All she had to do was say nothing, and Meta probably wouldn’t have found out. But it’s going to be very simple to look at the admin tool logs and see exactly who unbanned her account.
We both know that the chances of an internet entertainment professional doing that are close to zero.
I’m also blown away at how short-sighted this woman is about the man’s employment, after he did her frankly a big favor in return for sex. Not to mention her account will just get banned again, given she admitted to it on video.
Hopefully she isn't an idiot and has downloaded everything she cared about from facebook.
But the fact is that we're all talking about this, inside tech spheres as well as outside. A literal real-life "who do I have to screw to get my stuff back?" moment.
It means that no matter how little you respect what she has done, she may have just changed the world. Or, we'll forget in five minutes and Metabook will continue to ban people with impunity.
Just my opinion, but someone being willing to lose something they sold their body to win back is reasonably respectable. Certainly they've done the world a big favour, whatever their motivations.
Not sure you're assigning the responsibility to look after someone's career to the right person here.
Banning her at this point would look pretty vindictive: "You revealed corruption in our organization, so we're banning you." Would make for some pretty bad headlines. They might still do it, but it's not a good PR move.
> I’m also blown away at how short-sighted this woman is about the man’s employment, after he did her frankly a big favor in return for sex.
It's not a favor if you had to pay for it.
Consider, for example, flights to a corrupt country. To get through customs unscathed, every passenger is required to bribe the staff at the airport.
Just because the passenger pulls out their wallet and hands over a bribe at the first sign of friction, does that make the passenger more guilty than those who set up this corrupt system? Those that benefit from the corruption?
It must always be those with power that we hold to account. That's not to say that those who participate in the system should have zero consequences (which, in these examples, is not the case - they've paid something, whether with their wallet or with their flesh) - but until those in power are fully held to account and the systems are changed, you are blaming the victim, even if they did initiate this form of corruption.
If they set up the corrupt system and everyone is expected to pay bribes, then the newly incoming passenger is not really the initiator, in that case the corruption is systemic, and i would put most blame on management to not make steps to eliminate it, but i agree that in this setup the bribees are more responsible than bribers, as they have more experience and information about the corruption in the system.
But let consider a slightly different case - a bureau (say building authority), with many twisted bureaucratic rules and procedures, where any request takes long to proceed and is often denied, but generally not corrupt. People just patiently do the necessary steps and accept it, or shrug off and go away. Then someone does not accept that and instead offers a bribe to get pass their request fast. In such case the initiator is clearly responsible for corruption, while the bureau is just responsible for general bureaucratic inefficiency.
And lets consider third case - driving license exam, and someone who fails it just bribes driving inspector to instead make it pass. In that case it is not even inefficiency, the license should be rejected and the briber just seeks unfair advantage. That is even more clear that initiator is more guilty, although the driving inspector has the power.
So, i would say that there are two kinds of corruptions - first, where briber wants something that should get without bribes, and second, where briber wants some unfair advantage.
Your premise is that acting on the desire of an unfair advantage is the greater immoral act, and the act of accepting the payment for an unfair advantage is less morally bankrupt.
In each of these scenarios, the person being bribed has the power. They have nothing to lose if they reject the bribe.
Yet, if they have nothing to lose when _accepting_ the bribe, that is how corrupt regimes start.
Of course, one could argue that it depends on the corruption. In your case of a building authority, imagine one that always says no regardless of the request. Maybe they let through the odd high-profile project where someone in the project is chummy with the director of the authority. Arguably, this building authority is already corrupt, and merely hiding behind the excuse of bureaucracy. (We don't tend to think about social capital as a form of bribery, but it very much is)
In the case of the driving inspector, they are potentially licensing an individual who will get others killed. Morally speaking, any future deaths are at least partially attributable to the driving inspector.
I suspect part of your position hinges on a malicious intent in the initiator. However, power and responsibility are not separable - and cases where there are possible consequences, morality must be judged in part on the basis of that responsibility.
As I say, we're getting into the weeds - these hypothetical situations are in many ways divorced from the original question, so let's look at that:
- A person is kicked off an online communications platform. Nobody is quite sure why, but there are some pretty likely conclusions.
- The platform is known for bending the rules for high-profile accounts
- The person can prove that they are not breaking any consistently-applied rules (assuming valid interpretation of vague rules should be judged on whether their peers are allowed to post similar - and in this case, she pointed out that her content is well within moral norms for the platform)
- The platform offers no accessible recourse (except for those with social capital) and not just bureaucracy, but hidden bureaucracy dependant on the whims of a hidden adjudicator who has nothing to lose for interpreting the rules harshly.
- Very limited harms if accepted, potential loss of revenue, personal content, position in a (digital) society, freedom of expression etc if rejected.
In this case, I'd say the briber has, at the point their account was terminated, already lost a lot to the corruption of the platform, and yet the bribe was still over-paid. Saying that theirs was the more immoral act seems intensely unfair, when they did the only thing they felt they could to re-gain justice.
Two possible ways this might have gone down:
Employee is cold-contacted with an upfront offer: "Let's meet up, I'll have sex with you, and exchange you can help me get my account unbanned"
..or..
Employee is cold-contacted with something like: "You seem like a cool guy, let's meet up" Then a few days later they get hit with "Btw now that we've hit it off, can you help get me unbanned?"