
Open Letter to Facebook Employees - anonymousvc
Dear Facebook employees,<p>I am writing not in my capacity as a shareholder, but as a concerned citizen.<p>You have worked tirelessly to build a world-changing platform that enables almost 1.8 billion people to connect and share what matters to them.  What you have accomplished is unprecedented in the history of the world.<p>The thing is, communications technologies don&#x27;t just passively reflect what already exists in society.  They shape society.  From the printing press to the earliest peer-reviewed scientific journals of the Royal Society, from the wireless to radio to television, each new communications technology has evolved with it social institutions that govern how people communicate on that platform.  This is not about politics -- Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative.  It is about the rules of debate, whether a communications technology facilitates or destroys a culture where argument is grounded in evidence, reason, and respect.<p>You are not just building a communications platform.  You are building the future.<p>And right now, the future you are building has a lot of swastikas in it.  It&#x27;s a future where bald-faced lies get more shares than evidence-based argument.  It&#x27;s a future where propaganda trumps reason.<p>Is that the future you want for your children?<p>The choice is really yours.  No one can stop you from building a communications platform that foregrounds civility, rational evidence-based argument, and tolerance.  If you build it, that platform will support a society where the best ideas from the right and from the left, from all races and from all creeds, are shared and discussed and respectfully debated.  A society where the best ideas are successful, not the best propaganda.  It&#x27;s up to you.<p>Move fast.  Break things.  Before it is too late.
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italian_donald
"Is that the future you want for your children?

I would like a future that protects everyone's speech, not just a specific
political group. I want my children to be able to express their opinions,
without the fear of physical attacks.

Many conservative bloggers have been banned from Facebook, not for harassment
or hate speech, but for merely stating an opinion that does not agree with the
current narrative.

I've seen some of the most abusive and vile comments after the election not
about minorities, but about Trump supporters. When will Facebook start banning
these people for hate speech? Will it ever happen?

I thought after the election that we really could start fixing our divided
nation, but the truth is now here: nobody really wants to fix the divide, they
want the other side buried and silenced.

"It's a future where bald-faced lies get more shares than evidence-based
argument. It's a future where propaganda trumps reason."

This has been happening since Twitter started. I stopped looking at all social
media because of this.

Wikileaks and the hacked DNC emails showed us that the mainstream media
regularly used its power to spread anti-trump propaganda and nearly destroyed
him like they did Bernie Sanders.

~~~
lsiebert
What you see is what your friends show you. Facebook is an echo chamber in an
increasingly polarized society.

From what I can tell, facebook is occasionally awful to everyone, about
equally. It takes down posts it shouldn't, because it's not trained ethics
experts deciding, it's low paid contractors/workers trying to follow
guidelines for removing content and banning people in an messy world.

It's just that people only hear about their friends issues with the site,
because their friends are like them in outlook, and because the algorithms
behind facebook that surface posts tend to prefer posts that are like other
posts you clicked on.

Now, it's my understanding that a fair bit of fake news was created by people
looking for ad word revenue on both sides. I think FB deserves critique for
allowing false news stories to spread, and it should be non partisan, because
regardless of who won the election, we can all agree that false stories about
the candidates didn't benefit anyone except the people getting that ad
revenue, and certainly not the voting public.

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ztratar
Completely agree. Not sure why you're anon.

