What's with wrapping this up in such rhetoric? To make it sound smarter or "more right"? If the conclusion is no such ethical binding exists, say that. This comes off like it was written by a sophomore studying physics just completed their mandatory philosophy course.
This feels like a whole lot of pointless justification. "Oh, the world is making me feel bad about something. Well, screw you world! I don't have to, because you're not a real law!" for lack of a better way to describe it right now.
FWIW, The Washington Post is owned by Amazon/Jeff Bezos. Not to say they can not biased, but I doubt as an organization, they carry as much bias against tech for gutting their business model.
Clearly a biased article. "Opinion" doesn't mean you can just let in all you biases.
But is there any truth to this -
> "This is a toxic arrangement. The tactic shields tech companies from accountability. It allows giants like Amazon and Tesla an opportunity to transmit their preferred message, free of risk, in the voice of a given publication. "
>"If the company later reverses course or modifies its position, the egg is on the reporter’s face, not the company’s. "
You can simply attack back, we were lied to by a representative “on background” about this case, if this is a tacit being used.
But I suspect it's in the Opinion piece authors head. Evidence? The Authors personal stories are not this.
I stopped reading after the first paragraph, couldn't get past the obvious slant from the authors.
Genuinely curious, did EFF write a similar article when Bezos bought the WP? (I searched but couldn't find anything). I hope so because otherwise this is very hypocritical. I'd be glad to be wrong on this but I suspect I'm not.
The first chunk of that article is here[1]; worth deciding for yourself if you think this qualifies as speaking for the company or not. As you say, this may or may not be the specific objection.
> "The original headline of the piece was itself an unsubtle threat: “As a CEO, I want my employees to understand the risks of not returning to work in the office.” (Over email, Washington Post Opinion editor Fred Hiatt told me that Merrill did not write the headline. “I asked our team to change it early this morning to something I thought better captured the piece,” he said.)"
As an aside, this unethical practice in the media irks me. It's really despicable for the Washington Post to write a headline from the perspective of the CEO, which the CEO never said themselves.
Does anyone know of any good non-partisan orgs that attempt to quantify and track these unethical practices across the media landscape?
HN title: Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’
My thoughts after reading the title: "Oh good, I always thought Amazon was scummy and lacked integrity, but credit where credit is due, they did good here.
.
The actual article's title and body: Amazon deletes their own job listings for union-busters, as a PR response due to public outcry.
Wow, this is a really terribly-written article. You'd imagine a company that had been around for 20 years would have a sense of professionalism or something. When someone is able to pinpoint your exact political alignment and the news outlets you read from a corporate blog post, you're probably doing something wrong.
Then again, the guy links to his book (with a subtitle of "Protect Yourself from Deplatform Attacks, Cancel-Culture and other Online Disasters" no less) at the end of the post, so this was probably intentional.
I share more or less the same political views as him, but this is ridiculous.
> How can these benign, universally loved innovators be stopped from turning into evil, soulless corporate behemoths? Break up companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, (...) Or perhaps recognize them as utilities (...) Neither makes sense in most cases.
In fact they advocate for c):
Tech giants should be treated as classical business. Amazon like a retailer, Uber like a taxi comp, Airbnb like an hotel brand, …
For Facebook they talk more about the fact if it was treated as a media company they should keep track of who is running ads and follow regulations on political ads.
The quote at the end, "I don’t want fucking activism from a sweatshop monopoly." Would have been sufficient and far more effective than the politicizing title and long winded article.
Also, I don't want fucking politics from a tech news site.
Article title is "Amazon expands layoffs from 10,000 to 18,000 jobs as stock price keeps falling". That's not the same as "blaming the stock price". The subhead is "CEO blames 'uncertain economy' and Amazon's rapid hiring", which is more reasonable.
It would be odd to blame the layoffs on stock price, since the stock price doesn't affect operations. A CEO might say it anyway, to deflect blame from themselves, but that's not what the article says. Blaming the economy as a whole, however, is at least not actively wrong.
I read the first section and it doesn't seem to support your claim. In particular, it claims they have a mandate to protect consumers and links to another wiki entry on that topic. Within that wiki entry protection against misleading statements is mentioned as an aspect of protection of consumers. This seems to refute your claim of overreach, because in the blog post related to guidance to companies the tone which is consistently struck again and again is that companies should not make misleading statements about AI capabilities. This is complete alignment with their mandate according to the link which you claimed was a decent summary. It also in alignment with the rest of the wiki, which covers topics like false advertising.
> Blog posts making casual threats about AI claims is a long way from appropriate. There are places for formality, and the law is one of them.
The use of sequences of characters in digital spaces for the purposes of communication is not inherently inappropriate. This sequence of characters is on guidance for companies and requests they do not lie or make false claims about capabilities. This relates to their mandate, because they have a mandate to protect consumers from misleading statements. For example, lies about capabilities or false statements about capabilities made unknowingly under the presumption that models were more effective than they are.
> There are serious people quitting the FTC over current leadership, claiming they engaged in behavior that is wildly overstepping their legal authority.
Can you link to one of these people who are so serious they have quit making the claim that the FTC shouldn't provide guidance to companies via their government website at a URL under https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance for the purpose of discouraging companies from misleading consumers regarding the capabilities of their AI models?
The HN title is currently "Zuckerberg Proposes Plan for Regulatory Capture"
The axios title is currently "Zuckerberg suggests how to tweak tech's liability shield".
I happen to agree with the opinion expressed in the editorialization, but that's not where those opinions belong; the headline should be retained and the opinion expressed in a comment.
Article claims:
- Google should canonized (stock market as implied canon?)
- Anti-trust legislation is merely political whimsy
- Corporations don't have inherent structural problems, all problems are caused by individuals
Can we keep this shallow business major ideology crap off of HN? It is simplistic corporate knob slobbing. I expect a more empirical stance in this community.
> Why did Boeing buy McDonnell-Douglas? Because the airplane manufacturing industry is consolidating, and Boeing is pursuing profit at the expense of human lives.
Was it really necessary to add the second part to explain why the merger occured? 'industry is consolidating' seems reason enough. The mixing of explanation with moralism in every sentence is grating. Put the moralism and ethics in it's own paragraph so we can understand the explanation first. If it's all mixed up, then I have to evaluate every claim in the article as if it might be ethical statements by the author instead of focusing on understanding first, and then considering the ethical outcome after having attained the understanding.
That article is long on fanciful rhetoric and short on actual facts and quotes. I’m still not entirely sure this is not just native advertising and wrapped front covers - common pieces in the free San Francisco paper here.
I do feel like there’s a lot of “gotcha” kind of writing in this article - their prerogative - but I can’t help wonder if it’s just a coordinated attempt to attack American businesses.
I also think there’s a presumption of goodwill for opendemocracy, and a presumption of ill will to the standard. What if things were completely opposite?
The reason I run this thought experiment - remember the last time you read a newspaper article about an area of industry you’re very familiar with, and how incorrect and wrong it was? Why would you trust the veracity of every other article instead?
A newly-public EEOC ruling resulting from investigative journalism around explicitly discriminatory hiring practices facilitated (and profited from) by one of the more morally-bankrupt technology companies of our time is announced, and your gripe is the journalists aren’t giving Facebook enough credit?
A lot of discrimination happened while Facebook hadn’t fixed the problem. Discrimination which Facebook profited from. Facebook decided to enter the job, credit and real estate ad markets, but didn’t care enough to think through the details.
Recent history has been Facebook et al being brazenly lawless, making money from it, and then getting away with a slap on the wrist. The government starting to show teeth is news, and stating their confirmed finding is a fair headline.
> the IG said "we believe the evidence we received showed that the DoD personnel who evaluated proposals and made the source-selection awarding Microsoft the JEDI Cloud contract were not pressured about their decision on the award of the contract by any DoD leaders more senior to them, who may have communicated with the White House."
As with most articles, the juicy, salacious lines are at the beginning but the real details are 10 paragraphs in.
Based on the following paragraphs, the IG did find evidence of ethical misconduct by Amazon as they hired the DOD guy who helped form the JEDI program.
> Dissent Erupts at Facebook Over Hands-Off Stance on Political Ads
From the article:
> More than 250 employees have signed the message
Facebook has >35,000 employees. 250 signees is <0.7% of employees. Hardly seems like an "eruption" of dissent.
The article does acknowledge this:
> While the number of signatures on the letter was a fraction of Facebook’s 35,000-plus work force...
So why use such a misleading title? "A tiny fraction of company employees does not like company policies" is a statement you can make about every sizable company.
This feels like a whole lot of pointless justification. "Oh, the world is making me feel bad about something. Well, screw you world! I don't have to, because you're not a real law!" for lack of a better way to describe it right now.
FWIW, The Washington Post is owned by Amazon/Jeff Bezos. Not to say they can not biased, but I doubt as an organization, they carry as much bias against tech for gutting their business model.
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