A Matter of Trust

Last year, a video of mine went viral.

I now have two "Know your meme" pages because of it.

A couple news articles were written about me, and at one point, I got a DM from a reporter: "Hey, do you have time to answer a couple questions?"

I responded in the positive, "Sure."

I never heard from her again.

"Surprisingly" enough, she still wrote an article about me, and at the bottom of it, was the line, "We reached out to Mr. Timmel for comment."

And I found that fascinating.

Because they had reached out to me, and I responded, and my response was ignored.

The writer/publication had absolutely zero intention of talking to me, they just wanted to cover their tracks. By dropping "we reached out to Mr. Timmel for comment," they could write whatever they wanted, while pretending I was the neglectful party.

The statement gave their article weight, and authority.

Last week, I started reading Character Limit, the book about Elon Musk buying Twitter, the other day.

Because I'm dumb, I was about halfway through before realizing, "Hey, wait... wasn't Peite involved with this, even if tangentially?"

Peite, being Peiter Zatko, aka Mudge.

Last night, I got to Chapter 23, which purported as being about Peite, but…

Well, wasn’t.

Like with the article about me, I found the Chapter fascinating.

They didn't appear to have talked to Peite, or researched him in the slightest, other than a quick glance at his Wikipedia page. 

Then they wrote what they wanted to write, stating it was how "some" Twitter employees felt.

Feelings, rumors, innuendo…

No facts.

And yet, the book is presenting itself as an authoritative take on the situation.

Because that’s the world we live in.

Fox News can lie about the election in 2000, pay over $700 million dollars to cover things, and people still watch and believe the things they continue to spew.

No one cares about facts, or reality, we care about confirmation bias.

If someone believes what we believe, then we must be right.

Interesting path society is on.

Interesting, indeed.