I would consider working at Facebook, but only if the role didn’t contribute to outcomes I see as net negative for society. For example, working to strengthen content moderation feels very different to me than working on targeted advertisement systems, even if the day-to-day tasks of each job look similar. Working as a lawyer on their anti-trust operations would be a whole other operation. I don’t want to take a moral high ground and declare I’d never work there because of scandals like Cambridge Analytica or the company’s role in social media addiction and harmful content exposure. As the readings point out, our economy is so deeply intertwined that abstaining from every morally questionable organization would eliminate nearly all jobs.
At the same time, I don’t think it’s enough to say, “as long as my specific job isn’t directly harmful, it’s fine.” Within large organizations, individual roles often seem neutral, but stitched together, they can drive outcomes far more damaging than any single contribution. Nike offers a parallel: a shoe designer or marketing professional may not feel complicit in exploitative labor practices, yet the company’s supply chain decisions create harmful realities. Responsibility, then, also means understanding how your piece of work feeds into larger systems and consequences.
That’s how I’d approach Facebook: with an effort to understand what systems my work would support and how they shape society. If I were an engineer on Facebook Dating, for instance, I’d see it as my responsibility to understand not just my technical tasks but also the broader product direction and social impact. Of course, this is never simple—when I interned at a consulting firm this summer, I realized that even my managers didn’t always have a full picture of how a project’s outcomes would unfold in the real world. Still, I believe we can and should do our best to live informed, principled lives, even if imperfectly, and hold ourselves accountable for the systems we help sustain.
