This is a microcosm of our political environment where when one subjectively determines the weight of harm, they attempt to objectively apply it to others. Sure, FB does immoral things. But why can't we simply recognize that people disagree about whether harm exists, whether value exists, and what weights are applied to each? As you say, this is not clear good vs bad, this is some good vs some bad and at what levels.
This is a really important point. Political movements often attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a differing value system, but that doesn't rile up your base like proclaiming the other side is evil.
I should remember this myself :)
Evil is only meaningful in the context of a value system.
Malice is will for things which are evil.
Valuing something positively is willing for it to transpire.
Valuing something negatively is seeing it as evil.
Valuing something positively that others value negatively is, therefore, exactly malice in the context of the others’ value system (it's not wrongly attributed to malice.)
Sure you have, you just have the ability to log in. ;-)
Agreed. But these same arguments could be made by many terrible people throughout history. Associating with and assisting those who do bad things is bad behaviour.
Society is incentivised to restrict people who show a tendency towards assisting destructive behaviour. We aren’t at the point where everyone voluntarily at Facebook should be seen as dirty, but we’re closer to that Enron moment than many there would like to think.
Some people have determined that Facebook is an organization that's producing bad results. Socially shaming employees, removing the status they might have hoped to acquire and spiking attrition are tools being deployed to change Facebook's behavior and the behavior of Facebook's competitors.
You might claim is that this strategy can't positively affect Facebook's incentives, operations, or effects. But nobody should be distracted by navel-gazing or fancy philosophizing.
If there are people who've found a good strategy for changing companies for the better without being exceptionally senior, i'd love to hear about it.
Facebook is a democracy-threatening, attention-wasting, extractive institution, with a deeply unethical leadership. Most tech companies are neutral -- Amazon, Microsoft, Uber etc., I assume they're doing business for profit and not social good, but they do provide value and largely play by the rules. Some other companies I would classify as "good" as they provide considerable value to society as a by-product of doing business, like Apple and Google (disclaimer: I work for Google, and I am quite happy about that).
Facebook is the only large tech company I can think of that is just plain evil. There's no other like it. It's in a league of its own.
That's an interesting thought. If carried to its logical conclusion, the 'good people' had many, many, many years to influence the direction of the company, and whatever little 'less bad' the 'good people' are doing is being completely negated by the 'more bad' that the not-so-good people are doing. So I think its fair to conclude the 'good people' are completely inept when it comes to their ability to effect any kind of meaningful change from inside of FB, and should probably leave en masse. After all, given such across-the-board ineptness, what's going to change tomorrow that couldn't have already been changed yesterday?
Facebook is going to face a massive recruitment problem from here on. To paraphrase Richard Hamming, "the only folks left there are the moral dregs".
You might be surprised. After only a year and a half, I'm rapidly approaching a point where I've been there longer than 2/3 of my peers. There has been a huge influx of new people with new perspectives and new voices. Admittedly that's weighted a bit toward the low end of the individual-influence scale, but collectively all those people can make a difference.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can neatly divide tech workers into good and bad. Likewise for companies. All categories are non-empty, and certain to remain so. What's the optimal assignment of workers to companies? Is it never beneficial for a good person to work at a bad company, perhaps making it less bad? Is it never harmful for a bad person to work at a good company, perhaps making it less good? Is it better to have all of the bad people concentrated at a few companies, or distributed throughout the industry?
Once you start thinking about it, I think you'll see that the Manichaean "entirely and immutably good or entirely and immutably bad" model just isn't very useful. Maybe we should talk about good vs. bad behaviors instead of demonizing (or for that matter idolizing) people - especially large groups of people in aggregate.