That's what a company does. That is the entire purpose of a company. They don't owe any social good, they are a profit seeking entity.
If you don't agree with a given company, stop giving them profit. Don't like Facebook? Stop using it. Don't care for Microsoft? Stop buying Windows and Office.
The only other option for controlling companies is government control - that has never worked out well longterm.
I'm not sure those are the only two options. Pure capitalism and central control are more like two extremes on a continuum. There is a lot of work being done at the moment to get companies to accept a certain degree of social responsibility for the externalities relating to their activities - things like environmental impact, for instance. So there is an intermediate way forward.
I barely trust Facebook/Microsoft/et al. at an arms length. The last thing I want is them aggressively making choices about what kind of content is ok or not - it seems easy to censor Nazi's but what about brexitors or pro-firearms talk?
Add in a government compulsion to crack down on "bad speech" and we've circumvented free speech. Facebook has a right to not allow some content, but when Governments start setting standards across companies, what then?
In the UK, firearms talk is basically verboten. In the US, that's protected speech. Whose rules does Facebook follow? Or do we have a separate UK facebook?
Unless you have a clear argument that all people have a prima facie duty to always do social good (mandatory volunteering?) then it seems very difficult to claim there's a special duty when multiple people group together. Does that duty affect the bake shop up the road? The bookshop that employs 20 people?
I believe everybody part of a society has a responsibility minimise or prevent the harm they do, and this idea that corporations should not have any form of social conscience is actually a fairly recent one.
The idea that they are legally obliged only to maximise shareholder value is also a myth I'm pretty sure.
We can blame hacks like Friedman for that. His warped ideology doesn't jive with reality.
> The idea that they are legally obliged only to maximise shareholder value is also a myth I'm pretty sure.
The CEO and other officers of a company have a stated, legal requirement to act in the companies best interest in regards to the shareholders. All commercial companies (let's ignore non-profits and such for a moment) are founded to generate profit for their shareholders since that is what in turn attracts shareholders.
> I believe everybody part of a society has a responsibility minimise or prevent the harm they do
That's a nice belief and it'd be great if it was true - but that's not an argument for an a priori duty to do social good. Let's just imagine for a moment that you, yourself, are legally obligated to do social good. What does that look like? Do you have a minimum amount of hours per week you're forced to do free work (eg, forced labor)? Can you get out of that by being forced to give some money to charity (eg, taxes)? What are the punishments if you don't execute your duty? Jail?
Imagine that system scaled up and applied just to everyone - each person individually. Forced labor, some kind of weird mandatory charity tax thing, and the threat of punishment if you don't comply - is that the kind of world you want to live in?
It's easy to demand other people do good. It's much harder to do good ourselves when it's our own time and money.
If you don't agree with a given company, stop giving them profit. Don't like Facebook? Stop using it. Don't care for Microsoft? Stop buying Windows and Office.
The only other option for controlling companies is government control - that has never worked out well longterm.