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Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

Listening to Facebook is starting to feel like listening to an arms dealer who wants to sound remorseful.

Well what did you think the very targeted things that you're selling to anyone would be used for?

I find it so hard to believe that everyone at Facebook is just shocked now to learn the realities of what they do. Their naivety and ignorance would have to be off the charts for it to be genuine.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Maybe it's a lot of young people fresh from college and they hear about the big five or whatever, and choose Facebook because they think of it as a social networking company and big, famous, and cool. Just an old guy's opinion - would not want to work there.

That explains the actions of (some of) Facebook's "rockstar" developers. That does not explain the actions of Facebook's data scientists, psychologists, product managers, and execs.

Occam's razor - They knew, and perhaps they cared, but they cared far more about their salary and climbing the industry ladder to say no or blow the whistle.

Or maybe there is no whistle to blow.

You cannot really expect people who have to work for a living and do work for a vertically structured corporation to be ethical and to go against their bosses. The problem is inherent to capitalism and it can make people do far worse things than this, like killing people or promoting and making wars.

Yes you can. Doing the right thing at the expense of a comfortable lifestyle is a problem every generation has faced. Washing one's hands of responsibility in such a way is a rather lazy argument.

The conscious and deliberate decision to put a system in place that manipulates and exploits people who have to work for a living and makes them do things with no questions asked is not created by employees themselves. But it is a decision nevertheless and it is unfair to expect employees, who are victims of such system, to do the right thing as they usually fear the consequences of the dissent. Which can literally mean not just losing a job, but life and death kind of choices, never being able to afford a medical care, lack of place to live, prison and so on.

It's disingenuous to claim that employees of Facebook are being exploited as such. Factory workers maybe, but not a lucrative position at Menlo Park.

This response is the 'I was only following orders' response

For execs sure it's about managing the product, i.e. the users, especially in what we've seen in public statements from Zuckerberg and Sanders.

For the data scientists and psychologists, it's a chance to work on large scale data/populations and test all sort of theories and hypotheses on a large scale, probably unavailable anywhere else except Google and Amazon as postulated here.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/05/how-onl...

I imagine it's a dream job in that respect, where one gets so caught up in the work the consequences don't matter to the worker until the 2016 US election (Trump got about 25% of the vote in the Bay Area) or Brexit referendum and now these investigative reports.

That would be an example of caring more about advancing one's career than the deleterious effects your work has on individuals.

I think the simpler explanation is that people are very good at looking the other way when their income depends on it.

I’ve worked in places that were pretty fubar. People work very hard to find ways to whitewash what they do. Nobody wants to be the bad guy.

CA did not rely on facebook’s ad platform-at least not for the part of their business now under scrutiny. They used the app API to gain acess to individual users’ data, something not possible with their ad targeting platform.

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