Open Letter to the Facebook Recruiter-bot
Dear Recruiter-bot,
Thank you for contacting me about an amazing opportunity to work for Facebook as a data scientist or machine learning engineer.
Everything in your email is true. Truly impressive work in data science, machine learning, and engineering is happening every single day at Facebook. You have some of the smartest people in my field, and their work is backed by Facebook’s world-class computing and data resources. And the opportunity for impact is huge because you reach billions of people on a regular basis. And I’m sure the pay isn’t bad, either.
As a machine learning professional, I’m well-acquainted with the engineering and machine learning feats that drive Facebook’s business. You’ve got models that can infer a person’s interests, likely future buying behaviors, views on political and social issues, and much more. You can leverage your enormous social graph to amplify the impact of advertisements. And you can combine the data you generate with data from a vast array online behaviors gleaned from websites and mobile devices. I’m very impressed not only with the scale of what you can do, but the specificity and accuracy of your models as well.
So why don’t you use a fraction of your talent, data, and computing resources to mitigate the very real harm caused by Facebook? As a data professional, I’m confident that the problem of microtargeting advertisements is far more difficult than the problem of targeting misinformation about Covid-19, to take one example. Real people die every single day as a result of what they read on Facebook, but the leadership allocates only a tiny fraction of the company’s resources to the problem.
To be sure, you’ve taken some positive steps recently. But any data professional who takes one look at Facebook can see the truth: Your efforts to mitigate the impact of misinformation are a tiny fraction of the massive effort you exert to maximize your advertising revenue.
This is why I won’t work for Facebook. You can tell what a company’s priorities are by how they allocate resources. Preventing some of the harm that’s done on your platform is not an important priority for Facebook.
I hope that other professionals who work in engineering, data science, machine learning, and related fields will feel the same way. We are the population that has the most leverage against a gigantic tech company such as Facebook. Tech companies survive only because they can attract great talent. If the leaders of Facebook realize that they’re missing out on top talent because of their unethical priorities, they will either change those priorities or watch Facebook fade away.
Sincerely,
Zac
