Scare quotes often reflect derision; they don't necessarily imply intention. I think in TFA's case they're suggesting that Instagram is downplaying the incident, since calling it an "error" puts in the same category as a service outage.
I wrote this article. The quote is in the headline because Instagram is calling it an error, I am not calling it an error. People have been wondering what happened and why, and have been posting on Reddit wondering why there’s no media attention. It’s a small signal, but I put the quote around “error” to indicate that I did some reporting and got official word from Meta about what happened, and was not just speculating.
The scare quotes don't suggest that it was deliberate, it's quoting instagram's response to highlight how ridiculous it is to call showing thousands of people gore a simple "error." They're dramatically minimizing the problem.
It seems like a fair callout to me, especially because instagram has made this "error" before at least one other time.
I think we intend awful things all the time, without realizing it. To get at what the intentions are here you might ask things like:
* why this particular error and no other? The bug could’ve been that the content becomes particularly happy or cheery
* why a bug in the content at all? You don’t see bugs generally on Instagram, they are immensely careful about operations. How could something like this slip through? (Why are safeguards not prioritized)
