> I guess you need to be a bad person from the get-go to be able to keep a smiling face in that place.
I have a close friend who works there. He's a moral person and disagrees with the social changes that Facebook has caused.
But if you ask him why he works there, he has a few standard responses:
- Most of the employees at Facebook are good and push back against Zuckerberg's harmful decisions.
- If all the good people leave, who will be left to push back?
- If I don't do this work, someone else will.
- These decisions have nothing to do with me.
All of these things are true and (I'd argue) bullshit. But history's greatest crimes and genocides were perpetrated by organizations of people who made many of these same excuses.
The core problem is that any large organization is guaranteed to be psychopathic. It's large and therefore powerful, which means small ethical compromises can cause a lot of harm. And also because it's large, every constituent can say, "Well, I didn't decide to do this." It's like a massive ouji board or a firing squad, where everyone is contributing to a concerted action, but no one feels responsible.
Not certain if I support your friend, but he is right in one regard. If people who push back against Zuckerberg were not part of Facebook, we would not have all these leaks.
When they announced that they would be cracking down on leakers, that announcement leaked immediately. Imo it shows that they don't have popular support within Facebook at all.
Of course this doesn't excuse implementing features that you know are unethical, but it does help, and hopefully government will step up and attach consequences to Facebook's deceitful and malignant practices.
> Imo it shows that they don't have popular support within Facebook at all.
This is correct. There's a huge amount of internal dissent. There are internal protests and letters to the CEO.
But the dissent means nothing (except, as you say, in the rare instance of a leak) because Zuckerberg has 100% control of the company. There are even reports that Sandberg has been sidelined over time as Zuckerberg has consolidated decision-making for himself.
> The core problem is that any large organization is guaranteed to be psychopathic.
Well any large organization is, to a certain point, very successful and you can't get to that position with morals. Doing the ethical thing is very often not the thing you need to do to succeed or profit.
I have a close friend who works there. He's a moral person and disagrees with the social changes that Facebook has caused.
But if you ask him why he works there, he has a few standard responses:
- Most of the employees at Facebook are good and push back against Zuckerberg's harmful decisions.
- If all the good people leave, who will be left to push back?
- If I don't do this work, someone else will.
- These decisions have nothing to do with me.
All of these things are true and (I'd argue) bullshit. But history's greatest crimes and genocides were perpetrated by organizations of people who made many of these same excuses.
The core problem is that any large organization is guaranteed to be psychopathic. It's large and therefore powerful, which means small ethical compromises can cause a lot of harm. And also because it's large, every constituent can say, "Well, I didn't decide to do this." It's like a massive ouji board or a firing squad, where everyone is contributing to a concerted action, but no one feels responsible.