The mask comes off at LWN, as *two* editors (jake and *corbet*) dive in to frantically defend the honour of Justine fucking Tunney against multiple people pointing out she's a Nazi who fills her projects with racist dogwhistles

https://lwn.net/Articles/998196/

@davidgerard wtf

@shlee in fucking deed

@davidgerard
corbet in comment https://lwn.net/Articles/998415/:
> if we let that discussion take over LWN, we won't have LWN anymore

Well OTOH, if they silence this discussion, LWN isn't worth having anymore.

@davidgerard the sheer audacity of Jake replying:

>> I certainly don't go around personally vetting the beliefs of every maintainer of software I use against my own.
> Right. And we don't either.

Yer a journalist, Jake. You *should* be vetting the people you're doing an article on, ffs. It's literally your job.

@davidgerard The number of people who don’t get that all tech is political is astonishing…

@schrotthaufen loved the heartfelt defence of Tunney in the thread by a guy who also turned out to be a huge racist in public, what are the odds

@davidgerard

Every publication eventually has to decide whether it will be a virtual nazi bar.

Probably unrelated -- why did you put corbet in quotes? Is the account used as a mask by multiple people?

@dashdsrdash that was emphasis, i was shocked

@davidgerard First, what "mask" do you think has come off?

Second: if you look hard, you still will not find either of us "defending her honor". Please do not put words in our mouths.

We did do our best to close down the conversation; what good comes from hundreds of posts of people throwing names at each other? There are enough posts criticizing the person involved for anybody to get the point; there are almost none in the other direction. Trust me that this would not have been the case had we let the conversation run. *That*, perhaps, indicates an editorial bias, but it is not the one you are accusing us of.

Look, as I posted in the thread, had we known the backstory of the person involved, there is a good chance we would not have run that article. We are a small operation, we lack a biographical research unit, we will not have a background file on any of the hundreds of developers we write about over the course of a year.

@corbet @davidgerard maybe you should have considered actually retracting the article and actually shutting down the conversation rather than giving her the last word and then locking it for everyone else... Food for thought...

@corbet @davidgerard personally I would (and indeed, have!) find it extremely embarrassing to inadvertently highlight the work of Tunney, but it seems to me the correct course of action afterwards is to delete it and apologize, not double and then triple down on pretending her views are somehow unrelated and unimportant to the software and your post.

@corbet @davidgerard It is more important to keep your community free of Nazis than it is to keep your site free of the word “Nazi”. You got that reversed and you deserve criticism for that.

How can you handle this better?

1. Acknowledge error (as you did), temporarily take down the article, and freeze the thread.
2. Re-report the piece as one about fascist entryism in open source. Post it with an editor’s note acknowledging the pivot.
3. You’ll need help moderating comments on the re-reported piece, because it’s a charged topic and some of these fascists clearly know how to use your community norms to tie you in knots. Get this help from an experienced mod with at least one marginalized identity. Pay them and listen to them.

I don’t expect you’ll take this advice, but I’m offering it in a sincere and respectful frame of mind. I’ve been around open source since the mid-90s, and I know more than I would like to about fascism.

@dotstdy @corbet yes, the tripling down was quite amazing

@corbet @davidgerard Not knowing about it was excusable. Leaving the article in place and simply ceasing discussion of how the subject of the article was deeply intolerant? That is how you get a Nazi bar.
Mistakes happen in journalism. Committing to those mistakes makes it clear you do not think it was a mistake.

@corbet
You don't need a research department for personal bios and I don't think anyone expects that. What we (or myself at least) expect however is basic journalistic due diligence. In this case, it would have been enough to type the name into a search engine. Her Wikipedia page comes up even before her Github, where people have done the research work for you. I don't think skimming over that would be an unreasonable request or quality gate.

@davidgerard