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Comment by jackhuman | Hacker News Reader

I searched for a used steamdeck in my area and got 100% fraud sellers. My elders in my family fall for fraud via meta’s platforms. Its caused me lots of stress and pain.

The only thing I can do is delete all my Meta accounts. One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.

If this was my product, I’d feel ashamed by how trash it is. I really hope governments force stricter regulations on meta and ads in general. Meta should be liable if a user is scammed by an ad on their platform. Plane and simple.

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>One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.

The rank and file are complicit. There are people commenting on HN every day who are paid handsomely to work at Meta and to act willfully blind to the awful ethics their company has displayed for two decades.

The 1972 Knapp Commission into police corruption introduced some really great vocabulary to express "the rank and file are complicit".

"Meat eaters" and "grass eaters".

The meat eaters were the officers that actively pursued opportunities to be corrupt and spent a great deal of time on the job engaging in corrupt activities instead of police work. The grass eaters were essentially normal officers who would turn a blind eye or do things that had been normalized such as accepting or soliciting small bribes opportunistically.

In the words of the report, "the grass eaters are the heart of the problem".

> One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.

Leadership can certainly be blamed, but I think it comes down to their hiring practices. When you prioritise leetcode-isk wrote memorisation and deprioritise intrinsics (like ethics, shocker), you end up with a company full of people who are willing to do anything to achieve their singular goal of making TC go up. Morality or product quality be damned.

I think there's certainly some blame that falls on the engineers at Facebook. But, in my experience, if you put any number of developers in a room, noone is going to come up with "let's help scam the elderly". That requires an MBA or two.

Nah, engineers like to solve problems. The silicon valley jerk ratio scene doesn't come out of nowhere. You can get engineers to work on solving just about any problem if you make it interesting enough to them.

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