TL;DR: Yes but with some caveats.
1. Let’s be honest. Facebook is not the only ethically and/or morally questionable company out there. Especially in Big Tech. To quote Ricky Gervais from his famous 2020 Golden Globe Monologue: “Apple roared into the TV game with The Morning Show, a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China.” Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft (which surprisingly has had an improvement in its public perception since the new CEO took office), and countless other companies (even non-tech) mine user data to the smallest drop and use them almost brazenly to develop their “personalized” products and features. Yes, Facebook goes one step ahead via its content curation and distribution method but so do others in their own respective dimensions (Google at the time of writing this article is facing an Antitrust Case for killing competition in the search market, say by paying Apple huge sums of money for being the default search engine on iPhones). So the picture is not at all monochrome and I feel Facebook’s practices are “reasonable” enough for me to not single it out for its evils (doesn’t mean that it should go unchecked as well though).
2. To quote from Reading 5.2, “something’s going on there that’s wrong, but things could be a lot worse, plus, the right and good things I can achieve by taking this job are pretty significant.” If I decline, then someone else is definitely going to fill up the job. While it would be too high-headed to say that there won’t be anyone else who can do (ethically?) a “better” job than me in the role, but I feel that it is definitely a worthwhile opportunity to learn how the company works from the inside, and try and make any positive change that I can. If I succeed in improving the practices and policies followed by the company as a higher up, then it can have a huge positive impact on not just the lives of billions of people around the globe but also present a reference for other companies to follow. If I don’t succeed then quitting out of disgust is always an option 🙂
3. Further, as the reading rightly points out, it’s not ethically wrong to put yourself first. It’s a lucrative job with all sorts of perks which I can utilize to not just advance my personal ambitions but also to enhance the lives of people in my family and loved ones. Even if I do end up rage quitting, the experience will help me network across the industry which (in a wild, wild dream) can enable me to raise money to start-up or support ventures companies working on tech policy and ethical practices.
My decision would thus keep in mind not just the company’s ethical complexities but also the potential for personal and societal impact.
