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Comment by silenced_trope | Hacker News Reader

When judges do their job, you the accused have due process and legal representation.

I specified my issue (aspergers) for a reason. I would need legal and competent representation if I were accused of something.

We know from people that have actually consented to be in the public sphere (politicians, performers, etc) that even denying an accusation against you still leaves you a pariah with the scarlet letter, to be ostracized in some cases.

Smearing and destroying a person extra-judicially with no "burden of proof" to convict isn't something I'm okay with.

If there is legitimate wrongdoing of some kind, an investigation, carried out by the designated representatives (police, detectives, prosecutors) who are paid by our tax dollars and not by advertisers or the wealthy is what's preferable and actually representative.

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> We know from people that have actually consented to be in the public sphere (politicians, performers, etc) that even denying an accusation against you still leaves you a pariah with the scarlet letter, to be ostracized in some cases.

Your actions as the officer of a company are generally considered to be "public".

You don't have a right to privacy over your business (you certainly don't have to answer questions from a journalist either, but they're not generally invading your privacy by merely asking them).

He wasn’t being accused of a criminal act, ergo he didn’t need legal representation on hand. He was being asked by a professional journalist for a world-renowned publishing source why he wasn’t doing more as the responsible officer to keep his company’s product from putting children into harms way in exactly the way his product was designed to perform… he had neither any right to avoid being questioned nor any real interest in avoiding providing comment. He might not like being approached, and if he has some condition that makes such in-person discussion difficult I’m certainly sympathetic but he could just as certainly have communicated by email as he had been asked to do, but chose not to.

As for the reputational risk you’re pointing to, nothing here was trying to cancel him, ostracize him, etc… the journalist was, I think rightly, trying to pressure him into changing his business’s product to prevent the very real harm that product has been, unquestionably, used to perpetrate. There is a very legitimate question why he wasn’t doing more to prevent his platform’s weaponization when his platform was pretty much by design ripe for exactly that use case.

Answer me honestly, have you stopped beating your spouse yet? Yes or no answers only accepted.

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