@carnage4life alt text: a screenshot of an ars technica article, timestamped FEB 15, 2026 10:09 AM and credited to Ken Fisher, with the text
"Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations
We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.

On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an Al tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards.
Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said

@evan ok

@evan there isn't any protocol to communicate consent with all parties, so it just has to be a broken mess.

Even if Bob gets a return list of Alices followers and allows those the thread is still broken for all of Bobs followers who are not in Alice's list. Even if you had reply controls for Alice to approve Bobs reply it would have to retroactively apply to all of Alice's posts to be useful to Bobs followers. And beyond just retroactively applying this change it'd be a mess to communicate that this was happening in the UI. And we didn't even wonder what happens with a 3rd participant yet.

I think the concept is mostly just flawed and the best we can do is mostly broken threads and a working implementation for the people who are in the subset of all followers lists.

@evan there's the correct answer and then there's what happens on fedi