however, you can see a budding feud between SV/SF tech and GC journalism. SV/SF tech will take the side of free speech (or at least some semblance of it)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40550294)

But they do not want to flirt with alienating a critical mass.... For example - do you think they're at all happy that people like me now know what Parler is , only having been made aware it exists over these last few weeks....

Not to mention compliance like you said - our org just got $2 million to do projects related to something for visibility reasons b/c of all this mess, not b/c it's something we otherwise would've done...

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40550795)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40550704)

I know conservatives don't think so. Because H1Bs, liberal/PC thought control, insipid social media, useless technological diversions, Uncle Teddy, GC and HR shitlibbery par excellance, etc. etc.

BUT is one place that thrives on competency because it is so focused on a cross between science, engineering and business success. Which is basically a proxy for everything you know and love about our current meritocracy.

We know that making it on the business battlefield is not the be all and end all of life and relentless GC causes a lot of modern social problems.

But it also inevitably sorts people by traits such as: specialized expertise, work ethnic, risk taking, initiative, confidence, analytical thoughtfulness and yes greed, ruthlessness, selfishness and self-righteousness.

You might argue with this: but I see those as the same traits that did stuff like conquer the frontier.

It may be an artificial or even amoral metric, but the pursuit of business success in technical fields as a primary personal motivation infused into the culture of SV makes it like a fortress against radical social engineering, which I think is the biggest threat to America.

In fact, the SV culture actually has the effect of making women act more like men.

The "meritocracy" is basically what we all grew up with and it's not perfect but as we stand at the abyss, now we are reminded it was good in a lot of ways. I think SV runs like a "colorblind meritocracy" that conservatives are perfectly OK with and that is why the likes of the NYTimes publish so many hit pieces always based on some "cultural" angle (on FB, Uber, Amazon, etc.).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40550519)

Add to this - recession pressures on both Universities and student loans / parental income and willingness to pay for useless degrees.....

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40550652)

Also it has the effect of drawing in lots of men who want to be women. Based!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40550679)

In the global all hands you notice the entire leadership team - CEO his team / c-suite, are all white male except for like 2 out of 10, then it becomes crystal clear what this is about for them: deflection

The last thing they want is to stand out during this movement, so they're basically forced to get on board. (Also WSJ article by wharton marketing prof explaining how much of this was about fear of the groups that do reports on C-suite representation, call companies out on causes / values they support etc). But people underestimate how much of the F500 support of this shit is because during a huge upheaval, a group of mostly all rich whites on the executive teams in these companies start to sweat that the mob could take a turn and be directed at them somehow - eg being called out for how white their leadership teams are.

They're all too happy to duck behind the protest lines and blend in with the mob joining the fight against racism. these signaling games of your anti-racism are just a game of mirrors re-directing the lasers of the mob reflecting every which way until it lands on the people who don't have the political, social, or cultural capital to play this game

Edit: Also, the week or two after all the protest mess, it had the feel of - okay we got that all over with now didn't we? back to work everyone.... As someone who's worked in bigtech for years, i'm much less pessimistic over its culture / influence than others here seem to be. The executives are supporting this nonsense out of deflection / fear of being focused on, the best way to avoid the focus of the mob is to signal your membership in this mob so strongly that you obfuscate to the point of it looking like you are the mob.... or at least are rank and file mob member... Of course escalation occurs and the signals have to get stronger and stronger to make sure you don't stand out vs your rivals / peers in any way.

I would be very suspect about inferring how much of these leadership teams personal thoughts align with this shit rather than this being guided by business decisions.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40550768)

If this focused rage has is against statues , well that's better than my house. Then there's some denial about facing the economic reality elites have caused, where it's easier to label Trump supporters as racists than face some hard truths about how much you're unliked....

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40552743)

Liberals are activing, persistently campaigning for it. Facebood needs to remove "hate", whatever that means. If they can coerce social media to interject the same bias and information engineering that they have into the mainstream media (even if just to pay lip service to liberal PC norms) then there is a real problem.

But I trust that FB can't censor all speech on the internet, so can't move the needle from the top down as much as in the mainstream media.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40550858)

in my experience the mob demanded donations to BLM and the leadership just flatout LOL no'ed them

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40551000)

It also exposes how much this is not about police / criminal justice / education reform, rather just naked power moves

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40552790)

This is absurd.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40551063)

This is terrible though

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40555865)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/03/pinterest-race-bias-black-employees/#comments-wrapper

SAN FRANCISCO — Two days after two black female ex-Pinterest public policy officials claimed in viral Twitter posts that they were underpaid, faced racist comments from their manager and were subject to retaliation, Pinterest chief executive Ben Silbermann tried to assuage outraged employees.

Ahead of a companywide gathering on Google Meet in mid-June, they had submitted more than 100 questions about the allegations. Silbermann ended the Q&A by assuring his 2,000 employees that people who work at Pinterest have “really good hearts,” according to an employee in attendance.

The image of Pinterest as a kinder, gentler social media juggernaut grew out of the site’s predominantly female user base and soft-spoken CEO — a reputation held aloft in recent years by the company’s commitments to racial and gender diversity. This made Pinterest an outlier among its generation of multibillion-dollar start-ups, where Uber’s unbridled aggression led the pack.

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But since Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, two of the three people on Pinterest’s policy team, quit together at the end of May and soon went public with their claims, that image has grown harder for Pinterest to maintain.

The two women and other former employees, who were inspired to speak after they saw the Twitter threads, say there is little accountability at Pinterest, where some subordinates were berated, women were pushed out without warning, and executives in Silbermann’s inner circle faced no consequences despite repeated complaints. The Washington Post spoke with Ozoma, Banks and five other women who formerly worked at Pinterest, and viewed copies of performance reviews, investigation findings, emails and other documents. The other women spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation from Pinterest and further harm to their careers.

“On the one hand, Pinterest was fine with me being the person interviewed on ‘All Things Considered,’ the person who’s doing press all around the world on behalf of the company for an initiative I’m leading,” Ozoma said. “And on the other hand, they just completely did not believe that I had enough sense and enough ability, both financially and otherwise,” to keep pursuing her bias claims, which she felt Pinterest had shrugged off.

Complaint alleges that Facebook is biased against black workers

Pinterest declined to comment on specific allegations. The company pointed to a note Silbermann sent employees Monday, which was included in a statement announcing that Pinterest’s board of directors hired the law firm WilmerHale to conduct an independent review of the company’s culture.

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“This is important work that will help us make Pinterest better,” Silbermann wrote, urging his staff to prioritize following up if they were contacted by the firm.

The women’s stories echo complaints across the tech world and corporate America, as companies are pressured to address systemic racism. In Silicon Valley, black employees are breaking norms by speaking out against employers and investors who failed to take their allegations seriously and often did not believe their stories of toxic bias. In recent weeks, employees have also come forward from Facebook, LinkedIn and other tech companies.

Hours after the Q&A, Silbermann sent an effusive note to his staff, apologizing for not confronting these issues. “What I’ve learned over the past few weeks is that parts of our culture are broken. Truthfully, I didn’t understand just how much work we have to do. That’s not an excuse, that’s a failure in leadership, and I’m truly sorry for letting you down,” he wrote. “It’s been devastating to hear the stories of Black employees who feel like they don’t belong at Pinterest. Because of the lack of representation in senior leadership and the board. Because they are afraid to bring concerns to their managers or HR. Because they don’t feel that they have the same opportunities to grow their careers.”

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But that was a shift from Silbermann’s early response to the women’s claims. Hours after Ozoma and Banks tweeted, he sent his staff an email disputing their claims without mentioning their names. “The investigations found that we treated these employees fairly. I know that this message is not nearly detailed enough to give everyone the clarity you may have hoped for,” he wrote in an email viewed by The Post.

Tech companies are asking their black employee groups to fix Silicon Valley’s race problem — often for free

“Unfortunately, this is not just a Pinterest problem. Every tech company I know has stories of anti-Black racism and bias,” Michelle Kim, the chief executive of Awaken, a Bay Area firm that hosts diversity workshops for tech companies, and has Pinterest for a client, said in an email.

Bias is reinforced in part because of the tech industry’s monoculture, in which white and Asian men tend to hire the people in their networks, who in turn hire from their networks, which can define what is considered acceptable workplace behavior and who is viewed as an outsider. Ozoma and Banks, however, had sterling credentials: They had worked at Google, Facebook and the White House, and studied at Oxford and Yale, upending the unspoken belief in tech that the industry’s lack of diversity is due to a lack of diverse talent.

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The idea of Pinterest as an exception to the rule was an outgrowth of Silbermann’s unassuming persona as a nontechnical transplant from Iowa who came up with the idea for online pinboards because he collected insects as a kid. The site’s earliest adopters were Mormon women and Midwestern moms. The first rule on Pinterest’s etiquette page was “Be nice.”

As Pinterest grew, it increasingly defined itself in opposition to the recklessness of growth-at-all-costs start-ups. When Pinterest was a five-year-old company already valued at $11 billion, co-founder Evan Sharp told Business Insider that Pinterest liked to hire “geniuses that are nice to each other,” rather than follow the “stereotype of a successful startup” as an “aggressive, type A place.”

That year, in 2015, Pinterest announced its strategy to increase diversity inside the company, including hiring a start-up called Paradigm to train employees and executives in unconscious bias, hiring a head of diversity and inclusion, and publicizing its hiring goals to hold itself accountable to making meaningful improvements on diversity. (Four percent of Pinterest’s workforce is black, according to the latest figures released by the company.)

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The reality inside the company was different, the former employees said. One black female former employee said she was told to stop speaking in meetings and watched her manager use the presentations she created to speak to clients instead. The woman, who was the only black person on her team, said an executive joked that she should act as “the servant” and “serve” her co-workers at a team dinner. “Everyone knew it was wrong, but nobody said anything in that moment,” said the ex-employee, who said she was too scared of retaliation to report the incident to HR.

Another black ex-employee said a top marketing executive told her that she was surprised that marketing material showing a black woman, created by the ex-employee, was successful.

Most of the women said they were made to feel incompetent after raising these issues. Most said they believed their experience inside Pinterest was unique until they heard what happened to Ozoma and Banks.

Now, nearly 25,000 people have signed a petition demanding that Pinterest pay its black employees fairly.

After Aerica Shimizu Banks pushed for holiday pay for Pinterest contractors, she says the company was more interested in investigating her actions than the concern she raised.

After Aerica Shimizu Banks pushed for holiday pay for Pinterest contractors, she says the company was more interested in investigating her actions than the concern she raised. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

Ozoma and Banks were well-respected in tech circles for spearheading improvements to Pinterest’s policies, including the decision to stop promoting content about slave plantation weddings and to block anti-vaccination content, as well as the decision to reinstate holiday pay for Pinterest contractors in December 2019.

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The content policies were frequently cited in media coverage as Pinterest prepared to go public last year, insulating Silbermann from the type of scrutiny around misinformation and racist content that greeted his social networking rivals.

Yet, behind the scenes, Ozoma and Banks were rebuked and investigated for championing those decisions around content moderation and contractor pay, they said.

They say that they were unknowingly assigned lower levels on Pinterest’s internal hierarchy for doing the same work as their manager, who is white. Ozoma received two raises and a promotion during her two-year tenure at the company, which she said was a reflection of her job performance, but the changes did not address her concern about being hired at the wrong level. Both women said their lower level in the internal hierarchy deprived them of stock options they believe are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Pinterest takes the right step toward curbing misinformation on vaccines

In June 2019, Ozoma’s name, cellphone number, email address and photo were published on extremist forums, including 8chan and 4chan, where users organize harassment campaigns after a co-worker leaked documents to a right-wing news organization. In one of the documents, Ozoma suggested looking into creating an advisory warning for content from conservative media personality Ben Shapiro, whom she described as “a white supremacist,” which angered Shapiro’s supporters.

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Ozoma said she had sought help regarding the publication of her personal details from a third-party company named Storyful, which she had worked with on health misinformation, after Pinterest’s deputy general counsel brushed off warnings from Ozoma and Banks that individual employees were likely to be targeted, according to emails viewed by The Post.

But when Pinterest’s legal department took over monitoring, the company asked Storyful to investigate whether Shapiro actually was a white supremacist. “Instead of focusing on security and making sure that we were fine and validating the concerns that we had, their concern was: Is what you said valid? Almost like [the employee] had a legitimate reason to share my personal information all over the Internet,” Ozoma said.

In an email exchange with Silbermann the day she was doxed, Ozoma shared her disappointment in Pinterest, including screen images of the harassment she received. “I’m personally concerned that when these risks were raised, we didn’t take the right steps,” the CEO wrote, vowing to ask his deputies to look into the matter. Ozoma said she received no follow-up from Silbermann.

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Banks also claims that Pinterest was more aggressive about investigating her actions than the complaints she raised. In December, Banks had advised the company to reinstate holiday pay for contractors, a position that Pinterest’s federal consultants congratulated Banks for pushing, according to an email viewed by The Post. However, under pressure from management who disagreed with the situation, the consultants, from a firm that advises Pinterest on interactions with regulators and government agencies, falsely said they had not advised that course of action, Banks alleged.

In response, Pinterest’s “business conduct” team investigated Banks’s policy decision, including searching through an employee’s cellphone to try to find WhatsApp and Facebook messages with Ozoma or Banks, and then accidentally forwarded the screen images to Banks, according to emails viewed by The Post. Pinterest never informed Banks of the outcome of the investigation, she said.

Both women say they hoped to resolve their disputes internally. Even after they filed documents in 2019 with California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing indicating their intent to sue, Pinterest still had the same manager they had been complaining about for months conduct their reviews.

Black tech founders say venture capital needs to move past ‘diversity theater’

When the women posted parts of their story on Twitter, the uproar was immediate. Public policy executives from Facebook and Google praised their skills and accomplishments. Color of Change, an advocacy group that had worked with the women on restricting marketing for plantation weddings before they quit, posted a statement saying Pinterest’s “hypocrisy is glaring,” considering statements the company made in support of Black Lives Matter.

Responding to internal and external pressure, Pinterest took a page from Uber, whose chief executive Travis Kalanick hired former attorney general Eric Holder to investigate the company’s culture after allegations of rampant sexism.

“I’m not sure that they remember Kalanick ended up stepping down,” Ozoma said.

This story has been updated to reflect that Pinterest is one of Awaken’s clients.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40551003)

Translation: we felt the friction of a competitive environment....

Imagine having a shit culture - where the family unit / fathers are nearly nonexistent, verbal skills are terrible, gangster culture is idolized, criminality is justified, there's a culture of resisting arrest, authority isn't respected, and so on. Now imagine having to navigate through life and interact with American institutions - schools, retail stores, criminal justice system etc, and all the cultural frictions that are inevitable. There's also a political machine reliant on your dependency that tells you any friction you experience in the world, every cop who's an asshole, customer experience agent that makes a rude comment, every teacher who criticizes you, this is all because this country isn't for people who look like you it's all rigged against you and only we can help. Any friction is the fault of whites...

Think this may cause a few problems?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4576974&forum_id=2#40552848)