Welcome to the forum and thanks for sharing your story. Please feel free to contribute to the discussions, especially with a tech background !
Would you mind elaborate on this?
Unless these big tech actively help the oppressive regime to crackdown civil society or persecute dissidents, or actively destory the natural environment of those counties, I cant quite immagine how these big tech can do harm to the whole country.
I mean, it really depends on your personal moral compass. I would personally disagree with the idea Apple is fine though. For me, I wouldnât really work for them unless they gave me some really good advantages compared to any other less predatory companies.
Sorry @TinFoilHat, took my time.
Here are sources about what these companies are doing wrong in the world :
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/09/meta-china-censorship-facebook-mark-zuckerberg/
To summarize, no @quantum, this is very understandable that some consider these companies as evil. Especially if they look at what they are doing in poor countries. People donât have to âcorrect their myopiaâ, you should rather inform yourself on these companies.
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Thanks for the info, I will take a good look when I can sit down lwter today.
Two instant thoughts, one is that we will have to evaluate whether they are intentionally programmed the social media algorithms to promote certain perspectives (i.e. amplifying one and silencing another), or is it just due to lack of thought.
Second is that even someone associated / work for those âevilâ companies / regime, they could still âhelpâ the society by exploring, exploiting and exposing loopholes, and to slow down or mitigate the effect on general public. I did it and I knew people in person who did the same.
To me there is no doubt tht Tiktok is CCP propagandist though.
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At a macro scale, the answer is yes. Individually we can arm ourselves, but on the scale of millions and billions it works. People invest in propaganda not because itâs speculative - itâs a known way to move public opinion. Used to be newspaper and television and radio, but now the avenue is streamed to our eyeballs everywhere on a portable devices, and we really enjoy it even more.
Thank you for this. Adding them to my reading list.
I was aware of all of these issues minus the TikTok one but I am not going to defend TikTok; my statements were intended for US Tech giants.
Of your examples of âevilâ; all the Meta related ones are about users abusing the platform and not some kind of intentional outcome from the company.
For Googleâs project Dragonfly, it was cancelled six years ago and never went into effect.
Regarding Gaza, the tech companies are providing standard cloud services contracts to the government of Israel. This is not great; but again it is far from directly committing evil and those same companies are also critical in providing the infrastructure needed for the information about warcrimes being committed by the IDF to reach a global audience. So hardly black and white.
The most concerning example is Palantir. Though to play devils advocate, if their products are actually assisting in finding real Hamas terrorists they could actually be marginally reducing civilian casualties.
Iâm under no illusion weâre going to agree here. Evil is, after all, a subjective definition. However, I find it incredulous to claim anything these tech companies are doing is anywhere near the level of depravity of the other examples in my previous post. Facebook isnât running slave labor camps in Xinjiang, the CCP is. Google isnât bombing hospitals in Gaza, the IDF is.
Yes obviously. I donât underdstand why you were making this comparison in the first place.
However what I was saying is that these companies are behaving really badly, often like thugs, collaborating with whoever they can make money with, even if they are even more evil.
And in addition, no. did you rid the article about Eritrea for instance ? But this is also valid for all countries : Meta has a responsibility about how it manages its platforms. It censors certain discourses and not others, put moderators for certain countries, not in others, does not recommend certain content, recommend others, etc.
These are decisions they do consciously and they must be held accountable for them.
In addition, I just said that having this in mind, this is understandable that a lot of people think they are not evil. I would not say they are evil because they also do a few good things and yeah because they donât run concentration camps or air strikes so we need to be reasonable. However, they have nearly 0 ethic
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