There is no economical reason to optimize for your happiness, if you can’t easily switch to a competing platform. Maybe unhappy people click more ads, who knows… But for the sake of thought experiment let’s assume that our corporate overlords are benevolent.
Could this feature be somehow abused? The first idea that comes to my mind is, imagine that I hate you and decide to spread some nasty rumors about you. Let’s assume that we are already connected as “friends”. So I use this feature to lite-block you. Because you wanted plausible deniability, it means that our mutual friends would still see that we are friends. And they will see what I write about you. But you won’t see it, so you won’t be able to react. But they will assume that you saw it, and could interpret your silence as consent.
In less personal situations, this could be used to make someone look bad by association. Imagine a politician or a celebrity, who “friends” tons of people without thinking twice. So I make hundred fake accounts, use them all to “friend” my target, then all of them will lite-block the target, and start posting some sort of bad stuff. Now when anyone else looks at the target, they will be “uh, this guy has a lot of Nazi friends”. Only the target will not see anything bad during their everyday usage of the platform.
Maybe not the most convincing examples, but generally it seems bad to me that the functionality you want is messing with other person’s vision, without them being aware of it. That feels like something that can be abused. So we have to consider how a bad actor would abuse it.
I think your two examples of abusing the feature can be more easily and subtly done today:
If you hate me and want to spread rumors you could just share with “friends except jkaufman”. To your other friends it just looks like a normal post with restricted visibility. You can do this today on FB, either directly or by adding me to your “restricted” list (which is automatically carved out from posts shared to “friends”). You can also just block me and expect reasonably that no one will notice.
If you want to make me look bad by assocation and you can convince me to accept a friend request from your fake accounts, all you have to do is post boring content I won’t interact with. The network will quickly decide that these new friends are not interesting to me, and then when they later start posting hateful things I won’t notice.
There is no economical reason to optimize for your happiness, if you can’t easily switch to a competing platform. Maybe unhappy people click more ads, who knows… But for the sake of thought experiment let’s assume that our corporate overlords are benevolent.
Could this feature be somehow abused? The first idea that comes to my mind is, imagine that I hate you and decide to spread some nasty rumors about you. Let’s assume that we are already connected as “friends”. So I use this feature to lite-block you. Because you wanted plausible deniability, it means that our mutual friends would still see that we are friends. And they will see what I write about you. But you won’t see it, so you won’t be able to react. But they will assume that you saw it, and could interpret your silence as consent.
In less personal situations, this could be used to make someone look bad by association. Imagine a politician or a celebrity, who “friends” tons of people without thinking twice. So I make hundred fake accounts, use them all to “friend” my target, then all of them will lite-block the target, and start posting some sort of bad stuff. Now when anyone else looks at the target, they will be “uh, this guy has a lot of Nazi friends”. Only the target will not see anything bad during their everyday usage of the platform.
Maybe not the most convincing examples, but generally it seems bad to me that the functionality you want is messing with other person’s vision, without them being aware of it. That feels like something that can be abused. So we have to consider how a bad actor would abuse it.
I think your two examples of abusing the feature can be more easily and subtly done today:
If you hate me and want to spread rumors you could just share with “friends except jkaufman”. To your other friends it just looks like a normal post with restricted visibility. You can do this today on FB, either directly or by adding me to your “restricted” list (which is automatically carved out from posts shared to “friends”). You can also just block me and expect reasonably that no one will notice.
If you want to make me look bad by assocation and you can convince me to accept a friend request from your fake accounts, all you have to do is post boring content I won’t interact with. The network will quickly decide that these new friends are not interesting to me, and then when they later start posting hateful things I won’t notice.