Facebook’s original mission was to help Harvard students get to know each other better. With this original mission, I doubt Facebook’s origin was unethical: no exploitation of workers or consumers, no environmental exploitation, and no ethically dubious missions or connections. In fact, social connection is a generally positive mission; in psychology, it’s widely known that the quality of one’s relationships is a big factor in one’s overall happiness. Perhaps Facebook’s original intent was more positive rather than negative.
Over the years, however, I think Facebook has become morally ambiguous. Facebook’s mission has evolved into an engagement game, and while it continues to foster social connection, on a large scale, I think their new mission has resulted in harmful effects: spreading misinformation, the rise of anti-social behavior such as trolling, consumer data privacy concerns, and allegations that social media use could be harming teenagers’ mental health. At its current stage, I think Facebook violates some of the ethical concerns outlined in the reading: Facebook exploits its consumers, both intentionally and unintentionally, by poor privacy infrastructure and data leaks/hacks. Facebook is so large that it produces millions of tons of carbon dioxide, harming the environment. And I’d also say that its mission of engagement is ethically dubious; is engagement worth it when it begins to prioritize harmful content for the sake of engagement?
As the reading states, accepting a job at an “ethically difficult workplace” is difficult because it essentially causes psychological dissonance: our belief in doing good or being a good person comes into conflict with our job, which we know is not “good.” But as the reading states, it’s almost impossible to refuse to work for any company that is unethical; every company is tied together through the economy. While I wouldn’t be excited to work at Facebook, if it came down to it, I think I would work at Facebook.
At this point, Facebook isn’t going anywhere; it generates billions of dollars in revenue and whether we like it or not, dominates media distribution (as The Facebook Papers mentions). We know the problems that Facebook has caused, but that leaves the question of who will solve them. I think there’s only so much outside corporations or legal infrastructure can do to mitigate Facebook’s harms, and there has to be people in the inside to help solve Facebook’s problems. For example, one way an organization can create positive change is by recognizing their faults, redesigning their goods and services, and incentivize prosocial good. I think working at Facebook, such as in an engineering or product role, could become part of a greater effort to redesign its products for the better. Perhaps this is overly optimistic, but engineering better privacy features, designing better interfaces, and even redefining Facebook’s mission away from engagement, are possible from the inside. I think it’s a double-edged sword: working at Facebook is bad, but it also has the potential for doing good.
