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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

If one is born in the US, it's quite difficult to leave. Even if you leave, it's a long process to become a citizen elsewhere and give up your US citizenship.

But one who chooses to work at Facebook (and reads HN) must know what goes on there; and they could choose a different, more ethical company.

The police provide necessary services. Facebook does not provide a necessary service. Some would argue that they prevent other, better services from existing because of their critical mass and financial means. So while plenty of bad things are done by some police, the service has value. Ethics aside, the value of Facebook is very marginal based on many studies.

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It's not clear to me that Facebook is acting unethically. They provide a communications platform, and communications platforms are always used unethically.

This is true of the telephone. Of the newspaper. Of text messages. Of telegram services. Of video chat. Of magazines. Of public meeting areas like park benches.

Every single one of these platforms have been used for human trafficking and other illegal behavior. It's ubiquitous, always has been, and always will be because the communications on a system are reflective of the humans using them.

The subjective question is whether Facebook puts enough effort into policing their platforms, and it's the exact same question posed (for example) to a city regarding the policing of solicitation in public parks. There will always be people unhappy with the level of enforcement in a common platform. It's reasonable to ask for more enforcement, but I cannot see a compelling argument that Facebook's communications platform is somehow less ethical than any other.

The mistrust in Facebook's self-policing comes from the times they have buried internal studies which show that they're doing a poor job, or from intentionally making it difficult for outsiders to illustrate that they're doing a bad job.

It's one thing to say, "this is hard and we're not good at it yet". It's another to hide evidence and pretend to be doing a good job, especially when you're talking about human lives.

Again, Facebook seems to be generally operating within the status quo. It is typical for companies to hide embarrassing internal studies. Are you able to point out a large telecommunications or tech company which hasn't shown similar behavior?

And again, just because other companies do bad things doesn't mean it's ok.

Also, most of these other companies exist because they provide a real, needed service to people. Facebook creates the need (artificial) for the services they provide.

Well, that simply isn't true. Facebook's communications platform is as real as any other communications platform.

I think you're confusing carte-blanche acceptance (which I haven't suggested) with considering the relative weight of your suggested ethical issue.

Have you called for people to quit working for ATT? For Google? Are there any telecom or software companies you don't think people should refuse to work for?

FB is a communication platform and a publisher, depending on what is more convenient for them. They police speech but then in more important things is clear that they are doing a very bad job. You can argue that any company at the end try to maximize profits but FB has a long history to be misleading an manipulating to avoid do what they should do while keep milking their cash cow.

It's not quite difficult to leave. It's actually very easy. The process of getting citizenship elsewhere can take a while. But if you leave and renounce US citizenship, there are many countries that will allow you to stay until you get citizenship there.

Arguing against the value of FB is tough, given how much money it makes. In some sense, our society has determined that the BEST way to measure value is by how much money can it generate. By this measure FB has a lot of value.

You personally may not like FB. But my point is that there are a probably a lot of things that you hold dear (or at least don't find overly offensive) that others consider to do FAR more harm than FB ever has.

This is now off-topic, but ...

> It's not quite difficult to leave. It's actually very easy. The process of getting citizenship elsewhere can take a while. But if you leave and renounce US citizenship, there are many countries that will allow you to stay until you get citizenship there.

With a US passport, you can go many places and stay for a short time. You cannot, however, stay indefinitely. If you try, you will face many obstacles and quite possibly fail and be ejected.

Also, renouncing US citizenship is not like sending a letter or walking into an embassy and handing your passport back. There's an interview process and some financial preparation required.

Lastly, even if you did renounce, and you're somehow allowed to live in another country while you go through the (lengthy) process to get a new passport, you are now stuck in that one place. You cannot go anywhere. This is certainly not something you would do unless you were really desperate.

I was speaking of value to humanity, not value to FB execs and investors. This is not a money matter.

Finally, pointing out other bad things does not make this a not-bad thing. By this logic, you could excuse anything because you could always point to something worse.

> This is certainly not something you would do unless you were really desperate.

This is aligned with your position on value to humanity. If you believe that the US is the greatest force against humanity in the modern world (which a lot of people do believe) then not being a part of it is extremely prudent. That inconvenience associated with not being able to visit other countries pales in comparison to being part of the evil which is the US (if this is what you believe).

> Finally, pointing out other bad things does not make this a not-bad thing.

It's all relative. If on the list of bad things in the world, I have FB below about 20 other things I have yet to act on -- and FB is paying the rent and my kids college then why should I act on that (as you point out with the police, there is some value to their service -- if I were employed by FB, they also provide value directly to me)?

Others may have a list of things that rate worse against humanity than FB (but we still "participate in them") such as the crimes committed by the US govt, abortions, police abuse, the prison industrial complex, my cheating best friend, regulatory capture in pharma, allowing animals to be imprisoned and killed for meat, our overreliance on plastics, etc... There's a lot of problems in the world that harm humanity. FB just simply isn't high on most people's list. I'm not saying it isn't high on yours. In which case, you definitely shouldn't work there or use it. I'm just trying to prepare you for the fact that most people, myself included, just don't rank this very highly. And I certainly don't hold it against people that work there -- except for maybe Mark himself.

> If one is born in the US, it's quite difficult to leave. Even if you leave, it's a long process to become a citizen elsewhere and give up your US citizenship.

If you ever vote for a mainstream candidate, this line of argument falls flat. You are now participating in the process and actively supporting someone who is actually making the bad stuff happen.

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