Thread · 3 tweets · 9 Feb 2021

I think the part of this critique I disagree with the most is "the Times keeps playing with M-80 fireworks while telling us all how bad and dangerous explosives are." People have a clear intuition that explosives are dangerous. They really don't have that intuition with data.

We've been through these motions so many times over the past couple decades. Explain it's bad: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Give examples of how it could be misused: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If people treated explosives this way, it would be a journalistic duty to blow shit up to show them.

This shouldn't detract from the fact that using surveillance data for journalistic purposes, of which the authors list other cases, is a practice that still needs to be figured out. But I don't think that "just say no" is the best option.