boundaries of spaces of privacy that exist along the spectrum of 1:1 to effectively "in public"
- The former employee, frustrated and angry and activated by the heat of the moment, willfully decided to sic the mob on the other person
Honestly, I don't know this person so it's hard to say. And I do know it is often the case the hindsight is 20/20. But, I wonder, in this former employee's entire time at Facebook, did their manager ever notice any of these kinds of aspects in that employee's interpersonal interactions or collaboration style? In my experience, hints of these things surface fairly quickly in the workplace, especially during the ramp-up phase or the first time some sort of an adverse situation is encountered, whether it be subpar code, a deadline that doesn't make sense and is hard to change, or a stakeholder that isn't exactly aligned with reality and isn't very easy to get there. If this former employee (consciously or unconsciously) takes such an adversarial approach to conflict resolution with a colleague, one wonders if this was the first time they have ever done that, or merely the first time they ever did this to such a degree.
But who knows. The past few weeks and months have been insane. Many people are seeing more psychological stress and social unrest now than they've seen in their entire lives. A lot of them are not prepared to handle these kinds of situations in a manner they won't regret. It's unfortunate that it has to turn out this way, but on the other hand, this kind of behavior really can't be condoned. It's emotional blackmail.
I really hope this former employee takes to heart a valuable lesson from this, but I have a feeling that the exact opposite will happen; to be fired so publicly, with the humiliation that comes with that, is the perfect accelerant to a radicalization that might already be in progress. I don't know where we go from here.
More people should do what you do when judging others.
On your last point: This is what I fear most as well, a permanent radicalization of this individual.
One important principle in management is that you must be extremely careful NEVER to humiliate someone in even the slightest way in front of audience (any meeting >3 people by my book). The mere suggestion that "something didn't go well" can trigger extremely hurt feelings, defensiveness, and antipathy depending on the size of the audience.
Well on the internet, everything occurs in front of potentially infinitely large audience. To admit that you are wrong is to endure humiliation before the whole world. To deal with this, people dig in their heals, and claim that "I was always right, and those who disagree with me are not only wrong and stupid, but evil to the highest degree."
It's heartbreaking watching watching the far left stab their nearest ideological neighbors and most important allies.
I will admit that the original comment came off as more judgey than I would have liked. And I completely agree that the firing being so public was not a good thing.
> “Intentionally not making a statement is already political,” Dale wrote in the tweet
No it’s not. And this reminds me of the Dictatorship of the small minority [0] from NN Taleb. There are small intolerant minorities who are extremely vocal on certain matters to the point their opinions resemble a dictatorship
Assuming no mitigating circumstances for not speaking out, it literally is acceptance and tacit perpetuation of the status quo which is most certainly political.
I'm not saying there were no mitigating circumstances nor condoning the person's behavior but they are clearly correct on that specific point.
"It's not the violence of the few that scares me, it's the silence of the many."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The mitigating circumstances are the un-nessicary stress and responsibilities of dealing with anyone who doesn't 100% agree with what you're saying. Unfortunately these are pervasive on pretty much any platform you are on, so there's no good way around it.
It's pretty necessary to deal with racism. It's life and death, in fact. The fewer who speak out, the more stress for everyone who abrogates their responsibility.
That's a baseless accusation. I specifically refuted what you said with an argument that even used the words of your own response. To be even more clear, there are no known mitigating circumstances here and your excuses are not mitigating circumstances. See previous comment for argument.
They are involed, specifically in presrving the status quo. There is unfortunately no abstaining in the same way you can't abstain when you know a child is being abused.
Thinking, saying and acting how one does does not exempt them from being the consequences of doing so, specifically, being judged for it.
HN is not a uniform group of people speaking with one voice. It's a group of different people with different opinions on different subjects who speak up at different times.
It's tempting to personify things that are too complex to grasp in detail, but this roads lead nowhere.
Connecting facial recognition software and racism seems to be earning you downvotes here.
While racism is the hot button topic right now, widespread governmental and corporate (or indeed, private) use of facial recognition software is problematic for many reasons. Erosion of privacy, sexual and non-sexual harassment and stalking, racial profiling, gender profiling, profiling for membership of any other kind of group, cute Facebook apps tied to shadowy political organizations, even crazy dystopian inventions like the Chinese social credit scheme. This tech needs to be very strongly regulated, and soon.
Anyone working in this field, and creating this type of software for companies with a historically weak moral compass, _should_ think deeply about their involvement.
Facial recognition may not work reliably if there is training data bias, which can be disadvantageous if you want it to work.
And as you note it can also be used for reducing privacy at scale in a way that humans can't normally do on their own, for example personally identifying thousands of people in a crowd at a sporting event or political rally.
Recoil isn't facial recognition software, it's a React state management library. That's why the employee's conduct was so toxic here; the project he demanded a statement from just has nothing to do with racism in the first place.
Disclaimer: I have no opinion whatsoever about what this guy did or didn't tweet, or whatever the reason may be that he's no longer at Facebook.
That being said, WOW that's some crap reporting: the only source mentioned in the article is what the guy himself wrote on Twitter. From the bottom: "Facebook and Dail did not immediately respond to requests for comment."
Reuters chose to spin that into "Facebook fires employee who..." Come on, a Journalism 101 teacher would go nuts over a student who wrote that headline with no credible sources.
Disappointing indeed. I had thought that the "wire services" like AP and Reuters largely stayed out editorializing but it seems not. I understand that framing will always come into play and that completely neutral "just the facts" is an elusive ideal, but still this example is really egregious.
Bullying for a good cause is still bullying. It feels like a lot of righteous bullies out there don’t want to put in the real effort of changing minds, so they take up their pitchforks in public forums. It’s hard work influencing people for the better, it takes a lot of empathy and a lot of patience.
I'm starting to wonder whether "for a good cause" is exactly the reason why this is happening. People are mistakenly believing that as long as the ends are just, the means couldn't possibly be wrong.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis
I'm so over this political posturing. I can't wait for ~2 weeks when everyone's going to go back to their lives like nothing happened (remember #OccupyWallStreet?).
People that actually change the world don't need to advertise it on Twitter. I have friends that volunteer in Watts and Compton every other weekend (and have done so for years) that don't need to share it on social media. I can't help but think that this current Twitter slacktivism really diminishes their genuine mission.
"I can't wait for ~2 weeks when everyone's going to go back to their lives like nothing happened"
Unfortunately, there is no going back here - it's partly the issues, but mostly a totally new culture of a) Twitter wars b) a new generation of people feeling that it's their 'duty' to (act out which I often believe lacks context) c) a press and pop culture climate considerably more clicky-baity and divided (just google cnn headlines from the 2000's, way more tame) d) corporate pressure to 'buy into' movements which is only going to really exacerbate the system.
I've said this before to strong disagreement but marketers jobs are to sell you aspiration - when that aspiration moves off the court and into the streets and politics, and you're gadget/shoes/apparel/cars are being sold with politics, it's not only deeply hypocritical, but it's going to come back and bite us.
I don't really see the underlying fundamentals moving in a positive direction.
People might argue that if 'the system were fairer' we wouldn't see this reaction, my response would be that there will always be something to argue about. The NYT was literally calling for 'Paw Patrol' to be cancelled due to indoctrination of children by 'coppaganda'. While this is an interesting idea, I feel there will always be threads to pull upon for people to be angry.
First, it's not an accident that this happened two months into the COVID lockdowns. Seattle PD seems to be doing much better than 10 years ago, and yet nothing happened back then and we see lots of protests now. People get more anxious being afraid of the illness and from sitting indoors with 1/8th of the usual social contact, and with unclear job prospects, so they are more likely to act on this anxiety. The summer will turnt to fall, the Woodstock will end, the COVID will recede, the anxiety will subside, and the need to earn money will come front and center again.
Second, the kids will grow up and move on. Some people will never grow up, but it's not the same numbers. The next group of kids will have another cause to fight, for the simple reason that they will not be caught dead practicing anything done by the "old people". In fact a key element of all protests is the desire by the young to distance from the old in order to find their own place under the sun. This dynamic is fueling the protests now, and this same dynamic will undo the protest movement.
I appreciate your point that marketing is more about movements today that it was earlier. Still the capitalism has turned Che Guevara into a T-Shirt franchise, so it can go either way I guess.
It could still be that you're right and I'm wrong, but I think it bears listing all considerations.
I think the COVID point is very salient - there are a lot of people with a lot of spare time.
However - the kids will be replaced by other kids.
'Social Protest' - I believe is actually a form of normal rebellion.
As kids grow and they come into their own identities, at some point, they have to rebel against something. Kids who are abused rebel really early in life. Kids with their own identity rebel in HS. A lot of 'well-raised kids' don't rebel until University - and this rebellion takes a more intellectualized form.
'Youth in Revolt' is perennial, it's metastasizing now because of the possibility of outrage.
That said ... Baby Boomers were considerably more outspoken than their progeny so perhaps whatever comes after Gen Z will be more chill.
I'm surprised how little reporting has covered how lockdowns are a contributing factor to the protests. There's pent-up frustration with Trump adding to the anger, and Trump adding to it in reaction.
The thing is these really are issues that need to be talked about and addressed, and they really have fallen on deaf ears in the past because of lack of popular force. The people in charge just keep posturing, brushing it off, saying "yeah yeah we'll get to it", and waiting for the news cycle to move on. Nothing ever changes.
But the problem is that society at large, especially on the internet, apparently just sucks across the board at anything resembling actual discussion. It seems impossible to both a) give an issue national attention and b) have a remotely civil or productive public conversation about it.
I don't know what to do about it except to say we all deserve each other.
Sometimes I wonder if answer to all of these problems is to divide lands based on ideology, politics and other factors. People are then given a choice to migrate between them every 5 years or so.
Nations shouldn't be so big and migrating shouldn't be that hard. Just divide and divide until the group of people stop complaining.
Racists can live with racists. Progressives can live with progressives.
This is something I've thought as well, an easy example would be abortion - one group thinks that abortion is literally murdering a child, another thinks that it's an inalienable right that a woman has to preform any operation to her own body. There's no way to make both these people happy at the same time.
There are a lot of logistic issues, though, I doubt this will ever happen.
First, he clearly says his friends chose. Second, is it not good enough that they're doing good deeds with any disadvantaged people? Third, these friends may a host of reasons to only return to a couple of places - they may have built relationships with the local residents, for example. And fourth, is every place mentioned in a hip hop song now "privileged" or something?
My friend, you may not be aware that there is an election in a few months. This chaos will continue to escalate all summer and into the fall. Then once Trump wins re-election your really gonna see some slacktavism.
:shrug: people are mad because they don't want to admit that that Trump still has a real shot. Or they just assume that anybody who even tables the idea is racissss. Oh well.
in particular because our president refuses to be eclipsed in newspaper headlines so he's likely to keep doing things that keeps these protests relevant for the next few months. (unlike #occupy)
I’m not American, and I always wonder why it’s always about Trump. The police in the US reports to the mayor, governor, whatever, but not the president. George Floyd was killed in the city where mayor and governor are democrats. In Seattle where CHAZ is mayor and governor are democrats. In New York where police brutally attacked protestors they are also dems. Why Trump is responsible for anything? What Trump is doing exactly?
He has been doing the same old Trump-y things, such as publicly praising violent crack-down of protests in places like Mineapolis as being "beautiful".
I think the advocates would agree that it's brigading. They're trying to create a climate where it's simply impossible to be neutral on their issue of choice, since they feel it's wrong to be neutral.
They don't have the numbers to impose the authoritarianism they seek (to fully remake things in the way they see fit), so the rampant threats and intimidation are meant to force joining. The best way to accomplish that, is to threaten a person's livelihood, which threatens their ability to exist. They started by just doing social ostracising, social threats of exclusion, and now they've moved on to targeting livelihoods.
Cancel culture is part of this livelihood targeting shift. Behave exactly the way we say, or you're "problematic" and we'll kill your life. And we'll cheer and dance like soulless monsters in the tweet threads while you suffer. It's going to get a lot more aggressive yet, until a line gets drawn by the companies that comply too easily with the cancel demands.
The malignant dictatorship of social media rage in the US is becoming insufferable. It's probably going to require government regulation to stop it.
> “The malignant dictatorship of social media rage in the US is becoming insufferable. It's probably going to require government regulation to stop it.”
you know you can just not tune in, right? it’s not coercive in any way, unlike said dictatorship or government regulation. amplification of voice is not a civil right.
As many employers will not hire you now without an extensive, positive social media history, and many people communicate with their friends and family almost exclusively over social media, it's questionable to call social media use optional. It's also extremely dubious to effectively support bullying because "you can just go somewhere else".
You can easily find yourself dragged into situation where activists at your workplace demand you sign a letter, or else you will be branded <all kinds of crap>. If you depend on these people in any way, you will be in trouble. And it's the social media that turned your coworkers that way.
These days you don't have to go to social media to find trouble - the social media comes to you.
folks just gotta learn how to say no gracefully. it's a useful workplace skill anyway.
as for the branding, you can say no without conceding either side. the target of this twitterer seems to have done it successfully, keeping their job and not conceding either way.
note that i'm not taking sides here either. just making a point about having the fortitude to put social media in its proper place.
further, if you can't take a principled stand under pressure (another useful skill), it might be an indication that the stand isn't principled, or at the very least, you need to find the foundational principles on which to stand.
Sadly a valid point. However, I would submit that as a business you are less susceptible to the "silence is violence" attack than an individual would be. But who knows, the times they are a-changin.
The more times you can bring people of different opinions and beliefs together, the more good can be done in the world.
The activists of today just divide people, and cause more net pain in the world than the moderates.
Deep down I think these kinds of divisive activists are actually just fighting their own personal deamons and need a way to vent their anger, because their real personal problems in life are unchangeable.
The workplace is not a soapbox for personal political opinion. I'm surprised Facebook hasn't taken a harsher stance on employees publicly criticizing their leadership. It takes a special level of entitlement to be able to expect to represent oneself publicly as an employee of a company and criticize it…and not face disciplining by the company. It's a clear fireable offense. If I were leadership, I would make that clear and take the necessary steps to terminate each employee who violates that policy,
In general this is such a mess. Every four years these topics are framed in a such a divisive manner that the end result is that it rips friends, families and communities apart. I really loathe these times and it's becoming harder to avoid it.
Wow, talk about being a dick.
"Intentionally not making a statement is already political." I am really curious, are these types of persons not able to see their own hypocrisy?
There isn't a lot of information, for what it's worth I would be interested in how "public" his confrontation was, depending on that this could be more of a knee-jerk "this person is yikes" vs. sinister "don't stray from the party line"
As much as I want to be sympathetic, if I was his co-worker I would feel very publicly harassed especially when the co-worker explicitly was conferring to him privately.
Sure shame the monolith that is FB, I would even say shame Zuckerberg he controls the place. But don't shame a fellow engineer who you work with, he didn't have any say in what FB was doing.
Also long term ineffective, if you promote a culture of shaming private conversations, then nothing happens because no one talks.
I'm a bit disappointed at articles like this, that IMO really don't reflect what I'm seeing...
What I'm seeing is a lot of internal discussions, a lot of people challenging execs, a lot of people changing their profile pictures, etc.
Politics are always going to be a dividing subject, and I find it quite remarkable that we are all able to debate about these topics, and are even encouraged to do so.
Sure, not everyone agree with some of the decisions the company is taking, but you gotta respect the transparency and the willingness to explain and discuss these decisions.
I don't think many companies would allow people to do this, and they would also probably get rid of people sharing too much.
He probably did more than that in which he was doing a lot more to show his displeasure, not that I’m disagreeing but you don’t just raise your hand and they fire you
>Dail said the tweet that prompted his firing, which he sent the day after that walkout, scolded a fellow engineer for declining to add a statement of support to developer documents he was publishing.
>“Intentionally not making a statement is already political,” Dail wrote in the tweet.
Yeah good riddance, imagine FORCING someone to say _anything_. And you twitter clowns are the good guys? Hardly.
I have no problem with this. If Facebook is a private company that could use its monopoly power to censor people and ban them arbitrarily, certainly it is a private company with the power to end relationships with employees who disrespect and harass their colleagues.
It's a quote said in 1967 by Miami police Chief Walter Headley who was talking about how he will respond to protests against the police. For context, he also said he was against "young hoodlums, from 15 to 21, who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign. ... We don't mind being accused of police brutality"
The Chief got the phrase from the guy who used firehoses and dogs against children during the Birmingham, AL protests.
That sounds like the "Hitler liked dogs" argument. Just because that police chief sounds like a bad person from the quote doesn't mean that everything he said was bad. In fact, I think many Americans would be fine with the use of violent force to stop violent criminals
> That sounds like the "Hitler liked dogs" argument. Just because that police chief sounds like a bad person from the quote doesn't mean that everything he said was bad
This sounds like the “straw man” argument. Just because I made a specific point about a specific utterance does not mean that I was claiming that literally every single thing he said was intrinsically racist. In fact, I think many Americans would be fine with the idea that this was a massive stretch of what I just said.
If you read "young hoodlums" and think of certain race maybe it's your own bias shining through. Where I grew up on Ohio the kids I considered "young hoodlums" didn't happen to be any specific race
Thank you for explaining that you, who grew up 1,700 miles away, decades later, and not a police chief with the literal legal ability to kill black people with impunity, did not have the exact same thought process as this particular person. That was very helpful and your insight contributed enormously to clarifying the point.
No, no, I’m sure you have a valid point here. In addition, the people that talk about the (((globalists))) could really be talking about absolutely ANY ethnic group at all and making inferences based on the speaker’s past language and behavior and overt, documented, racism would be entirely silly.
If Trump didn't know, I suspect that he had adopted the phrase from someone in his circle who does know - can imagine him thinking 'sounds like a catchy way of threatening consequences; I'm going to bust that out next chance I get.'
When someone leads a nation of several hundred million people, it is expected that their public communication be thoroughly vetted. This is even true at a medium to large corporation for an executive.
This is an expectation. I don’t actually believe Trump has anyone filtering his speech and I don’t think he’s educated enough to understand the phrase he said, but with that said, yes, we should expect our leaders to be informed on the nature of the words they say especially in the context of a crisis or emergency.
I was the one who asked the question and I've lived in the US all my life. I had never heard the phrase or knew that Trump said it until this conversation just now.
I'm not sure why your default position is that conservatism is anti-minority. It just seems intellectually lazy. Thiel is a pretty hardcore libertarian, so it makes sense that he looks at the world through a lens of personal responsibility, as opposed to group tribalism. It's merely a question of first principles.
If you disagree, that's fine (and plenty of people do), but accusing him of being racist (or racist-adjacent) is silly. I expect a tad more insight out of HN comments.
See #7 in my updated comment. For a hardcore libertarian he sure loves government contracts.
Also I'm not accusing him of being a racist, just trying to point out that he's a major figure in the alt right circus and that it might have something to do with how Facebook deals with Trump.
It's just an opinion. Like literally _everything_ in life, multiculturalism has pros and cons that must be studied and analysed for us to understand the effects.
FWIW I've not read the book, but the existence of such a book isn't necessarily racist.
Has to be a really strongly held opinion to write a book about it. He's probably not racist though, just like Rabois wasn't a homophobe when he was shouting anti gay slurs [1]. I interpret it as a typical conservative distraction, same thing that Tucker Carlson pulls every night on fox news: "protecting western values", "defending freedom of speech", "woke liberals", "antifa", "seattle taken over by radical leftist terrorists", etc.
He's a brilliant entrepreneur, an opportunist funding divisive politics to build and protect his wealth.
I didn't intend to label him a racist but to point out that one of their most prominent board members is a big player in right wing politics and has clearly used the platform to help elect the president, which might be the reason why Facebook has not banned political advertising and is allowing the president to violate their terms of service. (I personally don't believe that they should censor him)
"The response was private so he shared publicly because it's relevant info for the community."
Made me feel very positive to see this comment in the replies, thank you! It was very difficult to focus the discussion on Twitter to why the engineer would feel sharing publicly was necessary in the first place, despite potentially losing their job.
It's called compelled speech, which the first amendment says is illegal. (Yes yes, the first amendment is entirely about the government and speech, but it's somewhat of an American belief to then try to apply first amendment protections across our society, even if we're not legally bound by it.)
I have a strong feeling that if the employee was instead protesting Facebook's spying on people he'd be lauded as a hero on here. Or if he posted a particularly long manifesto against diversity policies.
Regardless I can understand why he was fired, since being particularly inflammatory like that will probably lead you to losing your job anywhere. Though that also depends on how high in the food chain you are.
Twitter de-emphasized one because it violated their policy by advocating violence, and added a fact check to another that was blatantly and verifiably false. Neither was removed completely. Zuckerberg specifically said Facebook would do nothing of the sort.
CA Labor Code section 1102 seems to prohibit firing employees for political activity:
"No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity."
Perhaps publicly criticizing the company you work for does not qualify as a political activity? But expressing support for or opposition to a candidate, law, or public policy presumably would. A company would presumably not be able to fire you for attending or expressing support for a protest or political rally.
You can attend a rally. You can’t harass and incite harassment against a coworker for not attending. The harassed coworker is the one whose political rights needed to be protected here.
Completely disagree, you’re spinning a narrative by leaving out context, and the original tweeter labeled it as political too.. so they disagree as well.
So here's a nuanced view I'm sure will get downvoted into the ground: both FB and the employee were right, but along different dimensions, and this outcome was not only inevitable, but desirable.
The employee, as a white male in tech, is absolutely morally right to use his privilege to call out other powerful white males for their silence.
And make no mistake, silence is complicity. Many smart philosophers have written about this, see MLK Jr. or Maya Angelou for more.
This is the core of being an ally. Use your privilege to make the hard ask from your peers that a less privileged person, who is decidedly not a peer, cannot.
FB, on the other hand, is also right in a different sense, to maintain internal expectations that singling out colleagues with your political opinion in public is ineffective at best and toxic harassment at worst. FB are signalling to the rest of their employees what behavior they will not tolerate.
In the end, this employee leveraged awareness several orders of magnitude more than had he not been fired (and will likely easily find a new job) and FB protected whatever they believe their culture to be (and whatever other HR lawsuits they believed themselves to be at risk for).
I want to push against this silence is complicity mindset.
Looking at your profile, I can point out countless atrocities that you don't explicitly denounce. Do I see you upset about how Israel has amped up its program of settler colonialism in Palestine in the past few weeks? How the PRC is running literal concentration camps in Xinjiang? Or, moving along to the USA, how men have extraordinarily high suicide rates? Or how the elderly are being sacrificed at the altar of economic growth in the midst of COVID-19? Or, thinking long term, the tens of millions of people who will die because of climate change?
I don't. And, for what it's worth, I wouldn't be surprised if you have "correct" points of view on all of those. But you're still being complicit in deprioritizing those things and prioritizing your own set of causes, at the expense of human lives. And if you're indeed complicit in a conspiracy of silence on them, you've got blood on your hands.
Brandon Dail was demanding someone add some kind of explicit support for BLM to a Github repo. Where does that stop? I can think of hundreds of very worthy causes that need more publicizing. Is what we ultimately need some long list of evils that every open source project needs to denounce before right-thinking people can choose to use them? And, if you choose to use e.g. Linux, can I denounce you for choosing to use software that is complicit in a conspiracy to terminate black men's lives?
People can prioritize and take action on different causes in whatever way they want to. It's fine to ask individuals to reprioritize, but you're not entitled to anything. And, tactically speaking, ever-increasing stridency of tone and denunciation of imagined enemies is not an effective way to gather support for a cause.
What threshold must you cross (in terms of platform size) for silence to equal complicity? Since it apparently doesn't apply to you, but it does apply to a GitHub repo.
Once you've made up your imaginary platform size threshold, which movements must people not be silent on, lest they find themselves complicit through silence? Is it ALL political movements? Those READMEs are gonna get pretty long if so. Is it only the "most important political issue at the moment" that needs to be voiced? Who decides what the most pressing issue is? Is there some sort of vote going on that I don't know about? When is it OK to start being silent again? If he puts up a BLM message in his repo and then takes it down the next day, is that OK? Or does he need to keep it in there forever (because presumably Black Lives always Matter, so he should keep it in there indefinitely, right?)
There are way, way too many things going on for silence to mean complicity.
Take any other humanitarian crisis, and ask yourself if anyone silent must be complicit. Think about it for a second. It's just not true. If someone in Germany were to not speak out against the Nazis rounding up Jews, but at the same time was hiding Jews in their basement, would that person be "complicit" in the Nazis crimes?
If you only donated $50 to cancer research whereas your coworkers donated $200, would that give me the right to tweet that out to everyone? It's okay if I attempt to coerce you thru public shaming, right? Bullying is okay if it's for a good cause?
As for Dail's victim, you don't know whether he has or hasn't helped in his own way. This Dail guy wanted to coerce a coworker to do something that RISKS HIM GETTING FIRED. He said no to Dail; this doesn't mean he hadn't or wasn't willing to help.
I don't like FB and I hate Zuck's stance, but no company would allow someone like Dail to continue bullying coworkers and creating a hostile work environment. I wouldn't be surprised if he already had a list of prior complaints. HR doesn't usually fire people based on a first-time offense.
If you are ever in charge of fundraiser or are looking for people to join a worthwhile cause that you support, try to understand that you'll gain more allies if you're not shitting on & shaming people to do what you want.
This is needlessly reductive and unhelpful. One can work to end racism and police brutality without supporting groups like BLM and/or making public declarations about the issues.
This is misleading as well. They aren’t autoblocking word “unionize” in their Facebook Workplace product. They give customers (employers who purchase this product) the ability to block any arbitrary word they want. And as an example, they brought up word “unionize”.
WTF, Facebook is not a platform for "unlimited freedom of speech". It has very strong moderation, and if you pay an inkling of attention to conservative or LGBT groups, too much. It's because neither of these groups are considered "advertiser friendly".
He shouldn’t have been fired I think, but he also shouldn’t be a tattle-tale against his co-workers. We need solidarity with our co-workers + an end to at-will employment.
Relatedly (but not specific to this situation), if we had stronger employment guarantees people probably wouldn’t taddle to try to get people fired as much. Win-win-win all around.
In other words, he publicly harassed a colleague who (for what could be any number of perfectly valid reasons) preferred not to publicly state their beliefs. That would seem to me to be an eminently reasonable reason to fire someone. If you go around publicly harassing your colleagues to publicly state their political opinions, you deserve to be fired.