Yes – and not only for government and organizations:
> In 1999, NetBus was used to plant child pornography on the work computer of a law scholar at Lund University. The 3,500 images were discovered by system administrators, and the law scholar was assumed to have downloaded them knowingly. He lost his research position at the faculty, and following the publication of his name fled the country and had to seek professional medical care to cope with the stress. He was acquitted from criminal charges in late 2004, as a court found that NetBus had been used to control his computer.
Interesting. I was a student at Lund University in 1999. I vaguely remember hearing about a law professor getting caught with child pornography, but the exoneration never reached me.
This is where I feel like reporting goes terribly wrong. Failure to correct stories like this just cements the wrong idea. It's not slander, but it's like slander by omission.
It's as if bad news and boogie monsters sell better than "we reported incorrectly" I know, but still.
In this age of search engines and social media “amplification” a correction wouldn’t even be sufficient. The original story will always be more salacious than the correction, thus more widely shared and more likely to appear in search results (unless Google etc somehow weight the correction higher, I have no idea if they do)
Not before losing his career and having to flee his country, probably because his reputation was dragged through the mud. News of the acquittal doesn't travel nearly as far as the initial arrest - see sibling comment below.
> In 1999, NetBus was used to plant child pornography on the work computer of a law scholar at Lund University. The 3,500 images were discovered by system administrators, and the law scholar was assumed to have downloaded them knowingly. He lost his research position at the faculty, and following the publication of his name fled the country and had to seek professional medical care to cope with the stress. He was acquitted from criminal charges in late 2004, as a court found that NetBus had been used to control his computer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBus