Introduction
Vetted Causes writes reviews of charities. Thus far, we have published reviews of two charities. In both cases, we did not reach out to the charities before publishing reviews on them. We did consider doing so for our most recent review, but did not due to concerns which we've described below.
We hope that through this post, members of the community can offer solutions that resolve our concerns. Should this happen, we would be more than happy to send reviews to charities before releasing them going forward.
Acknowledging The Potential Benefits of Reaching Out to Charities Before Publishing Reviews on Them
We would like to start by acknowledging some of the potential benefits of reaching out to charities before publishing reviews on them:
- Charities could inform us of public information that we failed to locate.
- Charities could inform us of strong counterarguments that we did not consider.
- Charities may expect us to do this due to social norms, and failing to do so may lead to less productive discourse.
There are other potential benefits as well, which you can find stated and suggested by community members on our previous posts.
Potential Risks of Reaching Out to Charities Before Publishing Reviews About Them
Note: none of the risks we mention are directed at any particular charity. When we begin evaluating any charity, we are concerned about all of these risks.
The two risks we are primarily concerned about relate to biased evidence, and unconscious biases.
Risk 1: Charities could alter, conceal, fabricate and/or destroy evidence to cover their tracks.
Much of the evidence we cite is from charities’ own webpages. Charities have the ability to change their webpages to potentially alter, conceal, and/or destroy evidence that we have cited. In some cases, there is also an incentive for charities to do this.
If we reach out to charities before publishing negative reviews about them, there is a risk that they will take these actions. While it is possible charities will still do this even when we don’t reach out before publishing negative reviews about them, it is riskier for charities to do this since the general public has already seen the review, and people may notice that evidence was changed after the review was released. This serves as deterrence against charities taking these actions.
Currently, there are no known statistics on how often charities alter or remove evidence in response to critical reviews. However, there are many documented cases of evidence tampering in various fields. Additionally, police investigators often do not want an organization under investigation to know they are under investigation for fear they will tamper with evidence to avoid consequences. We believe similar concerns exist when we are investigating a charity and plan to release a negative review.
Prior to releasing our reviews, we have always taken screen recordings of important evidence. This was done in case one of the above scenarios were to ever happen. In the future, we also plan to create internet archives for the important evidence we use. However, we remain concerned that in the case of a dispute, we would be accused of creating fake screen recordings/archives.
If there is a third-party service that is trusted by the community that could verify the accuracy of our screen recordings/archives prior to us showing reviews to charities, we’d be much more open to the idea of showing reviews to charities before releasing them. Please let us know if you’re aware of one.
Risk 2: Unconscious biases from interacting with charity staff.
When we evaluate a charity, we want to evaluate them based on their work, not based on how much we like their employees. Accordingly, we do not want to acquire unconscious biases.
If anyone has solutions to this problem, please let us know below, as it would make us more open to showing reviews to charities before releasing them. We would also like to acknowledge that we may be misunderstanding what people are suggesting when they say they'd like us to show our reviews to the charities before publishing them. If this simply entails sending them an email and nothing more, we are more open to that than having meetings with charity employees to discuss their review.
Other Reasons
Below are additional reasons we have been inclined to not reach out to charities before publishing reviews about them. This section largely reflects our own personal opinions.
Reason 1: Organizations should be held accountable for serious mistakes.
If a company makes a serious mistake that causes significant harm, even though it was a mistake, the company is generally still liable for the harm they caused. Simply correcting the mistake does not erase the harm that was caused. Similarly, if a charity makes misleading claims, it should not be allowed to quietly revise them without being held accountable for both the misinformation itself and the harm it caused.
If we reached out to a charity we have written a negative review about, we would hope they address the mistakes we identified. However, even if they addressed the mistakes, we believe they should still be held accountable for making the mistakes in the first place, and for whatever damage the mistakes caused.
If we gave a charity a negative review before publishing it and they immediately fixed the problems we noted, we think it is likely that once we published our review, the charity would say something like “VettedCauses' review is about problems we have already addressed.” We believe this unreasonably reduces the level of accountability the charity is held to.
If anyone has a solution to this concern, please let us know below, as it would make us more open to showing reviews to charities before releasing them.
Reason 2: Charities should be incentivized to provide sufficient and publicly stated evidence to justify their important publicly stated claims.
It is not acceptable for charities to make public and important claims (such as claims intended to convince people to donate), but not provide sufficient and publicly stated evidence that justifies their important claims.
If a charity has done this, they should not be given the benefit of the doubt, because it is their own fault that there is not sufficient publicly stated evidence to justify their important claims; they had the opportunity to state this evidence but did not. Additionally, giving a charity the benefit of the doubt in this situation incentivizes not publicly stating evidence in situations where sufficient evidence does not exist, since the charity will simply be given the benefit of the doubt.
Note: If a charity is unable to disclose all relevant evidence due to legal or strategic reasons, they should at least acknowledge this fact up front. A simple statement such as: "Unfortunately, we cannot disclose everything here due to legal reasons. Thus, the evidence we have presented is incomplete. We hope you trust that we have properly assessed our full evidence and reached an accurate conclusion" would be far more responsible than presenting the disclosed information as complete.
Further, members of the public should not be expected to reach out to charities to figure out if they have hidden evidence that justifies their claims, since this also incentivizes not providing sufficient publicly stated evidence (charities could make claims based on poor evidence that is hidden, but many people would not know the evidence is poor since it is hidden). The expectation should be for charities to provide sufficient and publicly stated evidence to justify their publicly stated important claims. We are concerned that the norm of reaching out to charities before publishing critiques about them worsens these issues.
We are interested to hear your thoughts about this concern.
Conclusion
We apologize for violating the social norms of the community. It was not our intention to disrespect anyone. We are genuinely concerned about the issues above, and look forward to hearing the community’s thoughts and solutions.
My first impression is that these techniques are pretty obscure and technical, and charities would not think to use them or know how to by default. In fact, sharing them here might make it more likely that charities use them (an infohazard).
EDIT: But maybe if motivated and strategic enough, they would find them through online search.