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posted by on Monday January 09 2017, @07:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-go-first-wikileaks-task-force dept.

WikiLeaks wants to start building a list of verified Twitter users that would include highly sensitive and personal information about their families, their finances and their housing situations.

"We are thinking of making an online database with all 'verified' twitter accounts & their family/job/financial/housing relationships," WikiLeaks tweeted Friday.

The disclosure organization, run by Julian Assange, says the information would be used for an artificial-intelligence program. But Twitter users immediately fired back, saying WikiLeaks would use the list to take political vengeance against those who criticize it.

Twitter "verifies" certain users, such as world leaders, nonprofit organizations and news outlets, with a blue check mark beside their names so that other users of the service can be confident about the posters' identities. WikiLeaks, which has a verified Twitter account, did not say whether it would subject itself to the scrutiny it was proposing. (It was also unclear whether, under its plan, WikiLeaks would seek to uncover information about the financial lives of Russian President Vladimir Putin or President-elect Donald Trump, both of whom are verified on Twitter.)

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday January 09 2017, @08:50PM

    by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 09 2017, @08:50PM (#451619)
    I'm not sure what words you are trying to put in my mouth, so let's be clear on this. My criticism of WaPo is this: Since Bezos bought them and targeted them to a younger audience, the quality of their reporting has plummeted. Their reporters now work with little editorial oversight, and being first is now more important that being right, which points to a slump in journalistic ethics. The article I linked to, in direct response to your assertion that they "... reports facts that impinge on your reality.", is a very recent, very serious example of just that type of sloppy, amateurish reporting. The story was rushed to press, with no fact checking, no verification at all. They didn't even bother to reach out to the utility in question to get a response. Any editor worth their salt would never have allowed that story to run, but in all likelihood an editor wasn't even involved. Printing a retraction to a story that should never, ever have been allowed to be published in the first place, and only after other media outlets call them out on it, is not a badge of integrity; it's a badge of shame.

    They don't report facts anymore. They publish lazy, hyperbolic articles to get clicks to sell ads and to hell with being accurate.
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @09:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @09:34PM (#451661)

    > Since Bezos bought them and targeted them to a younger audience, the quality of their reporting has plummeted.

    Sounds like you just don't like Bezos and are an attributing industry wide phenomenon to his ownership.

    > The story was rushed to press, with no fact checking, no verification at all.

    At best that's an exaggeration. They reported the on-the-record statements from three government officials - the governor and both of the state's senators. They also reported the official on-the-record statement from the electric company itself. Yes it turned out there was more to the story. But get fucking real man, your requirements are beyond reasonable. It sounds like you are just echoing greenwald's own invective.

    > They don't report facts anymore. They publish lazy, hyperbolic articles to get clicks to sell ads and to hell with being accurate.

    You just went meta. A hyperbolic accusation of hyperbole.