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Usually, I read articles putting Facebook's role in Jan 6 together with its role in massacres in Myanmar and India, together with revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The public circle. so to speak. Linking that with the somewhat private internal comms within Coinbase and Basecamp is a new direction. That said, I sadly don't see how this article has taken advantage of this unique angle.

Corporations have long been the vehicles for important social reforms. Colonialism was pushed by trading companies. Even though the French Revolution established the property right inviolable and sacred, before and quite often after then the governments were not public. The clear boundaries between public and private corporations have only emerged after the explicit renouncement of private corporations by the Communists, prompting the Capitalists to also strengthen protection of private properties from their now public governments. Still, the corporations in essential industries of any country are invariably also big players in their politics. Facebook and Google, being so big in such an essential industry as Internet, cannot evade this forever.

I am not an expert entrepreneur, so I looked up Volkswagen's Code of Conduct, and it says that it is "committed to working with employee representatives in candor and trust", and has a Compliance Office which also acts as a whistleblower system.

Volkswagen's Code of Conduct: https://www.volkswagenag.com/presence/konzern/documents/CodeofConduct_vw_group_en_V2020.pdf

Coinbase and Basecamp, though, are on a much smaller scale, and I don't care that much whether their leaders want to involve themselves into politics or not. I only question them (and you) pitting politics against "the bottom line". In both cases the profits seem fine, and whatever metrics they have used to decide that political discussions have affected the profit, they have not disclosed. Maybe you know that from experience, but you have not explained yours in the article either. I so question because it is similar to what I hear often from the Chinese propaganda: "Look at those politicians fighting in their congresses! That's why their economy is not developing as fast as ours is." It's at a different scale, but it tings.

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