Paul Cantrell
Did you see that thing about the whistleblower engineer exposing how a food delivery company exploits its drivers? It turned out to be a hoax:
https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/
The thing is, I don’t doubt that companies •do• in fact do stuff like what the whistleblower described, if not in such cartoonish terms. But this story is apparently fake, and that matters.
Paul Cantrell
That whole article is worth a read. It’s a good yarn. Here are the final paragraphs, and the link.
https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/
Paul Cantrell
@chrisamaphone
I don’t think it’s realistic to fact check everything we boost, but I do wish I’d quoted it with a “smell test” commentary!
chris martens
@inthehands yeah i almost boosted that and then was too tired to fact check and disappointed that so many seemed to boost without doing so
Paul Cantrell
@jplebreton @chrisamaphone
…when in fact the reason this story spread so widely is that it rings true, and probably •is• not too far off the kinds of things these corps do (albeit in a less cartoon villain kind of way)
JP
@chrisamaphone @inthehands exactly yeah. i don't think it was an "op" to increase general cynicism + skepticism of future labor violation reports but it functions very effectively as such.
chris martens
@inthehands i really fucking hate stuff like this because when it’s inevitably exposed as a wolf cry it just adds ammunition to anti labor efforts.
Paul Cantrell
@depereo
Skepticism warranted all around, I guess
Big Kumera Energy
@inthehands eh, it's newton claiming it, I'll maintain some skepticism
Rich Felker
RealGene ☣️
@inthehands
Now, hear me out… What if door dash or whoever *planted* this story with every intention of having it exposed as a hoax, so that when the true, almost identical story inevitably comes out, any attempt to search for it or ask a LLM about it will return "it was a hoax".
Paul Cantrell
Curiously large number of replies to this thread, and a whole lot of them fall into two camps:
“Obviously the original story was bunk and we shouldn’t have trusted it”
“Obviously this debunking is questionable and we shouldn’t trust it”
My main takeaway from the article is that •nothing• is obvious, and we need to be comfortable living with a bit of uncertainty — and being willing to see and act on larger patterns despite uncertainty.
Paul Cantrell
As @DavidM_yeg and others point out, we can be fairly confident that companies do things in the •general spirit• of these accusations, albeit not quite as cartoonishly as the Reddit post described.
We can and should fight this kind of corporate behavior, and the concentration of power that foments it. We also shouldn’t lean on that dubious Reddit post as any kind of smoking gun.
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