To look at what can cause companies to take concrete action, consider the following two examples of how Facebook has behaved. In 2018, a UN investigation found that Facebook had played a “determining role” in the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya, an ethnic minority in Mynamar described by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as “one of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world.” Local activists had been warning Facebook executives that their platform was being used to spread hate speech and incite violence since as early as 2013. In 2015, they were warned that Facebook could play the same role in Myanmar that the radio broadcasts played during the Rwandan genocide (where a million people were killed). Yet, by the end of 2015, Facebook only employed four contractors that spoke Burmese. As one person close to the matter said, “That’s not 20/20 hindsight. The scale of this problem was significant and it was already apparent.” Zuckerberg promised during the congressional hearings to hire “dozens” to address the genocide in Myanmar (in 2018, years after the genocide had begun, including the destruction by fire of at least 288 villages in northern Rakhine state after August 2017).

This stands in stark contrast to Facebook quickly to try to avoid expensive penalties (of up to 50 million euros) under a new German law against hate speech. Clearly, in this case, Facebook was more reactive to the threat of a financial penalty than to the systematic destruction of an ethnic minority.

Clean air and clean drinking water are public goods which are nearly impossible to protect through individual market decisions, but rather require coordinated regulatory action. Similarly, many of the harms resulting from unintended consequences of misuses of technology involve public goods, such as a polluted information environment or deteriorated ambient privacy. Too often privacy is framed as an individual right, yet there are societal impacts to widespread surveillance (which would still be the case even if it was possible for a few individuals to opt out).

We need both regulatory and legal changes, and the ethical behavior of individuals. Individual behavior change can’t address misaligned profit incentives, externalities (where corporations reap large profits while offloading their costs and harms to the broader society), or systemic failures. However, the law will never cover all edge cases, and it is important that individual software developers and data scientists are equipped to make ethical decisions in practice.

The problems we are facing are complex, and there are no simple solutions. This can be discouraging, but we find hope in considering other large challenges that people have tackled throughout history. One example is the movement to increase car safety, covered as a case study in “Datasheets for Datasets” by Timnit Gebru et al. and in the design podcast . Early cars had no seatbelts, metal knobs on the dashboard that could lodge in people’s skulls during a crash, regular plate glass windows that shattered in dangerous ways, and non-collapsible steering columns that impaled drivers. However, car companies were incredibly resistant to even discussing the idea of safety as something they could help address, and the widespread belief was that cars are just the way they are, and that it was the people using them who caused problems.