FACEBOOK PITCHED NEW TOOL ALLOWING EMPLOYERS TO SUPPRESS WORDS LIKE "UNIONIZE" IN WORKPLACE CHAT PRO

[douglas9]

DURING AN internal presentation at Facebook on Wednesday, the company debuted features for Facebook Workplace, an intranet-style chat and office collaboration product similar to Slack.

On Facebook Workplace, employees see a stream of content similar to a news feed, with automatically generated trending topics based on what people are posting about. One of the new tools debuted by Facebook allows administrators to remove and block certain trending topics among employees.

The presentation discussed the “benefits” of “content control.” And it offered one example of a topic employers might find it useful to blacklist: the word “unionize.”

Facebook Workplace is currently used by major employers such as Walmart, which is notorious for its active efforts to suppress labor organizing. The application is also used by the Singapore government, Discovery Communications, Starbucks, and Campbell Soup Corporation.

The suggestion that Facebook is actively building tools designed to suppress labor organizing quickly caused a stir at the Menlo Park, California-based company. Facebook employees sparked a flurry of posts denouncing the feature, with several commenting in disbelief that the company would overtly pitch “unionize” as a topic to be blacklisted.

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/11/facebook-workplace-unionize/

[2naSalit]

1. K&R for visibility.

[Newest Reality]

2. WARNING: Thought Crime!

Unionize = Ungood!

Censorship is free speech!

- Minitrue

[TalenaGor]

3. well it would be illegal for any employer to actually use the tool

Wonder if that came up in conversation

But an employer cannot take any actions that would prevent people from unionizing if they wanted to

[SheltieLover]

4. 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

I will never comprehend why people use fb. It is a pos, imo.

[secondwind]

5. Time to get off FB folks!!!!

[BadgerMom]

7. No kidding.

The idea that you can control your own experience doesn’t acknowledge the fact that this sort of thing is going on beyond your purview. Using it is supporting it. Break the ghastly habit.

[not fooled]

6. Facebook employees

"Shocked, shocked" that fuckerberg's promoting anti-worker measures.

[bucolic_frolic]

8. Economist Alfred E. Kahn knew

We won't talk about recession. We'll call it a banana.

[Karadeniz]

9. Yucky Zucky really is unamerican.

[NurseJackie]

10. Alternate spellings will crop up faster than the variation spellings for V1agra and Calis..

... to sneak past the spam filters and facebook's chat filters.

There must be thousands of different variations: onionize, unionise, unoinize, unioniz, un10n1z3, nuionize, unionyze, yoon-yun-ice.

[ancianita]

11. Nice.

It's Zuck's sandbox. Let's see if he can catch the clever ones.

[AllyCat]

12. Dropped FB 2 weeks ago.

Don’t miss it. Zuck is an anti-democracy shill