I'm going to tell the story about what radicalized me against "the news" as a source of useful information that could be trusted.
I had been an avid news reader for a long time, very much about using different tools and aggregators and RSS and stuff to deliver a nonstop stream of what I considered high-quality news sources into my brain.
I'd see people complain about now the news was "biased" or "clickbait" and I just kind of dismissed it.
Anyway one day something happened while I was working at Twitter. A mistake was made involving user passwords, and there were a lot of rules about having to publicly disclose such security incidents.
So Twitter followed disclosure procedure and explained what happened. A short time later, sites like The Verge and TechCrunch ran with the story.
Someone (no not me) had been debugging a issue, and added a temporary logging statement to one of the instances that takes frontend requests. Included in the debug output was the current request, which unfortunately meant that if the request it was serving was the login form, the user's password would be logged.
And since all of the logs on all of the systems were collected by a unified log search, it meant that the log contents were persisted to a log aggregator.
So yes, some passwords were logged out to this file and then persisted into the log search tool. Since you stood some nonzero % chance of your login being served from this one instance, Twitter advised everyone change their password to be safe.
The headline wasn't technically a lie.
Because the log aggregator persisted the log files it collected, they were "stored". Since more than one password was included, "Twitter Stores Passwords in Plaintext" is a statement you can make without lying.
But the thing is, that's not what anyone who read only the headline imagined. They imagined the thing that the headline IMPLIED: that Twitter's database with usernames and passwords was storing everyone's passwords in plaintext, without hashing them.
This was a common mistake companies made, storing passwords in plaintext or reversibly encrypted with no hashing or salting. And companies that did that without knowing better were roundly mocked for having such "dumb" engineers.
They knew that people were going to read the headline and think that Twitter was doing a specific thing. And they knew Twitter wasn't actually doing it - they'd made a mistake yes, but not the one people would think they had.
These news outlets had to have known that people reading their headline would believe something that wasn't true. And they wrote the headline that way anyway, to encourage clicks and shares.
This was such an eye-opening moment for me. They weren't trying to inform.
Yes, the body of the article always clarified what the headline meant. It always specified that the storage was only some user's passwords, it was a temporary logging bug, and the persistence mechanism wasn't the central user credentials store but a log aggregator.
But they also knew a lot of people would share the article without reading it. And people would think something objectively untrue was true. And the HN comments all verified that yes, that's precisely what people thought.
It was so carefully worded to not be libelous, there was so much intention behind it all.
And it made me realize that the only reason I even knew that it was misleading was because I was on the inside, on the opposite end of the news story, at the place the news story was about.
Watching as CNN and FN and AP and Reuters and NYT and all these other legitimate news sources reprinted the story, each time slightly more scandalous because it was written by someone who understood it less.
I couldn't help but wonder, how many headlines had I read that had similarly misguided me? How many times did I shake my head at the villains of a news story and conclude they were stupid or evil because I too had read an inflammatory-but-not-quite-a-lie headline and made conclusions based on it?
It didn't seem likely that TC and Verge specifically "had it out" for Twitter. It was just another news story for them.
I pretty much stopped following the news after this. I'd read every headline so skeptically that I didn't believe it, or a friend or relative would share a headline or article with me and I'd just respond with a count of the number of ads I saw on the page.
I became so skeptical of all news that I basically stopped consuming it. Denzel Washington's quote started really resonating with me:
"If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read it, you’re misinformed."
@rodhilton yeah, i mostly read ars technica, techdirt, some stuff popehat writes. every outlet you mentioned, i abandoned. ive never watched tv news. my BA is in journalism. i do read ap stuff occasionally.
I had learned in school that when you write a newspaper article, the headline summarizes the whole thing.
The first paragraph gives all the detail the reader needs to understand everything.
Next paragraph adds a little more detail, and so on. The idea was that the editor could cut the article between any two paragraphs and the article would be publishable.
That just isn't how it works now. It's all a misleading scandalous trick until the first inline ad. After that is the truth. Sometimes.
I want to like the news. I really do. My favorite genre of movie is when journalists uncover some huge story and put everything on the line to get the truth out there. Those movies where the poster is all black and white with red letters and it's just concerned people sitting in a news room. I love that stuff.
I won my oscar pool by picking Spotlight the year The Revenant was nominated!
But this event totally poisoned me on the modern news consumption experience.
@rodhilton I’ve lost count how many times stories about people and occurrences I know personally have had something exactly like this occur. Misleading headlines and summaries, quotes taken way out of context or deliberately framed to imply something that wasn’t there or wasn’t said. I used to read multiple (physical) newspapers for years. But now I’m very disallusioned.
I, seriously, think the original sin of digital newspapers (and magazines) was not bringing their print advertisers online
@rodhilton my argument is that newspapers and magazines should have treated their print ads as part of their online content and continued it online. Instead they stripped ads out of even their archives online and entered into all kinds of dubious bargains for online only ads/targeting that create incentives that reward churn and appealing to the lowest common denominator vs what ads historically had been in newspapers which was far broader, less tied to specific stories and part of the content
@rodhilton for years (now decades ago) I had a subscription to the print WSJ almost entirely for the ads. As the full page ads in the first section of the WSJ was how many companies sent messages to the market and business about major announcements and strategies. (I also liked a handful of the regular columns - which were nearly all over time reduced and corrupted by the politics of the owners)
But likewise local papers like the Chicago Tribune or Sun Times had ads that were useful content
@eoin yeah, this is spot-on. I noticed this when I'd watch movies about any aspect of technology, I'd laugh and point out all the inaccuracies in what the computers were doing, how impossible it was, how ignorant these screenwriters must be.
Then one day I watched what I thought was an excellent courtroom drama with my brother-in-law, who was a lawyer. And he did exactly the same thing.
@rodhilton Yes. I work in a local government and have responded to requests for information and seen the fiction that reporters have spun with it. Unless the article posts the actual documents, assume you are being fed a narrative.
Until you read the article and the documents, and are able to confirm a connection between all three with an independent source, presume that the headline you read is a lie, is clickbait, or is both.
This experience got me to a point where I realized I couldn't just passively consume news, I had to seriously work at double-checking everything, essentially becoming my own journalist with no training. It was too much work.
And people rightly point out that "I don't read the news" is a position of the super-entitled but I don't know what the alternative is. It feels like it's all dishonest.
@rodhilton This was pretty much my experience being on the site of an occupy encampment and reading the news about us. In the decade since, I've learned how to read between the lines by accounting for media objectives, namely profit (so clicks and shares) and preserving the status quo (such as reprinting police press releases without edit, commentary, or any independent investigation). So I still read about what's going on, but I have hypertension from the amount of salt I've taken with it
Because headlines are limited, subheads exist. While the media plays a role, it's bigger than that. It's society. And the media are not going away, only converging into further derision, as evidenced from their mishandling of the Hamas debacle, and their inability to detect propaganda without bordering on collusion.
This is as far I got in your complaint, but it was interesting. Always curious about mass media effects.
@SteveThompson Yeah I mean you didn't read as far as the part of the thread where I specifically address what you are saying.
The headlines were written by tech people knowing how the readers would read them, knowing that they would come to an inaccurate conclusion, and posted them anyway.
Yes, that is on the media. If the job is to INFORM, then that precise scenario would be avoided at all costs, rather than explicitly made to happen for clicks.
@SteveThompson okay but when basically every news outlet works this way, I find it very difficult to blame society as a whole.
Like we all know that the news is manipulating us and misleading us. Okay great, we're all on the same page. Now what? There's no alternative, you can just detach from the news and know nothing about what's going on, or read it anyway in an antagonistic relationship where you're at a disadvantage.
@rodhilton I wasn't putting the onus strictly on society. It's a system of roots and symptoms.
You started your piece noting aggregation and that is exactly what we must do. It doesn't solve problems with editors ill-equipped to perceive propaganda or media bias but it keeps us informed.
@rodhilton get over yourself. One bad experience -- which could have been avoided if Twitter had a competent communications department -- is no excuse to distrust the millions of journalists worldwide trying to bring you facts about the world. If your conclusion is that all journalism is bad, you already wanted to hate journalism.
@stevenbodzin yeah if your conclusion from this whole thread was that I "wanted to hate journalism" I hate to inform you that your reading comprehension skills are severely lacking.
The whole point of the story was that this "one bad experience" made me realize that every other story which I took for face value was probably, for someone else, the same misleading thing that this one was for me.
@rodhilton of course you need to read skeptically. But you are encouraging people to distrust all reporting because of one silly, forgettable experience with the yellow press
@stevenbodzin I'm not encouraging people to do shit.
I'm sharing my own personal experience and why I went from being a news hound to being extremely skeptical of the news, by seeing how the facts were misrepresented when I was in the position to be an expert on the topic being reported on.
@stevenbodzin Blah, bhah, blah, blah. You sound personally offended by this. Another "Not All......" moaner. Perhaps you should get over 'your' self.
Btw, there are very few journalists worthy of the title. Most are churnalists, Rupertors, feelpinionists, and hacks. Real journalists often get 'disappeared' or killed. @rodhilton
@Tooden based on @stevenbodzin's profile it looks like he's in journalism, so I can see why my experience here might personally offend him. It must be hard to see someone discount all of journalism when you consider yourself part of the field.
I can't fault him for that. Could probably fault him for some of the other ultra rude-as-fuck shit he said that he's since had the good sense to delete but not that.
@stevenbodzin@rodhilton
It's not the journalists who we distrust. It's the editors who make the clickbait headlines and the news sites that sprinkle the news article page with 400 ads. This isn't about tge journalsm itself. I'm sure the story itself was properly written and likely even had originally a non-clickbaity headline. It's just that the whole news business is now poised to misinform as a default, in order to get the clicks and the sweet sweet ads moula.
@prettyhuman@stevenbodzin yeah, I love journalists. It's just that the only places they can earn a living are more interested in slurping down clicks than informing the public.
The financial motivator at the heart of news organizations as for-profit corporate businesses is the root of the evil here.
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