If by "established" you mean that it's well known, then yes, you're right. If instead you mean that it's agreed-upon or widely accepted, you'd be wrong. There's a lot of great debate / critique, both about how well the phrase actually applied to Adolf Eichmann himself (Arendt was famously only at the trial for like 5 days), and whether evil in general is ever, in fact, all that banal. Sadly the conversation around "the banality of evil" hasn't received a fraction of the attention that the phrase itself has.
>"Arendt was famously only at the trial for like 5 days..."
Besides David Cesarani's "Becoming Eichmann" book from the mid 2000s where he stated Arendt had "only saw Eichmann in action for four days", are there any other references that support this? I've not been able to find any. Also the "in action" in that context specifically refers to Eichmann's testimony not that amount of time Arendt spent in the court room. I'm not sure how "famous" this is. Elsewhere her correspondance with her former teacher Karl Japsers indicates she was there for 10 weeks. That would be about a third of the 8 month trial.
I don't think this idea matches what parent poster is saying.
Banality of evil is about how ordinary people can work on evil things while not being sociopaths and still being considered ordinary people. But it also presumes that there is some truly evil / sociopathic force driving this through authority, such as Hitler himself in case of Eichmann.
On the other hand the parent poster is saying that Facebook is simply too big to not end up evil, that evil is an emergent property of the million different processes that is Facebook. That view absolves not only regular workers of Facebook who are helping the company achieve evil things, but also the people who are actually in control of the company – Mark Zuckerberg and his senior executive team.
Personally I'm not buying either of these absolutions, but especially not the grand universal absolution that the parent poster affords to the whole company.
Ultimately it is someone's decision to put profits above everything else. Engagement doesn't excessively optimize itself. Users' contact books aren't getting stolen by themselves. Shadow profiles don't fill up themselves. "Just doing my job" is a choice, not an excuse. Many people are complicit in making and implementing these decisions for their own benefit, and they are all responsible for the outcome.
I don't think that's what the OP means, though. It's not "decent" people doing evil things. It's great people doing great things, within an organization that also does bad things.
There are some amazing people on their safety and moderation teams. They're also fighting marketing algorithms, I'm sure.
Eichmann in Jerusalem is the book that coined the phrase for anyone passing through, and it's a pretty wild story.
It's essentially Arendt, a Jewish exile from Berlin who fled the holocaust, wrestling with her realization that Eichmann, who reported to Hitler and organized major portions of the holocaust, wasn't a psychopath, but a completely mundane and thoughtless career focused bureaucrat who was trying to rise in government and believed in doing what you are told, who then organized one of the most evil acts in human history without reflecting on what he was doing.
