Working for Facebook is a morally bankrupt position. If you are an engineer you have plenty of job opportunities available to you and there is no excuse for you to continue contributing your labor and time to a wholly malignant organization. At a certain point one has to ask how we as an industry will start dealing with those who continue to take a paycheck from Facebook even in the face of constant and horrific evidence of wholesale ethical violations and negligence.
Your point? Should we stop working in IT and go back to the fields?
Also, I fear that HN somewhat forgets the world is not SF, in Europe going to work for Facebook/Google/Amazon is a enormous bump (we're speaking 2-4x) of salary for many people, which in some cases means you can buy an house after 3-4 years even with the crazy rents back in your home country - and that's HUGE. Why should those people spend their time slaving as a subcontractor for yet another TLC/bank trying to squeeze their customers dry at the first occasion while getting 25% the salary and zero benefits? Are those less evil?
What needs to happen is that people keep applying pressure so facebook is forced to adapt its business model even if it hits their bottom line - which is already happening apparently.
Can you go into your argument for that?
So this is how we justify it now? “But it will allow me to buy a house in 3-4 years”?
Which large companies are morally worth getting our support?
Minimizing the damage of collecting that information is maybe not directly evil, but helping kick the can down the road to the point where facebook is so deeply networked in our society its unremoveable doesnt seem like a high horse to be riding on.
I enjoy destroying the environment for future generations so they don't have it too easy?
The "justification" (if you want to call it that way) you are looking for is in the part you forgot to quote and respond to ;)
So they are certainly engineers at Facebook doing very questionable things - but not all of them.
In general: the more influence you have (via code you write or otherwise via power you are aware you have over people), the more you become ethically accountable for your actions.
Doesn't improve the validity of the position though.
The parent poster is calling on them to do just this with regard to Facebook.
There is nothing wrong with that call, and it doesn’t impugn your friends unless they ultimately fail to re-evaluate the company.
Yes. Most of the large and powerful organizations have severe moral problems, almost all of them due to violations of a simple rule: $ < Values
"Love of money is the root of all evil."
We all have choices. We all make decisions.
I would go even further and say that people who ride Uber or buy from Amazon are moral cretins.
Yes, it's an horrible world. I know, I'm saying that it is, I agree completely. What's the alternative? We blame people that work in other companies and claim we are honest and pure? Do we say that since there are X layers between us and them then we're fine? :)
What that's too much? Moving jobs is sooooo much easier, what with changing your healthcare, benefits, probably taking a paycut, losing all the friends and acquaintances you've made, no problem man.
And we all know Facebook is the only Pure Evil company in the valley. You could get a job at Google and work on censoring search results for the Chinese government. I hear MSFT is in good graces these days with hacker types, unless you don't like the idea of supporting the Military Industrial Complex, and certainly they would never become as anti-competitive as they were in the 90s if they found themselves in a monopolistic position again. Or you could always work for any number of startups that sell hype, bullshit, and vaporware to get VCs to part with their money.
Really if you don't quit your Facebook job and #delete your account you're really no better than Mark Hitlerberg at this point. And you can't hide, we'll find you, and "deal" with you (I hear Twitter mobs are good for shaming these days).
Full disclosure: The company I work for does some small contracting work for Facebook, so I guess I'm on the list.
What about those who argued for React to move to a more reasonable license? What about those who pushed for open sourcing code and hardware in the first place?
Companies at the 25k+ employee size are complex, often internally-disagreeing enterprises. Code may be pure, but resource allocation (programmer time) is political.
Of the recent Facebook news (e.g. shadow profile and 2FA phone numbers being used for ad targeting)... "we had bugs in our code" is by far the least ethically problematic.
And unfortunately Hillary Clinton did it to Putin first, probably using similar methods.
I'm pretty sure we'll end up discussing the various shades of moral bankruptcy soon enough though.
You should change this.
But why? Use of the platform is entirely voluntary. Beyond that, what are they doing besides targeting ads at people based on pretty basic info that those users (almost entirely) provided to Facebook of their own free will. Yeah, I know they were found recently to be using "shadow contact info" to target ads. But even that study seems fairly contrived- they had to upload an entire organization's private data without their consent just to prove the point they were making in the article. But even if we all agree that that's bad, so what? Okay, so if they stop using MFA data and shared contact data not necessarily shared by the users to target ads are they suddenly not evil? My guess is that most people would remain unconvinced.
I think there's some part of society that just hates the idea of advertising of all kinds. They think they should be able to move through life without having information foisted in front of them without their consent. That's a fine view, but the reality of our society is that it relies on businesses being able to sell and they do that largely by advertising to consumers. I also think a lot of the lament comes from the idea that using these platforms is a waste of time, which obviously is more of a personal value judgment call.
But above all this, I believe Facebook is hated because it's powerful. But it's powerful because people the world over use it and use it a lot. And that doesn't seem to be changing at all based on Facebook's last several earnings reports. People seem convinced that everyone should agree that Facebook and targeted advertising is evil and the use of the platform isn't worth the trade-offs. And yet people don't care. That stubborn fact. People just simply do not care about having their phone numbers, ages, political beliefs, genders and interests used to target ads at them. Lots of people can't wrap their minds around that fact- that not everyone is so concerned about using that info for ad targeting. Some fraction of the active FB user base probably does care- but not enough to delete the app and stop using it. "Your actions speak so loudly that I cannot hear what you say."
I'm pretty sure you can do good even within facebook, doing your utmost to keep the company accountable (from my experience in another big corp, we don't see 1% of what's happening inside it, and how many people are facepalming - and we'll never know if many things were just humans being stupid or actual calculated decisions). You can also keep your guard up from outside and force facebook to fix itself (obviously, as much as its business allows) from outside, for example pushing it to hire more moderators and get as better so to prevent things like myanmar from happening again.
What I'm saying is that it's impossible (and in my opinion, pointless) to claim moral superiority and to accuse people of being morally bankrupt because they work for corp X.
No it's not. Do you know Facebook creates shadow profiles of you by tracking your online activities?
Even if you discount that, what about when all your friends use Facebook? Then you are going to be forced into a situation where you either use Facebook or stay disconnected from you friends.
Being human is a morally brankrupt position. Accumulating wealth is a morally brankrupt pastime.
If you want to be a morally pure human, starve yourself -- that's the only way.
There are plenty of companies which can't easily be categorized as having significant negative effects to the world. You can work for a "bad" company but consciously constrain your work to a business unit which improves customers' lives.
What you're using is false equivalence. You know what the worst thing for the environment is? Being born. Why do people insist on living when everything is bad? Reject the notion that you're powerless to change things.
How would they do this if you never visit the site or download the app? If you're referring to the use of a pixel, compared to the full-fledge use of cookies used by other ad networks (the Gizmodo article from yesterday itself noticeably had ads all they way down the page based on sites I'd recently visited), surely that alone doesn't make FB evil relative to other advertisers?
what about when all your friends use Facebook? Then you are going to be forced into a situation where you either use Facebook or stay disconnected from you friends.
Why are you forced to use Facebook or be disconnected from your friends? You still have texts, email, Twitter and phones. I know a few people (admittedly not a lot) that refuse to use Facebook. They complain occasionally because they believe they are missing out on seeing photos or something, but nothing to the point where they are in the dark. I think the use of Facebook is a convenience and each person has to weigh their values against what they know Facebook does. But let's not elevate what Facebook does beyond the level of displaying ads for money and crossing ethical boundaries in some instances about what data they use to target those ads. Based on some comments you'd think they were proactively trying to destroy the world.
So I'm wondering (out of curiosity as I can't personally think of any) where in Europe is that happening?
Whew! It's not just me? That's reassuring (As in, yes, there IS a monster on the wing of the plane, but that's so much less scary if you see it too. Little Twilight Zone reference there.)
> What's the alternative?
I don't actually know. However...
Bucky Fuller calculated that we would have all the technology we need to supply our needs globally for everyone, if only we applied it efficiently, by sometime in the 1970's. We have arguably already passed that point, meaning that our problems today are not physical, that they are just psychological (or moral or religious or spiritual if you prefer.)
Starting in the mid-1970's a kind of effective cybernetic psychology has been developed (under a kind of trade name Neuro-Linguistic Programming) that provides simple algorithms for correcting a great deal of malfunctioning psychology. (Be aware that the Wikipedia article for NLP is crap, it's haunted by skeptics. I can vouch for NLP. Not only is it grounded in hard science, I myself was cured of serious debilitating depression. I owe my life in a sense to NLP.)
To sum up, we have the technology to supply our needs, and the technology to overcome our psychological problems, so I think it's a matter of A) dispelling ignorance of the possibility, and B) logistics.
Tag, you're it.
And again I say to you: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. --Matthew 19:24
Not the OP... But no... Just stop working for morally bankrupt companies.
There are enough consulting jobs, to say nothing of current and future startups around (including your own if you create one), to not need to work for them.
> What needs to happen is that people keep applying pressure so facebook is forced to adapt its business model even if it hits their bottom line - which is already happening apparently.
Then again, would-be employers saying loud and clear that they won't hire people who worked for morally bankrupt companies is a potential answer too.
If software engineers pushed hard to consider that working for them was a dead-end job rather than something very desirable, then maybe they might end up attracting less talent and go bust eventually.
On your deathbed you'll only take a single thing with you. Not your house or family; not your wealth; only whether what you did with your life was worth it.
A very very few, like Alfred Nobel, are lucky enough to see what their contemporaries thought about their lives before they passed away and got to adjust. You probably won't.
While Google and Amazon both have their ethical problems and serious anti-trust issues, Facebook is in a league of its own. The complete, cavalier disregard for the consequences of its own actions as long as they get theirs is utterly unconscionable.
Unlike Google or Amazon, they add nothing of real value to society to balance the abuses they bring with them. All their labors are geared towards extracting the utility of other creators (their acquisitions like Instagram or WhatsApp) or to suck the time and attention out of people through addictive mechanisms. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow a hundred federated online platforms to function as generic address books and life-updaters would crop up over night, and just about every one of them would be better.
You would have to look at lines of business like Big Tobacco to find another field of similar moral perfidy.
Look friend. If I lose my job, you aren't going to do anything to augment my lack of income. You're not going to do anything to provide health insurance. And you're not going to do anything to help me find new employment.
There is no "We".
Here's an idea. If this topic is something that you feel is important, then perhaps you can set aside half your income to a general fund to help provide benefits for employees who leave facebook for morality reasons. Maybe if it gets enough momentum others will also provide funds. Given enough time perhaps this will help the "industry" to become more ethical.
You know what's not going to convince anyone to leave facebook now? Trying to setup some sort of ad hoc lynch mob to "deal" with people who are trying to pay a mortgage.
As an adult, I heard someone talk about one of the gates in the wall to Jerusalem was named the "eye of the needle" because of its shape. If a camel was loaded up that exceeded a certain height, the camel could not fit through the gate. It was this situation that the biblical passage was supposedly referring. So as with most things, context really helped. </random_tangent>
Facebook offers a service that people wants. A service that is not morally bad, if any connecting people is a positive thing.
The monetization of that business is what has proven problematic. As it is offered for free, it is people's privacy what is being sold.
Who should solve it?
The problem with "just don't work for Facebook" is that it shifts the responsibility to policy companies from governments, that have the power and resources, to individuals that have not. Of course individuals have a moral responsibility, and that is why whistle-blowers are so important in all industries.
But it is the government that has the responsibility to assure that the industry remains a positive force in the country. Tech giants are a new phenomenon. Regulations have not still catch up with its problems. But governments around the globe need to shape up and get up to the challenge of letting companies offer services that people wants and needs while minimizing the harmful impact that some business models have.
If you do not like the ethics of the company that you work for, change jobs. You are going to be happier. But that is not going to make the company more ethical, if any it is going to be less ethical as people that worries about such things move out.
I sincerely hope your friends will be more successful. But I doubt it.
Your friends install the app on their device. They provide access to their contacts. FB slurps in all of that data. For every person in the user's contacts, FB compares that info to their records. They update connections where found, and start new records when not found. So they now know your name/email/phone number/physical address info depending on how detailed your friend's contact was about you. I haven't read anything if the user has added your picture in their contacts if that's something FB can read as well, so they could know what your face looks like. They are now tracking you, and you've at this point never joined FB. One day, you decide to join FB, and you're presented an option to connect with people FB thinks/knows you know. Oh, and now that you're a user, you don't get to see that info that they had been making on you before you signed up either.
To me, this is the most evil part of the scheme.
Alright then, where do we draw the line? Can I go buy a person? If not, can I invade Sudan?[1]
> Ethical consumption is a dead end.
Should we give up even thinking about it and just do whatever is most convenient?
Will that solve all our problems?
You know Amazon treats its employees like disposable shit. If you buy from them anyway you are putting your self-love above the love you should have for the folks working there. You know Uber is extracting value from their drivers[2] and will discard them without compunction when the robots come online. And they killed Elaine Herzberg. If you ride Uber you're rewarding them for all this and putting your self-love above the love you should have for those folks driving.
I'm gonna keep fighting for what I think is right. That means telling people that they are moral cretins when they are blithe about it. (I don't think violence solves anything, but a good rant can shake up a body's thoughts. I have friends that shop through Amazon and ride Uber and I don't chide them too harshly or often.)
Working at FB or one of the other emerging technocracies isn't an instance of "Never let ideological purity prevent you from effective action." It's a case of putting money above core values, or not having those values in the first place, or simply not paying attention.
If you're going to be a Morlock at least be a self-aware Morlock, eh?
> You can't even buy slavery-free clothing or food reliably.
You can try.
If you don't even try you're a moral cretin.[3] It's a common malady in this empty and abortive age.
[1] One of the few places where outright slavery still occurs in modern times. If that's not grounds for attack what is? Oil?
[2] "They don’t pay the cost of their capital. The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human." https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the...?
[3] "Origin Late 18th century: from French crétin, from Swiss French crestin ‘Christian’ (from Latin Christianus), here used to mean ‘human being’, apparently as a reminder that, though deformed, cretins were human and not beasts." https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/cretin
Facebook SDK is used in more than 40% of mobile apps. Devs do it for analytics and ads. The feature is called Facebook Audience Network.
I'm definitely not giving Google a pass. I just didn't mention them ;-) Google Analytics, Fonts, whatever are just as bad, to me. I as an unsuspecting web user have my browser tracked from web developers using some free tools. I have no idea that it is occurring as a viewer. If a website puts in FB's like buttons, it is visible to me, and being in the know, I understand the repercussions of that site's decision. GA, Fonts, etc, are completely hidden from view. This is why I've used NoScript/Ghostery/etc throughout the years. It started with ads, but now I'm more concerned about these types of scripts.
Maybe, but at least Facebook doesn't actively try to manipulate you into believing that they're the "good guys" and "not evil". That's why, after all, my level of respect for FB is still a lot higher than for Google.
Its like, "Doctor, why dont we just apply pressure on the tumor until it starts to grow at more reasonable rates!".
No. When you find cancer, you try to eliminate it.
Facebook is exactly this -- cancer. They have been aggressively monopolizing software for socializing so that they can arrive to the dominant position they are in now.
Until Facebook becomes more transparent w.r.t how they use the user data and until Facebook gives users autonomy -- they need to be regulated. We need to define constraints regarding how they present and manipulate user data and interactions.
They don't? News to me.
I could be totally wrong, of course. Maybe they started naming holes in dilapidated walls that to bring tourists/pilgrims.
Did a quick google for pic examples; https://patmcinerney.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/the-church-of-...
People who work for known unethical organizations are hardly celebrated so these are poor attempts at muddying the waters and distraction.
The bottom line is if you can't behave ethically you can't expect ethics from others in society. If 6 figure earning engineers can't exercise ethical choice then who can? Its incredible given the level of discourse how anyone can expect any ethical behavior from the poor and starving and yet we do. The double standards and greed from educated classes is stunning.
Do you also suggest that someone should no longer be friends with anyone who uses that Facebook platform and is 'the product'? What about that? That is support as well. Right?
In my mind, FBs inaction in countries like Burma has caused more direct conflict/hate then most tobacco companies. However, if you look at the oil industry, its harder to draw a line... For example: Is the oil industry responsible for the bombing of Irak? The Government gave different reasons, but looking at current evidence for example, it just looks like pipeline protection.
So what i wanted to get at is that when a company gets to a certain size, it gets harder to separate government/ company involvement. At that point we need to look at how the company acts, and in this case, especially FBs, they are doing a horrible job (IMO) at actually standing up for their users, instead choosing to protect their business interests.
(While this is their supposed purpose as a company, there exists people like myself, who believe the current model of stock sponsored companies are the wrong way to do business).
Just a FYI: This is more a rant then anything, Im tired of the BS that these huge companies are producing and selling as the solution to humanities issues. Personally i hope that this current system fails for something better, however, personally i have not thought up anything much better atm.
Hah, good one!
But just in case you're serious: Did you see Zuckerberg's Senate hearing?
There are hundreds of more similar articles documenting hacking by China and Russia. The data breach at the parent of this article even is supposed to have been done by a coordinated nation states. How can a company ever compete against a nations resources? Expecting Facebook to magically secure themselves against attacks by a nation is wishful thinking. If you want to stop breaches like this, the nation's that are doing it must be held accountable. Facebook is an easy target, but that's just attacking the victim. China and Russia are much more intimidating but are the ones who are the true perpetrators.
People also want heroin. That doesn't mean it's actually a positive thing in people's lives. If anything the evidence is mounting that it is negative, e.g.: https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-t...
I mostly agree with the rest of your post, though. I believe it's possible, though very rare, to work at Facebook and have a positive impact.
And there's definitely a total mismatch between regulation and the realities of big tech companies. I'm skeptical of government regulation solving privacy issues specifically (I think that stems more from a widespread cultural misunderstanding or unawareness of privacy concerns) but maybe it's needed for other ways these companies are negatively impacting the world.
With as big as Facebook is, a lot of people (the majority?) are not directly connected to all the crap you see in the news. Sure, you can say they contribute to it, and you'd be totally correct...but Im sure what they see is a bunch of smart people working on cool technology with a good salary and free lunch.
So yeah, its probably "morally corrupt", no denying it, but so's the majority of companies that hire more than 50 people, one way or another. You have to work somewhere.
Then you have people who are trying to do the right thing from the inside. I knew someone who worked for Google purely to try and change its culture. The paycheck probably didn't hurt. There's a lot of these people.
preventing impersonation is literally the only reason I have an account, since I cannot trust facebook to handle this for me
> They don't? News to me.
News indeed. Being good IS their mission statement. "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."
This is a spearfishing attack... That's a totally different beast. Let me look at the gross mishandling of data that facebook had recently:
Remember the Cambridge Analitica scandal? That wasn't a hack. That was facebook deliberately letting apps access user data like it was candy, because that's what facebook does. It was done on purpose. Of course, they didn't expect someone to scrape the whole network at that scale, so it wasn't fully intentional. Still, it was absolutely gross negligence, and is absolutely a breach of trust that happened outside of external government interference: https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/17138756/facebook-data-breach-...
What about the recent scandal revolving around the use of 2FA SMS numbers being used for ad targeting? Against, this isn't Russia coming in and hacking facebook. This is Facebook shooting themselves in the foot with a bazooka. They should have been aware that, when a user enters their phone number for 2FA, they expect it to be used for this feature and this feature only. Not for ad targeting, not for notifications. Again, facebook breached that trust. No outside interference, just facebook being either lazy, irresponsible, and incompetent around user data: https://9to5mac.com/2018/09/28/facebook-ad-targeting-2fa/
There are many other cases like the above. Facebook doesn't need china to attract hate. They can fuck things up by themselves well enough.
"Nation states": The bad guys, usually China and Russia, sometimes Iran.
If you look outside the Bay Area, I’m sure you will find people who desperate enough and would sacrifice any sense of morals they have for a $100k job.
It’s as simple as that.
The issue is that there is not a 'universal' set of morals for tech people, especially as tech has started to become a more accessible profession. I'll agree, personally, that the ethics of working with FB may have issues, large ones at that (Rohingya comes to mind). But, and correct me if I am wrong, are you are advocating for a medical board/ the bar / ASME / professional engineer type of organization? Generally, those organizational types also have ethical issues too, but they tend to be a lot more nuanced and not as glaring.
but I'm also hoping that it breaks apart and we find a better way then invading peoples privacy to monetize platforms
going to work for Facebook/Google/Amazon is a enormous bump (we're speaking 2-4x) of salary for many people, which in some cases means you can buy an house after 3-4 years even with the crazy rents back in your home country
Ah yes, the ends justify the means.
That’s not how you change the world.
Or, have the former earned a monopoly on the latter/our-species?
Also EU != Europe
I think that is clearly a fallacy.
Nobody is arguing that every individual within Facebook is an unethical person.
The argument is that the overall project is unethical and the ethical people within it should take that possibility seriously.
For more philosophical background on this idea:
Between you and me, I pulled a muscle in my neck/shoulder this morning and I've been in a devil of a mood all day. I'm not trying to make excuses, I shouldn't have taken out my bad mood here. Today's B.S. is not indicative of my best efforts.
HN is an incredible forum (I interacted with Alan Kay the other day!!!) and I'm ashamed to have added such counter-productive negativity. It won't happen again.
I'm sorry for being part of the problem today. Have a great weekend.
I work at a big tech thing. But these also do a lot of good.
Facebook keeps me more connected to old friends and family than ever before. It facilities communication and organization of events that would far more time consuming to do without Facebook. I hang out with loved ones more, because pinging them is on Facebook is easy.
Sure, Facebook could be better. IMO ads in messenger is a cheap move, that won't play out well. But Facebook could also be a lot worse than it is.
You're not going to rebuild the world from scratch. Nothing will ever be perfect -- but don't let that get in the way of better. Why not make it better from the inside? How is that not ethical?
But, I do know that working for companies that are funded by advertising makes me feel uneasy. I know because I've worked at one or two. I also know that the company I currently work for charges our customers for the services provided, and I know there's a consensual quid pro quo in every customer agreement. I also know we don't track our customers beyond their consent. I would hope if my company ever started doing that I'd speak up, and if things didn't change I would hope to have the fortitude to leave and continue to speak up outside of the company.
I also have no doubt that my day to day work is automating away someone's job, somewhere. Where someone used to make a good living, my code will run instead. People might not get overtly laid off because of my code, but there's no doubt people who use my company's services hire less people... it's kind of the point. I definitely think about the moral implications of that. Sometimes I'm not super comfortable with the hypothetical effects of my code over a long time period. Even if I contribute less than 1% to my company's service, if my company's service saves our customers on average the equivalent of one salary a year I've been responsible for the, at best, lack of creation of hundreds of jobs. In a different world someone fed a family, bought a house, and lived a life with one of those salaries, and now that opportunity is forever gone. Sometimes that's a hard thing to grapple with, and I really hope that I'm not contributing to negative economic trends that hurt a large majority of the world's populace while enriching myself. Chances are I probably am, though.
However I am certain of a couple things. The mass collection of billions of people's information is putting upon yourself an incredible responsibility that I find hard to justify. This wasn't by accident, this wasn't dumb luck, this was a purposeful attempt to amass and control power. This power isn't inherently good or evil itself, but even in a vacuum one has a right to be suspicious of such power. Fortunately we don't live in a vacuum and over time Facebook has shown itself to not be a good steward of the power it's created. I have no doubt there are plenty of ethical people that work at Facebook, and there are definitely plenty of ethical, smart people who work in Facebook infosec. I don't blame them for the data breach. I blame the creator of this Pandora's box, I blame those who willingly continue the abuse of this power, I blame those who purposefully profit off the abuse of this power, and I blame those who refuse to realize that they will not change an organization that refuses to change. Until the use of Facebook's data is no longer rewarded with massive amounts of money Facebook will continue to collect and sell this data. The incentives are very clearly aligned. Working there, no matter your intentions, cannot change these incentives. I'm not saying everyone at Facebook is evil, but if the hiring reputation is true they are too smart to not understand these things for much longer. Facebook will continue to be morally bankrupt until its power is abolished or democratized, and since a Pandora's box cannot be closed I'll settle for democratized.
And is ridiculous, for anyone who's worked in the real world.
We all make ethical compromises, and have worked for companies that made ethical decisions we didn't agree with.
That was the crux of the Nuremberg Trials: what portion of an endeavor's ethical decisions can be assigned to an individual.
The answer was "more than none, but less than all."
Facebook is more like Big Tobacco. They're purely malignant, continuing solely through adversarial relationships with their users meant to foster addiction or control the revenue streams of key industries like media and news. They're pirates. What benefits they provide, they have only ever made worse than other services and tools that predated them.
>but I'm also hoping that it breaks apart and we find a better way then invading peoples privacy to monetize platforms
Amen to that. Treating attention as a form of currency has been utterly corrosive to society.
Can you quote anything at all from this particular thread that supports this statement?
It’s clearly the position you are trying to refute, but I think it’s a straw man.
That said, at least you are in the domain of agreeing that working for Facebook is an ethical compromise:
“We all make ethical compromises, and have worked for companies that made ethical decisions we didn't agree with.”
Once again, your position seems to be to try to erase the distinction between Facebook and any other company. The Nuremberg trials demonstrate that this position is not tenable - we don’t erase the distinction between the Nazis and any other government.
The argument here is that by now there is enough evidence that this compromise is too much, and that ethical people who work at Facebook should consider that.
Being an ethical person doesn’t imply some kind of mythical ethical purity. It implies that you care about ethics.
The original parent comment of this thread...
> Said this yesterday in the other Facebook thread, and I'll say it again.
Working for Facebook is a morally bankrupt position. If you are an engineer you have plenty of job opportunities available to you and there is no excuse for you to continue contributing your labor and time to a wholly malignant organization.
As to your comment...
> The argument here is that by now there is enough evidence that this compromise is too much, and that ethical people who work at Facebook should consider that.
The argument in this thread is not that people who work at Facebook should "consider" that, but rather that anyone who continues to work at Facebook is no longer ethical.
It's not a straw man if the very first comment proposed exactly that.
Which is a sort of absolutism that I'm taking issue with. I'm sure there are parts of Facebook that are wretched hives of scum and villainy. I'm sure there are parts that would make my and your employer look terrible, ethically comparatively.
So maybe we should use a bit finer brush when tarring people. That seems like a fairly modest proposal to me.
The poster you quote believes that Facebook is clearly immoral, and to continue to work there is indefensible.
Have you considered that this might be true?
Now perhaps you don’t think it is true. That would be my guess based on your positions in this thread.
A non-absolutist position would be to say ‘Facebook as a whole isn’t that bad - here are my reasons...’
Whereas your actual position is ‘nobody can make valid ethical statements about organization above a certain unstated size’.
The first is holding a different opinion. The second is an absolutist claim.
Another counterargument could be like the Nuremberg defenses that you have already mentioned - I.e. Facebook is that bad but there are good people there who don’t realize that, or who think they can change it, or don’t understand the consequences of the orders they are following etc.
But that’s not what you are saying - you are saying that nobody should claim that Facebook is that bad.
You seem to think that Facebook is no different from any other employer, but have offered no explanation other than to suggest that not all steps taken by all employees are calculated to be evil.
It’s perfectly reasonable for others to think that Facebook is so obviously corrupt that to work there is morally bankrupt.
Perhaps it is.