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Major props to those causing a ruckous internally there. That said, they likely fully expected a backlash and likely didn’t care. Anyone who cares can be replaced by another sycophant, at a reduced salary even.
You get what you pay for. They’ll be drawing from “the best of the rest” in a dwindling pool.
They pay well enough to get anyone who doesn’t care about principles. Plenty people in tech like that.
Get some real nihilists in there.
B-)
They don’t need the very best to make profit for a very long time, especially in a friendly regulatory regime. Check IBM for reference.
They own the social media market and have enough capital to acquire any plausible competitor, as have done in the past.
Losing top talent is only a significant price to pay if the firm or its competitors are still building new stuff that affects their bottom line. Meta is happy raking in the social media-ad profits. Google is happy raking in the search-ad profits. They’re all busy getting more money out of the markets they’ve monopolized, not competing.
Nah, with Trump in office, he’ll be delighted to hire in H1B slave labor …
Since when is/will be Trump in office. I only see President Musk.
Zuck fully expects to take advantage of the H1B push President Musk is advocating for.
Man they’re not even doing the dog-whistle thing anymore, huh? Fucking disgusting, I hope he experiences the everlasting warmth of a car fire in the near future.
Maybe we blow up another Tesla.
If they don’t blow themselves up, that is.
or CEO.
More billionaires should become amateur submariners.
Or go on a trip to Mars.
Imagine this being your red line. Your totally prepared to work at Facebook, because there’s absolutely nothing dodgy about that, but suddenly his transphobia is a problem.
Well, Frances Haugen left a while ago. Some people did go.
And, well, the best time to leave Facebook was to never join. The second best time is now.
It’s ok to let their platform spread misinformation and hatred that affects millions, but it’s not OK when that comes back and bites them in the ass.
Nah Meta is widely regarded as one of the best employers in the world. I’d take 300k/usd year and all of the benefits too. Let’s stop pretending that traditional companies are somehow better so you either don’t work for any corporation or actually work for one that provides incredibly benefits to you so you have the luxury to give back and steer the ship towards good a little bit.
Personally, I wouldn’t but this is the reasoning most employees have when joining Meta.
Nah Meta is widely regarded as one of the best employers in the world
lolwut
They pay a lot, but everyone knows they’re overworked like hell. Meta is a shit-tier employer, but if you’re a young masochist then they’re worth a few years to pad your accounts.
Please note - 99% of the time on the internet, when someone says “in the wuuurld” they mean “In this one capitalist hellhole country” so in this case it may be correct
Expanding on to your comment:
99% of the time on the internet, when someone says “in the wuuurld” they mean
“In my very limited experience, in my tiny portion of the world, that I may have never left.”
Unless a person has vast experience and has had deep conversations with thousands of people, we as humans just don’t have the ability to appreciate just how radically different life experiences are for people we share the same block with.
Same with Apple. They pay a lot and it looks fantastic on your resume. Even though in reality the likelihood is that the job you did was basically the same as it would be in any other company, but Apple prestige is a thing.
No I understand that they pay very well what I’m saying is it just seemed odd that you would go to work for such a company without knowing that you were essentially walking with the devil.
If you make peace with that then absolutely fine, but it then seems a bit odd to turn around and be suddenly offended by something as if they hadn’t already been doing stuff like that all along.
OK Meta HR…
Nice try, Zuckerberg…
It’s not just transphobia in these changes. You are also allowed to say that women should be/are property.
Facebook has a history of facilitating genocide (Indonesia, Myanmar). It’s clear that if it starts in the US, Facebook will be happy to help.
So as long as the genocide is far away, is completely acceptable for its employees to work there?
Nah, it was fucked up then too.
It makes sense that US politics would be the straw that would break the camels back for most Facebook employments - I don’t think your average tech worker is too familiar with the violence organized on Facebook by Hindu nationalists, the crimes against the Rohingya etc… a lot of that was with foreign language content moderation, so I can see people reasonably not knowing.
It is genuinely terrifying though. I’m already living in a fascist state and have gone through hell; I don’t know if I’ll get to survive another term of Trump.
For many, I imagine it’s just the straw that broke the camel’s back
It is kind of a red line. First theyre going after trans people. Why do you think you hear about it every day now? It gets the hate machine going for people other than our rulers
First theyre going after trans people.
That first appears to be skipping over a whole lot of people who’ve been getting fucked for a long time.
If youre not rich youre getting fucked but not actively being demonized by the state(not yet). Well maybe immigrants are up there with them
But what is your mobility as one of its workers? What other social networks can they begin working for realistically in such a small market? Maybe that’s the way to fight against Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s attempts to turn their networks into propaganda tools for the highest bidder, to encourage disgruntled workers to start their own social networks and then go support them as well. I would seriously consider paying for an adequately moderated ActivityPub alternate that truly respected its users, was truly transparent, focuses on high quality content, and prevented brigade agenda pushing.
I don’t know if they use activityPub but open source Facebook equivalence do exist.
I know because me and my friend thought we were onto a great idea with “social networks as a protocol” but it turns out that it already existed. For some reason it just doesn’t seem to have taken off in the same way that Mastodon has, not that Mastodon itself is that successful (look at its numbers compared to Blue Sky).
He answered the Trump signal, walked in and plop down one mil on the man’s desk. Now he’s following the Russian handbook for censorship.
There is a vast chasm between not doing a good enough job reining in your sensors and publicly openly declaring hate speech acceptable
I know their longest tenured employee. Ran into them after 20 yrs… Different human. Nothing behind her eyes.
Others that have been there from 5 to 15 yrs…
Boiled frogs at different stages. (Yes, I know the science is debunked for literal frogs.)
What I don’t know, living in SV, is a single human that’s started a new job with them in the last… 5? 10? yrs… at this point it’s all younger people who only know a world with Meta. And this is all normal to them.
Gee I wonder why he’s suddenly decided to start moving parts of the business to Texas… little Musk-ette over here…
All of this is very likely to kiss the ring of Herr Trump
Unfortunately it’s a very rational choice to cozy up to an incoming fascist dictator.
- Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp/Oculus
- Amazon
- Apple
- OpenAI
I am surprised myself, but making progress of not using their products. For example did not buy any gift via Amazon this Christmas.
“Rational”!? No, that’s false. Though it might be reasonable for someone who works for a living. But the only thing they are risking is their “high score”, nothing else. Literally nothing a billionaire does is rational, and that goes for every single one of them. I feel like we all constantly forget how much $1 billion is. https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ These people have several or hundreds of times that! Don’t forget they didn’t actually earn it. Plus, it’s still not enough. They choose to spend their time “working” and influencing governments instead of spending time with family. Power and money, they can never have enough…
Can you imagine your generational line’s entire lives being paid for before they’re even born plus the ability to literally solve suffering in society. Homelessness? Malnourishment? Drought? Hunger? The amount of wealth they sit on could literally solve any problem, anywhere in the world with a signed check and it wouldn’t even affect their day-to-day life at all. They just choose not to. I can’t imagine it. That’s what’s wrong with billionaires and why they’re not rational at all…
For some reason you are conflating “rational” with “moral.”
But I’m not. To distill my rambling: it’s not rational to feel the need to “cozy up to an incoming fascist dictator.” Because billionaires simply don’t have needs. Housing, healthcare, education, food, security, it’s all paid for, for the next 100 generations. That was my point.
The parts about morality were 100% me ranting…
Who’s making the argument that cozying up with a dictator makes the difference between them being able to meet their lowest Mazlow needs?
I’m not familiar with that term. I thought we were discussing why it’s rational?
A) then look it up; concept or vocabulary, doesn’t matter, Google it before saying it’s whataboutism. The point was salient.
B) self preservation is rational.
C) parasites kill to survive in nature.
D) something sucking for an observer, doesn’t make the observed’s rationale illogical.
All of this is very likely to kiss the ring of Herr Trump
Not likely, obviously.
That’s Führer Trump to you, worm!
i prefer to call him herr trump.
The Turd Reich is upon us.
All heil!
Five people interviewed….
“It’s total chaos!!!”
I despise Facebook as much as the next person, but sensationalism hurts more than it helps.
Getting five employee accounts on record is impressive.
There is not a zero-risk of retaliation.
“Internal conversations and five people interviewed.”
Let’s be honest. For current employees, it’s probably 10-100 times that. If my company did something controversial and then the press asked me for a reaction, I’d say “no comment” like it’s my catch phrase. Unless you already have a job lined up (that can’t be undone by “badmouthing your employer”), no one’s being open and truthful.
Its amazing how quickly these assholes have dropped any sort of facade they were keeping up towards their public image. At best they are doing whatever they think will get them the most money, more realistically they actually support this regressive bullshit. As a non-American I am so pissed at what a good portion of that country has voted for and those that stayed home instead of preventing this.
LOL welcome to corporate America. The only reason they paid lip service to causes like you mention is because it was temporarily a pathway to more profit. Now that Trump is in office (or nearly so, anyway) they have read the room and realized these beliefs are actually a liability now. So, surprise! They dropped em like a rock in the pursuit of more profits. Never never never trust a corporation to do the right thing. They sometimes accidentally do it in the pursuit of profits, but tying your hopes and dreams to a large corporation is a foolish plan. THEY DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU THEY CARE ABOUT THE MONEY IN YOUR WALLET.
Yeah, it is absolutely crazy how much the tide has shifted with trump’s reelection. These so-called “woke” companies (it was always performative, but they performed for the more just side) have all turned 180 and dropped to their knees to kiss the ring.
And this is because of the very real feeling that trump will abuse his power and unconstitutionally stay in office. The guardrails seem to have come down, and these fuckers are rushing to get on the fascist’s good side.
That should alarm everyone, so I’ll say it again: these companies are positioning themselves on the side of fascism because they don’t think we can stop them anymore. They are making business decisions that bolster fascists because there’s a fuckin dollar in it.
With the power of these fucking megacorps behind the fascist movement, it’s like sticking a rocket engine on its ass.
Something something 1930’s Germany.
The guardrails seem to have come down
They don’t seem to, they definitely have. Remember that Supreme Court ruling that said the president can break the law?
The oligarchs have paid their tithe to king Trump and feel like they are immune to consequences. So far they have been correct.
That’s not at all amazing. What’s amazing is that a large number of people thought it was a great idea to hand over the power to decide what’s true or not to private companies. When they rolled out this “content moderation” used mostly against Trump the political left was beside itself with joy. I remember the taunts of “haha it’s a private company, they can publish whatever they want.” So incredibly stupid and short sighted.
The “it’s a private company lolz” thing was itself a reaction to when Republicans were refusing to make gay wedding cakes, and the loss of the Fairness Doctrine long before that.
I think “thought it was a great idea to hand over the power […] to private companies” is a misrepresentation. Some moderation was better than no moderation, but obviously "the political left"would have preferred regulation rather than self regulation.
What’s the point you’re making? That nothing should have been done?
That this was worse than nothing. Time after time we fall for the old “we’ll self-regulate trust us” and all it did was delay actual action being taken while a Democrat was in charge, and now we’re stuck for at least 4 more years. It was already godawful 4 years ago, 4 years from now the state of public discourse may be beyond repair.
I see your point now and agree
I mean, I feel thats still true. And because it’s true, we need to get the f off of it, as a society.
Supposing your team had won, these people would go back to only paying lip service. Better, no doubt, but not a solution. How long did fascists and racists and misogynists lay dormant in US culture before seizing control now?
You need cleansing and systemic change. People need to internalize “no one is free until everyone is free.” Fascists and ethno-nationalists need to be afraid and culturally eliminated over generations.
Fascism is enabled by liberalism, and its capitalist ideology, and it’s promoted by capitalists when capital is threatened. Capitalism is the underlying force here, and capitalists are behaving in exactly the same way they’ve done at similar points in history and as described and predicted by leftists.
Yes Democrats losing the vote sucks and we’re all paying for it, globally, but their win would have been a delay at best. That doesn’t mean winning votes isn’t important, but it means that it can’t be your one and only political action once every 4 years. It’s time to get serious.
LMAO, employees are about to find out why a union would be a good idea. Gotta speedrun growing class consciousness.
Tech bros are too smart for that. They are true libertarians. Totally can get a better deal on their own. /S
we can only hope fb implodes sooner rather than later. I personally know multiple people working there who are very decent human beings who need to pay bills. I just hope their current trajectory will force employee action and paralyze fb long enough to hurt. Unlike other places it’s not so simple to just hire a load of IT professionals and have any meaningful results short term, esp. if they have not been ramped up to speed by their colleagues. So it’s not impossible, bowever tolerance threshold is kind of high for any action to take place. Wads of cash, unpaid mortgages and all. Employees of big tech are truly living in gold cages…
With meta on your resume you can easily find employment or freelance. Tech people have widely applicable and desired skills. Hell they could even move to a non 3rd world country and be better off.
As someone in the tech industry i can say that now is a pretty terrible time to lose your job.
The market was booming during covid but is very dry right now. Many companies have had lots of layoff and the market is saturated with candidates
Yes but at Facebook they make more money, and money speaks louder than morals 🤡 I’m not sorry for the people working at Facebook. They are part of the problem. Facebook didn’t just suddenly become evil yesterday.
I recently quit facebook due to rampant russian propaganda, unmoderated communities full of far left or far right (same thing really) bots and constant, rampant scams and ai posts. It’s not that platform has it, any platform with 5 digit userbase has them. It is that FB has used it consistently across all their platforms to drive “”“”“engagement”“”".
unmoderated communities full of far left or far right (same thing really)
No, they are not the same thing at all 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
Both wanna solve problems with violence and shit up the internet.
The left: we want fair wages, working conditions and healthcare
The right: we want to enslave minorities and murder lgbtq people
This moron: they’re the same!!!
“Fair wages, working conditions, and healthcare” isn’t the left. Those positions are centrist. The far left wants to do stuff like abolish the government. I’d still pick them over the far right, but abolishing the government is a pretty fuckin’ bad idea.
With meta on your resume you can easily find employment or freelance
And end up working for a company that’s just as shitty but worse pay, or finding less shit companies that don’t have the financial resources to employ more people
Lots of evil is done by people who “just need to pay the bills”
Tell your friends to quit and find something better if they can get hired there they can get hired anywhere
Protest quitting would require a large amount of people to do it at the same time. If only a few people quit it’s a net loss because then the percentage of bad people is higher.
Excuses
Now we’re doing headlines like this with tech companies in addition to politicians? These fuckers act with impunity because they can.
For some reason, it appears the unbreakable barrier for humanity is switching the fucking social media site you go to.
What would it take for people to consider not looking at Instagram and Facebook? A feed full of snuff videos?
the unbreakable barrier for humanity is switching the fucking social media site you go to.
Facebook is quickly becoming a retirement community, exclusively for me-maws and pepes. It hasn’t been the tool for college kids to organize keggers in nearly a decade.
But when alternatives to Facebook crop up - your Instagrams and TikToks and Discords and WhatsApps and Grindrs - they don’t last long before being gobbled up by the bigger social media giants or shut down by hostile state regulators.
In the end, everything returns to Facebook, because the big companies can borrow money for free and staple on whatever small firm is seeing a lot of early growth. I give BlueSky another three years, tops, before one of the big social media giants acquires it.
I agree, but we should at least have them fork over the cash to buy a new dumpster to enshittify every few years. There’s Twitter that people still cling to despite it being a superfund site since at least when Leon bought it.
Make Facebook the next MySpace, make Reddit the next Digg. Make social media sites starve to death from lack of engagement again.
pepes
You’re thinking of 4chan
Instagram and TikTok are already big social media giants in their own right.
If TikTok gets gobbled up, it’ll be because of the legal proceedings going on in which lawmakers are trying to force TikTok to allow itself to be bought up by some US company. Which is another issue altogether, cause if I start a business, the legality of the US government forcing me to sell my business to someone else, or even to be forced to sell my business to a foreign government or company and not be allowed to possess it, is a whole can of worms.
But outside of WhatsApp being shut down due to security reasons, the majority of those wouldn’t qualify as social media sites that would be gobbled up by some other social media giant.
Instagram is, uh, Meta? It was gobbled up just as it was taking off.
Tiktok couldn’t be gobbled, and is being beat down by legislators until they sell to US tech firms.
I stand corrected then. You can ignore all my bloviating.
bloviating
I love this word. TIL it.
I wish, they got rid of all the snuff sites long ago
Meta was already enabling genocide in third world countries and countless other things but this is what caused chaos. Those employees have weird priorities, huh?
[edit] reworded slightly on the account of caused controversy
Not sure why you’re being down voted, it’s a fair point.
In fairness, do we know for certain what happened in Facebook back then? Maybe some employees did protest, maybe they’re the same people protesting now, even. Or they quit. Thing is, LGBT issues make engaging articles. Third world suffering? Eh, it depends.
Yet, I agree with the overall point because this is the crux of the matter: on average, one of these simply matters more—one way or another, see transphobes cheering—for people of this subgroup. This is us.
The usual notes apply: good on them for protesting, big media isn’t helping, fully ethical employment is like fully ethical consumption.
Not like they’re a bunch of committed leftists working there.
Which is more likely to impact a Meta employee personally?
The fact ur so heighly downvoted for saying this. Perfect example of weird priorities.
id say a good 80% of those downvotes are misunderstanding. something about the wording? idk. i thought they were talking about progressive folks getting outraged at first, not meta employees specifically. almost downvoted but caught my misunderstanding in time
Ah yes, the “old news theory”…
-They’ve done it already, why call them out again? It’s old news.
While they escalate and continue to go full-on hate for profit.
i was with you at first but upon rethinking i do think it’s fair to note that there was little to no internal uproar in meta over the myanmar and othe situations. of course there was uproar outside meta. when they said “weird priorities” they meant from meta employees specifically—not progressive or leftist voices in general.
hope me describing my train of thoughts helps :)
- They haven’t done “it” because it’s a different thing
- OP did not say not to call it out again, simply ask us to consider why this thing caused more chaos than others
I refuse to use Meta, and I block their various URLs in my home. Friends and family complain and give me grief about it. It’s astonishing how much of a creep Zuck is, and yet he’s got his hooks in deep, and some people are still addicted to his garbage.
“Total Chaos” feels a bit overblown…
It’s probably accurate. Imagine cubicles and desks smoldering in a filthy, smokey heap, copy machines smashed through the windows, sparking electrical conduit dangling from the ceiling. It’s likely madness.
I wonder if even one chair has been overturned.
Dogs and cats, living together. Mass hysteria!
Yeah, the only outcome I can see from this is everyone is given a choice to stay and shut up or leave if they disagree with the new direction. Most will chose, the people who stay behind to cause trouble will be removed shortly after and then business will return to normal.
Meta’s anti-LGBT rules are closely knit to their ending the fact-checking: It is science denialism and linked to racism and vaccine skepticism.
Homosexuality and gender identity are not considered mental illnesses, Sex is not a binary, and Race is not connected to intelligence.
Bigots never liked science on these three, and now they use political power to impose their narrative.
Meta never moderated such discourse. Nor reddit nor twitter nor youtube. There was no censorship to end here. What this is, it is a free pass to punch down trans and gay people. It is incitement to violence, and Zuckerberg and Musk must go to the gallows for it.
Don’t get me started on the toxic harassment these platforms have allowed against African and Carribean reparation activists, how they have destroyed the lives of feminists, and how they have named all Palestinians terrorists.
At this point race realists and gender essentialists have ensured political and technological control of the narrative.
There is no room for debating sealioning trolls on this one. If they don’t understand the social dynamics against gender/sex/minorities at this moment, they are no better than brownshirts.
It is permabans and hooks and jabs all the way, for every single weird freak that backs this deranged hateful shit.
deleted by creator
feel free to be heroes and leak meta’s source code before leaving.
That’s a bit like emptying the sewer into the street
You know what would be an effective ‘protest’? If employees started deleting important files…
Sorry, I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.
It’s extremely unlikely that facebook has in place a system that allows any lowly engineer to cause such damage alone. No hard drive hosting unique files no one else has, without backups, without security, and so on.
If you’re a billion dollar corp that depends on an important recipe to make your product, you’re not leaving the only copy of it on front desk with no oversight.
I don’t see how deleting files would work as a form of protest. Would probably get you in trouble, though.
Okay, so what are employees doing? The title says “employees protest”, by “protest” do they mean “complain but continue to follow orders”? Because that’s basically the norm for any job.
Don’t know. Article asks for sign-in, but much as I like 404’s reporting, I just don’t feel like creating one more account right now, so all I got is they’re unhappy and talking. Maybe they’re talking to people who can do something about it, maybe they’ll do more soon—organizing takes time, after all—or maybe they’ll do fuck all 'cause that’s what we usually do.
I don’t think 404 uses a password-based login if that makes a difference.
I personally just consume their crap via RSS like most other things I read.
Wait, isn’t their RSS feed only available to subscribers? If not, can you share the link?
I just put in the web address into my reader (Feeder).
Some articles are only for subscribers, but a lot of them are the whole thing.
I tried that and I’m only seeing truncated articles a few paragraphs long, just like they have on their paywalled pages.
Unionize tech and then it can happen.
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all
Well, yeah, if tech workers unionized, maybe they’d have some leverage. Let’s hope they get to that before the next absurd move from big tech? Fingers crossed, 143rd time’s the charm.
Tell me you’ve never worked in a tech company without telling me…
you have to introduce errors that are likely to not be spotted right away. Set variables that cause 1/1,000,000 errors on pages or that that move things around over time
I’m sure that meta doesn’t have backups so that makes this an effective form of protest
