Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by RansomStark | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

RansomStark

> Facts can only be gathered from reliable sources.

Source?

How do you define reliable?

Why is the authors identity important?

Facts don't change because you know the authors name, or trust the source, or like the person telling lies.

The idea that anonymous sources, or "untrusted" sources (for someones definition of trusted) cannot be the source of facts is gaining ground right now, and it needs to be pushed back on wherever it is seen.

It's a lazy Ad hominem, and it's down right dangerous.

I don't care if it's elected officials claiming Russian malinformation or a random chess thread, this is the hill I choose to die on.

View on HN

The tradition of journalists using anonymous sources doesn’t mean they use anonymous sources, it means that they know who the source is, considers them reliable, but agrees not to name them. Usually they require multiple independent sources.

Unknown sources on the internet are usually not reliable. Anonymous sources should not be trusted, even when there are more than one saying the same thing. Bots and deliberate misinformation abound.

This is not a hill you should die on as it’s a hill that can greatly harm democratic society.

Is democratic society the hill to die on? Sources?

That's one possibility. The other possibility is that the journalist mentions anonymous sources because he/she does not have any and is simply making stuff up.

That’s why you verify the information from other sources.

Thank you Sherlock for this invaluable suggestion.

Quite often this is simply not possible.

Next time I read "according to our anonymous sources in the FBI", I'll make sure I reach out to them for verification.

If you can’t verify it then that’s a rumor. The world doesn’t owe you an explanation and you can’t be informed of everything.

That’s not journalism, that’s something else. There used to be fact checkers and editors used to have to verify the sources. I realise that the press barons no longer have any integrity, but it certainly used to be the rule.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com