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Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

Eh... I've never seen quiet as implying deceitfulness. If anything, to me it implies sincerity. It means someone is using the court system to address a real grievance they have; not just virtue-signal and grandstand for the public, like other recent filings against FB (e.g. the FTC filing an anti-monopoly suit that got summarily dismissed for being unworkably low-quality).

And I have no idea how much effort it would take to find such a lawsuit amidst the huge shuffle of papers that must be the Delaware Chancery.

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Agreed. I read "quietly" as "without any money or effort put into advertising, PR, or messaging the fact."

If someone sues Facebook and does the media circuit, advertises the fact, and gets their face out there, and the case just isn't likely to succeed on the merits, that's one thing. If someone sues Facebook, gets to discovery, survives motions to dismiss and "doesn't tell a soul" (though public will find out from court records) that meets my definition of doing it "quietly."

You are perhaps right about what is implied here. But I have noticed the same trend outside of the media in general. There's currently an uproar in my town and I've seen 3 or 4 very outspoken people, including hearing it on a radio interview, say that the school board "quietly" reinstated mask mandates in school, and there's a lot of implication of secret, ulterior motives.

But I also don't understand it. You can't "quietly" enforce a policy against every kid in the school, especially if you expect them to come to school with masks in hand ahead of time. And the uproar started after a widely advertised meeting that was broadcast online and that had solicited public comment. There was nothing quiet about it.

I think it's just a cheap tactic used to convey a lack of trust.

I get what you're saying. I think in general, everything salient and attention-grabbing gets abused, so it all starts leaving us a little cold and cynical towards salient things in general. Like how we've been desensitized by overexposure to violence and sex, but now creeping into more abstract and intellectual things.

On the face of it, it's bizarre that an innocent word like "quietly" has come to have irritating connotations of clickbait for so many. But thousands of people are having meetings every day to discuss how best to grab our attention by any means necessary, and this is the result.

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