The odds of you, the non-warmonger, influencing your employer's business direction are close to nil. You becoming complicit is a certainly.
The change is not "objectively worse" - it is the same for them and is definitely better for you. This is a pointless take.
Many other comments here expand on these themes - you're not going to influence the company direction by staying. You should not be surprised when the armaments factory makes bombs, or the influence factory makes political influence.
So many poor arguments and analogies in you master sage comment.
1. No one is surprised when the armaments factory makes bombs; they claim to. Does Meta claim to be an influence factory? Ha! They argue tooth and nail against this fact in every court they've been sued or charged in. Thus, it is certainly surprising when a space for connecting to others makes specific connections, particularly political ones impossible or difficult in the midst of the election. I don't think most people saw that coming; perhaps you did because you are obviously more clever than the rest of us.
2. A zero percent chance versus a close to nil chance are objectively different. Which one is better or worse is of course context dependent.
3. If you work at a company that does bad things and you are trying to steer it away from those bad things, it is not clear that you are becoming complicit. Some could argue that you are the opposite of complicit.
4. Perhaps the point is not merely influencing your employer's business direction, but also that of your colleagues.
Here's another example, where Meta's AI was asked to make a voting poster for the election, made it about voting for Bolsonaro unprompted, then when asked to make one for Lula said it couldn't make one for political candidates: https://www.reddit.com/r/brasil/comments/1x965on/eu_n%C3%A3o...
It’s easy to hand wave that stuff as mysteries of the LLMs. Much stronger case now that these employees have spoken out about it. I hope they can point to specific cases.
I couldn't figure it out from this link or any other English news articles. After some searching and translating Brazilian language articles I found some complaints that they were unable to pay Instagram to boost their posts for a day, but that outage applied to many accounts. There was another problem where Instagram changed the search algorithm to only trigger account matching after 5 characters were typed, making "Lula" harder to find, but that's a global change. There are scattered additional complaints about IG stories losing a few seconds and political restrictions on AI tools not triggering equally for both candidates.
Palpatine is quite mesmerizing. He will invite to his yatch, island, show you toys etc. "You want to be like me do what I say". Works on most of the chimp troupe since the dawn of time. #TheoryoftheLeisureClass
That's not completely realistic. A lot of people are attracted to companies like Meta because of unusually large paychecks. The whole "making the world a better place" schtick is just the whitewashing to help make them feel good about it.
This is what Banality of the Evil was all about. The idea that people who do evil things is different from people who do not is what allows those awful things to happen. Because that idea stops us from examining our own cognition for signs of conformity and groupthinking.
If we start recognizing that we too are capable of awful things all while believing we are doing good, we can start self examining our ideas, motivations and behavior, to catch ourselves before we embark on such grouptrips.
Yea, but they don't have to act like they are doing society a big favor. People are angry because they said "We Meta employees want to build technologies and platforms that millions of people use and enjoy". When we all know what they are creating....
I believe that in the future, companies that deliberately rot people's brains will be viewed in the same light as tobacco companies and other despicable businesses. It's good to see that more and more people are recognizing Meta for the moral cesspool it is.
I would say it lost the ethos It had few years ago. But you are sadly right. Needles to say, many people are working for tobacco companies too but it lost it's glamor. Same as ordinary tech companies.
The fewer people that are willing to work there, the dumber and less effective metas bullshit continues to be. Look at the Trump Admin - anybody who is still there sucks at their job. The damage they’ve done is immeasurable but it seems to be backfiring pretty significantly. Meta is successful because of the smart motivated people who continue to work there. Turn it into a confederacy of dunces. Quit your job.
At least you're being honest about the fact that you're selling out. Many people working there believe that they're making the world a better place, or think that Meta is just another amoral company like the many others, or that they as an individual aren't contributing to the negative impacts. Money will do strange things to good people.
How are lower-level workers supposed to influence a crank like Zuckerberg?
He owns the company and all of its decisions. He is literally accountable to no one, from the board down.
The only viable action here is to do what the Brazilian government are going to do - document the abuses, and fine the company into oblivion and/or ban it if it doesn't behave itself.
If the US ever recovers democracy itself, pass the documentation on to the new US government.
> How are lower-level workers supposed to influence a crank like Zuckerberg?
By witnessing first-hand the abuse and blowing the whistle on Zuckerberg for trying to manipulate elections.
The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal broke because an employee leaked proof, and now Facebook has to cough up 25 billion in fines. Do you think Zuckerberg didn't felt this?
there's a reason this is a meme and not one of the Ten Commandments haha
people are not questioning whether or not the goal is good or bad. they're showing that the Concern is really a Concern Troll. that is, their concerns aren't really sincere.
that said i think the appropriate meme for this is the Big Chin guy
There is a spectrum. On the far left or right is the claim that someone who criticizes society somewhat can go live in a cabin somewhere. That is very convenient, since that would remove everyone who is critical from society itself, meaning that nothing could be ever done to improve it.
Far to the other side are are FU Money/assets CEOs and what have you that could quit what they are doing. Not terribly far from them are well-paid software engineers who could just demote themselves to a regular-paid job and be fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50255234
Notably with a regular, not-terribly-evil job they wouldn’t disappear from society at all. They would still be a part of society.
You don't know how many people have already quit. You don't know how many will quit. But you do know that someone that quits also loses any influence they have on the decisions.
Turns out when your main recruitment strategy is dangling multiple-6-figures in front of debt-laden college graduates (during an employment slowdown), there's always going to be another person willing to take the place of whoever leaves, and the work still gets done
A lot of folks left over Cambridge Analytica, another bunch left over Myanmar, more left over Trump, and yet the hits keep on coming...
(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.
TBH I question the ethics of most big tech employees, but Meta is definitely the grossest money-grubbing hog pit of them all. I instantly lose respect for people who sell themselves to carry out the wishes of the billionaire elites like that. They'd be powerless without their legions of storm troopers.
Honestly, I dream of the day a meta employee isn't seen as a position of prestige or intelligence, but one of shame and disgust. I hope recruiters and companies actively avoid, not seek, meta employees.
Company influences politics for shareholder value, not a surprise at all. This was just the time they got caught and I bet the other MAG7 are doing it in some form too even if its just massive donations
Well, no. If you stick to a job at an employer that does this kind of crap then indirectly you are an enabler, even if you protest. Meta would replace them but that's on Meta, not on those that walked out.
Meta will not stop short of government action and I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is happening at the request of that government in the first place. Zuckerberg may have some excuse (say, they showed him a documentary about Jack Ma) but he definitely either folded or just straight up decided to comply in advance.
> I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is happening at the request of that government in the first place
You wouldn't be surprised if the incumbent candidate requested that Meta platform and systematically encourage voting for their rightwing opponent? What do you think happened here?
And as for me, I want people with morals to stick around and try to influence things in a positive direction. It's so easy to get on one's high horse and say "then go elsewhere", but everyone acting like that is a short path to a worse world. Tend the gardens you are in while you can, but I don't blame anyone who just can't carry that torch day-in, day-out.
> If you stick to a job at an employer that does this kind of crap then indirectly you are an enabler, even if you protest. Meta would replace them but that's on Meta, not on those that walked out
So walking away would allow the former-employees to have a clear conscience, in full knowledge that the evil will continue exactly the same without them?
This is a somewhat exotic philosophical position you are staking out here
> So walking away would allow the former-employees to have a clear conscience, in full knowledge that the evil will continue exactly the same without them?
So they know nothing will change regardless of what they do and yet they willingly continue to sell their time and skills to said evil organisation?
That’s a rather binary and extreme way to see things. It doesn’t scale well if everyone acted like that.
It's better that people in these organizations feel they can speak up. If they have to choose between saying nothing or resigning, many would simply say nothing. And how is that situation any better?
If we're just wishing for everyone to behave exactly how we want, you might as well just wish for the company operators and executives to behave exactly how you want as well. And then you don't need to coordinate the much larger employees group.
That's the point. You can denounce something easily enough. But there is no pricetag attached to that so it means absolutely nothing if you continue to enable the company that does these things. Like the 100's of times before that 'Meta' (Facebook) did stuff that was despicable. They continued to work there.
The situation everywhere looks dire. These aren‘t social media platforms anymore but tools for propaganda and repression against opposition groups across different countries.
> 25.10.2026: Meta removed three prominent satire pages from Facebook the day before presidential elections in Bulgaria.
> Shortly after the deletion they were recreated and gathered tens of thousands of followers within hours. Less than 24h later Meta removed them again. Due to past incidents involvement of security forces is suspected. No meaningful response from Meta as usual.
Meanwhile, a couple of oligarchs are positioning convenient AI summaries in between us and all of the world's information. Talk about a useful tool to control people...
The American propaganda platforms have for a long time been helping the US regime to undermine democracies around the world. More and more Europeans are realising that the Nerd Reich are supporting the far right movements in Europe, helping Trump and his friend Putin in destabilising European democracies.
Hoping that Brazil and Lula will issue an international arrest warrant for Zuckerberg for being a foreign agent interfering in a sovereign state's election.
Germany should do the same with Musk.
A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company. The question is, if the people that actually care and push back leave:
1. Will this increase or decrease the incidents?
2. Will we know more or less about these incidents in the future?
3. Will anyone else inside work for or against this happening?
Which way do we want things to go?
I don't mean to say it's clearly this or that. I think it's a genuinely interesting and challenging dilemma. Do I continue working someplace that is involved in something evil but try and provide a voice, push, influence, or, if nothing else, a voice to the outside of the goings on inside, or do I separate myself and work only from the outside?
We can imagine the same for law enforcement, military, defence contractors, government, and any number of other vectors and industries.
Snowden was working from the inside before he leaked what he did. Every single whistleblower was involved first.
Yeah this is one of my biggest questions from a lot of the high profile departures during the Trump admin early days (both times probably). Sure, you save face a little maybe, and you register your protest, but then you are replaced with a yes man almost certainly, which is significantly worse.
But also, then, I know exactly how I would feel about continuing to work if my purpose is now to just be a roadblock. It must be pretty demoralizing and can you really ask that of someone else or be upset if they aren't up for that? I would certainly be tempted to jump ship for a chance to get paid better doing something I enjoy.
I get the sentiment but basically you say that people need to join corrupt fucked up organisations to make them better.
Like if you don’t join and improve things, some kind of psychopath will join in your stead and make things worse.
I don’t think that’s a helpful way to think about it.
You’re not required to improve things anywhere and you can leave a toxic (work)relationship if that’s what you need.
The problem is not that power corrupts; it’s more that power attracts corruptible people
Well ideally we want companies and governments to be trustworthy and that only works with trustworthy individuals, but here in this case I can only see Meta dissolving as a solution.
Remember how it started? Zuckerberg literally said about his users: ‘They “trust me.” Dumb f--ks’.
This is the base the company has been operating since the beginning, just got better at hiding it, but now some masks are slipping again.
I wonder if an alternative could be found - for example the state funds an independent news organisation that gets access to everything they are doing by law, and turns up at offices, and asks questions, joins meetings, etc. Refusing to share information counts as criminal and a director gets shipped to prison every week until the situation resolves itself.
Or just make it criminal for any accredited (because sensitive information) news organization to be blocked from these things?
I'm not convinced the world wouldn't be a better place if we advantaged the free press over corporations, the least transparent component of our modern world.
The only issue right now is that the "free press" begins l belongs to the few. Their purpose is mostly to entertain and drive up antagonism towards the enemies du jour.
Trying to change things materially from the inside against the wishes of the higher ups probably means your career stalls or you'll be fired anyway. From the perspective of your career, you may as well find a new job while you have the leverage from the current one and then make your statement as you leave. There is almost nothing a non C-suite person can do to change things in this context.
Or for that matter, doing the possible/doable thing vs trying (and failing) the impossible. Sometimes "the right thing" is just not possible because the obstacles in place are literally insurmountable. At that point your only real options left are a) pick a thing that can be done and do that instead (not always "easy"), or b) give up and accept "that's just the way things are".
I'm not pretending there isn't very real risk of retribution, but I do think this can be done under the protections under the NLRA so long as it's done right (as in, seek legal guidance first).
This also isn't to fault anyone who instead chooses to leave, instead.
I also think your comments diminishes the actual impact lots of folks have had, such as stopping donation to certain PACs. Relative to many other groups of workers, tech workers actually have more leverage.
> A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company
Another obvious point is: those computer programmers, and related professions, are now precarious employees.
Times have changed, there are redundant computists all over the place. Telling people they should leave the job that feeds their family because of short sighted management is cruel
> A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company.
Yes, that sounds awfully suspicious and counterproductive. It sounds like they actually want to silence any reference to wrongdoing, as if potential whistleblowers and offenders must be held accountable to deeply contrasting morality bars.
To me, asking people who object to their employer's moral, ethical, and/or criminal violations to resign and go away has the same vibes as calling for people who criticism the government to exile: their goal is not to fix things, is to silence dissent.
Your argument would carry more weight if the employees weren’t getting paid absurd sums of money. It’s very easy to stick around and keep getting rich while signing petitions and virtue signaling on social media.
> Your argument would carry more weight if the employees weren’t getting paid absurd sums of money.
What a stupid appeal to morality. This is not the middle ages where you can only aspire to do the right thing if you abdicate any worldly possession. I am paid well because I stood up for myself in contract negotiations, and no keyboard hero is going to put my sense of right and wrong into question because I earn more than you.
I have heard about a few things that the 300K a year SC proletariat have done. I can’t remember offhand right now, but they did apparently force management to go back on some unethical stuff.
But on the whole we see the world that we live in. I guess it would be ten times worse without their quiet protests?
What I do know is that SC is the capital of Effective Altruism, which contains the idea that the best way to do good in the world is to earn a lot of money and then give it to “effective causes”. And I expect no holistic or systemic action from those of such convenient, myopic beliefs.
I hope I will never be in that situation to make that decision; but seeing the fate of the different whistleblowers (in the USA) it seems you need to be almost suicidal to blow the whistle.
Like your life will basically be ruined for a long time, maybe forever.
People who work at Facebook and complain about this strike me as incredible naive. They work for the devil in exchange for huge sums of money, but are then shocked that the devil partakes in devious acts.
Neither leaving in protest nor staying would really change much. As long as someone is willing to do the dirty work, it'll continue to get done.
Okay. So the idea is to keep helping to overthrow democracy hoping that you'll get a chance to leak something?
And yes, working for META means doing your part to overthrow democracy. It's company strategy to do so, and like it or not, working for META means you are "just following orders" in this enterprise.
That's because you have some idea of morals and ethics. If people were ethical to begin with they wouldn't have to denounce anything: they wouldn't be working there in the first place.
> 2. Will we know more or less about these incidents in the future?
The letter was from a UK communication worker's union and no article I can find includes the number of employees who signed the letter or their roles a Meta.
With how much is being obscured about the signers of the letter and their location, I think it's unlikely they were involved with the incident at all.
Yeah, I always wonder about this when I hear about people that resign from an organization in protest. Sure, they get to sleep at night now, but now they've just opened up a job for an unscrupulous person.
I mean, if you really think your organization is a net negative, perhaps your best civic effort is to just sort of linger as organizational dead weight or, better yet, as some sort of bureaucratic tar baby.
> I mean, if you really think your organization is a net negative, perhaps your best civic effort is to just sort of linger as organizational dead weight or, better yet, as some sort of bureaucratic tar baby.
Everything you contribute to the organisation helps it achieve its goal, no matter how small or insignificant. By staying you agree to continue to sell your skills and time to this organisation in favour of its objectives. You are as much part of the problem as the organisation itself.
It will be more expensive for Meta to hire people. Why do you think gambling companies pay better then other? And why gaming companies pay badly? Because too many people refuse to work for gambling companies, so price goes up. And conversely, too many people want to work on games, so price goes down.
People who stay will not meaningfully push back. They can grumble. They can ask to be reassign to slightly different position. But, they will never have any option to actually do something meaningful from inside.
What percentage of whistleblowers are punished, directly or indirectly, for their ethical behavior? What percentage come out of the experience worse? Worse finances? Worse health?
The incentives aren't there to behave as an ethical human being in business beyond getting caught breaking the law (for a narrow definition of ethics).
I say this as someone who fought for the smaller fry multiple times (one sexual harassment victim, one employee at risk of losing their visa, and multiple teams getting done to) in the workplace and came out of it with autistic burnout (I didn't know then about my autism) from the emotional labor leading to unemployment.
Also, if you think you're company is enabling musk&co, stay and document. In my city, the antifa group has one member who used to be a bar pillar at a place that after an ownership change became the new place for the néo-nazi and royalists to meet up. Last Saturday they planned on disturbing the protests. We all got the information about that the day before. The day of the protests, we had two watchdogs ready outside the bar who took pictures of the nazillons who got out and dispatched them to various signal groups, allowing engaged people to organise and prevent any disturbance, provocations or fights. My more casual friends didn't notice anything and were very happy about how the day went.
Inside information is critical, and you can always try to do your part.
Big Tech can offer a high salary for non-managers, for people who cannot impact the organization other than through extra-hierarchical means (organizing). Wy would they leave?
They have options. People here spend enough time glazing each others’ 200,000 lumen minds and abilities. And judging by extra-curricular activities, no lies are told as far as I can see. That means that they can just find other employment.[1] There is enough IT that the rest of us work on, IT that doesn’t want to become a global Panopticon. None of it is perfect. You might have to work on software that just makes some previously flexible and okay procedure into a rigid, somewhat buggy, but streamlined and legible to management kind of procedure. You might earn more than the cleaning personell who have unalloyed-good jobs, just removing dirt.[2] But it’s better for the soul.
And you can earn a normal wage. Not a bad wage.
But the horde of luminous minds in Silicon Valley and I guess the Seattle Area (and maybe urban Texas and I dunno) have showed us what they can do with all the demand for their labor, their high salaries, and the pliable management who know that they have to put up with the nerds.
[1] Yes. Some workers have many options. Many have some options, many have few. Most people can’t make principled employment choices.
[2] Now someone with 30 years of experience managing cleaning personell will tell me all the dirt on what cleaning personell get up to.
I really don't like to gas those jews, but know what, I'll keep gassing them and think on how I can topple the nazi regime, that is the best option. Ohhh also, my paycheck just cleared, >Order New Tesla<, done, now back to thinking on how I can kill Hitler or something (while ordering Uber Eats for an expresso machiatto for 30 dollars and pressing that 'Burn Them' button)
Short-term is the only thing that matters for billionaires. If they cared for the future they will not do the things that they do.
Also, if you help a dictator-wanna-be to take power you may get a election short-term but a country long-term. Billionaires are not very friendly towards democracy or the working class.
Really depends on the political climate. Such a ban is very difficult for two main reasons:
1. It's going to be very unpopular, enabling the domestic opposition to take advantage rhetorically. Without a local mandate it's political suicide, so you'd need to build up to it for a while and turn the public against Facebook/Instagram. Tricky if that's their primary mode of engagement with community/news/entertainment.
2. An attack on a powerful private company tends to scare other capital owners. If you depend on donors and local (or international) businesses to maintain your lifestyle or electoral viability then it can be tricky to convince them that your ban is limited in scope and won't prompt additional regulatory action or contribute to a social shift of people expecting more from their leaders. If you fail to provide adequate assurances then capital is likely to side with Meta and sink you for trying to cut them off.
yes, it's measured roughly with "financial wealth". Finer details like "number of baby momma's" and "number of dollars donated to political groups" can be used to break ties.
> If you truly despise their actions, start leaking documents to the press
I don't think meta has had an all hands meeting that wasn't live-tweeted by journalists since... 2019? The leaks are pretty ubiquitous, but notably not from high-ups or the folks with access to a lot of the public policy stuff.
I found that Lula's team was unable to pay to boost posts for about 24 hours, which was a bug that affected other accounts too.
Meta also changed the search algorithm to trigger account matching after 5 characters, which would make "@lulaofficial" not the top recommendation for everyone who only typed "lula".
The rumors about what happened are crazy. These things would be so easy to report in any of the news articles, but instead everyone is just guessing and sharing rumors.
It is incredible how little critical thinking is being applied on the Brazilian election. Too many are taking at face value that somehow META is responsible for something nefarious without any direct evidence and accusations.
There is enough precedence to believe that it was intentional. The book Careless People goes into details specifically describing this tactic being used a decade ago.
Meta itself has been describing the favouritism as caused by technical glitches - which for some reason always benefitted Bolsonaro.
Searches for Lula on Instagram didn't show any results while searches for Bolsonaro worked.
Restrictions on Lula's ad account was apparently also a technical glitch.
Strangely enough, there was also some technical glitches that caused whatsapp searches for Lula's 7 million members whatsapp channel to bring up Bolsonaro's whatsapp channel instead.
Did I mention that Meta was fined $25 billion dollars last week for lying and misleading the public?
Aside from what other users described, some interesting “technical glitches” revealed training biases:
- Meta AI refused to generate campaign images depicting Lula, but not Bolsonaro.
- If you asked for Meta AI to generate fictitious campaign images for fake candidates, they would have Bolsonaro’s party number. It would refuse to generate images with Lula’s party number claiming it can’t use real party numbers (Brazilians vote by typing the candidate’s number in an electronic voting machine)
- AI-powered translation was refusing to translate “presidiário” correctly when referring to Jair.
Any calls for Meta to change are useless until Mark Zuckerberg no longer holds a majority of voting shares. You have to have reforms around that first. Cambridge Analytica, the Metaverse, the New Mexico judgment... all examples of things that would have gotten any other CEO canned due to their damage to the bottom line, but Mark doesn't have to worry, because he's not going to vote himself out.
> Any calls for Meta to change are useless until Mark Zuckerberg no longer holds a majority of voting shares.
That's not true. Zuckerberg blinked when the share price hit the 90s in 2022. Despite holding the vote, he started listening to external investors more.
The change is not "objectively worse" - it is the same for them and is definitely better for you. This is a pointless take.
Many other comments here expand on these themes - you're not going to influence the company direction by staying. You should not be surprised when the armaments factory makes bombs, or the influence factory makes political influence.
1. No one is surprised when the armaments factory makes bombs; they claim to. Does Meta claim to be an influence factory? Ha! They argue tooth and nail against this fact in every court they've been sued or charged in. Thus, it is certainly surprising when a space for connecting to others makes specific connections, particularly political ones impossible or difficult in the midst of the election. I don't think most people saw that coming; perhaps you did because you are obviously more clever than the rest of us.
2. A zero percent chance versus a close to nil chance are objectively different. Which one is better or worse is of course context dependent.
3. If you work at a company that does bad things and you are trying to steer it away from those bad things, it is not clear that you are becoming complicit. Some could argue that you are the opposite of complicit.
4. Perhaps the point is not merely influencing your employer's business direction, but also that of your colleagues.
Sorry, bud, you didn't clinch it.
Meta employees say Lula’s accounts restricted in Brazil election
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50227639
Lula wins election after final votes tallied
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50237485
Banality of the evil. Hannah Arendt.
If we start recognizing that we too are capable of awful things all while believing we are doing good, we can start self examining our ideas, motivations and behavior, to catch ourselves before we embark on such grouptrips.
If Meta keeps those positions at all.
It’s one thing to recognise it as evil, it’s entirely another to keep selling your times and skills to the evil you recognise.
If you care about preventing Meta from doing evil things, you have far more influence and power over that if you work for Meta.
He owns the company and all of its decisions. He is literally accountable to no one, from the board down.
The only viable action here is to do what the Brazilian government are going to do - document the abuses, and fine the company into oblivion and/or ban it if it doesn't behave itself.
If the US ever recovers democracy itself, pass the documentation on to the new US government.
By witnessing first-hand the abuse and blowing the whistle on Zuckerberg for trying to manipulate elections.
The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal broke because an employee leaked proof, and now Facebook has to cough up 25 billion in fines. Do you think Zuckerberg didn't felt this?
people are not questioning whether or not the goal is good or bad. they're showing that the Concern is really a Concern Troll. that is, their concerns aren't really sincere.
that said i think the appropriate meme for this is the Big Chin guy
Far to the other side are are FU Money/assets CEOs and what have you that could quit what they are doing. Not terribly far from them are well-paid software engineers who could just demote themselves to a regular-paid job and be fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50255234
Notably with a regular, not-terribly-evil job they wouldn’t disappear from society at all. They would still be a part of society.
A lot of folks left over Cambridge Analytica, another bunch left over Myanmar, more left over Trump, and yet the hits keep on coming...
So we should rather want these people to stay on for as long as possible, and make it hard for Meta to pull off such shit.
Meta will not stop short of government action and I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is happening at the request of that government in the first place. Zuckerberg may have some excuse (say, they showed him a documentary about Jack Ma) but he definitely either folded or just straight up decided to comply in advance.
The world exists in shades of grey my friend..
You wouldn't be surprised if the incumbent candidate requested that Meta platform and systematically encourage voting for their rightwing opponent? What do you think happened here?
And as for me, I want people with morals to stick around and try to influence things in a positive direction. It's so easy to get on one's high horse and say "then go elsewhere", but everyone acting like that is a short path to a worse world. Tend the gardens you are in while you can, but I don't blame anyone who just can't carry that torch day-in, day-out.
So walking away would allow the former-employees to have a clear conscience, in full knowledge that the evil will continue exactly the same without them?
This is a somewhat exotic philosophical position you are staking out here
So they know nothing will change regardless of what they do and yet they willingly continue to sell their time and skills to said evil organisation?
Interesting.
It's better that people in these organizations feel they can speak up. If they have to choose between saying nothing or resigning, many would simply say nothing. And how is that situation any better?
> 25.10.2026: Meta removed three prominent satire pages from Facebook the day before presidential elections in Bulgaria.
> Shortly after the deletion they were recreated and gathered tens of thousands of followers within hours. Less than 24h later Meta removed them again. Due to past incidents involvement of security forces is suspected. No meaningful response from Meta as usual.
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/yurukov.yurukov.net/post/3myozobbcy...
does this mean they were ordered to take them down by the government? what can they do in that case?
1. Will this increase or decrease the incidents? 2. Will we know more or less about these incidents in the future? 3. Will anyone else inside work for or against this happening?
Which way do we want things to go?
I don't mean to say it's clearly this or that. I think it's a genuinely interesting and challenging dilemma. Do I continue working someplace that is involved in something evil but try and provide a voice, push, influence, or, if nothing else, a voice to the outside of the goings on inside, or do I separate myself and work only from the outside?
We can imagine the same for law enforcement, military, defence contractors, government, and any number of other vectors and industries.
Snowden was working from the inside before he leaked what he did. Every single whistleblower was involved first.
But also, then, I know exactly how I would feel about continuing to work if my purpose is now to just be a roadblock. It must be pretty demoralizing and can you really ask that of someone else or be upset if they aren't up for that? I would certainly be tempted to jump ship for a chance to get paid better doing something I enjoy.
I don’t think that’s a helpful way to think about it.
You’re not required to improve things anywhere and you can leave a toxic (work)relationship if that’s what you need.
The problem is not that power corrupts; it’s more that power attracts corruptible people
> It must be pretty demoralizing and can you really ask that of someone else or be upset if they aren't up for that?
Did they add this after your comment?
Well ideally we want companies and governments to be trustworthy and that only works with trustworthy individuals, but here in this case I can only see Meta dissolving as a solution.
Remember how it started? Zuckerberg literally said about his users: ‘They “trust me.” Dumb f--ks’.
This is the base the company has been operating since the beginning, just got better at hiding it, but now some masks are slipping again.
I wonder if an alternative could be found - for example the state funds an independent news organisation that gets access to everything they are doing by law, and turns up at offices, and asks questions, joins meetings, etc. Refusing to share information counts as criminal and a director gets shipped to prison every week until the situation resolves itself.
I'm not convinced the world wouldn't be a better place if we advantaged the free press over corporations, the least transparent component of our modern world.
Or for that matter, doing the possible/doable thing vs trying (and failing) the impossible. Sometimes "the right thing" is just not possible because the obstacles in place are literally insurmountable. At that point your only real options left are a) pick a thing that can be done and do that instead (not always "easy"), or b) give up and accept "that's just the way things are".
This also isn't to fault anyone who instead chooses to leave, instead.
I also think your comments diminishes the actual impact lots of folks have had, such as stopping donation to certain PACs. Relative to many other groups of workers, tech workers actually have more leverage.
Lots of lists of people who, in a just society, would be valorized and treated as national heroes:
https://www.whistleblowers.org/how-whistleblowers-changed-th...
https://stfrancislaw.com/blog/10-most-famous-whistleblowers/
Another obvious point is: those computer programmers, and related professions, are now precarious employees.
Times have changed, there are redundant computists all over the place. Telling people they should leave the job that feeds their family because of short sighted management is cruel
Yes, that sounds awfully suspicious and counterproductive. It sounds like they actually want to silence any reference to wrongdoing, as if potential whistleblowers and offenders must be held accountable to deeply contrasting morality bars.
To me, asking people who object to their employer's moral, ethical, and/or criminal violations to resign and go away has the same vibes as calling for people who criticism the government to exile: their goal is not to fix things, is to silence dissent.
What a stupid appeal to morality. This is not the middle ages where you can only aspire to do the right thing if you abdicate any worldly possession. I am paid well because I stood up for myself in contract negotiations, and no keyboard hero is going to put my sense of right and wrong into question because I earn more than you.
— Upton Sinclair
But on the whole we see the world that we live in. I guess it would be ten times worse without their quiet protests?
What I do know is that SC is the capital of Effective Altruism, which contains the idea that the best way to do good in the world is to earn a lot of money and then give it to “effective causes”. And I expect no holistic or systemic action from those of such convenient, myopic beliefs.
* capitol
Like your life will basically be ruined for a long time, maybe forever.
Neither leaving in protest nor staying would really change much. As long as someone is willing to do the dirty work, it'll continue to get done.
And yes, working for META means doing your part to overthrow democracy. It's company strategy to do so, and like it or not, working for META means you are "just following orders" in this enterprise.
I couldn't live like that for long.
The letter was from a UK communication worker's union and no article I can find includes the number of employees who signed the letter or their roles a Meta.
With how much is being obscured about the signers of the letter and their location, I think it's unlikely they were involved with the incident at all.
They're just signing a letter protesting it.
I mean, if you really think your organization is a net negative, perhaps your best civic effort is to just sort of linger as organizational dead weight or, better yet, as some sort of bureaucratic tar baby.
they could take a page out of the CIA manual for it.
Everything you contribute to the organisation helps it achieve its goal, no matter how small or insignificant. By staying you agree to continue to sell your skills and time to this organisation in favour of its objectives. You are as much part of the problem as the organisation itself.
People who stay will not meaningfully push back. They can grumble. They can ask to be reassign to slightly different position. But, they will never have any option to actually do something meaningful from inside.
The incentives aren't there to behave as an ethical human being in business beyond getting caught breaking the law (for a narrow definition of ethics).
I say this as someone who fought for the smaller fry multiple times (one sexual harassment victim, one employee at risk of losing their visa, and multiple teams getting done to) in the workplace and came out of it with autistic burnout (I didn't know then about my autism) from the emotional labor leading to unemployment.
The incentives aren't there. I wish they were.
Inside information is critical, and you can always try to do your part.
They have options. People here spend enough time glazing each others’ 200,000 lumen minds and abilities. And judging by extra-curricular activities, no lies are told as far as I can see. That means that they can just find other employment.[1] There is enough IT that the rest of us work on, IT that doesn’t want to become a global Panopticon. None of it is perfect. You might have to work on software that just makes some previously flexible and okay procedure into a rigid, somewhat buggy, but streamlined and legible to management kind of procedure. You might earn more than the cleaning personell who have unalloyed-good jobs, just removing dirt.[2] But it’s better for the soul.
And you can earn a normal wage. Not a bad wage.
But the horde of luminous minds in Silicon Valley and I guess the Seattle Area (and maybe urban Texas and I dunno) have showed us what they can do with all the demand for their labor, their high salaries, and the pliable management who know that they have to put up with the nerds.
[1] Yes. Some workers have many options. Many have some options, many have few. Most people can’t make principled employment choices.
[2] Now someone with 30 years of experience managing cleaning personell will tell me all the dirt on what cleaning personell get up to.
We Palantir employees want to build software tools for clients to combine, clean, and make sense of their own scattered datasets
Also, if you help a dictator-wanna-be to take power you may get a election short-term but a country long-term. Billionaires are not very friendly towards democracy or the working class.
1. It's going to be very unpopular, enabling the domestic opposition to take advantage rhetorically. Without a local mandate it's political suicide, so you'd need to build up to it for a while and turn the public against Facebook/Instagram. Tricky if that's their primary mode of engagement with community/news/entertainment.
2. An attack on a powerful private company tends to scare other capital owners. If you depend on donors and local (or international) businesses to maintain your lifestyle or electoral viability then it can be tricky to convince them that your ban is limited in scope and won't prompt additional regulatory action or contribute to a social shift of people expecting more from their leaders. If you fail to provide adequate assurances then capital is likely to side with Meta and sink you for trying to cut them off.
If you truly despise their actions, start leaking documents to the press. Climb the ladder as high as possible and infiltrate top leadership.
I don't think meta has had an all hands meeting that wasn't live-tweeted by journalists since... 2019? The leaks are pretty ubiquitous, but notably not from high-ups or the folks with access to a lot of the public policy stuff.
I found that Lula's team was unable to pay to boost posts for about 24 hours, which was a bug that affected other accounts too.
Meta also changed the search algorithm to trigger account matching after 5 characters, which would make "@lulaofficial" not the top recommendation for everyone who only typed "lula".
The rumors about what happened are crazy. These things would be so easy to report in any of the news articles, but instead everyone is just guessing and sharing rumors.
- Meta AI refused to generate campaign images depicting Lula, but not Bolsonaro.
- If you asked for Meta AI to generate fictitious campaign images for fake candidates, they would have Bolsonaro’s party number. It would refuse to generate images with Lula’s party number claiming it can’t use real party numbers (Brazilians vote by typing the candidate’s number in an electronic voting machine)
- AI-powered translation was refusing to translate “presidiário” correctly when referring to Jair.
That's not true. Zuckerberg blinked when the share price hit the 90s in 2022. Despite holding the vote, he started listening to external investors more.