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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.