
Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague - TangerineDream
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-protests-firing/facebook-fires-employee-who-protested-its-inaction-on-trump-tweets-idUSKBN23J35Y
======
nsainsbury
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.

~~~
mgleitub
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].

[0]
[https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1271522288752455680](https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1271522288752455680)

[1]
[https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1271531477209976832](https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1271531477209976832)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057](https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Havel's_greengrocer)

~~~
Grimm1
Politics should be kept out of the workplace.

~~~
purple_ferret
Normally sure, but when politicians are using your platform (paying you) to
further their own narratives, it's fair game.

~~~
formercoder
That depends on if you are a platform or a publisher.

~~~
purple_ferret
"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.

~~~
foobarian
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.

------
renaudg
“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.”

\- Barack Obama

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-
ca...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-cancel-
culture.html)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM)

~~~
pryce
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.

~~~
notSupplied
"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!

~~~
pryce
> "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.

------
yowlingcat
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.

~~~
jedimastert
> borderline harassment

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.

~~~
yowlingcat
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.

~~~
notSupplied
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.

~~~
jedimastert
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.

------
_b3dj
> “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

[0] [https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-
dict...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-
of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15)

~~~
guerrilla
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.

~~~
chipperyman573
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.

~~~
guerrilla
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.

~~~
chipperyman573
You completly ignored everything that I said

~~~
guerrilla
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.

------
packetslave
_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.

~~~
tonymet
i read articles bottom-up for this reason – you'll find whatever shred of
facts to be found there.

------
SirensOfTitan
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.

~~~
notSupplied
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.

------
dvt
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.

~~~
sky_rw
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.

~~~
DenisM
sky_rw has a good point and the post does not deserve the downvotes.

There very well might be a direct connection between the upcoming election and
the protests.

~~~
sky_rw
: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.

------
blahblahblogger
Why would this open source project add something specific to the US even if
just a banner?

People keep saying slogans like "injustice anywhere..." or silence is
complicit ... but they mean just on this US/Western issue?

It seems like brigading people.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
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.

~~~
adventured
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.

~~~
clairity
> “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.

~~~
DenisM
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.

~~~
clairity
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.

~~~
DenisM
You missed the point. I don't want to take any principled stands. That's not
why I came to work.

------
sky_rw
The best thing about running your own business is never having to deal with
people like this. It's vastly under appreciated equity.

~~~
DenisM
Depends on who are your customers, and how easily are they swayed with a
twitstorm.

~~~
paragraft
Quite. Plenty of people who've had their small businesses targeted by various
social media bandwagons for non-business reasons in the past few years.

~~~
sky_rw
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.

------
alslsls
> Open source shouldn't be political

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.

------
MattGaiser
The actual tweet for anyone who tried to go to the source material and found
it protected.

[http://archive.is/QBw9h](http://archive.is/QBw9h)

He publicly criticized a co-worker and when that co-worker tried to discuss it
privately, he publicly criticized him again.

~~~
propogandist
Open Source should not be politicized.

------
stephc_int13
I would have fired the guy as well. He was harassing colleagues.

------
geodel
Well world has not really changed in thousand years. is it? If one can't sign
letter to believe in one true God/Kind, they deserve to die.

------
kenneth
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,

------
dk8996
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.

------
newbie578
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?

------
Avicebron
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"

~~~
zachrip
Extremely public:
[https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057](https://twitter.com/aweary/status/1267895488205869057)
\- so public in fact, he brought the private messages out publicly as well.

~~~
Avicebron
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.

------
ycombonator
Setting all the drama aside he was fired for harassing a coworker. The news
article’s headline is misleading.

------
baby
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.

------
m3kw9
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

------
sergiotapia
>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.

------
baryphonic
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.

------
JohnBerea
> Trump’s posts included the racially charged phrase “when the looting starts,
> the shooting starts”

How is that racially charged?

~~~
alasdair_
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.

~~~
derision
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

~~~
cmdli
From context, it's pretty clear who he is talking about.

~~~
symlinkk
Oh I see. Well if it’s “pretty clear” then I guess that’s it then, discussion
over.

~~~
alasdair_
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.

------
davikr
How could Facebook have action on Trump tweets? I don't understand the title.

------
musicale
> Facebook fires employee who protested its inaction on Trump tweets

Why should _facebook_ act on Trump _tweets_?

~~~
_bxg1
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.

------
wyldfire
Maybe the title should be "...employee who was a jerk" [but also protested
Facebook's inaction on Trump tweets]

------
DailyHN
Not a single comment in this thread supports the employee.

~~~
messick
Sorry, too busy writing down everyone who doesn’t think “silence is
complicity” just in case their resume comes by my desk someday.

~~~
DailyHN
HN crowd has lost my respect. Not from this instance alone. But as a
culmination of years of inaction.

------
musicale
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.

~~~
dahfizz
Harassing a coworker on Twitter is not political activity.

~~~
fsociety
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.

------
achiang
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).

~~~
scarmig
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.

~~~
achiang
I don't have a platform the size that the recoil author has.

That's the difference.

~~~
fastball
So where it does it start and where does it end?

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?

------
freen
Facebook: hardcore about unlimited freedom of speech, unless you want to
unionize.

Then you can fuck right the fuck off.

[https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-
union...](https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-unionize/)

~~~
filoleg
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”.

------
java_script
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.

~~~
ohnope
Solidarity is important but how can you get there if coworkers harass each
other publicly?

