3 ms·

I agree it would increase transparency, but at the cost of further damage caused by the bad story. E.g., https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/study-finds-that-we-

by jmull 9y ago

I agree it would increase transparency, but at the cost of further damage caused by the bad story. E.g., https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/study-finds-that-we-still-believe-untruths-even-after-instant-online-corrections/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/study-finds-that-we-still-... Damage has already been done, since it appears that retractions have limited effect, if any. But removing the bad story at least means new people won’t stumble across it and be misled. It’s a balance and personally, I think they made the right choice. If it were me, I’d feel better if there was an indirect and obscure way to retrieve the original story. Perhaps in this case there’s an archive that severs the purpose? If so, great. Of course it would be much better if no mistake had been made, but sooner or later mistakes are always made. You only find out the character of a person or organization by how often mistakes are made and what the reaction is.

jessriedel 9y ago
Then prevent them from easily stumbling across it, but don't prevent them from accessing it in any form.
- fourthark 9y ago
  It's interesting how this relates to the "right to be forgotten." Some interpret that to mean that the content will still exist, but will not be indexed by search engines. If so, then we are evolving into two Nets, the searchable one and the - what? - one you have to follow links into? Links with grave warnings on them? I'm not sure this is entirely bad but it's weird. Will we also have pirate offshore search engines that ignore robots.txt and refuse to deindex? Also see: the internet archive of things they aren't allowed to show because of robots.txt
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    I agree that these issues are closely related, and one people's opinions on them will be correlated. However, much of the time we can find solutions that will almost everyone happy, e.g., removing just the name of individuals from retracted stories (an idea suggested by someone else in this thread). Importantly, almost no one thinks the mistakes of the newspapers have a right to be forgotten, or more precisely, that newspapers have an defensible interest in erasing the details of their errors and leaving only a summary (written by themselves!) describing the error and declaring a retraction.

by jmull 9y ago

jessriedel 9y ago

Then prevent them from easily stumbling across it, but don't prevent them from accessing it in any form.

fourthark 9y ago
It's interesting how this relates to the "right to be forgotten." Some interpret that to mean that the content will still exist, but will not be indexed by search engines. If so, then we are evolving into two Nets, the searchable one and the - what? - one you have to follow links into? Links with grave warnings on them? I'm not sure this is entirely bad but it's weird. Will we also have pirate offshore search engines that ignore robots.txt and refuse to deindex? Also see: the internet archive of things they aren't allowed to show because of robots.txt
- jessriedel 9y ago
  I agree that these issues are closely related, and one people's opinions on them will be correlated. However, much of the time we can find solutions that will almost everyone happy, e.g., removing just the name of individuals from retracted stories (an idea suggested by someone else in this thread). Importantly, almost no one thinks the mistakes of the newspapers have a right to be forgotten, or more precisely, that newspapers have an defensible interest in erasing the details of their errors and leaving only a summary (written by themselves!) describing the error and declaring a retraction.