<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>jawns</author><text>Former journalist here.  I spent lots of time in college learning about libel law, and then applying it in my professional life as an editor.&lt;p&gt;One thing about libel that many people don&amp;#x27;t understand is that retraction and editing of the content isn&amp;#x27;t a defense.  So where it says &amp;quot;note the libel-friendly phrasing&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;now edited to avoid any possible threats of libel&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;[editor’s note: removed a possibly incorrect claim]&amp;quot; he could still be found guilty of libel if previously published assertions contained non &amp;quot;libel-friendly&amp;quot; phrasing.  As long as a defamatory assertion was published &lt;i&gt;at some point&lt;/i&gt;, you can still be found guilty of libel.&lt;p&gt;It probably goes without saying, but it is also not a defense to libel to say that you asserted something to be true merely because there was no evidence to the contrary.  Absent a contractual or legal obligation, Lumina had no duty to engage with him and answer his questions.  So if Lumina can provide evidence that Trevor asserted things that are demonstrably false, and they damaged Lumina&amp;#x27;s business, then Trevor can&amp;#x27;t argue as a defense that he merely had no way of knowing that they were false.&lt;p&gt;Finally, Trevor seems to be saying in his update that he was merely asking questions -- but it&amp;#x27;s possible for a court to find that merely phrasing false, defamatory assertions in the form of a question is not an absolute protection against a libel claim.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Lumina&apos;s legal threats and my about-face</title><url>https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/luminas-legal-threats-and-my-about</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>ai_what</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t have any skin in this game but this is confusing to me because in the article that he put back up it (still) says:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Lumina likely aren’t following the Best Practices Guidelines for Probiotics, which require you to state how much of each strain in CFUs is in each batch that you send out on your packaging.&lt;p&gt;But in the new article it says:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Lumina’s manufacturing process follows legally mandated GMP protocols, if not the probiotic trade association’s voluntary best practices.&lt;p&gt;Because that does sound to me like the original claim was wrong?&lt;p&gt;I understand that it&amp;#x27;s weird that it didn&amp;#x27;t get revealed until he was pressed on it but then so is stating that he likely wasn&amp;#x27;t following the best practices, right?&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the first article doesn&amp;#x27;t mention that it&amp;#x27;s voluntary to follow the best practices guidelines but the second one does. To me that sounds kind of like &amp;quot;okay fine you were right, but it&amp;#x27;s voluntary anyway, so whatever&amp;quot;. Why not mention that in the original claim?&lt;p&gt;In fairness, the original article also has some great points, like the concerns about this particular BCS3L-1 strain that Lumina uses. I wish he had focused more on that.&lt;p&gt;I feel like both of them could have gone about this in a better way.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Lumina&apos;s legal threats and my about-face</title><url>https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/luminas-legal-threats-and-my-about</url></story>