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Comment by Mekantis | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but "good people" who are involved with all the evil things Facebook does by working for them aren't good people. I know it's hip to absolve yourself of responsibility by saying "I just work here" or "I didn't work on that", but all these rationalizations don't fly as long as you're one of the quiet majority that does nothing to fight what Facebook does.

Seriously, techies seem to act on the same amoral plane as business executives and I wonder how you people manage to sleep at night.

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Please don't morally posture over other people on this forum, first because it's bad for conversation, and second because we're all guilty, even those who don't work for Facebook.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There's 2 things here to keep in mind to go down your train of logic:

1) The company is actually doing evil things

2) The employee is aware of the purported evil things the company is doing, and agrees with that claim

Now we can debate all we want how evil Facebook is or not, but how many employees do you think check off box 2?

I find it difficult to believe that the average Facebook employee is exposed to less media coverage about their own company than a member of the general public is. So the remaining possibilities are that the employee either agrees with the policy (in which case, we can question their judgment), or they're just trying to keep food on the table (in which case, we should wonder about how healthy the job market is).

Which policies of Facebooks are 'evil', exactly?

There are more options than you've presented. There is also that the employee has perfectly valid and logical reasons for believing the policy isn't evil. In other words, the issue is you see the policies as evil with no possibility to see otherwise.

I use facebook to connect with my family and friends. I've unfollowed all overly political friends. I get no real or fake news in my facebook feed. If I worked at facebook I'd be proud of helping people to stay connected.

To add to this, Facebook is seen as an existential threat to traditional media so most reporting on it will pass through an editorial lens.

Here on HN we are happy to call out the NYT and Bloomberg when they are wrong, but is that only when their articles don't align with our prior biases?

There’s no question that there are good things about Facebook, but I think a fully contemplative person would need to balance those things against the harms Facebook allows to exist on their platform. It’s not a black and white question of good vs evil, as much as it is “does what this company does (or not do), on balance, comport with my values of right or wrong?” Evidence of wrong-doing and questionable judgment by the company’s leaders is abundant. And at some point you can’t continue to work for a company without being complicit in its sins; after all, a company hires someone because they need them to help execute the company’s decisions.

What if you replaced “Facebook” with “the US federal government”?

Can you continue to work for the digital service without being complicit in the government’s sins? There is plenty of evidence of wrong-doing and questionable judgement by the government’s leaders, for sure.

Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?

The Government is subject to a Constitution that has an amendment process, and laws are made by elected leadership who can be voted out by the people.

Facebook is not a democracy, and given the corporate structure and differing voting rights of shareholders, it is practically impossible to replace the current leadership even if a majority of shareholders wanted to.

Moreover, the Government is immense and highly diverse in its missions compared to Facebook. I don't think anyone reasonably believes the sins of the CIA should be borne by, say, U.S. Forest Service park rangers. If Facebook had a public service mission that, among other things, provided essential services to the public like food and housing, perhaps the discussion would be different.

> Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?

Some might say that this is the desired outcome, but eventually management might see the writing on the wall and change the way they do business. Indeed, this is one of the key mechanisms of unionized labor - to bring management to the table for negotiation through the threat of work stoppage (striking).

I think the government is indeed massive with a diverse set of goals, but I think employees at Facebook may see their workplace the same way:

- They could work on something “good”, like trust and safety, community moderation tools, emergency response, etc.

- They could work on something user-driven or “neutral”, like Events or Groups which are used to organize anything from BLM protests to Trump rallies.

If they’re not actively designing privacy anti-patterns or trying to make the news feed more addictive, quitting would not really affect those problem areas.

I think organizing at the workplace is a great idea, and the threat of work stoppage could be a very real one if enough employees organize. But the idea of telling people to quit their jobs and distance themselves from the problem is very different from telling them to start organizing to fix the problem.

As others have said, there are other possibilities. Some good, some neutral, perhaps some bad (but in ways unrelated to how Facebook itself is considered bad).

A great many are there to build their skills and/or resumes, which is a lot more than just putting food on the table. There aren't many places where one can learn so much so quickly about certain technologies (like VR/AR) or how to run things at that kind of scale, and most of those (e.g. Google, Amazon) have their own ethical issues. Many other companies, including some HN darlings, were founded by ex-FB employees. Some of them are doing good things, for practically any definition of "good" you might apply.

Others are there because they believe in the good Facebook does as well as the bad. As you said, they're likely exposed to more information about what the company does, which means a lower percentage is of the "jealous columnist at NYT" variety. Facebook helps connect people and businesses in positive ways as well as negative. You might think the ratio is not high enough, but others can quite reasonably disagree and/or think it's worth their time to work on improving that ratio.

There are many other possible reasons as well. "Evil or trapped" is not a useful simplification.

A good way to look at this is to consider someone working for RJ Reynolds in the 70s. The pay is good, you are working on a product that people just seem to _love_, and everyone at the company seems pretty enthusiastic and committed. There is a little thrill to tell people where you work and have them tell you that they use your company's product.

Yes, some people may have concerns about the product and its long-term consequences to individual health and society, but those are just alarmist freaks and we can ignore them.

Yes, there are also those internal reports that you might have seen or heard about in chatter around the water cooler, but you are not an expert in that subject so really what do you know? And the experts the execs bring around on office tours seem to be OK with things.

Yes, everyone at the company uses the product and while you were not a heavy user of the product before joining you can't avoid it in meetings and daily work. You seem to be recognizing some of the negative symptoms of the product in your daily life a lot more these past few months, but that recent project you worked on was pretty cool and in your last evaluation you got high marks for 'impact' so it can't all be bad, right?

Everyone who works at FB (ok, let's say IC2 and above) knows what is going on. Everyone who has been there for more than two or three years feels the relentless pressure to increase 'engagement' no matter the cost. Most are a bit unsure about the whole 'vision' thing Mark keeps talking about and they have enough self-awareness to see the cult-like aspects of the company, but the pay is very good and it can be a thrill at times to have access to either the audience or systems of such size and scope (e.g. let's count the files in /tmp across 1 million+ systems just because hypershell lets us...)

At what point in your career at RJ Reynolds do you realize that you are actually doing evil and check off box 2? At what point do you admit to yourself that what you do day to day has negative long-term consequences for society? When you do realize this what do you do?

(Disclaimer: worked at FB a while ago for a long enough period of time that the actions of sociopathic management eventually overwhelmed the 'protecting these systems protects activists and persecuted people from their evil governments' story I told myself and so I bailed.)

At the end of the day, you need enough people to care. But plenty are happy with finishing the work, or absolving all the messiness of real world and focus on the engineering work, which is simply more pleasant (and fits to their liking). Work is hard enough, why adding extra stress unless the company is doing something obviously illegal?

So you think that this person was the absolutely last good person at Facebook, and that every one of the other 48,000+ are evil? Do you also believe that every single US government employee, including Dr. Fauci and the inspectors general who regularly report on wrongdoing, must be evil because they're involved with what the Trump administration does? And what on Earth makes you think the majority at Facebook is quiet about any topic least of all this one? Interesting notions, to say the least.

It seems to me that there are three stories here. One is that some small group of employees were violating policy by preventing certain users from being flagged or banned when they should have been. One is that an employee caught them. The third is that the employee was fired - apparently for conduct around the disclosure rather than the disclosure itself, but that's beside the point. The point is that it's absurd to assume that the first and third stories are totally representative of how every single person remaining at Facebook is, while the one that connects them is assumed to be an anomaly that could never possibly happen again.

What evil things?

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