It’s misleading to frame the argument as “them claiming things were inaccurate was appropriate reason to delay publication.” The appropriate reason to delay publication was their evident willingness to compile specific counter-evidence within a week. Of course subjects of hostile articles will always claim inaccuracies, but it matters whether they can credibly claim ability to provide contrary information. “Very last-minute screenshots” simply should not be a thing when working on an investigative piece of this magnitude—if you’re doing investigative work, you have a duty to do it right, not call it short based on the “time [you] had budgeted” and publish whatever you have.
Here’s my standard: epistemic disclaimers do not matter much when it comes to articles impugning reputations. What matters is presenting all available information accurately to the best of your ability. Your claim that the alternative was not a delay simply does not hold water: whether the alternative was a delay or no publication at all was fully within your control. There’s no reason to suspect any retaliation would be greater without publication than with publication; your time budget is nobody’s concern but your own. If the post contained a single meaningful falsehood at publication that could have been prevented by reviewing the information the subject of the article was actively preparing for you, publication at the chosen time was unreasonable no matter how many disclaimers Ben included.
I am not an effective altruist, but I am broadly adjacent and I work on stories about sensitive and complex situations with competing information from various parties regularly. I am coming to this fresh, not having heard of Nonlinear or Lightcone prior to yesterday.
Of all responses in this saga, I confess this is the one I’m least sympathetic to. Lawsuit threats are distinctly unfriendly. Here’s another thing that’s distinctly unfriendly: publishing libelous information likely to do irreparable damage to an organization without giving them the opportunity to proactively correct falsehoods. The legal system is a way of systematizing responses to that sort of unfriendliness; it is not kind, it is not pleasant, but it is a legitimate response to a calculated decision to inflict enormous reputational harm.
So you would have lost 40 hours of productive time? Respectfully: so what? You have sources actively claiming you are about to publish directly false information about them and asking for time to provide evidence that information is directly false. A lot of time, when people do that, they provide a different gloss on the same substantive information, and your original story can go ahead without serious issue. But it’s vital to at least see what they’re talking about!
As of right now, I am persuaded that at least some of the claims in the original article—claims, again, used to inflict serious reputational harm—were substantively false in a way that could and should have been corrected by checking the evidence provided by the accused parties. I am persuaded that you published those claims without due diligence, that those claims materially contributed to damaging the reputation of an organization in the community where its reputation mattered most, and that you received warning in advance that there was evidence available to indicate the falsehood of those claims.
I’m an outsider to this situation proceeding on the limited information in these two posts and comment sections, but given that information, I think the decision to publish potentially materially false information without waiting for available hard evidence to counter it was a poor one to which “threats of retaliation” (libel suits) were a proportionate response, not an unreasonable escalation.