"Supporting their loved ones" is doing a lot of moral heavy lifting here, though.

History's littered with people trotting out this line when they've valued luxury and status over morals.

The more you interact with something, the more you are part of it and help it prosper. "Blame the kings!" is a little bit too simple, imo.

When you are paid $500,000+ a year you lose the right to use the "I'm just supporting my family" excuse.

You sold your morals for a wheelbarrow of money, that is the end of the story.

If morality is only a consideration after similar pay and benefits are secured, then it's not really a high enough consideration to call the person moral

There are many, many tech jobs at many companies (at least there used to be, until very recently).

“I work for one of the most evil institutions on the planet today because it is the only way I can support my sick parents” is an absurd excuse.

It's not actually that hard, most companies are morally superior to Meta. Even the other evil ones.

Lol, it's always. Oh, think of these poor software engineers making $400,000 a year. Just scraping by to support their family. Give me a break.

When you're pulling that kind of money, there is a choice.

Reads like "The poor kapos had kids! They weren't evil, they were just upstanding people supporting their families!"

Absolute bullshit.

> And it’s not like you can walk onto the street and just wave down a morally superior job with similar pay

Oh no! They might only have to make mid-six figures! Welp, better give some teenage girls depression. They really don't have a choice, do they?

Zero good people work at Meta.

There is no misconception. Meta also sells data, next to selling advertising space.

its not a misconception. As an advertiser, I can go use meta's tools, target people specifically, and show them ads on meta's platform. While i don't get the CSV dump, but if i can target people with my message, its the same thing. Meta keeps the data AND the distribution. Data brokers have the data but no distribution of attention for that data. Newspapers have distribution but don't have the granualar data for direct targeting.

There are many, many use cases of having a CSV dump of the data, but in reality, all of it boils down to either reselling the data, or marketing a product to the demographic in the data.

The 3rd use case is that of palantir but let's not get distracted.

So, meta is not selling data is like saying netflix is not selling movies (its actually buying them). Technically true, but a shallow understanding.

Why should anyone at all care about this distinction?