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Where do you draw the line? You're a TVC in the kitchen at Meta? All you do is give girls depression? You work at a business that buys ads on Meta? Is all y

Where do you draw the line? You're a TVC in the kitchen at Meta? All you do is give girls depression? You work at a business that buys ads on Meta? Is all you do is give girls depression? Even if you work in a non-profit branch specifically to do out-reach for kids or something?? How far separated from Meta do you have to be to not be reduced to doing nothing but giving girls depression?

jlengrand 4mo ago
Your obsession about teenage girls is worrying EDIT: my bad, I read you wrong and didn't realize you didn't bring up the whole tenage girl thing. Sorry for that.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
  Nice dodge. I'm directly addressing OP's original comment that "all anyone at Meta does is give girls depression." It's almost as if it's not that reductive... even though you just made the same reduction... Want to answer the actual question?
  - hparadiz 4mo ago
    I remember before FB was a thing and sharing photos with your friends was a huge pain in the ass. We had dozens of different websites in this days from MySpace to some weird ones that you've never heard of before. They all did the same thing as FB even to the point of having a very similar UI. The whole "damage to the world" thing is lost on me. I was in college when FB came out and we all were eagerly trying to get an invite to the site. You could only sign up with an EDU email at the beginning. Before Facebook there were magazines for teenagers that set the same exact standards and had the same exact issues.
    - dylan604 4mo ago
      Are you seriously reducing all of FB to an image sharing site?
mplanchard 4mo ago
Obviously it’s a spectrum, no? Anyone contributing to the edifice is in some way furthering its core mission (giving girls depression, or utterly destroying society, depending on who you ask). At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere, devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc. At the other end is, let’s say, the cleaning staff. Meta would suffer if either group outright refused to work for them, but their mission is affected more by the engineers, they are harder to replace, they have many more options in terms of alternative employment, and they have greater knowledge of the impact of the business. Thus, they bear (much) higher relative moral responsibility. Compare to the cleaning staff, who, because of their relative lack of standing, agency (they likely work for some other company that Meta contracts with), or other options, bear negligible moral responsibility, even though their absence would likely make Meta’s offices uninhabitable. Everyone working there is somewhere on that spectrum. They can make their own judgements about the degree to which they bear any moral culpability, but it’s not unfair to say that someone working on open source at Facebook still contributes to the overall mission by oss-washing facebook’s reputation, promulgating the brand into the engineering consciousness, etc., even if they are not directly contributing to giving girls depression.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
  > At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere Not exactly... > devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc. Nice try, but most of engineering at Meta has almost as much to do with this as the food staff... So the question remains - if you're an engineer working on nothing related to any of that - most of Meta - why is your work reduced to "destroying girls lives" but the TVC's working in the kitchen are not? Why are people working at GM, who have a large ad spend on Meta, not destroying girls lives? But the people working on storage compression algorithms to save on hardware costs are?? Why is the TVC not bad, but the person working on decorating the offices is?
  - mplanchard 4mo ago
lo_zamoyski 4mo ago
It requires discernment, to be sure. The Principle of Double Effect[0] is essential in such cases, because it helps determine when cooperation with evil is remote or proximate, and when such cooperation with evil is morally permissible. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/
- onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
  And Facebook is evil incarnate because some people hate while other people seem to like it just fine? It's interesting how easy it is to define exactly how evil Facebook is and categorize each worker on an evil spectrum based on job title alone. Who would have thought life was that simple!
ModernMech 4mo ago
A clear line would be if you are compensated directly in shared of Facebook, then your culpability is much higher than if you're just working a salary or buying ads.

jlengrand 4mo ago

Your obsession about teenage girls is worrying EDIT: my bad, I read you wrong and didn't realize you didn't bring up the whole tenage girl thing. Sorry for that.

onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
Nice dodge. I'm directly addressing OP's original comment that "all anyone at Meta does is give girls depression." It's almost as if it's not that reductive... even though you just made the same reduction... Want to answer the actual question?
- hparadiz 4mo ago
  I remember before FB was a thing and sharing photos with your friends was a huge pain in the ass. We had dozens of different websites in this days from MySpace to some weird ones that you've never heard of before. They all did the same thing as FB even to the point of having a very similar UI. The whole "damage to the world" thing is lost on me. I was in college when FB came out and we all were eagerly trying to get an invite to the site. You could only sign up with an EDU email at the beginning. Before Facebook there were magazines for teenagers that set the same exact standards and had the same exact issues.
  - dylan604 4mo ago
    Are you seriously reducing all of FB to an image sharing site?

mplanchard 4mo ago

Obviously it’s a spectrum, no? Anyone contributing to the edifice is in some way furthering its core mission (giving girls depression, or utterly destroying society, depending on who you ask). At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere, devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc. At the other end is, let’s say, the cleaning staff. Meta would suffer if either group outright refused to work for them, but their mission is affected more by the engineers, they are harder to replace, they have many more options in terms of alternative employment, and they have greater knowledge of the impact of the business. Thus, they bear (much) higher relative moral responsibility. Compare to the cleaning staff, who, because of their relative lack of standing, agency (they likely work for some other company that Meta contracts with), or other options, bear negligible moral responsibility, even though their absence would likely make Meta’s offices uninhabitable. Everyone working there is somewhere on that spectrum. They can make their own judgements about the degree to which they bear any moral culpability, but it’s not unfair to say that someone working on open source at Facebook still contributes to the overall mission by oss-washing facebook’s reputation, promulgating the brand into the engineering consciousness, etc., even if they are not directly contributing to giving girls depression.

onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
> At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere Not exactly... > devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc. Nice try, but most of engineering at Meta has almost as much to do with this as the food staff... So the question remains - if you're an engineer working on nothing related to any of that - most of Meta - why is your work reduced to "destroying girls lives" but the TVC's working in the kitchen are not? Why are people working at GM, who have a large ad spend on Meta, not destroying girls lives? But the people working on storage compression algorithms to save on hardware costs are?? Why is the TVC not bad, but the person working on decorating the offices is?
- mplanchard 4mo ago

lo_zamoyski 4mo ago

It requires discernment, to be sure. The Principle of Double Effect[0] is essential in such cases, because it helps determine when cooperation with evil is remote or proximate, and when such cooperation with evil is morally permissible. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/

onlyrealcuzzo 4mo ago
And Facebook is evil incarnate because some people hate while other people seem to like it just fine? It's interesting how easy it is to define exactly how evil Facebook is and categorize each worker on an evil spectrum based on job title alone. Who would have thought life was that simple!

ModernMech 4mo ago

A clear line would be if you are compensated directly in shared of Facebook, then your culpability is much higher than if you're just working a salary or buying ads.