[chc]

If I shoot a gun and the guy in front of me drops dead of a bullet wound, are you going to wait for the forensics to come back on the bullet before you suggest that I shot him? It could be that I shot past him and some guy on a grassy knoll is the real killer, but it is not unreasonable to say that I "apparently shot him."

[brianchu]

This is not a valid analogy. Causation is typically proved empirically. We have consistent (as in, 99.9999%) empirical evidence that if you "shoot a gun and the guy in front of [you] drops dead of a bullet wound," there is a causative relationship.

The incidence of "people on HN/Reddit make a fuss" and "Apple/other-big-tech-company changes it's website or some other legal matter" is occasional and inconsistent at best. There is really no empirical evidence of causation.

[chc]

The incidence of "People on Reddit make a fuss" and "Big company quickly makes a change that happens to address the fuss but was actually completely unrelated" is far lower. While a fuss doesn't always produce change, it seems to me that change following a fuss may reasonably be viewed as a response.

Better analogy: Asking me for five dollars will not consistently result in me giving you five dollars. But if you ask for five dollars and I give it, you would not be wrong to assume that the two events are related. There are other conceivable explanations (e.g. perhaps I wasn't listening to you, but mistook you for a valet), but those are so much less likely given the context that it's quite reasonable to assume I was responding to your request.

[brianchu]

Again, the analogy is not quite accurate. I find that analogies are often poor justifications of arguments because of widely varying contexts. In Apple's case there are many other more plausible alternative explanations, such as Apple wanting to avoid a court order. This is bolstered by Apple's reputation for not being very responsive to the public (see: Antennagate, long time until public iOS maps apology). In the second analogy, there is 1) a personal element (direct asking) and 2) a physical interaction (handing money), neither of which exist in the HN/reddit case.