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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

I’m still struggling to understand why they’d want to block that.

Edit: on re-reading I realize it’s so that they don’t get caught for this plagiarism since their modus operandi was plagiarize first rewrite slowly.

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So they can silently change stuff without the ability for someone to go back and look at what it used to say.

Honestly I can almost imagine a way to arrive at this conclusion without it being shifty (although no idea what the case actually is here).

If you're going to debunk an article about something like a lack of vaccine safety and need to retract a couple of sentences later, but the overall conclusion is the same, then the conspiracists will be right on you with a diff of the changes from the archive trying to piece together what it all means and who paid you off.

Then one can update to provide a prominent note of clarification, rather than rewriting history. This deprives conspiracists of the ability to go "See, they rewrite history" while providing the full story, warts and all.

That's 100% standard practice for any reputable news organization.

Sadly, many an erstwhile reputable organization have devolved to engage in this practice.

Conspiracists (and many others) disregard Snopes out of hand, so I highly doubt that was part of their thinking.

Putting the concern of those who may misinterpret the changes above the goal of the truth, is also known as deception. Encyclopedias stand the test of time with addendums, to facilitate corrections. Removing the transparency merely allows for cyclical references in the news.

You can print a retraction if you need to. Nothing wrong with fessing up and saying “we made a mistake, here’s the correction”, and reputable newspapers/news sites do this as a matter of course. Conspiracy nuts are going to do their own thing no matter what you do or say and if they’re determined enough, will have their own record, so you can only act in good faith for people who are willing to look at you and receive what you say in good faith.

>Nothing wrong with fessing up and saying “we made a mistake, here’s the correction”

Sadly if you do retractions, you are not qualified for the name "fact checker". Because "facts" are not retractable.

And fact-checkers are just the tip of the iceberg, and if you care to look, there are many things that are peddled as being "fact" when there is not enough credible evidence to say so..

For example the statement "Vaccines don't cause autism". Any one with two brain cells will know that this NOT a fact, simply because it does not say "Which vaccines".

But that does not prevent people from saying that as a FACT.

So it is not only them. It is you as well.

You’ve touched on a basic problem with claiming to be a fact checker where it intersects with science, because “fact checking” is a journalistic tool decent for checking he said/she said BS, but science is an ongoing and continuous process that has its own form of review not assisted by the fact (fact check this!) that most science reporting is crap.

That said, fact checks are typically written by journalists or institutions claiming to serve a journalist function; and so are fully governable by common journalist practices such as retractions.

Retractions are nice because they acknowledge that there was a human error somewhere in the organization’s processes, memorialize the error but then correct the record with supplementary and reviewable matter. Doing this also provides a signal to readers that even though this particular institution filled with these imperfect humans made a mistake on the record, they sufficiently value their reputation to own the mistake and correct it on the record.

Good faith and honesty can take you far.

That is a good thing. I want to see those changes.

Preventing people from seeing the change log of a page because "conspiracy theorists might use it" is dangerous thinking. Saying that it's okay to forego transparency because it could be used to bolster people who disagree with you is backwards. That's precisely why transparency should be retained - when you're the person disagreeing, it benefits you.

Case in point: On Jan 6, NPR published an article with a 10AM headline and timestamp about the upcoming Trump rally.

Later in the day, they changed the headline to be something like "Insurgents invade Capital building", but did not change the 10AM timestamp up top. One had to read the article to find the update timestamp.

Newsmaxx, and thus many if its viewers looked at the headline and headline timestamp and trumpeted "how did they know?! It's a conspiracy!"

I had to look into the wayback machine to see the original headline to show to a relative who'd bought the Newsmaxx narrative. I'm not sure they totally believed or even understood what I was telling them, but I am certain it raised some doubt.

All of that would was unnecessary, if only NPR had done proper change management on its articles.

This is the exact same because "conspiracy theorists might use it" reasoning just flowing in the opposite direction. Conspiracy theorists with conspiracy theorize regardless of the level of transparency provided by journalist organizations.

What!? NPR's website contains articles with false time stamps. Are you ok with this? Why does the conspiracy theorist angle matter at all?

Knowing when an article was written is a useful piece of information that is being destroyed by these always evolving articles. It might not be full on Orwell yet, but these always-mutating-articles are opening the door to an Orwellian future.

We need to be able to go back and look at the past unfiltered and unmodified.

>Why does the conspiracy theorist angle matter at all?

It doesn't. That was my point. I wasn't praising or criticizing NPR. I was saying that conspiracy theorists shouldn't be a reason either for or against transparency.

> Later in the day, they changed the headline to be something like "Insurgents invade Capital building", but did not change the 10AM timestamp up top. One had to read the article to find the update timestamp.

News websites really need to stop continuously rewriting their articles. It's a PITA if you want to cite them as a source, then all the sudden what you cited isn't there.

I've had NY Times articles get completely rewritten while I read them (admittedly with some long pauses between when I started and finished), and when I went back to quote something, it wasn't there anymore.

I don't think this is nefarious or anything, it's just them trying to adapt to expectations that they'll always be up to date with the latest stuff. You have the same article about some rapidly changing story hanging around their app/website all day (and "most popular articles" facets), and I suppose most people expect those things to be up to date.

This isn’t any different than Wikipedia. If the news article was more like a Wiki (with revision history), would that be sufficient for you?

Sure, but they need to be clear that they aren’t committed to it being an accurate story at the time of publish (expectation of a newspaper).

If they want to be an encyclopedia then be one.

> Sure, but they need to be clear that they aren’t committed to it being an accurate story at the time of publish (expectation of a newspaper).

You're misreading the situation. The media doesn't have a crystal ball any more than you or I do. They can be "committed to it being an accurate story at the time of publish," but then new stuff happens after that time, or they have the time to go into more depth. The news isn't just about accuracy, it's also about timeliness.

>The media doesn't have a crystal ball any more than you or I do.

Sure, but the media is not writing encyclopedia entries. They make hyperbolic claims about how they break stories before anyone else, and how accurate they are.

But since they are human, sometimes mistakes are made, and I think it's pretty dishonest to quietly change an article after it's been published. Publishing a story should mean that you back its content 100%, and it's the best, most accurate story you could have written with all available information. If new information comes out later that changes things, write a new article that references the mistakes of the original. There were still decisions made to include the content that was later shown to be incorrect, and I would _much_ rather see a follow up explaining what they got wrong than "correcting" the article after publication.

> Sure, but the media is not writing encyclopedia entries. They make hyperbolic claims about how they break stories before anyone else, and how accurate they are.

Well, breaking news stories is their job an no one else's.

> If new information comes out later that changes things, write a new article that references the mistakes of the original. There were still decisions made to include the content that was later shown to be incorrect, and I would _much_ rather see a follow up explaining what they got wrong than "correcting" the article after publication.

I'm sure a front page of mea culpas and minutiae about the process of reporting itself would scratch some people's ideological itches, but it wouldn't actually be very useful as an information source about what the current state of things are, which is what people are actually going there to get.

Personally I'd prefer they just issue a new version of the story with a kind of version history (or at least leave the old version up somewhere), at least for major revisions, but I also kind of empathize with them not wanting to do that, because that would probably be a feature almost exclusively used by annoying pests trying to stir up BS outrage (e.g. like the kind of people who think that software should never have bugs).

This seems like it would be a mess. My local news has a weather page that they constantly update. Sometimes 10 times an hour. While some people, like you, care about the original accuracy, I think most people don’t care at all about the past forecasts. I think a bunch of links and references to a change of the 1pm temperature forecast from 86 to 87 degrees would be more annoying than useful.

Do you know what “at the time of publish” means?

By having a fluid changing story, two people won’t even have the same reference point if they both read the same NYTimes article.

> If the news article was more like a Wiki (with revision history), would that be sufficient for you?

Not the person you were replying to, but I would love this, yeah. That changelog proposal being implemented would be more than enough to resolve most of the issues I have with publications that silently alter contents of their articles after they were originally published (without indicating that an alteration took place).

Maybe Journalists need to be better at their jobs and just more honest in general? Major publications should have revision history links as articles are changed. If anything some of them are clearly going out of their way to cover their tracks as the narrative changes.

I understand mistakes happen, but you should be always very clear on your corrections and if you are a web publication, have revision history links.

Source: Journalism degree holder that is tired of the MSM. I advise all the people I know to stop reading/watching it. So tired of the outrage driven news cycle that is often highly misleading.

This kind of thing also makes the internet less searchable.

I was trying to find some information on the previous activity of a cop who recently became infamous in my area for beating and choking a man who was pleading for his life, to see if he had ever been in the news before. So I used the time window feature on Google, only to get tons and tons of articles published that same day that were backdated years because of bad change management.

See for yourself on the link to a google search below, results are filtered between 2018 and January 2021, but every single article for the first five pages is about the incident that occurred two weeks ago, mistakenly backdated years.

https://bit.ly/3xEpCGA

> See for yourself on the link to a google search below, results are filtered between 2018 and January 2021, but every single article for the first five pages is about the incident that occurred two weeks ago, mistakenly backdated years.

Is that the news website's fault, or Google's fault?

The first two links are to what look like keyword/topic pages with many articles, and it wouldn't be surprising of Google pulled a different date than what you're looking for out of such a page. Some of the other hits appear to be old articles with a "new stories" bar (not sure exactly what you call it, here's an example: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/15/trump-admits-biden-won-ele...).

Personally, I don't consider Google date searching to be very reliable, IMHO. They're making a promise with it they can't really keep.

Personally, I don't consider Google date searching to be very reliable, IMHO. They're making a promise with it they can't really keep.

It might work better if they searched on first-indexed date, rather than server modification timestamp headers or dates embedded within the page.

> It might work better if they searched on first-indexed date, rather than server modification timestamp headers or dates embedded within the page.

But that assumes they index things in a timely matter, which is likely not true a huge amount of the time.

And I don't think that would help in this case, because in many of the cases it appears they got the article date right, but the article page is dynamic and now includes snippets of stuff that post-dates the article.

Totally agree. If someone’s hell bent on seeing conspiracies they’re going to see them everywhere. Better to be transparent.

Just saying I can see how you could rationalise this decision, even if it’s a terrible idea.

The MOT, may it always be right. But my MOT right, or wrong.

Orwell never expected that Minitrue would come from private instead of government entities, but at this point I’m not even sure what is public and what is private anymore.

The arbiters of truth get their legitimacy by never being wrong. Nobody is never wrong but you can give that illusion by removing any instances of you being wrong from history.

Because they're a sham fact checking website and they don't want a paper trail.

How is this not a better established position? I see Snopes as pure, unadulterated bias. Honestly, I see all those fact checking websites the same way.

Which is fine, though humorously this pairs nicely with another thread on HN this morning about HS critical thinking courses around journalism, quite well.

Really? So you think Trump was wearing his pants backwards at this rally?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-wear-pants-backwards...

Snopes says he wasn't, and shows evidence why. That's just "pure, unadulterated bias" though, right? His pants are on backwards?

Otherwise "I see Snopes as pure, unadulterated bias" would be such a broad generalization it's meaningless!

> I see Snopes as pure, unadulterated bias

Could you please elaborate? I have never seen them described like this.

I see it all the time... on the sorts of subreddits all the RWNJs hang out on.

Here's an example Snopes article questioning the authenticity of the photos on Hunter's Biden Laptop.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-hunter-biden-porn/

They have not updated the fact check.

Here's a story with a video in which Hunter Biden himself claims Russian drug dealers stole another one of his laptops for blackmail. And 'The Russians have videos of me doing crazy f**ing sex!

Source with the Video: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9881213/Unearthed-v...

Huh, the article where they say "Trump did not explicitly tell people to 'storm' or 'breach' or 'break into' the Capitol" and instead “peacefully and patriotically” march does't fit the mold of "pure, unadulterated bias."

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-tell-supporters-stor...

I'm so confused!

Engage with the given example, which proves the claim.

If a source makes questionable claims to the left or right, it is biased. If it makes questionable claims to the left and right, it is not biased, it just lacks quality.

There's nothing questionable about the statement you quoted.

That statement is correct. Why are you confused?

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-s...

Snopes rated that claim "Mixed"

Compare:

  It was a subjective call on whether ____'s use of phrases "you have to show strength" and "demand that ____ do the right thing" were meant to condone violence and crimes among ____ extremists without explicitly encouraging it.

With:

  ___ said they should “stay in the street,” “fight for justice,” and “get more confrontational.” But there was more context to ___ remarks, and ___ didn’t call for violence, nor did ___ words incite violence.

---

The first is from the article on Trump you cited (rated "Mixed").

Second quote is from an article about comments by Maxine Waters on George Floyd protests & LA riots (of which she explicitly said, "I call it a rebellion") https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/maxine-waters-comments/ (rated "False")

The pattern seems to be: If there's a way a favored speaker can be taken positively, that will be explained. If there's a way a non-favored speaker can be taken badly, it will be called out.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/

Rating: Mixture

What's True

Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.

What's Undetermined

In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-forgot-defense-secre...

Rating: Mixture

What's True

A video shows Biden fumbling his words and apparently blanking on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's name at one point in the speech, although he had mentioned Austin's name a few minutes earlier without issue.

What's Undetermined

It's unclear whether Biden literally "forgot" his defense secretary's name at that moment, or whether, for example, he got stuck doing an extended "folksy" ad lib after initially tripping over his words.

I see it stated all the time, but whenever I ask why, instead of a substantial argument, I get downvotes or "isn't it obvious?" or some thinly veiled "how dare they debunk something I wanted to be true.".

The plagiarism accusation is interesting and should be resolved, but isn't evidence of misinformation or evidence that they are less reliable than [no known alternative] suggested by critics.

> I see Snopes as pure, unadulterated bias

Oh, they said Trump told the truth when he said "Murders this year have spiked 27% in Philadelphia."

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/24/donald-tru...

Why didn't anyone remind them of their bias before this got published?

I love how ever single reply to the parent mentions Trump, as if anyone that thinks snopes is full of shit must be a Trump supporter. It's almost as if there's a group of people out there who all think exactly alike and knee jerk to defend these organizations out of some strange sense of loyalty.

>I love how ever single reply to the parent mentions Trump, as if anyone that thinks snopes is full of shit must be a Trump supporter.

Because there was no widespread vocal opposition to Snopes until Trump supporters started calling it "fake news" for debunking his claims about his inauguration turnout. Now they come out of the woodwork with every mention of the site to call it liberal propaganda and whatnot. No one else cares about the site that much - it's entertainment at best.

The thread they're replying to said nothing about liberal anything, although I would understand jumping to that conclusion if they had.

The widespread vocal opposition to Snopes is not simply from Trump calling it fake news, if anything his was a response just like the rest of us, a response to that organization plainly and blatantly lying to their readers repeatedly.

And yet if you ask people for a list of these blatant lies, most of the time they'll be items critical of Trump or of right-wing talking points.

I'm sure there are some people who don't like Snopes for whatever other reasons but it's obvious that much of the modern resentment against the site is driven by a political agenda.

Well sure, but those examples aren't the result of opposing bias. For the past 5 years any mainstream source or aggregator of information has been on a feverish rampage against Trump. Even if you don't like him it's plain as day. So of course a lot of the prominent examples are going to be that, because that's all they've been doing for 5 years.

And the reply in the other direction mentions Hunter Biden. I don't understand why! (We're still pretending we don't know that people are insinuating Snopes has a liberal bias right?)

If Trump makes a huge number of false statements during his tenure as the president he's going to get the attention of fact-checking sites...

I can tell you why, it's because it is a very prominent example of a blatant bald faced lie left as is to propagandize naive people who won't actually look into things themselves and delegate that role to Snopes.

If Trump makes a huge number of false statements it should attract the attention of everyone. People that delegate their own critical thinking to an entity claiming to be unbiased and informed in doing it for them are going to be misled one way or another.

They debunked the video that purported to show Trump insulting his supporters. They said the video was fake.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-video-insulting-supp...

According to you, they are wrong, though. Ignore evidence to the contrary.

>plagiarize first rewrite slowly

Obviously publishing work that isn't your own is wrong, but "plagiarize then rewrite" is a very effective method of developing a creative skill. There is a question about when the transformation really becomes "yours".

An example: Radiohead - "Creep" was a tranformation for The Hollies "The Air that I Breathe", Radiohead later went to sue Lana Del Rey for "Get Free" which seemingly was built with one of the two as a starting point.

The moral question is... when is copying actually ok? How much do you have to transform something until you don't "owe" the result to someone else... or more fundamentally, to what extent should any of us be able to own intellectual property? There are some valid arguments towards "none at all".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaXFc4Zb78s

I’ve heard from authors that typing someone else’s entire novel helped them to understand the craft (and then they went on to write their own books, not based on the novels they typed).

And of course musicians learn other songs before they write their own.

But, copy/pasting an article, and then tweaking a few words to make it more unique, doesn’t seem like a great process for learning the journalism craft. At least not on the same level as the two examples I brought up.

to the non expert ear, Get Free sounds much much more similar to Creep, than Creep does to "The Air that I Breathe"

If the "groove", "feel", or chord progression of such a song is identical or substantially similar to the song you copied from, you could still be liable for copyright infringement per Williams v. Bridgeport Music (the "Blurred Lines" case).

Before you complain, note well that among black musicians the groove is the song, the melody being something of an afterthought -- the exact opposite of what prevails in the white concept of music and, in particular, historical understanding of copyright law. Black musicians have been trying to get acknowledgement of ownership of their grooves for decades.

In general, it's not a good idea to use someone else's song as a starting point. In most cases, the original composer is going to be able to establish some form of "substantial similarity" to make you liable for infringement; it will take radical transformation to avoid this.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

"We were always at war with eastasia"

So that their stated facts are not held to a consistent expectation.

I wanted to post their original article on the corona virus and masks in the replies here and went to the wayback machine to find it and just learned they excluded themselves from the service. So I can see why they'd block that.

Archive links are used to bypass paywalls and direct traffic away from the site. (The moderator of this site encourages it [1], and archive links for most paywalled articles are in the comments.)

This could be a legitimate reason they were doing it (nefarious ones are easily imagined as well).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

Ad revenue? A traditional news org might put up a paywall, but that presumably goes against Snopes' mandate of debunking nonsense for the masses. We here at HN tend to paste paywalled article links into archive.is. Sure, an adblocker does the job of depriving beneficiaries of ad revenue just as well, but this way there's at least a chance.

One possible scenario that's not evil: If they get something wrong and correct it, people that don't believe the correction can pass around links to the archive.org version before the correction.

Not saying I agree with the decision or that's why they did it, just a possible reason.

Why is that a bad thing? It's clearly marked as an archive. I'm also not sure how that fixes the problem, considering that people could still pass around images, which are pretty much taken as seriously as the real site.

I didn't say it was. I was just guessing at a possible reason they might have done it. I've seen anti-vax folks pass around archive.org links as well as pictures of stuff that was taken down/corrected before.

The fact that we have had good version control for decades and the journalism industry has not adopted it tells you their motives. It's like a godsend to someone who views themselves as a journalist, the ability to always be able to demonstrate their integrity. It almost takes more effort to not adopt it.

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