I knew a Facebook employee a while back, but when there were still enough problems known and public. I asked him about it. He just said they were all lies and BS. He worked there, and never saw any of that.

So either he rationalised it away, or, like anything political, half of what you read is blatantly false, and the other half is mostly false.

I'm not trying to relativize here - just wondering, doesn't this hit a lot of people? Several megacorps have a bad image - at least Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. And whole industries get bad reputation - military, intelligence, meat, oil & gas, surveillance, the list goes on. In some circles even proprietary software is an evil thing. (I like FOSS but I can't go around hating every software company.)

Lots of people decide that they just want to make a living and can't always find a job that is ponies and rainbows, I think. I've myself thought about working for a local surveillance-related company but it disgusted me a bit and I was in a fortunate position to be able to find something else.

I'm speaking for myself only, etc.

> Does it not nag you to be employed by one of - if not the most - ethically disgusting companies in the world?

I'm sorry - I don't work for a "defense" contractor[1]. That said, a lot of societal problems are pinned on FB. IIRC, YouTube moderators also suffer from PTSD, I suspect the same goes for Twitter, and Vimeo[2] - and I believe more should be done - saying this is a FB-specific problem is just dishonest, but convenient.

Getting rid of Facebook will not fix the deterioration of social fabric and degraded, that is a convenient lie people tell themselves. Go ahead and look at YouTube comments, misinformation, or Twitter threads, and and ragebait purveyed by - lets see - everyone. Society is fucked and cannot be fixed, at best, it can only be mitigated.

This is not to excuse Facebook, but just setting the tone on where we are as a society. The reason it's hard to legislate a fix for this because the required changes are going to affect everyone in ways they don't like, therefore we can't even come to a consensus on what the solution ought be.

Getting to your question, FB is a big company, and there are a lot of orgs that do great work that benefits humanity, those don't get as much media attention. That said - I really was "radicalized" on HN: I am a minority, and for years, I've witnessed the cavalier attitude or outright disdain shown by HN towards the more problematic areas of our industry (racism, sexism, etc). What can I say, the "Fuck you, got mine" attitude is infectious[3].

1. I'm being snarky, but I think writing software to take lives is the most disgusting thing fellow SWE's do.

2. Does Vimeo they even moderate? All the gore/"watch someone die" links I have not visited were exclusively Vimeo

3. It's also the best solution to iterated prisoners dilemma scenario

1. You drink the cool aid, the perspective is different, you will think it is hit piece and the people are out to get your company and discard valid journalism along with the junk . [1]

2. If you job depends on your not understanding something, most people won't understand even if it is common sense. The economic incentives don't align

3. It is easy to blame the institution vaguely like all the people who didn't directly kill/torture anyone in Nazi Germany nevertheless enabled the oppressive government to function. [2]

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[1] More extreme forms we see today all the time with vaccine and other science denialism enabled/ fueled by platforms like Facebook

[2] Comparison with Nazis is not to equate with Facebook and offend anyone, it is to illustrate that even in the extreme case like that unless you are directly involved easy to ignore and support/enable atrocities at that level let alone what companies like Facebook / Google do