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Comment by ianstormtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Why is the title here only "Apple", when the article's title is "Tech Giants" and it mentions Apple, Samsung and Microsoft?

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I'm waiting for the headline: Amnesty International uses Machines Made with Cobalt Mined by Children

From the actual report [1]:

"The 16 multinational companies covered in the report are Ahong, Apple, BYD, Daimler, Dell, HP, Huawei, Inventec, Lenovo, LG, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, Vodafone, Volkswagen and ZTE. Company responses are available in the report annex."

"The largest [purchaser of Congolese-sourced cobalt] is Huayou Cobalt’s Congolese subsidiary CDM.

"Huayou Cobalt [then] supplies cobalt to three lithium-ion battery component manufacturers[:] Ningbo Shanshan and Tianjin Bamo from China[;] and L&F Materials from South Korea.

"[The] 16 multinational consumer brands listed [are] direct or indirect customers of the three battery component manufacturers."

(edit: Note I've rearranged the paragraphs from the original report.)

[1] "This is what we die for: Human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo power the global trade in cobalt." http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/this-is-what-we-d...

As you can see from the URL, the original title was the more click-baity one that ended up on HN.

Maybe because Apple is the one named company that refused to comment.

"(Samsung) SDI, told Amnesty it doesn’t do direct business with the major Chinese suppliers mentioned in the report and that they aren’t in its supply chain."

We've seen this before. Apple's silence in the past is because 1) they are doing their due diligence in fact gathering and 2) if change is necessary, coming up with a plan to do so.

Meaning you'll hear nothing from them until they have planned, prepared and can respond in detail.

(Supporting Reference: http://www.macworld.com/article/1159548/apple_crisis_managem...)

  they are doing their due diligence

They are claiming that they try to do their due diligence -- not the same thing.

Because Tim Cook is a fundamentally decent human being and might possibly do something about it?

Sensationalism and attention seeking is why.

And the subjunctive mode indicated by "may" usually evaluates to "is not" in new articles.

There's some "law" associated with that sensationalism news article observation, but I don't know its name offhand.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines states (roughly) that "headlines in the form of a question can usually be answered with 'no'".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Thanks!

Keep in mind it's "usually", not "always". Some people take that law to mean "always", especially here on hackernews.

I have seen many articles change their titles after they are initially published. Maybe it is from companies or readers pushing back when they feel the headline is unfair.

Could be, but it's more likely that they're changing the titles as a result of A/B testing.

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