5 ms·

Unfortunately par for the course these days. At least they did remove the article. Citing "editorial standards" is weak sauce though, the point of having editor

Unfortunately par for the course these days. At least they did remove the article. Citing "editorial standards" is weak sauce though, the point of having editorial standards is so they can be applied by the editor before publication...

diggan 3y ago
> At least they did remove the article Wouldn't it be better to add a correction at the top of the article instead of deleting it? Deleting it I'd think would just fuel (current or budding) conspiracy theorists, as they can point to something that existed but got removed, rather than something that got corrected. But in the end, it's probably a loosing battle anyway...
- Operyl 3y ago
  Adding a correction at the top would just fuel (current or budding) conspiracy theorists, as they can point to something that was, in their eyes, forcibly corrected against WIRED's will.
  - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    So instead they prove the conspiracy folks right that the media is willing to scrub proof of inaccurate reporting.
    - Operyl 3y ago
      The point I’m making is that no matter what you do, a conspiracy theorist is going to twist the narrative to fit their world view.
      - generalizations 3y ago
        Well, the world view in this case is 'the media lies' - and that's correct in this case (though it wasn't intentional).
        vkou 3y ago
        Whereas the sources spoon-feeding them this attitude are, of course, unimpeachable. (They don't redact, or admit fault.) I generally find that anyone expecting error-free perfection in any subjective field from an entire industry can be safely dismissed as a complete idiot. Intelligent people look at the processes that produce outcomes, not the outcomes. (In this case, the process that produced the outcome was a former DDG employee mailing in an oped of incredibly questionable quality that criticized a DDG competitor, that was eventually pulled. Wired should look into reading op-eds before publishing them.)
    - 0ct4via 3y ago
      If they admit it's "inaccurate" / "does not meet [their] editorial standards" then it's hardly "scrubbing proof"... Admitting it was trash is proof of inaccurate reporting, whether they remove TFA or not As for the conspiracy folks, they'll think what they want, regardless of evidence presented to them. That's the whole point.
  - zo1 3y ago
    Because journalism is not the way to solve this, and we all think that it will. The way to solve it is for "investigators" to get access to said source code and give us an honest assessment. Get someone neutral, get NDAs in place, have them look at the source in an air-gapped clean room, anonymize DB access, etc etc. Instead we go around in circles. Journalism at the end of the day then becomes "we got some info that points to X, but we have no proof, and we won't look for it. We'll just wait till someone, somewhere, at some point, who knows when, finds some proof and puts it out in the public, only then will we say it's conclusive. Until then, you all go nuts, especially the conspiracy theorists. Don't worry, we'll ride this gravy train and report on those nut jobs too!". It's a mess, and I'm not at all surprised that conspiracy-theorists have a field day with it. Hey, let's get a bounty up so that a whistle-blower from Google comes forward. Maybe Mozilla foundation can take some of that sweet sweet endowment they use for "Social Justice" and pony up to fund this investigative effort. After all they claim to be fighting for a free internet. I'd say this is a much better use of money than paying random DEI consultancies huge speaking fees.
- throw__away7391 3y ago
  I don't know if you've ever had the misfortune of interacting much with conspiracy theorists, but literally whatever happens it always proves their beliefs are correct.
  - borski 3y ago
    This. It doesn’t matter what you do, conspiracy theorists can and will justify it as a conspiracy.
    - Forgeties79 3y ago
      Had a discussion about Assange the other day (contentious I know but bear with me). I brought up how he had a show on RT, the Russian state media channel, mentioning that it’s pretty bad optics regardless of what one thinks of the dude. They immediately went “no they didn’t that’s got to be a CIA myth.” Hand to god that’s what they said. I showed him the IMDb and Wikipedia pages for it and a clip. Without missing a beat - remember they literally had never heard this before and have already decided it’s misinformation planted by the CIA - he said “Well it’s an independent show he put on that happened to be shown on RT.” I mean what can you say to that?
      - anjel 3y ago
        'Happens to be' is doing alot of work in that sentence
        Forgeties79 3y ago
        Seriously! Like I said, I get it’s a very contentious issue and I’m sure people have varied feelings on this, but to walk into a conversation literally knowing nothing about the topic at hand and then hand waving it away so quickly…I mean there’s no point in even continuing the conversation at that point.
        cultureswitch 3y ago
- granzymes 3y ago
  Whether they removed the article or not, I think it’s ridiculous that WIRED didn’t explain why the article was retracted. They should have mentioned 1) what the article got wrong and 2) that the article was written by a former Duck Duck Go executive who should know better.
  - bonestamp2 3y ago
    Ya, I'd prefer if they just corrected the article, made a note at the top of the article about what was corrected, and have a disclaimer that it was written by Google's competitor.
- SllX 3y ago
  That would be showing too much respect for or deference to conspiracy theorists, who aren’t really worth the trouble. Copies probably exist in the Internet Archive, archive.is and in PDFs people could have saved when the article was up so it’s not like it truly disappeared. WIRED just took down a bad article that shouldn’t have been published.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Transparency is the key to trust and journalistic integrity. Even an article that was mostly wrong/written from a failed premise should remain accessible with a timestamped correction statement explaining the problem. Making your mistakes suddenly disappear as if they never happened is tempting, but it's going to leave users feeling gaslit, distrustful, or even just misinformed.
littlestymaar 3y ago
> the point of having editorial standards is so they can be applied by the editor before publication... “Ain't nobody got time for that”. The role of journalists is to provide facts, but the business model of media in the internet age is about “creating content” and “engagement” and they don't work well together …
- vkou 3y ago
  Even providing facts is a subjective, opinionated process. Which facts are provided, which are left out, which are contextualized, whether or not active or passive voice is used[1] and which are not can completely invert the meaning of a story. [1] 'The gun went off and the shot hit Mr. Smith's head' versus 'Officer Sloan shot Mr. Smith in the head.' [2] [2] Both of these are 'just the facts', but one of them blames the gun for going off, the other blames the person who made the gun go off. Passive voice versus active voice, very different presentation of the same facts, both are correct, and both are biased.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    > Even providing facts is a subjective, opinionated process. Yes, that's why you need press freedom with multiple point of views. But it is orthogonal to the point I was making.
jrockway 3y ago
I have always found this to be a weird take from a forum largely populated by software people. Every piece of software I have ever used has been riddled with bugs and security defects. This despite the fact that we have dedicated sub-fields for both (security engineering / test engineering). So when a journalist notices a bug in their article and has to "retract a release", how is that not what we do every single day? I think you might just be disappointed in humanity, rather than any particular agency or person. Humans come together to get the right answer eventually; not multiple times a day, every day, without fail. Sometimes the software doesn't do what you want. Sometimes that article has a factual error. Eventually we figure it out. It's not the end of the world.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- zo1 3y ago
  The same way we expect "QA" to pick up those bugs before release? Think about the opposite. Imagine we pickup a bug in a live application and update it citing "our QA standards". This magical word does not absolve us of the fact that we let a bug through to production. And it's implied that we'll do better next time to pick up this kind of bug.
  - embik 3y ago
    The post you are responding to is making the point that even though we have QA, dedicated jobs or even departments for these things … We, as a profession, still fail in releasing bug-free software. And that’s 100% correct. Is that really something you are challenging? Which pieces of popular software you can think of are bug-free? And are you thinking of more than a handful?
    - zo1 3y ago
      They said "So when a journalist notices a bug in their article and has to "retract a release", how is that not what we do every single day?" And they themselves were responding to someone criticizing media for using "editorial standards" as an excuse when they "retract a release". And I explained how we are the same and supposedly strive to not release bad content/software, we just don't get to magically absolve fault with an excuse that "it doesn't meet our QA standards" as an analogy to "editorial standards". Anywho, the whole thing breaks down when we have to beat it with a stick. It's a discussion, assume a charitable interpretation.
omoikane 3y ago
> having editorial standards is so they can be applied by the editor before publication Maybe there were lots of articles that were never published due to editorial standards, but we only see the ones that slipped through.

diggan 3y ago

> At least they did remove the article Wouldn't it be better to add a correction at the top of the article instead of deleting it? Deleting it I'd think would just fuel (current or budding) conspiracy theorists, as they can point to something that existed but got removed, rather than something that got corrected. But in the end, it's probably a loosing battle anyway...

Operyl 3y ago
Adding a correction at the top would just fuel (current or budding) conspiracy theorists, as they can point to something that was, in their eyes, forcibly corrected against WIRED's will.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  So instead they prove the conspiracy folks right that the media is willing to scrub proof of inaccurate reporting.
  - Operyl 3y ago
    The point I’m making is that no matter what you do, a conspiracy theorist is going to twist the narrative to fit their world view.
    - generalizations 3y ago
      Well, the world view in this case is 'the media lies' - and that's correct in this case (though it wasn't intentional).
      - vkou 3y ago
        Whereas the sources spoon-feeding them this attitude are, of course, unimpeachable. (They don't redact, or admit fault.) I generally find that anyone expecting error-free perfection in any subjective field from an entire industry can be safely dismissed as a complete idiot. Intelligent people look at the processes that produce outcomes, not the outcomes. (In this case, the process that produced the outcome was a former DDG employee mailing in an oped of incredibly questionable quality that criticized a DDG competitor, that was eventually pulled. Wired should look into reading op-eds before publishing them.)
  - 0ct4via 3y ago
    If they admit it's "inaccurate" / "does not meet [their] editorial standards" then it's hardly "scrubbing proof"... Admitting it was trash is proof of inaccurate reporting, whether they remove TFA or not As for the conspiracy folks, they'll think what they want, regardless of evidence presented to them. That's the whole point.
- zo1 3y ago
  Because journalism is not the way to solve this, and we all think that it will. The way to solve it is for "investigators" to get access to said source code and give us an honest assessment. Get someone neutral, get NDAs in place, have them look at the source in an air-gapped clean room, anonymize DB access, etc etc. Instead we go around in circles. Journalism at the end of the day then becomes "we got some info that points to X, but we have no proof, and we won't look for it. We'll just wait till someone, somewhere, at some point, who knows when, finds some proof and puts it out in the public, only then will we say it's conclusive. Until then, you all go nuts, especially the conspiracy theorists. Don't worry, we'll ride this gravy train and report on those nut jobs too!". It's a mess, and I'm not at all surprised that conspiracy-theorists have a field day with it. Hey, let's get a bounty up so that a whistle-blower from Google comes forward. Maybe Mozilla foundation can take some of that sweet sweet endowment they use for "Social Justice" and pony up to fund this investigative effort. After all they claim to be fighting for a free internet. I'd say this is a much better use of money than paying random DEI consultancies huge speaking fees.
throw__away7391 3y ago
I don't know if you've ever had the misfortune of interacting much with conspiracy theorists, but literally whatever happens it always proves their beliefs are correct.
- borski 3y ago
  This. It doesn’t matter what you do, conspiracy theorists can and will justify it as a conspiracy.
  - Forgeties79 3y ago
    Had a discussion about Assange the other day (contentious I know but bear with me). I brought up how he had a show on RT, the Russian state media channel, mentioning that it’s pretty bad optics regardless of what one thinks of the dude. They immediately went “no they didn’t that’s got to be a CIA myth.” Hand to god that’s what they said. I showed him the IMDb and Wikipedia pages for it and a clip. Without missing a beat - remember they literally had never heard this before and have already decided it’s misinformation planted by the CIA - he said “Well it’s an independent show he put on that happened to be shown on RT.” I mean what can you say to that?
    - anjel 3y ago
      'Happens to be' is doing alot of work in that sentence
      - Forgeties79 3y ago
        Seriously! Like I said, I get it’s a very contentious issue and I’m sure people have varied feelings on this, but to walk into a conversation literally knowing nothing about the topic at hand and then hand waving it away so quickly…I mean there’s no point in even continuing the conversation at that point.
        cultureswitch 3y ago
granzymes 3y ago
Whether they removed the article or not, I think it’s ridiculous that WIRED didn’t explain why the article was retracted. They should have mentioned 1) what the article got wrong and 2) that the article was written by a former Duck Duck Go executive who should know better.
- bonestamp2 3y ago
  Ya, I'd prefer if they just corrected the article, made a note at the top of the article about what was corrected, and have a disclaimer that it was written by Google's competitor.
SllX 3y ago
That would be showing too much respect for or deference to conspiracy theorists, who aren’t really worth the trouble. Copies probably exist in the Internet Archive, archive.is and in PDFs people could have saved when the article was up so it’s not like it truly disappeared. WIRED just took down a bad article that shouldn’t have been published.
autoexec 3y ago
Transparency is the key to trust and journalistic integrity. Even an article that was mostly wrong/written from a failed premise should remain accessible with a timestamped correction statement explaining the problem. Making your mistakes suddenly disappear as if they never happened is tempting, but it's going to leave users feeling gaslit, distrustful, or even just misinformed.

littlestymaar 3y ago

> the point of having editorial standards is so they can be applied by the editor before publication... “Ain't nobody got time for that”. The role of journalists is to provide facts, but the business model of media in the internet age is about “creating content” and “engagement” and they don't work well together …

vkou 3y ago
Even providing facts is a subjective, opinionated process. Which facts are provided, which are left out, which are contextualized, whether or not active or passive voice is used[1] and which are not can completely invert the meaning of a story. [1] 'The gun went off and the shot hit Mr. Smith's head' versus 'Officer Sloan shot Mr. Smith in the head.' [2] [2] Both of these are 'just the facts', but one of them blames the gun for going off, the other blames the person who made the gun go off. Passive voice versus active voice, very different presentation of the same facts, both are correct, and both are biased.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > Even providing facts is a subjective, opinionated process. Yes, that's why you need press freedom with multiple point of views. But it is orthogonal to the point I was making.

jrockway 3y ago

I have always found this to be a weird take from a forum largely populated by software people. Every piece of software I have ever used has been riddled with bugs and security defects. This despite the fact that we have dedicated sub-fields for both (security engineering / test engineering). So when a journalist notices a bug in their article and has to "retract a release", how is that not what we do every single day? I think you might just be disappointed in humanity, rather than any particular agency or person. Humans come together to get the right answer eventually; not multiple times a day, every day, without fail. Sometimes the software doesn't do what you want. Sometimes that article has a factual error. Eventually we figure it out. It's not the end of the world.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
zo1 3y ago
The same way we expect "QA" to pick up those bugs before release? Think about the opposite. Imagine we pickup a bug in a live application and update it citing "our QA standards". This magical word does not absolve us of the fact that we let a bug through to production. And it's implied that we'll do better next time to pick up this kind of bug.
- embik 3y ago
  The post you are responding to is making the point that even though we have QA, dedicated jobs or even departments for these things … We, as a profession, still fail in releasing bug-free software. And that’s 100% correct. Is that really something you are challenging? Which pieces of popular software you can think of are bug-free? And are you thinking of more than a handful?
  - zo1 3y ago
    They said "So when a journalist notices a bug in their article and has to "retract a release", how is that not what we do every single day?" And they themselves were responding to someone criticizing media for using "editorial standards" as an excuse when they "retract a release". And I explained how we are the same and supposedly strive to not release bad content/software, we just don't get to magically absolve fault with an excuse that "it doesn't meet our QA standards" as an analogy to "editorial standards". Anywho, the whole thing breaks down when we have to beat it with a stick. It's a discussion, assume a charitable interpretation.

omoikane 3y ago

> having editorial standards is so they can be applied by the editor before publication Maybe there were lots of articles that were never published due to editorial standards, but we only see the ones that slipped through.