"The big myth Facebook needs everyone to believe"

"observers remain deeply skeptical of Facebook’s claims that it is somehow value-neutral or globally inclusive, or that its guiding principles are solely “respect” and “safety.” There’s no doubt, said Tarleton Gillespie, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in New England, that the company advances a specific moral framework — one that is less of the world than of the United States, and less of the United States than of Silicon Valley.

If you study Facebook’s community standards, going back to the long-forgotten time when users voted on a version of them, the site has always erred on the side of radical free speech, corporate opaqueness and a certain American prudishness: Its values are those of the early Web, moderated by capitalist conservatism.

The values that Facebook articulates are not always the ones it enforces."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/01/28/the-big-myth-facebook-needs-everyone-to-believe/

And, honestly, I don't know if it's possible for Facebook-the-culture to see this. Having grown up in that area, and spent most of my life surrounded by people geographically of that culture or part of the culture because of their alignment to business/computer science/etc... I know the inflated sense of one's judgment that comes with being part of that world: "We are global, diverse, knowledgeable, focused on technology - which is social-neutral, right, how can metal and 1s and 0s have any kind of social baggage? If it mattered, we would have been required to take more humanities courses in undergrad, right, and our products are totally functional without that knowledge, so - everyone else is reacting wrong."

We've also been taught that the majority of the action of having a value is to declare that you have that value, and maybe spend a few minutes writing it down somewhere. It confuses me so much whenever a company has some problem with sexism or racism or whatever and then releases a statement like "We at XYZ are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workspace!". And that's taken as some sort of evidence that everything is okay...

And then, if you grow up seeing that kind of stuff, you start to think that you can be good at social stuff just by declaring that you want to be good at it; that that's it, and if anyone accuses you of not being good at it, they are saying something false and to prove them wrong you just declare again.