As someone who's neither a heavy social media user[1] nor an engineer on one of these projects, I think this perspective doesn't really make a lot of sense in c

As someone who's neither a heavy social media user[1] nor an engineer on one of these projects, I think this perspective doesn't really make a lot of sense in context. The consensus that social media is a horribly damaging drug that's destroying our democracy is quite recent. Someone, a decade ago, decided to slightly lower the friction of the already-existing practice of retweeting by formalizing it as a feature. Expecting them to have the clairvoyance necessary to interpret that as an unethical act is beyond insane. The same is true of pretty much everything else on the product side of social media companies: you'd have to have a much keener, more cynical sense than average of how deeply horrible most people are in order to predict that social media would've evolved the way it has. "Not internalizing the fact that most people are mostly shitty people" isn't really a reasonable bar to tar people in knowingly being unethical. The new public square and its ability to unleash unfiltered humanity is _sui generis_, so nobody has a schema for how to handle this. The closest you come to people who've grappled with this question are people like The Founding Fathers. (and to be clear, I'm no fan of these companies: I explicitly avoiding applying to Facebook and Twitter out of college because I either didn't agree with their ethics or thought itthey were shit at product. My opinion hasn't changed, but I don't think it's valuable to look back and place unreasonable standards of clairvoyance onto employees). [1] I suppose depending on how broad your definition is, I use HN fairly regularly, but the frequency and level of interaction on a site like this seems categorically different to the kinds of social media usage you're talking about when you say "grow a conscience before building them".