Meta axes internal team responsible for asking 'are we the baddies?'

pcgamer.com:

As reported by the Wall Street Journal(opens in new tab), Meta has disbanded its internal «Responsible Innovation» team. The 20+ member group included employees of various specializations and backgrounds, including ethicists, and was tasked with investigating and responding to ethical concerns related to Meta's products. One example cited by the WSJ was how it advised Facebook Dating to not include a race filter as part of its services.

The Responsible Innovation team seems to have been established in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, and has been active for several years. In 2021, Facebook VP Margaret Gould Stewart articulated something of a mission statement for the team titled "Breadth & depth: Why I'm optimistic about Facebook's Responsible Innovation efforts.(opens in new tab)"

«These tools have generated a lot of good in the world,» Stewart wrote of Meta's products, «but their very power requires a deep sense of responsibility and a commitment to making the most ethically responsible decisions possible, every day.»

Meta has noted that most of the employees from the team will continue doing similar work in other departments. A Meta spokesperson told the WSJ that future work of this nature would be more «issue-specific.»

Even with that taken into account, Meta strikes me as a company that could use more ethicists at every level. Meta's biggest products, Facebook and Instagram, have had far-reaching social consequences beyond their initial purviews.

Facebook's role in warping individuals' perception of reality through the content it algorithmically determines they want to see is well documented, with a 2021 Washington Post(opens in new tab) story noting that «news publishers known for putting out