This is more along the lines of correlation/causation. It's one thing to speculate, but it's another to report the matter as fact. Did anyone from TNW contact Apple for comment?

After re-reading the headline, I see that it's cleverly worded to avoid making a patently false claim. "After" is a statement of proximity.

Fact 1: there was backlash on Reddit and HN.

Fact 2: Apple has stopped hiding the policy on their UK site.

Fact 3: fact 2 happened "after" fact 1. Congrats on the weaselly headline.

However, the body of the article shows that they did intend to imply causation:

> The backlash has apparently led the company to remove the code sometime between Monday and Thursday, possibly in the hopes of avoiding yet another court order.

Yes, "apparently". So basically, this is speculation about which TNW has no actual facts.

Yes, this is yet another trite complaint about the sad state of journalism, but the fact that it's trite doesn't make it untrue.

If I shoot a gun and the guy in front of me drops dead of a bullet wound, are you going to wait for the forensics to come back on the bullet before you suggest that I shot him? It could be that I shot past him and some guy on a grassy knoll is the real killer, but it is not unreasonable to say that I "apparently shot him."

This is not a valid analogy. Causation is typically proved empirically. We have consistent (as in, 99.9999%) empirical evidence that if you "shoot a gun and the guy in front of [you] drops dead of a bullet wound," there is a causative relationship.

The incidence of "people on HN/Reddit make a fuss" and "Apple/other-big-tech-company changes it's website or some other legal matter" is occasional and inconsistent at best. There is really no empirical evidence of causation.

The incidence of "People on Reddit make a fuss" and "Big company quickly makes a change that happens to address the fuss but was actually completely unrelated" is far lower. While a fuss doesn't always produce change, it seems to me that change following a fuss may reasonably be viewed as a response.

Better analogy: Asking me for five dollars will not consistently result in me giving you five dollars. But if you ask for five dollars and I give it, you would not be wrong to assume that the two events are related. There are other conceivable explanations (e.g. perhaps I wasn't listening to you, but mistook you for a valet), but those are so much less likely given the context that it's quite reasonable to assume I was responding to your request.

Again, the analogy is not quite accurate. I find that analogies are often poor justifications of arguments because of widely varying contexts. In Apple's case there are many other more plausible alternative explanations, such as Apple wanting to avoid a court order. This is bolstered by Apple's reputation for not being very responsive to the public (see: Antennagate, long time until public iOS maps apology). In the second analogy, there is 1) a personal element (direct asking) and 2) a physical interaction (handing money), neither of which exist in the HN/reddit case.

Yes, circumstantial evidence relies on correlation. Furthermore, correlation and causation are not mutually exclusive.

but the fact that it's trite doesn't make it untrue.

Irony.

Nothing ever changed because of a big backlash on Reddit or Hacker News. Nope, no way, uh-uh. What an impossible leap of imagination this article is!

When reddit had started talking about this, people almost right away started posting links to news stories about the judge having already responded. I don't think reddit really had much to do with this given the order of events.