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Comment by wmsiler | Hacker News Reader

I would dial this back a bit. Worst case scenario, the commenter you are responding to is committing confirmation bias by making negative assumptions to match their existing negatives beliefs. Confirmation bias is easy to slip into even if you know it exists, and this angry response isn't useful.

Best case scenario (which I think is more likely), they are simply interpreting this story in context. Uber has several ethics scandals under their belt including ones involving them gathering and analyzing data for unethical purposes (guessing which of their customers have had one night stands).

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How is this different from how fake news perpetuates? My foe has done bad things A, B and C, therefore it's OK to not just assume they are doing D as well, but OK to present D as fact.

For the record, what I am reacting to is not the possibility of a belief that Uber might do such a thing[1], but the defence of a naked lie.

1: I think such a belief is an extremely shallow reading of Uber as wanting to do evil in and of itself, rather than willing to bend a lot of rules very very far to serve their customers (and sometimes cross the line in creative data-driven marketing), and have created a toxic corporate culture in the process -- it's easy to see how 'break all the rules as long as you're winning' can do that. I also don't think they will survive long, companies with less toxic cultures (but no less friendly to the taxi-interest-captured regulatory bodies or unions) will prevail because they can attract the better talent. Firing a driver with good performance because he doesn't listen to the company podcast is not even remotely consistent with that willingness. But that's not the discussion we're having.

This is a company who wrote software to detect and hide from law enforcement, and you think it's not feasible they'd try and come up with a score for how friendly a driver is to unionization? C'mon.

The headline is incorrect - they're not being forced - but it's hardly "fake news" conspiracy theory to speculate that some drivers may feel pressured over this.

The word was 'forced'. You defended it. C'mon yourself.

Speculating what people might be doing, especially when it sounds plausible, then presenting it as fact, is exactly fake news.

My post literally stated (now edited to add "the headline is misleading / clickbaity" to be even more crystal-clear on that point) that they're not technically forced.

I understand, and I understood before. You're defending the lie by saying that it's only technically incorrect. You do understand that the phrase means that you think it's still substantially correct -- not that it conceivably could be true?

I believe it is substantially correct that Uber and companies like it engage in ethically dubious and legally murky anti-union actions.

I believe it implausible that Uber didn't consider the pressure/intimidation aspect that a daily prompt to listen to their propaganda entails when adding it to the system.

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