But this was also just a case of really lazy journalism. Nicole Perlroth failed to contact any of the organizations or companies involved before publishing her article, and it contained a number of factual inaccuracies, only some of which have now been corrected:
- "Sites like Tumblr, Mozilla and DuckDuckGo, which were listed as organizers, did nothing to their homepages."
None of them were "listed as organizers." Their logos appeared on their site, but supporting/participating != organizing. This would have been easily corrected if she'd asked.
DuckDuckGo changed their homepage logo yesterday, and Mozilla added a link and logo on the browser start page, which is visible every time someone opens a new window.
- "[List of large tech co's] only participated Tuesday insofar as having a joint website flash the protest banner."
Facebook, Google and Twitter also released statements in support, and tweeted/shared on social media.
- "Most of those [calls and emails] were directed to Senator Dianne Feinstein."
I have no idea where she got this from. Feinstein did receive 2420 calls, but saying she received "most" of them is just nonsense.
- "But on privacy forums and Reddit, significant discussions failed to materialize."
Over 4,000 comments were posted to the reddit blog post that announced their participation and contained the banner. At least another 3,000 comments were made on other threads.
You can also see a diff of changes made to the post later in the day here: https://github.com/sinak/sinak.github.com/commit/d8050c45633...