Any current Facebook employees care to chime in on what makes this company worth your time as an employee in 2019?
Any company employing over 1,000 people is almost guaranteed to be involved in something evil because of the corruptibility of mankind, but you can't just assume that every single person is a direct contributor. Another similar example would be how you can't blame every individual American citizen for the various crimes the CIA has been running around the world committing, because there really are only a few Americans who have any connection to those things. This is true despite the fact that Mother, Apple Pie, the CIA World Factbook and the assassination of third world government officials are all technically part of the same institution.
You might counter with, if people can claim innocence even though they are part of a guilty organization, what's the motivation to improve? The answer to that is that the moral calling of Americans isn't to all leave America until the CIA gets shut down, it's to stay and stubbornly assert their morals until things improve. Evil leaders would much rather have a slightly smaller but completely obedient workforce than they would a larger, more skilled but unmanageable (in evil directions) one.
Replacing your own personal morality with the average morality of the organizations you are a part of is a trap, because you could also be way more evil than average. In fact, the most vile schemers at HBO might be worse than the most vile at Monsanto; and they could justify themselves by saying, "I can't be vile, I work at HBO, and HBO is not vile on average."
The best person at the NSA was probably Snowden while he was planning his defection. It's Snowden's actions that count for his judgment, not the morality of the NSA on average. If all NSA employees were traitors to the American people then Snowden would be one too! Obviously, only the NSA employees that do their jobs are traitors to the American people. There is more opportunity for heroism at Facebook because people could put their jobs on the line to defend what's right.
By no means am I justifying complicity, I'm saying that there's more opportunity to become a hero of the revolution in a terrible country than in a great one.
To use your fascist example, just because someone came from West Germany doesn't mean that they were members of the Statsi, and even if they were members of the Statsi, they could have been (and I would say they would have a duty to be) agents of the people working to undermine it from within.
Never thought of it this way... because it's bloody ridiculous.
If FB has been infiltrated by so many "agents of the people", they're doing a pretty crap job at improving it.
Granted, my "revolution CIA the people NSA morals evil" language makes it sound kind of silly, but what I'm really talking about is the more mundane pushback that workers can achieve when asked to go beyond ethical boundaries. You don't know whether any individual Facebook employee is working in the right direction or against it, because although they might not be "plotting the people's coup, undermining the New Statsi from within," they might be gently pushing for more realistic improvements.
I'm sorry but I can't follow your argument. By now if you work for Facebook you must already know that they are in the surveillance business.
Previous justifications for that seem to have revolved around them not doing anything bad with that information. Well here's the thing, using that information to target children with addictive games for money is a bad use of that information. If you work for Facebook you work for people that pay you with that money.
The parent was calling the people being voted for or against in the US "facists" even though the NSA is the secret police of a constitutional republic. East German communists were closer to fascism than the US today by a long shot, "everything is the state" and all that.
>By now if you work for Facebook you must all ready know that they are in the surveillance business.
I'm not trying to absolve Facebook, I'm pointing out that some Facebook employees may be using their position to push back against Facebook's evil, or to slow it down. So, you can't pick up your torches and pitchforks against everyone who works there, because some good people might get pitchforked.
Personally, this is true for me. I've lived in four cities and three countries in my relatively short life, and my immediate family is often in four countries at any one time. I have friends around the world, who are starting families, getting married and generally living their lives. Facebook's products are the best way for us to stay connected to each other.
The world has never dealt with issues we're now facing, on the scale we're now facing. The lessons we learn as a society from Facebook, both its successes and failures, will only make whatever comes next that much better. Every single day, I work alongside incredibly smart people who are empowered to turn the tide. We're making a difference but perception often lags reality. It's also a really, really big ship to turn around.
I've been given an opportunity to be part of the solution. I know that I would regret it forever if I didn't give it a try - if not me, who else?
Stealing from families by exploiting toddlers. This is what many of the most talented minds in the world are working on. Truly tragic.
No we don't, we can choose not to accept it and to speak out against it. It's abhorrent behavior and shouldn't be tolerated in a modern society.
Many of the world's greatest atrocities began with apathy. It's so easy to look back and wonder how on Earth people accepted the behavior of the powerful that descended to tyranny, but looking into the future is much more difficult, and often, much more uncomfortable.
If there is a market it will be exploited by someone.
The solution is to regulate the market so that Facebook cannot do whatever it is doing.
On short term, maybe.
The possibility of doing evil to customers is proportional to the market size, much like in the drug business.
I do however why such questions are being asked of Facebook/Google and not of companies like Thales/Lockheed Martin? Perhaps the mainstream media feel more threatened by Facebook/Google, because like all the MSM crave power, and Google /Facebook /other social networks can democratize dissemination of opinions and erode the power of MSMs to act as gatekeepers of Ideas.