I’m not confident in the belief that Meta as a company causes more harm than good. If you look closely at most of the criticism, it’s generally overblown.
I’m more convinced of the overall harms of social media (esp. in regards to teenage mental health), but is Meta is worse than other social media companies out there like TikTok? Probably not?
In terms of benefits to the world, they enable a lot of small businesses to exist through personalized advertising and they’re pushing the field of virtual reality forward faster than it would otherwise develop.
If I had to guess, Meta’s impact on the world (compared to a world without Meta) is net neutral or maybe slightly positive (/negative), instead of significant negative impact. So your impact of joining Meta as 1 of 70k+ employees is likely a few orders of magnitude lower than the impact you’d have through earning to give.
Other factors to consider—What team would you be on? Can you get into other FAANGs? How long would you even work at Meta before you jump jobs? Is there a significant reputational risk of working at Meta, regardless of the facts?
I’m not confident in the belief that Meta as a company causes more harm than good. If you look closely at most of the criticism, it’s generally overblown.
For example, the headline of the 2021 Facebook Leak is “Instagram Harms Teenagers!” but the reality is more complicated—https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043138622/facebook-instagram-teens-mental-health . Cambridge Analytica too: https://mobiledevmemo.com/cambridge-analytica-was-a-false-panic-its-time-to-move-on/ .
I’m more convinced of the overall harms of social media (esp. in regards to teenage mental health), but is Meta is worse than other social media companies out there like TikTok? Probably not?
In terms of benefits to the world, they enable a lot of small businesses to exist through personalized advertising and they’re pushing the field of virtual reality forward faster than it would otherwise develop.
If I had to guess, Meta’s impact on the world (compared to a world without Meta) is net neutral or maybe slightly positive (/negative), instead of significant negative impact. So your impact of joining Meta as 1 of 70k+ employees is likely a few orders of magnitude lower than the impact you’d have through earning to give.
Other factors to consider—What team would you be on? Can you get into other FAANGs? How long would you even work at Meta before you jump jobs? Is there a significant reputational risk of working at Meta, regardless of the facts?
See also: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/show-me-the-harm/