Every employee and Engineer that is currently at Facebook is involved in this mess. Every one of them are complicit. To the FB Engineers reading this: it is a saddening you have chosen to use your talents to build dangerous technologies instead of technologies that improve our lives.
I genuinely feel like shaming and social ostracization should be way more commonly used. If suddenly you stop hanging out with friends who work at outfits like Facebook, if they stop being invited to dinners, are socially shunned, then I genuinely believe it will have a net positive effect.
The problem is that bad behavior is normalized and rationalized in our society, 'everyone needs a paycheck.' This legitimizes working for companies like this.
>The problem is that bad behavior is normalized and rationalized in our society, 'everyone needs a paycheck.'
The movie Thank you for Smoking, about a tobacco lobbyist, calls this the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense." All manner of immorality, even shilling for a tobacco firm, will be excused away with hey man, I've got a mortgage to pay.
I once applied for a job at Phillip Morris in VA. On the reception desk (you had to walk about 30 yards from the entrance through the marble-lined lobby to get there), there was a sign saying "Enjoy smoking!"
Every office had ashtrays everywhere, and staff were provided with a carton of 200 free cigs every week.
There's a book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, that investigates a few cases of internet lynch mobs, and the history of shaming as punishment.
The book's conclusion (as I recall) is that shaming is far more cruel than we commonly think, and shaming used to be more common until people realized its cruelty.
I think there is a stark contrast between something like a digital lynch mob and disassociation. The latter is simply doing things like not interacting with people whose behavior you find egregious.
The book covers that form of shaming too, in the context of close-knit towns in the last few centuries. But it's been too long since I read the book to discuss that in detail.
I doubt that shaming individuals works. But having thoughtful discourse about it is probably much better - let people hear the arguments and make up their mind.
With this being said, I do find it a waste that some of the best minds in the world are working towards ads and engagement businesses. Having a tool for global communication is wonderful, but their unethical behaviors are unexcusable.
> I doubt that shaming individuals works. But having thoughtful discourse about it is probably much better - let people hear the arguments and make up their mind.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Have a nice long thoughtful conversation with your friend about why you disapprove of what they're doing with their life, offer to help them find a new job if you're so inclined, but cut contact if/when they refuse to reform. Tell others what you've done and encourage them to do the same.
Shaming almost certainly does work, otherwise humans wouldn't be so inclined to try it all the time. I'm quite certain that shaming is a tactic baked into our social instincts by evolution.
It does work, but it has to be truly pervasive. If it's 1 out of 9 personal interactions that the person might have, the very proportion becomes a self-justification: "if it really were that bad, why don't all those people bring it up?"
But e.g. you don't see many people openly self-identifying as racists anymore.
I believe that in a society that has free speech, there is a duty of the member's of society to exercise their free speech and disassociate from those acting unethically. Particularly for unethical actions that cannot be prosecuted due to the rights afforded to all.
Now while there are a lot of things that facebook probably can be prosecuted for, there are many things that they probably can't be. So I think we have an obligation to shame and shun those who act in reprehensible ways. And obviously in proportion to how culpable/complicit those individuals are.
It might also work in a sense that FB has less qualified engineers than they would otherwise have. Which would cause their quality of service to be less, hopefully. Which would provide some advantage to their competitors, and/or annoy some of their users into leaving.
There is no real competition for FB, all the users that leave (like I did several years ago) are self-inflicted wounds.
However FB is part of the FAANG group that pays top dollar. That is attracting enough good engineers, especially the type that don't care too much about the ethics of their work results.
FB is not the only large company that pays well. They might pay better than others, but when you're in that income bracket, we're not talking about making ends meet either way. So when you introduce ethics into consideration, it does affect their ability to attract talent.
FWIW their recruiters seem to be getting desperate in the past couple of years. Until then, I'd see a FB recruiter ping me about once every year. But from 2019 on, it's much more frequent, and I know it's not just me - there's many other people I know who have observed that, and you can find more testimonies along those lines in these comments. Furthermore, I have explicitly told them to GFTS in no uncertain terms, and I still got recruiters contacting me after. This tells me that they are feeling the crunch.
