Meta's core product is a machine to sell ads, just like YouTube, TikTok, Netflix (now), etc. It's not that unique. And these stories are all over the valley for even much less powerful individuals
Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta had a much higher ratio of people - including people I know, respect, and consider very smart in other aspects - who bought in to the vision that what the company was doing was good for the world even in a post-2016 world when all of the consequences of social media and Meta's specific actions were fully evident.
My Amazon friends won't defend the bad things Amazon does, my Alphabet friends love to gripe, my Microsoft friends....you get the idea. But my friends at Meta would repeatedly try to defend bad things in a way the others don't.
It does feel slightly cathartic to reject someone's resumè for having any time at Facebook on it.
Did they work for a tobacco company, advertising harmful products to kids? I think that's bad, but you're right, it is a personal bias. Some argue that tobacco is actually fine.
Did they work for a buy-now-pay-later company which sneakily traps people into debt cycles? Again, I think that's bad, but it is just my opinion. And some people can argue that bnpl companies are good because they provide low cost* loans to consumers to buy Coachella tickets. *until you miss a payment then you're fucked.
Did they work for the Trump 2024 Campaign? Plenty of people voted for him so it's just like, my opinion man.
Or, did they work for Facebook, an antisocial, anticompetitive growth at all costs company which is absolutely a net drain on society. But hey - they did produce, er, buy, a messaging app which allows you to keep in touch with your family.
And I could go on and on.
There are plenty of smart people with a moral compass. I've been blessed to have worked with many - truly it has been a joy. There are also unscrupulous, smart people who will do any work as long as the money is there. I've also worked with those types, and it's not as pleasant. The best projects I've been a part of have had teams of people who truly care about the customer, they aren't trying to outsmart or trick them.
I think it's important to separate the person from the machine.
{company} has done {things I disagree with}, and {candidate} was working for them during this period.
{candidate} has done {things I disagree with}
Lots of products came out of Facebook that have no moral implications at all
At the end of the day, every facebook product must optimize for this singular business goal. Even if you don't see it at the moment you ship whatever feature, that is the truth.
Maybe if you only interned there or it was your first job and you left before 2 years.
Sounds like a great way to foster and protect an echo chamber.
I know some lovely, brilliant people who work at Meta or have. None of them have any such delusions or deserve this kind of condemnation.
Or if they do, then so do engineers who have worked at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, or any other of a host of countless corporate tech companies -- which would be just as silly.
But if that's your filter or how you judge engineers, then I'd wager you're actually doing them a favor by not hiring them.
That said, I do think this kind of behavior extends across the industry. I've seen all sorts of wild things like founders&insiders starting a separate encrypted messaging company just so they had an app to send messages between each other about all of the illegal shit that they were doing in the main company.
Jane leaked the feature and put this entire 'evil Facebook' shade on it, with no real proof, just wildly false speculation based on what she thought the feature is. That's when I realized how easy it is to present anything Meta works on through the lens of "stealing people's data" and "ads bad". Oculus headsets? VR ads. Smart glasses? AR ads. Spyware. Facebook app feature? Must have some privacy issue.
I'm not saying it's not deserved, with all the scandals, just that at some point it was getting a bit ridiculous with all the "Facebook bad" articles, at least one of which I knew first-hand was complete nonsense. It did seem like news outlets were grasping at straws to write yet another article to put Facebook in a bad light.
It's low-hanging fear-mongering fruit that gets the clicks and it's hard to disprove (not that PR/Legal would let us refute anything in the first place) because the trust is broken.
Tell us the feature so we can evaluate your claim. Absolute certainty, bitter criticism, and expectation of unearned trust do not build confidence in your ability to judge what is good for humanity.
Afterwards, I went to a startup, and the company leadership was shockingly callous about doing things that would harm customers. Some lower-level people spoke up about it, but nobody in a leadership position seemed to want to hear it.
Not that others wouldn't and don't manipulate the market and lobby policy, and exploit humans in bad ways, but the basic precept makes it that Facebook needs to protect something fundamentally more immoral than others, hardened behavior and corruption is somewhat to be expected.
If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and time again?