[RetroTechie]

> Those leaders own full responsibility for this.

Sorry, no free pass.

No doubt there's lots of decent people working at FB. But through their work they do support a company with questionable ethics. Same goes for FB users.

Not judging any of FB's employees (or users) here! But unless you're starving or someone's whipping you, you have a choice to go elsewhere.

[pllbnk]

We shouldn't blame people who work in companies making harmful decisions. Employees are not in a position of strength and should not feel responsible for choosing employment that helps them maximize their wealth. It's the government's responsibility to control the employers.

[syndacks]

Yes, the men running concentration camps are 100% absolved of their culpability. Not their fault!

[pllbnk]

Meta is a private organization subject to the laws of the countries it operates in. Concentration camps are government entities, legalized by the country. Even then it's not always the choice of a person whether to comply the orders. But let's not go into extremes, they don't help the discussion.

[sometimes_all]

> Employees are not in a position of strength

Employees that are paid multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars plus equity, and likely can jump ship to another company without a hitch are not in a position of strength?

Please. Meta is one of the few firms where employees genuinely had a chance to stop this from happening, with all the "engineers are first-class citizens" bit.

I'd rather people own up to their responsibilities than dodge around theoretical nonsense.

[mindslight]

This framing is directly at odds with the top-level comment. "the whole business is rotten."

If someone is a professional programmer and wants to maintain a similar level of income, where do you propose they go? There are similar perverse incentives at every other big tech company. While I agree that it's certainly possible for someone to avoid working for big tech and horrible companies in general, it's not possible for everyone to do so. Framing things the way you have merely supports unproductively railing at individuals who have worked for big tech, while actually making it harder to critique the underlying structural incentives.

[sometimes_all]

To quote Don Draper: "that's what the money is for".

By all means go work for big tech if you want to, it's a free country, but then you don't get to wash your hands off the bad things your company's doing by saying stuff like "the execs made us do it" or "the execs overruled us".

There's nothing unproductive in calling out denying responsibility/culpability. Some would say it's practically mandatory.

[mindslight]

> There's nothing unproductive in calling out denying responsibility/culpability. Some would say it's practically mandatory.

I've been condemning the surveillance industry going on two decades now. Making that condemnation personal has felt pretty unproductive to me. Maybe there is now enough of a critical mass of people seeing the problems that personal condemnation might help move the needle these days, but many years of this not being true is still the perspective I am coming from.

[RetroTechie]

> This framing is directly at odds with the top-level comment. "the whole business is rotten."

No, both apply. I agree it doesn't help to take aim at lower-level employees. The Zuck & co at the helm, and underlying causes that produce a laser-focus on "shareholder value", are both better targets.

But Meta has many employees, including various levels of management. Each of them can discuss shaky-ethics decisions, organise, protest, or.. quit.

Just saying that every cog in the machinery carries some responsibility. Some more than others.