Closed Door

A reading room

Closed Door

Preference falsification. What they said in public, and what they said when they thought the door was closed.

People do not have one preference. They have a preference they can afford to show. Closed Door is a reading room of cases where the affordable sentence and the private sentence both survived — because a court, a Congress, a whistleblower, or a settlement dragged the second one into the light. The point is not that companies lie. The point is to see the split clearly enough that you start noticing it in rooms that have not been unsealed yet.

Ten rooms

All rooms

They wrote the concealment down

Meta × LibGen

Training on available books is fair use, and we were careful not to seed.

A dataset we know to be pirated — in no case would we disclose that.

euphemismMeta · 2023–2025
Open room

Testimony versus Workplace research

Instagram teens

Instagram is helpful for most teens; the research is complicated.

We make body-image issues worse for one in three teen girls.

testimony gapMeta · 2008–2021
Open room

We compete for talent — plus a smiley

Jobs / Schmidt no-poach

We compete fiercely for the best people.

Stop recruiting from Apple. :)

paper trailApple / Google · 2005–2010
Open room

Destiny versus demo-mode

Theranos texts

A full lab from a tiny drop of blood.

The demo and the production machine were different rooms.

testimony gapTheranos · 2013–2018
Open room

Tours

Sequenced paths. Twenty to forty minutes. The product is finishing one of these, then noticing the next rename.

Compare the same move in two rooms: Meta LibGen vs OpenAI LibGen. Or read by person.