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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 30 2018, @10:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-internet-is-forever dept.

Joy Reid, an MSNBC host, apologized in December for "homophobic content" on a "now-defunct blog". This month, a Twitter user found similar material by using Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, although robots.txt is now in effect. This time around, Reid blamed hackers (archive) for inserting these posts into the blog, before admitting that it could not be proven (archive) that the blog had been hacked/manipulated:

Joy Reid, the MSNBC host who accused hackers of inserting homophobic posts into her now-defunct blog, said on Saturday that while she continued to deny having written the offensive language, security experts could not conclusively say her blog was breached. "I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things, because they are completely alien to me," she said on her morning show, "AM Joy." "But I can definitely understand, based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past, why some people don't believe me." She hired a cybersecurity expert to see if her former blog had been manipulated, she said, but "the reality is, they have not been able to prove it."

The posts containing the offensive language, which Mediaite wrote about on Monday, said that "most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing" and that "a lot of heterosexuals, especially men, find the idea of homosexual sex to be ... well ... gross." They also allegedly showed Ms. Reid arguing against legalized gay marriage and criticizing commentators who supported it, including Rachel Maddow, who is now one of Ms. Reid's colleagues at MSNBC.

The Internet Archive responded to claims that its database might have been manipulated:

This past December, Reid's lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog (blog.reidreport.com) taken down, stating that "fraudulent" posts were "inserted into legitimate content" in our archives of the blog. Her attorneys stated that they didn't know if the alleged insertion happened on the original site or with our archives (the point at which the manipulation is to have occurred, according to Reid, is still unclear to us).

When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions. At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.

We let Reid's lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation. Consequently, and due to Reid's being a journalist (a very high-profile one, at that) and the journalistic nature of the blog archives, we declined to take down the archives. We were clear that we would welcome and consider any further information that they could provide us to support their claims.

Also at CNN.


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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday April 30 2018, @01:41PM (4 children)

    I read the paper. The core methodology and results are passable even if some of the prior assumptions aren't. I'd give you a sci-hub link but that could cause trouble being as I'm staff.

    Because I never earnestly say anything I know to be untrue. I may be less precise than I should or just be flat wrong but I do not lie. For comedic purposes is another matter entirely but that is not relevant to this discussion.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Monday April 30 2018, @02:00PM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 30 2018, @02:00PM (#673727) Journal

    I'd give you a sci-hub link but that could cause trouble being as I'm staff.

    Unfortunately, the site mirror that I still can use is malfunctioning for the moment, the onion one is mostly unusable from here.

    Because I never earnestly say anything I know to be untrue.

    I trust you to hold a sincere belief the article is true.
    Unfortunately, your belief in its truthfulness doesn't necessary translate in an actual truthful article.

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday April 30 2018, @02:08PM

      How many science articles have I nit picked about methodology and such on? I'm not exactly known for being generous with my forgiveness of poor science. This one was done with some assumptions/presuppositions that shouldn't have been made but I'm unable to see how they could have influenced the results. The experiment and results themselves seem solid, barring evidence of a flaw.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday April 30 2018, @07:14PM (1 child)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Monday April 30 2018, @07:14PM (#673866) Journal

    Eh, you never say anything you believe to be untrue. Belief and knowledge aren't the same thing.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday April 30 2018, @08:21PM

      Yeah, I covered that a couple sentences later. Finding out you're wrong on something should be one of the great pleasures of life. It gives you an opportunity to correct the wrongness and actually be as right as is currently possible. Unfortunately that is something we all have to put the effort into keeping in mind. Very few people can manage it even half the time.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.