• salarua@sopuli.xyz
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    6 days ago

    Playing devil’s advocate here: most websites are generated by programs, so it’s possible it could be a coding error. That said, for it to plausibly be a coding error in whatever generator they’re using, they’d have to store the Constitution with each paragraph in a separate file. That’s the only way I could possibly see a “coding error” exclude the stuff that was excluded.

    Edit: That is to say, obviously it is not a coding error. The text of the Constitution would be stored in one file because 1. that makes sense, and 2. storing per paragraph would add to overhead. And stuff in the middle of files doesn’t just get deleted by a coding error.

    • Kairos@lemmy.today
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      6 days ago

      Do you know of anything else missing? If it was a “code” error, like in a Drupal site or something it would likely delete other stuff. Most U.S. government websites are modernized during the Obama administration or newer. This stuff doesn’t happen due to code.

      The text/tweet/whatever really feels just like made up words to convince non technically literate people it was a mistake.

      • Arcka@midwest.social
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        5 days ago

        it would likely delete other stuff

        It did delete more than the lines that most of the news articles mention. When I looked at the diff, the missing text seemed so arbitrary and wide in scope that a technical error was completely plausible. It made the news articles seem totally sensationalized.

        • Kairos@lemmy.today
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          5 days ago

          Oh yeah I saw. Really feels like someone just looked at a paragraph and selected until the editor wouldn’t let them anymore.

    • dickalan@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Giving people the benefit of the doubt is how we are in this situation to begin with, screw your fucking head on right

      There have been no changes to the Constitution that would have required them messing around with it at all. It’s a static document except when there are amendments, and the most recent amendment was in 1992.

      It’s clearly bullshit. I can imagine the page disappearing entirely due to a coding issue, but the deletions were precise and clearly intentional. To what end, I can only imagine.