Facebook makes a Slack competitor called "Facebook Workplace," with marquee customers like the government of Singapore, Walmart, Discovery Communications, Starbucks, and Campbell Soup Corporation.
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On Wednesday, the company demonstrated a new suite of features for Workplace, including the ability to censor certain words or topics from the system. The example they chose? "Unionize."
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The company took the presentation down the next day and told @lhfang that "this example was poorly chosen and should never have been used. The feature was only in early development and we’ve pulled any plans to roll it out while we think through next steps."
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As Fang points out, Facebook has a curious approach to content moderation, maintaining that it cannot remove Donald Trump's calls for protesters to be shot, while equipping employers with tools to prevent employees from discussing collective bargaining.
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This is particularly salient in an age of telework, where employees may no longer be gathering face to face (and indeed, many tech workplaces are proposing to continue telework after the pandemic is over).
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In the time of the company town, firms used the pretense that they owned the houses workers slept in and the streets they walked to work as an excuse to ban labor organizing, saying that these activities were banned by the owners of this private property.
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We've inverted this in the 21st century, where your employer can force you to convert your private home into a branch office of their company, and then order you to conduct yourself as though you were on their property.
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Such an obviously inequitable demand won't work on its own: it needs an enforcement mechanism. Your employer isn't ready to send Pinkertons with fixed bayonets to your spare room (yet), but Facebook, as ever, is ready to be the robopinkerton, omnipresent and ever-vigilant.
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