6 ms·

Some stealth edits Vox made to its article debunking “conspiracy theories”

hirundo 5y ago
Making stealth edits was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth. Please someone write an unstealthing service, a cross between Wayback Machine and diff, that outputs a feed of such edits. I'd love to see a trend of sites surfacing changes themselves and serving up a per-article history like Wikipedia or GitHub. Bonus if they annotate the changes. In this case they could just write something like "the lab escape theory still looks unlikely but we're now less certain of that".
- anaphor 5y ago
  It exists for NYT headlines https://twitter.com/nyt_diff https://twitter.com/nyt_diff Also https://twitter.com/newsdiffs https://twitter.com/newsdiffs
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    I wish there was a way to know how much exposure each version of information received. Retractions often don’t have the corrective effect of setting the record straight because few read an older article that got an update but isn’t on the front page anymore.
  - bfuller 5y ago
    If only it existed for the content too, when I had the unpleasant experience of being interviewed by them they changed the article many many times. In fact, in my whole career the NYT journalist was the most unprofessional, unethical one. They knowingly took things I said out of context and portrayed them to mean the opposite things. Startup founders, I advise you to decline NYT interviews, they are extremely unscrupulous.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Wayback supports diffs natively, it’d be straightforward to poll for diffs based on URLs you wanted to monitor. https://thenextweb.com/news/the-wayback-machine-now-lets-you-track-changes-to-web-pages https://thenextweb.com/news/the-wayback-machine-now-lets-you...
arolihas 5y ago
The edits are subtle but clearly introduce plausible deniability. Some of you might be interested in the science suggesting lab made origins, I enjoyed this article: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
- tzs 5y ago
  From that link:> Chinese researchers found earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. How do they determine that a case has no link to the wet market?
  - arolihas 5y ago
    These links may be helpful: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market-may-not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Basically cases of covid had occurred before the cluster reported from the Huanan wet market, and no connection could be established between these cases and the marketplace
underseacables 5y ago
It’s fascinating to see a news organization that, due to editing after the fact, can never be wrong.
- g42gregory 5y ago
  I think it also means that it can never be trusted (again).
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    They could have easily made the edits as corrections showing both original and corrected content. That they did not warrants the assumption of intent to deceive.
- wmf 5y ago
  Vox's "innovation" is having undated, occasionally-updated articles that present the current state of a topic, kind of like Wikipedia. They see this as a feature.
  - whythre 5y ago
    I’ll bet they do.
agogdog 5y ago
Doesn't Vox consider articles living artifacts and regularly change them as they become more informed? More like a wiki that's meant to be highly relevant in search results? I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but it's their self-inflicted mode of operation.
codeflow2202 5y ago
This is whole story is absurd! For this to be true the following should have all been lying: - researchers - the most influential science magazines - China, the USA and many other governments - the WHO and other health organizations - the media - people on HN, Reddit and any social media platform that made me believe that the lab leak was never an option.
- zpeti 5y ago
  But they did it because Trump is evil and he said it was China. Being anti trump justifies anything.
- ralfn 5y ago
  Many responsible adults jumped on the 'it can't be man made' bandwagon out of instinct. It feels like the kind of narrative that could lead to destabilization and may be fueled by xenophobia. But beyond the responsible adults there are few people in the world that can study the genome and they never really had internal consensus. They had internal consensus to downplay the 'its made in a lab' conclusion, but there is no clear evidence of the opposite. Keep in mind at that moment in time this would give ammunition to general public to harass random asian looking individuals. You can imagine that's a not a conclusion you want to exist in the head of your common hooligan. You can also imagine that most people convinced of anything are just, ehm, idiots. Because if you can't do the science yourself, or if you can't but haven't, it would be foolish to believe any kind of consensus where most of the people talking also can't or haven't done the science themselves. The majority is always wrong, and scientific consensus of a new event becomes insightfully about 10 years in after a few revolutions of ideas like the one currently happening. It is in the end just a economic system of gatekeeping by a cabal. A cabal very much in a situation of economic dependency on political structures. So there can't be a scientific consensus about this in the media. Only a political one.
  - musicale 5y ago
    > Many responsible adults jumped on the 'it can't be man made' bandwagon out of instinct. A common error or misrepresentation seemed to be conflation of "lab escape" with "man made." They're not the same thing; a virus from nature (smallpox etc.) could still escape from a lab.
amai 5y ago
We need something like github for news articles.
infoseek12 5y ago
It seems like a lab leak was always the most parsimonious explanation. Now that we aren’t in the middle of Covid and don’t have a distractingly incompetent administration I think we are going to see a re-estimation of probabilities and a lot of attempts to rewrite history. The Lancet and quite a few other really respected institutions published things I suspect they’ll now need to try walk back.
throwawaysea 5y ago
I don’t really care, as a reader, if Vox claims to treat their articles as “living” articles. This feels like a cover up for the past aggressive shutdown of the lab leak hypothesis, pushed by journalists and activists, who often did so only to attack Trump in an election year where they were desperate for any leverage. Such stealthy edits are avoidance of accountability that is long overdue for the journalism industry. Don’t let them get away with it: https://spectator.us/topic/media-u-turn-lab-leak-coronavirus-theory/ https://spectator.us/topic/media-u-turn-lab-leak-coronavirus...
musicale 5y ago
Here at [internet company] we care deeply about fact checking, so we are pleased to announce that we no longer consider [x] to be a debunked conspiracy theory, so you are now permitted to post links to news articles about [x] without being banned from our platform for spreading disinformation. Have a great day!
- nojokes 5y ago
  There is a great difference between saying "this is Chinese/Bill Gates bioweapon" and "Possibility of the lab origin could not eliminated".
  - musicale 5y ago
    Yeah, it's a shame they were conflated in the media.
soonnow 5y ago
I'm severely lacking in the virology department, but what I have read is that it clearly is, without a doubt, not man made. That leaves the escape from lab hypothesis. Which is certainly has not been disproved. Maybe the scientific community should just ask themselves, how could it have happened and how could it have been avoided? I don't believe at all in blaming China, that is just xenophobia in disguise. Would you blame India for the Indian variant, or the UK for the British variant?
- bad_username 5y ago
  China should not be blamed for the virus, but should be blamed for the initial handling of the virus, and failing to prevent the global pandemic.
  - MathYouF 5y ago
    Like or dislike the Chinese government, question how much it cares about saving face versus protecting the international community, sure. But name a time since the dawn of commercial air travel 1950-2019 where a country, much less the country with the largest population on earth, suspended all air travel for any reason, much less a flu they'd only discovered a few weeks prior. I have my doubts on how many other countries would've isolated their entire population and suspended travel in and out if given the same time line and information. Do you really think if a flu outbreak had been detected in the US that we would have suspended ALL travel in and out of the country in December of 2019 only a few weeks after becoming aware of it? It's been a century since this last happened, no one alive in 2019 really had any memory of such a catastrophe unfolding. I think China would've been called alarmist, totalitarian, and an unreliable business partner, had they taken the full measures of lockdown early enough to possibly prevent it spreading internationally.
    - atatatat 5y ago
      > I have my doubts on how many other countries would've isolated their entire population and suspended travel in and out if given the same time line and information. The rest of society is easily the shittiest thing to peg your morality against.
OldGoodNewBad 5y ago
Part of the reason “conspiracy theories” are more popular than ever is the media’s a bunch of vomit-encrusted lying shills without the self awareness to even pretend they’re unbiased any more. The media in general will never recover from Trump, he broke them thoroughly and completely, forever.
nojokes 5y ago
In other news UK government along with Boris Johnson claims that UK policy was not initially based on reaching herd immunity through uncontrolled spread of the virus.

Making stealth edits was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth. Please someone write an unstealthing service, a cross between Wayback Machine and diff, that outputs a feed of such edits. I'd love to see a trend of sites surfacing changes themselves and serving up a per-article history like Wikipedia or GitHub. Bonus if they annotate the changes. In this case they could just write something like "the lab escape theory still looks unlikely but we're now less certain of that".

anaphor 5y ago
It exists for NYT headlines https://twitter.com/nyt_diff https://twitter.com/nyt_diff Also https://twitter.com/newsdiffs https://twitter.com/newsdiffs
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  I wish there was a way to know how much exposure each version of information received. Retractions often don’t have the corrective effect of setting the record straight because few read an older article that got an update but isn’t on the front page anymore.
- bfuller 5y ago
  If only it existed for the content too, when I had the unpleasant experience of being interviewed by them they changed the article many many times. In fact, in my whole career the NYT journalist was the most unprofessional, unethical one. They knowingly took things I said out of context and portrayed them to mean the opposite things. Startup founders, I advise you to decline NYT interviews, they are extremely unscrupulous.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Wayback supports diffs natively, it’d be straightforward to poll for diffs based on URLs you wanted to monitor. https://thenextweb.com/news/the-wayback-machine-now-lets-you-track-changes-to-web-pages https://thenextweb.com/news/the-wayback-machine-now-lets-you...

arolihas 5y ago

The edits are subtle but clearly introduce plausible deniability. Some of you might be interested in the science suggesting lab made origins, I enjoyed this article: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

tzs 5y ago
From that link:> Chinese researchers found earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. How do they determine that a case has no link to the wet market?
- arolihas 5y ago
  These links may be helpful: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market-may-not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Basically cases of covid had occurred before the cluster reported from the Huanan wet market, and no connection could be established between these cases and the marketplace

underseacables 5y ago

It’s fascinating to see a news organization that, due to editing after the fact, can never be wrong.

g42gregory 5y ago
I think it also means that it can never be trusted (again).
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  They could have easily made the edits as corrections showing both original and corrected content. That they did not warrants the assumption of intent to deceive.
wmf 5y ago
Vox's "innovation" is having undated, occasionally-updated articles that present the current state of a topic, kind of like Wikipedia. They see this as a feature.
- whythre 5y ago
  I’ll bet they do.

agogdog 5y ago

Doesn't Vox consider articles living artifacts and regularly change them as they become more informed? More like a wiki that's meant to be highly relevant in search results? I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but it's their self-inflicted mode of operation.

codeflow2202 5y ago

This is whole story is absurd! For this to be true the following should have all been lying: - researchers - the most influential science magazines - China, the USA and many other governments - the WHO and other health organizations - the media - people on HN, Reddit and any social media platform that made me believe that the lab leak was never an option.

zpeti 5y ago
But they did it because Trump is evil and he said it was China. Being anti trump justifies anything.
ralfn 5y ago
Many responsible adults jumped on the 'it can't be man made' bandwagon out of instinct. It feels like the kind of narrative that could lead to destabilization and may be fueled by xenophobia. But beyond the responsible adults there are few people in the world that can study the genome and they never really had internal consensus. They had internal consensus to downplay the 'its made in a lab' conclusion, but there is no clear evidence of the opposite. Keep in mind at that moment in time this would give ammunition to general public to harass random asian looking individuals. You can imagine that's a not a conclusion you want to exist in the head of your common hooligan. You can also imagine that most people convinced of anything are just, ehm, idiots. Because if you can't do the science yourself, or if you can't but haven't, it would be foolish to believe any kind of consensus where most of the people talking also can't or haven't done the science themselves. The majority is always wrong, and scientific consensus of a new event becomes insightfully about 10 years in after a few revolutions of ideas like the one currently happening. It is in the end just a economic system of gatekeeping by a cabal. A cabal very much in a situation of economic dependency on political structures. So there can't be a scientific consensus about this in the media. Only a political one.
- musicale 5y ago
  > Many responsible adults jumped on the 'it can't be man made' bandwagon out of instinct. A common error or misrepresentation seemed to be conflation of "lab escape" with "man made." They're not the same thing; a virus from nature (smallpox etc.) could still escape from a lab.

amai 5y ago

We need something like github for news articles.

infoseek12 5y ago

It seems like a lab leak was always the most parsimonious explanation. Now that we aren’t in the middle of Covid and don’t have a distractingly incompetent administration I think we are going to see a re-estimation of probabilities and a lot of attempts to rewrite history. The Lancet and quite a few other really respected institutions published things I suspect they’ll now need to try walk back.

throwawaysea 5y ago

I don’t really care, as a reader, if Vox claims to treat their articles as “living” articles. This feels like a cover up for the past aggressive shutdown of the lab leak hypothesis, pushed by journalists and activists, who often did so only to attack Trump in an election year where they were desperate for any leverage. Such stealthy edits are avoidance of accountability that is long overdue for the journalism industry. Don’t let them get away with it: https://spectator.us/topic/media-u-turn-lab-leak-coronavirus-theory/ https://spectator.us/topic/media-u-turn-lab-leak-coronavirus...

musicale 5y ago

Here at [internet company] we care deeply about fact checking, so we are pleased to announce that we no longer consider [x] to be a debunked conspiracy theory, so you are now permitted to post links to news articles about [x] without being banned from our platform for spreading disinformation. Have a great day!

nojokes 5y ago
There is a great difference between saying "this is Chinese/Bill Gates bioweapon" and "Possibility of the lab origin could not eliminated".
- musicale 5y ago
  Yeah, it's a shame they were conflated in the media.

soonnow 5y ago

I'm severely lacking in the virology department, but what I have read is that it clearly is, without a doubt, not man made. That leaves the escape from lab hypothesis. Which is certainly has not been disproved. Maybe the scientific community should just ask themselves, how could it have happened and how could it have been avoided? I don't believe at all in blaming China, that is just xenophobia in disguise. Would you blame India for the Indian variant, or the UK for the British variant?

bad_username 5y ago
China should not be blamed for the virus, but should be blamed for the initial handling of the virus, and failing to prevent the global pandemic.
- MathYouF 5y ago
  Like or dislike the Chinese government, question how much it cares about saving face versus protecting the international community, sure. But name a time since the dawn of commercial air travel 1950-2019 where a country, much less the country with the largest population on earth, suspended all air travel for any reason, much less a flu they'd only discovered a few weeks prior. I have my doubts on how many other countries would've isolated their entire population and suspended travel in and out if given the same time line and information. Do you really think if a flu outbreak had been detected in the US that we would have suspended ALL travel in and out of the country in December of 2019 only a few weeks after becoming aware of it? It's been a century since this last happened, no one alive in 2019 really had any memory of such a catastrophe unfolding. I think China would've been called alarmist, totalitarian, and an unreliable business partner, had they taken the full measures of lockdown early enough to possibly prevent it spreading internationally.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    > I have my doubts on how many other countries would've isolated their entire population and suspended travel in and out if given the same time line and information. The rest of society is easily the shittiest thing to peg your morality against.

OldGoodNewBad 5y ago

Part of the reason “conspiracy theories” are more popular than ever is the media’s a bunch of vomit-encrusted lying shills without the self awareness to even pretend they’re unbiased any more. The media in general will never recover from Trump, he broke them thoroughly and completely, forever.

nojokes 5y ago

In other news UK government along with Boris Johnson claims that UK policy was not initially based on reaching herd immunity through uncontrolled spread of the virus.