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Comment by wussboy | Hacker News Reader

For me the barrier to working at Facebook is the fact their product is causing so much harm in our world, from elections to the environment to mental health to the breakdown of social capital.

I know I’ll be downvoted for taking an ethical rather than financial or technological position, but ethics matter. Especially in technology and finances.

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It's also doing a lot of good. It's in the nature of any broadcasting and communications platform

"drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"

Never actually saw the skip parent post quantify harm vs good and yet.

Lmao that is ridiculously unfair since you're starting with a near-universally agreed bad thing.

Better analogy augmenting yours: just cars. Accidents between cars or cars and pedestrians kill lots of people every year.

This works with every tech. Phones have made it easier to coordinate crimes. Printing press and even televisions made mass propaganda possible. There are always tradeoffs.

"driving helps a ton of people get around, but sometimes people drive drunk and kill other people, so it's definitely unforgivingly bad"

Bad enough you won't catch me working for a car company. Excellent example really.

The problem with facebook isn't that individual users sometimes do bad things on it's platform.

As much as I dislike Meta, this is a very unfair comparison.

Facebook has done a lot of harm to the world, but it also has done plenty of good.

Aside from that, your analogy is incredibly weird. Do people drive drunk to... work? Who does that?

Qualify "good".

Ethics matters, but not everyone think that Facebook causes "so much harm in our world". At least, not more than other corporations.

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