[EDIT: I was assuming from the content of the conversation Sam and Kelsey had some preexisting social connection that made a “talking to a friend” interpretation reasonable. From Kelsey’s tweets people linked elsewhere in this thread it sounds like they didn’t, and all their recent interactions had been around her writing about him as a journalist. I think that makes the ethics much less conflicted.]
I’m conflicted on the ethics of publishing this conversation. I read this as if Sam’s is talking to Kelsey this way because he thought he was talking casually with a friend in her personal capacity. And while the normal journalistic ethics is something like “things are on the record unless we agree otherwise”, that’s only true for professional conversations, right? Like, if Kelsey were talking with a housemate over dinner and then that ended up in a Vox article I would expect everyone would see that as unfair to the housemate? Surely the place you end up isn’t “journalists can’t have honest friendships”, right? Perhaps Kelsey doesn’t think of herself as Sam’s friend, but I can’t see how Kelsey could have gone through that conversation thinking “Sam thinks he’s talking to me as a journalist”.
On the other hand, Sam’s behavior has been harmful enough that I could see an argument that he doesn’t deserve this level of consideration, and falling back on a very technical reading of journalistic ethics is ok?
Copying what I posted in the LW thread: Sam has since tweeted “25) Last night I talked to a friend of mine. They published my messages. Those were not intended to be public, but I guess they are now.”
His claims are hard to believe. Kelsey is very well-known as a journalist in EA circles. She says she interviewed him for a piece in May. Before Sam’s tweet, she made a point of saying that she avoids secretly pulling “but I never said it would be off-the-record, you just asked for that” shenanigans. She confirmed the conversation with an email from her work account. She disputes the “friend” claim, and says they’ve never had any communication in any platform she can find, other than the aforementioned interview.
The only explanations that make sense to me are:
Sam expected Kelsey’s coverage to be more favorable and is now regretting his conversation
Sam has been under so much stress that even the incredibly obvious fact that this was a professional interview was something he failed to realize
Sam is just lying here, perhaps after hearing from his lawyers about how dumb the interview was
I’m honestly more than a bit surprised to see there being doubts on the propriety of publishing this. Like on the facts that Kelsey gives, it seems obvious that their relationship is journalist-subject (particularly given how experienced SBF is with the press). But even if you were to assume that they had a more casual social relationship than is being disclosed (which I do not), if you just blew up your company in a (likely) criminal episode that is the most damaging and public event in the history of the social movement you’re a part of, and your casual friend the journalist just wants to ask you a series of questions over DM, the idea that you have an expectation of privacy (without your ever trying to clarify that the conversation is private) does not seem very compelling to me.
Like, your therapist/executive coach just gave an interview on the record to the New York Times. You are front page news around the world. You know your statements are newsworthy. Why is the baseline here “oh this is just a conversation between friends?” (Particularly where one of the parties is like “no we are totally not friends”)
I don’t mean for my tone to be too harsh here, but I think this article is clearly in the public interest and I really just don’t see the logic for not publishing it.
Kelsey’s messages are written in a style of informality that strongly suggests a casual conversation with a friend, and not a formal interview with a journalist. The emoji reactions have a similar effect, and there isn’t an introductory message along the lines of “would you be happy to talk to vox”. This overall seemed somewhat manipulative to me.
Ugh, yeah. Publishing details about people without their consent (especially if there’s a bait and switch like you suggested) is the kind of thing I’d expect from an outlet like TMZ, not Vox’s Future Perfect. I think that, if it seemed like SBF didn’t realize the conversation was on the record, Kelsey should have clarified that to him at some point.
Edit, clarification: In the theory of contextual integrity, there are context-relative information norms that dictate when and with whom one can share private information about someone else. Different sets of norms apply to conversations with journalists in their capacity as journalists and casual conversations. Like you said, the tone of the conversation suggests that the casual-conversation norms should apply. If Kelsey wanted to publish the conversation, she should have clarified that she wanted the journalist-conversation norms to apply.
That’s just not how it works, and everyone who interacts with journalists with any regularity at all (like Sam has for years) knows that that’s not how it works.
A lot of people in this thread don’t know those norms and seem to be trying to reason about them from first principles or something. This is not useful. The norms are what they are, have been well-established for decades, and are common knowledge among all relevant parties. Sam has certainly had them explained to him many, many times.
Surely everyone on this thread realises that there should be a relevant distinction between being some random hack and ‘the EA journalist’. We’re holding her to higher standards than general journalistic norms.
I genuinely thought SBF spoke to me with the knowledge I was a journalist covering him, knew we were on the record, and knew that an article quoting him was going to happen.*** The reasons I thought that were:
- I knew SBF was very familiar with how journalism works. At the start of our May interview I explained to him how on the record/off the record works, and he was (politely) impatient because he knew it because he does many interviews.
- Obviously SBF’s communications right now are going to be subpoenaed and presented in court. I can still get why he might not want them in the news, but that does seem like a significant constraint on how private he expected them to be. If we’d talked over Signal I’d feel differently.
- When I emailed him “hey! Writing about what you said happened and your plans now. Just wanted to confirm you still have access to your Twitter account and that isn’t a troll or something- Kelsey Piper, Vox Media”, it seemed possible to me that he would claim it was a troll, or decline to answer, or ask me to take the interview retroactively off the record (which by journalism norms I am not obliged to do, but I would probably have worked with him to at least some degree—there are complicated moral tradeoffs in both directions, at that point!). But he didn’t, which I thought was because he was okay with my writing a story about our conversation.
With all that said, I was less careful with SBF than I am with most people. With most people, if it seemed possible they were under seriously mind-altering substances, I’d hesitate to interview them. If I was not completely sure they understood they might appear in press, I would remind them, and maybe even at particularly salacious quotes ask “okay to quote you on that?” Not all journalists do that, but I don’t want to hurt people, and I don’t want to be untrustworthy to people.
But in this case it felt to me like I had significant duties in the other direction—to get answers that made sense, if there were any, to the question of how this happened and (though as expected this did not have a thrilling answer) where the money was. A $10billion missing funds situation is just very very very different and much larger than most situations, and I think the right place on that tradeoff is also different.
I don’t think (as we all fret about these days) that the ends justify the means, or that it’s okay to break commitments of confidentiality as long as you have a good enough reason. I think I do believe that it’s okay to not be as proactive about commitments of confidentiality, not work as hard to remind people that they probably should want confidentiality when they seem perfectly happy to talk to you, when something happened to ten billion dollars.
I think it might be good if journalists had something like the Miranda warnings, where if you want to quote someone you have to first explicitly with established language warn them how journalism works and how to opt out, and if you failed to warn them then you don’t get to quote them. I think I would sign on to make that a norm of journalism. But it isn’t, and so I’m just balancing a lot of things that all seem important.
It seems possible that SBF thought that as a person involved in EA I wouldn’t hurt him, another person involved in EA. I don’t think that would be the right approach. It is not my job to protect EA, and that’s not what I do. It’s my job to try to make the world a better place through saying true things on topics that really really matter. I share values and priorities with many of you here, but my job comes with obligations and duties on top of those, and I think it’s overall good for the world that that’s so.
With all that said—I never intend to take a subject by surprise in publishing, and thought I had not done so. I wish that had happened differently, though I think I had serious professional obligations to write about this conversation.
*** This is edited. The original said ‘I genuinely thought SBF was comfortable with our interview being published and knew that was going to happen’, which is as written kind of absurd—obviously he didn’t want the mean stuff in print—so I’m trying to be clearer about what specifically I thought he understood and what specifically I thought he knew.
I’m going to argue a line here that I’m uncertain of.
The key question in this part of the thread seems to be “Did SBF expect you to be on the record?”. To which, I guess you were scared the answer was no, hence you didn’t ask during the initial conversation. Even in the follow up you don’t say “can I share our screenshots”.
I can see the social benefit to the conversation. But I guess I don’t necessarily buy the “I did the journalism norms thing so it’s okay”. I think I buy “it provided a lot of social benefit so I did it” which does feel ends justify means-ey but in a way that I think most people can accept from someone who defrauded billions of dollars.
I don’t say you were wrong. Who prepares for a decision like this? It was the break of a lifetime and it would have almost seemed suspicious if you let a funder off here. But I don’t necessarily buy that it was straightforwardly acceptable either. What I do think is that I don’t buy the “it was journalistic norms” defence.
But her defense wasn’t that she was just following journalistic norms, but rather that she was in fact following significantly stricter norms than that.
And why would sharing the screenshots in particular be significant? Writing a news story from an interview would typically include quotes from the interview, and quoting text carries the same information content as a screenshot of it.
There are options between credible and lying. It’s possible, for one thing, that Kelsey was engaged in some motivated reasoning herself, trying to make these trade-offs between her values while faced with a clear incentive in one direction.
I genuinely thought SBF was comfortable with our interview being published and knew that was going to happen.
For what it’s worth, I don’t buy this.
My understanding is that you didn’t ask SBF whether he wanted the text published. More importantly, I am confident you would have been able to correctly predict that he would say “no” if you did ask. Hence, why you didn’t.
The reasons SBF wouldn’t want his DMs published are too obvious to belabor: he said things like “fuck regulators”, that his “ethics” were nothing but a cover for PR, and he spoke in a conversationalist rather than professional tone. Even if you actually thought he would probably be OK with those messages being leaked, an ethical journalist would at least ask, because of the highly plausible “no” you would have received.
In my opinion, publishing the DMs without his consent might have been the right thing to do, for the greater good. I do not think you’re a bad person for doing it. But I don’t think it makes sense to have expected SBF to want the conversation to be published, and I don’t think it makes sense for you to claim you thought that.
I’m also not persuaded by the appeal journalistic norms, since I think journalistic norms generally fall well below high ethical standards.
That doesn’t seem plausible to me. I haven’t seen any substantive reason for why you should have thought that.
Again, SBF said things like “fuck regulators” and you knew that he was trying to foster a good public image to regulators. I find the idea that you thought that he thought people would react positively to the leaks highly implausible. And the “fuck regulators” comment was not the only example of something that strikes me as a thing he obviously meant to keep private. The whole chat log was littered with things that he likely did not want public.
And again, you could have just asked him whether he wanted the DMs published.
In my opinion, you were either very naive about what he expected, or you’re not being fully honest about what you really thought, and I don’t think either possibility reflects well on what you did.
- if you asked SBF “did you know that Kelsey was writing a story for Vox based on your conversation with her, sharing things you said to her in DMs?” the answer would be yes. Again, I sent an email explicitly saying I was writing about this, from my Vox account with a Vox Media Senior Reporter footer, which he responded to.
- if you asked SBF “is Kelsey going to publish specifically the parts of the conversation that are the most embarrassing/look bad”, the answer would be no.
- if you asked me “is SBF okay with this being published”, I think I would have said “I know he knows I’m writing about it and I’m pretty damn sure he knows how “on the record” works but he’s probably going to be mad about the tone and contents”.
I agree that it would be bizarre and absurd to believe, and disingenuous to claim, “Sam thought Kelsey would make him look extremely bad, and was okay with this”.
I agree that it would be bizarre and absurd to believe, and disingenuous to claim, “Sam thought Kelsey would make him look extremely bad, and was okay with this”.
This is not the claim I am making. I don’t think you thought that, or claimed that.
The most important claim I’m trying to make is that I think it was obvious that SBF would not want those DMs published, and so it doesn’t make sense for you to claim you thought he would be OK with it.
Note that I am not saying that publishing those DMs is definitely bad. Again, it might have been worth it to violate his consent for the greater good. I’m still uncertain about the ethics of violating someone’s consent like that, but it’s a plausible perspective.
I mostly just don’t think you should say you thought he’d be OK with you publishing the DMs, because I think that’s very likely false.
But Kelsey said in her email that she was going to write about their conversation, and he didn’t object. What do you think his epistemic state was, if he knew she was writing about the conversation but objected to the actual damning things he said being included? It seems like for those things to both be true, it would have to be the case that he expected her to write a piece that somehow left out the most damning things, i.e. to write a weirdly positively distorted piece.
People (must) behave according to complex norms in very competitive (hostile) external environments
If they don’t, they don’t exist, and we’re just in an internet forum pretty much LARPing.
It’s difficult to draw bright lines—it’s impossible.
For the issue of Piper’s quoting, very adjacent worlds has other outcomes that are more negative
Clearly, sentiment about SBF and the consequent effects played a role in the acceptability of quoting him
Piper’s explanations are doing a lot of dancing here
While there’s probably relevance to “deontological” or “utilitarian” rules and philosophy, the quality of discussion about utilitarianism ha been really bad in the wake of the FTX crisis.
The EA forum and EA ability in general doesn’t really provide good ways to discuss this
To be precise, it’s something like, “high quality spanning vectors” for discussion don’t really exist here. Like, Parfit is not enough.
Don’t get me started on the “Sequences”
I think the above is a useful set of content.
There’s another relevant set of content:
EA thinks it looks bad because it discusses things, but I suspect if it was more competent and had greater intellectual depth, it wouldn’t need to do this awkward dance, and at least in this aspect, I strongly agree with Ollie (? I thought it was Oliver but maybe I’m not cool enough to use that name?)
It’s not Will or the “utilitarians” fault.
Unfortunately “walking in a straight line” to go deontological probably is counterproductive.
More to the heart of the matter, the blogs and “intellectual leaders” of EA are often second rate, and sometimes much worse, and this is pretty suffocating.
To be clear, Will is good or great
For the forum, IMO, Gertler pretty much just climbed the hill and hit a local max that looks presentable. He never understood the issues, and left Lizka and others with deep structural challenges.
To be fair, the skills involved are huge
I don’t have the spoons for this right now, even the outline above is low quality.
Re “fuck regulators”, I guess it’s possible that in the mental state he was in, he thought this would go down well with the crypto community and he could regain some of their trust that way, or something. Recently the crypto community had turned against him for being too cosy with regulators in the US. See e.g. this clip that went viral on crypto twitter recently (28 Oct), and the reaction to his proposed regulations.
Yeah, I’ve had like 2 conversations with journalists and even I think this is pretty obvious to anyone with even basic media training (which Sam obviously has). I don’t have much sympathy for people claiming there was some kind of malpractice here.
FWIW some people are acting like the social rules around on vs. off the record are obvious and Sam should have known, but the rules are not obvious to me, and this sort of thing makes me reluctant to talk to any friends who are journalists.
I sort of agree with you, but I also think that Sam had much more experience talking to journalists than either of us do and so it’s more reasonable to say that he should have known how this works.
It takes about a minute of googling to find an article that reasonably accurately clarifies what is meant by “on the record”, “background”, and “off the record”. The social rule is that when speaking to a journalist about anything remotely newsworthy (if unsure, assume it is), you’re on the record unless you say you’d rather not be and the journalist explicitly agrees.
The rules aren’t self-evident, they’re just well-known among people who need to know them. People are acting like Sam should have known because he has been actively engaging with the press for years now, has consulted with PR professionals, etc. The idea that these rules have not been explained to him clearly and repeatedly is vanishingly unlikely to the point of being laughable.
There’s no reason to be reluctant to talk to journalist friends about non-newsworthy stuff, and the vast majority of things normal people talk to their friends about are not newsworthy. If you want to talk to a journalist friend about something that might be newsworthy, it’s as easy as just saying “off the record, yeah?” and them responding “yeah of course.” Takes five seconds and is really not an issue.
I’m not saying Sam didn’t know he was on the record. I’m saying I, personally, don’t understand when I should expect to be on or off the record, and you saying it’s obvious doesn’t make me understand. Saying “newsworthy” doesn’t help because I don’t always know what’s newsworthy, and it’s basically tautological anyway.
And Kelsey’s tweets show that journalists don’t even agree on what the rules are, namely, some believe it’s ok to quote something that the interviewee says is off the record, and others (like Kelsey) say it’s not. If they disagree about this, they probably also disagree about other things. Even if I know the social rules according to one journalist, that doesn’t mean I can safely talk to a different journalist because they might be following different rules.
If your journalist friends are good friends, maybe you could agree with them that all of your conversations are off the record by default, and they have to ask if they want to put anything on the record (and maybe even get that in writing just in case?). And then only remind them of this if you want to talk about something that readily comes to mind as being potentially sensitive/newsworthy.
I don’t know you personally so I can’t say whether this applies to you specifically, but: the vast majority of people do not say newsworthy things to their friends basically ever. I really don’t think it makes sense to feel anxious about this or change your behaviour based on a (former?) multi-billionaire’s DMs getting published. Almost everyone who is in the reference class of “people who need to worry about this” is aware that they are in that reference class.
Almost everyone who is in the reference class of “people who need to worry about this” is aware that they are in that reference class.
Fwiw, my guess is that a large fraction of the people writing on this Forum are suddenly and unwittingly in that reference class. So while I may agree with your literal statement, I want to emphasize and underline that the relevant implications are not very strong for this forum, especially now.
I think that’s a pretty fair point but a bit overstated? I don’t think arbitrary EAs have that much to worry about here, I think it’s mainly just people with a more direct connection to the events. That’s certainly not a small group, but I’m not sure it’s a “large fraction of the people writing on this Forum” either. And again, I think we all generally know who we are and know that that implies we should be cautious when talking to journalists.
That said I certainly don’t think it would hurt for everyone writing on this Forum to explicitly confirm that they’re off the record when talking to any journalists for the next few weeks. I don’t see doing so as very costly at all.
Not in my experience. In the past couple of days, a former housemate of a couple of months, who is now a journalist, reached out to a mutual friend asking to be put in touch with any EA people she knew, as she’s writing a piece on the impact of the FTX stuff on EA (AFAIK she knows very little about EA).
I have nothing to do with the current events, but IMO journalists will definitely mine their social networks to get content from anyone even tangentially related to the events, if that’s the closest they can get.
I should maybe have been clearer. When talking to a random journalist you don’t know, I think it’s pretty obvious that you should confirm whether you’re on the record or not. I was more trying to address the concern about whether things are newsworthy when talking to friends who also happen to be journalists. Journalists have beats, and most journalists are not currently working any stories for which comments from random EAs are newsworthy. A few journalists are! And if you happen to be talking to those ones, then, yeah, exercise more caution.
I dunno I think people are just really overestimating the likelihood of getting “caught on the record” as a random EA. It’s hard to explain precisely why, but, if any EA who is totally unconnected to current events ends up with their words being published against their expectations I will be very surprised. Happy to bet against it happening at 4:1 odds (for relatively small amounts as it’s a bit hard to make the criteria ungameable).
Yeah I also suspect that this was a betrayal of trust and feel conflicting about whether it was justified. I haven’t seen any explicit mention of Sam consenting to sharing it. This could be him high on stimulants going through the worst times of his life, messaging a friend while thinking about other things. Easy to see how you end up saying things with interpretations that you wouldn’t endorse.
It seems like they weren’t friends, only professional acquaintances up until 5 years ago, and then more recently journalist-subject. So it’s a bit disingenuous to say he was ‘talking with a friend’ as though they had anything resembling a DMing relationship within the past 5 years.
In journalism the ethical standard is both parties have to state an acknowledgement of a conversation being off the record before the conversation occurs.
I’ve had some people say to me “I’d like all future conversations with you to be off the record/confidential unless we agree otherwise”. I agreed to this.
I mean, depends what your housemate did, doesn’t it? You can decide to be loyal and protect them, or you can decide it’s in the public interest to know? Imagine you’re friends with the prime minister and they tell you they took a bribe. Surely those journalistic ethics stop weighing more than your duty to report it?
Given that Kelsey reports on EA for a living, it does seem plausible that basically every causal interaction people have with her should begin with ‘Do you agree this conversation is on background’, which seems unfortunate.
I don’t understand how you talk WITH A JOURNALIST and are then surprised when they publish what you say. Like, what do you think their job is?
If Kelsey had a close personal relationship with him (e.g. family member), that gets a bit more blurry. But in this case most/all of their interactions have been in a professional context, as far as I can tell. No shades of gray here.
In my book she has done everything above board. To whatever extent he’s gotten burned, it’s by being too dumb to see the incredibly obvious consequences of his own actions. Which is becoming a real pattern.
In the Vox piece, Kelsey says she emailed Sam to confirm he had access to his Twitter account and this conversation had been with him. It’s not completely clear to me that Sam should have interpreted this as an implicit request for permission. In his reply, Sam only confirmed that it was him who had responded and not an impersonator (“Still me, not hacked!”); he doesn’t give an indication that he is consenting to the release of the conversation. See also Peter Slattery’s comment.
I don’t disagree with any of that. To be clear, I wasn’t using that tweet as evidence she asked permission, but rather that they had little prior relationship.
What I’m confused by is why he assumed that he had any presumption of privacy in the first place, given the fact that she’s a journalist and they don’t have a significant prior friendship. In my opinion, that’s not a situation where Kelsey is obligated to explicitly check if he’s ok with this being on the record. That ought to be the default assumption.
Yes, based on Kelsey’s subsequent tweets, it seems like it would be a stretch to call their relationship one of friendship. If they were not friends, the main apparent reason against releasing the conversation is that Sam would probably have declined to give consent if Kelsey had asked for it. But based on Sam’s extensive experience with journalists, it’s hard to see how he could not have formed the expectation that, by engaging in an exchange with Kelsey, he was tacitly consenting to the publication of that exchange. Maybe he was deluded about the nature of their relationship and falsely believed that they were friends. Overall, it now seems to me that Kelsey probably did nothing wrong here.
She is a journalist whose previous interaction with SBF had been a published interview. He clearly approached the conversation too casually, but, I mean, he’s also still tweeting. His own reaction was much more “welp, gives you some color” than actually furious about it.
You also have to consider the implications of holding onto the information rather than publishing it. I think it would be far worse for Future Perfect, who SBF gave money to, to be seen as trying to hide information about his internal mindset.
Maybe you might argue she shouldn’t have reached out in the first place, but I think it’s pretty clearly newsworthy stuff!
You also have to consider the implications of holding onto the information rather than publishing it. I think it would be far worse for Future Perfect, who SBF gave money to, to be seen as trying to hide information about his internal mindset.
I don’t think this consideration should have influenced Kelsey’s decision to publish the conversation. Indeed, if it was improper for her to release the exchange with SBF, it is even worse if she did so out of a concern that this would improve her reputation or Vox’s. (I doubt this influenced her decision, though.)
Mmh, I’m not sure that’s the correct interpretation of Dylan’s tweet. I read him as saying that Vox is not less likely to publish stuff that reflects poorly on you if you are a sponsor, not that being a sponsor makes it more likely that they’ll publish that stuff.
Speaking of ethics, is there any alt text on the screenshots? Publishing an interview as a series of screenshots rather than actual text, especially without alt text, hampers accessibility and searchability.
[EDIT: I was assuming from the content of the conversation Sam and Kelsey had some preexisting social connection that made a “talking to a friend” interpretation reasonable. From Kelsey’s tweets people linked elsewhere in this thread it sounds like they didn’t, and all their recent interactions had been around her writing about him as a journalist. I think that makes the ethics much less conflicted.]
I’m conflicted on the ethics of publishing this conversation. I read this as if Sam’s is talking to Kelsey this way because he thought he was talking casually with a friend in her personal capacity. And while the normal journalistic ethics is something like “things are on the record unless we agree otherwise”, that’s only true for professional conversations, right? Like, if Kelsey were talking with a housemate over dinner and then that ended up in a Vox article I would expect everyone would see that as unfair to the housemate? Surely the place you end up isn’t “journalists can’t have honest friendships”, right? Perhaps Kelsey doesn’t think of herself as Sam’s friend, but I can’t see how Kelsey could have gone through that conversation thinking “Sam thinks he’s talking to me as a journalist”.
On the other hand, Sam’s behavior has been harmful enough that I could see an argument that he doesn’t deserve this level of consideration, and falling back on a very technical reading of journalistic ethics is ok?
Copying what I posted in the LW thread:
Sam has since tweeted “25) Last night I talked to a friend of mine. They published my messages. Those were not intended to be public, but I guess they are now.”
His claims are hard to believe. Kelsey is very well-known as a journalist in EA circles. She says she interviewed him for a piece in May. Before Sam’s tweet, she made a point of saying that she avoids secretly pulling “but I never said it would be off-the-record, you just asked for that” shenanigans. She confirmed the conversation with an email from her work account. She disputes the “friend” claim, and says they’ve never had any communication in any platform she can find, other than the aforementioned interview.
The only explanations that make sense to me are:
Sam expected Kelsey’s coverage to be more favorable and is now regretting his conversation
Sam has been under so much stress that even the incredibly obvious fact that this was a professional interview was something he failed to realize
Sam is just lying here, perhaps after hearing from his lawyers about how dumb the interview was
The tweet you linked to appears to have been deleted.
Kelsey’s correction.
I’m honestly more than a bit surprised to see there being doubts on the propriety of publishing this. Like on the facts that Kelsey gives, it seems obvious that their relationship is journalist-subject (particularly given how experienced SBF is with the press). But even if you were to assume that they had a more casual social relationship than is being disclosed (which I do not), if you just blew up your company in a (likely) criminal episode that is the most damaging and public event in the history of the social movement you’re a part of, and your casual friend the journalist just wants to ask you a series of questions over DM, the idea that you have an expectation of privacy (without your ever trying to clarify that the conversation is private) does not seem very compelling to me.
Like, your therapist/executive coach just gave an interview on the record to the New York Times. You are front page news around the world. You know your statements are newsworthy. Why is the baseline here “oh this is just a conversation between friends?” (Particularly where one of the parties is like “no we are totally not friends”)
I don’t mean for my tone to be too harsh here, but I think this article is clearly in the public interest and I really just don’t see the logic for not publishing it.
Kelsey’s messages are written in a style of informality that strongly suggests a casual conversation with a friend, and not a formal interview with a journalist. The emoji reactions have a similar effect, and there isn’t an introductory message along the lines of “would you be happy to talk to vox”. This overall seemed somewhat manipulative to me.
Ugh, yeah. Publishing details about people without their consent (especially if there’s a bait and switch like you suggested) is the kind of thing I’d expect from an outlet like TMZ, not Vox’s Future Perfect. I think that, if it seemed like SBF didn’t realize the conversation was on the record, Kelsey should have clarified that to him at some point.
Edit, clarification: In the theory of contextual integrity, there are context-relative information norms that dictate when and with whom one can share private information about someone else. Different sets of norms apply to conversations with journalists in their capacity as journalists and casual conversations. Like you said, the tone of the conversation suggests that the casual-conversation norms should apply. If Kelsey wanted to publish the conversation, she should have clarified that she wanted the journalist-conversation norms to apply.
That’s just not how it works, and everyone who interacts with journalists with any regularity at all (like Sam has for years) knows that that’s not how it works.
A lot of people in this thread don’t know those norms and seem to be trying to reason about them from first principles or something. This is not useful. The norms are what they are, have been well-established for decades, and are common knowledge among all relevant parties. Sam has certainly had them explained to him many, many times.
This is entirely on him.
Surely everyone on this thread realises that there should be a relevant distinction between being some random hack and ‘the EA journalist’. We’re holding her to higher standards than general journalistic norms.
Some thoughts about this—
I genuinely thought SBF spoke to me with the knowledge I was a journalist covering him, knew we were on the record, and knew that an article quoting him was going to happen.*** The reasons I thought that were:
- I knew SBF was very familiar with how journalism works. At the start of our May interview I explained to him how on the record/off the record works, and he was (politely) impatient because he knew it because he does many interviews.
- I knew SBF had given on the record interviews to the New York Times and Washington Post in the last few days, so while it seemed to me like he clearly shouldn’t be talking to the press, it also seemed like he clearly was choosing to do so for some reason and not at random. Edited to add: additionally, it appears that immediately after our conversation concluded he called another journalist to talk on the record and say among other things that he’d told his lawyer to “go fuck himself” and that lawyers “don’t know what they’re talking about”. I agree it is incredibly bizarre that Sam was knowingly saying things like this on the record to journalists.
- Obviously SBF’s communications right now are going to be subpoenaed and presented in court. I can still get why he might not want them in the news, but that does seem like a significant constraint on how private he expected them to be. If we’d talked over Signal I’d feel differently.
- When I emailed him “hey! Writing about what you said happened and your plans now. Just wanted to confirm you still have access to your Twitter account and that isn’t a troll or something- Kelsey Piper, Vox Media”, it seemed possible to me that he would claim it was a troll, or decline to answer, or ask me to take the interview retroactively off the record (which by journalism norms I am not obliged to do, but I would probably have worked with him to at least some degree—there are complicated moral tradeoffs in both directions, at that point!). But he didn’t, which I thought was because he was okay with my writing a story about our conversation.
With all that said, I was less careful with SBF than I am with most people. With most people, if it seemed possible they were under seriously mind-altering substances, I’d hesitate to interview them. If I was not completely sure they understood they might appear in press, I would remind them, and maybe even at particularly salacious quotes ask “okay to quote you on that?” Not all journalists do that, but I don’t want to hurt people, and I don’t want to be untrustworthy to people.
But in this case it felt to me like I had significant duties in the other direction—to get answers that made sense, if there were any, to the question of how this happened and (though as expected this did not have a thrilling answer) where the money was. A $10billion missing funds situation is just very very very different and much larger than most situations, and I think the right place on that tradeoff is also different.
I don’t think (as we all fret about these days) that the ends justify the means, or that it’s okay to break commitments of confidentiality as long as you have a good enough reason. I think I do believe that it’s okay to not be as proactive about commitments of confidentiality, not work as hard to remind people that they probably should want confidentiality when they seem perfectly happy to talk to you, when something happened to ten billion dollars.
I think it might be good if journalists had something like the Miranda warnings, where if you want to quote someone you have to first explicitly with established language warn them how journalism works and how to opt out, and if you failed to warn them then you don’t get to quote them. I think I would sign on to make that a norm of journalism. But it isn’t, and so I’m just balancing a lot of things that all seem important.
It seems possible that SBF thought that as a person involved in EA I wouldn’t hurt him, another person involved in EA. I don’t think that would be the right approach. It is not my job to protect EA, and that’s not what I do. It’s my job to try to make the world a better place through saying true things on topics that really really matter. I share values and priorities with many of you here, but my job comes with obligations and duties on top of those, and I think it’s overall good for the world that that’s so.
With all that said—I never intend to take a subject by surprise in publishing, and thought I had not done so. I wish that had happened differently, though I think I had serious professional obligations to write about this conversation.
*** This is edited. The original said ‘I genuinely thought SBF was comfortable with our interview being published and knew that was going to happen’, which is as written kind of absurd—obviously he didn’t want the mean stuff in print—so I’m trying to be clearer about what specifically I thought he understood and what specifically I thought he knew.
edited
I’m going to argue a line here that I’m uncertain of.
The key question in this part of the thread seems to be “Did SBF expect you to be on the record?”. To which, I guess you were scared the answer was no, hence you didn’t ask during the initial conversation. Even in the follow up you don’t say “can I share our screenshots”.
I can see the social benefit to the conversation. But I guess I don’t necessarily buy the “I did the journalism norms thing so it’s okay”. I think I buy “it provided a lot of social benefit so I did it” which does feel ends justify means-ey but in a way that I think most people can accept from someone who defrauded billions of dollars.
I don’t say you were wrong. Who prepares for a decision like this? It was the break of a lifetime and it would have almost seemed suspicious if you let a funder off here. But I don’t necessarily buy that it was straightforwardly acceptable either. What I do think is that I don’t buy the “it was journalistic norms” defence.
But her defense wasn’t that she was just following journalistic norms, but rather that she was in fact following significantly stricter norms than that.
And why would sharing the screenshots in particular be significant? Writing a news story from an interview would typically include quotes from the interview, and quoting text carries the same information content as a screenshot of it.
“I genuinely thought SBF was comfortable with our interview being published and knew that was going to happen. ”
This is not credible, and anyone who thinks this is credible is engaged in motivated reasoning.
I still think you should have published the interview, but you don’t need to lie about this.
There are options between credible and lying. It’s possible, for one thing, that Kelsey was engaged in some motivated reasoning herself, trying to make these trade-offs between her values while faced with a clear incentive in one direction.
Weak disagree but upvoted—I think that Kelsey has played this game enough to know what’s up
For what it’s worth, I don’t buy this.
My understanding is that you didn’t ask SBF whether he wanted the text published. More importantly, I am confident you would have been able to correctly predict that he would say “no” if you did ask. Hence, why you didn’t.
The reasons SBF wouldn’t want his DMs published are too obvious to belabor: he said things like “fuck regulators”, that his “ethics” were nothing but a cover for PR, and he spoke in a conversationalist rather than professional tone. Even if you actually thought he would probably be OK with those messages being leaked, an ethical journalist would at least ask, because of the highly plausible “no” you would have received.
In my opinion, publishing the DMs without his consent might have been the right thing to do, for the greater good. I do not think you’re a bad person for doing it. But I don’t think it makes sense to have expected SBF to want the conversation to be published, and I don’t think it makes sense for you to claim you thought that.
I’m also not persuaded by the appeal journalistic norms, since I think journalistic norms generally fall well below high ethical standards.
I believed that SBF thought not that the conversation was secret but that the coverage would be positive.
That doesn’t seem plausible to me. I haven’t seen any substantive reason for why you should have thought that.
Again, SBF said things like “fuck regulators” and you knew that he was trying to foster a good public image to regulators. I find the idea that you thought that he thought people would react positively to the leaks highly implausible. And the “fuck regulators” comment was not the only example of something that strikes me as a thing he obviously meant to keep private. The whole chat log was littered with things that he likely did not want public.
And again, you could have just asked him whether he wanted the DMs published.
In my opinion, you were either very naive about what he expected, or you’re not being fully honest about what you really thought, and I don’t think either possibility reflects well on what you did.
My best guess is:
- if you asked SBF “did you know that Kelsey was writing a story for Vox based on your conversation with her, sharing things you said to her in DMs?” the answer would be yes. Again, I sent an email explicitly saying I was writing about this, from my Vox account with a Vox Media Senior Reporter footer, which he responded to.
- if you asked SBF “is Kelsey going to publish specifically the parts of the conversation that are the most embarrassing/look bad”, the answer would be no.
- if you asked me “is SBF okay with this being published”, I think I would have said “I know he knows I’m writing about it and I’m pretty damn sure he knows how “on the record” works but he’s probably going to be mad about the tone and contents”.
I agree that it would be bizarre and absurd to believe, and disingenuous to claim, “Sam thought Kelsey would make him look extremely bad, and was okay with this”.
This is not the claim I am making. I don’t think you thought that, or claimed that.
The most important claim I’m trying to make is that I think it was obvious that SBF would not want those DMs published, and so it doesn’t make sense for you to claim you thought he would be OK with it.
Note that I am not saying that publishing those DMs is definitely bad. Again, it might have been worth it to violate his consent for the greater good. I’m still uncertain about the ethics of violating someone’s consent like that, but it’s a plausible perspective.
I mostly just don’t think you should say you thought he’d be OK with you publishing the DMs, because I think that’s very likely false.
But Kelsey said in her email that she was going to write about their conversation, and he didn’t object. What do you think his epistemic state was, if he knew she was writing about the conversation but objected to the actual damning things he said being included? It seems like for those things to both be true, it would have to be the case that he expected her to write a piece that somehow left out the most damning things, i.e. to write a weirdly positively distorted piece.
I guess he could have also not been reading carefully and missed that somehow?
(inhales slowly)
Like, I think you guys don’t understand what this means. It’s extremely relevant and poetic to this thread developing.
https://www.shakespearetheatre.org/watch-listen/coriolanus-and-the-body-politic-martius-butterfly/
Well, Ben or another mod hit this with a −8 vote.
Anyhoo, the point that is being made is:
People (must) behave according to complex norms in very competitive (hostile) external environments
If they don’t, they don’t exist, and we’re just in an internet forum pretty much LARPing.
It’s difficult to draw bright lines—it’s impossible.
For the issue of Piper’s quoting, very adjacent worlds has other outcomes that are more negative
Clearly, sentiment about SBF and the consequent effects played a role in the acceptability of quoting him
Piper’s explanations are doing a lot of dancing here
While there’s probably relevance to “deontological” or “utilitarian” rules and philosophy, the quality of discussion about utilitarianism ha been really bad in the wake of the FTX crisis.
The EA forum and EA ability in general doesn’t really provide good ways to discuss this
To be precise, it’s something like, “high quality spanning vectors” for discussion don’t really exist here. Like, Parfit is not enough.
Don’t get me started on the “Sequences”
I think the above is a useful set of content.
There’s another relevant set of content:
EA thinks it looks bad because it discusses things, but I suspect if it was more competent and had greater intellectual depth, it wouldn’t need to do this awkward dance, and at least in this aspect, I strongly agree with Ollie (? I thought it was Oliver but maybe I’m not cool enough to use that name?)
It’s not Will or the “utilitarians” fault.
Unfortunately “walking in a straight line” to go deontological probably is counterproductive.
More to the heart of the matter, the blogs and “intellectual leaders” of EA are often second rate, and sometimes much worse, and this is pretty suffocating.
To be clear, Will is good or great
For the forum, IMO, Gertler pretty much just climbed the hill and hit a local max that looks presentable. He never understood the issues, and left Lizka and others with deep structural challenges.
To be fair, the skills involved are huge
I don’t have the spoons for this right now, even the outline above is low quality.
Re “fuck regulators”, I guess it’s possible that in the mental state he was in, he thought this would go down well with the crypto community and he could regain some of their trust that way, or something. Recently the crypto community had turned against him for being too cosy with regulators in the US. See e.g. this clip that went viral on crypto twitter recently (28 Oct), and the reaction to his proposed regulations.
Yeah, I’ve had like 2 conversations with journalists and even I think this is pretty obvious to anyone with even basic media training (which Sam obviously has). I don’t have much sympathy for people claiming there was some kind of malpractice here.
FWIW some people are acting like the social rules around on vs. off the record are obvious and Sam should have known, but the rules are not obvious to me, and this sort of thing makes me reluctant to talk to any friends who are journalists.
I sort of agree with you, but I also think that Sam had much more experience talking to journalists than either of us do and so it’s more reasonable to say that he should have known how this works.
It takes about a minute of googling to find an article that reasonably accurately clarifies what is meant by “on the record”, “background”, and “off the record”. The social rule is that when speaking to a journalist about anything remotely newsworthy (if unsure, assume it is), you’re on the record unless you say you’d rather not be and the journalist explicitly agrees.
The rules aren’t self-evident, they’re just well-known among people who need to know them. People are acting like Sam should have known because he has been actively engaging with the press for years now, has consulted with PR professionals, etc. The idea that these rules have not been explained to him clearly and repeatedly is vanishingly unlikely to the point of being laughable.
There’s no reason to be reluctant to talk to journalist friends about non-newsworthy stuff, and the vast majority of things normal people talk to their friends about are not newsworthy. If you want to talk to a journalist friend about something that might be newsworthy, it’s as easy as just saying “off the record, yeah?” and them responding “yeah of course.” Takes five seconds and is really not an issue.
I’m not saying Sam didn’t know he was on the record. I’m saying I, personally, don’t understand when I should expect to be on or off the record, and you saying it’s obvious doesn’t make me understand. Saying “newsworthy” doesn’t help because I don’t always know what’s newsworthy, and it’s basically tautological anyway.
And Kelsey’s tweets show that journalists don’t even agree on what the rules are, namely, some believe it’s ok to quote something that the interviewee says is off the record, and others (like Kelsey) say it’s not. If they disagree about this, they probably also disagree about other things. Even if I know the social rules according to one journalist, that doesn’t mean I can safely talk to a different journalist because they might be following different rules.
If your journalist friends are good friends, maybe you could agree with them that all of your conversations are off the record by default, and they have to ask if they want to put anything on the record (and maybe even get that in writing just in case?). And then only remind them of this if you want to talk about something that readily comes to mind as being potentially sensitive/newsworthy.
I don’t know you personally so I can’t say whether this applies to you specifically, but: the vast majority of people do not say newsworthy things to their friends basically ever. I really don’t think it makes sense to feel anxious about this or change your behaviour based on a (former?) multi-billionaire’s DMs getting published. Almost everyone who is in the reference class of “people who need to worry about this” is aware that they are in that reference class.
Fwiw, my guess is that a large fraction of the people writing on this Forum are suddenly and unwittingly in that reference class. So while I may agree with your literal statement, I want to emphasize and underline that the relevant implications are not very strong for this forum, especially now.
I think that’s a pretty fair point but a bit overstated? I don’t think arbitrary EAs have that much to worry about here, I think it’s mainly just people with a more direct connection to the events. That’s certainly not a small group, but I’m not sure it’s a “large fraction of the people writing on this Forum” either. And again, I think we all generally know who we are and know that that implies we should be cautious when talking to journalists.
That said I certainly don’t think it would hurt for everyone writing on this Forum to explicitly confirm that they’re off the record when talking to any journalists for the next few weeks. I don’t see doing so as very costly at all.
Not in my experience. In the past couple of days, a former housemate of a couple of months, who is now a journalist, reached out to a mutual friend asking to be put in touch with any EA people she knew, as she’s writing a piece on the impact of the FTX stuff on EA (AFAIK she knows very little about EA).
I have nothing to do with the current events, but IMO journalists will definitely mine their social networks to get content from anyone even tangentially related to the events, if that’s the closest they can get.
I should maybe have been clearer. When talking to a random journalist you don’t know, I think it’s pretty obvious that you should confirm whether you’re on the record or not. I was more trying to address the concern about whether things are newsworthy when talking to friends who also happen to be journalists. Journalists have beats, and most journalists are not currently working any stories for which comments from random EAs are newsworthy. A few journalists are! And if you happen to be talking to those ones, then, yeah, exercise more caution.
I dunno I think people are just really overestimating the likelihood of getting “caught on the record” as a random EA. It’s hard to explain precisely why, but, if any EA who is totally unconnected to current events ends up with their words being published against their expectations I will be very surprised. Happy to bet against it happening at 4:1 odds (for relatively small amounts as it’s a bit hard to make the criteria ungameable).
Yeah I also suspect that this was a betrayal of trust and feel conflicting about whether it was justified. I haven’t seen any explicit mention of Sam consenting to sharing it. This could be him high on stimulants going through the worst times of his life, messaging a friend while thinking about other things. Easy to see how you end up saying things with interpretations that you wouldn’t endorse.
It seems like they weren’t friends, only professional acquaintances up until 5 years ago, and then more recently journalist-subject. So it’s a bit disingenuous to say he was ‘talking with a friend’ as though they had anything resembling a DMing relationship within the past 5 years.
In journalism the ethical standard is both parties have to state an acknowledgement of a conversation being off the record before the conversation occurs.
That must make having a journalist as a friend pretty tedious, if every conversation has to start with “confirming that we’re off the record? yes”
(I have several journalist friends and I don’t do this, and now I’m wondering if I should start)
I’ve had some people say to me “I’d like all future conversations with you to be off the record/confidential unless we agree otherwise”. I agreed to this.
I mean, depends what your housemate did, doesn’t it? You can decide to be loyal and protect them, or you can decide it’s in the public interest to know? Imagine you’re friends with the prime minister and they tell you they took a bribe. Surely those journalistic ethics stop weighing more than your duty to report it?
(Sorry, edited a few times)
Given that Kelsey reports on EA for a living, it does seem plausible that basically every causal interaction people have with her should begin with ‘Do you agree this conversation is on background’, which seems unfortunate.
I don’t understand how you talk WITH A JOURNALIST and are then surprised when they publish what you say. Like, what do you think their job is?
If Kelsey had a close personal relationship with him (e.g. family member), that gets a bit more blurry. But in this case most/all of their interactions have been in a professional context, as far as I can tell. No shades of gray here.
In my book she has done everything above board. To whatever extent he’s gotten burned, it’s by being too dumb to see the incredibly obvious consequences of his own actions. Which is becoming a real pattern.
He at least claims he didn’t intend for the conversation to be public. Difficult to see how it didn’t occur to him that he should explicitly state it was off the record.
The claim that Sam considered it an informal chat between friends seems hard to square with this tweet from Kelsey
In the Vox piece, Kelsey says she emailed Sam to confirm he had access to his Twitter account and this conversation had been with him. It’s not completely clear to me that Sam should have interpreted this as an implicit request for permission. In his reply, Sam only confirmed that it was him who had responded and not an impersonator (“Still me, not hacked!”); he doesn’t give an indication that he is consenting to the release of the conversation. See also Peter Slattery’s comment.
I don’t disagree with any of that. To be clear, I wasn’t using that tweet as evidence she asked permission, but rather that they had little prior relationship.
What I’m confused by is why he assumed that he had any presumption of privacy in the first place, given the fact that she’s a journalist and they don’t have a significant prior friendship. In my opinion, that’s not a situation where Kelsey is obligated to explicitly check if he’s ok with this being on the record. That ought to be the default assumption.
Yes, based on Kelsey’s subsequent tweets, it seems like it would be a stretch to call their relationship one of friendship. If they were not friends, the main apparent reason against releasing the conversation is that Sam would probably have declined to give consent if Kelsey had asked for it. But based on Sam’s extensive experience with journalists, it’s hard to see how he could not have formed the expectation that, by engaging in an exchange with Kelsey, he was tacitly consenting to the publication of that exchange. Maybe he was deluded about the nature of their relationship and falsely believed that they were friends. Overall, it now seems to me that Kelsey probably did nothing wrong here.
It is often the explicit job of a journalist to uncover and release publicly important information from sources who would not consent to its release.
She is a journalist whose previous interaction with SBF had been a published interview. He clearly approached the conversation too casually, but, I mean, he’s also still tweeting. His own reaction was much more “welp, gives you some color” than actually furious about it.
You also have to consider the implications of holding onto the information rather than publishing it. I think it would be far worse for Future Perfect, who SBF gave money to, to be seen as trying to hide information about his internal mindset.
Maybe you might argue she shouldn’t have reached out in the first place, but I think it’s pretty clearly newsworthy stuff!
I don’t think this consideration should have influenced Kelsey’s decision to publish the conversation. Indeed, if it was improper for her to release the exchange with SBF, it is even worse if she did so out of a concern that this would improve her reputation or Vox’s. (I doubt this influenced her decision, though.)
It clearly influenced her editor.
Mmh, I’m not sure that’s the correct interpretation of Dylan’s tweet. I read him as saying that Vox is not less likely to publish stuff that reflects poorly on you if you are a sponsor, not that being a sponsor makes it more likely that they’ll publish that stuff.
That’s how I read him too. They want to show that they wouldn’t bury the piece because of his sponsorship.
Speaking of ethics, is there any alt text on the screenshots? Publishing an interview as a series of screenshots rather than actual text, especially without alt text, hampers accessibility and searchability.
I think we added alt text to all screenshots in the piece and if we missed one let us know.
Thanks for clarifying! I’m sorry for being rude in the above comment and have retracted it.
Weirdly enough, I also copied those alt text to this post, but they don’t seem to be rendering in the post itself.
Images are embedded with markdown code: ”! [alt text] (link_to_image.png)” (no spaces). I don’t know if that’s sufficient for screen readers.
It seems it is a bug on the forum software. I’ve made a PR fixing it.