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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

this is nonsense. Most CEOs (and wealthy people in general) and medium-to-large companies engage in a lot of political activism, and always have. Lobbyists don't pay themselves, after all. We just don't call it 'activism' when it's in support of corporate interests (even when those corporate interests have social impacts) for some silly reason.

It only gets called activism when it scares someone with power.

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> It only gets called activism when it scares someone with power.

My impression is that calling something activism is a seal of approval by the journalist.

Could be. But the motives remain the same, it's just a feedback cycle where whether you're for or against you call it activism.

It's pretty clear from many of the comments in this HN post's replies that many people find this particular form of political activity a threat in ways that they don't find more status-quo enforcing forms to be.

I think in this context OP meant _social_ justice activism.

Yes, in other words one kind of activism is considered worse (or less 'neutral') than others.

Do you think that lobbying for and getting massive tax exemptions has no social impacts? SCV is basically one of the richest places on the planet, with likely trillions of dollars effectively flowing through it, and it can't even manage to keep enough shelter for homeless people going or have a functioning public transit system.

That's not neutral, but we pretend it is. It is social, but we pretend it's not.

Your comment is an excellent illustration of how everything is "political" in some fashion, some things are just inconvenient or uncomfortable to think about in that way.

>Yes, in other words one kind of activism is considered worse (or less 'neutral') than others.

You could also say that one kind of activism is considered more PR friendly. It's obvious that a company lobbying for lower taxes is directly beneficial only to that company, and that's why we don't hear about it. The problem I think a lot of people (myself included) have with the more obviously "social" corporate activism that the article describes is that it feels extremely fake, and corporations are only doing it to make themselves look good.

In 2017, Coca Cola put out a commercial[1] that depicted a heated kerfuffle between protesters and police. Then a celebrity walked onto the scene and handed some people a nice cold can of coke, and everyone started smiling and relaxing like the problems that brought them to that point were solved. Everyone rightly hated it, and it was pulled. How is anyone supposed to believe that that any of their activism isn't just a form of PR? When I see CEOs of gigantic corporations (including coke) go on TV to talk about how some new legislation is going to hurt the little guy, I can only roll my eyes and wonder how anyone in their right mind can believe them, or why they are being given a chance to speak on the matter in the first place.

I believe the most beneficial thing a company as big as coke could do to help anything would be to pay their fair share of taxes, and that any form of activism they engage in is a distraction from the fact that they will never willingly do that.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/pepsi-ad-kendall-jenner-...

edit: s/coke/pepsi/g, which I will leave because just lol what a dumb mistake

Exactly. It's somehow not activism when corporations and executives lobby for lower taxes or less regulation, it's only activism when a company or executive say that the police should kill fewer black people or that trans people deserve basic human rights.

Trans people do have all human rights - your gender expression does not change your access to your other rights.

So anyone saying 'trans people deserve basic human rights' is actually saying something else, like about access to women's spaces. That disingenuous advocacy of one thing to get another thing through under the table is more activist than principled. In a company or otherwise.

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