Meta's legal team abandoned its ethical duties

Meta’s Ethics and Corporate Culture

• Many commenters see Meta as fundamentally unethical, citing past scandals (e.g., Myanmar, data deals with authoritarian states, privacy abuses) as part of a long-standing pattern rather than a recent shift.
• Firsthand and secondhand accounts (including from ex-employees and the cited book) describe leadership as obsessed with growth and share price, willing to ignore or enable serious harms, and cultivating an internal culture where “doing anything” to meet metrics is rewarded.
• Some argue Meta’s inability to innovate beyond acquisitions and enshittified products shows a company focused on financial extraction, not user well-being.

Children, Social Media, and Parenting

• Multiple parents describe refusing or tightly limiting social media for their kids, but facing intense FOMO, social friction, and pressure from more permissive households.
• There is widespread concern about hyper-addictive design, disturbing content (e.g., TikTok for toddlers, YouTube stunt channels), and VR environments where children allegedly encounter sexualized behavior “every time” the headset is used.
• Some urge other parents to read insider accounts to help explain to kids why these products are dangerous.

Capitalism, Incentives, and Systemic Harm

• A large subthread broadens the critique to US capitalism: shareholder value as primary duty, lack of consequences for white‑collar crime, and health insurers’ practices as parallel cases.
• There is back-and-forth on whether law can or should enforce morality, with some saying you can’t legislate virtue and others arguing you must structurally disincentivize parasitic business models.
• Tension appears between “freedom to consume” and “freedom from being relentlessly manipulated,” with some claiming US “freedom” produces societal collapse and extreme inequality.

Lawyers, Ethics, and Attorney–Client Privilege

• One camp argues Meta’s lawyers crossed bright ethical and legal lines: coaching researchers to hide or sanitize harmful findings, pushing deletion of evidence, and exploiting privilege to shield ongoing misconduct (including child exploitation and teen mental-health research).
• Others defend core doctrines like attorney–client privilege and routine data deletion, stressing that lawyers’ job is to minimize legal exposure, not to act as moral arbiters.
• Debate centers on where normal zealous advocacy ends and crime‑fraud begins, and whether the article fairly reflects legal ethics or overreaches.

Who Should Define and Enforce Ethics?

• Many commenters insist companies cannot be relied on to “do the right thing”; only robust laws, enforcement, and structural changes can realign incentives.
• Others express skepticism that politicians, courts, or media are more ethical than corporations, leaving a pervasive sense that the entire system—corporate, legal, and political—is failing to protect the public from Meta‑style harms.