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Comment by blotter_paper | Hacker News Reader

Another clear red line was when spez started editing comments.[0] It was childish and non-consequential, but should have resulted in an immediate exodus from the platform. I'm not politically aligned with r/The_Donald, but I think this sort of petty power abuse should not be forgiven; the platform needs to die, as an example to other platforms.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5ekdy9/the_admi...

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Really? I thought it was a fantastic reminder to users: they hold all the cards, and pretending otherwise is just diluting yourself.

If only other online platforms were that honest! Imagine Google sending out misleading gmails in your name, or Facebook mining your private messages for incriminating secrets and offering to "share" them with all your friends.

There's nothing technical preventing any of these kinds of abuses, and the sooner average users understand that, the sooner we'll have support for strong legal protections to rein in big tech companies.

For the record, systems at both FB and Google prevent internal employees from doing either. "There's nothing technical preventing any of these kinds of abuses" is only true in the sense that you can imagine implementations that don't prevent these kinds of abuses.

You're claiming that a rogue employee can't take it on themselves to do that on their own initiative. Either of those companies could trivially choose to do those things as a management decision. Maybe it doesn't make good business sense today, but who knows what the business landscape of 2025 or 2030 looks like?

And then my comment would be false. But as it stands today, it's true.

I do think you overestimate how trivial it would be for "management" (who? a senior PM? Sergei? Zuck?) to decide to turn off all internal security controls so individual Googlers could send emails using someone else's identity--it would likely run afoul of multiple current laws and contracts, to speak nothing of the universal, strong internal objections there'd be to that change and the high engineering cost to migrate off those systems. And I can't imagine a business landscape that would encourage any company to let individual employees do that.

There are tons of things to worry about wrt BigTechCos, but preventing and auditing rogue employees are something where their incentives align pretty strongly with the public good.

FWIW I do support stronger legal and privacy requirements (with some caveats, mostly because compliance is very expensive and potentially harmful to smaller companies).

Do they actually prevent malicious abuse, or do they just catch people after the fact and fire them? I know from reading about the NSA that they watch what data agents retrieve, and they're restricted by policy from going snooping, but there's nothing except fear of losing their job that stops them.

Google's servers have the ability to send email from myname@gmail.com and it comes with all the appropriate DKIM signatures to be from "me". They have some kind of auto-reply system such that their computer can automatically send "as me". They're already 90% of the way there: I think you've overestimating how big a change this would be.

I'll also say that I have little to no confidence in "strong internal objections". VW engineers built the emissions-cheating system, Facebook engineers built Beacon, Google engineers dutifully slurped up everyone's private wifi traffic. As long as management dressed it up a little bit and/or reassigned any dissenters, I'm sure they'd get a compliant team to build whatever garbage they wanted.

Obviously you think you're the good guys, and you'd never do that, but you'd be surprised how "good" people can gradually slide into really unethical behaviour. If you haven't read them I recommend https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/558867.Disciplined_Minds and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37976541-bad-blood

I... kind of agree with you, actually, with the caveat that I see decentralised platforms being the solution rather than laws. I think moving to a different platform is better than staying on the known-manipulator, but moving to a platform without a potential-manipulator is better still. Proper decentralised solutions would be and are prohibitively expensive at the moment, in a number of senses, but if we valued free (as in freedom) discourse more this wouldn't be the case, and the costs should decrease over time anyway.

Also, when they created comments and manipulated their timestamps to make it seem like they were created far earlier than they actually were, for advertising purposes.

They also obfuscate the real upvote/downvote numbers, purportedly to stop vote manipulation but I don't really see how it does anything but provide a mask of plausible deniability for editing the up/down figures for advertisements, subversive posts, etc.

It ensures batters cannot tell if their account has been shadow banned.

What incident is this referring to? I can't find anything via a quick search...

It didn't blow up like the comment-editing incident, but I was referring to https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/7a2mle/possible_...

That was beyond unacceptable because it didn't show the comment as have been edited with an asterisks. Which means they have and use special admin powers at will.

The only issue to Reddit it seems was that he was caught doing it.

There are people sitting in prison RIGHT NOW from Reddit posts. Now think about the damage admins editing posts can do. You're right, it is beyond acceptable.

> Now think about the damage admins editing posts can do.

Why, their actions can lend plausible deniability to incriminating information in posts that have not been edited.

I don't think admins can edit comments using the regular website interface. The CEO edited the comments directly in the database. That's why the asterisk never appeared. (Which, by the way, means the CEO has direct access to the database. Why?)

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