Re:Facebook blocks sharing of critical Guardian article
by afandian on Friday September 28, 2018 @07:23PM
(#18097796)
Ok, well maybe we're at cross purposes. You did use the word plausible originally, and again in reply. It depends whether you bring any context to a given judgment or rely on intuition on statistical distributions. I think that when appraising the plausibility of bad faith you should take past behaviour into account.
I can totally see a situation where a well meaning PR person says "what can we do to slow down this story?" and some engineer says "we have this mechanism but it wasnt designed for this purpose..."
Compare with yesterday's fun and games when the same metanarrative was reported. "We could shift more units if we had phone numbers"."we do but they were given to us for an expressly different purpose" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18082017
When you're in this position, ethics is a competence. They may be great at shipping code but past experience suggests that there are deeply inadequate decision making processes.
Apologies if this misses your point again.
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> find it a fascinating side of the human psyche that it finds it hard to believe that "big brand name company" might be responsible for atrocities when history is littered with examples. Companies are only staffed by humans, after all.
I'm not sure why the majority of your comment is focusing on how plausible it is that they would do something evil. It couldn't be less relevant to my comment.
Like I said, my point doesn't rely on any assumptions about Facebook's morality as an organization, just some baseline of competency. I know organizations have done stupider things, but I can't think of a similar org taking an action whose _first-order_ effect would so obviously be the opposite of what they intended. It's far more common and far more plausible that they didn't consider the second-order PR effects of an algorithmically-enforced broad policy they have.