[jgacook]

Generally I try and shy away from being too alarmist, but I am so disillusioned with the kind of tech worker HN's userbase seems to represent. I think it's a feckless attitude to think that working in one of the best-paid, global, most influential professions in the world right now means that your only obligation is to clock in on time, code whatever you're told to code, take no ownership of the effect your work may have on the general public and collect your fat paycheck at the end of the month.

Why does it sound good to anyone that Facebook employees should be prevented from discussing the ethical implications of the product they sell their labor to create? Facebook complete lack of accountability - internal or governmental - has to date:

- incited a genocide [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...]

- provided a bias for right wing content in a American election year (and fired the employee who blew the whistle on it) [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...]

- exacerbated a global pandemic, indirectly causing 1000s of deaths, by not policing Covid misinformation [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/19/facebook-...]

- is arguably a contributor to the global rise in authoritarianism [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/24/facebo...]

and that's really just the tip of the iceberg. If you buy into the notion that Mark Zuckerberg is a nice man in a hoodie trying to run a business that his employees are tearing down with some radical agenda then I'm sorry, but how naive are you? Facebook has a track record of ignoring the consequences of what happens on their platform in order to continue profiting. It's not a mistake, it's the point.

We should be cheering on tech workers challenging the ethics of the work they produce, not talking about how inconvenient it is for Facebook workers to start realizing how questionable the product they're building really is.

[wmf]

I'm convinced that discussing ethics or politics inside Facebook or Twitter will have literally zero effect. Employees should either quit or get back to work.

[jgacook]

Why are you convinced of that? Unionized protests frequently accomplish institutional change - why do you think Facebook or Twitter would be exempt? If anything a unionized tech force striking would have more bargaining power than other groups since they are educated, specialized, and difficult/expensive for either company to replace en masse.

[wmf]

I agree that unions could be effective, but I also doubt that Facebook/Twitter employees could ever unionize. And for anything less than a full strike, leadership will just ride it out.

[fivre]

We should indeed. I unfortunately don't know enough at Facebook well enough to have those conversations in person often, so internet will have to suffice.

It's unfortunately very much in the interest of Facebook's leadership team to discourage it, however, as a clock in clock out, see and hear no evil labor culture is good for the leaders' personal wealth, so ethics be damned, number go up.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I think it's reasonable for someone working on, say, scaling the photo storage service to say that their work is apolitical and these debates aren't relevant to them. The performance characteristics of Facebook photos aren't going to incite a genocide or contribute to the global rise of authoritarianism.

[claudeganon]

I don’t want to go all Godwin’s law, but the “I was just scaling capacity for processing census punch cards” argument doesn’t pan out very well, historically.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I don't think this comparison works at all except through Godwin's law. Nobody argues that, say, Walmart store clerks bear personal moral responsibility for their company's decisions.

[jgacook]

Yes, and this is why nobody is going after, for example, Facebook HQ's janitorial staff for the moral responsibility of Facebook's actions. Their income remains static in spite of Facebook's quarterly profit so it would be unfair to accuse them of trading their ethics for an income.

There is a fundamental difference when you're talking about a stock-owning, educated, in-demand software engineer, even if they are "just" working on scaling Facebook's image service. They have the institutional power at the company that they could leverage to change the product's outcomes, if they so desired.

[SpicyLemonZest]

There's a difference, but it still strikes me as unreasonable to say that all institutional power must be leveraged towards political ends. I do business with a lot of companies whose owners don't agree with my politics, and I'd be unhappy to see them dedicate more of their institutional power towards fighting for things I don't want.

[jgacook]

Yes, but it's not a political end it's an ethical end. Facebook is being leveraged by political actors to cause harm in an unethical way - wanting to prevent this is not a political stance unless you believe that being apolitical is adopting some middle ground between America's Republican and Democrat parties, in which case considering ethics at all is a non-starter since both parties have shied away from imposing any kind of hard regulation on Facebook.

Institutional power doesn't have to be leveraged towards political ends, but if you profit directly from an institution choosing unethical behavior in pursuit of profits then you are also behaving unethically. It's completely reasonable to apply that standard to the best-paid of Facebook's employees, just as it is completely reasonable for those employees to petition against committing more unethical behavior.

[claudeganon]

Last time I checked, Walmart doesn’t sell conspiracy theories, stoke political violence, or demonstrably false, targeted advertising. You can muddy things with as many analogies as you like, but it’s quite obvious that Facebook’s engineering staff is closer to my example than yours.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Sorry, I don't mean this to be dismissive, but I don't think I can productively engage with the idea that Facebook is more closely analogous to the Nazi Party than to Walmart. I just wouldn't know where to begin.

[claudeganon]

My comparison was to IBM, not the Nazi party.

Facebook themselves already admitted that they were used to further a genocide, so your dismissal is somewhat beside the point.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...

[chillacy]

Seemed to work out pretty well for all the scientists in Operation Paperclip. So historically, maybe it does pan out.