Adding a correction at the top would just fuel (current or budding) conspiracy theorists, as they can point to something that was, in their eyes, forcibly corrected against WIRED's will.

So instead they prove the conspiracy folks right that the media is willing to scrub proof of inaccurate reporting.

The point I’m making is that no matter what you do, a conspiracy theorist is going to twist the narrative to fit their world view.

Well, the world view in this case is 'the media lies' - and that's correct in this case (though it wasn't intentional).

Whereas the sources spoon-feeding them this attitude are, of course, unimpeachable. (They don't redact, or admit fault.)

I generally find that anyone expecting error-free perfection in any subjective field from an entire industry can be safely dismissed as a complete idiot. Intelligent people look at the processes that produce outcomes, not the outcomes.

(In this case, the process that produced the outcome was a former DDG employee mailing in an oped of incredibly questionable quality that criticized a DDG competitor, that was eventually pulled. Wired should probably read op-eds before publishing them.)

If they admit it's "inaccurate" / "does not meet [their] editorial standards" then it's hardly "scrubbing proof"...

Admitting it was trash is proof of inaccurate reporting, whether they remove TFA or not

As for the conspiracy folks, they'll think what they want, regardless of evidence presented to them. That's the whole point.

Because journalism is not the way to solve this, and we all think that it will.

The way to solve it is for "investigators" to get access to said source code and give us an honest assessment. Get someone neutral, get NDAs in place, have them look at the source in an air-gapped clean room, anonymize DB access, etc etc.

Instead we go around in circles. Journalism at the end of the day then becomes "we got some info that points to X, but we have no proof, and we won't look for it. We'll just wait till someone, somewhere, at some point, who knows when, finds some proof and puts it out in the public, only then will we say it's conclusive. Until then, you all go nuts, especially the conspiracy theorists. Don't worry, we'll ride this gravy train and report on those nut jobs too!".

It's a mess, and I'm not at all surprised that conspiracy-theorists have a field day with it.

Hey, let's get a bounty up so that a whistle-blower from Google comes forward. Maybe Mozilla foundation can take some of that sweet sweet endowment they use for "Social Justice" and pony up to fund this investigative effort. After all they claim to be fighting for a free internet. I'd say this is a much better use of money than paying random DEI consultancies huge speaking fees.

I don't know if you've ever had the misfortune of interacting much with conspiracy theorists, but literally whatever happens it always proves their beliefs are correct.

Evidence for the claim: proves the claim

No evidence: obviously the evidence is being suppressed, proves the claim

Evidence against the claim: shills obviously trying to control the narrative, proves the claim

I recall an anecdote by a mathematician about his approach to peer-reviewing proofs of theorems. He said he glosses over most of it, but very thoroughly checks anything the author claims to be "obvious" because it's the things that seem obvious that screw people up.

This. It doesn’t matter what you do, conspiracy theorists can and will justify it as a conspiracy.

Had a discussion about Assange the other day (contentious I know but bear with me). I brought up how he had a show on RT, the Russian state media channel, mentioning that it’s pretty bad optics regardless of what one thinks of the dude. They immediately went “no they didn’t that’s got to be a CIA myth.” Hand to god that’s what they said.

I showed him the IMDb and Wikipedia pages for it and a clip. Without missing a beat - remember they literally had never heard this before and have already decided it’s misinformation planted by the CIA - he said “Well it’s an independent show he put on that happened to be shown on RT.”

I mean what can you say to that?

'Happens to be' is doing alot of work in that sentence

Seriously! Like I said, I get it’s a very contentious issue and I’m sure people have varied feelings on this, but to walk into a conversation literally knowing nothing about the topic at hand and then hand waving it away so quickly…I mean there’s no point in even continuing the conversation at that point.

Assange knew every western government was likely to do literally nothing to defend him against the US. In his shoes you'd also probably be drip-feeding information and money to the Russians. Info which should be out in the open anyway.

But that’s what any decent conspiracy would do!

Whether they removed the article or not, I think it’s ridiculous that WIRED didn’t explain why the article was retracted.

They should have mentioned 1) what the article got wrong and 2) that the article was written by a former Duck Duck Go executive who should know better.

[delayed]

That would be showing too much respect for or deference to conspiracy theorists, who aren’t really worth the trouble. Copies probably exist in the Internet Archive, archive.is and in PDFs people could have saved when the article was up so it’s not like it truly disappeared. WIRED just took down a bad article that shouldn’t have been published.

Transparency is the key to trust and journalistic integrity. Even an article that was mostly wrong/written from a failed premise should remain accessible with a timestamped correction statement explaining the problem.

Making your mistakes suddenly disappear as if they never happened is tempting, but it's going to leave users feeling gaslit, distrustful, or even just misinformed.