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Comment by donohoe | Hacker News Reader

Years back I worked for customer service at The New York Times. I got a call. It was from a man asking if we could take down an article (short answer: no). It was a brief article from years back where, as a high-school teacher, he had been accused of an inappropriate relationship with a student.

The charges were dropped/withdrawn at some point, the article noted that in an update. Yet there was the article, with his name and easily findable. He said it had cost him jobs, relationships, and almost his engagement.

He told me charges were dropped because this person had also made false allegations against numerous others, and this was determined to be similar.

Assuming thats true, should he be able to clear this? I'm still not sure. There are a lot of reasons for/against.

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Absolutely - and the name of the person making false charges should be known more clearly. The current risk of false charges is too low. Same thing with death penalty - if you are on death row and project innocence proves your total innocense - prosecutors should be fired.

I mean, in this case you are talking about a crime (false charges) committed by a child. That adds a whole other level of complexity to the matter.

Well it's up to the paper, but personally, I support papers re-evaluating their positions on this sort of thing.

You'll still be able to find the old article on archive.org et al, but what a paper publishes today should reflect what it stands for today. If the paper was wrong or unfair, what is wrong with modifying or removing the coverage which is served today? Is that really worse than printing a "correction" paragraph at the end of the original article?

Maybe publishers could implement a sort of "timeline" feature which shows how the organization's understanding of an event changed over time. But today, I can't see anything wrong with a newspaper accepting petitions to modify outdated coverage.

> Well it's up to the paper

Leaving it up to the paper basically means the rich get to rewrite history but the poor don't.

Unfortunately that's how the world currently works.

Well that’s just awful. Changing the name is the only thing he could realistically do.

Clearing the history is dicey - internet doesn’t easily forget even when the NYT does. I believe it’s the NYT responsibility to not just report facts but to keep track of the externalities and put on work to repair them. In this case they could rewrite the article - still include the original but frame it with the context, the resolution (charges dropped), the layman explanation of resolution, etc.

Reminds me of the film "Absence of Malice," directed by the great Sydney Pollack, starring Paul Newman and Sally Field.

"... That as a matter of law, the truth is irrelevant. We have no knowledge the story is false, therefore we're absent malice. We've been both reasonable and prudent, therefore we're not negligent. We may say whatever we like about Mr. Gallagher, and he is powerless to do us harm. Democracy is served."

What are the reasons why the Times should keep his name? Surely we’ve moved past the whole “erring on the side of ruining someone’s life just in case the accusation turns out to be true” thing, right?

No. No we have not.

Not for NYT apparently

The problem at that point is employers' general widespread aversion to reputation risk, which manifests itself in all kinds of ways. Erasure of the past isn't the fix for that.

It sure would be a fix for the man from the anecdote. It sounds to me like there is a starving man begging for a morsel, and you're saying to him "No, just wait until society can develop a system to keep all people fed. Feeding you isn't a fix for the real issue".

This pattern occurs everywhere. Leveraging a broken system against the people most vulnerable under it with the pretense of abolishing it.

I don’t think the parent is suggesting that the Times deny this man mercy, but rather that this shouldn’t be the general policy (rather, an angry mob shouldn’t be able to jeopardize one’s livelihood).

Yes, I guess what I was getting at is that while the NYT isn't being helpful, the root of the problem is elsewhere.

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