TLDR: This isn’t a moral panic, and this has been building up for a decade plus now.

Heck no. Year after year after year these issues have been brought up and ignored.

I worked in this damn domain, and have seen better people than me try their best to avoid exactly this outcome, for these exact same firms.

I can give credit to the people at these firms who try to do the right thing, but the firm itself needs to answer in terms of revenue and growth figures.

The fact is that your policy and T&S teams are cost centers, while the quarterly shareholder report is God. There is only one way these incentives line up.

It’s been YEARS of teams within these firms raising the issues of user harms and getting no where.

I remember having T&S folks cry on MY shoulder about how they couldn’t get engineering resources even while working at a FAANG company.

Others talked about how, out of sheer repetition, they developed a protocol for the times an engineering team would inevitably come in to “fix” T&S issues. They knew they would get sidelined, till eventually the PM/engineers/Savior would run into the same problems they had been dealing with forever, and then ask for help.

Public research also has issues - If you want to do actual research on tech, you can’t even get the data.

If you get the data, you also get the NDA, which means your results need to make tech look good, or the report becomes an internal report that will never see the light of day.