If you can reduce abusive patterns of misinformation on Facebook by a few percent, that's a huge win for both the company and for the billions of people affected by the service - by extension, society.
This is likely the other side of the argument.
And besides, this isn't about moderation. It's that it is far from obvious if "social networks" (FB), or "personalized search results" (Google), or whatever it is that Twitter peddles provide any benefit to humanity.
That these are "incredibly difficult, challenging, interesting, and impactful problem to work on and requires a lot of new technology" -- well, good for them. So was developing V-2 rockets. At least that got us into space.
I think entertainment has immense value.
I love sharing dumb memes and pictures with my friends on Twitter. I like to laugh at cute puppy videos on Instagram. I like seeing vacation photos from my family on Facebook.
I also love watching SpaceX launches, reading about NASA's latest projects, and learning about the latest advances in AI.
I'm certainly in no position to boldly proclaim that rocket launches are absolutely more important than the movies that my friends and I enjoy watching. Fundamentally if the world was _only_ dedicated to building rockets and going to Mars, that'd be quite a boring society in my opinion. Luckily there's more than enough of us to go around to work on different problems that interest us.
We take something like email for granted, but I think that's at least as impactful/important of an invention as rockets - if not more.
You also seem to have missed the actual point -- that working on "incredibly difficult, challenging..." problems is rather orthogonal to doing something obviously evil (or good, for that matter). And in case of Facebook, or Twitter we can already see verifiable adverse effects of that work. While I have yet to see anyone manage to point out any positive effects apart from slight convenience for a few people.
I am also reasonably sure that FB (as well Google and others) are engaged in some pretty public efforts to improve the gender balance in tech. Or at least pay lip service to doing so. Might they be doing so because there actually is a pretty well known gender disbalance in tech.
Of course if you were meaning to say that a lot of negative moves on FB's part come from quite female Sheryl Sandberg, well, yes, but I don't think she's involved with the tech side.
You have to remember that this is a global service cutting across all cultures, countries, governments, and circumstances.
At some level, it becomes trying to design a system of governance that cuts across all those things in a scalable way. This is a problem where there is very little precedent.
The original sin in my opinion was Facebook charging ahead with a historic rate of growth without building the rails (moderation systems, governance, etc) to support that growth.
However, that ship has long sailed. Facebook is already massive now. It's easy to say with hindsight that the problems were obvious and to be expected. But the pressing question for society now is what do we do about it?
Not just for Facebook but for all similar services - of which Facebook isn't the first and it won't be the last. And what software solutions will the industry invent to combat some of this stuff? Who is building it? How much is shared? How much is driven by regulation versus this stuff becoming a competitive moat? etc etc.
It's a very interesting question and I look forward to progress in the area from all levels, including our legislators (whom I have little confidence in, but I'm an optimist at heart).
Deregulate and cut corporate taxes. If they have access to more private user data and keep more of their money from atrocious behaviour they'll be less atrocious.
Oops, I meant the opposite of that.
