[modriano]

I stopped using Facebook in 2017. I felt absolutely miserable while angrily reading the stream of ragebait Facebook kept feeding me. Facebook has been really damaging to the mental health of my parents which has been an absolute nightmare for me over the past two years. I went through my dad's feed last year too see if FB had improved and it was an absolute hellscape. There would be nice content like grandbaby pictures from his friends sprinkled between lethally dangerous COVID disinformation and content designed to enrage. Much like what was captured in this article [0].

I don't see the value of giving a platform to dangerous bullshit. People need truth about reality. Giving a platform, or voice, to people who feed bad information to others can cause those others to make suboptimal choices, like rejecting masks or vaccines. How many people have died a miserable death (suffocating because their lungs can no longer absorb any oxygen even at 100% O2) over the past 2 years because of COVID disinformation spread on FB? Based on how many hours I've had to spend on the phone with my parents explaining why things they saw on FB are wrong, there's absolutely no way it's less than 10s of thousands just in the US.

I'm pretty impressed with your ability to just brush aside a genocide caused by FB rushing into a new market with 18 million people with only a few dozen moderators that speak the language. Facebook had been running a social media site for nearly a decade by then; there's no way FB didn't know the minimum ratio of moderators to users needed to keep up with typical moderation workloads. The only explanation consistent with the evidence is that FB just didn't care about avoiding that genocide and mass displacement. And based on your reaction to it, I assume the FB culture still isn't concerned about the boring details of being responsible and ethical.

I'm not trying to shame you, I don't think shame works at changing people's behavior, but I do think being caviler about massive harms like genocide and COVID disinformation is a major red flag, and I think you should take a hard look at your values and grapple with the possiblity that working for a company that kills hundreds of thousands through (best case scenario) gross negligence may be indefensible.

[0] https://nyti.ms/3mffwXX