Comment by erikw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erikw | Hacker News Reader

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I too am curious about the internal motivations of people who work for Facebook. Something I've noticed about myself is that I would be okay with working for a US defense contractor, ie a company which makes machines that literally kill people, yet I could not picture myself working at Facebook. I struggle to square this morally, because I also believe that defense contractors have a greater net negative impact on society than Facebook does, but there is something "icky" to me about Facebook.

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".

> I would be okay with working for a US defense contractor, ie a company which makes machines that literally kill people

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.

What damage is Zuck causing again?

Damage to society by denying the role - via inaction, if nothing else - the company he leads plays in coordinated campaigns of deceit and disinformation aimed not just to undermine public discourse but also the functioning of democractic government itself (via targeted political advertising and misinformation).

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.

> 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.

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.

>> I would be okay with working for a US defense contractor, ie a company which makes machines that literally kill people, yet I could not picture myself working at Facebook.

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.

Clear definition of mission is important. For external and internal consumption.

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...

>none of them seemed to have any moral qualms about their employers.

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.

There is shared morality, just not universally shared morality. The people marching right now share some morality. As do the folks complaining about mandatory mask rules. We may or may not agree with them, but there is shared moral logic.

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