"...Both of these developments come at a time when Big Tech companies, from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube and Google, have established a pattern of arbitrarily silencing voices – overwhelming conservative voices – with whom they disagree...."

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/...y-is-wrong

This thread is not so much about Cruz's topic, which is whether twitter is right about banning political ads, but about why this has become such an issue.

Why is hi-tech overwhelmingly liberal? In the South, its hard to find a non-Black accountant or engineer who is not conservative. But hi-tech is overwhelmingly liberal.

I've got three theories:
1) Its very free wheeling, which lends itself to libertarians. Many libertarians have been turned off by Republican emphasis on old fashioned views on social issues.
2) Tech leaders are the ultimate in robber barons, using and abusing their employees, putting many on contract status. While many employees do very well, the leaders become richer than Rockefeller. Many other employees struggle in the high cost locales that hi-tech businesses gather. So like the labor movement in the 1880s, hi-tech workers are turning left. Meanwhile the leaders are so rich, left/right doesn't matter, as long as they continue to get favorable regulatory environments.
3) Hi-tech workers are not liberal. Only those willing to work in California. And that is where the biggest tech companies are. So tech workers in non-Silicon Valley corporate computer departments are not so liberal, but the leadership of the tech industry is.

(11-01-2019 11:24 AM)bullet Wrote:  "...Both of these developments come at a time when Big Tech companies, from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube and Google, have established a pattern of arbitrarily silencing voices – overwhelming conservative voices – with whom they disagree...."

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/...y-is-wrong

This thread is not so much about Cruz's topic, which is whether twitter is right about banning political ads, but about why this has become such an issue.

Why is hi-tech overwhelmingly liberal? In the South, its hard to find a non-Black accountant or engineer who is not conservative. But hi-tech is overwhelmingly liberal.

I've got three theories:
1) Its very free wheeling, which lends itself to libertarians. Many libertarians have been turned off by Republican emphasis on old fashioned views on social issues.
2) Tech leaders are the ultimate in robber barons, using and abusing their employees, putting many on contract status. While many employees do very well, the leaders become richer than Rockefeller. Many other employees struggle in the high cost locales that hi-tech businesses gather. So like the labor movement in the 1880s, hi-tech workers are turning left. Meanwhile the leaders are so rich, left/right doesn't matter, as long as they continue to get favorable regulatory environments.
3) Hi-tech workers are not liberal. Only those willing to work in California. And that is where the biggest tech companies are. So tech workers in non-Silicon Valley corporate computer departments are not so liberal, but the leadership of the tech industry is.

I think #2 is the greater factor here than 1 and 3 which I see as sidelines attributable to the second, which represents profit.

The Tech Companies see great power in having the "world" use their products, rather than just the U.S.. The see no benefit to trade restrictions based on National Security (therefore they are globalists by nature), they don't like the interference that religion creates for their desires to sell to Hindu, Muslim, Buddhists, and other global religions so they want to stay away from religion altogether which plays into the agenda of the LGBTQ's agenda, and they make oodles from China which as a government has no religion but the state and which wields coercive power to get the Tech companies to fall in line in order to have access to their markets.

So in short Bullet they are by nature, as many multinational corporations are, at odds with the concept of the nation state and as a direct result at odds with treaty law, constitutional law, parliamentary law, and would much rather deal with communists which operate like a corporation (independent of anything but self interest since the welfare of their people is a lower priority).

Add all of that up and you can see the dichotomy of values (or lack thereof) and you can also see the #1 issue for anti-trust legislation for a free society. What Tech companies are openly doing (while thumbing their noses at our nation) is meddling in elections to seek the outcome most friendly to their bottom line and their philosophy. They have zero loyalty to the nation, and only acknowledge shareholders (which are international) as their accountability.

It's a complex multi-variable problem with several contributing factors.

I agree that in the South most engineers are either conservative or libertarian. Overwhelmingly so in fact. But most IT engineering jobs are not in the South, though that has shifted in recent years with the booms in Austin and Raleigh and datacenter build out in the southeast due to cheap electricity. The IT industry is still unquestionably centered around locations which are politically far left and ideological echo chambers (Seattle and the Bay Area). Even areas that seem far away become connected to that culture. The plane flights between SFO and Austin, TX are often called the nerd birds because it's full of Silicon Valley types going back and forth between the two places.

The policies you are implying you're against aren't reflective of a monoculture at these high tech places. They're reflective of the desires of the HR departments and PR departments and the very tip top of the company. Their interests IMO are entirely self-serving: claim the moral high ground, generate sales from people who will buy or shill your product because you agree with their politics, try to use this public holier than thou image to drive recruitment of better IT talent.

Wait, better IT talent? Yes. The talent pool for IT positions is chronically low. This is largely because getting a Bachelors of Computer Science is as useful in the job marketplace for actual IT positions as a Bachelors of Pre-Medicine is for actual medical positions. Examples: "Great, you have your pre-med. Can you reliably and with minimal pain get an IV line in? Oh, you've never done that before?" "Great, you have your BS of CS. Can you use SaltStack to automatically deploy and manage software on a 300 node server cluster? Oh, you've never even heard of that software before?" You need people who don't just have the stupid sheep skin but actually then went on to teach themselves relevant career tech because colleges just flat out don't do it. And this in general means somewhat more introverted people and people who are effectively introverted for other reasons ("on the spectrum", etc). I don't have any hard numbers or know of anybody who does them, but I can say with some confidence that whatever the rate of gender dysphoria is in the broader population it is may be twice that in the IT space. This is where you get a lot of the trans issues in IT. If you're hiring a very large IT pool and you get on the Dave Chapelle alphabet people shitlist ... that could be a real talent fulfillment problem. PARTICULARLY in the Bay Area.

Lastly, there's all the same gender abrasiveness you'd expect from an overwhelmingly male field. That is to say guys having the "locker room" style of decorum which causes pearl clutching, etc, etc. Sexual harassment is a real thing and is certainly there in IT too, in no small part because there's no shortage of dudes not getting action in IT. If you just have a legit 6-pack and guns you move to the top 0.5% of the picking order for women in IT, it feels like. So probably a higher than average number of lonely dudes who don't have strong social skills in general let alone social skills with women. So I wouldn't doubt that it's a bigger problem in IT than most places and so that's where you get a lot of the gender issues in IT.

THAT BEING SAID .... there is a real issue with women being overpaid and overpromoted in IT simply because they have ovaries and companies want to look woke. Women seem to get away with things men never could in the IT workplace when it comes to learning on the job. If you're a guy you're gonna be told to RTFM and be ready to work day one. When women are given the same brusque response men would get, it tends to not go over well.