[conradev]

What if you replaced “Facebook” with “the US federal government”?

Can you continue to work for the digital service without being complicit in the government’s sins? There is plenty of evidence of wrong-doing and questionable judgement by the government’s leaders, for sure.

Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?

[otterley]

The Government is subject to a Constitution that has an amendment process, and laws are made by elected leadership who can be voted out by the people.

Facebook is not a democracy, and given the corporate structure and differing voting rights of shareholders, it is practically impossible to replace the current leadership even if a majority of shareholders wanted to.

Moreover, the Government is immense and highly diverse in its missions compared to Facebook. I don't think anyone reasonably believes the sins of the CIA should be borne by, say, U.S. Forest Service park rangers. If Facebook had a public service mission that, among other things, provided essential services to the public like food and housing, perhaps the discussion would be different.

> Say everyone who did take issue with Facebook’s policies decided to leave – who would be left?

Some might say that this is the desired outcome, but eventually management might see the writing on the wall and change the way they do business. Indeed, this is one of the key mechanisms of unionized labor - to bring management to the table for negotiation through the threat of work stoppage (striking).

[conradev]

I think the government is indeed massive with a diverse set of goals, but I think employees at Facebook may see their workplace the same way:

- They could work on something “good”, like trust and safety, community moderation tools, emergency response, etc.

- They could work on something user-driven or “neutral”, like Events or Groups which are used to organize anything from BLM protests to Trump rallies.

If they’re not actively designing privacy anti-patterns or trying to make the news feed more addictive, quitting would not really affect those problem areas.

I think organizing at the workplace is a great idea, and the threat of work stoppage could be a very real one if enough employees organize. But the idea of telling people to quit their jobs and distance themselves from the problem is very different from telling them to start organizing to fix the problem.