[Chapter-delegates] Major news errors on ISOC home page

[Dan York]

Dave,

Thanks for writing. I welcome feedback like this!

On Mar 18, 2020, at 3:55 PM, Dave Burstein <daveb at dslprime.com<mailto:daveb at dslprime.com>> wrote:

I'm writing up the possibilities of working from home breaking the Internet, on which there is already a fair amount of data widely available. Nearly all the data and expert opinion - I'll post in a little bit - is that most broadband landlines networks are having minimal trouble and that will likely continue.

That is also our conclusion, as outlined in David Belson’s post (which you mention later): https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2020/02/is-the-internet-resilient-enough-to-withstand-coronavirus/ and some of the coverage you can see listed here: https://www.internetsociety.org/news/in-the-news/

But our homepage news currently writes

To be clear, this was in our our weekly “This Week in Internet News” article that was posted on March 16: https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2020/03/the-week-in-internet-news-coronavirus-shutdowns-expose-digital-divide/

In Britain, broadband networks aren’t ready for millions of people working from home, ABC14News.com<http://ABC14News.com> reports. Many home-based Internet services in the U.K. still use old copper-based networks, and Internet users should expect congestion.
<snip>
It is unclear who owns the ABC 14 News website, although it appears to be part of a larger collection of fake news sites, including CBS15.com<http://CBS15.com>, NBC9News.com<http://NBC9News.com>,.

Yes, I removed that paragraph of text just now from the article because the link it has to that ABC14News is now no longer available. “The account has been suspended.”

Unfortunately it would seem that we got fooled by a bogus site.

If we want to be trusted, I think we should have a policy of not printing any technical conclusion without someone technical having reviewed it.

We agree, which is why we do fact-check our articles before publishing.

In this case, I own the error.  Grant Gross, who wrote that article, sent it to us on Friday for our review as he usually does.

With everything else going on right now, I did NOT review the article, as I usually do. Grant is a freelance journalist who has been writing in the technology space for 15+ years and who I’ve grown to trust over the years. Unfortunately, he got fooled, too.

My mistake for not reviewing it. And so I’ve now removed that text.

Thank you for pointing out the error.

I quickly found several other insupportable claims.

Please send those along. As you note, we do not want to be publishing incorrect information.

Thanks,
Dan

--
Dan York, Director, Web Strategy / Project Leader, Open Standards Everywhere<https://www.internetsociety.org/ose/> / Internet Society
york at isoc.org<mailto:york at isoc.org> / +1-603-439-0024 / @danyork<https://twitter.com/danyork>
<https://www.internetsociety.org/>

[cid:image001.png at 01D5D03B.DF736FF0]
internetsociety.org<https://www.internetsociety.org/> | @internetsociety<https://twitter.com/internetsociety>


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