A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company. The question is, if the people that actually care and push back leave:
1. Will this increase or decrease the incidents?
2. Will we know more or less about these incidents in the future?
3. Will anyone else inside work for or against this happening?
Which way do we want things to go?
I don't mean to say it's clearly this or that. I think it's a genuinely interesting and challenging dilemma. Do I continue working someplace that is involved in something evil but try and provide a voice, push, influence, or, if nothing else, a voice to the outside of the goings on inside, or do I separate myself and work only from the outside?
We can imagine the same for law enforcement, military, defence contractors, government, and any number of other vectors and industries.
Snowden was working from the inside before he leaked what he did. Every single whistleblower was involved first.
Trying to change things materially from the inside against the wishes of the higher ups probably means your career stalls or you'll be fired anyway. From the perspective of your career, you may as well find a new job while you have the leverage from the current one and then make your statement as you leave. There is almost nothing a non C-suite person can do to change things in this context.
I'm not pretending there isn't very real risk of retribution, but I do think this can be done under the protections under the NLRA so long as it's done right (as in, seek legal guidance first).
This also isn't to fault anyone who instead chooses to leave, instead.
Well ideally we want companies and governments to be trustworthy and that only works with trustworthy individuals, but here in this case I can only see Meta dissolving as a solution.
Remember how it started? Zuckerberg literally said about his users: ‘They “trust me.” Dumb f--ks’.
This is the base the company has been operating since the beginning, just got better at hiding it, but now some masks are slipping again.
People who work at Facebook and complain about this strike me as incredible naive. They work for the devil in exchange for huge sums of money, but are then shocked that the devil partakes in devious acts.
Neither leaving in protest nor staying would really change much. As long as someone is willing to do the dirty work, it'll continue to get done.
I hope I will never be in that situation to make that decision; but seeing the fate of the different whistleblowers (in the USA) it seems you need to be almost suicidal to blow the whistle.
Like your life will basically be ruined for a long time, maybe forever.
> A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company.
Yes, that sounds awfully suspicious and counterproductive. It sounds like they actually want to silence any reference to wrongdoing, as if potential whistleblowers and offenders must be held accountable to deeply contrasting morality bars.
To me, asking people who object to their employer's moral, ethical, and/or criminal violations to resign and go away has the same vibes as calling for people who criticism the government to exile: their goal is not to fix things, is to silence dissent.
Yeah this is one of my biggest questions from a lot of the high profile departures during the Trump admin early days (both times probably). Sure, you save face a little maybe, and you register your protest, but then you are replaced with a yes man almost certainly, which is significantly worse.
But also, then, I know exactly how I would feel about continuing to work if my purpose is now to just be a roadblock. It must be pretty demoralizing and can you really ask that of someone else or be upset if they aren't up for that? I would certainly be tempted to jump ship for a chance to get paid better doing something I enjoy.
I get the sentiment but basically you say that people need to join corrupt fucked up organisations to make them better.
Like if you don’t join and improve things, some kind of psychopath will join in your stead and make things worse.
I don’t think that’s a helpful way to think about it.
You’re not required to improve things anywhere and you can leave a toxic (work)relationship if that’s what you need.
The problem is not that power corrupts; it’s more that power attracts corruptible people
> A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company
Another obvious point is: those computer programmers, and related professions, are now precarious employees.
Times have changed, there are redundant computists all over the place. Telling people they should leave the job that feeds their family because of short sighted management is cruel
there's a reason this is a meme and not one of the Ten Commandments haha
people are not questioning whether or not the goal is good or bad. they're showing that the Concern is really a Concern Troll. that is, their concerns aren't really sincere.
that said i think the appropriate meme for this is the Big Chin guy
Yea, but they don't have to act like they are doing society a big favor. People are angry because they said "We Meta employees want to build technologies and platforms that millions of people use and enjoy". When we all know what they are creating....
The fewer people that are willing to work there, the dumber and less effective metas bullshit continues to be. Look at the Trump Admin - anybody who is still there sucks at their job. The damage they’ve done is immeasurable but it seems to be backfiring pretty significantly. Meta is successful because of the smart motivated people who continue to work there. Turn it into a confederacy of dunces. Quit your job.
You don't know how many people have already quit. You don't know how many will quit. But you do know that someone that quits also loses any influence they have on the decisions.
Turns out when your main recruitment strategy is dangling multiple-6-figures in front of debt-laden college graduates (during an employment slowdown), there's always going to be another person willing to take the place of whoever leaves, and the work still gets done
A lot of folks left over Cambridge Analytica, another bunch left over Myanmar, more left over Trump, and yet the hits keep on coming...
(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.
TBH I question the ethics of most big tech employees, but Meta is definitely the grossest money-grubbing hog pit of them all. I instantly lose respect for people who sell themselves to carry out the wishes of the billionaire elites like that. They'd be powerless without their legions of storm troopers.
Palpatine is quite mesmerizing. He will invite to his yatch, island, show you toys etc. "You want to be like me do what I say". Works on most of the chimp troupe since the dawn of time. #TheoryoftheLeisureClass
That's not completely realistic. A lot of people are attracted to companies like Meta because of unusually large paychecks. The whole "making the world a better place" schtick is just the whitewashing to help make them feel good about it.
The situation everywhere looks dire. These aren‘t social media platforms anymore but tools for propaganda and repression against opposition groups across different countries.
> 25.10.2026: Meta removed three prominent satire pages from Facebook the day before presidential elections in Bulgaria.
> Shortly after the deletion they were recreated and gathered tens of thousands of followers within hours. Less than 24h later Meta removed them again. Due to past incidents involvement of security forces is suspected. No meaningful response from Meta as usual.
Meanwhile, a couple of oligarchs are positioning convenient AI summaries in between us and all of the world's information. Talk about a useful tool to control people...
Sorry all. I'm very slow here. The linked story only talks about a group within Meta showing concern with concernable events. What was the event?
I'm slow because this article doesn't describe it: and believe it or not, I use this website as a source of "breaking" news, so I sincerely would like to know.
There are so many English articles about this topic that never explain what happened. I clicked on everything from Reuters to Al Jazeera and they're all reciting the same line about "accounts restricted".
The "account restriction" was a period of about 24 hours where Instagram's "Boost Post" feature wasn't working for some accounts, including Lula's. The ads were still shown, but the part to add more money for the boosts wasn't working that day.
There's another complaint about not being able to search for "Lula" and get the exact account after they changed the global search to require 5 characters to identify accounts.
There are additional accusations of things like some stories posts getting cut short and the AI tool not applying political restrictions equally.
A lot of the articles imply the "internal communications" caught them red-handed doing these things intentionally, but as far as I can tell those internal communications are just them responding to the issues? If there was a leaked internal communication about them disrupting elections, the news stories would probably lead with that instead of dancing around the subject.
That's the context I could find after not getting much useful information from this link. I know this comment is going to make some people angry but to clear I'm only trying to figure out what these articles are talking about.
> If there was a leaked internal communication about them disrupting elections, the news stories would probably lead with that instead of dancing around the subject.
And it works! Nearly every comment here is just riffing on how this was definitely intentional and further evidence of the commenter's preconceived notions of Meta, etc, etc.
Company influences politics for shareholder value, not a surprise at all. This was just the time they got caught and I bet the other MAG7 are doing it in some form too even if its just massive donations
Honestly, in 2018 Meta *allegedly* interfered in the other direction. It basically goes along with who the US President is. This discourse is just to stoke division and promote censorship and bigger government control.
Tech fascism is panicking universally as the algorithmic manipulation doesn't seem to work anymore as people are getting more and more aware of the tactics.
Really depends on the political climate. Such a ban is very difficult for two main reasons:
1. It's going to be very unpopular, enabling the domestic opposition to take advantage rhetorically. Without a local mandate it's political suicide, so you'd need to build up to it for a while and turn the public against Facebook/Instagram. Tricky if that's their primary mode of engagement with community/news/entertainment.
2. An attack on a powerful private company tends to scare other capital owners. If you depend on donors and local (or international) businesses to maintain your lifestyle or electoral viability then it can be tricky to convince them that your ban is limited in scope and won't prompt additional regulatory action or contribute to a social shift of people expecting more from their leaders. If you fail to provide adequate assurances then capital is likely to side with Meta and sink you for trying to cut them off.
Short-term is the only thing that matters for billionaires. If they cared for the future they will not do the things that they do.
Also, if you help a dictator-wanna-be to take power you may get a election short-term but a country long-term. Billionaires are not very friendly towards democracy or the working class.
Any calls for Meta to change are useless until Mark Zuckerberg no longer holds a majority of voting shares. You have to have reforms around that first. Cambridge Analytica, the Metaverse, the New Mexico judgment... all examples of things that would have gotten any other CEO canned due to their damage to the bottom line, but Mark doesn't have to worry, because he's not going to vote himself out.
> Any calls for Meta to change are useless until Mark Zuckerberg no longer holds a majority of voting shares.
That's not true. Zuckerberg blinked when the share price hit the 90s in 2022. Despite holding the vote, he started listening to external investors more.
This will damage Meta's business. As the meme that they cannot be trusted spreads alternative methods of communication will revive, and start to flourish
Trust does matter. Hard to win, easier to loose, and no matter how big you are, how mean you seem, you can still sicken and die
I couldn't figure it out from this link or any other English news articles. After some searching and translating Brazilian language articles I found some complaints that they were unable to pay Instagram to boost their posts for a day, but that outage applied to many accounts. There was another problem where Instagram changed the search algorithm to only trigger account matching after 5 characters were typed, making "Lula" harder to find, but that's a global change. There are scattered additional complaints about IG stories losing a few seconds and political restrictions on AI tools not triggering equally for both candidates.
Here's another example, where Meta's AI was asked to make a voting poster for the election, made it about voting for Bolsonaro unprompted, then when asked to make one for Lula said it couldn't make one for political candidates: https://www.reddit.com/r/brasil/comments/1x965on/eu_n%C3%A3o...
It’s easy to hand wave that stuff as mysteries of the LLMs. Much stronger case now that these employees have spoken out about it. I hope they can point to specific cases.
yes, it's measured roughly with "financial wealth". Finer details like "number of baby momma's" and "number of dollars donated to political groups" can be used to break ties.
> If you truly despise their actions, start leaking documents to the press
I don't think meta has had an all hands meeting that wasn't live-tweeted by journalists since... 2019? The leaks are pretty ubiquitous, but notably not from high-ups or the folks with access to a lot of the public policy stuff.
Well, no. If you stick to a job at an employer that does this kind of crap then indirectly you are an enabler, even if you protest. Meta would replace them but that's on Meta, not on those that walked out.
Meta will not stop short of government action and I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is happening at the request of that government in the first place. Zuckerberg may have some excuse (say, they showed him a documentary about Jack Ma) but he definitely either folded or just straight up decided to comply in advance.
> If you stick to a job at an employer that does this kind of crap then indirectly you are an enabler, even if you protest. Meta would replace them but that's on Meta, not on those that walked out
So walking away would allow the former-employees to have a clear conscience, in full knowledge that the evil will continue exactly the same without them?
This is a somewhat exotic philosophical position you are staking out here
> I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is happening at the request of that government in the first place
You wouldn't be surprised if the incumbent candidate requested that Meta platform and systematically encourage voting for their rightwing opponent? What do you think happened here?
And as for me, I want people with morals to stick around and try to influence things in a positive direction. It's so easy to get on one's high horse and say "then go elsewhere", but everyone acting like that is a short path to a worse world. Tend the gardens you are in while you can, but I don't blame anyone who just can't carry that torch day-in, day-out.
That’s a rather binary and extreme way to see things. It doesn’t scale well if everyone acted like that.
It's better that people in these organizations feel they can speak up. If they have to choose between saying nothing or resigning, many would simply say nothing. And how is that situation any better?
If we're just wishing for everyone to behave exactly how we want, you might as well just wish for the company operators and executives to behave exactly how you want as well. And then you don't need to coordinate the much larger employees group.
1. Will this increase or decrease the incidents? 2. Will we know more or less about these incidents in the future? 3. Will anyone else inside work for or against this happening?
Which way do we want things to go?
I don't mean to say it's clearly this or that. I think it's a genuinely interesting and challenging dilemma. Do I continue working someplace that is involved in something evil but try and provide a voice, push, influence, or, if nothing else, a voice to the outside of the goings on inside, or do I separate myself and work only from the outside?
We can imagine the same for law enforcement, military, defence contractors, government, and any number of other vectors and industries.
Snowden was working from the inside before he leaked what he did. Every single whistleblower was involved first.
This also isn't to fault anyone who instead chooses to leave, instead.
Well ideally we want companies and governments to be trustworthy and that only works with trustworthy individuals, but here in this case I can only see Meta dissolving as a solution.
Remember how it started? Zuckerberg literally said about his users: ‘They “trust me.” Dumb f--ks’.
This is the base the company has been operating since the beginning, just got better at hiding it, but now some masks are slipping again.
Neither leaving in protest nor staying would really change much. As long as someone is willing to do the dirty work, it'll continue to get done.
Like your life will basically be ruined for a long time, maybe forever.
Yes, that sounds awfully suspicious and counterproductive. It sounds like they actually want to silence any reference to wrongdoing, as if potential whistleblowers and offenders must be held accountable to deeply contrasting morality bars.
To me, asking people who object to their employer's moral, ethical, and/or criminal violations to resign and go away has the same vibes as calling for people who criticism the government to exile: their goal is not to fix things, is to silence dissent.
But also, then, I know exactly how I would feel about continuing to work if my purpose is now to just be a roadblock. It must be pretty demoralizing and can you really ask that of someone else or be upset if they aren't up for that? I would certainly be tempted to jump ship for a chance to get paid better doing something I enjoy.
I don’t think that’s a helpful way to think about it.
You’re not required to improve things anywhere and you can leave a toxic (work)relationship if that’s what you need.
The problem is not that power corrupts; it’s more that power attracts corruptible people
Another obvious point is: those computer programmers, and related professions, are now precarious employees.
Times have changed, there are redundant computists all over the place. Telling people they should leave the job that feeds their family because of short sighted management is cruel
If you care about preventing Meta from doing evil things, you have far more influence and power over that if you work for Meta.
people are not questioning whether or not the goal is good or bad. they're showing that the Concern is really a Concern Troll. that is, their concerns aren't really sincere.
that said i think the appropriate meme for this is the Big Chin guy
If Meta keeps those positions at all.
A lot of folks left over Cambridge Analytica, another bunch left over Myanmar, more left over Trump, and yet the hits keep on coming...
Banality of the evil. Hannah Arendt.
> 25.10.2026: Meta removed three prominent satire pages from Facebook the day before presidential elections in Bulgaria.
> Shortly after the deletion they were recreated and gathered tens of thousands of followers within hours. Less than 24h later Meta removed them again. Due to past incidents involvement of security forces is suspected. No meaningful response from Meta as usual.
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/yurukov.yurukov.net/post/3myozobbcy...
I'm slow because this article doesn't describe it: and believe it or not, I use this website as a source of "breaking" news, so I sincerely would like to know.
EDIT: ahh p2detar has something real: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50248577
Probably Zuckerberg's gravestone
The best I could find was from some translations of paywalled Brazilian articles like this one https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2026/10/em-mensagens-int...
The "account restriction" was a period of about 24 hours where Instagram's "Boost Post" feature wasn't working for some accounts, including Lula's. The ads were still shown, but the part to add more money for the boosts wasn't working that day.
There's another complaint about not being able to search for "Lula" and get the exact account after they changed the global search to require 5 characters to identify accounts.
There are additional accusations of things like some stories posts getting cut short and the AI tool not applying political restrictions equally.
A lot of the articles imply the "internal communications" caught them red-handed doing these things intentionally, but as far as I can tell those internal communications are just them responding to the issues? If there was a leaked internal communication about them disrupting elections, the news stories would probably lead with that instead of dancing around the subject.
That's the context I could find after not getting much useful information from this link. I know this comment is going to make some people angry but to clear I'm only trying to figure out what these articles are talking about.
And it works! Nearly every comment here is just riffing on how this was definitely intentional and further evidence of the commenter's preconceived notions of Meta, etc, etc.
1. It's going to be very unpopular, enabling the domestic opposition to take advantage rhetorically. Without a local mandate it's political suicide, so you'd need to build up to it for a while and turn the public against Facebook/Instagram. Tricky if that's their primary mode of engagement with community/news/entertainment.
2. An attack on a powerful private company tends to scare other capital owners. If you depend on donors and local (or international) businesses to maintain your lifestyle or electoral viability then it can be tricky to convince them that your ban is limited in scope and won't prompt additional regulatory action or contribute to a social shift of people expecting more from their leaders. If you fail to provide adequate assurances then capital is likely to side with Meta and sink you for trying to cut them off.
Also, if you help a dictator-wanna-be to take power you may get a election short-term but a country long-term. Billionaires are not very friendly towards democracy or the working class.
That's not true. Zuckerberg blinked when the share price hit the 90s in 2022. Despite holding the vote, he started listening to external investors more.
Meta employees say Lula’s accounts restricted in Brazil election
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50227639
Lula wins election after final votes tallied
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50237485
Trust does matter. Hard to win, easier to loose, and no matter how big you are, how mean you seem, you can still sicken and die
We Palantir employees want to build software tools for clients to combine, clean, and make sense of their own scattered datasets
If you truly despise their actions, start leaking documents to the press. Climb the ladder as high as possible and infiltrate top leadership.
I don't think meta has had an all hands meeting that wasn't live-tweeted by journalists since... 2019? The leaks are pretty ubiquitous, but notably not from high-ups or the folks with access to a lot of the public policy stuff.
So we should rather want these people to stay on for as long as possible, and make it hard for Meta to pull off such shit.
Meta will not stop short of government action and I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is happening at the request of that government in the first place. Zuckerberg may have some excuse (say, they showed him a documentary about Jack Ma) but he definitely either folded or just straight up decided to comply in advance.
So walking away would allow the former-employees to have a clear conscience, in full knowledge that the evil will continue exactly the same without them?
This is a somewhat exotic philosophical position you are staking out here
The world exists in shades of grey my friend..
You wouldn't be surprised if the incumbent candidate requested that Meta platform and systematically encourage voting for their rightwing opponent? What do you think happened here?
And as for me, I want people with morals to stick around and try to influence things in a positive direction. It's so easy to get on one's high horse and say "then go elsewhere", but everyone acting like that is a short path to a worse world. Tend the gardens you are in while you can, but I don't blame anyone who just can't carry that torch day-in, day-out.
It's better that people in these organizations feel they can speak up. If they have to choose between saying nothing or resigning, many would simply say nothing. And how is that situation any better?