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Comment by sirwolfgang | Hacker News Reader

This kind of stuff is really upsetting. If you don't want people to do this kind of thing, you have to not encourage them. Even if they are all arrested, others will see this. And think, Hey I can get a reward for doing this stuff.

A 10 sec look at their twitter feed will tell you that they are doing this primarily to make a name for themselves. They want to be famous.

Yet what does every single news outlet do? Plaster their groups name all over every story. Even the BBC goes to mention them by name. Which is only going to encourage this behavior.

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>Yet what does every single news outlet do?

What they're supposed to? This is after all, news. You don't drop a story because you think someone is a cunt.

You report it, as news, saying "a hacker group". You don't have to report the name of the group. There's something called "Journalism ethics and standards", that includes stuff like not reporting a victim's name or in a lot of cases not broadcasting the videos terrorist groups send out.

You want to see something scary, start to look at how media coverage affects mass shootings. There is very strong evidence to support the idea that our current media coverage of making these people "famous" increases the deadliness of these events as compared to something like the North Hollywood Shootout.

I rather disagree--it's already basically trivial to fabricate as much news as we want; removing the burden of proof and specific naming makes it almost impossible to fact-check anything (and even then, in the pathological case, details can be made up, but I digress).

Allowing agencies to not report details that can be independently verified makes for worse news and better propeganda.

So you're saying that The Washington Post shouldn't have reported on Watergate, with Deep Throat? If you can't trust the people providing the news, then citing sources doesn't change that fact. This is why you have collaborating sources, this is why you vet stories, and this is why you build trust with your readers. They could have linked to their source, and still not NAMED the group. Its the name that gets added to google search, not the sources.

Are you sure about your last sentence? The last time I checked, all that news did was eavesdrop and classify everyone as a cunt, because those news sell.

You say "a group of hackers" or whatever and don't name them. Similarly with serial killers, school shootings, or anything of that nature you simply don't say the name. Psychologists have been saying for years that doing so only encourages copy cats, because they want to be in the media spotlight.

What they're supposed to? This is after all, news.

I think the point is that you just don't publish the names of the groups responsible for the attacks. The truly interested (security professionals, law enforcement) can go dig for the group names, other people don't really need to know, and likely don't care anyway.

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