Two fantastic items in my Tweetstream today, the first from journalist Jehan Casinader, a New Zealander of Sri Lankan heritage, in Stuff.
Some highlights:
As an ethnic person, you can only enter (and stay in) a predominantly white space â like the media, politics or corporate leadership â if you play by the rules. And really, thereâs only one rule: blend in. Youâre expected to assimilate into the dominant way of thinking, acting and being âŠ
I sound like you. I make myself relatable to you. I communicate in a way that makes sense to you. I donât threaten you. I donât make you uncomfortable. And I keep my most controversial opinions to myself.
And:
Kiwis love stories about ethnic people who achieve highly: winning university scholarships, trying to cure diseases, inventing new technology or entering the political arena. These people are lauded for generating economic and social value for the country âŠ
We do not hear stories about ethnic people who work in thankless, low-skilled jobs â the refugees and migrants who stock our supermarket shelves, drive our taxis, pick our fruit, milk our cows, fill our petrol tanks, staff our hospitals and care for our elderly in rest homes.
Jehan says that now he is in a position of influence, heâs prepared to bring his Sri Lankan identity to the places he gets to visit, and hopes that everyone in Aotearoa is given respect ânot because of their ability to assimilateâ.
He was born here to new immigrants who had fled Sri Lanka, and I think there is a slight difference to those of us who came as children. Chief among this, at least for me, was my resistance to assimilation. Sure I enjoyed some of the same things other kids my age did: the Kentucky Fried Chicken rugby book, episodes of CHiPs, and playing tag, but because of various circumstances, as well as parents who calmly explained to me the importance of retaining spoken Cantonese at home, I constantly wore my Chineseness. I hadnât chosen to leave my birthplaceâthis was the decision of my parentsâso I hung on to whatever I could that connected me back to it.
I could contrast this to other Chinese New Zealanders I went to school with, many of whom had lost their native language because their parents had encouraged assimilation to get ahead. I canât fault themâmany of them are my dearest friendsâbut I was exposed to what Jehan wrote about from a young age.
It saddened me a lot because here were people who looked like me who I couldnât speak to in my mother tongue, and the only other student of Chinese extraction in my primary class who did speak her native language spoke Mandarinâwhich to many of my generation, certainly to those who did so little schooling before we left, find unintelligible.
At St Markâs, I had no issue. This was a school that celebrated differences, and scholastic achievement. (I am happy to say that sports and cultural activity are very much on the cards these days, too.) But after that, at one college, I observed what Jehan said: the Chinese New Zealanders who didnât rock the boat were safe buddies to have; those who were tall poppies were the target of the weak-minded, the future failures of our society. You just have to rise above it, and, if anything, it made me double-down on my characterâso much so that when I was awarded a half-scholarship to Scots, I found myself in familiar surroundings again, where differences were championed.
But you do indeed have to play the game. Want your company recognized? Then get yourself into the media. Issue releases just like the firms that were sending them to you as a member of the media. Donât bring your Chineseness into that, because you wonât get coverage. Jack Yan & Associates, and Lucire for that matter, always had a very occidental outlook, with my work taking me mostly to the US and Europe, with India only coming in at the end of the 2000sâbut then we were bound by the lingua franca of the old colonial power.
Despite my insistence on my own reo at home, and chatting every day to my Dad, I played the game that Jehan did when it came to work. I didnât as much when I ran for mayor, admittedlyâI didnât want voters to get a single-sided politician, but one who was his authentic selfâbut that also might explain why Stuffâs predecessor, which was at that stage owned by a foreign company, gave me next to no coverage the first time out. They werenât prepared to back someone who didnât fit their reader profile. The second time out, it still remained shockingly biased. Ironically the same publishing group would give me reasonably good coverage in Australia when I wasnât doing politics. Thatâs the price to pay for authenticity sometimes.
Jehan finishes his piece on a positive note and I feel he is right to. We still have issues as a nation, no doubt, but I think we embrace our differences more than we used to. There have been many instances where I have seen all New Zealanders rise up to condemn racism, regardless of their political bents. (What is interesting was I do recall one National MP still in denial, residing in fantasy-land, when I recalled a racist incidentâand this was after March 15, 2019!) People from all walks of life donated to my fund-raising when a friendâs car had a swastika painted on it. We have a Race Relationsâ Commissioner who bridges so many cultures effectivelyâa New Zealander of Taishanese extraction who speaks te reo MÄori and Englishâwho is visible, and has earned his mana among so many here. The fact that Jehanâs piece was even published, whereas in 2013 it would have been anathema to the local arm of Fairfax, is further reason to give me hope.
The second item? Have a watch of this. It’s largely in accord with my earlier post.
On Friday, Facebook carried out a purge of left-wing, antiwar and progressive pages and accounts, including leading members of the Socialist Equality Party. Facebook gave no explanation why the accounts were disabled or even a public acknowledgement that the deletions had occurred.
At least a half dozen leading members of the Socialist Equality Party had their Facebook accounts permanently disabled. This included the public account of Genevieve Leigh, the national secretary of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, and the personal account of Niles Niemuth, the US managing editor of the World Socialist Web Site. In 2016, Niemuth was the Socialist Equality Partyâs candidate for US Vice President.
Seen it happen before, and weâll see it again. Given Facebookâs managementâs right-wing leanings, this really should come as no surprise. Doing it on a Friday also ensures less coverage by the media.
I just wonder if the leftists who celebrated the ban of former US president Donald Trump will now be claiming, âItâs a private company, they can host whom they like,â and âThe First Amendment doesnât guarantee that these websites should provide you with a platform.â
I have never trusted Facebook with my personal information and made sure I kept copies of everything. Itâs precisely because it is a private company that acts unilaterally and above the law that one never should trust them. We have had so many examples for over a decade.
My exact words on the 8th were: âLeftists (and a good many on the right) might be delighted at the actions taken by US Big Tech, but would one be as cheerful if a Democratic president or a leftist movement were silenced?â
As I have said for a long time, the left and right have common enemies, and here is a shining example.
Postscript: Alex, who maintains three spaces on NewTumbl, can still see my “missing” five posts. In addition, NewTumbl has responded and it’s believed there was a bug. More on that here.
This is interesting: talking to Bii on Twitter, who is also a NewTumbl user, I discovered that he canât see my last five posts on NewTumbl.
I sent him a permalink (using the recommended NewTumbl method) to my last post there, but he gets a 404.
In fact, the newest post he can see is my sixth-to-last. And itâs interesting to me that of the last five, three were critical of NewTumblâs moderation system.
This reminds me of Google Plus, which used to hide my posts that were regularly critical of Google.
Bii would kindly prefer to give NewTumbl the benefit of the doubt though my thoughts jumped immediately to censorship. The last five posts are all public.
Top: The way my NewTumbl blog is supposed to look, in its top left-hand corner. Above: What Bii sees, with the last five posts hidden. Coincidentally three of them are critical of NewTumbl.
Like I say, my blog posts here have a pretty good audience, and the first one on NewTumbl comes up very high when one searches for that site. You do not want to be playing these games.
To think, I was so supportive of that place.
For the sake of completeness, then, here are the three critical posts, which have been excerpted before.
November 27, 2020 Do the mods here know their own rules?
Had a couple of modelling shots marked M by the moderators here and I cannot understand why. I had them marked O.
Thereâs no nudity (M) but they contain sexy or sultry imagery (O). Do the mods here know their own rules?
See for yourself: this was the latest. As this is a US site, maybe I should use The Handmaidâs Tale for guidance? I hear itâs a big hit over there. This is after a post with the word w*nk (literally written like that, with an asterisk) got marked as M.
November 29, 2020 See you at my blog gallery
That was pretty simple. Iâve put the New Image Gallery plug-in from A WP Life on to my main blog. And since that blog gets an average of 700 views per post (and the viral ones getting six figures), Iâm betting that whatever I put there will get more eyeballs than here. For those interested, itâs at jackyan.com/blog/2020/11/november-2020-miscellaneous-images/. [Postscript: the galleries can be found at jackyan.com/blog/category/gallery/.] New entries will be added on a monthly basis. Itâs not as cool as NewTumbl but Iâm going to be interested to see if itâs as enjoyable as what Iâve been doing here.
I wanted in all sincerity to see NewTumbl grow but as @alex99a-three and others have seen, some moderating decisions have been questionable. I know first-hand that Wikipedia is a place where true expertise, that of professionals, is not welcomeâfounder Larry Sanger has said as much, which is why he left. The late Aaron Swartz echoed those comments. And here, if professionals are being overruled by people who are not at the same level, then Iâm not sure what the point is. I feel Wikipedia has no point, and my own dissatisfaction with it led me to create Autocade, and thereâs a sense that, in its very real wish to make sure it could keep up with its growth, NewTumbl is heading down the same path.
I donât begrudge this siteâs founders for adopting the approach they did in post moderation. In fact, I think it was very clever and itâs a great way for NewTumbl to punch above its weight. However, in practice the absence of an appealsâ system doesnât work for me any more. I totally get that they havenât the resources. So maybe I will return when they do.
As @constantpriaprism pointed out, Dean is not really present these days, either, so one big drawcard to NewTumblâits transparencyâis now also missing.
And itâs those of us in the F and O spacesâpeople that NewTumbl said they wanted to encourageâwho seem to be bearing the brunt of puritanical moderating. Iâm guessing we are being sidelined by people who donât have the context (e.g. Alex has posted some really innocent stuff) or knowledge outside their countries. Both Alex and I (if I may be so bold as to guess his intent) have been marking as F or O things that were safe for us on prime-time TV when we were younger. I use the same standard with imagery and language.
To confirm this lack of knowledge, I read one comment which absolutely highlighted that one moderator had no idea what they were doing, advancing what I felt was a particularly weak argument. In that case, a newspaper front page was taken down and marked as M. You have to ask yourself: if a word appears (censored) on a newspaper front page, then itâs probably not M; and if a word is used on prime-time television without bleeping, then itâs also probably not M. There are other words which may be adult in nature but are commonly used that even Mary Whitehouse would be fine with, but you just know that with the lack of knowledge that some display here, youâre going to have it taken off the site and marked out of range.
Iâve done my share of rating posts here and I like to think Iâve taken an even-handed, free-speech approach based on decades of experience and life in different countries.
If this is to be an adult siteâand I know the majority of posts lean that wayâthen good luck to it. I will be back as @vergangene-automarken has some excellent stuff, as do the regulars whom I follow, but for now I really want to see what itâs like doing the same thing in my own space. See you there.
After I posted that I would leave NewTumbl (not quite those wordsâI said I would still return to check out a few people I followed), I had a very nice note from Alex, one of the US folks there whose posts I regularly enjoyed, along with those of Marius and a few others. Alex reblogged my post and you can see his additional words here. Below was my response (italics added). He’s faced ridiculous actions against his posts as well, which I allude to. I suspect he’s slightly older than me (he recalls actress Angel Tompkins, for instance, after I posted about herâand I’ve a feeling he remembers her in period, not in reruns), but not by much.
Here are the images that have piqued my interest for December 2020. For November’s gallery, click here (all gallery posts are here). And for why I started this, here’s my earlier post on this blog, and also here and here on NewTumbl.
I do a lot of rating on here. Which posts are you referring to? By the way w*nk is M, because we know what wank means. Rating on nT is done by people, not algorithms. We’re not perfect but we do our best.
This user, calling themselves Bottomsandmore, is rather âsplainy, telling me things everyone knows as though they were somehow authoritative (everyone on the site knows NewTumbl rating is done by peopleâI’ve even done some), and being plain wrong about the word wank (note that in the original post that was taken down at NewTumbl, it had the asterisk).
We all know what bugger and tosser mean but neither of them, as used in the colloquial fashion, is considered offensive, so they need to do better than that.
âSplainers bore me no end, and the internet is full of them. As the old Chinese saying goes, it’s like holding a feather thinking it to be an arrow. They lack substance and social media have taught me that pointing it out is futile because they lack the intelligence to understand what you are saying. Before you know it, you’ve strayed so far from the original point because the person keeps taking you further and further away from it as their defence mechanism, or unwillingness to be freed from their delusions. I don’t know if this is a conscious technique but it’s played out every day.
If NewTumbl is Mary Whitehouse on steroids, where moderators are ‘puritanically patrolling posts’ (my words tonight), then it’s not exactly difficult to set up an image gallery here. I also wrote:
This seemed like a fun site but if a professional has to make his case in a post like this against the decision(s) of amateurs (which is the case with Wikipedia: look at the talk pages!), then that just gets tiresome: itâs not a great use of my time. If you donât know the culture of the majority of countries in which the English language is used and somehow think 1950s white-bread America is the yardstick, then youâre already not on my level. Itâs not terribly hard to put together an image-bank site where I share those âirrelevantâ thoughts, as I call them here. I donât have Deanâs [site founder Dean Abramson’s] skill in making it a site for all, but my aims are completely selfish, so I donât have to.
And I may start experimenting with that soon, thanks to A WP Life’s New Image Gallery. Most of what I post to NewTumbl is imagery, and early next week I might see how this new plug-in goes. If it’s a success, then I may end my time on NewTumbl in under two years. As noble as its moderation system is, there is no appeal. The result is, like Wikipedia, actual expertise does not get its say. And that’s a real pity for the good people who actually run the site.
Iâm surprised that a clip from a front page of a British tabloid newspaper was ruled M by a moderator here after I made it O. It was critical of British cabinet minister Matt Hancock and made fun of his surname, with two words that rhymed with its two syllables.
The words on the headline included the work wank, which was even starred there (w*nk) for the really sensitive. I realize this is an American website but I didnât even think that was a word they used. For most of us in the Anglosphere, itâs nowhere near offensive. Itâs not uncommon to call someone a wanker and the word is never bleeped on televisionâitâs that throwaway. I learned of the word wank when I was 11, and wanker I heard before that. Kids would probably know of it even younger now. A younger reader would not link it to anything sexual and if they did, theyâre a dirty little kid. (Same with bugger, which infamously even appeared on television commercials for Toyota here, and I know in Australia, too.)
The second word that appeared was cock, a colloquialism for penis, but also it has other meanings. Letâs not get into those: itâs clear the context suggested penisâin the same way an American might call someone a dick, I suppose. Again, hardly offensive, never bleeped, and, I donât know about the US, but here itâs the word that children might learn to refer to male genitalia.
But, hereâs the real kicker: the image was from the front page of a national newspaper. Not the top shelf wrapped in a brown paper bag or plastic at a convenience store.
Looking at the classifications, M is for adults-only stuff, with âstrong suggestive or violent language.â O was already suggested by NewTumbl staff as suitable for politics, including COVID-19 posts (this qualified), and the language by any standard was mild (feel free to come and give your reasoning if you were the mod and you want to defend your decision).
So Iâve had a post removed for a word that an 11-year-old uses (remember, O is for âolder teensâ) and another word that children use, and both appeared on the front page of a national newspaper.
I have used these words on a website run from a country that thinks itâs OK to show people getting blown away in violent movies and cop shows (oh, sorry, âpolice proceduralsâ), where guns are commonplace, but words are really, really dangerous. Thought you guys had a First Amendment to your Constitution.
The conclusion I am forced to draw is that the post was removed because, like Facebook, there is a right-wing bias shown by a moderator who does not like a conservative government criticized here. Good luck, because Iâll continue to criticize a bunch of dickheads that even my right-leaning, pro-market, lifelong-Tory friends in Britain dislike. If this post is classified M then I will have to conclude that the reason is also political, because thereâs not a single word here that any right-thinking user of English would deem âstrong suggestive or violentâ.
I came here because I objected to the censorship at Tumblr, where, for instance, they hide posts referring to NewTumbl in searches. Thatâs pretty tame but enough for me to insist on free speech over silly, petty corporate decisions, the sort of games that other silly, petty corporations like Google play. I can live with NewTumblâs male nipple rule and other attempts to be non-sexist, but I also believe that if youâre moderating, you should be apolitical.
With the Twitter advertising preference monster continuing to gather preferences on all of us even after opting outâwhich basically makes Twitter FacebookâI decided to switch the MastodonâTwitter Crossposter around.
With Twitter being my main social network, I was quite happy to allow the Crossposter to take my Tweets and turn them into Toots on Mastodon, and Iâd check in to the latter regularly to respond to people.
But with this latest discovery, Iâm having second thoughts. We all know Twitter censors, and protects bigots, and its latest way to make a quick buck crosses a line.
I know most people have lines that they redraw regularly, especially when it comes to social media and phone apps, but Iâm trying to manage mine a little better.
What Iâll miss is the news: I get plenty from Twitter, often breaking items. Iâll have to find an equivalent, or a news bot, on Mastodon. Iâll also miss interactions with real friends Iâve made on the service. It was incredible to get the condolence messages from Twitter. But if Stephen Fry can walk away from time to time, leaving millions there, I can probably take some time out from the 5,200 following me.
Note that I wonât cease going to Twitter altogether: Iâm not going cold turkey. There’s a bunch of us supporting one another through Alzheimer’s in the family, so I still want to be there for them. But if plans go well, then it wonât be my main social network any more. Twitterâs advertising clients will all miss me, because I simply never consented to Twitter compiling info to micro-target me. Mastodon will get my info first.
And if Mastodon, one day, decides to do ads, I actually wonât mind, as long as they donât cross that line. If Iâve opted out of personalization, I expect them to respect it. Even Google respects this, and they’re a dodgy bunch. The fact I have an IP address tied to my country, and that Iâve given some personal info about me, is, in my book, enough. Besides, anyone who knows me will know that a lot of the preferences shown in Twitter have no connection with meâjust as Facebookâs were completely laughable.
PS.: Dlvr.it does not take RSS feeds to send to Mastodon. I’m trying out the Activitypub plug-in for Wordpress instead.
Go a bit further to this link, and there they are, nearly 500 preferences linked to me, compiled even though I had opted out of personalizationâmaking Twitter just as bad as Facebook.
What do I do? Exactly what I did on Facebook: I deselected each and every single one. Twitter doesnât need this to market to me. Frankly itâs enough that it has my IP address and it can geo-target. It doesnât need any more precision than that. I get to the bottom of the page, having done them all:
And just like Facebook, within hours it has reselected over 400 of them, repopulating preferences and overriding what the user wants.
In fact, some were being reselected within seconds, but I put that down to the fact I was using a cellphone. As of this writing, the second deselections have been done on the desktop.
This is simply not right, but we have been seeing signs in the latter part of the 2010s that Twitter is as bad as Facebook, with its love of bots, bigotry and its mass censorship. Now itâs as devoted to selling its users as the rest of Big Tech. The net result is Iâll begin limiting my time on Twitter because its privacy intrusion has gone too far. It cannot be trusted. It will probably become a work tool as Facebook has, where I do little of my own stuff, and only serve my clients; or I simply have automated content.
I suppose you can always say, âWell, at least itâs not as bad as âŠâ and on that note, I checked in to Facebook to see if I could post a question on why advertising preferences were not editable.
Eventually I found four others had managed, after wading through Facebookâs many layers of pages before getting to one where you could pose a question, to ask the same.
Except none of them are clickable to a question-and-answer page. They all take you to a Facebook Business advertising queriesâ page.
Therefore, I asked the question even though it had already been asked. I doubt Iâll hear back, as I noticed that on the same visit, Facebook had censored two of my earlier responses.
Why? They reveal that Facebookâs platform is buggy, that I was unable to do some things on pages that it claimed I was able to do.
All I can say is that this is petty. Facebook: for the last 15 years your platform has been buggy. Everyone knows this. Covering up a couple of comments made in your own forums, comments that are truthful and actually helpful to others who encounter the same thing, doesnât make your platform any less buggy. But this is the Zuckerberg way: all-too-precious, wimpy against criticism, with a self-belief that not publishing something will make it go away. I mean, itâs worked against equally wimpy governments. It is a page out of the Google playbook, too: its forums are full of cultist believers who ask, âHow dare you question our god?â when you post about bugs. However, it alienates users.
Itâs probably why the old Getsatisfaction Facebook forum was closed down, because it revealed so many bugs about the system.
Iâm hoping the 2020s will see some sort of mass rejection of these Big Tech social-tracking platforms, but I thought that would happen years ago. I was wrong. There are still good people on them but there are also good people on Mastodon and elsewhere.
PS.: Here we are, four hours later, after I unticked all the preferences. At least 300 of them have been reselected by Twitter. So it is like Facebook. Once again, we have to say to a US Big Tech firm: stop lying. Your claims about your settings are bogus.
P.PS.: Day two, still fighting Twitter, which reticked a lot (but not all) of the preferences. Still in the hundreds.