Generally I try and shy away from being too alarmist, but I am so disillusioned with the kind of tech worker HN's userbase seems to represent. I think it's a feckless attitude to think that working in one of the best-paid, global, most influential professions in the world right now means that your only obligation is to clock in on time, code whatever you're told to code, take no ownership of the effect your work may have on the general public and collect your fat paycheck at the end of the month.

Why does it sound good to anyone that Facebook employees should be prevented from discussing the ethical implications of the product they sell their labor to create? Facebook complete lack of accountability - internal or governmental - has to date:

- incited a genocide [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...]

- provided a bias for right wing content in a American election year (and fired the employee who blew the whistle on it) [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...]

- exacerbated a global pandemic, indirectly causing 1000s of deaths, by not policing Covid misinformation [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/19/facebook-...]

- is arguably a contributor to the global rise in authoritarianism [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/24/facebo...]

and that's really just the tip of the iceberg. If you buy into the notion that Mark Zuckerberg is a nice man in a hoodie trying to run a business that his employees are tearing down with some radical agenda then I'm sorry, but how naive are you? Facebook has a track record of ignoring the consequences of what happens on their platform in order to continue profiting. It's not a mistake, it's the point.

We should be cheering on tech workers challenging the ethics of the work they produce, not talking about how inconvenient it is for Facebook workers to start realizing how questionable the product they're building really is.