#that this probably does confirm the doxx was real

[avocant]

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[thenuanceddebater]

Let’s Talk About the CNN Debacle

It’s been a while since I’ve done a “let’s talk about post”, but I feel like this latest debacle associated with the CNN meme is enough of a cause to break my unintentional vow of silence. So, without further ado let’s do a general review of what exactly is going on with this whole CNN story and then we’ll talk about legality versus morality and ethics and how this applies. 

For starters, I’m just going to do an incredibly “quick and dirty” summary of the facts in the CNN case. On July 2, 2017 Donald Trump tweeted a gif of him beating up a man with the CNN logo placed over his head. The context from this gif was his Wrestlemania 23 match with CEO of WWE (then WWF I believe) Vince McMahon. CNN and some other outlets chose to interpret this meme as a sort of implied threat from the President (who it is worth noting also retweeted this tweet from the official POTUS twitter as well). The meme was considered in conflict with a statement from Assistant Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders that, “ The president in no way form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence, if anything quite the contrary”, a statement that CNN decided to directly tweet at Donald Trump as you can see here. 

Then the story gets interesting. Reddit user HanAssholeSolo on r/The_Donald claimed authorship of the gif in Trump’s tweet. This ignited a media frenzy over HanAssholeSolo’s other posts-- some of which were antisemitic, or racist in nature (one for example which identified CNN contributers with a Star of David called “Something strange about CNN... Can’t put my finger on it...”). Politico journalist Jared Yates Sexton claims to have been the first journalist that revealed HanAssholeSolo’s antisemitic content which quickly circulated both through other press outlets and over social media. 

Meanwhile, according to its own public statement, CNN then began to look for HanAssholeSolo’s identity while also asking the White House why the gif was tweeted in the first place. The White House proved to be evasive in their response, but HanAssholeSolo’s identity was not so evasive. Apparently, HanAssholeSolo had posted/ had visible personal details on his reddit account that CNN then used to identify him via Facebook. It is that this point that CNN first reaches out for contact with HanAssholeSolo on Monday July 3, 2017. 

HanAssholeSolo does not respond to this request for contact but instead begins to delete all of his reddit posts, images associated with said posts, and finally his reddit account after first posting an apology on r/ The_Donald (which I would love to post, but has since been deleted by moderators there, the CNN official statement includes either the apology in full, or at least in part, so I’ll post that again here). After posting this apology, HanAssholeSolo called CNN, confirmed his identity and agreed to an interview. During this interview HanAssholeSolo, “sounded nervous about his identity being revealed and asked to not be named out of fear for his personal safety and for the public embarrassment it would bring to him and his family.” CNN agreed not to publish HanAssholeSolo’s name citing the fact that he had made an extensive apology, but included a line that indicated that this position could be reversed when they stated, “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.” And the Internet exploded again. 

After this point, it’s difficult to do things chronologically.  All of the backlash seems to happen at about the same time. Some important pieces of backlash comes from Donald Trump Jr. Who makes a this tweet (which I’ll also post below)

This tweet is the first real instance of HanAssholeSolo being called a minor, a talking point that CNN’s critics quickly adopted. This tweet from Ted Cruz is also highly important as it is one of the two main tweets that starts the argument that CNN’s actions may have been illegal. 

The other widely-cited comment is from Julian Assange who had this to say 

Now, these legal claims are going to be the basis of the rest of my discussion of this issue. But, before we get to that CNN did have more information to reveal. First, that HanAssholeSolo called CNN and said that he completely agreed with their statement and was not in fact being threatened.

Which led to yet more memes about how this statement sounds similar to the expected statement a blackmailed person would make such as this one comparing CNN to ISIS (further down the tweet)

As well as comparisons to North Korea’s trial, and imprisonment of the recently-deceased Otto Warmbier. 

CNN’s second revelation is that HanAssholeSolo is not a minor and is in fact a middle-aged man

Now, you can come to whatever conclusions you would like to about HanAssholeSolo’s age. I’ve personally seen no evidence that he was in fact a minor, other than what Donald Trump Jr has retweeted which seems to originate form 4-chan, so I’m going to say that he probably wasn’t a minor. If anyone has any further information on the subject, I’d love to see it. Instead, we’re going to focus primarily on the legal claims here. 

So, first is the legal claim from Ted Cruz. In order for this law to apply, CNN would have needed to have obtained HanAssholeSolo’s IP address, and there’s just no reason why they would have needed that. Nothing that CNN did or said indicates that they must have HanAssholeSolo’s IP address. Again, if there’s information I’m missing please feel free to present it. But, based on what I have seen both from official and nonofficial sources, there is no reason to expect that CNN has HanAssholeSolo’s IP address or even any reason to assume that CNN engaged in any kind of hacking whatsoever. I think it is entirely possible that HanAssholeSolo posted personally identifying information publicly and CNN used that to track down his Facebook which had his other personal details on it. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Senator Cruz’s remarks while legally correct are completely irrelevant to this situation. 

Next, we need to look at Julian Assange’s claims. Mr. Assange’s claims are at the very least more probable than Senator Cruz’s; however, there is still  no evidence  that these claims are correct as well. CNN denies having made any kind of real agreement with HanAssholeSolo and instead seems to be predicating its actions on the fact that HanAssholeSolo took certain actions which rendered him no longer a part of the story. Therefore, rather than a tit-for-tat agreement that would make it easy to prosecute for coercion, blackmail, etc. you have a more complicated situation in which people make decisions without consulting one another based on previous decisions that the other has made. 

CNN made the completely legal decision to attempt to contact HanAssholeSolo and succeeded in finding him. This resulted in HanAssholeSolo deleting his accounts, apologizing, and then returning the contact to CNN where he informed them of his actions and likely asked to not be named in their story. CNN agreed to not name him but included a, granted poorly-worded, provision in their statement that this fact was subject to change if HanAssholeSolo continued his actions. This is all the information that we have about what CNN did. IF there is more information, lease feel free to present it but from what I’ve seen it just doesn’t exist. 

Now, allow me to be abundantly clear here: CNN absolutely has the legal right to publish HanAssholeSolo’s name if they want to. It is entirely legal for a newspaper to engage in investigative reporting as long as they do not break the law, and nothing that CNN has obtained warrants them breaking the law in any way, shape or form. The only way that this would not be legal is if CNN made the explicit threat to HanAssholeSolo that his name would be published if he continued to engage in his online activities and then told him that the only way to avoid his name being published was to stop his online activities and give a full public apology to CNN. This situation would trigger the New York statute (and a federal statute) on corruption. Anything less than this? Doesn’t trigger that statute. 

This is the burden of proof that the side making legal claims against CNN must meet. And yeah. It’s possible that this happened. But there’s just no evidence of it. Similar to how a lack of evidence of a rape doesn’t mean that the rape didn’t happen, but does mean that a person should not be convicted of rape, I can’t prove that CNN is not-guilty. I can say very, very assuredly that the evidence to convict CNN in a court of law does not exist at the current time. Therefore, it is entirely premature to talk about CNN as if they have done something illegal. 

Finally, a quick legal and ethical note on doxxing. First of all, doxxing is not as illegal as most people assume. As long as the individual in question acquires the personal information through legal measures (especially if the person themselves admits said information), then publishing public information does not tend to be illegal. Ethics are a different story. First of all, ethics tend to be more subjective and individual than law, but according to the Society of Professional Journalists code of journalistic ethics, CNN also behaved ethically in this situation. Despite what a lot of the fracas online would have you assume, CNN did not in fact doxx HanAssholeSolo because CNN did not in fact publish his personal information. So, even the people upset with CNN about doxxing are a reacting a little over-emotionally. 

There is one real valid reason to be upset with CNN, and that is a subjective opinion that the HanAssholeSolo story was not in fact newsworthy and thus did not warrant any kind of investigative reporting. However, newsworthiness is impossible to really put to a more objective metric and is one of the most subjective arguments against a story possible. In this situation for example, asserting that HanAssholeSolo made a simple harmless meme is just as correct as pointing out that HanAssholeSolo inserted himself into the national discourse through taking credit for a meme that the President of the United States himself retweeted, The former interpretation makes this story seem completely un-newsworthy while the latter makes it seem obviously newsworthy. I leave you yourself to decide on which one of these views you agree with, or if you agree with something in-between. Regardless, this is a subjective personal opinion. Not an objective fact. 

In conclusion, this whole CNN situation has been completely blown out of proportion with people making fallacious legal claims against CNN, claiming that they violated objective ethical standards when they did not, and circulating a lot of unintentionally false information. The truth is that the people who are attacking CNN and condemning them for their actions are being just as subjective as the people who originally condemned Trump for tweeting the meme in the first place. They are not being objective. Because by all non-personal standards CNN didn’t really cross the line. And that means that objectively speaking, CNN did nothing legally wrong, or ethically wrong according to the SPJ. Could they have done something wrong to you? Sure. But that’s an opinion. Not a fact.