Facebook, now Meta, has found itself at the center of many ethical predicaments, some of them well-known and others more insidious. As ethics varies from person to person, whether or not someone would want to work at Facebook is something highly individual dependent. When considering the factors that compose the ethics of a company mentioned in the reading of worker and consumer exploitation, environmental exploitation, and mission, I think that Facebook errs on (maybe marginally) net good. Personally, I would work at Facebook, and I will explain my reasons why.
From my perspective, the dubiousness of Facebook’s ethics lies in a few areas: privacy, safety, and user behavior. Like many internet giants, Facebook makes money off ads — in fact, if I’m not wrong, Facebook helped pioneer the ads-based business model. We know that Facebook channels user data to target advertising, including indirectly allowing other organizations to get ahold of user data to accomplish ethically dubious motives, one notorious example being the Cambridge Analytica case where users were targeted with political content. This privacy concern is of high ethical concern.
Safety, or lack of safety, when using the platform is intrinsic in the interactions hosted on Facebook. How easily will we allow unsafe interactions — interactions concerning child safety, display of vulgar and unsolicited content, phishing and scamming– to exist on the platform? How proactive is Facebook in preventing this? As social media welcomes more and more young users with malleable development, safety is of greater concern than ever.
Lastly, the changing of user behavior to compel users to spend increasing amounts of time is a big insidious concern that is topical in our new digital age. The digital ecosystem is highly complex — there is educational content, entertainment, news, personal connections, influencers, and more. As Facebook invests heavily in crafting a seamless user experience that makes consuming content hard to stop, I am personally concerned about the amount of power that Facebook wields in altering our cognition and development, which is a concern on consumer exploitation.
All of these concerns are tradeoffs that need to be tended to in this new digital age. Since Facebook a leading player in social media, it has been put in the pressure cooker for making the ethical choice. Especially in America, where we place so much emphasis of individual empowerment and freedoms (of most behaviors and expression), this social media space is a particularly challenging place for regulations. It is incredibly hard to make ethically correct decisions, which comes with this space, and I believe that although Facebook has made quite terrible decisions, it seems to be adapting to public concerns and amending many wrongs. Admittedly, I am not as informed as I can be in reading up on policies and court cases against Facebook, so perhaps Facebook is breaching more ethics than I am even aware of. My current stance is that Facebook’s mission of connecting the world does more good than harm, and I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on leaning to be on the right track.
