Nobody believes themselves to be the bad guy, but many people frequently make decisions that cause harm.
One person makes a “decision making framework” but doesn’t make any individual decision themselves.
Then another person makes the individual decision, but based on the decision making framework, so they feel no personal responsibility for the choice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178 ("[flagged] Total Chaos at Meta: Employees Protest Zuckerberg's Anti LGBTQ Changes (404media.co)")
https://www.404media.co/its-total-chaos-internally-at-meta-r... ( https://archive.is/R1c7S )
I can attest that you don't need them to have a job or function in society.
I don't use Meta products, and haven't for many years. But I still have a Facebook account, because a) deleting it would be a fairly rigorous process, and b) as long as I maintain the account, I have some control over the information about me that Meta maintains; if I deleted the account, they would maintain a "shadow profile" for me that I had no control over, and (for instance) any photos tagged as containing me, I would not be able to go in and untag.
Unfortunately, it's not, at least for Whatsapp.
That's a part of the issue - as there is no open access federation requirement, there are messenger islands. Whatsapp for the non-tech folks, Telegram for those who either are wary of Meta, want gambling, or a service decidedly not affiliated with the American judicial sphere, Signal and Threema for the utter nerds/journalists/activists, iMessage for the Apple crowd, or the now-defunct rich bro network of Blackberry. SMS, MMS or its replacement RCS that the carriers are trying (and failing) to push, I don't even count these given how faded to irrelevance they all are. Oh, and then there are (particularly in the Asian market) all the country specific "everything in one"-apps that Musk tried and failed to convert X to.
And particularly among the non-tech folks, no way to get them to use anything but Whatsapp. Network effects are a thing, hence the EU's push to break up the walled gardens at least a tiny tiny bit, but it will take years until it's implemented.
But you're assuming these messaging apps are something we need and have to have and then solving backward from there.
While I certainly recognize that a society may have made the mistake of going all-in on a proprietary app in order to participate in society (whoops!), I can tell you for a fact that it's not required for any given society to function because I don't have any of these apps and just use SMS and e-mail and I am able to work, coordinate events with friends, make dinner reservations, and send funny videos. I can also vouch for the United States, specifically that such apps aren't required.
So we can clearly separate out that we don't need these apps to function as a society - we can go back to the question of morality. In the US if you are "against" Meta or Mark Zuckerberg or whatever, you can just delete the apps because you don't need them.
Remember how Mark was caught on hot mic saying ‘I wasn’t sure what number you wanted, Mr. President’ after lying about it on camera[0]
[0]https://www.businesstoday.in/world/us/story/i-wasnt-sure-wha...
Someone like Zuck actively isolates themselves: from buying huge tracts of land to literally isolate themselves, building underground shelters, hiring security to keep riff-raff away, etc. They have no concept of society. They just don't see themselves living in the same world as we do.
A few elite people are poached, some are acquihired, but most applied to get the job. I believe if you can make it to Meta you can make it to equivalent mega companies, it's a choice.
You might ask - but what about the people who work at those corporations? And that's also pretty simply explained by this classic quote: it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
This isn't high school. This is about real people having real experiences of fear, stress, violence, and horror facilitated by deliberate cultural engineering.
If the very talented and smart people don't get that, that's a them problem.
Yes it does. That is the only thing that makes enemies.
Note: I do like my neighbor!
If I’m queer and Facebook is actively censoring queer content then that’s more significant to me than just being a difference of opinion. The company is actively suppressing my way of life.
Maybe the word “enemy” is too much but if so I think describing the idea as “sad” is equally as so. Giving a corporation a pass on behaviour you consider abhorrent simply because it’s a company and not a person seems pretty sad to me.
Why queer community will not find an alternative app?
They do everything they can to become the central place for online communication and profit enormously from that. But they reject any of the responsibility that ought to come along with that, the refrain being what you're saying here: "well, you can always just go somewhere else"
Except that when online communication is as deeply siloed as it is it's extremely difficult to set up an alternative. How will people even find out about it when their entire online lives are lived on Facebook? This capture is exactly what Meta wants. Remember internet.org?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org
Picking and choosing which services people can use is Zuckerberg's explicit goal.
Like not every social media is good for everything
Top software engineering content is also not on facebook
But answer the question, why should they have to?
Just like restaurant owner can kick you, they also can.
If you dont agree with it, then vote for social media being treated as infrastructure like roads
What I'm asking you is: why should they have to find a new place?
At this point we have gone in a circle, I must assume I won't get a genuine answer to the only thing I have asked despite trying to engage genuinely in conversation. Have a good day.
If they believe that someone is harming them, then they should stay with them?
Because it erases our existence, which is what a substantial slice of straight society wants. Queer content and spaces are important for queer adults, because it gives us places to comfortably be ourselves without feeling subject to leering or judgement from bigots, and safety in numbers in case someone starts something. It gives us people to be among who we can talk to, form community with, and support one another. And for people just coming up, it's literally lifesaving. Numerous studies have shown that queer-leaning teens and kids are MUCH safer when they have access to safe places to explore who they are, even if they don't "turn out" that way, prevents awful, irreversible things. [1,2,3] Not to mention it can be lifesaving also when their parents are bigots themselves and they need a way out.
> Sure, maybe you don’t like the censorship, but how does that make them your enemy?
The bridge between "they suppress expressions of who I am" and "they participate in my extermination" has been proven to be quite short and easily traversed for queers many times, and for racial groups, and for religious groups too. [4]
By your definition they may not be my enemy today, but they may be in a short period of time.
> If you don’t like their content, simply move along.
This is actually great advice for people who keep trying to take down queer content.
Edit: And this is exactly what figures like Breitbart have been openly trying to do for over a decade. And it isn't just him either, you have the Family Research Council, Fox News hosts, Daily Wire personalities like Matt Walsh, and Libs of TikTok have all made careers out of normalizing queer erasure. For them, "winning the culture war" is not only their stated, in-text goal, it's a means of pushing us out of public life: sometimes just running us out of town, other times things too ugly to say aloud.
1. AFSP – LGBTQ youth face higher suicide risk, but affirming spaces cut that risk significantly. https://afsp.org/preventing-suicide-in-lgbtq-communities/ 2. Springer (2025) – Queer teens are 5–8× more likely to attempt suicide; supportive spaces reduce risk. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12310-025-09797-4 3. Trevor Project (2020) – Having even one affirming space lowers suicide attempts by 35%. https://www.thetrevorproject.org/research-briefs/lgbtq-gende... 4. Oxford Research Encyclopedia (2019) – History shows censorship of queer spaces often escalates into violence and erasure. https://oxfordre.com/politics/politics/view/10.1093/acrefore...
There's also a difference between not amplifying something and actively suppressing it. Neutral omission is one thing; deliberate censorship is another. When queer content is singled out for removal, it sends a message: you don’t belong here. That's erasure.
History shows us that erasure is rarely neutral. It's part of a continuum: silence leads to exclusion leads to violence. Pretending censorship is harmless ignores the fact that queer people have lived through this cycle many times before, and we're far from alone.
Why are you conflating "not pushing" with "actively censoring"?
Lots of very talented and smart people work for big tobacco, Aramco, Stake (crypto gambling), Kick (streaming of crypto gambling), Purdue (made billions on manufacturing an opioid epidemic), DuPont, Shein, Nestlé, NSO group, the GEO group (private prison industry), Clearview (facial recognition at scale including for ICE) and indeed Meta.
I don't think we should hate them or show them hatred. I don't think that if you're working at a company that's suppressing someone's way of life you're somehow above criticism or contempt.
I don't mean to be a dick, but no, the question was what is a reasonable cause to bash someone if it's not disliking what they do. I don't know if these weird Socratic replies are meant to be thoughtful but they read as dismissive and condescending.
But hey, I can also play stupid games!
> The question is, why do you feel the need to bash them?
Why do you feel the need to defend them? (I answer this question less flippantly below.)
> Do you feel the need to say ugly things to your grocery store because they don’t actively have the goods you want?
Is not stocking garbanzo beans censorship? Why do you think this is equivalent?
> Do you feel the need to bash the coders of YouTube because they have ads or censor content?
Depends what Youtube is advertising. Depends what they're censoring.
> Are they your enemy because they hire a certain type of person?
Who'd they hire?
...
There is a difference between my grocery store stocking or not stocking something and having problems with a multi-national trillion dollar company that has wedged itself itself into most people's daily lives and has a history of censoring content to curry favour with authoritarians.
I sympathize with the folks who are working there trying to change things for the better, and I sympathize with the people who are legitimately stuck for whatever reason (don't know a lot about visas to the US, but those are probably a good reason). I also think they're tough enough to take it when they dunked on, and have the reading comprehension to realize that when people are critical of Facebook employees, there's context where it absolutely makes sense. Being a Facebook employee is not an identity, it's just a job. Facebook has pivoted to censoring queer content at a time when queer people are being marginalized after years of gains. Most of my ire is directed at the executives and management, but yeah, if you work at Facebook knowing what they do, you're not getting a pass.
BTW - Meta wedged itself into most people's lives because the people let it happen. It started off well enough, but just like many companies, they adjusted their content based on the people consuming the platform. Its (Meta's) survival is based on getting views and posting ads. That's the business model. If they started showing content that appealed to a small percentage of their viewership, they would probably go out of business.
Also, simping for these companies is such a bad look.
Not only bash but zsh, fish and sh them as well.
Its not personal, and they operate outside of human morality so it doesn't even make sense to call them evil. But they'll still eat you.
I've come to strongly dislike this quote, because it's so often used on HN to decide that whoever's disagreeing with you is doing it for simple, stupid and greedy reasons, thus absolving you of the duty to think a bit about whether there might be nuance you're missing.
But not everyone think that way, some think that by limiting access to abortion information, they are actually saving (unborn) lives. Some people think that "sex positive" movements are morally questionable and help spread infection. For them, they are the good guys and they think that Meta is finally doing the right thing.
These are divisive political subjects and political parties with these ideas get elected for a reason. In a democracy, parties will not promote ideas that no one agree with, they need the votes, so if they are promoting them, it means that for a large part of the population, it is the right thing to do. HN is a bubble with mostly liberal ideas, we have to understand it for what it is.
That's in addition to the idea that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". But it applies more to activities that are almost universally recognized as bad rather than partisan ideas, things like scamming.
I'm not sure I agree with this, though I suppose it depends on what one defines as "liberal."
>In a democracy, parties will not promote ideas that no one agree with, they need the votes, so if they are promoting them, it means that for a large part of the population, it is the right thing to do.
I would say instead that it means that for a large part of the voting population, the ideas are not objectionable enough for them to vote differently or abstain. People are already voting in spite of the disconnect between the policies they support and the policies that actually get implemented [0]
[0] https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
I forget the exact statistic, but CEOs are disproportionately sociopaths (compared to the whole population).
So, no story required because there's no guilt felt.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair
And Meta in particular - just look at the founder/leader. The “CEOs are all sociopaths” trope exists because of people like Zuck.
Donald Trump's co-opted the religious nuts that are anti-abortion and anti-LGBT, and Zuck is more than happy to please him rather than risk prosecution and losing his money or freedom. What a model of cowardice.
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
It's called the "narcissist's prayer", it's what narcissists and sociopaths tell themselves to absolve themselves of accountability. Whatever the situation, they have an excuse as to how it's not their fault. It's like the stages of grief but for people trying to avoid consequences or guilt for their actions.