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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Because her income depends on maintaining her instagram account. That's a material need, anything in the other direction is a rationalization. You might as well say a prisoner forced her prison guard to sleep with her by being so appealing.

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A prisoner sleeping with a guard is an obvious abuse of power… if they remain imprisoned. I’d not know what to make of it though if the prisoner was freed though. It’s like bribing a cop to destroy evidence of wrong doing, rather than being forced to bribe them since they stopped you on the road. If the bribe removes you from their power then it changes the dynamic and moral outcome.

She was banned repeatedly, which does make it feel a little extortion-esque, akin to the cop throwing you back in prison so you can bribe him again.

> feel a little extortion-esque

But she profits greatly, and is getting banned with cause. She also went out of her way to meet up with those people and slept with them.

It doesn't even sound like there is a clearly stated quid pro quo, sounds more like manipulation in this case.

> She was banned repeatedly, which does make it feel a little extortion-esque, akin to the cop throwing you back in prison so you can bribe him again.

She was probably also violating policies repeatedly (e.g. sexual nudity).

I think viewing this situation as a case of a purely unidirectional power dynamic is an ideologically-motivated falsehood. She's got one kind of power, the Facebook employees have another kind, and it's unclear who (if anyone) is on the loosing end.

I mean, she claims she was literally hunting for Facebook employees to achieve her goals (likely to not suffer the usual consequence for policy violations). It's also quite possible that the employees she successfully used could get fired on account of the situation she consciously engineered. This also has one of the hierarchy or duty-of-care dynamics that you'd have in a school or workplace setting.

> I mean, she claims she was literally hunting for Facebook employees to achieve her goals

Yeah, and if you check her IG page, as of today it explicitly states that she is looking for TikTok employees now, probably for the exact same purpose (but that one is just a speculation on my part).

As a sidenote, on her twitter she referred to the whole incident as "When Instagram tried to cuck me so I took my power back"[0].

0. https://twitter.com/Kittylixo/status/1527021683256659968

EDIT: looks like her IG went private at some point earlier today, so I cannot see that statement about TikTok there anymore (and no, I am not going to request to follow her account just to find that one post).

Literally everyone income is dependent on various types of enforcement authorities (HR, professional licensing boards, cops, osha, etc) not being on their case.

I have a very hard time seeing anyone who manages to pull a fast one on some stupid bureaucracy as a victim.

The enforcement authorities aren't on my case, though.

The only difference between this scenario and an actual porno setup is that the meta employee isn't a college professor who controls her grade.

You could make the argument that it's only a power dynamic problem if the IG employee is the first to bring up sex, but if a college student offers to sleep with their professor to get a better grade, if the professor accepts are they benefiting from a power dynamic? I would say, very clearly yes.

The hypothetical professor, or meta employee, is transacting business that creates a conflict of interest with their prior business relationship with their employer.

This is little different from me tipping the safelite guy to lay a bead of sealant on some other stuff while he's at it.

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