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by shug2k 1700 days ago
While at the company, we were busy trying to solve problems during a critical period. The criticism has been fierce for Facebook - but make no mistake, our teams made enormous difference within the company, and the world would look very different than it does today without the work of integrity workers within the company. This continues to be true to this day.

Coming out publicly over the years has done very little. Even now, with all the attention, it is questionable what will actually change. We are much less interested in virtue signaling, taking the high ground, etc. than working with folks who are interested to carve a path forward. We are dedicating our lives to this work to find solutions over the long-term, whether it is in the spotlight, or not.
1 comments
dogman144 1700 days ago
Someone else in this thread commented it well - “this is the problem talking to FB engineers.”

I’m not sure how you can read that founders letter, and not see a spotlight grab/virtue signals by people who contributed to and profited from the problem they’re trying now take a leading role in solving. It’s like there is just total refusal to be seen as part of the problem. Blows my mind.

“Coming out publicly has done very little” attitude sort of says all you need to know. Pretty sure the article said also ~”now that Frances came out publicly, we can start this!” Mental gymnastics.

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dogman144 1700 days ago
Correct, the Integrity Institute's cofounder:

"Frances is exposing a lot of the knobs in the machine that is a modern social media platform," Massachi said. "Now that people know that those knobs exist, we can start having a conversation about what is the science of how these work, what these knobs do and why you would want to turn them in which direction."

It seems public discussion does help, and is even a critical input to this effort. It's just better when others do it first.

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sayhar 1700 days ago
We started this back in January, and have been getting our ducks in a row since then. It turns out starting a nonprofit is hard, and takes a long time.
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dogman144 1700 days ago
Haha what… have a fair bit of experience with technical mission non-profits, and I’d disagree with that take.

Registration is quick and has been done by many a skeleton crew over a Slack DM, AWS/Azure credits abound, free GSuite is available, board charter is boilerplate if you can make a mission statement, free Slack pro tier is often an option, $10k in Google Ads are available.

This is all a few weeks of focused evenings.

Man, words escape me. Tethics indeed. Will stop engaging on this thread.

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