- they're going to do their evil thing anyway, may as well show up and intentionally do it marginally worse
- they're going to pay someone large sums of money, may as well be me
- I increasingly believe this whole industry is net evil overall, and large sums of money mean I can leave it sooner
- also, it was their VR thing, and if it was a VR thing at literally any other company I would be excited about that because VR is at least conceptually cool
These are not particularly good arguments, and that's why I don't work there now. But statistically, I can imagine a few people who we would otherwise categorize as non-evil actually convince themselves with arguments like these, and when you're casting as wide a net as Facebook does, a few is all you need.
edit: I mean nothing wrong in terms of the product it delivers
"Hey, there are crack dealers, people selling cigarettes, etc. Why are you singling out Facebook?"
It's almost like they know the issue, but think that somehow the existence of even worse scumbags provides them with ethics aircover.
If it's damaging to some percentage of users, having more users means it damages more people.
Is your argument that this is okay because some people also put their health at risk being salt miners?
Frankly, how does anyone continue to work in any job? They all bring undesirable externalities of some sort. As a farmer, I'm one of the most evil people on the planet, or so they say, due to the externalities created by agriculture. Working for Facebook would be a huge moral improvement. But, what are you going to do?
You can pick any random thing, compare it to any other random thing, and get similar or opposing results - or anything in between, because those things aren't correlated or comparable in any way. :P
If your rule is "we can't have things that may hurt some people" then you're going to live in a pretty bland world. Gonna be especially tough without water.
Here's the thing: anyone who is in IT, especially programming; is going to be well-aware of the...I don't want to say 'evil', but I will at least say questionably ethical nature of Facebook's workings.
Anyone working there had to compromise some level of ethics for the profit they acquire from it.
And we have people and organizations that try to reduce the amount of deaths from those things. Raising awareness, passing laws, etc.
>If your rule is "we can't have things that may hurt some people" then you're going to live in a pretty bland world.
I only asked for clarification on your argument. But, no, that's not my "rule". I just think that if we can reduce harm, it's nice to do that where possible.
>Gonna be especially tough without water.
Come on. Your whole last sentence is ridiculous. The poster questioned why someone would work at Facebook. That is not the equivalent of saying "we can't have things that may hurt some people" and it's so far removed from your water/drowning scenario that I can't tell if you're being serious.
Oh God, I write software that helps farmers do a better job!
I thought my answer was pretty easy to interpret, but I will spell it out: Because the vast majority of people who use Facebook enrich their lives with it.
Spelling it out even further: Just like Facebook employees, the people who work in salt mines, or build swimming pools, go to work each day because they think about the vast majority of people satisfied by their product, not about the small minority of people injured by it.
I don't work at Facebook, but if I did, the answer to "How do you sleep?" would be "Like a baby."
Kind of a bad excuse to be honest. I do think the damage is exaggerated and at some point users are responsible for themselves and their media consumption and many are probably happy with that.
I don't use Facebook and in my county Whatsapp is sadly very widely spread and it is noticeable that people express concern about missing something if they don't install it.
In this way, the poor choices people make is not the responsibility of the person offering the choice, it's the responsibility of the chooser. You can sell heroine this way and sleep like a baby.
It's not totally crazy if you think what you're offering is not coercive and that people can and should look out for their best interests. This doesn't work for my ethics because I think, basically, that some people aren't so great at looking out for their own best interests and can be tricked or seduced into hurting themselves. If someone is weak in whatever way that they can be tricked into hurting themselves, this is a soft form of coercion.
Ethically though it's not totally cut and dried. Pretty much everyone engaged in behavior where they might come out ahead relative to another (e.g., buying/selling a car, aiming for a promotion or raise, etc). I work for a company that sells shiny baubles and people buy stuff they can't really afford partly because of our slick marketing. I feel this is better than working for Meta, but is it? I don't know. Being ethical while living under an unethical system is almost impossible and requires significant sacrifice. If I'm being honest, I'm not willing to make that sacrifice, so I'm already compromising my ethics to _some_ level too. I guess we all just pick our levels.