I guess I live in a state where a larger portion of the Indian H1-B population has stayed and become citizens, had children, etc. Indians are our third largest foreign born group.
Politics isn’t part of work, what then when it is? Have you seen what one Google executive said on the Project Veritas video about Google?
Come to think of it I don’t think of it that hasn’t been mentioned in this thread at all.
The people on Google’s side can claim the video was edited to make them look bad, and one can cast aspersions about O’Keefe until the cows come home, but when a full sentence by a Google executive is “Elizabeth Warren is saying that we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better, it will make it worse because now all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation.” it’s quite obvious that politics at work are being pushed from the top.
It’s clear to me that they’re biased but I’m not going to debate that point right now because I’ve already seen it be debated ad nauseum elsewhere.
There’s an interesting development regarding the possible consequences of that bias. Facebook has just posted an update to their Community Standards. They forbid “threats that could lead to death” or “high severity violence” except they are making exceptions to allow death threats against people and organizations Facebook deems as “dangerous”:
So people reported by the media as violent or sexual criminals can be threatened with death. And so can “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations”. Facebook’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy includes the following:
So any organization that Facebooks says promotes hate, can be threatened with death on Facebook. And of course, there’s a lot of subjectivity in that. Does it include all Republicans, as many believe they promote racial hatred? Churches that oppose gay sex or marriage? Liberals who rant about the evils of conservative Christianity or white colonialism? Feminists who post “#killallmen”? There’s a lot of room for judgement there.
The Dangerous Individuals and Organizations Policy is the same one they’ve used to deplatform some political figures such as Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, so this implies they’re specifically going to allow death threats against those particular individuals. They’ve mostly been banning conservatives, although there are apparently some exceptions such as Louis Farrakhan who was banned for his anti-Semitism.
Brett Kavanaugh, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump have been reported by the media as having committed sex crimes, so according to this policy, it seems threatening them would be allowed by Facebook’s new policy.
This is batshit crazy, unless it is somehow some sort of mistake that they’re going to retract. They’re openly saying that they’re going to make (published or unpublished) hit lists of “dangerous individuals” that they will allow their users to threaten. And the way it’s worded, “threats that could lead to death” makes it sounds like they plan to allow serious, credible attempts to get people killed. As in, “hey guys please go kill this dude” as opposed to a vague “this dude deserves to die”.
This must run afoul of some law, whether civil or criminal, doesn’t it? I can’t see how they can legally allow death threats to remain on their platform when the threats have been reported and Facebook knows about them.
I didn’t mean to write such a long post but these new rules were just released and the story just broke hours ago tonight. It has only been discussed by right-leaning reporters so far. So, I decided to write up my own post with direct quotes and links from Facebook rather than post a Breitbart link and get accused of posting fake news.
“Cast aspersions” on O’Keefe (criminal)…yeah, that’s what people do to the guy that tried to trap a female reporter on a boat full of sex toys. Using Project Veritas in any way does little to lend credence to your opinion.
That you cherry pick a quote about combating fake news to portray Google in a poor light, however, makes you far more of a kindred spirit to O’Keefe than most honest people would be comfortable with.
Unless it has a basis in reality. And the fact that Twitter has had to dial back its censorship of hate speech in order to avoid blocking right-wing politicians is a data point in support of that basis.
Without that exception, I wouldn’t be allowed to post “The US Air Force should bomb ISIS continuously until they are all dead”
When you go to vote? :dubious:
I have not. However, I’ll also note that religion shouldn’t be taught in schools, but have you seen those videos by that asshole Richard Dawkins? Pshhh, you know what I mean?
Let’s say that 80% of tech workers are coming to Seattle and Silicon valley, split evenly between the two cities. If about 33,000 are staying each year, then that’s 13,200 to one of those two cities. After a decade of that, you’ll have 132,000 people who immigrated plus some extra because of spontaneous human multiplication (procreation). That’s not nothing. That can perfectly easy turn into a high population percentage in a city of a million or two.
But that doesn’t change that most of the workers return to India.
Think of it like compound interest, you hang on to a small amount of money and it’s just sort of “nothing”, “nothing”, “nothing”, and then finally a few decades have gone by and you’re staring at a huge pile of cash. When things are continuously building up over time, it has a tendency to rocket up all of a sudden when you’re not noticing the slow trickle of growth.
They already have a separate category for terrorist groups. I didn’t quote it but it’s in the links I posted. I’m talking about the “hate organization” policy which as I explained, is highly subjective and is very likely to include domestic political organizations.
Not to mention people reported by the media as violent and sex criminals. So if the media reports someone as a criminal, possibly with no trial, Facebook will allow users to seek their death.
“I think OJ Simpson is guilty of murder, and he should be arrested and put to death!”
Would that be allowed in your hypothetical Facebook world? What about “We should go to war with Iran and bomb them continuously until every Iranian is dead!”
I mean Hillary Clinton is infamous for being part of a child sex ring in a Pizza Parlor, but I’d hope you’d agree that that is a pile of steaming horseshit, infamous or otherwise.
No they won’t. They originally had a poorly worded statement that was meant to allow exactly the type of post that manson1972 put forward
.
No, as I explained in great detail with direct quotes from Facebook, the policy did not just allow threats against ISIS or other terrorists, it also explicitly allowed “threats that could lead to death” against other categories including individuals reported by the media (not convicted) as committing violent and sex crimes, and groups designated by Facebook as “hate organizations.”
But yes, they have changed the policy again since last night as can be seen in the crossed-out words in that link. But it’s still crazy that Facebook has anyone working for them who thought it was OK to officially allow death threats against people Facebook disapproves of. There must have been more than one person involved in writing these policies and publishing them on the website. They thought these policies were OK until the press and people on Internet forums pointed out how crazy they were.
What’s worse is that these companies have been subcontracting the determination of ‘hate groups’ out to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has declared such notorious monsters as Dennis Prager, Sam Harris, Majiid Nawaz, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali as ‘hateful’ individuals.
Here’s their current list of hate groups.
On that list are such horrible groups as:
The American College of Pediatricians
The American Border Patrol
The Family Research Council
The Jewish Defense League
Oath Keepers
ACT for America
The Center for Immigration Studies
The Alliance Defending Freedom
These groups, which are absolutely mainstream and within the bounds of normal political debate, are mixed right in with the KKK, Stormfront, and other despicable groups. But the ones above are basically just traditional Christian organizations, or Libertarian organizations. They had a lot more ‘right wing’ groups on their list, but they had to remove them under threat of lawsuit.
Notably missing from their hate list is the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and a number of other hateful left-wing groups (although to be fair, a number of left-wing groups are on the list as well.)
Getting labeled ‘hateful’ by the SPLC can mean having your videos demonetized on Youtube or being kicked off the platform. It can mean having your web site downgraded by Google’s algorithms. It can mean essentially having your career or business destroyed if it relies on social media for advertising, distribution, or revenue. It might get you barred from Patreon and other revenue sharing sites. It might even get your bank to drop your company, and make it impossible to get funding or loans.
And yet, the SPLC appears to be a crappy organization which recently has had to fire its founder. Its president resigned, and the organization has been accused of workplace practices that discriminate and sexual harassment against female employees. They have massive funds parked offshore, and have been accused of hyping up ‘hate’ in order to improve fundraising.
A group that actively fights hate-crime legislation and gay rights.
*Oath Keepers is an anti-government American far-right organization associated with the patriot and militia movements. The group describes itself as a non-partisan association of current and former military, police, and first responders, who pledge to fulfill the oath that all military and police take in order to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. It encourages members – some of whom are current and former U.S. military and law enforcement officers – not to obey orders which they believe would violate the United States Constitution. The organization claims a membership of 35,000 as of 2016.
Several groups that monitor domestic terrorism and hate groups describe the Oath Keepers as extremist or radical. Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes the group as “heavily armed extremists with a conspiratorial and anti-government mindset looking for potential showdowns with the government.”*
Sure, tell me again how they’re not an extremist hate group.
Anti-Muslim organization that deliberately spreads lies and anti-Muslim propaganda.
Anti-Immigrant think tank that supports the use of concentration camps.
Virulently anti-LGBTQ.
- Not even remotely true. Stop spreading that lie.
- Flag on the play, illegal Whataboutism.
…not to be confused with the American Academy of Pediatrics, the wikipedia page for the American College of Pediatricians describes their primary focus as advocating against the right of gay or lesbian people to adopt children, and it also advocates conversion therapy.
Not to get confused with the US Border Patrol, the American Border Patrol are these guys.
Even I’ve heard of these nutters. They believe "that homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large, and can never be affirmed. It is by definition unnatural, and as such is associated with negative physical and psychological health effects.”
I’ll stop there. I’m starting to think you actually haven’t read your cite. Do you actually believe that these ideas are “absolutely mainstream and within the bounds of normal political debate?” That gay people should have to debate their right to exist in society? You think these groups compare to Black Lives Matter? A group that doesn’t think gay people should exist is the same as a movement that just wants the police to stop killing and discriminating against black people?
Sam and others demonstrate what I did notice before, there is a complete misunderstanding that the conservatism of just very recent history is not the same conservatism that is swallowing the Republicans now.
In essence, a lot of sources full of poison are controlling the narrative among many conservatives, under that consideration it should be less surprising that seeing efforts towards inclusion or to counter hate will be seen under the darker colored glasses that many conservative sources are using as a “bad thing”
What I meant with the question was in reference to the executive level of a company making politics part of its operation. If you have people at the top saying that they want to stop Trump with the tools at their disposal then the company is politicized whether the underlings bring their own politics into it or not.
I’d post a link to that video but it was nuked by Youtube pretty darn fast, I don’t know where it may be hosted now.
No, I don’t know what you mean with that reference to Dawkins.
The party of Cut and Spend is not conservative, and hasn’t been for decades.
I think that blog entry is obfuscating the issue, what she says:
"People are asking us if we shadow ban. We do not. But let’s start with, “what is shadow banning?”
The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.
We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile)."
The definition of shadowbanning she uses is very convenient, the way Twitter works is people post replies to other people’s post, shadowbanning can be making those replies invisible to others unbeknownst to the person making the post, even if those post show up on the person’s own page and people who follow that person can see them it doesn’t mean that, to the larger audience out there, those posts are invisible.
To bring back the analogy to the SDMB, it would as claiming that (hypothetically) the SDMB doesn’t shadowban users because whatever they post it will be visible to the user, accessible through a search, and visible to other users in their Friends list. That, of course begs the question of what goes on outside those cases, because under those terms a user’s post can be invisible to anyone who does not directly do a (blind) search or is not a friend of the user in question.
In short, I think she was obfuscating the issue, and the way she did it is, IMO, admitting that they do, in fact, shadow ban users.
What is the logical inference of this statement? “You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow”
Obviously that one will not always see what people one does not follow post, and that would be without knowing that content is being rendered invisible. It’s not like one can trawl through the entire user base of Twitter to spot when and where posts have gone missing without notice.
FWIW I’ll WAG that 90% of what I read on Twitter is from accounts I don’t follow.