I always wonder, when it's so clear some corporate decision will cause social harm, what the story the perpetrators tell themselves is to avoid feeling guilt or responsibility.
Nobody believes themselves to be the bad guy, but many people frequently make decisions that cause harm.
Pretty sure many of Meta's tech workers are furious about these actions, as they were in the previous story where 404media published a number of employee comments:
I mean, you've got to imagine that Facebook tends to drive people who would be worried about such things away; if you had any sense of responsibility and could get another job, why would you stay? It's not like this is the first problem Facebook has had...
The Corporate religion demands unwavering profit orientation. "Ethics" is just barely maintained right above the limits of market research. All for the betterment of man, amirite?
Welcome to the world of antisocial personality disorders. The rationale goes:
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
It's called the "narcissist's prayer", it's what narcissists and sociopaths tell themselves to absolve themselves of accountability. Whatever the situation, they have an excuse as to how it's not their fault. It's like the stages of grief but for people trying to avoid consequences or guilt for their actions.
Aside from prizing their salary more than the guilt, if it was "so clear" it wouldn't be a controversial issue. For some in Meta they could very well think that the opposite caused social harm, either in absolute terms ("abortion is a sin/murder") or in relative terms ("has its uses, but we go too far and make it too easy"). Why the assumption those working in tech would be liberal? Thiel isn't.
To complete sister comments: people who go work for Meta already have their priorities in place or won't have these kind of conundrums.
A few elite people are poached, some are acquihired, but most applied to get the job. I believe if you can make it to Meta you can make it to equivalent mega companies, it's a choice.
These people only think in terms of money. Their bank accounts will tell them if it was the right decision or not.
Someone like Zuck actively isolates themselves: from buying huge tracts of land to literally isolate themselves, building underground shelters, hiring security to keep riff-raff away, etc. They have no concept of society. They just don't see themselves living in the same world as we do.
You have the point of view that having publicly available queer content and abortion information is a good thing, something I generally agree with.
But not everyone think that way, some think that by limiting access to abortion information, they are actually saving (unborn) lives. Some people think that "sex positive" movements are morally questionable and help spread infection. For them, they are the good guys and they think that Meta is finally doing the right thing.
These are divisive political subjects and political parties with these ideas get elected for a reason. In a democracy, parties will not promote ideas that no one agree with, they need the votes, so if they are promoting them, it means that for a large part of the population, it is the right thing to do. HN is a bubble with mostly liberal ideas, we have to understand it for what it is.
That's in addition to the idea that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". But it applies more to activities that are almost universally recognized as bad rather than partisan ideas, things like scamming.
I'm not sure I agree with this, though I suppose it depends on what one defines as "liberal."
>In a democracy, parties will not promote ideas that no one agree with, they need the votes, so if they are promoting them, it means that for a large part of the population, it is the right thing to do.
I would say instead that it means that for a large part of the voting population, the ideas are not objectionable enough for them to vote differently or abstain. People are already voting in spite of the disconnect between the policies they support and the policies that actually get implemented [0]
that's a pretty heavily-worked little phrase. What is "non-explicit" nudity? That sounds to me like starting at the violation and then working backward to ensure that the people they want to be violators turn out to be violators.
I know it's against HN rules to ask if people have read the article, but you clearly didn't read the article.
The "non-sexual nudity" example is at the bottom of the article. It's a stylized cartoon drawing of a nude man and woman with arms around each others' waists viewed from the back as they walk along a path. There is a heart strategically placed around waist level so you can't even see their whole butts.
It's about the tamest artistic depiction of nudity you can imagine, certainly something that is totally fine anywhere else on Facebook. Very clear that this is a bullshit excuse being used by Meta.
The memory of Zuckerberg blabbering about Facebook positive social impact and mission of "Making the world more open and connected" triggers strong cognitive dissonance when reading this article.
Same as when remembering the "Don't be evil" moto from Google.
I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this. What kind of moral shield can we claim from this mess ? I'm afraid it's actually very little
It's interesting how they're so concerned with censorship now. Weren't they the ones who were all up in arms about censoring everyone with right-wing views? But now that the script has flipped, suddenly it's a problem. It's not like we didn't try to warn them that if they force open the floodgates of censorship, then it can happen to them too. Maybe, just maybe, we should all stop trying to control what other people think and say. Mind your fucking business and leave other people alone. I hope this gets resolved. I don't believe that anyone should be censored, whether they agree with my views and beliefs or not.
I know it's a hot take, but I strongly believe that some things are good, and some things are bad. I don't think it's necessary to pick either "all things are good" or "all things are bad".
Like, killing is bad. But if I'm alive in WW2 times and I see Nazi soldiers shooting Jewish protestors on the street, I'm going to be horrified, while if I see Jewish protestors shooting Nazi soldiers on the street, I'm going to be significantly less horrified. One could even argue the latter is a good thing.
Repro Uncensored, an NGO tracking digital censorship against movements focused on gender, health and justice, said that it had tracked 210 incidents of account removals and severe restrictions affecting these groups this year, compared with 81 last year.
Meta denied an escalating trend of censorship. “Every organisation and individual on our platforms is subject to the same set of rules, and any claims of enforcement based on group affiliation or advocacy are baseless,” it said in a statement, adding that its policies on abortion-related content had not changed.
Has The Guardian confirmed the facts either way? Or are they just reporting what people say without digging deeper?
I think reporting ought to try to get to some level of truth through rigor.
Wow. I'm very involved in LGBTQ, sex positive and poly communities and locally and I have to say I hadn't noticed this yet. For IM we mainly use telegram, not WhatsApp, but Instagram is used the most as a social network, by far. "What's your Insta" is a standard line when you meet someone at a party. But everything is small scale and not big enough to be on the global radar.
It does mean that people will see more and more bans now when they are reported by haters. I guess it's time for a new common social media network. But which? It'll be hard to get traction for fediverse networks in such a diverse and non technical community.
I don't really understand why though. I understand they're against LGBTQ for religious reasons or something but why try to ban it? They can just like... not follow the content they don't like? The algorithm does the rest. And the content on insta is already very mild. No nudity etc.
I hate political posts on a tech news site, especially ycombinator.
These problems will never be solved and only cause agitation on both sides.
Closing the ycombinator tab for the day.
This once again brings up the point that while Meta and other "single company" social networks can easily exclude you, you can't get excluded on Nostr.
It's designed in a way that that's not even a thing. Anyone can create account locally on their computer or mobile phone (even completely offline) and that's it.
If you save & store your "notes" or "posts", you can always re-broadcast them later to different "relay" servers - and this is what your app can do for you anyway.
We have Trump blabbering about EU censorship, but here's the US oligarch's social network doing it at his orders.
The "bastion of free speech" is exporting its censorship to other countries... If I'm an EU lawmaker, I'd honestly use this to just ban Zuckerberg's entire social media sites and get it over with
Protip: don't use Facebook. Meta doesn't control the internet. Post whatever you like. I'm sick of people kowtowing to these platforms; people are increasingly censoring themselves, afraid to even post a picture with a word like "kill", "murder", "suicide", etc. (regardless of context) without obscuring the offending word in some way.
As long as you support social media companies censoring people you don't like, you're in a weaker position arguing against their censorship of people you do like. There should be a strong social objection to all such censorship, but I don't know how we get there from here. All the justifications for censorship during Covid were corrosive, "The 1st amendment only protects you from _government_ censorship, etc."
At this point, nobody trusts the other side to "play fair" and reciprocate, which makes standing on principle feel like a loss. If all sides stood up just a little bit for the principle of "I don't agree with that person, but I defend his right to voice himself", we'd all be better off.
Looking at all this as an outsider, I'm a bit baffled at the responses. Basically, it seems to me that the vast majority of Americans want this.
And by "this" I mean that they want organizations to proactively make changes that fit with the policies of whoever is in power, even if there's no actual laws that make them do this. When Democrats ran the place, big tech was going out of their way to out-woke one another, with product announcement videos somehow starting with land acknowledgements and the likes, and now the same companies are going out of their way to out-dumb one another and this is just one of many examples.
I mean, America is a place with only two sides, and both sides are very on board with having their particular preferences and ideas enforced informally without any sort of legal framework. I think it would be useful for a lot more of the outrage to be directed at that fact.
Just.. be against all of this! This shit where legally you can do whatever the fuck you want but actually in reality you're going to get in serious trouble if you don't toe the party line, and oh by the way the party line switches every 4 years... that's no way to run a business! It's banana republic stuff.
I mean I agree that there's a difference in scale, in that censoring access to abortion advice is actively harmful and most things people felt they had to do under Biden (eg land acknowledgements, DEI trainings etc) are just cringe. But come on, don't politicize everything! It will only come to bite you back in the arse, as this episode illustrates beautifully.
50 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 50.8 ms ] threadNobody believes themselves to be the bad guy, but many people frequently make decisions that cause harm.
One person makes a “decision making framework” but doesn’t make any individual decision themselves.
Then another person makes the individual decision, but based on the decision making framework, so they feel no personal responsibility for the choice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178 ("[flagged] Total Chaos at Meta: Employees Protest Zuckerberg's Anti LGBTQ Changes (404media.co)")
https://www.404media.co/its-total-chaos-internally-at-meta-r... ( https://archive.is/R1c7S )
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
It's called the "narcissist's prayer", it's what narcissists and sociopaths tell themselves to absolve themselves of accountability. Whatever the situation, they have an excuse as to how it's not their fault. It's like the stages of grief but for people trying to avoid consequences or guilt for their actions.
I forget the exact statistic, but CEOs are disproportionately sociopaths (compared to the whole population).
So, no story required because there's no guilt felt.
A few elite people are poached, some are acquihired, but most applied to get the job. I believe if you can make it to Meta you can make it to equivalent mega companies, it's a choice.
Someone like Zuck actively isolates themselves: from buying huge tracts of land to literally isolate themselves, building underground shelters, hiring security to keep riff-raff away, etc. They have no concept of society. They just don't see themselves living in the same world as we do.
But not everyone think that way, some think that by limiting access to abortion information, they are actually saving (unborn) lives. Some people think that "sex positive" movements are morally questionable and help spread infection. For them, they are the good guys and they think that Meta is finally doing the right thing.
These are divisive political subjects and political parties with these ideas get elected for a reason. In a democracy, parties will not promote ideas that no one agree with, they need the votes, so if they are promoting them, it means that for a large part of the population, it is the right thing to do. HN is a bubble with mostly liberal ideas, we have to understand it for what it is.
That's in addition to the idea that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". But it applies more to activities that are almost universally recognized as bad rather than partisan ideas, things like scamming.
I'm not sure I agree with this, though I suppose it depends on what one defines as "liberal."
>In a democracy, parties will not promote ideas that no one agree with, they need the votes, so if they are promoting them, it means that for a large part of the population, it is the right thing to do.
I would say instead that it means that for a large part of the voting population, the ideas are not objectionable enough for them to vote differently or abstain. People are already voting in spite of the disconnect between the policies they support and the policies that actually get implemented [0]
[0] https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
However the very first line reveals what the actual reason probably was: "posts showing non-explicit nudity triggering warnings"
that's a pretty heavily-worked little phrase. What is "non-explicit" nudity? That sounds to me like starting at the violation and then working backward to ensure that the people they want to be violators turn out to be violators.
I know it's against HN rules to ask if people have read the article, but you clearly didn't read the article.
The "non-sexual nudity" example is at the bottom of the article. It's a stylized cartoon drawing of a nude man and woman with arms around each others' waists viewed from the back as they walk along a path. There is a heart strategically placed around waist level so you can't even see their whole butts.
It's about the tamest artistic depiction of nudity you can imagine, certainly something that is totally fine anywhere else on Facebook. Very clear that this is a bullshit excuse being used by Meta.
Same as when remembering the "Don't be evil" moto from Google.
I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this. What kind of moral shield can we claim from this mess ? I'm afraid it's actually very little
Like, killing is bad. But if I'm alive in WW2 times and I see Nazi soldiers shooting Jewish protestors on the street, I'm going to be horrified, while if I see Jewish protestors shooting Nazi soldiers on the street, I'm going to be significantly less horrified. One could even argue the latter is a good thing.
I don't know who's behind this, but they're delusional.
Meta denied an escalating trend of censorship. “Every organisation and individual on our platforms is subject to the same set of rules, and any claims of enforcement based on group affiliation or advocacy are baseless,” it said in a statement, adding that its policies on abortion-related content had not changed.
Has The Guardian confirmed the facts either way? Or are they just reporting what people say without digging deeper?
I think reporting ought to try to get to some level of truth through rigor.
It does mean that people will see more and more bans now when they are reported by haters. I guess it's time for a new common social media network. But which? It'll be hard to get traction for fediverse networks in such a diverse and non technical community.
I don't really understand why though. I understand they're against LGBTQ for religious reasons or something but why try to ban it? They can just like... not follow the content they don't like? The algorithm does the rest. And the content on insta is already very mild. No nudity etc.
It's designed in a way that that's not even a thing. Anyone can create account locally on their computer or mobile phone (even completely offline) and that's it. If you save & store your "notes" or "posts", you can always re-broadcast them later to different "relay" servers - and this is what your app can do for you anyway.
The "bastion of free speech" is exporting its censorship to other countries... If I'm an EU lawmaker, I'd honestly use this to just ban Zuckerberg's entire social media sites and get it over with
At this point, nobody trusts the other side to "play fair" and reciprocate, which makes standing on principle feel like a loss. If all sides stood up just a little bit for the principle of "I don't agree with that person, but I defend his right to voice himself", we'd all be better off.
And by "this" I mean that they want organizations to proactively make changes that fit with the policies of whoever is in power, even if there's no actual laws that make them do this. When Democrats ran the place, big tech was going out of their way to out-woke one another, with product announcement videos somehow starting with land acknowledgements and the likes, and now the same companies are going out of their way to out-dumb one another and this is just one of many examples.
I mean, America is a place with only two sides, and both sides are very on board with having their particular preferences and ideas enforced informally without any sort of legal framework. I think it would be useful for a lot more of the outrage to be directed at that fact.
Just.. be against all of this! This shit where legally you can do whatever the fuck you want but actually in reality you're going to get in serious trouble if you don't toe the party line, and oh by the way the party line switches every 4 years... that's no way to run a business! It's banana republic stuff.
I mean I agree that there's a difference in scale, in that censoring access to abortion advice is actively harmful and most things people felt they had to do under Biden (eg land acknowledgements, DEI trainings etc) are just cringe. But come on, don't politicize everything! It will only come to bite you back in the arse, as this episode illustrates beautifully.
- Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences
- Are you saying Facebook should be forced to platform speech it doesn't like?
- Xkcd "showing you the door"
Did I miss any? Heavy pendulums hurt to be struck by.