[ultrarunner]

If I'm understanding correctly, you seem to propose that companies of people (generally, executives) should not be responsible for ethics, but rather politicians checked by journalists.

Politicians are notorious for their lack of ethics. Journalists have acquiesced to reprinting police reports and political press releases. Assuming someone unfortunately attains legal standing, the court process is so expensive and tedious it remains unaccessible anyway. This is to say nothing of political corruption or the way criminal proceedings work for people like Meta executives versus the general public.

How do you reconcile this dissonance?

[b40d-48b2-979e]

I read it as "companies should not be the definition of what is ethical behavior", not your reading of "they should not be responsible for ethics".

[jmward01]

I didn't say that politicians and laws are perfect. They are terrible. But the key differences is that I have at least -some- say in politicians while I have 0 say in a company. This is why libertarian philosophy always breaks down for me 'let the free market decide/do whatever' just leads to companies being the de-facto government and individuals having no say. I'll take a flawed system that has some redeeming qualities over a broken system with no redeeming qualities any day.

[ultrarunner]

The current administration has a very low approval rating, but the company at issue has infamously been caught colluding with them [0].

I suppose my concern boils down to the fact that positions like appeals to politicians ends up equating to appeals to empower politicians. This often seems to have the effect of enabling the very big businesses we sought to reign in, and often at the cost of any other alternatives. Rather, I suspect a more productive path would be to seek to remove power from both the Metas of this world and politicians.

[0] “I'm sorry I wasn’t ready ... I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with”