<story><title>Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name</title><url>https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>headmelted</author><text>Honestly I can almost imagine a way to arrive at this conclusion without it being shifty (although no idea what the case actually is here).&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re going to debunk an article about something like a lack of vaccine safety and need to retract a couple of sentences later, but the overall conclusion is the same, then the conspiracists will be right on you with a diff of the changes from the archive trying to piece together what it all means and who paid you off.</text></item><item><author>jaywalk</author><text>So they can silently change stuff without the ability for someone to go back and look at what it used to say.</text></item><item><author>ramraj07</author><text>I’m still struggling to understand why they’d want to block that.&lt;p&gt;Edit: on re-reading I realize it’s so that they don’t get caught for this plagiarism since their modus operandi was plagiarize first rewrite slowly.</text></item><item><author>danso</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Marchionni is reevaluating decisions Mikkelson made years earlier to not allow Snopes stories to be archived on the Wayback Machine and is empowered to make any changes necessary.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not the most immediate important thing, but hiding content from the Wayback Machine that is purported to be factual record is very problematic, to say the least</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>corndoge</author><text>That is a good thing. I want to see those changes.&lt;p&gt;Preventing people from seeing the change log of a page because &amp;quot;conspiracy theorists might use it&amp;quot; is dangerous thinking. Saying that it&amp;#x27;s okay to forego transparency because it could be used to bolster people who disagree with you is backwards. That&amp;#x27;s precisely why transparency should be retained - when you&amp;#x27;re the person disagreeing, it benefits you.</text></comment>
<story><title>Co-founder of Snopes was writing plagiarized articles under a fake name</title><url>https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>headmelted</author><text>Honestly I can almost imagine a way to arrive at this conclusion without it being shifty (although no idea what the case actually is here).&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re going to debunk an article about something like a lack of vaccine safety and need to retract a couple of sentences later, but the overall conclusion is the same, then the conspiracists will be right on you with a diff of the changes from the archive trying to piece together what it all means and who paid you off.</text></item><item><author>jaywalk</author><text>So they can silently change stuff without the ability for someone to go back and look at what it used to say.</text></item><item><author>ramraj07</author><text>I’m still struggling to understand why they’d want to block that.&lt;p&gt;Edit: on re-reading I realize it’s so that they don’t get caught for this plagiarism since their modus operandi was plagiarize first rewrite slowly.</text></item><item><author>danso</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Marchionni is reevaluating decisions Mikkelson made years earlier to not allow Snopes stories to be archived on the Wayback Machine and is empowered to make any changes necessary.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not the most immediate important thing, but hiding content from the Wayback Machine that is purported to be factual record is very problematic, to say the least</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaywalk</author><text>Conspiracists (and many others) disregard Snopes out of hand, so I highly doubt that was part of their thinking.</text></comment>