Facebook employees are not all scheming about the best way to target 5-year-olds. Just like any company (including 90s Microsoft!) for every one executive working out how to maximize business value at the expense of everyone else on earth, there are a couple directly complicit engineers, and a hundred engineers that mainly work on improving server uptime so that Joe Schmoe can catch up with his highschool friends, or so Grandma can use a computer (in the case of 90s MS).
Any company employing over 1,000 people is almost guaranteed to be involved in something evil because of the corruptibility of mankind, but you can't just assume that every single person is a direct contributor. Another similar example would be how you can't blame every individual American citizen for the various crimes the CIA has been running around the world committing, because there really are only a few Americans who have any connection to those things. This is true despite the fact that Mother, Apple Pie, the CIA World Factbook and the assassination of third world government officials are all technically part of the same institution.
You might counter with, if people can claim innocence even though they are part of a guilty organization, what's the motivation to improve? The answer to that is that the moral calling of Americans isn't to all leave America until the CIA gets shut down, it's to stay and stubbornly assert their morals until things improve. Evil leaders would much rather have a slightly smaller but completely obedient workforce than they would a larger, more skilled but unmanageable (in evil directions) one.
What a bunch of BS relativism. So every organization over 1000 people is equally evil? As Bill Maher said, working for HBO is not the same as working for Monsanto. And for who have been following, working for Facebook is like much more like working for Philip-Morris than its like working for HBO. And spare the nonsense about our collective guilt for the CIA. Those of us who vote (and vote against the fascists) have no reason to feel guilty.
>As Bill Maher said, working for HBO is not the same as working for Monsanto.
Replacing your own personal morality with the average morality of the organizations you are a part of is a trap, because you could also be way more evil than average. In fact, the most vile schemers at HBO might be worse than the most vile at Monsanto; and they could justify themselves by saying, "I can't be vile, I work at HBO, and HBO is not vile on average."
The best person at the NSA was probably Snowden while he was planning his defection. It's Snowden's actions that count for his judgment, not the morality of the NSA on average. If all NSA employees were traitors to the American people then Snowden would be one too! Obviously, only the NSA employees that do their jobs are traitors to the American people. There is more opportunity for heroism at Facebook because people could put their jobs on the line to defend what's right.
By no means am I justifying complicity, I'm saying that there's more opportunity to become a hero of the revolution in a terrible country than in a great one.
To use your fascist example, just because someone came from West Germany doesn't mean that they were members of the Statsi, and even if they were members of the Statsi, they could have been (and I would say they would have a duty to be) agents of the people working to undermine it from within.
Maybe the maligned FB research app was implemented as a clumsy clone of Onavo by such an agent of the people, working to undermine Facebook from within.
Never thought of it this way... because it's bloody ridiculous.
If FB has been infiltrated by so many "agents of the people", they're doing a pretty crap job at improving it.
>If FB has been infiltrated by so many "agents of the people", they're doing a pretty crap job at improving it.
Granted, my "revolution CIA the people NSA morals evil" language makes it sound kind of silly, but what I'm really talking about is the more mundane pushback that workers can achieve when asked to go beyond ethical boundaries. You don't know whether any individual Facebook employee is working in the right direction or against it, because although they might not be "plotting the people's coup, undermining the New Statsi from within," they might be gently pushing for more realistic improvements.
I don't expect everyone to pay attention to history but the Stasi was the _EAST_ German _COMMUNIST_ state secret police. They came after the Nazis.
I'm sorry but I can't follow your argument. By now if you work for Facebook you must already know that they are in the surveillance business.
Previous justifications for that seem to have revolved around them not doing anything bad with that information. Well here's the thing, using that information to target children with addictive games for money is a bad use of that information. If you work for Facebook you work for people that pay you with that money.
>I don't expect everyone to pay attention to history but the Stasi was the _EAST_ German _COMMUNIST_ state secret police. They came after the Nazis.
The parent was calling the people being voted for or against in the US "facists" even though the NSA is the secret police of a constitutional republic. East German communists were closer to fascism than the US today by a long shot, "everything is the state" and all that.
>By now if you work for Facebook you must all ready know that they are in the surveillance business.
I'm not trying to absolve Facebook, I'm pointing out that some Facebook employees may be using their position to push back against Facebook's evil, or to slow it down. So, you can't pick up your torches and pitchforks against everyone who works there, because some good people might get pitchforked.
I mean, and to pull the CIA analogy further... you could easily argue that any country you name has done (or is actively doing) equally or more evil acts, or will. Running away from problems allows bad actors to go unchallenged.
Any company employing over 1,000 people is almost guaranteed to be involved in something evil because of the corruptibility of mankind, but you can't just assume that every single person is a direct contributor. Another similar example would be how you can't blame every individual American citizen for the various crimes the CIA has been running around the world committing, because there really are only a few Americans who have any connection to those things. This is true despite the fact that Mother, Apple Pie, the CIA World Factbook and the assassination of third world government officials are all technically part of the same institution.
You might counter with, if people can claim innocence even though they are part of a guilty organization, what's the motivation to improve? The answer to that is that the moral calling of Americans isn't to all leave America until the CIA gets shut down, it's to stay and stubbornly assert their morals until things improve. Evil leaders would much rather have a slightly smaller but completely obedient workforce than they would a larger, more skilled but unmanageable (in evil directions) one.