4 ms·

I worked in the team at Facebook (2017-2019) relevant to this stuff. I saw (did not write) some of the documents cited. The rank and file engineers and designe

I worked in the team at Facebook (2017-2019) relevant to this stuff. I saw (did not write) some of the documents cited. The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people, working very hard all the time to steer the ship away from harm to normal people and toward establishing healthy relationships and media diet. We were consistently undermined and overruled by the Directors and Executives. Many health and safety boosting projects (with evidence) were cancelled or turned backwards to maximize harm, because it correlated with revenue or “Time Spent” or “Sessions”, which I guess their equity was based on. Those leaders own full responsibility for this.

throwaw12 4mo ago
But you can't sue individuals in this case. They will say: I had this metric to increase shareholder value, I tuned it, that's it, no one stopped me or told me not to do it. US just needs different laws
AlexandrB 4mo ago
The old adage applies to social media: "the medium is the message". You can't steer a ship whose whole purpose is crashing into icebergs from crashing into an iceberg. You're working against the whole purpose of the thing itself. Even if these engineers are Facebook were successful another, less idealistic, social media company would pick up the slack of promoting the clickbaitiest most sensationalistic content possible. We already saw this happen with the meteoric rise of TikTok. I don't know what the solution is, but the incentives created by the combination of algorithmic feeds and how lucrative internet "fame" can be consistently encourages the worst kind of content.
- rawgabbit 4mo ago
  Social should and will get the tobacco treatment. Social media is detrimental to public health and will get regulated/taxed to the point the industry will become unprofitable.
  - AlexandrB 4mo ago
    I just worry that the wrong thing will be regulated/taxed. It's the combination of algorithmic feed + global reach + monetization potential that makes social media so nasty. But it's easy to create "social media" regulations that would apply to sites like this one, or old-school forums.
    - rawgabbit 4mo ago
      In years past, when corporations saw the writing on the wall, they would actually get together and propose a set of regulations that could live with and satisfy the public. Because we are well past that point, yes, the wrong things and the rights things will get shoved into whatever regulation is coming.
  - zonkerdonker 4mo ago
    Advertisement as a concept should get the tabacco treatment.
cryo32 4mo ago
If you can't make the board do good or hold them to account when they do bad things, you should leave. No leadership position can function without enough resources to do their bidding. And yes, I have done that.
afavour 4mo ago
> The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people Then why didn't they quit? I believe I could have gotten a job at Meta (and hey, maybe I'm wrong!) but I've never been able to stomach the idea of working on their products. If I can choose to avoid working on morally compromising things, why can't they? And look, I get it. If they didn't make it some other engineer would. There's no union or anything that would make resisting it a meaningful cause. But that doesn't mean everyone can absolve themselves of any culpability. They took the (big pile of) money, they did the work.
- AlexandrB 4mo ago
  “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.”
- iterateoften 4mo ago
  Don’t worry, all employees were morally good people, who chose to stay and make millions from the harm to children they supposedly were resisting. It’s not like meta was a charity. There was a lot of money being made by every one knowing the harm they were doing.
- palmotea 4mo ago
  >> The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people > Then why didn't they quit? I can't speak for those people, but decisions like quitting your job aren't one-dimensional. Quitting a job can create severe hardships for a family, stress relationships to the breaking point, etc. The Bay Area is very expensive, so I'd imagine that's true even for workers making otherwise very good salaries at Facebook. Then consider that the harms caused by Facebook are remote, abstract, and diffuse. Also, making the pushing for the right decision to only get overruled by the people in power can feel like doing enough for many people. Also, there's the frog in a pot effect: a lot of the problems with social media have only become well understood relatively recently. Maybe you'd chose no to join Facebook today, but would stay if you'd already worked there for 10 years. > If I can choose to avoid working on morally compromising things, why can't they? What other morally compromising things have you not chosen to avoid? The modern world is full of them, many of them well publicized even if they're not in-your-face. IMHO, it's impossible to avoid them all without killing yourself.
RetroTechie 4mo ago
> Those leaders own full responsibility for this. Sorry, no free pass. No doubt there's lots of decent people working at FB. But through their work they do support a company with questionable ethics. Same goes for FB users. Not judging any of FB's employees (or users) here! But unless you're starving or someone's whipping you, you have a choice to go elsewhere.
- pllbnk 4mo ago
  We shouldn't blame people who work in companies making harmful decisions. Employees are not in a position of strength and should not feel responsible for choosing employment that helps them maximize their wealth. It's the government's responsibility to control the employers.
  - syndacks 4mo ago
    Yes, the men running concentration camps are 100% absolved of their culpability. Not their fault!
    - pllbnk 4mo ago
      Meta is a private organization subject to the laws of the countries it operates in. Concentration camps are government entities, legalized by the country. Even then it's not always the choice of a person whether to comply the orders. But let's not go into extremes, they don't help the discussion.
  - sometimes_all 4mo ago
    > Employees are not in a position of strength Employees that are paid multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars plus equity, and likely can jump ship to another company without a hitch are not in a position of strength? Please. Meta is one of the few firms where employees genuinely had a chance to stop this from happening, with all the "engineers are first-class citizens" bit. I'd rather people own up to their responsibilities than dodge around theoretical nonsense.
- mindslight 4mo ago
xorcist 4mo ago
> engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people, No. I'm sorry. You are not allowed to say this. Our society is post-truth enough as it is. This is a company founded on a singular idea: Lock up as much as the free web as possible behind their login and own as much of the information as possible. Every type of web service on the open web, from forums to classifieds to event booking to blogs and social media, and of course games early on, has been reimplemented on their platform. Every single person working on maximizing "engagement" or whatever you call it these days knows exactly what they are doing. Sure, do your thing. Take over what parts of the web you can. Take on the metaverse. We live in a market economy and you are free to do this. But not for a second are you allowed to talk about morals or doing good "from the inside". This is not the responsibility of senior executives alone. That is simply too much. This is a company where everyone knew an actual genocide was coordinated using their platform, and they did absolutely nothing to stop it, despite the efforts from Amnesty and outside journalists to raise attention to it. There must be a limit to how much spin you can put on it.

throwaw12 4mo ago

But you can't sue individuals in this case. They will say: I had this metric to increase shareholder value, I tuned it, that's it, no one stopped me or told me not to do it. US just needs different laws

AlexandrB 4mo ago

The old adage applies to social media: "the medium is the message". You can't steer a ship whose whole purpose is crashing into icebergs from crashing into an iceberg. You're working against the whole purpose of the thing itself. Even if these engineers are Facebook were successful another, less idealistic, social media company would pick up the slack of promoting the clickbaitiest most sensationalistic content possible. We already saw this happen with the meteoric rise of TikTok. I don't know what the solution is, but the incentives created by the combination of algorithmic feeds and how lucrative internet "fame" can be consistently encourages the worst kind of content.

rawgabbit 4mo ago
Social should and will get the tobacco treatment. Social media is detrimental to public health and will get regulated/taxed to the point the industry will become unprofitable.
- AlexandrB 4mo ago
  I just worry that the wrong thing will be regulated/taxed. It's the combination of algorithmic feed + global reach + monetization potential that makes social media so nasty. But it's easy to create "social media" regulations that would apply to sites like this one, or old-school forums.
  - rawgabbit 4mo ago
    In years past, when corporations saw the writing on the wall, they would actually get together and propose a set of regulations that could live with and satisfy the public. Because we are well past that point, yes, the wrong things and the rights things will get shoved into whatever regulation is coming.
- zonkerdonker 4mo ago
  Advertisement as a concept should get the tabacco treatment.

cryo32 4mo ago

If you can't make the board do good or hold them to account when they do bad things, you should leave. No leadership position can function without enough resources to do their bidding. And yes, I have done that.

afavour 4mo ago

> The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people Then why didn't they quit? I believe I could have gotten a job at Meta (and hey, maybe I'm wrong!) but I've never been able to stomach the idea of working on their products. If I can choose to avoid working on morally compromising things, why can't they? And look, I get it. If they didn't make it some other engineer would. There's no union or anything that would make resisting it a meaningful cause. But that doesn't mean everyone can absolve themselves of any culpability. They took the (big pile of) money, they did the work.

AlexandrB 4mo ago
“The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.”
iterateoften 4mo ago
Don’t worry, all employees were morally good people, who chose to stay and make millions from the harm to children they supposedly were resisting. It’s not like meta was a charity. There was a lot of money being made by every one knowing the harm they were doing.
palmotea 4mo ago
>> The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people > Then why didn't they quit? I can't speak for those people, but decisions like quitting your job aren't one-dimensional. Quitting a job can create severe hardships for a family, stress relationships to the breaking point, etc. The Bay Area is very expensive, so I'd imagine that's true even for workers making otherwise very good salaries at Facebook. Then consider that the harms caused by Facebook are remote, abstract, and diffuse. Also, making the pushing for the right decision to only get overruled by the people in power can feel like doing enough for many people. Also, there's the frog in a pot effect: a lot of the problems with social media have only become well understood relatively recently. Maybe you'd chose no to join Facebook today, but would stay if you'd already worked there for 10 years. > If I can choose to avoid working on morally compromising things, why can't they? What other morally compromising things have you not chosen to avoid? The modern world is full of them, many of them well publicized even if they're not in-your-face. IMHO, it's impossible to avoid them all without killing yourself.

RetroTechie 4mo ago

> Those leaders own full responsibility for this. Sorry, no free pass. No doubt there's lots of decent people working at FB. But through their work they do support a company with questionable ethics. Same goes for FB users. Not judging any of FB's employees (or users) here! But unless you're starving or someone's whipping you, you have a choice to go elsewhere.

pllbnk 4mo ago
We shouldn't blame people who work in companies making harmful decisions. Employees are not in a position of strength and should not feel responsible for choosing employment that helps them maximize their wealth. It's the government's responsibility to control the employers.
- syndacks 4mo ago
  Yes, the men running concentration camps are 100% absolved of their culpability. Not their fault!
  - pllbnk 4mo ago
    Meta is a private organization subject to the laws of the countries it operates in. Concentration camps are government entities, legalized by the country. Even then it's not always the choice of a person whether to comply the orders. But let's not go into extremes, they don't help the discussion.
- sometimes_all 4mo ago
  > Employees are not in a position of strength Employees that are paid multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars plus equity, and likely can jump ship to another company without a hitch are not in a position of strength? Please. Meta is one of the few firms where employees genuinely had a chance to stop this from happening, with all the "engineers are first-class citizens" bit. I'd rather people own up to their responsibilities than dodge around theoretical nonsense.
mindslight 4mo ago

xorcist 4mo ago

> engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people, No. I'm sorry. You are not allowed to say this. Our society is post-truth enough as it is. This is a company founded on a singular idea: Lock up as much as the free web as possible behind their login and own as much of the information as possible. Every type of web service on the open web, from forums to classifieds to event booking to blogs and social media, and of course games early on, has been reimplemented on their platform. Every single person working on maximizing "engagement" or whatever you call it these days knows exactly what they are doing. Sure, do your thing. Take over what parts of the web you can. Take on the metaverse. We live in a market economy and you are free to do this. But not for a second are you allowed to talk about morals or doing good "from the inside". This is not the responsibility of senior executives alone. That is simply too much. This is a company where everyone knew an actual genocide was coordinated using their platform, and they did absolutely nothing to stop it, despite the efforts from Amnesty and outside journalists to raise attention to it. There must be a limit to how much spin you can put on it.