Ethical Jobs: Would you accept a job at Facebook?

Being at Stanford, with access to so much knowledge and awareness around Facebook and its many harms, but also coming from a working-class, immigrant background, where the longing hope is that I go on to gain employment at a well-paying company like Facebook, this is a question that I constantly wrestle with. I want to make my family and community back home proud of my time at Stanford, and show that it paid off, but I also have my own moral obligations and dreams of being a part of a space that contributes to social well-being.

Maybe 4 years ago, when I came onto campus all wide-eyed and hopeful of the opportunities Stanford would afford me, like an internship at Facebook, I would have said yes, no questions asked. I still think I would say yes, but I would be intentional with what work I am doing. I percieve Facebook to be unethical, in terms of manipulating/exploiting a large part of the media industry, for destabilizing democracies across the world, and a range of other unfortunate realities. It could be easy to ignore it all, just go for it and take any job. But I don’t want to be guilty of “lying to myself.” It wouldn’t feel right and I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep with that. Instead, I would be intentional with the role I would hold at Facebook and ensure it isn’t something that continues to perpetuate harm but rather contributes to mitigating these harms and promoting a mission and values that I agree with. Like the reading mentioned, taking up such a role would establish both distance from morally corrupt work while also charging me with responsibilites to promote better change. And these roles do exist, albeit not too many of them. There are roles for managing the integrity of media revolving around elections as well as analyst roles to ensure internet trust and safety on the platform.

So, I would accept a job at Facebook, but I would be intentional about my work and stick to something that can change company policy to reflect better practices!