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Comment by donohoe | Hacker News Reader

As someone who worked at the NYT for 8 years and saw the inner workings I want to say the main assesrtions of this article are FALSE. Seriously. WTF

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Please be clearer. Which claims do you not think are true, and what reasons/evidence do you have behind your assertions?

Do you mean the assertion that NYT made these changes in response to being reached by Facebook's PR team? (This is difficult to prove but suggested by the facts we have.)

Do you mean the assertion that the NYT regularly changes headlines in response to criticism of those being covered? (This is alleged, but I have no proof of this.)

Do you mean the assertion that Facebook contacted the Times after the article was published? (I highly doubt that this is false, and it being true suggests that the first point was true.)

I was on the subway so I couldn’t dig deep.

In short, the opening paragraph, which the article leans on struck a nerve.

  The New York Times offers powerful third parties the ability to
  edit away–that is, to delete from the internet–unfavorable coverage
  appearing in the paper of record’s online edition.

It’s false. The editorial process is pretty rigorous. No company has a magic “edit” button.

The article goes through rounds of edits post-publish. It’s a established process and not done as-hoc.

Nobody at Facebook pushed a button, but the article was edited to remove an unflattering reference to Sheryl Sandberg after a phone call from Facebook PR.

Also, just because you work(ed) at a company it does not mean you are fully aware of everything that goes on there, so don't make blanket statements about what can or can't happen.

Employees are often some of the least informed about the inner workings of an organization, as they tend to dismiss uncomfortable findings out of hand and refuse to read about them.

Exactly. While I have generally held the NYT in high regard, the whitewashing of their coverage after being contacted by Facebook's PR team is immensely concerning.

The NYT reporters have denied that Facebook's PR had any influence, so why do you take OP at its word when there is no proof otherwise?

Furthermore, those same NYT reporters who apparently were cowed by Sandberg and Facebook PR published another article that same day in which the focus is on the disgruntled CSO:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/technology/alex-stamos-fa...

This was part of Facebook's PR push too?

That is an excellent point. The authors of the article you've provided are both authors on the edited article. It may be simply coincidence. In the absence of other information, I was concerned, albeit understanding `post hoc ergo propter hoc`. Taken with this, it seems that they perhaps wanted separate emphases for separate articles.

It wouldn't be coincidence because they were the reporters to have gotten this inside information from their sources. Their followup, which focuses on how Stamos got fucked over for his stance against Russian interference, is long enough that it would have had to been mostly written by the time FB is alleged to have put pressure on NYT to change the first story.

> the article was edited to remove an unflattering reference to Sheryl Sandberg _after a phone call from Facebook PR_

Can you prove this?

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