[cryoshon]

perhaps this is an incendiary comment, but i really do wonder what all of the HN facebook employees are telling themselves to deal with the cognitive dissonance caused by this latest scandal wherein facebook paid for smear campaigns to distract from their own dirty laundry.

every time i have encountered these people on HN, they've portrayed a cultlike naivety regarding their organization's actions. they always allude to the outside world "not knowing the whole story" or something similar. in other words, they've made excuses.

but i really do want to see what the excuses are this time. i imagine they will be particularly entertaining.

more seriously, it's time for facebook to wrap it up. we've known for years that they were abusing the public trust. while i doubt we will see any leadership from congress regarding breaking up the company or degrading their capabilities to hurt the public interest, the intense amount of flak that FB has been getting lately is immensely promising. plenty of people are leaving FB.

while it is true that many of these people are leaving for instagram, it's a critically different product. i think instagram has a much more limited ability to negatively impact the public good via propaganda etc mostly because it isn't as participatory as facebook.

[emtel]

Speaking as a former employee (who left for personal reasons), stories like this which compare facebook to a product that literally causes cancer make it much _easier_ to ignore criticism of the company. Once you see your umpteenth story about how facebook is the biggest force for evil in history its pretty easy to tune everything out.

[DoreenMichele]

A. Most people aren't really that worried about ethics. They are more worried about having a job.

B. Humans are really talented at counting the good something does for themselves/their people and discounting the harm it does others. See racism, sexism, nationalism etc.

C. The primary reason FB is getting so much flak is because it's gotten so big. There are many people who derive some kind of benefit from it or it wouldn't be that big.

[smt88]

I wondered about this too. I'm someone who won't work in any adtech at all for ethical reasons.

I asked my friend who works at FB, and he said, "I don't know about all that. I just want to work on cool tech."

I think that's how most humans feel about their role in orgs like Facebook, so I don't judge him at all.

[SirLJ]

“I was just following orders”...