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by semperfaux 4144 days ago
While this is an interesting idea, if this becomes common practice, the only possible result is a chilling effect on the willingness of informers to inform or whistleblowers to blow said whistles. It's another needle in the coffin of anonymity.

Plus, if this was written by a journalist (or someone else) based on a good-faith account from a legislator, the result will be either that person giving up his source (see paragraph 1, above) or being ethical and refusing to, potentially casting a bad light on the article whether it's appropriate or not.

2 comments

One might expect that scary agencies already have machine-learning-based approaches as common practice...

Could one defeat it by writing something, then having someone else "translate" it into their own vocabulary sentence-by-sentence, or even paragraph-by-paragraph, and having the original author approve the "translation"?

on the defensive side there is research into tools to conceal style, e.g. anonymouth https://psal.cs.drexel.edu/index.php/JStylo-Anonymouth