If you work for a large social network with huge social responsibilities, discussions about ethics ought to be unavoidable, in my opinion.
If you're writing accounting software for paper suppliers or something equally banal with few ethical implications, then sure, there's no need (and less reason) to have water cooler conversations about pro-genocide agitprop or whatever.
EDIT to add that of course not all departments at Facebook make the sort of decisions that have a marked social impact. More referring to the content policy teams, and the news feed algo teams, and so on.
> If you work ... with huge social responsibilities, discussions about ethics ought to be unavoidable, in my opinion.
The problem is distinguishing ethics from politics. These are very hard to disentangle, because ethical values are usually based on some political orientation. And I don't want Facebook to be making political decisions on my behalf, as a user. And I don't even want internal employee discussions to be derailed by political considerations.
So how do you distinguish ethics from politics? I don't think it's possible, unless the company defines its own ethical values, a priori, and only considers those when making decisions.
If you read the article, I think that this is precisely what Facebook's new policy is trying to do by putting a fence around "social issues."
> because ethical values are usually based on some political orientation
Are you sure that isn't exactly backwards? Because it definitely should be the other direction in my very strong opinion. One's morals or beliefs on ethics should inform their politics, not the other way around.
One way is based around a person's inner being, the other is molding their being and stances based on a sports team.
I don't agree with that. I don't think people choose their ethics based on their politics, but I do think they compromise them in the name of political tribalism. It's a mistake to ascribe the personal ethics of a specific party member to the ethics of the party platform, particularly when there is limited choice of parties.
Facebook must make political decisions, because it must have a stance on content moderation. Even if that stance is "we shouldn't moderate content", that is a political decision. All possible actions and inaction around content moderation require political decisions, and you can't be in the social media business without having a content moderation policy.
I work for an accounting software mega-corp in silicon valley. Our CEO sends company wide emails regarding every notable social issue event. After the George Floyd murder we've been told we need to openly discuss racial issues at work. Managers have been told that they must have these conversations, since if they don't, employees may think that they don't care.
The company's products are in no way social media platforms.
If you're writing accounting software for paper suppliers or something equally banal with few ethical implications, then sure, there's no need (and less reason) to have water cooler conversations about pro-genocide agitprop or whatever.
EDIT to add that of course not all departments at Facebook make the sort of decisions that have a marked social impact. More referring to the content policy teams, and the news feed algo teams, and so on.