Maybe it's an issue of politics as the mind killer?
I think it's mostly that scientific ethical standards developed out of a history of bad experiments, but the ethical breeches we think of w/r/t corporations are very different, and the context switch is jarring. Not to mention that the idea of a corporation running a social experiment with a substantially scientific purpose is novel to most people, and this one in particular is easy to understand.
It's not explicitly political.
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