Not trying to be snarky. I'm genuinely curious how these perceptions/feelings might have changed over the past few years.
I used to commute with a group of folks from Facebook, Oracle, and Amazon, and none of them seemed to have any moral qualms about their employers. My buddy from Oracle invited me to apply to work on his team, and in explaining why I couldn't consider working at Oracle, I mentioned some recent terrible thing Oracle had done in the open source community. His response was that Amazon contributed even less open source (which I believe is true). So I think in the end, the internal justification is "Yeah, maybe I'm contributing to something immoral, but it's less immoral than X & Y".
The thought of working for a company like this makes me feel physically ill. Soldiers can at least feel like they are working to defend a country they believe in. Weapons companies will sell killing machines to anyone with money. Few things in the world make me feel the visceral disgust that these companies engender.
By contrast Facebook is icky ... In the sense that there's one naive greedy idiot pulling the strings and he refuses to accept the damage he's causing. Weapons companies and the people who work for them know that their killing tools are sold indiscriminately and will end up in the hands of tyrants and terrorists across the world.
Not really. Even if I had the money, I don't think I would be allowed to buy a fully-armed F-16.
Even (foreign) governments typically have to get their purchases approved for export, and that approval is not automatic (e.g. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/denmark-suspends-saudi-we...).
IMHO, there can be little moral distinction between being a soldier and a weapons maker. If it's OK to be a soldier to defend a country you believe in, then it's OK to make weapons to allow those soldiers to destroy enemy forces as effectively as possible. If the former is OK, but the latter is somehow not, then you're basically condemning your soldiers to defeat and possibly unnecessary death.
Which isn't to say that moderation at Facebook's scale is an easy problem - it's not. And balancing freedom of speech with some degree of accountability and acknowledging empirically verifiable truths is difficult.
But, buy the ticket, take the ride. He's a billionaire. FB makes oodles and oodles of money. They just don't want to do it because it would cost them money.
Eventually laws will catch up, in one way or another, and the same way other media outlets are (imperfectly) regulated, new-media outlets such as FB, Google, etc, will be as well, IMHO.
Maybe I can help clarify because I share that view. Making weapons for defense contractors keeps you at some distance. Presumably we need to be at war (or today's equivalent) and engaged with an external enemy to use those weapons - at some level the use is justified by serious issues or threats. What facebook does is not justified by anything other than pure profit motive. Would you work for a company making weapons that indiscriminately kill people in your own country just for profit? Probably not.
The US military has a pretty clear mission, however you feel about it.
Facebook: "Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” [0]
I'm not sure what actionable guidance I'd be able to draw from the above.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/22/bring-the-world-closer-tog...
Should they be expected to?
In my opinion, there's little morality, let alone shared morality, left in society. I'm not personally going to place expectations on people's morality with regards to their employment when almost everything has become a moral quandary at this point.
Most people at Facebook believe that FB is good for the world, Zuck is a good leader, and that we are working to address dubious ethical decisions made in the past. Sure, FB itself may be a bubble, but HN is even more of a bubble :)
I might have interesting questions for a sibling or close friend though, assuming we had that kind of relationship.
Also, by boycotting FB as a developer you're reducing your earning potential considering FB is the top of the compensation pile.
"The Kool-aid here sure tastes great!"
> You don’t realize the heavy conscious and mental burden that comes with being a Facebook employee until you quit
>> https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1275363680767537154
> Probably could replace "Facebook" with just about any company in that sentence. Having to uphold "company values", live by some boss's petty rules, take HR initiatives seriously, etc, is pretty much universally frustrating.
Eh, I don't think so. This is the second tweet in that thread:
> Imagine not being complicit in social disorder and political interference. It’s pretty nice. Imagine not being ashamed to tell people where you work. Even better.
I work for an (old, non-SV) company with a pretty decent workplace culture, while I don't like some things about it, the company's products and values are OK and eye-rolly "HR initiatives" can be pretty much ignored if you choose. I don't feel any "mental burden" or shame for working here.
There is a palpable difference from company culture to culture.
If you work at a place where (a) you disagree with your company's ethical and moral standards and/or (b) you feel purported standards rarely influence actual decisions, then there are absolutely companies not like that.
Sure, you still have to deal with HR stuff, anti-union posturing, and sharp business practices. But fundamentally, it feels different.
I'd say most companies can be binary classified into "value their values" or "ignore their values".
If you don't believe this, go get a job at a lumber yard or a warehouse or something.
Related reading:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/558867.Disciplined_Minds
I can't understand why you're being down ranked for what is objectively the truth.
I've a long career inside and outside tech and this is consistent with my experience. Tech companies are uniquely toxic in the sheer volume of koolaid you're expected to digest to merely maintain your job there.
A tech company not filled to the brim with HR crap would be a breath of fresh air at this point.
Maybe many here simply haven't worked outside of tech?
Not to mention most warehouse workers don't make nearly enough to have the luxury of quitting.
Happy to answer more.
Edit: Apparently someone downvoted this comment within 60 seconds...this seems contrary to HN's ethos. I asked a general question with a specific example; is someone triggered by the words "Donald Trump"? This is pushing a legitimate question about FB's effect on the world down into the gray...is that a good thing?
It doesn't mean I believe everything that's done on our products is good for the world, but I do believe the good outweighs the bad by a wide margin. A big part of my job is to make sure that this margin increases.
How do we weight and balance the damage done by FB to our social discourse and elections, vs the benefits your family and many others have enjoyed?
HN commentary: Is anything I'm writing downvote worthy? Do you think my original comment (or this one) is incendiary or doesn't make the dialogue more nuanced and developed?
- Disrupt democracy all over the world,creating divisive political lines between us.
- Destroys the mental health of millions of teenagers that spend hours on Instagram comparing their lives with the fake lives of other people. An epidemic of mental health is directly linked to Instagram/Facebook
- Make us lose Billions of hours scrolling through a feed of nonsense just to display some ads.
Facebook is a huge net negative to the world. The only justification that I can see working for them is selfish money. Call it what it is, don't come up with some nonsense Koolaid around the product being a positive to the world.
Mainstream media has done more to disrupt democracy than Facebook. Whether it's:
- Lying about Iraq WMDs that eventually lead to tens of thousands of casualties (New York Times)
- Lying about Russian hacks of critical US infrastructure (Washington Post)
- Lying about the standards of immigration facilities (AP)
- Lying about innocent victims of assault during the riots (NPR)
- Threatening to ruin someones life through doxxing over political GIFs (CNN).
- log on
- see pics of niece/family
- message their buddy about that thing this weekend
- see funny cat video
- log off
To that person, FB provided a lot of value with none of the downsides you're talking about. I don't think I'm friends with a single person who even follows DT's page, so this whole ordeal means nothing to them.
Could people communicate via other websites? Sure, but it's easy enough to just use FB.
"The average US adult spends 38 minutes per day on Facebook. 16-24-year-olds spend a median of 3 hours a day on social media. Internet users spend an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social networking in 2019.May 19, 2020"
Source: https://review42.com/how-much-time-do-people-spend-on-social....
Facebook pays in line with what other top big public tech companies pay. You could go to Google or Netflix and expect similar comp.
Their core functionality, Find a Friend, is pathetically limited and naive. Why can't I search for ( cohort of near my age who went to my school ) or ( everyone called Bob who is one or two hops from Alice and lives in Bigville )?
Or even search a friend list by some criteria instead of scrolling through 1200 names.
Frankly it sucks.
They had this feature a couple years ago. It was called Graph Search and did exactly what you're suggesting (and even more impressive than that). They shut it down fairly quickly because it was a huge privacy and security issue as well as an incredibly abusive feature at their scale.
Building products in a system as complex as FB is not as straightforward as adding features just because you can or have the talent to do so.
I'm not sure how you stay sane working on those micro-issues though.
That said, my experience using Facebook is mostly positive. I see what my sister is up to, my mom, my aunt, several friends and acquaintances. Facebook messenger is by far my most used communications service.
I have taken step to keep it that way. I get no news of facebook. I've joined almost no groups. I unfollow anyone who gets too political, that has included a couple of close friends who I want to follow but they jsut can't stop posting politics several times week or even day so "unfollow".
I run FB Purity in the browser can block a bunch of stuff but I don't have that option in the FB app and for the most part I don't notice too much crap in my feed.
In other words, AFAIK it's mostly a positive in my life and the life of my friends. If I worked at Facebook I'd certainly be proud of how helped people stay in touch and organize group events.
I'm not excusing anything bad they do. Just suggesting I suspect many people have a mostly positive experience or they'd quit.
I guess different parts of the world have different moral standards. It is the way it is.
Another perspective is that I take the money, help support my extended family and community and feel like a net positive contributer.
Concerns with how social media is affecting relationships and corporate bullying are less real to me personally than the people I meet day to day who I can support.
Again, not arguing about which perspective is right, but yeah there are other ways to look at one's situation.
Compare this to Twitter, where a similar large amount of political discussion takes place, but mentioning that the law will be enforced is considered a 'threat' whereas actual death threats and doxxing are not.
Yes you can? I think X is OK, I think Y is not OK. I can even be a hypocrite about it, because X and Y may be fundamentally related, or share a source.
The ethical issues with Facebook could easily be seen as independent from the ethical issues with those other companies.
I know a guy who worked on a content moderation team and has been severely psychologically affected as a result. Like, he's not the same guy anymore. But he still works there and doesn't seem to consider taking any other job. I think it's because once you've seen all sorts of horrific images and have knowledge of heinous acts going on in the world after you're put in a position of policing them, you feel like the problem is bigger than yourself and your needs are secondary. It's sad, though.
I've never heard any of the people I know talk negatively about Facebook in any way, especially not a "wow, I can't believe I work for these people." There's always a focus on the good they're doing, and how the good outweighs the bad. After Trump got elected, there was all sorts of talk about how Facebook is bringing people together with feminist and anti-trump groups, ignoring the other facts. When Zuckerberg was testifying to Congress over privacy issues it was all about how he's being misrepresented and Congress doesn't understand the internet.
Only recently have I detected some small dissatisfaction from someone who has worked at FB for 7+ years, but instead of jumping ship entirely they switched to working for a different Facebook owned brand.
But I hear the pay is great, benefits are great, stock options are great, and the Facebook kool-aid is a mighty potent drink.
https://www.axios.com/exclusive-poll-facebook-favorability-p...
Facebook: Won't censor your political enemies enough.
"Not everybody shares your views" == "Not everybody shares your ethics".
Let me try and steel-man this for you: if you believe in classical liberal principles of free speech, then you might probably be "proud" to work at FB, as well as of Zuckerberg's stance.
Here's a better articulation of that: https://stratechery.com/2020/zuckerbergs-choice-zuckerbergs-...
Ethical frameworks were created specifically to be an objective standard.
Yes, and there are many ethical frameworks. You and I may subscribe to different ethical frameworks, and that's entirely a function of our morals.
The moral framework where Facebook "isn't a negative for society" is the one that says that a free society should be able to openly express itself, and insofar as there is a high degree of polarization/division, it's because society itself is divided, and the free expression simply exposes that. In other words, how do you know that Facebook caused the polarization? How can you definitely conclude that Facebook isn't simply a mirror on society, and that society was already divided to begin with?
> The moral framework where Facebook "isn't a negative for society" is the one that says that a free society should be able to openly express itself
I wasn't making any such grand claims. I intentionally scoped my argument to "Facebook has increased division in the world" and "increased division is bad", in an effort to keep it as non-subjective as possible.
> In other words, how do you know that Facebook caused the polarization?
I didn't have to look very far; Facebook did the study itself, internally, and executives directly chose to ignore it: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270659/facebook-divisio...
While this is indeed a compelling data point, I want to point out 2 things:
1. We have no way to verify the validity of the methodology, since the study is opaque to us.
2. We have no way to verify the veracity of the results, since the study is not peer reviewed.
And while you didn't have to look very far, perhaps if you look even a little farther, you'll find that there are conflicting studies (in published peer reviewed research):
"We combine nine previously proposed measures to construct an index of political polarization among US adults. We find that the growth in polarization in recent years is largest for the demographic groups least likely to use the internet and social media. For example, our overall index and eight of the nine individual measures show greater increases for those older than 75 than for those aged 18–39. These facts argue against the hypothesis that the internet is a primary driver of rising political polarization." [1]
"Contrary to conventional wisdom, my analysis provides evidence that social media usage reduces mass political polarization."[2]
"After conducting a detailed analysis of recommendations received by each channel type, we refute the popular radicalization claims. To the contrary, these data suggest that YouTube's recommendation algorithm actively discourages viewers from visiting radicalizing or extremist content."[3]
So this is by no means conclusive, and very much debatable. To repeat: the most charitable argument for "being proud" to work at FB is if you believe in classical liberal principles of free speech, and don't believe that social media itself creates polarization/division, it simply reveals it.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w23258
[2] http://rubenson.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/barbera-tpbw....