I’m at FB (throwaway account for good measure).

It’s impossible to tell, especially working remotely. It’s not like you can ask these kinds of questions over Workplace chat unless you’re close with other team members.

But the perspective that there are people who agree with Zuck’s decision and aren’t speaking up is valid. I’m one of them despite generally agreeing with BLM _and_ being a person of color.

You have people changing their profile pics to BLM icons which makes it ever so apparent that a non-negligible percent (20%-30% maybe) of co-workers in each group chat support the cause.

During Q&As, 95% of the comments are from BLM supporters making quite blunt remarks about Zuck’s decision making.

Director+ levels are also vocally against Zuck’s decision (although they accept that they can’t change his mind). I’m not willing to torpedo my career progression here, and imagine others feel the same.

So yeah, I’ll be keeping my mouth shut and silently nodding along with the rest while Zuck gets rocks thrown at him.

Just out of curiosity, what keeps you from speaking out (besides a strong feeling of group think).

Have you actually experienced firings / ostracism from people at the company? While I do feel like your points would be contrarian (and may get shouted at), I'm wondering what the actual repercussions would be.

Most of what I've seen (in regards to dissenters) have been relatively spirited debates and strong digital dissension but no strong tangible effects.

I'm asking this in good faith as someone who sits on the other side of the fence on this issue (though like with most things am not 100% assured of my decision).

Really appreciate you sharing this inside perspective with us, thank you.

Please go on.

They're responsible for 2015-2019 spike in the murder rate in black communities that has killed 10,000 extra people.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Lets see it.

E.g. in Baltimore, we saw the homocide rate spiking as of Freddie Gray protests.

https://epidemiological.net/2017/11/16/a-quick-geographical-...

https://www.copinthehood.com/2017/09/the-freddie-gray-effect...

A particularly good visualization of Baltimore's murder rate is here:

http://mistybeach.com/mark/BaltimoreHomicides.html

Baltimore's homocide clearance rate also dropped from 40% to some percentage in the 20's because the breakdown in police/community relations made people stopped snitching.

There's a similar spike in St. Louis, timed to the Michael Brown killing.

The national murder rate spiked 25% in the last two years of Obama's presidency, after decades of decline. There isn't any alternative explanation.

Well, I don't they did this, but it's an interesting technique used for this sort of scenario. Unfortunately, I can't find a wiki article to explain it (I think it's something like the hugh-jones coin or something).

Anyway, I think the idea was someone needed statistics on how many people were stealing things after some sort of event, but obviously they couldn't just ask people because who would admit to breaking the law.

So what you do is you ask the question: "Are you stealing" then you have the person flip a coin out of your view. If the coin is heads then they answer honestly, but if the coin is tails, then they always answer yes. This way the person in question has plausible deniability (I didn't steal, I said that I did because the coin came up tails). Then once you have the data you just need to divide by half and maybe tweak some other parameters, but you end up with realistic data (or so the statisticians say).

The method is called randomized response, iirc.

I think it's actually

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy

Even if it wasn't the majority that felt that way, it's interesting to me that they felt "afraid to speak out for fear of appearing insensitive". The situation is so polarizing and dramatic, we can't hope to find an optimal solution.

That was the perspective of a single Facebook employee that the reporter interviewed.

I think it's a mistake to assume that anyone who doesn't want to fact-check/remove Trump's posts has to lean right politically. There's a lot of other reasons they can have.

What if all of Trump's worst posts were removed, such that every potential voter reading them then has a less-aligned view of what he supports, and decides to vote for him, when they would not have had his posts not been selectively filtered? Just one of many possibilities

i think that the president should be able to speak to the people, and half the people want to hear it. those who don't want to hear it shouldn't block it from the others. it's jiggled into such a drama. a headache over nothing. zuck was right, about transcending the feelings, and going by principles.

Half is a vast overestimate.