Meta kills diversity programs, claiming DEI has become “too charged”

Meta claims it will find other ways to hire employees from different backgrounds.

See full article...

 

[JoHBE]

The first Liquid Spine was spotted in the wild , this week.

 

[Tea_and_Coffee]

Just imagine if people would just stop supporting companies like Meta, or any other corporation owned and run by the billionaire sociopaths.

We should do that and, as someone in a country without guns, I am utterly shocked that the billionaires and their fascist supporters remain so undecidedly bereft of bullets. I can see that changing with the rising nastiness and calling open season on minorities.

And, those that are stridently right-wing and those that support fascism and corporatism will only have themselves to blame.

 

[Frodo Douchebaggins]

We should do that and, as someone in a country without guns, I am utterly shocked that the billionaires and their fascist supporters remain so undecidedly bereft of bullets. I can see that changing with the rising nastiness and calling open season on minorities.

And, those that are stridently right-wing and those that support fascism and corporatism will only have themselves to blame.

The irony is that a shocking amount of the "we must have guns to protect us from tyranny" people chose to ally themselves with the rising tyrants.

 

[Sajuuk]

If DEI is run the way so many people say it is, why would being a "DEI hire" be derogatory? Maybe people have noticed certain patterns for companies with DEI hiring policies.

The vast majority of companies have DEI policies of some sort, including (until recently, obviously) the very richest companies in the world. So, uh, what's the pattern exactly?

 

[DarthSlack]

If DEI is run the way so many people say it is, why would being a "DEI hire" be derogatory? Maybe people have noticed certain patterns for companies with DEI hiring policies.

No, people have assumed certain patterns for companies with DEI hiring practices. Just like you're seeing in this thread. DEI means that you'd no longer be hired for the sole reason of being a white male and it turns out there's a lot of people that find that loss of privilege to be threatening, so they're spreading lies about what DEI is. Lies that claim that DEI is about racial quotas.

That's why "DEI hire" is derogatory. The only time you see that used is when racists are trying to smear someone and insinuate that they were hired exclusively for the color of their skin. It's exactly why one of the first right-wing insults hurled at Kamala Harris was that she was a DEI hire.

 

[passivesmoking]

Nobody should be surprised.

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power -
Benito Mussolini

I'm glad the the likes of SNW, Lower Decks, and Prodigy are going for a generally optimistic tone. I really need some optimism into which I can escape from this current absolute shit-show. Bring on the "no-money socialist utopia thing", please!

 

[passivesmoking]

Don't worry- they're going to pull a Tesla and fire all their American workers while asking for H1B slots to replace them

Yeah, remember that "great replacement conspiracy" that all the Trumpists thought the left were trying to inflict?

Funny thing...

 

[holmes6]

I was feeling a tiny bit better about Zuck with his love for BBQ sauce and Llama being somewhat more open than other ai models, but he's back to a steep downward trajectory in my mind with the recent cowardly acts.

 

[Sajuuk]

The irony is that a shocking amount of the "we must have guns to protect us from tyranny" people chose to ally themselves with the rising tyrants.

That's not ironic at all. The US created the 2nd amendment so they could raise militias to kill indigenous peoples and take their stuff. Nazi Germany relaxed gun rights for real Germans so they could...kill undesirables and take their stuff.

 

[mikeschr]

I know MANY conservatives. And almost to a person they LOVE the "meritocracy" dog whistle, along with the "white men are discriminated against". I could go on, but yeah, I'm QUITE familiar with "conservative" racist talking points (when the black guys aren't around, that is)

I'm an older white guy, but not straight and definitely not racist or conservative.
When I go to certain parts of the country and go to a bar or other public place and people start talking to me assuming I'm one of them, I get to hear all their unfiltered opinions until I have the chance to tell them I'm not interested in hearing them.
As a group, these people are as terrible as everyone thinks they are.

 

[hanharal]

You know this is code for “hiring exclusively white men,” right?

No, they'll also hire Asian men on H1B visas.

 

[Frodo Douchebaggins]

That's not ironic at all. The US created the 2nd amendment so they could raise militias to kill indigenous peoples and take their stuff. Nazi Germany relaxed gun rights for real Germans so they could...kill undesirables and take their stuff.

so really the irony is that I accepted the idea of the second amendment for the slogan, not the product.

 

[passivesmoking]

If DEI is run the way so many people say it is, why would being a "DEI hire" be derogatory?

Because America is inherently sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic and exclusionary?

 

[aapis]

BDS america.

 

[superstition2]

Just imagine if people would just stop supporting companies like Meta, or any other corporation owned and run by the billionaire sociopaths.

The people building flaming moats and end times shelters (which have reportedly replaced getting a larger and larger yacht as the yardstick for elite standing) would have to find other work, such as trying to preserve the recently reported 25% of freshwater species on the verge of extinction, thanks to such "success." I need to have a chat with Stephen King, suggesting a story about billionaires using flaming moats to kill endangered species for sport.

 

[omarsidd]

Because white-is-right for corporate America...smdh.

The maga-nazi assault on diversity has been building up for at least the last year, starting with false reports that companies with DEI policies were showing worse year-over-year returns, and trying to attach conspiracy theories blaming DEI to everything from Boeing's failure to hurricane response (thanks Putin and and his American stooges for spreading the idiocy).

Honestly we should have been aggressively countering it all along. You don't get anywhere with nazis by validating their ideas. Zuck might be just another sycophant oligarch worthy of scorn, but he's hardly the only part of the business landscape toeing the maga line.

 

[KingStudMuffin]

Don't worry- they're going to pull a Tesla and fire all their American workers while asking for H1B slots to replace them

Disney did it first!

 

[hanharal]

This IS best for shareholders because it results in better company performance.

OK, but I want Meta shareholders to suffer. If it takes hiring WASPs to do it, so be it.

 

[Psyborgue]

I was expecting the billionaire class to fall in line, but it's honestly kind of scary just how quickly they're doing it.

With Hitler it took less than two months.

"Do not obey in advance." -Timothy Snyder

If they read it, they didn’t care. Or they think there is no chance of successful disobedience, which might be true but this is still indefensible.

 

[Psyborgue]

Trump and Elon coming out in support H1B before distracting us with the Greenland nonsense should be enough info for everyone to understand exactly who the H1B program benefits.

My husband and I had this debate the other night. Is this just regular stupid or are they clever enough to use it as a distraction, because it's pretty distracting clickbait fodder.

 

[fancysunrise]

NBC has reported that Facebook now will allow people to post that homosexuality is mental illness, misinformation that is extremely toxic. Check out the language that Meta provided as the explanation if you want to become very sickened.

The gay = crazy myth was dispelled in 1956 by Dr. Evelyn Hooker, who decided to actually investigate the matter for the first time instead of doing what everyone else had done which is use "common sense" (wild bigoted assumption based on historical socialization). One of the experts who reviewed the data she gathered was so convinced of his "common sense" bigotry that he admitted later that he reviewed the data completely two times because he couldn't accept that gay people aren't crazy. At least he had the integrity to not only come out in favor of the facts but admitted his bigotry as a teachable moment. Despite that, it took the APA until the 70s to finally recognize the science. Zealots continue to falsely claim that the decision to remove homosexuality from the DSM was done primarily due to political pressure.

NPR even gave one of those guys' daughters (Spitzer) something like 22–27 minutes (I don't recall the exact number of minutes) during the Bush W administration to try to convince the public of this lie. It took her 15 minutes before she got to the name Hooker (and her pathetic attempt to handwaive the science). According to this particular mythology, poor social scientists like her father Spitzer were so bullied by horrible gay activists that they simply had no choice but to turn their backs on scientific truth. What a crock... thanks NPR. Did NPR follow that piece with a rebuttal or even a sentence or two about the actual facts? Nope. I can only guess that, like Zuckerberg, there was a decision to try to curry favor with the administration.

Facebook will hold "your" account hostage for 30 days if you try to delete it to protest this corporate hate for profit (or for any other reason, such as not wanting to help Zuckerberg build his flaming moat).

I hope that Ars will cover this. It's closely related to the DEI matter, of course — but it's certainly noteworthy enough to be an additional article. The words provided by Meta as explanation/justification are truly breathtaking in their odiousness and viciousness.

Bit of a tangent - To be fair to the APA, the DSM is largely a political/social construct in the first place. That is, it's partly about norms and partly about legal and quasi-medical processes (what to tell a court, how to write a grant application, and, most importantly, how to bill insurance) and not so much about anything valid in the sense other fields approach science. To quote a former head of the National Institute of Mental Health in the US about a decade ago (before superficial reactions in public forums inevitably misunderstand the above and appeal to some "authority" or trope they see on TV like "chemical imbalances" or a general defensiveness) - “The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been ‘reliability’—each edition has ensured that clinicians used the same terms the same ways ... The weakness is its lack of validity.”

The point is that the inclusion of most gender related stuff in the DSM, as popularly referenced, was/is political, as was its removal. People will continue to rely on it as something to validate what they want to do - either in treatment or in attempting to communicate about mental health or in justifying unwanted or harmful or ineffective measures and treatment or confinement or ostracism or laws or in writing narratives about individuals or events or in outright targeting perceived "undesirables". On its own, the DSM doesn't really mean anything. Don't tell many practicing clinicians though...

 

[cleek]

oh look, it does matter who is in the WH.

 

[wallinbl]

The hiring process is too late to address the problem of the birth lottery though. By that point you're stuck with candidates who either do or do not have the required skills. Fixing the birth lottery problem would need to be done at something closer to elementary school age to make sure people have a more even starting condition.

The same people that tout the ”meritocracy” over things like DEI also oppose any initiatives to level the playing field in schools, from elementary on through college.

They don’t want it fixed because they benefit from it being like that.

 

[evanTO]

Back in 2020, a writer named Michael B. Tager wrote a few tweets about his time at a dive bar in his native Baltimore.


While he was enjoying an after work beer he noticed the bartender booting out a seemingly quiet patron. This patron was wearing a jacket covered in Nazi symbolism.


When Tager asked about why he booted the guy, the bartender, a seasoned pro, said that if you let one Nazi in, slowly they replace the clientele.


“You have to nip it in the bud immediately,” he said, as Trager paraphrased. “These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after a while, they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.”

“And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh *****, this is a Nazi bar now,” he continued. ”And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.”

Zuckerberg isn't just letting the Nazi's in, he is now advertising for them.

I'm out!

 

[Curiosus Novitius]

Why is Zuck going for the Sherman Fangsworth look?

 

[choco bo]

Since color/gender/religion/nationality are generally not relevant to one's job duties, choosing to hire people based on those attributes strikes me as no more logical than declining to hire someone based on those attributes.

If I were a shareholder, I'd want them to focus on hiring the most qualified candidates, even if they're striped aliens from a species with three genders.

Right.

In other words, you don't have a slightest clue what DEI is. Your last sentence is an absolute marvel (of irony).

 

[Fabermetrics]

My husband and I had this debate the other night. Is this just regular stupid or are they clever enough to use it as a distraction, because it's pretty distracting clickbait fodder.

I dont think Trump or Elon are smart enough to come up with it but Im sure someone in their orbit is smart enough to signal the “base needs a distraction” lever.
and the media fell for it hook line and sinker.
Imagine the damage it would do to Trump if the media kept driving home how he and Elon are in support of importing “the evil brown people” as H1Bs and then showed the pay disparity between those workers and Americans.
Instead we now have them cheering “owning the libs” by calling to invade Panama.
The media focuses on how trump pisses off the left because it gets both sides to click, when they should be pointing out how stands against everything he claims to support. A highlight reel of him calling for war with Iran so Americans can die for Israel would have damaged his election chances far more than any reel highlighting him claiming immigrants eat dogs.

 

[barich]

I'm an older white guy, but not straight and definitely not racist or conservative.
When I go to certain parts of the country and go to a bar or other public place and people start talking to me assuming I'm one of them, I get to hear all their unfiltered opinions until I have the chance to tell them I'm not interested in hearing them.
As a group, these people are as terrible as everyone thinks they are.

I'm a younger (well, depending on your definition) not-straight white guy, and I've had similar experiences. People saying the most horrific things to me because they just assume I'll agree. And often it's in a business context where I have difficulty pushing back.

 

[Psyborgue]

I dont think Trump or Elon are smart enough to come up with it but Im sure someone in their orbit is smart enough to signal the “base needs a distraction” lever.
and the media fell for it hook line and sinker.

Sure, there's that. But it's also possible it's just stupid. I mean this is a guy who comes up with some new attention seeking stupid outrage every single day.

I'm not sure how much actual planning there is to Trump's actions. He's just playing it by ear. If you can whisper into it, you might be able to change the topic of stupid, but it's going to be stupid and distracting no matter what.

 

[mpfaff]

If DEI is run the way so many people say it is, why would being a "DEI hire" be derogatory? Maybe people have noticed certain patterns for companies with DEI hiring policies.

Many people also believe in a hierarchy of races, but I don't see why we need to care what they think

 

[ncc1701c]

I think that Zuck has always been a tool. The DEI efforts were because of political pressure, societal pressure, the writing on the wall. Now the pendulum swings back...

I was shocked in 2016.
I was relieved in 2020.
I was disheartened but hopeful in 2022.
I now wish I had the ability to leave the country.

 

[Litazia]

This is such a clumsy argument ! Because you actually mean that black and non white people are naturally less qualified than white people.

Nope.

Meritocracy is a nice idea in theory, but it depends on who gets to define merit. And for a group of people who "traditionally" had job experience and education (because they kept other people from getting educated or good paying jobs), there's a certain motivation to make sure only certain people get to maintain that merit. Hence people of certain groups not getting the same high-paying jobs, or getting them but being paid less and with fewer chances for advancement. Or those people just not getting hired at all, and then whining about the lack of qualified candidates.

Meritocracy in practice is a Jim Crow literacy test. Meritocracy in practice is saying "I'd vote for a woman for president, just not <insert name of prospective female candidate here>." Meritocracy in practice is having a bunch of equally qualified candidates, and then deciding to hire for "culture fit" (i.e. drinking buddy).

 

[superstition2]

I need to have a chat with Stephen King, suggesting a story about billionaires using flaming moats to kill endangered species for sport.

The Washington Post would surely then run George Will, who rails against the Endangered Species Act (something Trump & Co will soon burn to the ground, with the helping hand of the Supreme Court if it ends up in their hat — likely as overkill as Trump already, in all caps, shouted that he's going to use executive power to give the biosphere away completely to anyone who can muster a paltry 1.5 billion or whatever the figure was). Will would react to this tale by suggesting that the only species that is endangered is the scholarly American conservative, and not solely due to DEI in HR departments.

Did anyone actually read his article pissing on Jimmy Carter, posted immediately after he died? It was titled something like Jimmy Carter — The Man Who Made Reagan Necessary. I couldn't be bothered. Even my morbid curiosity about how low Pulitzer winners can stoop ran out after his attack of the cave spiders piece.

Let's create a Nude Emperor's prize to award to all of the people, like George Will, who are making "strategic" insanity great again. My first nominee is Mark Zuckerberg. Or, perhaps we should name the prize after Dr. Leaded Gasoline (Midgley), a completely perfect encapsulation of the folly of so-called capitalism and its "profit."

This extremely poisonous compound that I know is extremely poisonous... Well... I'll just wash my hands in it to demonstrate its safety to the public and my safety to my corporate overlords (right along side the Ph.d from Harvard who said radium is absolutely safe for those girls to put into their mouths and the Johns Hopkins black lung expert who never found cases of black lung).

When those 25% of freshwater species go extinct, The George Wills of the world will have articles at the ready to try to jettison the remaining 75. As a gay person, I'm not feeling particularly fresh... a bit like the manatees in Florida after yet another run-in with showboating.

Midgley had found that tellurium, which is much less toxic than lead, also stopped engine knock. However, it had an odor and it was decided that the public (I mean the insane corporate overlords) would be better off if the poisoning could happen silently.

 

[DaVuVuZeLa]

I haven't used Facebook in forever. So last night, I finally said, "fuck it" and deleted my profile.

I encourage others to do the same.

Moving to signal is next.