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Comment by binaryturtle | Hacker News Reader

It's called the Streisand Effect. :)

It's kind of amazing that people still hit this, really. Like, if you're Facebook's lawyers, how are you not telling them "don't talk about this; anything you say or do will only promote it further"? The lawyers must _know_.

After reading the article, it seems plausible that they were advised against this and, well... didn’t care.

(Perhaps it’s more accurate to say they did not think it would manifest but that’s not a fun play on words.)

From the lawyer's point of view I guess you're making a risk judgement, presumably they thought the chance of getting a successful court order outweighed the potential increase in press of they happened to fail.

Even if they got a court order (they did get partial bars on publicity AIUI) it would _still make the problem for Facebook worse_, tho.

I'm not so sure. I think there is some selection bias happening, so it's easy to say "Streisand effect!" When it makes the headlines but that ignores the times it doesn't make the headlines.

Yeah. How many were silenced prior to this?

Competing incentives.

Lawyers get paid to “do something”. To wealthy people, a lawyer saying “let’s actually not do anything” seems like a “what am I paying you for then” moment.

The lawyers and the PR team don’t talk to each other.

That is not the lawyers' concern.

Their lawyers are daft as bricks.

They can't even control their client from lying in public.

It's right there in the URL, along with #ZDGAF

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