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Comment by DrScientist | Hacker News Reader

> Companies have no soul. They are, by design, just chasing revenue. Everything else is just a risk to be factored.

I disagree - companies are set up/run by people, and those people define company culture/ company culture reflects those people.

Not all companies, even big ones, are the same.

To make that concrete - if Mark Zuckerberg found out about the above activity and was appalled and sacked everyone involved that would send out a very strong signal.

Note this particular method can't be a rogue one man job - it requires coordination across multiple parts of the Meta stack - senior people had to know - which would point to a rotten culture at Meta emanating from the top.

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> To make that concrete - if Mark Zuckerberg found out about the above activity and was appalled and sacked everyone involved that would send out a very strong signal.

We know from another case that the opposite culture is true: when told to break the law and use copyrighted material, the engineers feel uneasy - they were not stupid and understood what they were going to do, and for a similar-in-nature-but-a-few-orders-of-magnitude-smaller things Aaron Schwarz was facing prison time. So they expressed their concerns upwards but they were told to proceed anyway.

Exactly.

People made that decision.

This is a grey area. Yes people are people, but when they work for corporations they are given a green light to do things that they normally morally wouldnt do. The ability to blame it on superiors, brush it under the carpet, or hide evidence amongst billions of pieces of normal data allow 'People' to make abhorrent decisions in the best interest of making the company money. These decisions may even be incentivised by bonuses etc.

People are human beings, and we are all prone to bias and bribery nwhen big sums of cash are dangled in front of us.

There is nothing special about a company in what you say - you could say the same thing about a church or a protest group - or any other grouping of people.

And yes, the leaders of a company/protest group/church might have more influence on the moral choices of it's members than the rank and file than others - but they are also people too.

A company isn't magical with an existence outside the people that define the systems, processes, and perform the work.

Sure if you are flipping burgers in famous burger chain you are following very clearly defined rules as part of a bigger system - but a person designed that system - intentionally - and people manage and maintain it.

When an insurance company executive decided to start screwing consumers a bit less, a board member initiated a lawsuit against him and the company. The system corrects for errors, and individual choices to do better are exactly such an error.

No, companies indeed have no soul. This is all about perverse incentives. While companies are setup/run by people, the (publicly owned) company as a whole only has one incentive: profit. If any person on the inside stands against that, they won't stand long. Investors, executives whose pay depend on it, etc. will make sure of that.

So the problem here is to transform a moral incentive into a financial one. A strong outside regulator who will stand its ground can do this, by imposing a meaningful financial penalty to punish the legal/moral transgression. This is why regulations and regulators with teeth are vital in a capitalist system.

I'm not holding my breath here. Regulatory capture is a thing. OTOH, Trump's undiplomatic approach to the EU may wind up costing Meta. We'll see.

> If any person on the inside stands against that, they won't stand long. Investors, executives whose pay depend on it, etc. will make sure of that.

Not in my experience. Even investors are people too ( or the investment companies reflect the values of the people running it ).

Sure there are people who believe the only role of a company is to make money ( eg Milton Friedman ). However that's an opinion - not a fact.

Other people have different views and run their companies, or place their investments, accordingly.

Even if you believe all that matters is the bottom line - you still might take the view that doing reputational damaging stuff like this is bad for the long term bottom line.

That's not to say that I don't agree with you that companies will face pressure over the bottom line, and outside regulation is absolutely important. However you should realise that part of running a large public company is aligning your investors to how you want to operate. If you want to take a long term ethical stand then you attract those type of investors and try and get rid of the short term money men.

Like, attracts like.

>This is why regulations and regulators with teeth are vital in a capitalist system.

Why do you separate regulators from describing incentive system? The incentive system is also woven into them, and if anything, the incentives for regulators go in a much more sinister direction than for any capitalist company.

Profit-seeking companies are forced to satisfy customers that have their economic freedom. But what about regulators? Their primary incentive is to remain in a position of power, their primary tool for achieving their goals is forcing.

The economic freedom of all agents is a powerful disincentive. And even with it, we see abuses by capitalist companies. But what about regulators, whose disincentives are much weaker, and whose main tool, moreover, allows them to destroy even this weak disincentives? Fixing capitalism's incentives with regulators is like curing a cold with cancer.

Here's a senior ex-Facebook exec detailing how the company would betray users in the US to the CCP to help gain access to the Chinese market:-

https://youtu.be/f3DAnORfgB8

amongst other things...

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