by hirundo on 5/25/21, 12:57 AM
Making stealth edits was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth.
Please someone write an unstealthing service, a cross between Wayback Machine and diff, that outputs a feed of such edits.
I'd love to see a trend of sites surfacing changes themselves and serving up a per-article history like Wikipedia or GitHub. Bonus if they annotate the changes. In this case they could just write something like "the lab escape theory still looks unlikely but we're now less certain of that".
by arolihas on 5/25/21, 12:59 AM
by underseacables on 5/25/21, 1:14 AM
It’s fascinating to see a news organization that, due to editing after the fact, can never be wrong.
by soonnow on 5/26/21, 8:52 AM
I'm severely lacking in the virology department, but what I have read is that it clearly is, without a doubt, not man made.
That leaves the escape from lab hypothesis. Which is certainly has not been disproved. Maybe the scientific community should just ask themselves, how could it have happened and how could it have been avoided?
I don't believe at all in blaming China, that is just xenophobia in disguise. Would you blame India for the Indian variant, or the UK for the British variant?
by musicale on 5/26/21, 5:08 AM
Here at [internet company] we care deeply about fact checking, so we are pleased to announce that we no longer consider [x] to be a debunked conspiracy theory, so you are now permitted to post links to news articles about [x] without being banned from our platform for spreading disinformation.
Have a great day!
by throwawaysea on 5/26/21, 3:22 AM
I don’t really care, as a reader, if Vox claims to treat their articles as “living” articles. This feels like a cover up for the past aggressive shutdown of the lab leak hypothesis, pushed by journalists and activists, who often did so only to attack Trump in an election year where they were desperate for any leverage. Such stealthy edits are avoidance of accountability that is long overdue for the journalism industry. Don’t let them get away with it:
https://spectator.us/topic/media-u-turn-lab-leak-coronavirus...by infoseek12 on 5/25/21, 11:31 PM
It seems like a lab leak was always the most parsimonious explanation. Now that we aren’t in the middle of Covid and don’t have a distractingly incompetent administration I think we are going to see a re-estimation of probabilities and a lot of attempts to rewrite history. The Lancet and quite a few other really respected institutions published things I suspect they’ll now need to try walk back.
by codeflow2202 on 5/25/21, 5:54 AM
This is whole story is absurd! For this to be true the following should have all been lying:
- researchers
- the most influential science magazines
- China, the USA and many other governments
- the WHO and other health organizations
- the media
- people on HN, Reddit and any social media platform that made me believe that the lab leak was never an option.
by nojokes on 5/27/21, 1:55 AM
In other news UK government along with Boris Johnson claims that UK policy was not initially based on reaching herd immunity through uncontrolled spread of the virus.
by amai on 5/25/21, 9:30 PM
We need something like github for news articles.
by OldGoodNewBad on 5/26/21, 12:03 PM
Part of the reason “conspiracy theories” are more popular than ever is the media’s a bunch of vomit-encrusted lying shills without the self awareness to even pretend they’re unbiased any more. The media in general will never recover from Trump, he broke them thoroughly and completely, forever.
by agogdog on 5/25/21, 2:47 AM
Doesn't Vox consider articles living artifacts and regularly change them as they become more informed? More like a wiki that's meant to be highly relevant in search results?
I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but it's their self-inflicted mode of operation.