I was somewhat pained by this, as this is an interview question I've gotten, and I clearly annoyed the interviewer by knowing this isn't true, and you can avoid a full sort (which, at least two others have noted).
Making bad assumptions about data seems more likely than deliberate malice. If you A/B test different designs, and you see a huge increase in "interactions" with some design, you'll tend to assume that's a positive thing, unless you spend the time to interview a lot of customers to figure out what's going on.
If someone buys an overpriced shampoo, it only negatively affects them, but the are costs to overall society if people suffer health issues, addiction, etc.
In the past, a lot of people unknowingly ended up addicted to morphine, as it turned out both companies and individual doctors were happy to mislead them about the contents of medication.
> Papa Johns’ “Empty Fridge” campaign ran from late April through last weekend on NBCU streaming supply such as Peacock, NBC Sports and NBCU content across streaming distributors. While it’s too soon to digest the results, Papa Johns knows what it’s looking for.
They have data for a full month. They know if it worked or not. They decided to make a positive press release despite it failing to increase sales.
> Finally, and in parallel to this, the Commission should build a new relationship with the US. It is a hard pill to swallow: whether we like it or not, in the medium term, Europe will depend on American compute and chip infrastructure to grow its own providers at the application layer.
As a general concept, this seems fine, but in this case they seem to be paying people a cash reward for ignoring management priorities:
> The ticket sits in a backlog behind feature work because feature work has deadlines, stakeholders, and OKRs attached to it. Cost optimization has none of those things.
I was in a class where around 12% of the class got caught directly copying a journal assignment. I'm sure more went undetected. AI has made it easier, but it's in the same magnitude.