Facebook employees have vastly more options to leave a company that they reasonably know or should know is morally questionable, and quite likely to be able to find other employment.
That changes the measures of culpability (or at least compliance) significantly.
That only changes the costs of the options, not the fact that you are either complicit or choose to leave.
Specific to your specifics, if changing circumstances _in_ the Valley is so hard, leave the Valley as well. I live in the Midwest, so my perspective has it's own skew, but SV sounds more and more like a crazy place to even try to live.
There are schools and jobs waiting in Georgia and Texas and Wyoming. They aren't Valley jobs. But they offer comfortable lives.
I appreciate the honesty of the parent post. It's all about the money and lifestyle. The part that makes me blink is that they think this somehow alters the ethics in a positive way.
If I had a job, for example, maintaining photo storage at FB, should I be so ethically outraged that I should upend my whole life, and my family's life, to run away as quickly as possible?
If you want to argue that it is hard to quit FB because of money and schools, and that that changes the ethics, see my comment above.
1. I'm not arguing that every job at FB is ethical, I'm arguing that most aren't so unethical that one would permanently taint one's soul by staying there. This is especially so if you consider that FB has a chance to change, no matter how slim that chance is. Perhaps these people believe in the stated mission of FB and think they can help.
2. It's not at all easy to leave a job - not every engineer is a 20-something nomad with no kids. Finding a gig that matches a AAA, SV company in sum benefits is a hard task on its own, even if you're not geographically limited due to familial sentiment or obligations.