[pslam]

"They're all like this so it's impossible to do good" is an even more morally bankrupt position. It rejects personal responsibility and agency, places you as the victim, and allows you to continue to be a bad actor in the world.

You should change this.

[chronid]

It's not impossible to do good, that's not what I'm claiming at all, and that's why the last line is there.

I'm pretty sure you can do good even within facebook, doing your utmost to keep the company accountable (from my experience in another big corp, we don't see 1% of what's happening inside it, and how many people are facepalming - and we'll never know if many things were just humans being stupid or actual calculated decisions). You can also keep your guard up from outside and force facebook to fix itself (obviously, as much as its business allows) from outside, for example pushing it to hire more moderators and get as better so to prevent things like myanmar from happening again.

What I'm saying is that it's impossible (and in my opinion, pointless) to claim moral superiority and to accuse people of being morally bankrupt because they work for corp X.

[pslam]

Sure it is.

There are plenty of companies which can't easily be categorized as having significant negative effects to the world. You can work for a "bad" company but consciously constrain your work to a business unit which improves customers' lives.

What you're using is false equivalence. You know what the worst thing for the environment is? Being born. Why do people insist on living when everything is bad? Reject the notion that you're powerless to change things.

[DSingularity]

Why are you so invested in the continuity of facebook?

Its like, "Doctor, why dont we just apply pressure on the tumor until it starts to grow at more reasonable rates!".

No. When you find cancer, you try to eliminate it.

Facebook is exactly this -- cancer. They have been aggressively monopolizing software for socializing so that they can arrive to the dominant position they are in now.

Until Facebook becomes more transparent w.r.t how they use the user data and until Facebook gives users autonomy -- they need to be regulated. We need to define constraints regarding how they present and manipulate user data and interactions.

[jaequery]

whatever happened to the saying, "if you dont like it, dont use it" ?

[Al-Khwarizmi]

It died with network effects. And no, I'm not going to make all my family (including non tech-savvy, 60-year-old people) download a second app to talk with me apart from the ubiquitous Whatsapp they use to talk with everyone else.

[avip]

It is completely ridiculous to try portraying someone working for FB as morally disabled. I'd suggest people express their moral superiority by deleting their own FB account, without much ado.

[VMG]

if I deleted my profile, I have no control over who squats my name

preventing impersonation is literally the only reason I have an account, since I cannot trust facebook to handle this for me

[Al-Khwarizmi]

This. It's like with politicians. If you fall for the argument that "they are all the same", you are benefitting the most corrupt. And they won't have an incentive to become even slightly better.

[eanzenberg]

No, it's just being realistic. When a company gets to that size it's holy unrealistic to expect perfection and saintliness.

[srinathkrishna]

Well said!

[zeth___]

Yes, it's called voting. Unfortunately it seems that in the US the Democrats are more in the pocket of Big Data than the Republicans so it's a choice of 'do I like minorities or privacy more'.