It would be useful to track down the misleading statement that Mozilla PR released that suggested that neither party was receiving kickbacks with the new Pocket integration. The reality is that that there was money changing hands related to the decision to integrate Pocket (NB: this was pre-Pocket acquisition by Mozilla), but the statement was worded just so to merely suggest that no money was changing hands without ever explicitly stating so—the idea being no doubt that they could claim plausible deniability wrt any false statements and blame the reader/listener for misunderstanding. The problem with this is that it backfired because it was so successful that Mozilla programmers who weren't in-the-know themselves took the statement to mean exactly the thing implied, and then they took to all sorts of public fora and "refuted" people using the PR piece, only these duped employees were explicitly claiming that there wasn't anything untoward going on, rather than the way the PR statement merely implied it. Plausible deniability moot.

(I was hoping after stumbling upon this old piece that I'd see the statement here, which would allow me to trace the contamination to e.g. HN comment threads around the same time, but this isn't the statement. It's a good clue as to when, precisely, it might have been issued.)