Substrate

Facebook’s deflection of responsibility is merely the latest instance common line of argument that social media companies like Facebook put forward is that their work exists on a different plane of reality. The digital realm ties into the analog, but the relationship is not a two-way street. Rather, they claim, it is a set of two one-way streets. One of these streets is from computers to the real world, where only the good stuff travels, enabling free speech, liberating the oppressed, democratizing the internet. The bad stuff, however, only goes the other way, where bad individuals misuse and abuse internet platforms. In other words, Facebook argues the good things happen on Facebook, but the bad things happen to Facebook. ​ Most other fields of engineering, like civil engineering, already have this built into their culture, but software engineering is lagging behind. Tech employees need to realize that their responsibility doesn’t end at the last line of code — that’s just where it starts.