because it makes money. Why would they want to stop it? People have a weird mental model where they think private companies are the government. They're just a group of people getting paid to make money for investors.
Is it really only the job of government to make ethical decisions? Surely companies and employees can and should try to be ethical. Just because there is profit involved doesn't mean that we should throw out our humanity.
The point is, there are a lot of conflicting ways to be 'ethical'. It's not like we have a universal loss function we should minimize.
Any moral dilemma slightly more complicated than 'is killing wrong' is a tradeoff, and sometimes you can't blame people if they prefer a point on the curve different from the point on the curve you like.
Maybe in this case they are just wrong -- I have no sympathy for Twitter either. But I'd rather companies, in general, not try and play God. Even more so, I really would rather the government not try and play God.
> Any moral dilemma slightly more complicated than 'is killing wrong' is a tradeoff
Even killing is a trade off. Every country has a military of some sort. Every village has some form of police that can kill (some are much more likely to kill than others, but eventually all police forces can bring on death if the situation is bad enough). There have been cannibal societies in history (not very common from what I can tell, but they did exist) that would give a different answer as to what killing is moral than most of us.
In the end, the government answers to the people and companies answer to shareholders. Of course I agree that companies should be ethical, but they currently have no incentive to do so other than their own morals and I'd imagine those are pretty quickly squashed in the face of shareholders looking for profits and an "everybody else is doing it" argument.
Companies like Twitter and Facebook exist and thrive because they have taken the less ethical route.
And I don't think it's easy; I suspect corporations do bad things despite the good intentions of employees. Each one, driven by subtle incentives, makes a somewhat less ethically sound decision than they would otherwise. And the effects of those decisions are often abstracted away from the decision-makers. The status quo gradually becomes worse and worse.
> Is it really only the job of government to make ethical decisions?
one of the theoretical principals of capitalism is that free markets allow people to use their money as a proxy for ethical support and ethical decision making.
this principal is theoretical because of straight up apathy - people just cant be fucked. there are other minor contributing factors like information asymmetry, but the real issue with capitalism, like any politcal/economic system, is the people. PEBKAC.
if people cared and the market was free enough, ethical companies would simply put others out of business.
Work requires compromising ourselves. We do this for survival. There is no way to make most tech ethical. It’s an economic reality that is quite evident in the historical data. When was the last time we had an ethical tech company? We have apple, facebook and google, all evil in slightly different ways, all taking more from humanity than they give back.