This strikes me as weirdly one-sided. You’re against leaking, but presumably, you’re in favour of whistleblowing—people being able to raise concerns about wrongdoing. Would you have objected to someone leaking/whisteblowing that e.g. SBF was misusing customer money? If someone had done so months ago, that could have saved billions, but it would have a breach of (SBF’s) trust.
The difference between leaking and whistleblowing is … I’m actually not sure. One is official, or something?
This fundamentally misunderstands norms around whistleblowing. For instance, UK legislation on whistleblowing does not allow you to just go to journalists for any and all issues—they have to be sufficiently serious. This isn’t just for “official” reasons but because it’s understood that trust within institutions is necessary for a functioning society/group/community/company and norms that encourage paranoia over leaks lead to non-honest conversations filtered through fears of leaks.
Even in the event that a crime is being committed, you are expected to first go to authorities, rather than journalists—to journalists only if you believe authorities won’t assist. In the SBF example I’d hope someone would have done precisely that. Moreso, to protect trust, whistleblowing is protected only for issues that warrant that level of trust breach—ie my comment is that this is disproportionate breach of trust, with long term effect on community norms.
Furthermore, whistleblowing on actual crimes is entirely different to leaking private messages about managing PR. And—again—is something one should do first to authorities—not necessarily to journalists!
Essentially you are eliding very serious whistleblowing of crimes to police or public bodies, to leaked screenshots to journalists of private chats about community responses.
I’d guess the distinction would be more ‘public interest disclosure’ rather than ‘officialness’ (after all, a lot of whistleblowing ends up in the media because of inadequacy in ‘formal’ channels). Or, with apologies to Yes Minister: “I give confidential briefings, you leak, he has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act”.
The question seems to be one of proportionality: investigative or undercover journalists often completely betray the trust and (reasonable) expectations of privacy of its subjects/targets, and this can ethically vary from reprehensible to laudable depending on the value of what it uncovers (compare paparrazzi to Panorama). Where this nets out for disclosing these slack group messages is unclear to me.
This strikes me as weirdly one-sided. You’re against leaking, but presumably, you’re in favour of whistleblowing—people being able to raise concerns about wrongdoing. Would you have objected to someone leaking/whisteblowing that e.g. SBF was misusing customer money? If someone had done so months ago, that could have saved billions, but it would have a breach of (SBF’s) trust.
The difference between leaking and whistleblowing is … I’m actually not sure. One is official, or something?
This fundamentally misunderstands norms around whistleblowing. For instance, UK legislation on whistleblowing does not allow you to just go to journalists for any and all issues—they have to be sufficiently serious. This isn’t just for “official” reasons but because it’s understood that trust within institutions is necessary for a functioning society/group/community/company and norms that encourage paranoia over leaks lead to non-honest conversations filtered through fears of leaks.
Even in the event that a crime is being committed, you are expected to first go to authorities, rather than journalists—to journalists only if you believe authorities won’t assist. In the SBF example I’d hope someone would have done precisely that. Moreso, to protect trust, whistleblowing is protected only for issues that warrant that level of trust breach—ie my comment is that this is disproportionate breach of trust, with long term effect on community norms.
Furthermore, whistleblowing on actual crimes is entirely different to leaking private messages about managing PR. And—again—is something one should do first to authorities—not necessarily to journalists!
Essentially you are eliding very serious whistleblowing of crimes to police or public bodies, to leaked screenshots to journalists of private chats about community responses.
I’m a bit confused: Which authorities would the whistleblower report to, especially if they aren’t reporting any crimes?
I’d guess the distinction would be more ‘public interest disclosure’ rather than ‘officialness’ (after all, a lot of whistleblowing ends up in the media because of inadequacy in ‘formal’ channels). Or, with apologies to Yes Minister: “I give confidential briefings, you leak, he has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act”.
The question seems to be one of proportionality: investigative or undercover journalists often completely betray the trust and (reasonable) expectations of privacy of its subjects/targets, and this can ethically vary from reprehensible to laudable depending on the value of what it uncovers (compare paparrazzi to Panorama). Where this nets out for disclosing these slack group messages is unclear to me.