FTA: ...what has been a very hard three weeks for my team.
I think /u/urda's comment in another thread[0] feels appropriate:
"Every employee and Engineer that is currently at Facebook is involved in this mess. Every one of them are complicit. To the FB Engineers reading this: it is a saddening you have chosen to use your talents to build dangerous technologies instead of technologies that improve our lives." [1]
Ascribing blame for a company’s actions to its employees is questionable. They play a small role, for sure, but much more culpable are the shareholders and executives.
I agree to a point. However, employees do at least have to acknowledge that if they choose to work for, or stay at, a bad company then they get some blame as well. If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
Agreed to a point. Choosing where you work is a luxury however. In the software world, or at least, in the VC-funded software world, we are spoiled with an abundance of mobility. The same is not true for many other verticals and probably most other industries.
Heard an npr story on how Facebook posts are being used to promote violence against tigrays in Ethiopia. I suppose the engineers may have reduced hate speech and if it wasn’t Facebook then another network could take its place… but the way Facebook provides an easy platform for disinformation and hate and is detrimental to the psychology of many of its users is a tough pill to swallow. I really don’t see them doing enough visible action that the issues morally warrant
Data science, and probably software engineering in general, needs something like the Iron Ring [0], where you make a pledge to not build bad things.
While I understand the author of this Medium post wanted to do something good, and maybe even managed to mitigate something worse... ultimately, the project is a failure. People have died because of Facebook [1].
The analogy I want to draw is of a civil engineer, responsible for adding additional support to a bridge. The bridge partially collapses, killing people. Maybe the work lead to less of a collapse, but the moral thing to do is to loudly object to the bridge being used at all.
The iron ring has no legal significance. That's handled by whoever the licensing body for that region is. The iron ring is a purely symbolic ceremony about taking your work seriously.
Do you want to set up a licensing body for computer engineers, outside of which practice would be illegal? That's how civil engineers are held accountable - not by the iron ring.
I think /u/urda's comment in another thread[0] feels appropriate:
"Every employee and Engineer that is currently at Facebook is involved in this mess. Every one of them are complicit. To the FB Engineers reading this: it is a saddening you have chosen to use your talents to build dangerous technologies instead of technologies that improve our lives." [1]
[0] Specifically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28804729
[1] Contained within this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28804173