I just want to talk about this article as an example of trash journalism for a second.

in journalism •  2 years ago 

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https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-outage-monday-mistake-single-engineer-elon-musk-brittle-layoffs-2023-3

Ostensibly, you'd think it was a report on the issue where images and links were unviewable for a brief period, following a change to Twitter's API system that had unintended ripple effects.

It's not.

If it was about that, then Business Insider's "reporter" might have gathered facts from more sources and taken the time to speak with the engineer in question to get a better understanding of the issue itself, what happened, why, and what Twitter did to fix the problem.

Now... That wouldn't be the most interesting story of all time or anything, but it would have been journalism.

Instead, the reporter didn't bother to seriously contact Twitter at all. From the article:

"Representatives for Twitter didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, made outside US business hours."

Again, this isn't an urgent story. It's not breaking news. Sending some generic email account a question outside normal business hours and then publishing the story before anyone has even had the chance to see the email, let alone respond, is not a serious request for information.

It's a fake, bad-faith request that is designed as a really half-hearted CYA mechanism, where "Junior Reporter Beatrice Nolan" can claim to have reached out for comment without actually expecting to get or needing a reply.

And of course, the reply wouldn't have mattered anyway, as about half of this article is not about the outage at all, but rather turns into a covert op-ed on how Elon Musk fired thousands of employees and thus we should expect these kinds of failures.

Never mind also that no effort is made to explain how those thousands of employees would have prevented this problem, given that all it took was 1 minor change to break something else. Seems to me that an alternate-universe op-ed could be about how Twitter had thousands of employees who wrote such awful code that the slightest change to any part of it would cause a chain reaction that could take down completely unrelated functionality.

But nah.

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