Comment by cmiles74

So why not make the positive choice?

Zuckerberg claimed time and time again he wanted to connect the world, and it was part of the earliest mission statements:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/02/mark-zuck...

It was on the hoodie!

https://www.cnet.com/culture/zuckerberg-hoodie-makes-mountai...

Mark said, "But there’s this mission belief that connecting the world is really important, and that is something that we want to do. That is why Facebook is here on this planet."

https://www.thedrum.com/news/ads-not-short-term-solution-int...

He also said he wanted to make an impact, but I always felt like this was misguided, because what matters is whether the impact is positive or negative.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/05/mark-zuckerbe...

If we give him the benefit of the doubt that he actually wanted to achieve something positive, maybe he sadly became subdued by having to make an outsized return from VC money. I don't know that we should give him the benefit of the doubt, but imagine if he had sold to Yahoo for a paltry billion dollars and then created a site to truly connect people with a foundation or some other entity that gave him more freedom to ignore profit.

Meta has more luxury of choice than most companies. They can choose to make positive impacts if they so choose. "He chose poorly" and "You have chosen wisely" comes to mind from the the ancient knight in the 3rd Indiana Jones film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-_BH7x7Dl8

The United States and its businesses are continually faced with a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation when it comes to operating in countries which have poor human rights records claims, whether that's China or Saudi Arabia or others.

If the company doesn't operate in the country, a competitor will, and the United States in particular will be criticized for failure to compete, losing ground to China (or some other actor), and of losing soft power. If the American company does decide to comply with the laws of the host nation, they're evil and bad, and they're an example of fascism or being complicit in human rights violations. These charges are never levered at other countries or their companies, strictly American ones. For example, France sells weapons to Saudi Arabia.

Certain loud groups also like to complain when the United States takes forceful action to prevent those same human rights violations. They want the US to withdraw from the world, but they also want the US to be at fault for withdrawing and leaving others to suffer. We should ignore what they say and do what we think is right and in our best interest.

We're not going to change these countries by refusing to operate in them and we're just going to cede ground to a competitor for on change and no advantage. We're unwilling to fight or go to war over these things either, so we might as well learn to live with some countries doing some bad things or having some human rights violation and hope we can change them over time. In other words, it's fine that Meta operates in the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia even with the human rights violations.

EU member states are happy to sell weapons to these countries. Who cares if we let them on Facebook too?

My preference would be that they choose not to operate in areas where local law and policies make them complicit in hurting people.