Tech companies have complained about poorly sourced stories. I know that I’ve posted many times my confusion in cases where I could have been a primary source for stories that I knew were wrong —— not just wrong spelling (something fact-checkers always get right) but a company was accused of doing something wrong where they spend time and capital to be leading doing the right thing.

I’m curious if leaking easy-to-disprove stories in order to discredit journals are going to be common, either from frustrated employees or from teams that had deniable relations with the PR team. I can’t exclude that journalists make certain things up, but I have no experience of them doing that. I (and many HN readers) do have experience with the frustration of seeing our own work just denied publicly and people telling me that I’m lying because “they read something about it” online.