Meta disbands its Responsible Innovation team set up to address concerns about its products' downsides, but says the company remains committed to the same goals
just a year after company's vice president talked it up Nicholas Sutrich / Android Central : Meta is disbanding the team responsible for making its products more ethical Brendan Sinclair / GamesIndustry.biz : Meta disbands Responsible Innovation team Karissa Bell / Engadget : Meta dissolves team responsible for discovering ‘potential harms to society’ in its own products Andrew Hutchinson / Social Media Today : Meta Abandons ‘Responsible Innovation’ Team as Metaverse Development Continues to Ramp Up David Lumb / CNET : Meta Reportedly Disbands Team Studying Potential Negative Impacts of Facebook, Instagram Alap Naik Desai / Neowin : Facebook dismantles its ‘Responsible Innovation’ team, but will remain ‘safe and ethical’ Msmash / Slashdot : Facebook Parent Meta Cuts Responsible Innovation Team Tweets: Jeff Horwitz / @jeffhorwitz : Meta has quietly disbanded its “Responsible Innovation” team, a Schroep-championed group of 20+ employees who consulted with engineers and trained them to think about new products' downsides. Most staffers will be landing elsewhere in Meta, but not all. https://www.wsj.com/... Brian Boland / @brianboland : This is disappointing and in my view a mistake. I highly doubt they are going to do this work elsewhere in the company. https://twitter.com/... @hypervisible : I think absolutely no one wants to see what Facebook's version of “irresponsible innovation” looks like. https://www.wsj.com/... @changeterms : Never a promising sign to cut the ethicists. https://twitter.com/... Ed Zitron / @edzitron : This is funny because Facebook has been neither responsible nor innovative https://twitter.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : So on brand, though. https://twitter.com/... Kyle Becker / @kylenabecker : Shorter WSJ: @Meta is embracing the fact it's a really bad company https://twitter.com/... Joshua Benton / @jbenton : The Irresponsible Innovation team needed more desks https://twitter.com/... @chhopsky : like i want you to actually imagine you're building your game's matchmaking and an engineer suggests a feature that lets you choose to not have black people on your team. how do you react to that? now consider: meta was building this, and needed to be explicitly told not to Bill Grueskin / @bgrueskin : @jbenton Does any company ever noisily disband a team David Clinch / @davidclinchnews : This was what I used to refer to as much-needed “ethical product development” when I spoke to Facebook staffers and executives over the last decade+. Sad. https://twitter.com/... @froomkin : Corporate “red teams” are a great idea but oddly they never last long. https://twitter.com/... @chhopsky : so @Meta disbanded the team that had to tell them not to let people exclude races from dating apps https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Dr Catherine Flick / @catherineflick : @kentbye I'd like to think they were pushing back too hard perhaps and annoyed a few people? :) Kent Bye VoicesOfVR / @kentbye : @CatherineFlick Thank you! The WSJ reporter only reported that the RI “work was given prominence in [Meta's] engineering operation,” but ignores how the team being shuttered sort of implies that it must not have been on too many critical paths for launching new products. https://www.wsj.com/... @acidflask : In case it wasn't obvious that Big Tech is using Responsible AI as a foil until economic reality hits https://twitter.com/... @zarawesome : starting to get the impression these departments work as a short-term PR move https://twitter.com/... @arainert : Wonder how long this one was sitting in the News Dump hopper for https://twitter.com/... David Carroll / @profcarroll : But do the Social Good division and Social Bad division get separate cafeterias now? https://twitter.com/... Nora Benavidez / @attorneynora : This team was supposed to be one of the long term stopgaps for harms, intended to anticipate & mitigate civil / human rights issues. This is beyond negligence. It is an active about-face from stated commitments by @Meta to civil rights, safety & user protection. https://twitter.com/... Dr. Sanjana Hattotuwa / @sanjanah : Full marks for being honest the company's leadership doesn't really care about anything beyond profit, even though I know so many wonderful folk who do give a damn, & work everyday to constrain, & redress significant, enduring, deadly harms other teams at Meta unleash. https://twitter.com/... Carl Quintanilla / @carlquintanilla : The team “was to have had a formative role in future company products, beginning with .. how to think about potential downsides to what they build ..” @WSJ $META https://www.wsj.com/...