This was, is, a common refrain as Google slowly but surely ensured that Firefox users would run into blocking issues and mysterious performance bugs, every week, that disappear with merely a user agent change. Mighty convenient a supermajority of the time, these bugs.

At some point when your scale is big enough and you are the dominant incumbent, whether something is due to wreckless accidents or intentional or "blind"/ignorant malice is a moot question. The responsibility is (and so too should the punishments be) the same. That must be treated as the necessary cost of operating at this scale.

"It's a bug" is also a very convenient excuse for a lot of behaviors from the usual companies...

Yes. I tend to assume the people who are quick to think conspiracy and/or malice in these kinds of situations are either students or nontechnical users. If you've been working as a developer in the industry for a while, you've seen bugs like this many times.

It’s a feature until it goes viral then it’s a bug.

The logic of social media pileons is too pervasive at this point. As you can see upthread, a lot of people genuinely believe that they’re morally obligated to join these kind of pileons precisely because there’s not much information available; if we don’t apply pressure, there’ll never be a full investigation and they will get away with it! (And I very much include myself in "people" here, I've been there before many times.)

I think you just have to accept these days that when you go on an online platform you’ll see a few outrage mobs gathered around some tiny scrap of information. It’s like walking into a nightclub and asking people why they won’t drink more responsibly.

They will of course say that it's a bug otherwise they're in potential great trouble.

But "why" that "bug" was there in the first place is another issue.

Bug or malice, the end result is the same. I hope EU regulators pick on this and land a hefty fine.

Because masquerading a controversial "feature" as a bug would be a good way to trial it, and see what the pushback from your users is like.

Twitter doesn't have enough credibility left to deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Even if it isn't a bug, there's probably enough malicious stuff going on linked to these domains that it's justified. Even if the sites themselves are not producing malicious content, they are targeted by bad actors because the platform lacks the tech to detect and moderate said bad actors. And lets be honest, users of this platform are likely to be very susceptible to misinformation and manipulation.

It's a bug but HN crowds like to talk about the evil corps all the time.