Memorandum

To:

Arcadio Quintana

From:

Xochitl Calderon, Julio Molina, Maryann Ramos, and Alexis Reyes

Date:

November 20, 2015

Subject:

Ethical, Professional, and Business dilemmas

During the movie The Social Network, that we watched in your English
class we noticed there are ethical/professional/business dilemmas that we
would like to discuss. Cyberbullying in a blog, hacking the Harvard servers to
create a humiliating website, emotional relationships between employees,
ideas were taken and not credited, use of illegal drugs, and lying in general.
At the beginning of the movie, Mark Zuckerberg a Harvard University student
was arguing with his girlfriend (Erica Albright) at the time, about their social
differences, which ended up with her terminating the relationship. Mark was
extremely upset and hurt when he returned to his dorm, started to drink and
write in his blog humiliating and insulting comments about his ex-girlfriend
and her family name. Not only did he humiliate her on her blog but he also
hacked the Universities database to steal pictures of the female to students
to create a website called www.facemash.com. This website allowed the
visitors to compare the female students based on their hotness. This
resulted in six months academic probation for Mark Zuckerberg. We believe
that this is an ethical issue because he is stealing personal pictures and
invading the female students privacy. He was also cyberbullying his exgirlfriend as well as the rest of the female population in the school.
Another ethical issue that we observed during the movie there was an
emotional relationship between two Facebook employees. One of the
Facebook employees, Sean Parker, had a relationship with a female intern
named Ashleigh. Almost at the end of the movie Mark and Sean were having
a conversation discussing personal issues when Sean informed Mark about a
party he was hosting and the intern was attending as well. Mark asked Sean
if they were involved and Sean replied just a little bit. Then the same intern
came to deliver a package to Mark. Sean and her then exchanged sideway
glances as she walked away. With this information we deduced that they had
a relationship. We consider it is unethical to have relationships between
employees in a company. Having a relationship in the workplace will interfere

with your work performance, and should not combine personal and
professional relationships.
A little after Mark gets an article in the newspaper for his website
www.facesmash.com he attracts the attention of the Winklevoss twins and
Divya Narendra. They approach Mark and invite him to work on a new
website called Harvard Connection, which would be a social network for
Harvard students aimed at dating. After Mark agreed to work on the
Winklevoss idea, he approached his friend Eduardo with an idea for a new
social network he calls Thefacebook exclusive for Ivy League students.
Eduardo gives him a startup fund of one thousand dollars which allowed
Mark to build the site and it quickly became very popular. When the twins
and Divya found out they became enraged because they believed that Mark
had stolen their idea while deliberately stalling the development of the
Harvard Connection website. We believe that this is an ethical issue because
even though Mark didnt use any of the code for the twins website he still
took the idea of a social network for Harvard and didnt give any credit as to
where he got the idea for the website.
Another issue we encountered almost at the end of the movie was that some
of the employees of the Facebook Company were caught during a university
party consuming illegal drugs. Sean mentioned to Mark that he was going to
have another party after the one the fraternity was going to throw, to
celebrate the millionth subscriber. Mark didnt agree to attend this party.
During the fraternity party, Sean went upstairs with three girls and one man.
One of the girls was a Company intern. They started doing illegal drugs, the
substance looked like cocaine. The party was stopped due to the fact that
some police officers raided the house. Sean tried to clean the white
substance off the interns body, and when the police entered the room they
saw that Sean had this substance in his hands. We believe that this type of
conduct is unacceptable because we live in a society where the use of drugs
is seen as an irresponsible action. Even though the employees were not at
the company they shouldnt have used this substances because not only
does this affects them it affects the companys reputation as well.