[slg]

The details in the summary given by the previous poster were from the article. I don't know what distinction you think exists between a "hit piece" and "fact based reporting", but this article falls into the fact based reporting category.

[BrianGragg]

I called it a hit piece because instead of saying users recently found a bug affecting 1 link to NPR. They say X "Caught" blocking links like it was something intentional and not an erroneous error. Any other site not connected to Elon with the same issue and it wouldn't of been writen I suspect.

[slg]

> instead of saying users recently found a bug affecting 1 link to NPR

This is a good example of bias. It is not a fact that this was a bug. The fact is Twitter displayed the warning. Twitter has told NPR it was a false positive, but a journalist shouldn’t take an uncorroborated secondhand statement from the party being accused of potential wrongdoing as proof of anything.

Imagine for a second that this was done maliciously. Do you think Twitter would immediately admit that? Of course not, their statement would likely be identical to the one we got. Therefore the “fact based reporting” thing to do is present the facts, present Twitter’s response, and let the reader come to their own conclusions.

[Brian_K_White]

It's a fact that a pattern of behavior was accused, but a pattern of behavior was not shown.

Tells us more about bias.

(I'm no Twitter fan. I never had a Twitter account and no way in hell would I now.)

[slg]

>It's a fact that a pattern of behavior was accused, but a pattern of behavior was not shown.

Yes, that is exactly what both the article and I said. The warning was applied to the link. Some people accused Twitter of doing that nefariously. Twitter denied it and claimed it was a mistake. Those are the facts of the situation.

The motivation for applying the warning or whether it was a mistake are not facts that can be confirmed by an independent journalist. They are speculation regardless of which side of the issue you come down on.

[Brian_K_White]

"this article falls into the fact based reporting category" is unsupported.

The article makes a general claim of behavior that is not supported by any single incident, yet only presents a single incident.

[slg]

What are you talking about specifically? Can you point to a quote from the article that you think crosses a line journalistically? Because it seems like you’re equating reporting on the existence of accusations with actively making accusations and that type of thinking comes from either bias or a lack of media literacy.

[chucksta]

It's a non-story. Who needs to know X erroneously blocked 1 link to NPR? And what's with the title?

>X caught blocking links to NPR, claiming the news site may be ‘unsafe’

Is it one link or many?

[slg]

> Who needs to know X erroneously blocked 1 link to NPR?

The appearance of a conflict of interest is a story. This appears to be a conflict of interest because a site is making it more difficult to read a negative story about a candidate endorsed by the company’s owner.

> Is it one link or many?

This is a rather pedantic complaint but multiple instances of the same link qualify as “links”. This is easier to see if you imagine them physically, multiple copies of the same book would be referred to as “books”.