Such a shame Facebook is considered a prestigious place to work. Sure, you can become a millionaire, but at what cost? Is this what you imagined you would do as a kid interested in math/computers/science?
Not that the pay scales overlap much anyway.
Aside from that, I think _every single person_ that works at Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. (the uncivil technology corps) is morally bankrupt. Every last one of them is fundamentally compromised by their work.
I'm not making this judgment on a rational basis; my stance is based purely on my ethical values and ideological commitments.
If you find this silly, or think that it invalidates my opinion then: power to you! I do not believe that my ethical values are universal statements, nor that my ethics must be shared by anyone. I simply don't care to qualify every one of my statements with "it seems," "in my opinion," etc.
I genuinely wish to engage on this topic, so I welcome any further reply from you.
I disagree with the position taken that you can evaluate a person’s principles solely by their choice of employment or association. It’s only one factor and usually an unhelpfully reductive way to look at the world IMO.
What kind of people are you seeking out?
I'm not asking this to be obtuse; I'm genuinely interested in engaging on this topic, so I want to be sure I'm not speaking past your meaning.
"Who are the people I seek to condemn?" The information workers that find employment with massive, human-rights-violating corporations. I condemn these people for their willingness to dedicate such talent and intelligence towards actively making the world a more user-hostile place.
"Who are the people I seek to speak with?" Generally, everyone and anyone, including you or any of your acquaintances that happen to be reading this thread.
With respect, I think this speaks to a difference in our ethical values. I 100% believe that Facebook employees are fundamentally compromised by their employment. Don't get me twisted: I'm not accusing them of being Nazis, nor any such equivalence; these specific condemnations are very prevalent in our modern discourse. I'm not saying anything like this.
I'm also not saying that such people are necessarily unpleasant, or that their company might not be enjoyable. However, at the end of the day, they are making the world worse for me, the people I associate with, and (in my opinion) the people of the world at large. For these reasons, owing to my ideological commitments, I remain firm in my position.
Facebook employees are ethically compromised.
Again, I disagree heartily. I know FB employees who aren't ethically compromised, which serves as a counterexample to your claim. I can't think of any legal, large employer with whom people are ethically compromised simply by employment.
Also, your original claim was that they are morally corrupt. How do you distinguish between these two?
> they are making the world worse for me, the people I associate with
As a gentle reminder, a single person isn't the world, and your life being assessed by you as worse (without mention of baseline) is not a huge price to pay for free connections, central marketplace, and not to mention the groups that have been extraordinarily helpful for the marginalized. I've been in that place (marginalized), and finding support through groups facilitated by FB's platform was essential to my well-being. So again, counterexample to the totalizing claim.
Am I a fan of FB? No. But it's a really hard stretch to assume that everyone is compromised for being involved with them. Such claims aren't novel, but seem to be histrionics in most cases.
I will accede to your claim: this is largely histrionics. I don't disavow my position, but I certainly do regret having so casually made these "totalizing" claims. It's a position I'm still working on formalizing well, but posting pure rhetoric is not that well-formalism.
You are correct that a single person isn't the world; however, my singular personhood is my entire world, and I do think it's fair to use the data point of me to make judgments about the world and others.
I think I specifically need to work on how I convey my notion of "ethically compromised," because I think it's probably far weaker than it's likely to be taken.
Perhaps I should say, instead, that I can not say any Facebook employee is ethical; or that, if Facebook employees were to share my ethical values, they could not view themselves as ethical actors (although I'm certainly not contending they ought to have my values). More generally, however, I believe this of every employee of Microsoft, Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc. (the uncivil technology corps) Saving only for those employees whose immigration to the USA was conditioned upon their employment.
To me, the question is very much similar to "Were the employees of IBM during the Holocaust ethical?" The reporting goes, that IBM helped Nazi Germany design the computer systems that tabulated inmates at concentration camps. I really hate this particular formulation, because I definitely do not want to draw parallels to Nazism; nor do I wish to imply that they are on the fringes of such. However, at their most extreme, the uncivil technology corps has contributed a lot of tech and a lot of data to the CCP. I believe the reporting that the CCP is arresting Uighur Muslims and others, and placing them in concentration camps. Again, I do not wish to imply that this is the same _in scale_ as the Holocaust, nor even necessarily _in kind_ (yet), but it certainly rhymes to an uncomfortable degree. This is where I specifically stake my claim that these employees are unethical for human rights violations.
I don't see how someone can claim any degree of ethical standing if they directly aid an endeavor which profits from such malady.
I am glad to hear that you've found benefit from using Facebook, but I contend that whatever positive values Facebook might have are far-and-away outweighed by the definite societal ills it wreaks.
Again, just to clarify, I'm not saying that you need share my opinion: just as I am my own yardstick for the universe, I respect that you do the same.
I sincerely appreciate the engagement we're having. It's easy to look at someone you perceive to be displaying histrionics and snub them; thank you for our dialogue, and I hope it can continue.
EDIT: If you'd wish to continue this dialogue via email, my inbox is in my profile; else, I definitely welcome continuing this thread here publicly.
Why Microsoft though? Not sure they can be compared to Google or Facebook. But maybe I'm missing something.
If Microsoft - why not Apple?
I think most of us are morally corrupt however or let's call it applying a flexible morality.
When it comes to pleasure or money, e.g. going to McDonalds, buying fast fashion, or working for these massive ad companies, it's not always easy to do the right thing.
It's a systemic issue and we need to address the 'profit uber alles' value system.
How would you address this problem?
I'm not sure how I'd obviate the problem entirely. I would propose a new tax on companies, commensurate to the degree they lock down their tech. This tax would be ear-marked towards a granting program for groups and individuals in the US, with the sole purpose of enabling grantees to publish new technology for the community.
That is, a grantee would be a non-corporate interest. The work of the grantee would be released as a public good, possibly competing in the same space as the companies from whom the tax came. As an example: Apple, having locked down their ecosystem so tightly, would be taxed highly under this program. The tax goes into a grant. Interested software developers apply for the tax, possibly to contribute work towards an OS or a command-line utility or sundry other projects.
I don't know if this would help. I feel that it would because it ideally helps convert technological rent from the rent-seeking corporations into tangible public goods.
By that logic, the linux community is corrupted by helping and accepting submissions from evil companies and evil governments
Everyone who buys and/or uses any sort of devices is corrupt too
Kinda reminds me of "The Good Place", haha
Can someone deriving income from such a business model, while other options are almost certainly available to them, NOT be considered morally corrupt?
The same could be said of soldiers in an army used for oppression. They don't feel responsible for the outcomes because they aren't the ones making the decisions, or they work 'behind the scenes'.
I personally don't judge any of them but I can see how you could argue that simply by working for such a company or institution you are partly to blame for their immorality.
Whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.
I've worked a for a lot of 'nicer' small companies and they pretty much threw me in the trash
Ultimately Google and Facebook are ad agencies (by profit). They need to pay a premium to attract workers because their mission is less attractive, although they dress it up by publicizing ancillary projects. If you go several steps farther, porn companies do the same.
Now. They are a combination of advertising venues and ad placement agency. “Ad agencies” are the companies you hire to make ads.
Though Google branching out into using AI to generate ads probably isn't too far off.
> Not that the pay scales overlap much anyway
Those grapes sure are sour.
The thing about morals is that they're written by the individual, and meant to guide the individual. They're fine to have until you try to apply them to other people.
And in doing so, guide the individual's decisions, which then affect society.
Is it? It’s not my industry but I haven’t got that impression from reading threads here.
Edit: Here’s an example Reddit thread of what I mean: https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/mnl4u2/why_does_e...
(Unless the work involves having some sort of strong moral compass anyway)
(I frequent career fairs, blind and cscareerquestions)
And prestige among the FANGs generally goes: Google and FB in their own tier (depending on whether you value WLB or compensation and promotion rate), Apple and Netflix slightly lower, and Amazon (and Microsoft, albeit not a FANG) much lower than all of them.
Now multiply this by several billions.
(Disclaimer: Facebook employee who thinks Facebook and social media is a net positive)
What offsets FB's choices that connected millions of extremists and gave them protected spaces to radicalize each other? [0]
What offsets FB's decision to rush into regions it can't moderate, leading to FB being used as the platform that spreads genocide-inciting misinformation? [1]
Personally I've had to work very hard to keep my parents safe this pandemic, disabusing my parents of dangerous COVID related misinformation that they saw on Facebook. I've had to research some really deranged stuff that they picked up on that platform.
I see a pretty deep debt on the evil side of the ledger, but you're asserting FB is net positive. So what am I missing? Where is the good stuff FB does that offsets all of this harm?
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201219115127/http://wsj.com/ar...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
But I’ll leave a short one here to respect your comment.
I believe social media empowers people, it makes my life better, it gives many people a voice where before it only belonged to a few. Those few also incited wars and genocides, and bred rage and mistrust (From NY Times supporting Iraq war to your local news stations to Fox/CNN concentrating on stories that outrage or warm your heart and get you back) from before Facebook existed and do so to this day. All of those nasty effects of social media existed before, they just moved to the most efficient media form.
I support people’s right to communicate and own their opinions, and I accept that giving a voice to everyone will always results in problems small and large. But Facebook does spend a lot of resources trying to make social media better. I’m an insider and swayed, but I think Facebook spends much more resources than TV channels and newspapers trying to address such issues.
The rest is a proper response really depends on a lot of arguments clumped against Facebook, and addressing them depends on the person: - Is the criticism against all social media? - Is it against ranking feed items? - Is it against monetizing through ads? - More rarely, is it against censoring, or because of data policies, or supposed negligence, or more. There’s such so many issues against Facebook, yet almost everyone keeps using the products, and the only countries that ban Facebook are not ones that come of as inspiring to me when you consider their reasons.
I don't see the value of giving a platform to dangerous bullshit. People need truth about reality. Giving a platform, or voice, to people who feed bad information to others can cause those others to make suboptimal choices, like rejecting masks or vaccines. How many people have died a miserable death (suffocating because their lungs can no longer absorb any oxygen even at 100% O2) over the past 2 years because of COVID disinformation spread on FB? Based on how many hours I've had to spend on the phone with my parents explaining why things they saw on FB are wrong, there's absolutely no way it's less than 10s of thousands just in the US.
I'm pretty impressed with your ability to just brush aside a genocide caused by FB rushing into a new market with 18 million people with only a few dozen moderators that speak the language. Facebook had been running a social media site for nearly a decade by then; there's no way FB didn't know the minimum ratio of moderators to users needed to keep up with typical moderation workloads. The only explanation consistent with the evidence is that FB just didn't care about avoiding that genocide and mass displacement. And based on your reaction to it, I assume the FB culture still isn't concerned about the boring details of being responsible and ethical.
I'm not trying to shame you, I don't think shame works at changing people's behavior, but I do think being caviler about massive harms like genocide and COVID disinformation is a major red flag, and I think you should take a hard look at your values and grapple with the possiblity that working for a company that kills hundreds of thousands through (best case scenario) gross negligence may be indefensible.
Proportional to their extremely greater profit they better be.
"All of those nasty effects of social media existed before, they just moved to the most efficient media form."
Back in the day you could kill a few people with arrows and spears, then you had automatic rifles, now we have nuclear and chemical weapons. We actually try to regulate those...
As far as I can tell, Facebook's innovation is it's great at identifying people susceptible to extremist conspiracies and at connecting them. Per Facebook's own research: """Even before the teams’ 2017 creation, Facebook researchers had found signs of trouble. A 2016 presentation that names as author a Facebook researcher and sociologist, Monica Lee, found extremist content thriving in more than one-third of large German political groups on the platform. Swamped with racist, conspiracy-minded and pro-Russian content, the groups were disproportionately influenced by a subset of hyperactive users, the presentation notes. Most of them were private or secret.
The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth.The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”"" [0].
There were QAnon groups with millions of members. Facebook created these echo chambers and then ushered people in. And the only thing you can think of is they allowed you to communicate with your mother and share images?
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201219115127/http://wsj.com/ar...
Ubiquitous universal communication. It is the stuff of utopian sci fi.
Facebook has clearly cracked the monetization problem.
Anyways, the post I replied to was talking about the machinery, not the monetization.
There are dozens of software that can do worldwide instant messaging. It's ridiculous to think that that's why Facebook is successful. It's not, monetization and network effects are the reason, not being technically superior.
Pytorch is pretty neat, though.
IG is a net good because even in this specific case, it did more good than harm. The numbers in the article are all less than half. On average users self-report increased well being when they use IG, as long as they don't use it too much.
But improving things on average isn't good enough. IG also wants to improve the situation for the users who self-report being adversely affected by their IG usage. IG has added features and spent a ton on research and product improvements to improve subjective wellbeing, and have been successful in measurably improving self-reported wellbeing, reducing objective measures like bullying prevalence and negativity.
Years ago, when FB was relatively new, I was very anti-FB, and would discourage everyone from using it due to privacy concerns.
Then a Sudanese friend was staying with me for a few days. He had spent years separated from his relatives who lived in multiple countries, as he was working odd jobs to save enough money for a degree. Through FB, he got to see his nephews and nieces be born and grow for a few years. The amount of joy it brought him was immeasurable.
I realized I was the asshole thinking I knew better than he. If it brought him this much joy, it definitely was worth the loss of privacy. Multiply that by millions.
Today, there may be viable alternatives, but there weren't in those days. At least none that his non-techie relatives could use. FB is what brought about the joy. Nothing else did, despite trying.
FB is a tool. Yes, there are plenty of problems with it, but they require mitigations - perhaps even legislation - not a shutdown. Killing FB, IG and Whatsapp really won't solve anything. Plenty of competitors will eat up the space. It's like saying "Marlboro is the market leader. Let's ban it."
Their product kills people or makes them seriously ill - how would you improve that product so it doesn't?
So for the good of society - access to their products should be much harder, i.e. factor in the cost of all the damage those products cause and people will have less of an incentive to purchase these.
Wait, there was no email yet?
Email's been around forever. If email were a viable alternative, FB would not exist. The amount of sharing between the Sudanese guy and his family skyrocketed after FB came along.
And this was before smartphones.
I work a job that I imagined I'd like as a kid.
Work is interesting, but it's a crappy job.
Of the jobs I've had, all the ones that aligned with my passion sucked. It's no longer a criterion when I look for jobs.
If you can find a job that aligns with your passion, and it's not a crappy job, by all means go for it! For many, they tire of hopping from job to job in search of satisfaction. Optimizing for money (or time) tends to be the next logical step.
Ethics are disappointingly rare in Software. Such a shame.
Limiting everyone to only non-toxic crayons short, dull, plastic knives that cannot even cut bread would reduce ability to inflict harm. To call blaming the tool childish is an insult to children. Is Sony now responsible for production and distribution of child pornography for making camcorders, screens, and computer memory?
I don't even like Facebook but I can see the prevailing arguments are utterly deranged.
I agree that the sense of which you speak is a nonsensical perspective; I'm not interested in laying blame on a tool for how the tool is utilized.
The Facebook employee isn't unethical because of their nebulous entanglement in nth-order externalities, whereby bad-person X did bad-thing Y therefore employee Z is guilty by association.
The Facebook employee is unethical because of their direct, active, engagement in developing the actual tools actually utilized by none other than their employer for the explicit purpose of making our world a more user-hostile place.
On the topic of open source, would it be possible to construct a license that removes the ability of bad actors to use it? Of course, a bad actor could use it against the terms of the license, but the intent of the software project is made clear.
I take it as axiomatic that Facebook is an unethical actor. I believe I have good reasons for this. From there, I say that anyone who works to make Facebook more effective at its unethical goals is similarly unethical.
No, this doesn't include people that contribute to OSS that originated at Facebook. Improving OSS is a contribution to the community, of which Facebook is unfortunately permitted to benefit from. Facebook starting an OSS project does not make the OSS unethical, because the OSS is a tool.
The question is different for employees because of this community/Facebook divide. Facebook employees are not unethical because of the tools they use for Facebook, they are unethical for furthering Facebook's unethical aims.
There is a very good discussion further down this thread. I do not mean "enables" in the sense that "a tool is used to violate human rights." I mean "enables" in the sense that "Facebook itself commits human rights violations, and employees of Facebook further the aims and means of these violations."
That is, Facebook employees are not unethical because they develop tools that are used to violate human rights. Facebook employees are unethical because they take direct part in the actual policies by which Facebook makes the world a more user-hostile place.
I don't think plumbers,electricians,lawyers, construction workers,car salespeople, you name it necessarily have inherently better average ethics (even once and if we define and agree on what those are or should be :)
As a software dev, if you're good enough to pass the screening at Facebook, you're good enough to have your pick of employers. You can go to one which is making a positive impact on the world.
HN software people love to call themselves Engineers with a capital E, but it seems all too often it gets forgotten that the practice of professional engineering requires adherence to professional codes of ethics.
Every accredited engineering program in the US and Canada requires that graduates have completed a Professional Ethics course, but of course the vast majority of "Software Engineers" aren't actually degree-holding engineers. They're by and large Comp Sci grads and to the best of my knowledge there isn't the same requirement for Ethics courses in computer science programs.
Is a perfectly defensible moral argument.
Yes - there are tons of developers, but a lot of senior devs won't nab offers from facebook due to their poor corporate profile and their hiring is, as a result, incredibly desperate at the senior level. Those folks who do consent to work for them command higher salaries because of this shortfall and most of us just get jobs that don't leave a bad taste in our mouth.
You could debate and compare all of these companies and they come out the same.
NGOs are full of unethical practices hopefully with cover. Small business does unethical at a smaller scale.
More often the successful businesses are the ones willing to be an unethical. The dating company with fake profiles or that tricky sales funnel designed to catch grandma and sell her knitting needles using misleading text.
How ethical is the company you are working for?
You start with "I don't know what an Ethical company means to you _or if it should matter_;" I'm a sincere egoist, so I declare: no! It shouldn't matter to you, or to anyone, what my or anyone else's notion of ethical is! Ethics isn't a universal, it's not endemic to the individual experience, and neither is ethics-having in the first place.
I contend that ethics-having is vital to the human experience like vitamins are vital.
Having said that, what would an ethical company look like _to me_? I have one simple test: whether a B2C company enforces that their product or service be used only in specific ways. Any company which fails this test is de facto unethical, and downright uncivil.
Apple taking away the right to repair is a company enforcing rules for a product be used in certain ways. On the other side facebook tries to get you to use the product in certain ways but rarely enforces it.
Likewise, it's a simple assessment for me to conduct. "Do I think this corporation enforces that their product or service be used in a certain specific way?" Unfortunately, I'm incapable of formalizing it any better than that. Yes, it's arbitrary, and not rational. I accept that. I don't advocate that anyone use this test, nor adopt my ethical positions; however, it is what I use, and I was primarily interested in sharing my perspective (which is both arbitrary and irrational).
This line can defend anything people compete to be paid for, which should be a pretty clear sign that it's not a good line of reasoning.