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Meta continues to prove that they have a company culture of trying to ignore their responsibilities to users. This is a repeating pattern of someone raising th
by dagmx 1y ago
Meta continues to prove that they have a company culture of trying to ignore their responsibilities to users.
This is a repeating pattern of someone raising the alarm to them, teams realizing it’s a possible concern and the company reacting by telling them to avoid looking into it lest it bite them later. And it always comes back when something horrific happens and it is always shown they knew and did nothing.
A truly innovative and responsible company would investigate and rejoice in trying to find solutions. But the top down culture from Mark is one to get all power at all costs.
- ModernMech 1y agoHow it started: "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." How it's going: "Meta suppressed research on child safety" I'm sorry but at this point, Meta is just the lawnmower, you can't even be mad at it. We know what it is, and we always should have known based on what it told us about itself. That we continue to allow it to operate this way is an indictment of our culture, not Meta.
- cess11 1y agoDon't get mad, organise.
- ModernMech 1y agoGet mad -- organize.
- utyop22 1y agoYeah and frankly its employees are the biggest joke (this is more pointed at the directors who do virtue signalling that I see). You don't have to go work there - there are other jobs. They choose to work there.
- binary132 1y agoWhy are you displacing blame from meta?
- ModernMech 1y agoBecause what are we going to blame them for? Acting in accordance to the way their corporate shareholders and thereby society expect them to? I'm not not interested in that fight anymore. If you want things to change, the idea of a corporation and its role in society has to fundamentally change. What should be happening is our government should be doing this research and shutting down corporations that prey on and harm children. Instead our government protects people who prey on and harm children. And yes, that extends to corporate people. If you want something to change, fix the problem. Meta is not the problem.
- watwut 1y agoI think that other thing that needs to happen ia that executives need to stop being excused with "shareholders want it" whenever they do something illegal or immoral. And they need to have actual responsibility for what they order the company to do amd for what it does.
- binary132 1y agothat’s like saying DuPont and 3M weren’t the problem for hiding their knowledge about the dangers and wide prevalence of PFAS contamination from the public instead of handling it (because that might be bad for their Teflon product lines). would you also argue that they had no social obligation or responsibility for failing to do the right thing? how about the radium girls, same deal? have you ever considered the possibility that maybe the widespread total abandonment of ethical and moral norms and standards is the actual problem, and figuring out how to adequately punish the mass violation of ethics is downstream of that? Meta is the problem. Tolerating Meta is equally the problem, but it doesn’t make Meta not the problem.
- tavavex 1y agoI don't think you and ModernMech are really disagreeing over the core premise. They aren't saying that Meta isn't reprehensible on a personal level, but that Meta is acting in a very predictable way given the incentives that our system provides to companies like them. If Meta or DuPont didn't exist, someone else would've done similar if not worse things. The issue isn't just personal flaws within specific companies, the issue is that we reward businesses that do these things. Either way we'd self-select to a set of equally abusive companies. The solution isn't just punishing Meta, it's changing the rules to make Meta's practices deeply unprofitable, and/or making profit not be the most important thing in the universe.
- SoftTalker 1y agoIt is the modern version of "you knew I was a snake when you picked me up."
- anal_reactor 1y agoThis makes me think that the Chinese model where a company beyond certain size simply becomes a branch of the government actually does have decent upsides. Of course I don't have any specific suggestions about the process of transfer of power and we shouldn't judge the Chinese companies from the point of view of western liberal ideals, but my point is, imagine Gmail, Android and YouTube being public services maintained by the government. Like, from technological point of view, these services are virtually solved, there's nothing much to do to improve them besides basic maintenance, which is exactly what government is great at. Moreover, being public service, we'd accept better quality even if it's a money sink, instead of bitching about endless ads and slop and dark UI patterns and bad customer service. Meanwhile let the private companies innovate in areas that truly do need invitation.
- Taek 1y agoFrom a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth? What sort of fines and punishment are making sure invectives are aligned with good behavior? Is any of the management going to jail? If you want the largest businesses in the world to be responsible for the harm they bring to society, you need to make sure the management and profit motives are both aligned with taking on that responsibility. The more responsible companies of the world axiomatically don't get to be the biggest, because they will be outcompeted by the companies that choose to not be responsible.
- watwut 1y ago> From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth? Yes keeping things ethical and legal harms growth. Or otherwise said, absent enforcement, dishonest, unethical and illegal operations grow faster and eventually kill honest legal competition. That is WHY we need laws and enforcement. That is why it is necessary to complain and punish executives and bad actors companies.
- yoyohello13 1y agoThis is why it blows my mind how anybody can actually believe privatizing healthcare, or schools, or any public good can possibly be a good idea. Like have they see the shit for-profit companies have done? It’s like they are living in a different world.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ultrarunner 1y agoIt’s probably because they’ve seen the shit that government has done. The problem ends up being not who does it, but how much power they have.
- yoyohello13 1y agoAt this point, private companies have more power than some governments. How long before we are back to company towns with private security forces? We are trading elected officials, who may be corrupt, with unelected officials, who are corrupt by design.
- delusional 1y agoInterestingly, I don't think this shows a "company culture". culture would show up as these researchers not asking the questions. As framing of the problems as "outside" the platform. This is just blatant top down enforcement. It's not a "culture". It's the decrees of the executives and the leadership.
- moolcool 1y agoConsider how much oil and tobacco companies knew about the harms of their products. It's useful data to have, even if they don't care about right and wrong.
- fmajid 1y ago“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”—Upton Sinclair
- slg 1y agoIsn't this true of basically every publicly traded company (or those who want to eventually be publicly traded)? I'm not saying that to deflect blame from Meta, just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.
- swed420 1y agoYou're absolutely right. The wrong whack-o-mole focus is ingrained in most people under capitalism. We've come to see endless rotating villains to be acceptable while clinging to an illusory concept of choice. Expecting a company, public or private, to behave morally and with a long-term human vision is setting yourself up for endless disappointment. As in addiction treatment, the first step is admitting the problem. Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things? When they declared corporations to be people, I wish they would have specified it to be sociopathic people.
- loudmax 1y ago> Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things? Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model? Capitalism (or more precisely, a competitive free market form of capitalism) has proved extremely successful at producing material wealth. Automobiles, clothing, toaster ovens, food, all of these are Nice Things to have. Command economies have consistently failed to produce material wealth at the scale of free market economies. Capitalism has not been successful at producing other Nice Things, such as justice and equality, or a social safety net for people who happen to run into bad luck. If you have any kind of ethical compass and you care about these things, you should want other social structures like governments that are accountable to the people and so on. Democracy and the welfare state aren't alternatives to capitalism, these are non-economic models. They can exist with or without capitalism. Capitalism can't be the only organizing force in society, unless you're prepared to abandon morality. But if your stance is not to have capitalism at all, what economic model would you propose in its place?
- 1y ago
- beambot 1y agoSorry, he said the wrong numbers...
- mgh2 1y ago> Meta did not directly dispute or confirm the events in Germany described by the researchers, but said such a deletion would have been meant to ensure compliance with a U.S. federal law governing the handling of children’s personal data and with the General Data Protection Regulation, a landmark European privacy law that broadly prohibits companies from collecting personal information from anyone without consent. "Concerns on privacy", ironic and laughable. Meta is a just a PR company brainwashing its users.
- thegrimmest 1y agoYou're asserting that Meta a set of responsibilities towards their users, beyond simply providing a service that users can choose to use or not use. Are these responsibilities enumerated or written anywhere? Honest question, because it's quite hard for a large group of people to agree on what these responsibilities might be unless they are written down including reasonable tests of whether they are being met or not.
- procaryote 1y agoA fair number of people probably agree that it's bad to pretend to research the harm of your product to kids while suppressing data that shows such harm, We're not in the esotherics of subtle moral philosophy here.