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.
I guess being an a-hole has always been cheaper than not being one.
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?
I wish, they got rid of all the snuff sites long ago
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.
pepes
You’re thinking of 4chan
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.
Bye bye losers
I’m excited to see the technical staffing at Facebook under Dana White.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
The oligarchs have paid their tithe to king Trump and feel like they are immune to consequences. So far they have been correct.
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.
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?
Something something 1930’s Germany.
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.
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
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 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.
deleted by creator
He knows which way the wind is blowing…
Not just social issues.
It’s easier if people quit than you firing them.
So do shit like this so people “protest resign” and fill their positions with H1B’s who can’t resign because they’d be deported and take a fraction of the pay.
Resigning in protest is never a good idea.
Stay, obstruct, make them fire you.
Fuck the wind. Stand tall against the gale of hate
Seriously, this is how the media is spinning this? “Facebook now allows people to post that LGBT people are mentally ill”?
The default behavior of any social media platform is to allow people to say anything they want. That’s what social media is for, to allow people to talk to each other. The things it doesn’t allow are, and ought to be, exceptions. Facebook has now decided that one of these exceptions will be slightly loosened. I somehow fail to see the big deal in this.
The default behavior of any social media platform is to allow people to say anything they want.
False, moderation has existed since literally the beginning.
That doesn’t contradict what I’m saying (“default behavior”), and also moderation is different from censorship.
ok buddy
The paradox of tolerance is you have to be intolerant to intolerance
You are an idiot.(*)
(*)See anything wrong with that statement? Think an order of magnitude worse and directed at minorities who already are targeted with hate, and you have the reason why such policies must exist.
I wasn’t actually expressing a substantive opinion on whether this policy change of Meta’s is a good thing or bad thing. The rules there are as arbitrary as anywhere else on the Internet; this slight shift does not make much of a difference.
But moderation is different from censorship: if you (or I or anyone else) do not want to read people writing about LGBT people being mentally ill, or calling me an idiot (and I certainly don’t, most of the time), or literally making any statement at all in the world, then none of us should have to. That doesn’t mean people who want to say these things to each other (necessarily) need to be prevented from saying them to each other; there are arguments for that too, but it’s a different issue.
Let me shorten your wording to make my next question clear:
if you do not want to read X, then none of us should have to
How does that make sense? I actually don’t get what you are trying to say. Are you advocating censorship as in “rules should be global”?
The point of moderation is: If companies make profit providing a social platform, they should be the ones leveraging the effort to keep illegal contents off their platform. Also, it provides a legal path for making them responsible for their contents (if they fail to moderate).
Censorship - leaving all questionable aspects aside - puts the efforts entirely on the censoring party (typically a state entity). And while I am definitely not arguing in favor of censorship, I absolutely object to investing a single tax Euro into censoring (or moderating) privately owned for-profit social media.
Now to your first point:
[…] whether this policy change of Meta’s is a good thing or bad thing. The rules there are as arbitrary as anywhere else on the Internet; this slight shift does not make much of a difference.
Please call the stupid incel pieces of shit what they are - Facebook assholes. because fuck them, and they are not entitled to telling us how to call those useless wastes of oxygen. Meta is a word, it has a meaning, and it has nothing to do with the Facebook assholes. Least of all Fuckerberg.
To the point: This policy change is evil as it gets. They explicitly invite hatred targeted against people based on sexual orientation or gender identity. There is no grey area here, this is evil, period. And thanks to the new fascist administration divided states of southern northern america, it will succeed, business wise. But I still get to spit into the face of every person who uses their platform anyways.
Moderation = not showing things to people who do not want to see these things. If you are an LGBT person and do not want to ever see people calling you and people like you mentally ill, then hiding those things from you is moderation, completely legitimate, an important part of making the platform a more welcoming place. I don’t usually want to see people doing that either in my feed (and in fact I don’t, because I follow entirely different things on Facebook).
Censorship = not showing things to people even though they want to see these things. If a group of people who believe that LGBT people are mentally ill are talking to each other about these beliefs, then preventing them from doing so is censorship, it doesn’t make the platform a more welcoming place because the people it would make feel unwelcome weren’t seeing it anyway.
That is what I (and the linked blog post) am trying to say. You may still think censorship is in some cases a good thing, but I think it’s important to make the distinction.
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…
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
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!!!
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nice try, Zuckerberg…
OK Meta HR…
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).
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 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.
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
