Comment by scarecrowbob

I used to work at a company where we did hosting/ maintenance/ etc for large-ish content sites.

At some point a project came across my desk where a hard-right propaganda site for college students came across my desk and I needed to migrate it.

Folks might quibble about the reality of what that site was doing but that's how I (as a person with an MA in rhetoric) understood the site, so humor me on my assessment of that site. It was a pretty regular site on the Drudge report, though, so that might help with context.

It was a very popular site, with multiple millions of unique visitors every month, and was a lot of easy cash for the business.

At that point in my career, I felt that not doing that work would be a rather "privileged" pose to strike- it would have negative impacts on my coworkers and the very small business in general, while I would just be "uncomfortable" either way.

At some point I was asked to build out a "tracker" for things like "confederate state removals, etc", IIRC sometime around the "Unite the Right" events.

I turned the work down, even though it pissed off my boss and forced a different co-worker to do the work.

That situation was what helped me understand that the immoral and "privileged" position was to do that kind of work, which wouldn't quickly and directly harm me but was likely to harm other people at some point.

However, what I also realized was that doing that work is probably harmful to me, too, as a queer leftist who now wishes I didn't feel like I need to own guns.

Almost everyone in that small business was queer or brown or both. At some point after (I am vaguely recalling) an 8-chan related shooter, the boss of the business stopped doing updates or work on the site.

All that is to say, I used to feel like "speaking up when I didn't want to do something unethical" was a privileged thing to do but I have come to realize that the inverse is true.