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Comment by SirensOfTitan | Hacker News Reader

Once again a highly editorialized title on HN that doesn't match the article. The title of the article reads:

Facebook Ditched The Red Cross For Hurricane Harvey Relief

...the title on here implies some type of nefarious action on Facebook's behalf, but the article goes into way more detail and, just like the original title, has a lot more nuance.

> The Red Cross has faced intense scrutiny and criticism for its work in previous disasters. During Hurricane Harvey, people have encouraged others on social media to donate to groups other than the Red Cross.

From HN rules: > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

Your editorializing does nothing for the discussion except propagate falsehoods for those who read headlines.

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Story was submitted an hour ago, so I wonder if BuzzFeed itself changed the title.

(Looks like the submitted link URL confirms this)

I concur, BuzzFeed never changes the slug after changing the headline.

The only time I think we changed the slugs at my college newspaper was when I did not realize my terrible memey titles in the cms would be on the public url. Got some angry emails over that.

You read it as "highly editorialized" and as implying "some type of nefarious action" but that was entirely your own reading. I'm guessing that this "nefarious" reading was your first impression, but recognize that it may not have been everyone's first impression.

Those of us who have head about the poor job Red Cross has been doing in the past few years saw from the headline that Facebook isn't using Red Cross, and interpreted it as exactly as the article intended: The Red Cross has faced intense scrutiny and criticism for its work in previous disasters, and FB decided not to use them.

The original title was: > Facebook is steering users to donate to a small org no one has heard of

... which has quite an implication. I don't feel worried about: '[t]hose of us who have head about the poor job Red Cross has been doing,' but uneducated folks who just scanned this particular headline.

One thing to clarify is that the original title looks like it was Buzzfeed's, not the submitter. And it seems like Buzzfeed realized at some point the original title was too inflammatory. I could have done a much better job at checking this and redirecting my ire elsewhere for sure.

Ah. When I saw your comment, the HN headline was "Facebook is steering users to donate to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy," which is also different from BuzzFeed's current headline, so I assumed that's what you were talking about.

"Facebook is steering users to donate to a small org no one has heard of" is a worse headline, I agree.

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