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it doesn't look great if those accomplishments end up having a negative impact on society You're assuming all employers (a) believe in and (b) care about Cambr

it doesn't look great if those accomplishments end up having a negative impact on society You're assuming all employers (a) believe in and (b) care about Cambridge Analytica. That likely isn't the case. It requires quite a leap to begin with, to believe that CA could actually "influence elections". But this is just the latest iteration of a very, very biased political viewpoint emanating from Dems-in-Denial. Back in Obama's time it was "elections can be bought with campaign spending", then it became "elections can be controlled with Twitter spam" and now it's "elections can be controlled through some vaguely specified process involving years-old data from Facebook profiles". The mechanism keeps changing but the underlying belief that voters who don't vote left-wing are just marionnettes on string remains. If you don't believe that, and believe / know that voters make up their own minds consciously, based on the information they have, then this entire Facebook story would make no impact on your hiring decisions because the idea that Facebook is some sort of sordid unethical power broker seems ridiculous to begin with.

saagarjha 9y ago
You're assuming that I'm even referring to Cambridge Analytica. I'm talking about the general sentiment towards Facebook in general as being an unethical company, of which the "leak" of data to Cambridge Analytica is a small part. There are other bad-faith things that Facebook has done, especially with regards to their users' privacy, that certainly have a negative impact on society.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  So replace "Cambridge Analytics" with "ads". The vast majority of people do not consider advertising unethical. Nor do they consider social networks to be unethical. I always struggle to figure out what classical rules of ethics Facebook (or Google) are supposed to have violated, but nobody can ever give me one. Instead there's a lot of begging the question.

saagarjha 9y ago

You're assuming that I'm even referring to Cambridge Analytica. I'm talking about the general sentiment towards Facebook in general as being an unethical company, of which the "leak" of data to Cambridge Analytica is a small part. There are other bad-faith things that Facebook has done, especially with regards to their users' privacy, that certainly have a negative impact on society.

peoplewindow 9y ago
So replace "Cambridge Analytics" with "ads". The vast majority of people do not consider advertising unethical. Nor do they consider social networks to be unethical. I always struggle to figure out what classical rules of ethics Facebook (or Google) are supposed to have violated, but nobody can ever give me one. Instead there's a lot of begging the question.