[malfist]

I don't know how you could possibly have that take away from reading this. They did a review of their context to confirm this was an isolated incident and reaffirmed that it did not follow the journalistic standards they have set for themselves.

They admit wrong doing here and point to multiple policy violations.

[misnome]

> That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here.

It’s not optional, but wasn’t followed, with zero repercussions.

Sounds optional.

[throw3e98]

Reading between the lines, this is corporate-speak for "this is a terminable offense for the employees involved." It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process.

[g947o]

They might as well wait till business hours to sort things out before publishing a statement. Nobody needs to see such hollow corpo speak on a Sunday.

[maxbond]

No, admitting fault as soon as possible makes a big difference. It's essential to restoring credibility.

If they had waited until Monday the thread would be filled with comments criticizing them for waiting that long.

[g947o]

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/um-what-happened-to-th...

> we probably won't have something to report back until next week.

The forum thread is locked.

[icegreentea2]

Yeah, but the problem is that by not making it clear that additional actions may be coming, they're barely restoring credibility at all, because the current course of action (pulling the article and saying sorry) is like the bare minimal required to avoid being outright liars - a far cry from being credible journalists. All they've done is leave piles of readers (including Ars subscribers) going "wtf".

If they felt the need to post something in a hurry on the weekend, then the message should acknowledge that, and acknowledge that "investigation continues" or something like that

[maxbond]

You don't announce that you're firing people or putting them on a PIP or something. Not only is it gauche but it makes it seem like you're not taking any accountability and putting it all in the employees involved. I assume their AI policy is fine and that the issue was it wasn't implemented/enforced, and I'm not sure what they can do about that other than discipline the people involved and reiterate the policy to everyone else.

What would you have liked to see them announce?

[lapcat]

> It's a holiday weekend in the US so they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process.

That's not how it works. It's standard op nowadays to lock out terminated employees before they even walk in the door.

Sometimes they just snail mail the employee's personal possessions from their desk.

Moreover, Ars Technica publishes articles every day. Aside from this editor's note, they published one article today and three articles yesterday. So "holiday weekend" is practically irrelevant in this case.

[danaris]

> That's not how it works.

Some places.

> It's standard op nowadays to lock out terminated employees before they even walk in the door.

Some places.

You're speaking very authoritatively about what's "standard", in a way that strongly implies you think this is either the way absolutely everyone does it, or the way it should be done.

It's standard op nowadays to acknowledge that your experiences are not universal, and that different organizations operate differently.

[lapcat]

> You're speaking very authoritatively about what's "standard", in a way that strongly implies you think this is either the way absolutely everyone does it, or the way it should be done.

Neither. I just meant it's common.

The comment I replied to said, "they may need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process."

I think the commonality of the practice shows that Ars Technica doesn't need to wait for office staff to return to begin the process, if office staff is even gone in the first place (again, Ars Technica appears to be open for business today). There's certainly no legal reason why they'd need to wait to fire people.

Does Ars Technica have a "policy" to only fire people on weekdays? I doubt it. Imagine reading that in the employee handbook.

Besides, President's Day is not a holiday that businesses necessarily close for. Indeed, many retailers are open and have specific President's Day sales.

[trivialities777]

> (again, Ars Technica appears to be open for business today). There's certainly no legal reason why they'd need to wait to fire people.

They normally aren't, they probably write the stories on the weekdays and prepare them to automatically publish over the weekend, with only a skeletal staff to moderate and repair the website. Legal, HR, and other office staff probably only work weekdays, or are contracted out to external firms.

Their CEO posted a quick note on their forums the other day about this which implied they don't normally work on holidays and it would take until Tuesday for a response.

[danaris]

You're constructing quite a lot of hypotheticals to justify not waiting 3 more days to condemn Ars Technica for not firing this guy.

Can we not just have a little patience anymore?

[add-sub-mul-div]

It's embarrassing for them to put out such a boilerplate "apology" but even more embarrassing to take it at its word.

It's such a cliche that they should have apologized in a human enough way that it didn't sound like the apology was AI generated as well. It's one way they could have earned back a small bit of credibility.

[chrisjj]

> They did a review of their context to confirm this was an isolated incident

The only incident we know was isolated was getting caught.