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Comment by kridsdale1 | Hacker News Reader

I worked in the team at Facebook (2017-2019) relevant to this stuff. I saw (did not write) some of the documents cited.

The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people, working very hard all the time to steer the ship away from harm to normal people and toward establishing healthy relationships and media diet.

We were consistently undermined and overruled by the Directors and Executives. Many health and safety boosting projects (with evidence) were cancelled or turned backwards to maximize harm, because it correlated with revenue or “Time Spent” or “Sessions”, which I guess their equity was based on.

Those leaders own full responsibility for this.

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> Those leaders own full responsibility for this.

Sorry, no free pass.

No doubt there's lots of decent people working at FB. But through their work they do support a company with questionable ethics. Same goes for FB users.

Not judging any of FB's employees (or users) here! But unless you're starving or someone's whipping you, you have a choice to go elsewhere.

We shouldn't blame people who work in companies making harmful decisions. Employees are not in a position of strength and should not feel responsible for choosing employment that helps them maximize their wealth. It's the government's responsibility to control the employers.

Yes, the men running concentration camps are 100% absolved of their culpability. Not their fault!

Meta is a private organization subject to the laws of the countries it operates in. Concentration camps are government entities, legalized by the country. Even then it's not always the choice of a person whether to comply the orders. But let's not go into extremes, they don't help the discussion.

> Employees are not in a position of strength

Employees that are paid multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars plus equity, and likely can jump ship to another company without a hitch are not in a position of strength?

Please. Meta is one of the few firms where employees genuinely had a chance to stop this from happening, with all the "engineers are first-class citizens" bit.

I'd rather people own up to their responsibilities than dodge around theoretical nonsense.

This framing is directly at odds with the top-level comment. "the whole business is rotten."

If someone is a professional programmer and wants to maintain a similar level of income, where do you propose they go? There are similar perverse incentives at every other big tech company. While I agree that it's certainly possible for someone to avoid working for big tech and horrible companies in general, it's not possible for everyone to do so. Framing things the way you have merely supports unproductively railing at individuals who have worked for big tech, while actually making it harder to critique the underlying structural incentives.

To quote Don Draper: "that's what the money is for".

By all means go work for big tech if you want to, it's a free country, but then you don't get to wash your hands off the bad things your company's doing by saying stuff like "the execs made us do it" or "the execs overruled us".

There's nothing unproductive in calling out denying responsibility/culpability. Some would say it's practically mandatory.

> There's nothing unproductive in calling out denying responsibility/culpability. Some would say it's practically mandatory.

I've been condemning the surveillance industry going on two decades now. Making that condemnation personal has felt pretty unproductive to me. Maybe there is now enough of a critical mass of people seeing the problems that personal condemnation might help move the needle these days, but many years of this not being true is still the perspective I am coming from.

> This framing is directly at odds with the top-level comment. "the whole business is rotten."

No, both apply. I agree it doesn't help to take aim at lower-level employees. The Zuck & co at the helm, and underlying causes that produce a laser-focus on "shareholder value", are both better targets.

But Meta has many employees, including various levels of management. Each of them can discuss shaky-ethics decisions, organise, protest, or.. quit.

Just saying that every cog in the machinery carries some responsibility. Some more than others.

If you can't make the board do good or hold them to account when they do bad things, you should leave.

No leadership position can function without enough resources to do their bidding.

And yes, I have done that.

> The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people

Then why didn't they quit?

I believe I could have gotten a job at Meta (and hey, maybe I'm wrong!) but I've never been able to stomach the idea of working on their products. If I can choose to avoid working on morally compromising things, why can't they?

And look, I get it. If they didn't make it some other engineer would. There's no union or anything that would make resisting it a meaningful cause. But that doesn't mean everyone can absolve themselves of any culpability. They took the (big pile of) money, they did the work.

“The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.”

Don’t worry, all employees were morally good people, who chose to stay and make millions from the harm to children they supposedly were resisting.

It’s not like meta was a charity. There was a lot of money being made by every one knowing the harm they were doing.

>> The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people

> Then why didn't they quit?

I can't speak for those people, but decisions like quitting your job aren't one-dimensional. Quitting a job can create severe hardships for a family, stress relationships to the breaking point, etc. The Bay Area is very expensive, so I'd imagine that's true even for workers making otherwise very good salaries at Facebook. Then consider that the harms caused by Facebook are remote, abstract, and diffuse. Also, making the pushing for the right decision to only get overruled by the people in power can feel like doing enough for many people.

Also, there's the frog in a pot effect: a lot of the problems with social media have only become well understood relatively recently. Maybe you'd chose no to join Facebook today, but would stay if you'd already worked there for 10 years.

> If I can choose to avoid working on morally compromising things, why can't they?

What other morally compromising things have you not chosen to avoid? The modern world is full of them, many of them well publicized even if they're not in-your-face. IMHO, it's impossible to avoid them all without killing yourself.

So you’re saying hard decisions… are hard for reasons? No shit Sherlock.

They made them a specific way, and will be stained with the consequences, because they were cowards who took the easy way out.

> They made them a specific way, and will be stained with the consequences, because they were cowards who took the easy way out.

One thing I've gotten tired of as I've gotten older is self-righteous judgement like that, when directed at the rank-and-file.

Your assignment: carefully inspect your life, and enumerate all the things which you are "stained with the consequences, because [you] were [a] coward who took the easy way out." There are lots because you're a human living in the modern world. Then, before you join the peanut gallery to judge smoeone, remember that guy's like you.

Sure, judge leaders like Zuckerberg like that, the buck stops with him, and his lieutenants who support his vision, and associates with "fuck you" money. But regular folks who need a job who try to do the right thing within their scope but are overridden? Come on.

‘Just following orders’ is derided for a reason.

What do you think that actually looks like?

The same damn thing.

What do you think the scientists working at big tobacco said to themselves?

The same damn thing.

The system won’t work without the ‘little people’ doing all the day to day.

This is, quite literally, the ‘banality of evil’.

> ‘Just following orders’ is derided for a reason.

For things like murdering people and genocide. When you're talking about controversial/gray areas, where there is no crime or clear consensus on punishable immorality, then no.

Expand that concept too far, too zealously, and you might as well shoot everyone because everyone's guilty. The world ain't black and white.

Facebook’s algorithms have quite literally caused that. Nearly a decade ago. And haven’t much improved.

And is clearly (with many, many studies on the topic over a decade plus) behind the rise of right wing nationalism and the fraying social contract.

Zuck is very, very aware of this - as leaked emails show. He knows, but continues anyway, and anyone at Meta at this point who also doesn’t know is being willfully ignorant.

This is the ‘cigarettes don’t cause cancer’ argument.

> I can't speak for those people, but decisions like quitting your job aren't one-dimensional. Quitting a job can create severe hardships for a family, stress relationships to the breaking point, etc.

I can't disagree with that. But my point is more... own it, then.

OP's comment said the leaders are fully responsible. I argue the engineers are responsible too. If they made the decision they made because they don't want their family to leave the Bay Area then that's the decision they made: they put their family ahead of broader societal damage they're helping create. I might do the same for my family. But I wouldn't try to claim that I'm completely blameless in the scenario.

> Also, making the pushing for the right decision to only get overruled by the people in power can feel like doing enough for many people.

I suppose I would counter with "but it isn't".

> What other morally compromising things have you not chosen to avoid?

Again, I agree with what you're saying, every day involves some level of moral compromise. But the task I choose to dedicate most of my waking hours to, day in day out, is a little different from whether I buy free range eggs or not.

2017-2019… it sounds like maybe he did quit.

The old adage applies to social media: "the medium is the message". You can't steer a ship whose whole purpose is crashing into icebergs from crashing into an iceberg. You're working against the whole purpose of the thing itself. Even if these engineers are Facebook were successful another, less idealistic, social media company would pick up the slack of promoting the clickbaitiest most sensationalistic content possible. We already saw this happen with the meteoric rise of TikTok.

I don't know what the solution is, but the incentives created by the combination of algorithmic feeds and how lucrative internet "fame" can be consistently encourages the worst kind of content.

Social should and will get the tobacco treatment. Social media is detrimental to public health and will get regulated/taxed to the point the industry will become unprofitable.

I just worry that the wrong thing will be regulated/taxed. It's the combination of algorithmic feed + global reach + monetization potential that makes social media so nasty. But it's easy to create "social media" regulations that would apply to sites like this one, or old-school forums.

In years past, when corporations saw the writing on the wall, they would actually get together and propose a set of regulations that could live with and satisfy the public. Because we are well past that point, yes, the wrong things and the rights things will get shoved into whatever regulation is coming.

Advertisement as a concept should get the tabacco treatment.

But you can't sue individuals in this case.

They will say: I had this metric to increase shareholder value, I tuned it, that's it, no one stopped me or told me not to do it.

US just needs different laws

> engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people,

No. I'm sorry. You are not allowed to say this. Our society is post-truth enough as it is.

This is a company founded on a singular idea: Lock up as much as the free web as possible behind their login and own as much of the information as possible. Every type of web service on the open web, from forums to classifieds to event booking to blogs and social media, and of course games early on, has been reimplemented on their platform.

Every single person working on maximizing "engagement" or whatever you call it these days knows exactly what they are doing.

Sure, do your thing. Take over what parts of the web you can. Take on the metaverse. We live in a market economy and you are free to do this. But not for a second are you allowed to talk about morals or doing good "from the inside". This is not the responsibility of senior executives alone. That is simply too much.

This is a company where everyone knew an actual genocide was coordinated using their platform, and they did absolutely nothing to stop it, despite the efforts from Amnesty and outside journalists to raise attention to it. There must be a limit to how much spin you can put on it.

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