>I don't really see how a random Facebook engineer is substantially worse than an engineer who works for Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Lockheed Martin, or <insert large corporation here>. People just want to make a decent living, not change the world.
The Nazi SS officers also used this line of arguments during the Nuremberg trials, that they were just "following orders from above, with no choice in the matter (other than the choice to voluntarily join the SS for personal gains), just like the soldiers of the allies; what's the difference that makes them the bad guys?"
My point is, you can make big tech bucks at other places as well, nobody forces you to work for an evil corp, you choose that voluntarily. And there are other less evil places you can work for.
I knew this was going to come up because this is the internet, but I don't think this line of reasoning applies to every arbitrary Facebook engineer.
The Nazi soldiers tried at Nuremburg were directly murdering the Jews, and so "just following orders" led to a direct harm. However, I don't think that logic went transitive for forever; did we execute the secretaries that took phone calls in military Germany headquarters? I don't think we did, but you could argue that they helped enable all the murders.
Similarly, if a person's entire job at Facebook is to contribute to Presto or React, I don't really view them as guilty as a person who worked on all the data-harvesting stuff, and way less guilty than an executive making the decisions.
>did we execute the secretaries that took phone calls in military Germany headquarters? I don't think we did, but you could argue that they helped enable all the murders
Unlike military members of the SS, their secretaries didn't really have the power to send people to their deaths or perform executions.
Isn't that what they are doing? There was a story not long ago about a lady in her 90s who was a secretary at a death camp at 18. She's being dragged to court.
The Nazi SS officers also used this line of arguments during the Nuremberg trials, that they were just "following orders from above, with no choice in the matter (other than the choice to voluntarily join the SS for personal gains), just like the soldiers of the allies; what's the difference that makes them the bad guys?"
My point is, you can make big tech bucks at other places as well, nobody forces you to work for an evil corp, you choose that voluntarily. And there are other less evil places you can work for.