RETRACTION: Opinion Article on Justin Sun

Editor-in-chief’s note: At CoinDesk, retractions are almost unheard of. Normally, if a story contains an inaccuracy or doesn’t otherwise meet our standards, we simply and unstintingly correct the article, address what went wrong with the writer or editor, and then move on.

However, upon review of our opinion pages, we have found that one written under a pseudonymous byline about Tron founder and CEO Justin Sun fell so far short of those standards that we are compelled to retract it.

We take a firm position that a person’s right to privacy is to be respected – articulated here in relation to our opposition to “doxxing” harmless individuals.

As such, we allow the use of anonymous sources and, from time to time, publish articles written under pseudonymous bylines, but with one very important caveat: we cannot grant the cloak of that identity protection to a writer who launches an outright personal attack against an individual. Unfortunately, rather than flagging the insinuations in the pseudonymous author’s draft as a problem, our normally rigorous editors exacerbated them.

Any person, whether they are the CEO of a large blockchain or someone unknown to the public eye, deserves to know who is assailing their character in a public-facing outlet such as CoinDesk.

Given that the very nature of the piece violated that standard – allowing us no way to merely correct the story and be done with it – we are removing the story in its entirety.