WIRED has gone ahead with publishing an extraordinarily inaccurate article about GrapheneOS. It presents a highly inaccurate history of the GrapheneOS project heavily based on fabrications from James Donaldson. WIRED failed to incorporate most of our responses to his inaccurate claims.

Donaldson has fabricated a whole alternate history of the project and Copperhead including leaving out the fact that it had 3 co-founders rather than 2. Donaldson lived off income brought in by Daniel’s open source project created prior to the company. He certainly didn’t fund it as he claims.

Prior to publishing the article, a fact checker at WIRED asked us a long series of questions about the project. These questions made it extremely clear that the article was largely sourced from fabrications from Donaldson despite it not being specified. It’s not a real history of GrapheneOS at all.

Our community manager spring-onion (Dave Wilson) handled nearly all of the communications with WIRED. He’s a public-facing member of our moderation team and well known in our community. WIRED first reached out to Daniel, promised the story wouldn’t be about him and were handed off to spring-onion.

WIRED heavily misled about the article. They led us to believe the article would be about GrapheneOS with little coverage of the history. They repeatedly reassured us it would hardly have any of the content it ended up being based around. Therefore, we had no opportunity to properly address it.

We made a forum post at https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/34369-original-grapheneos-responses-to-wired-fact-checker which contains an overview of the situation along with the unmodified answers we provided to WIRED’s fact checker. You can see for yourself what we provided and that it wasn’t anywhere close to adequately incorporated into the article.