Facebook employee. My ethical relationship with my employer is ... complicated.
First, I believe in our basic mission to make the world more open and connected, and I think in many ways we do work toward that. We're especially seeing that now. Tons of people are using FB (including IG and WA) as a way to stay connected during this crisis, and it makes me proud.
On privacy: yeah, we've made some mistakes. Were they evil mistakes? Let's put that in context. I was around when "information wants to be free" was everyone's mantra. When Facebook was being criticized for not making information they had available to third parties. I do not accept the gaslighting about attitudes toward privacy always being like they are now. They weren't. Should FB have put in better controls, and more strongly enforced those controls? Almost certainly. Was the lack of such efforts "evil"? Only if you apply today's standards of diligence to events and decisions in a very different time. Right now, I can see some of the problems that occur as we apply rigorous access control to user data even as it moves between internal systems. How many of our critics have ever needed to deal with such issues? There will always be more to do, but I'd say we're a bit ahead of the industry in that area now.
On disinformation: this is the real "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. There's no logically-consistent reason why Facebook should exercise more control over content than Verizon does over the content of phone calls. To do so is to invite accusations of censorship, and run the risk of being treated as a publisher rather than a carrier. Nonetheless, we're devoting more human and computer time to detecting disinformation than most companies have in total. Vast data centers' worth. I'm in storage, so I see only the edge of this, in the form of (insanely complex) analysis pipelines and models. That's enough to get a feel for the scale of these efforts, and it boggles my mind. People are honing these techniques all the time, and having some successes. These successes are drastically under-reported compared to failures, for reasons I won't get into here, but they are reported. Anybody who's actually paying attention can see thousands of accounts being banned at a time for inauthentic content. Think for a moment about the computational complexity of detecting a thousand-node subset within a billion-node graph. Most people who accuse FB of taking this issue lightly just don't grasp the scale at which we operate and the additional difficulty that entails.
Does FB still do things that make me cringe? Sure does. The disrespect for user choice (e.g. chronological-timeline settings constantly being reset) pisses me off to no end. The demands put on moderators of large groups, and the dearth of tools made available to them, is inexcusable. Likewise for the lack of decent support or appeal processes when users are adversely affected by our own screwups. I've come to the conclusion that even though the people I work with directly are great, there are some other people at the other end of the company (user-facing product rather than deep infra) and at a different level who ... well, let's just say I wouldn't get along with them so well. It does give me pause sometimes, but not enough to outweigh my belief in the basic mission.
You want evil companies? How about those who make much of their money from contracts with ICE/CBP/NSA? How about those that have helped hollow out the economy with their anti-labor "gig economy" BS, leading to millions of unemployed right now? Or the worse half of the finance or defense industries? How about those helping to destroy our health or our planet? There are absolutely better companies I could work for. My ideal would be to do what I do at a company that's making vaccines or something, but they didn't seem interested in hiring me. But there are other companies that were interested and I turned them down because I don't approve of what they do. There are a whole lot of pots calling the kettle black.
> First, I believe in our basic mission to make the world more open and connected
Real question: do you think the top management feels the same? In general, do you see a lot of cynicism in workers around you?
> You want evil companies? How about...
Not saying GOOG/FB were worse than others, but people and the MSM began to increasingly question their moral alignment in the past few years, which is why I'm asking.
Honestly I don't know. If I had to guess I'd say they probably do agree with the words but might have different ideas of what they mean. Should "open" mean literally anyone can see literally anything? Clearly not. I might put limits where they wouldn't. Maybe the converse is true sometimes.
> do you see a lot of cynicism in workers around you?
Nope. TBH that's mostly because they're heads-down solving technical problems. Or maybe they're focused on social problems other than the ones that apply to the company from an external perspective (e.g. diversity is a big one). To the extent that I see these company-direction issues discussed at all, I do see people trying sincerely to grapple with them and do the right things. Are those people just fooling me? Are there others who take a more cynical position? Don't know and can't know. I can just say what I see.
First, I believe in our basic mission to make the world more open and connected, and I think in many ways we do work toward that. We're especially seeing that now. Tons of people are using FB (including IG and WA) as a way to stay connected during this crisis, and it makes me proud.
On privacy: yeah, we've made some mistakes. Were they evil mistakes? Let's put that in context. I was around when "information wants to be free" was everyone's mantra. When Facebook was being criticized for not making information they had available to third parties. I do not accept the gaslighting about attitudes toward privacy always being like they are now. They weren't. Should FB have put in better controls, and more strongly enforced those controls? Almost certainly. Was the lack of such efforts "evil"? Only if you apply today's standards of diligence to events and decisions in a very different time. Right now, I can see some of the problems that occur as we apply rigorous access control to user data even as it moves between internal systems. How many of our critics have ever needed to deal with such issues? There will always be more to do, but I'd say we're a bit ahead of the industry in that area now.
On disinformation: this is the real "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. There's no logically-consistent reason why Facebook should exercise more control over content than Verizon does over the content of phone calls. To do so is to invite accusations of censorship, and run the risk of being treated as a publisher rather than a carrier. Nonetheless, we're devoting more human and computer time to detecting disinformation than most companies have in total. Vast data centers' worth. I'm in storage, so I see only the edge of this, in the form of (insanely complex) analysis pipelines and models. That's enough to get a feel for the scale of these efforts, and it boggles my mind. People are honing these techniques all the time, and having some successes. These successes are drastically under-reported compared to failures, for reasons I won't get into here, but they are reported. Anybody who's actually paying attention can see thousands of accounts being banned at a time for inauthentic content. Think for a moment about the computational complexity of detecting a thousand-node subset within a billion-node graph. Most people who accuse FB of taking this issue lightly just don't grasp the scale at which we operate and the additional difficulty that entails.
Does FB still do things that make me cringe? Sure does. The disrespect for user choice (e.g. chronological-timeline settings constantly being reset) pisses me off to no end. The demands put on moderators of large groups, and the dearth of tools made available to them, is inexcusable. Likewise for the lack of decent support or appeal processes when users are adversely affected by our own screwups. I've come to the conclusion that even though the people I work with directly are great, there are some other people at the other end of the company (user-facing product rather than deep infra) and at a different level who ... well, let's just say I wouldn't get along with them so well. It does give me pause sometimes, but not enough to outweigh my belief in the basic mission.
You want evil companies? How about those who make much of their money from contracts with ICE/CBP/NSA? How about those that have helped hollow out the economy with their anti-labor "gig economy" BS, leading to millions of unemployed right now? Or the worse half of the finance or defense industries? How about those helping to destroy our health or our planet? There are absolutely better companies I could work for. My ideal would be to do what I do at a company that's making vaccines or something, but they didn't seem interested in hiring me. But there are other companies that were interested and I turned them down because I don't approve of what they do. There are a whole lot of pots calling the kettle black.