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Comment by phatfish | Hacker News Reader

IBM did some great work for the Germans in the 30s and 40s.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25222895.

I despise Facebook, but this is a horrible take. They’re not actively in the business of genocide.

Even if it's through inaction, they're still liable.

Unless you're Rohingya

Myanmar?

Is that an accusation that eBFP & io_uring are somehow tools of genocide? That seems a stretch. At some point, good work is good work.

It isn't like Alexei & Jens working for a different company and implementing the same features would stop people using them. As TFA mentions, these are likely to be hot, high demand nuggets for many companies and developers.

You're stretching big with the implication that they're tools of genocide, since that's not really how his comment (however snarky) reads. Good work does not remove it from a morally messed up situation.

Facebook has caused serious issues with society and it's not cool to just glaze over this any time their contribution to technology comes up.

I understand your feelings but it's not fair to blame developers for what the management is doing.

If you choose to give your labor to a company, you tacitly approve of what the company does with the fruits of that labor.

> you tacitly approve

This view seems quite reductionist. It's smells like guilt by association. It excludes the middle ground where you do not approve but ignore that due to other priorities (such as money or excitement about technology you get to work on). Approval is not a binary choice. It also is subject to tradeoffs.

So all you can derive from someone working at facebook is that their preference against indirect contribution (by several hops) to genocide is weaker than the combination of some other preferences. This may also be due to how they're discounting that responsibility distance.

Frankly, I don't understand this logic. This would mean all workers approve what their companies are doing. There are many warehouse workers at Amazon who hate several aspects of their company. Nevertheless, they still work there as they need to feed their families. That's one point.

Second, Facebook is not a tobacco or gun manufacturing company. Their main business is advertising, and they made several grave errors on the way, and they continue to do certain wrong things, but as much as you can hate them you can't morally equate any communication platform with planned genocide. It's shifting responsibility from actual people who commit attrocities to a platform that makes it easier for them to communicate. Yes, FB is easier to blame, but this approach misses the main point.

Maybe if the management changed the company's direction for the worse after the developers were hired - which seems to have happened at Google, but not at Facebook. Nevertheless, I think Facebook contributing to infrastructure for everyone is a net positive due to the large amount of outside users vs. the usefulness for Facebook.

Personally, I have a few things I won't do, which are different from what other people won't do. In a certain "Overton Window", I don't argue about it.

respectfully disagree.

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