
Facebook Employees Are Reportedly Deleting Controversial Internal Messages - JumpCrisscross
http://fortune.com/2018/03/31/facebook-employees-are-reportedly-deleting-controversial-internal-messages/
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radicaldreamer
It's always amusing to me how people in tech want to have very private lives
where they control their public image very carefully while building tools and
networks which take away that ability from others.

From the Facebook engineers doing this while working on facial recognition to
Peter Thiel going after Gawker while funding Palantir, this seems like a near
universal double standard in tech today.

~~~
austincheney
I really wish the media would distinctly separate media companies from
technology companies. Facebook is not a technology company. They are a media
company. They make money from eyeballs on advertising no differently than CNN
or FoxNews. Google claims to be a diverse technology company but they make
almost all their money, despite their various products and investments, from
data micro auctions that populate paid listings and advertising on their
search engine. Amazon is a general retail company.

In this vain almost every company in business is a technology company. Almost
every company has software developers and writes software products. I work at
a bank as a software developer to further the business of the bank. Wisely, my
employer clearly claims to be a bank and not a technology company.

Examples of technology companies are companies that sell technology as their
end product like NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Apple, Micron, and so forth.

~~~
origami777
Why do you think they should be classified as a media company? Is it to apply
the relevant regulations?

In my eyes, Facebook is a company of software and hardware engineers. They
produce software as a service. That sure sounds like a tech company.

If regulations are what you're after, new ones should be created for their
specific business.

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bogomipz
>"They produce software as a service."

No Salesforce, Box, Slack, Zendesk - these are examples of SaaS companies.
Customer pay for those services, the service is the product being sold. With
FB the user is the product being sold.

~~~
origami777
Who is the "user" product being sold to? A business, right? And how do they
buy the product? Thru a web browser, right? How is that not SAAS?

~~~
bogomipz
>"Who is the "user" product being sold to? A business, right?"

Yes and you just illustrated my point. Advertisers aren't buying software from
FB they're buying access to FB users.

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danso
When FB employees said that these freewheeling discussion boards were a core
part of Facebook’s organizational focus, I could believe it. But now that
they’ve faced the reality that _everyone else_ lives with — that there’s is no
such thing as a permanent perfect safe space — these discussion boards are now
useless?

Leaks, when they happen, are only harmful to the employees if FB doesn’t
pledge to stand behind employees. Zuck didn’t fire Boz, so why should other FB
employees fear if FB was so committed to free expression as a core principle?

A company’s values aren’t proven when they exist in a safe space. It’s only
when values operate in the real world — withstanding public scrutiny and even
outrage — that we can know the company’s principles.

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dahdum
The public and the media are out for blood, and will gleefully ignore the
context of discussions in order to publicly hang someone on a single quote.

Under that threat, real discussion and debate is not possible, so I think it’s
wise of employees to censor themselves.

~~~
seattle_spring
This captures my feelings exactly. Even on this forum where I used to feel
people would look at scenarios through a neutral lens, I see the dumbest, most
outrageous conspiracy theories being upvoted to the top purely because they
paint FB in a negative light. If I worked at FB I would definitely be keeping
a low profile, lest some tinfoil hat nutjob got a hold of my comments, snipped
a few words, and presented them in a negative light to the public completely
out of context.

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tomp
> "someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools"

I can't believe how terribly the media is spinning this. _Obviously_ it's not
Facebook's fault or responsibility if that happens. I mean, should we just
shut down the internet and have spies listen to every phone conversation and
reading every (paper) letter sent, just so that we can be _sure_ that there
won't be any criminals using any communication tools? Live in a totalitarian
distopia? Thanks, I'll take my dose of "terrorism" in exchange for freedom
from tyranny.

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ec109685
No, the point was that there was a “damn the consequences” attitude on the
growth team because of some higher calling that more connections equals more
revenue equals the ability to build great products.

For goodness sake, at one point they partnered with media companies to
automatically share every article you read with your friends. Absurd.

~~~
candiodari
Yeah sure, it wasn't just a soundbyte, explicitly picked because completely
devoid of context it would offend everyone. There's something to hate for
everyone in that line. Privacy advocates hate it, leftists hate it, rightists
hate it, all for different reasons that mostly wouldn't apply to the post as a
whole. Well, except the privacy argument.

The actual message of that post SHOULD be expressed as "we believe the
advantages of having people interacting on social fora outweigh the problems"
...

a) is obviously true

b) is very, very different from the statement that was picked and spread

And, I might add, we are switching into a political climate where people can
no longer safely express themselves for fear of the consequences of offending
the "majority" opinion. (between quotes because ... well because Trump got
elected. Even if that view is really majority it isn't majority by much,
obviously)

What baffles me is that progressives actually seem to think that doing these
attacks will further their cause. It is blindingly obvious that all these
progressive efforts destroy what we stand for:

fake news, and making online fora censor themselves

anti-racism and especially the constant doxxing (and worse) instead of
protecting and engaging people with these racist opinions (yes, protecting.
really)

and the repression of economic reality. The news about it, the facts ...

I don't understand how any of these are progressive. And yet, the democratic
party is at the core of all these efforts, and many progressives I know
participate in them. The net effect of them is almost fascist.

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chatmasta
But are they really being deleted?

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greggarious
They probably just _archived_ them. To delete you need to click on the
hamburger, click on the ellipsis in the drop down, enter your password,
receive a one time code via text message, scan a QR code spray and stare up
directly into the CCTV camera for 10 seconds for retinal confirmation.

~~~
bigiain
Then they go into "disabled" mode, and if you use the internet within the next
90 days they are reinstated. "For your convenience."

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falcolas
Is it just me, or could this (deleting internal messages) get them in serious
trouble if lawsuits come as a result of the latest troubles?

Or are they just "deleting" them like they do everything else?

~~~
concrete-faucet
Serious trouble like jail, hundreds of thousands in fines against you
personally, being labeled a rogue employee and treated as the whipping boy,
paying for your own defense out of your own pocket?

Yes, it might be a bit serious. When the first lawsuit was filed, a lot of
stuff went under legal hold. Ask the legal department if it is ok to delete.
If they say yes, it's their neck on the line, not yours. CYA CYA CYA.

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Involute
Given the general attitude toward Edward Snowden in the Valley, I can’t help
thinking that a lot of these FBers who are so upset that their dirty laundry
is being publicly aired were perfectly fine with Snowden doing the same with
state secrets.

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NotSammyHagar
I can't load the fortune page in chrome, I get too many redirects. I get the
same thing in anon mode. I see its still listed on the fortune site. It's got
some kind of redirect loop in it, I just tried in firefox.

~~~
QuantumYeti
I had the same problem in chrome. Clearing cookies fixed it :/

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akeck
They should be careful not to obstruct justice. ;-)

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candiodari
This is sad. It used to be the case at the university that you could say
things with your real name, especially on internal forums. That was useful.
This really helped with making carefully thought out judgements and getting
the feel of what a bigger community thought on a certain subject.

That's over and done with, and ended with a similar event. People deleting
their internal posts, or even demanding useful internal fora being taken down
entirely. Problem is that there are a number of controversial/racist ... but
fact ... well, facts (and of course some of these fora contained cartoons from
the 80s that are ... more than a little bit sexist, for example. In some cases
posted by what are now important professors or administrators). And you simply
cannot risk "being seen" saying them. Especially not have a published source
for something like that with your name prominently next to it.

Now we're supposed to point out papers that point out the problematic facts
and expect people to read them (and then finding that you can't say anything
about them). We have a few anonymous forums, and a few private forums. Even
there, you have the problem that some people might use these statements
against you outside of these forums, but at least it can't be some random
student, or worse an outside journalist (that's worse because firstly outside
journalists, frankly, almost always don't know what they're talking about, and
their works are widely read and can even affect the university as a whole). We
actually dedicate 2-3 lessons to warning students about racial sensitivities,
to push them to check their work and make sure it doesn't point out racial, or
god forbid, cultural, differences.

But the sometimes violent opposition to facts are the truly bad parts. Facts
that don't fit (this year's flavor of) the social justice narrative can
destroy careers. In some cases literally statements from particularly "caring"
students made a few years back come back to bite them now (one instance was a
(long) comment made a few years back about "white trash" middle Americans
being victims of capitalism. Now these people are perceived to have elected
trump ... they're still poor and need help, but now they're evil)

Hell, someone got reprimanded for saying people with black skin really are
more difficult to see at night. He meant, of course, in the context of getting
a neural net to do it automatically (and let's be fair here: they are).

And we have a problem: there are massive differences in performance between
white and black students, and we both must ... and can't ... discuss that.
That difference, especially that one is not going away no matter what we do,
and everyone in that meeting knows that everyone is just going to blame us
(and we're already letting some people cheat more than a bit). Privately I've
checked, assuming the name points to the religion, you can classify people
into their religions based on their grades 96% correctly. So there's big
differences in academic achievement "based on religion" (I would say attitudes
finding their origin in religions influence academic outcomes more than a
little bit).

Let me just say it here: different races ... are different. Different cultures
... are different. Unfortunately not just in skin color.

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schizoidboy
There's a pretty good movie called The Circle from 2017 with Tom Hanks and
Emma Watson that stylized really well what's happening now with FB. (The
funniest part was Doga!)

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leetcrew
the movie has a 16% on rotten tomatoes. is it really worth watching or do you
just find the specific topic interesting?

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schizoidboy
I thought it was quite good. It shows a Facebook-like company that goes to the
extreme of getting people to make their lives completely public, and I don't
want to give it away, but then shows the dangers of that.

