I'm the one who provides proof and rationale, but that's all just "techniques of the conspiracy theorist"? Whereas you are accepting at face value a blog post that itself produces no proof, other than to point out that Facebook PR contacted NYT and NYT made an edit to their story?

OK, I'll make my argument by assuming that I'm wrong and you are right:

- NYT defers to FB and Sandberg

- Yesterday, an NYT article was edited and a phrase particularly damning and specific to Sandberg was removed without notice.

- It's reasonable to assume Sandberg pressured NYT to make that change.

OK, I propose these facts:

This change was made at 9:21PM EST on Monday, 2+ hours after the story originally published at 7PM:

http://newsdiffs.org/diff/1652560/1652801/https%3A/www.nytim...

At 8:33PM Tuesday, the two reporters for the first story published this story:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/technology/alex-stamos-fa...

http://newsdiffs.org/article-history/https%3A/www.nytimes.co...

The End for Facebook’s Security Evangelist https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/technology/alex-stamos-fa...

I bring up the time stamps to argue that this story would've had to been partially reported and on deck for it to have been ready to publish less than 24 hours later. It's reasonable to assume they had some fo this reporting done at the time Sandberg is alleged to have coerced them into changing their story.

This follow up story is entirely focused on CSO Stamos, i.e. the Facebook exec who was forced out of a job and is the exec that advocated the most against Sandberg when it came to detecting Russian interference. The NYT reporters published this story sympathetic to Stamos despite agreeing to soften their coverage just 24-hours before to please Sandberg.

This follow story ends with a damning claim, that Stamos and Sandberg had a "deteriorating" relationship specifically on the issue of "how to handle Russian interference on Facebook and how to best reorganize Facebook's security team before the midterm elections." Even worse, the story alleges that when Stamos asked for a restructure to avoid reporting to general counsel, Stamos's work and department was dissolved. To put these two events (Sandberg disagreement, Stamos losing his job) in consecutive paragraphs strongly implies that Sandberg fired Stamos because of the Russia thing.

Even worse, this story sources this claim to "more than half a dozen people who work or formerly worked at the company."

-----

Assuming those facts above, here's the argument from contradiction: the NYT reporters are accused of erasing the following sentence regarding Sheryl Sandberg:

> Mr. Stamos had been a strong advocate inside the company for investigating and disclosing Russian activity on Facebook, often to the consternation of other top executives, including Sheryl Sandberg, the social network’s chief operating officer, according to the current and former employees, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters

The allegation is that the above sentence is damaging to Sandberg, and she went out of her way to threaten/pressure the NYT to change/remove it.

But as the facts stand, the NYT has published a separate story that states this:

> By October, the relationship between Mr. Stamos and Ms. Sandberg had deteriorated over how to handle Russian interference on Facebook and how best to reorganize Facebook’s security team before the midterm elections, according to more than half a dozen people who work or formerly worked at the company. Mr. Stamos proposed that instead of reporting to Facebook’s general counsel, Colin Stretch, he report directly to Facebook’s higher-ups. Instead, executives released Mr. Stamos from much of his day-to-day responsibility, employees said.

- The "consternation" sentence was so offensive to Sandberg that she used influence to get NYT to revise/remove it from a story yesterday.

- Today, those same editors published a story even more damning regarding Sandberg and Stamos and Russian interference.

- That this followup story was allowed to be published (and 4+ hours later, has had no revisions), contradicts the assumption that NYT is subservient to Sandberg/Facebook.