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Wired's Attack on Privacy

(simplex.chat)
115 points snvzz | 3 comments | 22 Oct 24 00:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.81s | source
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AlienRobot ◴[22 Oct 24 03:08 UTC] No.41910836[source]▶
Am I the only who finds it odd how Wired is treated as a person?

The article begins with

>The Wired article by David Gilbert

Acknowledging that there is a real person called David Gilbert who wrote the article and it wasn't just an amalgamation known as "Wired" who did. Yet later it says:

>Wired just a month earlier encouraged its readers to adopt encrypted messaging apps, making its current stance even more contradictory.

But that article was written by Lauren Goode and Michael Calore.

If Wired had a stance in this, it would be exercising editorial control, which some would criticize for censoring the authors. Instead, Wired publishes whatever its authors write, and then some criticize for writing contradictory articles.

If I was Wired I'd just shrug because you can't win.

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big-green-man ◴[22 Oct 24 03:25 UTC] No.41910927[source]▶
When you own a trademark that is for publishing and you let people slap your logo on their writing, you take responsibility for what they say. That's the whole point of the trademark, to take credit for publishing the words. You can't have it both ways.
replies(2): >>41910966 #>>41919233 #
solarkraft ◴[22 Oct 24 03:36 UTC] No.41910966[source]▶
Wired can choose to be known for publishing conflicting view points though, of course.

(though if that is the case it hasn’t really made it through to me until now)

replies(1): >>41911042 #
shiroiushi ◴[22 Oct 24 03:55 UTC] No.41911042[source]▶
Usually, when real journalism publications do this, they make sure to prominently display "OPINION" before these writings, along with a disclaimer that the views of the author do not reflect the views of the editorial board.
replies(1): >>41911253 #
1. unethical_ban ◴[22 Oct 24 04:41 UTC] No.41911253[source]▶
In my mind, magazines have had more editorial discretion than "papers of record" like the News section of a national paper.

Though I would expect a magazine to have some more consistency in ideology.

replies(1): >>41911334 #
2. shiroiushi ◴[22 Oct 24 05:02 UTC] No.41911334[source]▶
Normally (at least in the now-distant pre-internet past), newspapers were supposed to be as unbiased as reasonably possible and just report the news, though they frequently had opinion sections ("op-ed") which were clearly marked as such. Magazines catered to specific groups of people with specific interests, so those could be more biased (e.g., Motor Trend was quite blatant about its pro-car bias, for obvious reasons). But yes, along with this was consistency in ideology: you wouldn't buy Motor Trend and expect to see both pro- and anti-car opinions expressed there, and if you didn't like cars and car culture, you wouldn't buy the magazine to begin with.
replies(1): >>41916000 #
3. unethical_ban ◴[22 Oct 24 16:30 UTC] No.41916000[source]▶
If I were charitable, I would say there are technologists who are skeptical of completely unauditable, untraceable communication and they don't necessarily need to be government stooges to think that.

Same way we might read an article from a muscle-car-lover glowing about a Land Rover right before an article calling for bans on pure-ICE vehicles in MotorTrend.