eBay Chose Stalking When Legal Tools Would Have Worked

eBay's 2019 harassment campaign against two journalists who had criticized the company represents something almost anthropologically revealing about how power behaves when its usual tools stop working.

The couple, Ina and David Steiner, found themselves subject to what prosecutors later described as a coordinated stalking operation—employees sent them threatening packages, showed up at their home, pursued them across the country. What makes this case historically significant is not that it happened, but that it happened at all.

For two decades before eBay's pivot to criminality, the tech industry had perfected a different approach. When Frances Haugen's reporting exposed Facebook's internal knowledge that Instagram harmed teenage girls, the company did not send people to her house—it hired crisis PR, lawyered up. Flooded the zone with counter-narratives. When journalists documented Amazon warehouse conditions that contradicted the company's public image, Amazon's response was legal letters, terms-of-service enforcement, strategic lawsuits.

The playbook worked. Coverage was diffused, reframed, buried under litigation costs and the sheer friction of fighting institutions with unlimited resources. eBay's move into actual stalking broke that established pattern. The company had perfectly functional legal and reputational tools at its disposal, yet chose harassment instead.

This suggests something both specific and unsettling about the moment. When intimidation becomes unnecessary—when a company possesses all the institutional armor it needs—and someone deploys it anyway, you are looking at rage, not calculation. You are seeing what happens when power stops believing it needs restraint. The press learned that criticizing these companies was possible but expensive—not criminally dangerous, just professionally exhausting. What stops a company from trying what eBay tried, once someone has already absorbed the cost of being first.