[onlyrealcuzzo]

Where do you draw the line?

You're a TVC in the kitchen at Meta? All you do is give girls depression?

You work at a business that buys ads on Meta? Is all you do is give girls depression? Even if you work in a non-profit branch specifically to do out-reach for kids or something??

How far separated from Meta do you have to be to not be reduced to doing nothing but giving girls depression?

[mplanchard]

Obviously it’s a spectrum, no? Anyone contributing to the edifice is in some way furthering its core mission (giving girls depression, or utterly destroying society, depending on who you ask).

At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere, devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc. At the other end is, let’s say, the cleaning staff. Meta would suffer if either group outright refused to work for them, but their mission is affected more by the engineers, they are harder to replace, they have many more options in terms of alternative employment, and they have greater knowledge of the impact of the business. Thus, they bear (much) higher relative moral responsibility. Compare to the cleaning staff, who, because of their relative lack of standing, agency (they likely work for some other company that Meta contracts with), or other options, bear negligible moral responsibility, even though their absence would likely make Meta’s offices uninhabitable.

Everyone working there is somewhere on that spectrum. They can make their own judgements about the degree to which they bear any moral culpability, but it’s not unfair to say that someone working on open source at Facebook still contributes to the overall mission by oss-washing facebook’s reputation, promulgating the brand into the engineering consciousness, etc., even if they are not directly contributing to giving girls depression.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere

Not exactly...

> devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc.

Nice try, but most of engineering at Meta has almost as much to do with this as the food staff...

So the question remains - if you're an engineer working on nothing related to any of that - most of Meta - why is your work reduced to "destroying girls lives" but the TVC's working in the kitchen are not?

Why are people working at GM, who have a large ad spend on Meta, not destroying girls lives? But the people working on storage compression algorithms to save on hardware costs are??

Why is the TVC not bad, but the person working on decorating the offices is?

[mplanchard]

My answer already addresses this? I didn’t say every engineer works on those things. I said it’s a spectrum, with the people working on those things at one end. I also already answered that they all contribute to the edifice, with different levels of moral culpability, which it’s up to them to hash out how they feel about.

Meta’s business is enabled by (practically) everyone who works for them, otherwise they wouldn’t pay them to work there. The storage compression algorithms are enabled by and contribute to the mission of the company.

If you’re comfortable knowing that your job is paid for by destroying society, and that your work makes that destruction a little more efficient, that’s fine. Storage algorithms are pretty low on the spectrum, and at least they may have some other uses if open sourced. For me, I wouldn’t do it, because I don’t want to contribute even in a small way to what Meta does. But others obviously can and do feel differently.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> If you’re comfortable knowing that your job is paid for by destroying society,

It's so easy to reduce things!

I'm still trying to figure out if my cousin who decorates offices for FAANG is destroying society or not.

[lo_zamoyski]

It requires discernment, to be sure.

The Principle of Double Effect[0] is essential in such cases, because it helps determine when cooperation with evil is remote or proximate, and when such cooperation with evil is morally permissible.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/

[jlengrand]

Your obsession about teenage girls is worrying

EDIT: my bad, I read you wrong and didn't realize you didn't bring up the whole tenage girl thing. Sorry for that.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Nice dodge.

I'm directly addressing OP's original comment that "all anyone at Meta does is give girls depression."

It's almost as if it's not that reductive... even though you just made the same reduction...

Want to answer the actual question?

[hparadiz]

I remember before FB was a thing and sharing photos with your friends was a huge pain in the ass. We had dozens of different websites in this days from MySpace to some weird ones that you've never heard of before. They all did the same thing as FB even to the point of having a very similar UI. The whole "damage to the world" thing is lost on me. I was in college when FB came out and we all were eagerly trying to get an invite to the site. You could only sign up with an EDU email at the beginning. Before Facebook there were magazines for teenagers that set the same exact standards and had the same exact issues.

[dylan604]

Are you seriously reducing all of FB to an image sharing site?