Facebook and Uber have insisted that they are just tech companies. They allow people to post and view content or make a living driving, based on their platforms. Uber’s issues with inequality in the workplace culminated this week with CEO Travis Kalanick’s resignation. Some people question the entire disruptive model on which Uber is based — the idea that it is simply a tech company enabling a gig economy. It could be perceived as a way for Uber to escape traditional employer responsibilities and benefits to its drivers. Kalanick is not alone. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has to sell his platform as an optimized ad-delivery system capable of precision-targeting large captive audiences. He simultaneously has to convince the public that Facebook is a social good while admitting his company has a diversity problem. Here are five ways Facebook and Uber are similar.
Drivers around the world are fighting for Uber to treat them as employees with the accompanying benefits. “Uber has tried to frame the new economics of using a casual and amateur workforce as an economic revolution that brings benefits to consumers and drivers alike,” David Glance writes in The Conversation:
It could equally be perceived however as simply a way for Uber to shirk any of the normal employer responsibilities and benefits to its drivers and through this form of exploitation, provide a cheaper service to customers.
It takes a particular type of CEO to consistently ignore the problems created by this business model and to continue to talk up the benefits the company is bringing to society.
Facebook makes it difficult for smaller, often independent, media outlets to share their stories and reach new audiences by giving preferential treatment to large media outlets, said Todd Reubold, publisher and co-founder of Ensia, a magazine publishing stories about emerging environmental issues:
Zuckerberg himself wrote on his Facebook page, “the world is better when people from different backgrounds and with different ideas all have the power to share their thoughts and experiences,” Reubold said in a May 2016 Media Shift report.
Facebook’s current model gives organizations the power to share, but whether stories actually reach new audiences is left up to Facebook algorithms. “The company should stop providing preferential treatment to large media outlets and start treating high-quality, independent media outlets more equitably,” Reubold said.
Amid all the Uber controversy which recently culminated in the CEO resigning, Uber has decided to allow all U.S. drivers to accept tips.
The company refused for years to let passengers tip drivers on the app — one of many sources of frustration for drivers, who have repeatedly raised concerns about low pay and a lack of basic labor rights.
Facebook recently announced that it will pay up to $250,000 per episode for original video programming. “But it’s going to suck for media companies if they put all of this time and effort into original content and no one sees it,” said an executive from a publisher that was paid by Facebook to do live videos:
When Facebook made live video a priority, every media company under the sun embraced the product. But publishers struggled with Facebook Live, which came out to much fanfare and a heavy push by Facebook. The reach simply hasn’t been there — partially due to quality (or lack thereof) and partially because Facebook hasn’t made it easy for people to discover live videos.
“A majority of our live content was seen by very few people,” said one publisher paid by Facebook to produce live videos. “Yes, a few things took off, but relative to what publishers were spending in terms of both time and money, Facebook wasn’t able to effectively get live content in front of people.”
Uber released its first-ever diversity report in March detailing the demographics of its employees, TechCrunch reported. Like many tech companies, Uber is predominantly white and male but it does better than Facebook. Worldwide, Uber has 36.1 percent female representation vs Facebook (32 percent). Uber is 8.8 percent black, 5.6 percent Latinx and 4.3 percent two-or-more races in the U.S. Facebook is 2 percent black, 4 percent Latinx, 3 percent two or more races.
Uber used a technology feature nicknamed “Greyball” that identified regulators posing as passengers while trying to collect evidence that Uber was breaking local laws governing taxis. The program was a fake version of Uber’s app and made it appear that the undercover regulator was summoning a car, only to have the ride never show up or cancel, AP rreported in March. After the New York Times reported the existence of Greyball, Uber said it was dismantling the technology.
European Union antitrust regulators fined Facebook $122 million in March for giving misleading information during a vetting of its deal to acquire messaging service WhatsApp in 2014, Reuters reported.
Facebook had said it could not automatically match user accounts on its own platform and WhatsApp, but two years later launched a service that did exactly that.
“The Commission has found that, contrary to Facebook’s statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users’ identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility,” the Commission said.
Facebook said it made an unintentional mistake in its 2014 filings.
The E.U. sanction followed a separate 150,000-euro fine by a French data watchdog for failing to prevent its users’ data from being accessed by advertisers. Italian antitrust authorities fined WhatsApp 3 million euros for allegedly obliging users to agree to share their personal data with Facebook.
Employees and visitors can leave messages on walls like this on the Facebook campus in Menlo Park, Calif. Photo: Jeff Chiu/AP/lomo-photo-effect
After several complaints, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to tell his employees to stop replacing “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter” on a wall provided at work for people to express their opinions.
In a note posted to employees on a company announcement page, published by Gizmodo, Zuckerberg says he and several other leaders at the company have previously warned employees against doing this. “I was already very disappointed by this disrespectful behavior before, but after my communication, I now consider this malicious as well,” Zuckerberg writes.
“‘Black lives matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t. It’s simply asking that the black community also achieves the justice they deserve,'” Zuckerberg wrote in a company announcement to employees, NPR reported:
“We’ve never had rules around what people can write on our walls — we expect everybody to treat each other with respect. Regardless of the content or location, crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person’s speech is more important than another’s.”
Like much of Silicon Valley, Facebook has been unable to diversify its workforce and remains heavily white and male.
The Facebook site has been accused of becoming a playground for misogynists and racists, the Guardian reported. “It tries to defend itself by defending the public interest in a free flow of information.”
Companies that want to emulate Uber are likely paying much closer to attention to sexism in their workplaces following CEO Travis Kalanick’s resignation, Fortune reported. It “sends an encouraging message about just how bad sexism is for business—and how seriously some companies are beginning to take that fact.”
Susan Fowler joined Uber as a site reliability engineer in November 2015, and within a few weeks, was receiving sexually explicit emails from a manager on company chat saying he was looking for women to have sex with. The company’s human resources department berated her for keeping email records, and told her it was unprofessional to report things via email to HR. You can read about Fowler’s experiences here:
On my last day at Uber, I calculated the percentage of women who were still in the org. Out of over 150 engineers in the SRE teams, only 3 percent were women.
Fowler published a blog post about her experiences at Uber that inspired #DeleteUber and kicked off the weeks-long investigation that in Kalanick’s leave of absence, Mashable reported.