No one things FB is evil because they aren't transparent. It is because of the observable harm on society and their perceived reluctance to mitigate that harm. Internally, they also suffer with retention because employees don't want to work at an evil or perceived to be evil place.

Thus, FB decides to have more transparency, gets a little credit that they want to fix the problem. All good.

Now, FB then revokes that after it leads to criticism (which is the point of being transparent...), so they revert to the previous state, only now there is even more evidence and the problem is worse.

It's the height of irony that a company that profits from selling information about you would ever try to defend itself with a right to privacy. Not only is that not the issue at hand but it speaks to the lack of self-awareness that I can only hope will doom FB to irrelevance or legal destruction.

I am not arguing Facebook's goodness or evilness.

> It's the height of irony that a company that profits from selling information about you would ever try to defend itself with a right to privacy.

Everyone deserves a robust defense - even the guilty. It is not for their justice - it is to protect the integrity of the system.

Everyone also deserves the right to privacy because bad actors (competitors, disgruntled employees, political activists, etc...) are always happy to twist facts leaked to make a biased case. This happens all the time - there is no shortage of talking heads on spin alley.

You're right in that FB should have probably never tried to be more transparent - and doing so was naive and destined for failure. In the court of public opinion / social media (and eventually probably ACTUAL court someday), you simply cannot successfully voice your innocence. Even apologizing when you're wrong makes things worse.

My advice to clients is always...

#1. Shut up. Do not make public statements. Do not engage anyone publicly. Anything you say can and will be used against you - both in and out of court.

#2. See point above.

In my opinion, the correct strategy for a social media company these days is to be as ethical as possible, and to say as little as possible publicly about ethics or internal policies.

Your lecture on jurisprudence and standards of evidence is misplaced. This isn't a courtroom. We are not judges presiding over a case. These are matters of politics and profession as much as law and here we are free to interpret behavior, state our views and consider our associations as our knowledge and experience inform us. Further, unlike Facebook which has long since squandered whatever good faith one might imagine they were owed, we are owed the assumption of good faith while doing it.

It applies even more outside of a courtroom. Most people get information via very agenda-driven news articles, and not having "making sense of weird situations" as their day job, they're even more likely to be misled than judges.

At least a court has lots of rules built in to try and provide some amount of fairness to both sides in a debate. The political and public sphere has no such rules, making it even more vulnerable to such railroading.

"It applies even more outside of a courtroom."

Perhaps inside the heads of some. In the actual external world people make decisions based on incomplete information, first impression, secondhand observation, self serving bias and other imperfect influences. Neither you nor I will live to see this reality 'corrected.'

Yes, that's why corporations, even the most perfectly good ones in the world, still value their ability to keep things private.

That is also why, when one witnesses a corporation hide that which was previously observable, we may suspect malice.

Transparency and privacy aren't antonyms.