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Comment by nwhatt | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested to see how this plays out - in some respects it's hard to come back at Project Veritas, they'll just say - hey nice work Washington Post you did your job.

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> in some respects it's hard to come back at Project Veritas

outright lying and fabricating stories to try and discredit news organizations seems like it can come back on your no matter what happens.

In this case, Veritas has egg on its face, one of its employees is now outed, and everyone that they "may" have been able to expose that wasn't already on high alert for these frauds is. They've managed to not only prove WP follows proper journalist practices, but they've also given warning to those that don't to be extra careful of them.

WP on the other hand, appears to have done what it usually does, vets information and publishes what it finds. They come out a huge winner over doing nothing, which is exactly the opposite of what Veritas was trying to accomplish.

> outright lying and fabricating stories to try and discredit news organizations seems like it can come back on your no matter what happens.

Not when your clear history of willingness to do that is what drives donations. It's literally the entire reason Project Veritas exists and gets funded.

In this case, Veritas has egg on its face

Maybe they can escape this by rebranding themselves Project Mendacium.

An employee was outed but it sounds like these employees were disposable to begin with.

This story makes me wonder what the other 11 new employees they were looking for are up to right now.

> outright lying and fabricating stories to try and discredit news organizations seems like it can come back on your no matter what happens.

Why? News organizations should never accept fabricated stories. If they do, then something is wrong with their vetting process, and it means that non "pen-testing" fake stories can get through as well, where the intent is to have some effect in the world(say, getting a person out of an election) as opposed to just making the newspaper blush.

> News organizations should never accept fabricated stories

This is like running around committing fraud and then claiming "people should have never participated in my fraud!" No, they shouldn't. But no, you shouldn't.

But they do... all the time. Look at the Rolling Stone UVA debacle.

James O’Keefe tweeted a response:

> Hitting export on hidden camera footage into Washington Post shortly. Project Veritas vs Bezos 100mm monopoly. Fasten your seatbelts.

https://twitter.com/jamesokeefeiii/status/935266973176487936

EDIT: He posted the video, which is not a denial of the accusations in the WaPo article.

100mm? The man doesn't understand units very well.

MM is commonly used in banking/finance for Million, and M is sometimes used for thousands (but sometimes millions, depending on the person). It's a mess in other words.

https://english.stackexchange.com/a/182072

Yeah, but Bezos is worth 100 billion.

British English, MM means million.

Then he should've used capital letters. mm means millimeters.

Edit: you guys really will downvote anything, won't you?

In my experience it is pretty common to see it used both ways.

I'm not from the UK though, and why they would eschew the simple-and-obvious m and b suffixes in favor of alternatives, especially when Europeans love to lecture us about how metric is so neat and intuitive.

Probably has something to do with the root words -- mil means 'thousand' in a lot of latin languages, and a thousand is M in roman numerals, and I heard somewhere that "MM" stands for "mil mil" or "million million" which, in the context of M equaling 1,000, woudl make sense.

> why they would eschew the simple-and-obvious m and b suffixes in favor of alternatives

Because not everyone is an American. Those suffixes are not used in other countries.

Yes but in all English hundred means 100, thousand means 1000, million means 1000000. 'MM' means... what exactly? Without prior training, can you tell just by looking at it?

In accounting, M has long been used as 'thousand'. Therefore, MM was used for million, as it's a thousand thousand.

This is something that I didn't think would be this contentious. It's an old standard.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181917/mixing-us...

This clarifies exactly... thanks for the link!

More troubling is 'm' being used to refer to thousands, when the rest of the English-speaking financial world uses 'k' (which also makes little sense to me)

> English-speaking financial world uses 'k' (which also makes little sense to me)

It likely comes from SI prefixes. While there's not a standard base unit for currency, the fact they work for so many other units lends them towards easily inferred usage when applied to others.

1: http://www.npl.co.uk/reference/measurement-units/si-prefixes...

k = kilo - prefix for one thousand.

They were caught committing breaking and entering and (bungled) amateur wiretapping in the past and it didn't seem to hurt them

Surely it's not the first time the Post (or any MSM outlet) has been pitched a bogus tip. Surprised it doesn't happen more often.

AFAIK it does happen a lot. Normally it just wouldn't be publicized. This time they figured out it was not only false but an organized disinformation campaign and invested the time in documenting that instead.

It happens constantly, but it's not normally news.

Dan Rather, one of the last anchors doing his own reporting, got fired after reporting a bogus GWB story. A staffer was somewhat responsible for airing it, but that was the price of letting the staffer vet the story. I could probably think of some others that did make the news, but overall you're right. Typically The misinformation is front page and the retraction is weeks later, if at al, and as far from prominent as they can make it.

Exactly, my company doesn't issue a press release every time an employee avoids a phishing attempt. (Internal pats on the back are appropriate though)

I imagine it doesn’t usually rise to the level of ‘news’. It’s privably someone trying to make a competitor look bad or jump on a bandwagon.

This time it was an attempt to undermine journalism in a tricky situation.

It's only hard to come back at them if you're determined to stick to the idea that they're good. Anywhere else, doing things like this is considered shady as fuck.

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