A few possibilities:
* people generally cannot discern moral realities within complex systems, instead preferring simpler narratives ("he made a lot of money, he must be a decent chap")
* people can see it on occasion, but insist that the problem is the single bad actor rather than the system enabling them
* people realize they can't do much about it, as they're implicitly bound up in this system run amok
At the companies themselves, I blame the C suite entirely. It’s a leadership problem. What is the vision for your company? Why do we all get out of bed in the morning? If the goal is to make the world better, then concerns about how your business is impacting the world would matter. But having a goal to simply to enrich the founders (which seems to be the case with most tech companies), is like making an entire car just so you can drive to the gas station.
Companies like Twitter and Roblox change the world by their very presence. It’s shameful to waste that capacity by not making the world better in the process.
Even if you want to make the most money possible, you usually won’t get there by screwing over your employees and customers.
"Broader society" is not a real entity; it's just a term to denote, presumably, the entire planet's population, given Roblox is not limited to a single country.
People make fun of the "we live in a society" "insight" - sadly it would seem that capitalism has gone so far, that even this is being forgotten now.
Why I'm critiquing is for the same reason I mention your "people" silliness: massive overgeneralisations are sloppy and lead to wrong conclusions.
I don’t expect them to fix everything overnight. But there’s plenty they could do, if they weren’t too busy gaslighting and ignoring any criticism of their platform.
I saw an excellent critique of Roblox the other day, which covered many aspects of their business and different kinds of abuse which are happening in and around their game.
The most bizarre part was that they sent some questions to the company - and the company responded by saying they “clearly weren’t being objective” and essentially gaslighting the people making the video.
I think the people in charge of Roblox seriously don’t see themselves as holding any sort of responsibility to the broader society that pays their bills. It’s like someone watched The Corporation and thought - “oh companies can get away with sociopathic behaviour? I want in!”. Doing harm to the world in the name of your bottom line doesn’t make you clever. It makes you the villain.
(Video in question: https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY )