- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Meta’s HR team is deleting internal employee criticism of new board member, UFC president and CEO Dana White, at the same time that CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world that Meta will “get back to our roots around free expression,” 404 Media has learned. Some employee posts questioning why criticism of White is being deleted are also being deleted.
Monday, Zuckerberg made a post on a platform for Meta employees called Workplace announcing that Meta is adding Dana White, John Elkann, and Charlie Songhurst to the company’s board of directors (Zuckerberg’s post on Workplace was identical to his public announcement). Employee response to this was mixed, according to screenshots of the thread obtained by 404 Media. Some posted positive or joking comments: “Major W,” one employee posted. “We hire Connor [McGregor] next for after work sparring?,” another said. “Joe Rogan may be next,” a third said. A fourth simply said “LOL.”
But other employees criticized the decision and raised the point that there is video of White slapping his wife in a nightclub; White was not arrested and was not suspended from UFC for the domestic violence incident. McGregor, one of the most famous UFC fighters of all time, was held liable for sexual assault and was ordered by a civil court to pay $260,000 to a woman who accused him of raping her in 2018. McGregor is appealing the decision.
“Kind of disheartening to see people in the comments celebrating a man who is on video assaulting his wife and another who was recently convicted of rape,” one employee commented, referring to White and McGregor. “I can kind of excuse individuals for being unaware, but Meta surely did their due diligence on White and concluded that what he did is fine. I feel like I’m on another planet,” another employee commented. “We have completely lost the plot,” a third said.
Several posts critical of White were deleted by Meta’s “Internal Community Relations team” as violating a set of rules called the “Community Engagement Expectations,” which govern internal employee communications.
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One employee posted “Why do critical comments of this announcement keep getting deleted?” “LOL my comment got CEE’d too. Good stuff,” a second posted. A third said “I think it’s particularly fascinating that none of the comments I have seen disappear contained any specifically prohibited content under the CEE and must have fallen under ‘disruptive content’ - and if any criticism of company decisions falls under the ‘disruptive content’ bucket, the future of the company is looking bleak.”
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One employee brought up this apparent disparity: “Given Zuck’s message this morning on decreasing content moderation on our platforms, is that also going to apply internally?”
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“Curious to know if we can expect a similar shift to ‘more speech’ in internal Workplace posts/groups,” another employee asked. “CEE is quite chilling,” another said. “Basically any large scope critical post I make gets at least one message from ICR [Internal Community Relations].”
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People working at evil company surprised that evil company hires horrible human beings, doubly so when criticism was silenced. I mean, what the fuck did you expect??
Yes, we all need to pay bills and etc, but if you work for an evil company, don’t act like you care about morals or ethics.
just remember upset employees; before you quit working at meta, leak all the source code first and burn down the corpo.
Feudal lords like Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk will wrap themselves in fake populist notions like “free expression”, but they will never, ever tolerate speech that meaningfully challenges the entrenched power structure that they benefit from. All of their feel good taglines are an intentional misdirection designed to pacify the mob that would tear them to pieces if they actually realized what was happening. Remember “Democracy dies in darkness”? I work in Silicon Valley and I’ve been trying to educate family members who continue to mistakenly believe that the tech community is comprised of lefty California hippies. Tech will not save us from fascism. The professional media won’t either. Given the institutional corruption now fundamental to our government, I fear that there is no ‘rules-based’ solution to any of this.
but they will never, ever tolerate speech that meaningfully challenges the entrenched power structure that they benefit from.
I mean, neither will we.
Watch what happens if you suggest that first world people have more money than they need…
This is correct.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world that Meta will “get back to our roots around free expression,”
A bunch of creepy nerds e-stalking college girls and ranking how hot they are without their knowledge or consent? Or is that iteration considered a separate product now?
Well they definitely kept their core principles of collecting data without consent in any case.
It gives me hope that enough workers spoke up and were suppressed that it’s newsworthy.
It’s gonna take a hell of a lot more than that, but I hope they organize, if they haven’t already
Weird to see people who work 40 hours a week to advance Meta’s goals and grow its profits acting like ethics are some kind of key decider for them.
I am honestly shocked that someone at FB would post critiques about their board members in their internal forums.
Surely they should be smart enough to understand that:
- Senior management doesn’t give a fuck what they think.
- The internal forums aren’t actually for feedback. It’s an HR management tool.
That being said, if the posters are young, then it is somewhat understandable.
Maybe they are fine with abusing personal data but draw the line at literal rape.
At least they have some morals.
But they’re down for electing rapists to the presidency.
I knew somebody who was highly intelligent (was being interviewed for the CIA) and decided to go work for Facebook, because the pay was better. No compunction about the ethics of working for the disinformation machine that is Facebook, just saw it as a stepping stone in their career.
The people who work there must be masters of compartmentalization, because either they don’t care and/or see it as a means to their own ends.
Some people, especially in staff+ engineer levels, just want to work on their little piece of an ultra complex data center problem and are happy doing it. From my experience, they don’t seem to care what the broader company is up to, they’re just immersed in their n-of-1 problem space and happy that they get to solve it.
Not saying it’s the right thing to do, but not everyone actively cares about their company. It’s a paycheck and fulfilling technical problem solving to them.
The last time I was job searching, Comcast recruited me for a job. It was for way more than I was expecting but I told them that I was not going to work for them. They tried to push and ask me why and I should go through the interview process to see if I like it.
I was very frank with them. Their stance on net neutrality alone was enough for me to decline. The recruiter was surprisingly understanding and wished me luck.
If we’re gonna have our work used for evil one way or another, might as well get paid as much as possible so we can exit the system as soon as possible.
On a positive note it wont be the same free expression from Facebook that gave us the Rohingya genocide :)
Is this actually a post about technology? I feel like more and more posts here are about business or politics rather than about technology. I don’t give a shit about business, i just wanna see stories about technology.
It makes a break from the AI slop usually dished up but yes I agree with you
I report them pretty frequently, but I hardly ever see them removed. Checking the mod log, it looks like only fully spam posts are getting removed, off-topic ones are staying.
