I personally don't want companies deciding what is or isn't ethical. That is because a company only has one ethos, make money, so a company's ethics and mine will never line up. I expect every company to be rational which means they will be evil from my point of view. Any system that relies on companies to 'do the right thing' on behalf of people is clearly broken and any push to get them to 'do the right thing' when they don't have to is foolish. This is why we have laws and other checks in the system like journalism. From the article it looks like there is a clear argument that these lawyers broke the law in destroying evidence or purposefully hiding it/. The real issue here is that they, and their clients, aren't being held accountable for it. That is the issue that needs to be vigorously pursued. Why are they protected over people? Dig into that and we may actually make headway on the problem.
This article seems to argue:
- Attorney client privilege is unethical.
- Reducing your legal risk by deleting old data that is no longer needed and no longer on legal hold is unethical.
- Violating laws that say you can't collect data on children is okay to do.
I personally don't see these as bad things. Lawyers will trying and minimize the risk the company is in for violating various laws that exist around the world. I think it is ethical for them to give such advice. I also think attorney client privilege is also a big part of being ethical and saying that it is unethical is just trying to manipulate people's values to the author's benefit.
I'm pretty tempted to discredit this article on the basis of the author's lack of legal expertise, but to be honest I don't really have the expertise to properly comment here either.
But I don't think the author is correctly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, and their repeated questioning of attorney-client privilege, which I've considered to be one of the foundations of the American legal system, is hard to take seriously.
Also, I don't think their depiction of John Adams's representation of the British soldiers is accurate. From what I can tell, Adams sought only to give his clients as strong a legal defense as possible. In the trial, he called the American protestors a "mob", gave a racist depiction of one of the victims to justify the soldiers' panic, and ultimately saw all but two soldiers acquitted. Adams viewed this as a patriotic act, yes, but only insofar as he believed all accused of crimes in America deserved fair legal representation. He was a lawyer defending his clients, not the judge or jury trying to find the "truth" of the matter.
"The latest revelations about Meta's malfeasance come from newly unsealed court documents. In 2020, the company discovered through its own experimental research - an initiative known as Project Mercury - that when users reduced the amount of time they spent on Facebook, their levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness decreased. Meta's lawyers buried the findings."
Further reading:
https://dn710108.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
Excerpts:
"And we start with what is perhaps the most succinct acknowledgment of the problem, from a chat between two UX Researchers: "oh my gosh yall IG is a drug... We're basically pushers... We are causing Reward Deficit Disorder bc people are binging on IG so much they can't feel reward anymore... like their reward tolerance is so high... I know Adam [Mosseri] doesn't want to hear it he freaked out when I talked about dopamine in my teen fundamentals leads review but its undeniable! Its biological and psychological... the top down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more. That would be fine if its productive but most of the time it isn't... the majority is just mindless scrolling and ads." Ex. 74 at 2152-53."
"One Meta employee warned, "if the results are bad and we don't publish and they leak, is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves? I went... oh." Ex. 91 at 1943."
One might engage this topic better by asking a series of rhetorical questions. 1. Imagine you drove 40mph in a 25mph zone, a school zone. Children were present. Do you present yourself to the police? 2. You consult an attorney. Should the attorney report your conduct to the police independently? 3. You write a root cause analysis in an effort to verify your perception of exceeding the speed limit and endangering children. Then you lose interest. Are you prohibited from deleting it? 4. You give the analysis to the attorney. Must they permanently preserve it until one of the children you endangered sues you?
Attorney-client privilege is always thin with in-house counsel, and it’s a high-stakes, hard-decisions situation both defending and challenging in all cases. The mention of crime-fraud suggests my hypothetical is a tamer than the actual facts considered by the judge, and this may be the real lesson: 5. How do you distinguish between speeding in a school zone and something that requires a fundamentally different response, even one contrary to your client’s goals?
FWIW, "Careless People" is an excellent read.
Related previously:
Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege
Normally at a major corp, the attorneys act as a buffer to stop management from doing crime. Once the legal team becomes co-opted that's the HOV lane to the SEC.
The title poses it like companies (such as Meta) should be ethical and they might sometime stop to be. No for-profit company is obliged to be ethical, only legal. So the surprising news here are 'Meta used to be ethical until recently'
To all the parents: read Careless People. Realize everyone, including the author, is flaming hot trash. And never let your kids near social media ever again.
Legal teams tend to be the most "pragmatic" crowd in companies in my experience.
"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." - Mark Zuckerberg
I'm sure folks will come out of the woodwork to say that this isn't relevant as it was 20 years ago and Zuckerberg was just a wee lad at the time. However, I've never seen any evidence that Meta's attitude towards its users has changed since this quote was written. Every new Meta scandal just helps keep this thing relevant for another year or two.
Unchecked white-collar crime by US tech companies poisoning the world.
It’s quite obvious that making money has trumped ethics in US companies for a long time now. Look what united healthcare does to its “customers” to make more money.[1]
Every last one of them should be rotting in jail, but that ain’t good for the ol GDP which is more important that peoples lives.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/unitedhealths-alleged-plan-t...
When lawyers abandon fact, evidence, and law, and turn their craft toward suppression instead, they corrode the foundation of public trust on which the entire legal system depends.
That is a ship that sailed a long, long, long time ago.
I funny it amusing/sad that this story was written by a substack author, and not a major news publication
It’s articles like these that make me believe if Mark had not dropped out of Harvard, he could have become world class.
Alas.
Trying not to be petulant, but I have some difficulty reading Meta and ethical in the same sentence.
Since reading too much philosophy (username relevant), I don't think ethics are worth teaching. Instead, put laws in place that benefit the state/population(I know these can conflict, but at least in a republic, there are power sharing agreements that can balance these).
At best, you can indoctrinate people with a religion, conventional religion or a modern ascetic stoic humanist religion.
But its silly to think that religion is going to stop 100% of the population from doing anti-social things.
This might be strange to hear, but people have different and conflicting values. The worker at Meta might have a life goal to help society, the executive might have a life goal of making lots of money. These conflict, and its overly optimistic to rely on individual ethics to create a good world to live in.
Now I'll give an example: Should affairs be punished? Currently, there are plenty of US states that don't have laws on this. However, there may be something to be said about having a contractual agreement that penalizes this. If there is no contract, then it doesn't matter.
We can enforce pro-social values, we don't need to rely on individuals being wholly good.
What ethical duties? Their job is to safeguard the money printing machine and to isolate it from all externalized costs and consequences. Those people would sell their children into slavery if it made them a nickel.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody. Meta's main shareholder is devoid of any intrinsic ethics, it should come as absolutely no surprise that their legal team has abandoned their ethical duties because I would have assumed they never had any in the first place.
Zuckerberg's only saving grace by now is that he's not the only despicable billionaire.
> without an independent and impartial bar willing to defend the despised
Well - capitalism nullified that. You need money - and connections - to win for many cases in court. So it is more of a milking game than "the old ideals".
> today’s legal ethics codes still speak of lawyers’ threefold duty: to the client, to the court, and to the country
This creates a conflict of interest. If the lawyer thinks he is not responsible for winning the case, then a defendent should be able to defend himself or herself in court. Though this leads to an automatic loss, let's be honest. The current system is designed to make the courts and lawyers rich(er).
> Imagine if Adams had decided that defending his clients meant winning at all costs.
So why should this matter for the client? Why would Adams be allowed to be lazy and lose? How is that a winning strategy for the client?
> Meta lawyers ordering evidence of child exploitation destroyed
Well - people made Facebook rich. That was a big mistake on their behalf. Now children suffer - perhaps you should not have made Facebook rich in the first place.
> These lawyers collapsed Adams’ threefold duty into one — serve the client alone, whatever the cost to the courts and the country.
I think Facebook should be disbanded, but I fail to see why the lawyers should consider "courts and the country". That makes no sense. Then again I also don't think corporations should have persona-rights either - the whole system is not fair.
> Meta’s attorneys have forgotten that the law’s legitimacy derives from the integrity of those who practice it.
Except that the rich have always gamified the system. Look at Trump.
The whole focus on Facebook here makes no sense. This is a systematic problem. Question the whole system. It is basically legal corruption.
> Holding Meta accountable includes holding its lawyers accountable
They know they work for evil but they get money that way. So the question is: why does evil pay so much money? The whole system is geared towards that.
> The truth will out for Meta’s lawyers — eventually — as happened with Big Tobacco’s
I am not sure this can be compared 1:1. Tobacco lied about cancer and smoking.
I don't think Meta faces the same problem, even if they ruin people's life. The data just isn't as clear as for smoking.
The whole article is really weak. I'd be the first to chop down Facebook, Google etc... and split these up for evil, but you need to write good articles as to why. That article seems superweak. The comparison to Big Tobacco simply don't apply 1:1. And being an evil lawyer in itself does not invalidate a case, even if their rationale for throwing out cases is also garbage.
Lawyers are intellectual prostitutes. Think about it. They will defend whatever position you pay them to defend.
Can you imagine if you ask an engineer "what's your opinion on the maximum load this bridge can take?" he answered "for a fee, I will claim that my opinion is what you tell me". In any other profession this would be corruption, but when it comes to lawyers that's their job. Intellectual prostitutes.
I'd be happy if Meta's Legal Team withholds its legal duties. Asking them to be ethical is a huge /s.
Related headline: Water wet
As the popular practice shows, the first and only duty of a for-profit company is to create returns for shareholders.
If you do that ethically, fine. If you're not sure if it's ethical, try anyways. If it's unethical, do it. If it's illegal, do the cost-benefit analysis of what the punishment would cost the shareholders.
That's how these people think, and it's a direct threat to the liberty and well-being of our society.
EDIT: Downvote me all you want, but look around. That's how many of the people at the top of companies think as evidenced by their companies' behavior.
I think the whole idea of holding a platform responsible for what users do is extremely unethical. Especially in this case, it's not even Meta's platform. It's Roblox. Meta's providing the hardware and app store here.
If the laws make Meta somehow possibly responsible for child abuse happening on Roblox, and the legal team protects them from this, I think the legal team is on the ethical side.
> Holding Meta accountable includes holding its lawyers accountable
Wow. Just wow.
Ex-facebook employee here: abandoning ethics in facebook didn't start in near past. And it's not only the legal team; engineers and PM team are even worse in this matter.
Only people ready to do "anything" to optimize their performance rating and team goal are successful at facebook. And remember, facebook only hires smart people. So they do know what they are doing.