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Comment by tareqak | Hacker News Reader

Quote: The judge agreed with Facebook’s request to keep some of the records sealed, saying certain records contained information that would cause the social media giant harm, outweighing the public benefit.

How does that make sense? If the action Facebook committed was somehow morally reprehensible, but legal?

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Maybe there was an internal e-mail discussion where they discussed or joked about doing something reprehensible, which they didn't end up doing.

Any project where you detect a vulnerable person so you can protect them, or detect an evildoer so you can block them, you can joke about the fact there's money to be made by doing the reverse. And those jokes would look pretty bad taken out of context, even though you were never seriously considering them.

My bet would be some kind of internal political/interpersonal bullshit that is good for generating hot takes on twitter and not much else.

The interesting part about that to me is that they don't regard the fleecing-children part to be "giant harm." I.e., the court has records that are even more damaging to Facebook.

That's really troubling. But by now several people have access to this information anyway, so it's just a question of time before we learn what it was.

Or they think in that case, the public benefit outweighs the damage to Facebook.

This is much more likely IMO. The public benefit of different pieces of information can vary greatly, with most probably approaching zero. Even if the child-fleecing stuff was the most harmful of anything to FB, it's still reasonable that other things are not beneficial enough to release even if they likely are not as damaging.

Many things that are morally reprehensible are also legal, e.g. adultery, drinking. The goal of having law is not to make people more moral, it's much humbler: to maintain relative peace and safety.

Don't mix law and morality. Attempts to do so gave us sharia law, let that be a cautionary tale.

There were many cases of religious law being the law of the land e.g. the Ten Commandments.

Maintaining peace and safety are moral impetuses.

depends on your thorough definition of "peace", "safety", and "moral"

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