News You Can Use: 3/28/2018

  • Facebook asks users: should we allow men to ask teenagers for images?

    On Sunday, the social network ran a survey for some users asking how they thought the company should handle grooming behaviour. “There are a wide range of topics and behaviours that appear on Facebook,” one question began. “In thinking about an ideal world where you could set Facebook’s policies, how would you handle the following: a private message in which an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures.”

    The options available to respondents ranged from “this content should not be allowed on Facebook, and no one should be able to see it” to “this content should be allowed on Facebook, and I would not mind seeing it”.
    **
    In neither survey question did Facebook allow users to indicate that law enforcement or child protection should be involved in the situation: the strictest option allowed involved turning to the social network as arbiter.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/05/facebook-men-children-sexual-images
    I called out Facebook on SourceCast 106 for “outsourcing” policy to users instead of doing it themselves. This survey is even worse. Facebook needs to decide what kind of community it wants to be. Users will come and go as a result. Also – Facebook should not be trying to attract children and teens, so this line of question is problematic on a whole other level.

  • For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.

    On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don’t just post stories — they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.

    There’s nothing wrong with getting lots of shades of opinion. And reading just the paper can be a lonely experience; there were many times I felt in the dark about what the online hordes thought about the news.

    Still, the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd — to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself — that makes us susceptible to misinformation.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/technology/two-months-news-newspapers.html

  • What Happens In One Lifetime?
  • Another new survey underscores that skilled workers can pretty much live wherever they want

    According to feedback from more than 1,005 workforce hiring decision-makers conducted on Upwork’s behalf by the company Inavaro, skilled workers can pretty much live wherever they want and employers will come to them. The reason: companies say they are struggling to find talent, with the average position open for 36 days and some engineering jobs vacant for up to 45 days.

    In fact, though the majority of organizations surveyed — 57 percent — don’t support a work-from-home policy, those that do say they’ve become increasingly inclusive of people who work outside the office, and five times as many hiring managers expect more of their team to work remotely in the next decade than expect less. Put simply, they say the most skilled person for the job outweighs that person’s ability to work in the same location as the rest of the team.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/09/another-new-survey-underscores-that-skilled-workers-can-pretty-much-live-wherever-they-want/?ncid=rss

  • United Airlines’ Bonus Lottery Was Doomed to Fail. Don’t Make the Same Mistake With Your Team.

    If you want to know what your employers need or want, try asking them what they’d change about the culture of your workplace. I doubt the answer will be, “We need a Ping-Pong table” or, “I’d love to have my name picked out of a hat for a bonus” but instead, “I don’t understand what I need to do to get promoted or a raise,” “I’d love to be able to attend a conference to learn more about our industry” or, “I would love a mentor who could help guide me.”

    If your employees want to play the lottery, they have that option outside of work. Adults don’t want to play games at work, and United Arilines found that out the hard way. We don’t need toys; we want job satisfaction. And most importantly, employees want predictability.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/309984

Photo: Joshua Earle