My friend Richard MacManus wrote a great blog post in February on the passing of Clive James, and made this poignant observation: ‘Because far from preserving our culture, the Web is at best forgetting it and at worst erasing it. As it turns out, a website is much more vulnerable than an Egyptian pyramid.’
The problem: search engines are biased to show us the latest stuff, so older items are being forgotten.
There are dead domains, of course—each time I pop by to our links’ pages, I find I’m deleting more than I’m adding. I mean, who maintains links’ pages these days, anyway? (Ours look mega-dated.) But the items we added in the 1990s and 2000s are vanishing and other than the Internet Archive, Richard notes its Wayback Machine is ‘increasingly the only method of accessing past websites that have otherwise disappeared into the ether. Many old websites are now either 404 errors, or the domains have been snapped up by spammers searching for Google juice.’
His fear is that sites like Clive James’s will be forgotten rather than preserved, and he has a point. As a collective, humanity seems to desire novelty: the newest car, the newest cellphone, and the newest news. Searching for a topic tends to bring up the newest references, since the modern web operates on the basis that history is bunk.
That’s a real shame as it means we don’t get to understand our history as well as we should. Take this pandemic, for instance: are there lessons we could learn from MERS and SARS, or even the Great Plague of London in the 1660s? But a search is more likely to reveal stuff we already know or have recently come across in the media, like a sort of comfort blanket to assure us of our smartness. It’s not just political views and personal biases that are getting bubbled, it seems human knowledge is, too.
Even Duck Duck Go, my preferred search engine, can be guilty of this, though a search I just made of the word pandemic shows it is better in providing relevance over novelty.
Showing results founded on their novelty actually makes the web less interesting because search engines fail to make it a place of discovery. If page after page reveals the latest, and the latest is often commodified news, then there is no point going to the second or third pages to find out more. Google takes great pride in detailing the date in the description, or ‘2 days ago’ or ‘1 day ago’. But if search engines remained focused on relevance, then we may stumble on something we didn’t know, and be better educated in the process.
Therefore, it’s possibly another area that Big Tech is getting wrong: it’s not just endangering democracy, but human intelligence. The biases I accused Google News and Facebook of—viz.their preference for corporate media—build on the dumbing-down of the masses.
I may well be wrong: maybe people don’t want to get smarter: Facebook tells us that folks just want a dopamine hit from approval, and maybe confirmation of our own limited knowledge gives us the same. ‘Look at how smart I am!’ Or how about this collection?
Any expert will tell you that the best way to keep your traffic up is to generate more and more new content, and it’s easy to understand why: like a physical library, the old stuff is getting forgotten, buried, or even—if they can’t sell or give it away—pulped.
Again, there’s a massive opportunity here. A hypothetical new news aggregator can outdo Google News by spidering and rewarding independent media that break news, by giving them the best placement—as Google News used to do. That encourages independent media to do their job and opens the public up to new voices and viewpoints. And now a hypothetical new search engine could outdo Google by providing relevance over novelty, or at least getting the balance of the two right.
For a guy who gave up updating his own Facebook in 2017, and uses it just for work stuff, I’m still amazed at how many bugs I come across.
Two days ago: discovered that you can’t post links. The ‘Publish’ button is greyed out.
Yesterday: I wanted to tag one of our writers on Lucire’s Facebook page. Don’t think it worked but the other thing that didn’t work was the link preview. This is an old bug and I remember it from when I used Facebook regularly, so things must move really slowly there. You can post links again—sort of. Basically, the posted link and the link in the preview have different URLs. The one in the preview takes you to a 404: it’s the correct URL with the author’s Christian name appended to it, to make it wrong. I’m glad that for the most part, I leave this page to automation—it’s actually more accurate than going in there and posting directly into Facebook! You would think the opposite would be true.
What is good is that you can delete posts now, which you couldn’t three weeks ago.
Today: they’ve got rid of the news feed, which is actually a good thing, but I know how others like it. I went in just before I wrote this post in case it was a fleeting bug this morning, but there’s still no news feed.
I’ll might look again next week if work stuff comes up. Three visits like that, one or two a day, is anomalous for me these days. All these visits showed is that Facebook is no less buggier than it was half a decade ago, with pretty much the same bugs: regular failures in posting, linking, and displaying databased content. In fact, it may be worse as the whole thing appears to crumble under its own weight.
Not withstanding that I can’t edit my advertising preferences on Facebook—they took that ability away from me and a small group of users some time ago (and, like Twitter, they are dead wrong about what those preferences are)—I see they now lie about what ads I’ve seen and clicked on.
I can categorically say I have not seen an ad, much less clicked on an ad, for the US Embassy.
It’s pretty hard for a person who doesn’t use Facebook except for work to have clicked on any ads on their platform.
And as I’ve largely quit Instagram it’s highly unlikely I accidentally swiped and clicked on an ad there, too.
On the remote chance that I did, then it shows that either Facebook’s or the US Embassy’s targeting is appallingly bad since I’m not American. I doubt that the US Embassy would have had such a wide market as to include me.
I theorize, and I do so with zero proof, that Facebook is so deep in its con to claim certain advertising reach numbers that it’s falsely attributing hits to random users across the site. These may have been hits done by bots—bots that it endorses, incidentally—and now they want to pin them on legitimate people.
It’s a hypothesis but given that I’ve been right about a few way-out ones (false user numbers, bot epidemics, malware downloads), I’m going to advance it. Now let’s wait four years for this to blow up into something.
Above: The only way I can view my advertising preferences on Facebook is through the mobile version. But here they cannot be edited. (The web version won’t show them at all.) They are also quite wrong that these are my interests, but since when have they been right anyway?
Here’s quite a funny one for you this Easter weekend: Facebook apparently has filed suit against companies that do the following, according to Social Media Today.
• Companies that sell fake followers and likes, which Facebook has pushed harder to enforce since New York’s Attorney General ruled that selling fake social media followers and likes is illegal last February
• Two different app developers over ‘click injection fraud’, which simulates clicks in order to extract ad revenue
• Two companies over the creation of malware, and tricking Facebook users into installing it in order to steal personal information
In other words, Facebook has filed suit against people who do things that are variations of what Facebook itself does.
The first. This has long been proven by Veritasium, and one would hope the defendant points out that Facebook has endorsed such behaviour, and that its terms and conditions have generally meant squat. Facebook allows hate groups (hate speech is ‘counter-speech’, they tell me), hates drag queens and kings, drags its heels in removing illegal content (eight clips of the Christchurch massacre are still on there, a year later), and preserves bots, fake accounts and phishing pages, all contrary to what their own terms and conditions say. These happen with such frequency that one might say they are Facebook policy.
Now, Facebook mightn’t do the second but it certainly extracts ad revenue from customers, and not necessarily fairly. Click fraud? How about audience fraud? That’s been the subject of lawsuits against it. We’ve gone through this before on this blog, least of which is Facebook’s lying about its user numbers. It cites heaps of people but we know among them are bots; and we know that it claims more people in certain demographics than there are people. I’ve said this for a long, long time.
Third: Facebook tricked users for years into installing a ‘malware scanner’with purposes it would not go into. But it essentially admitted their scanners collected data from users (as reported in Wired, ‘Facebook tells users when they agree to conduct the scan that the data collected in the process will be used “to improve security on and off Facebook”’—it seems reasonable to conclude this is personal information). The scanner never appeared in one’s installed programs’ list, either, and in my case, knocked out my real antivirus software. We also know that when Facebook accused certain people of having malware, the company was lying. The scanner took a long time to run, so what was it sending back to the mothership? Conclude from all of that what you will, but tricking Facebook users into installing software that is hidden on a user’s PC and takes data off it is right out of a fraudster’s playbook.
Given the amount of crooked activity that Facebook itself engages in, and the lies its team tells, criminals would be forgiven into thinking that it was a website that collected and ran scams, and that Mark Zuckerberg was a kindred spirit.
The hypocrisy remains strong at Facebook.
PS.:This fake page has been up for days, and its posts, promoting a phishing link, apparently do not violate Facebook’s standards. Duly reported, but what really is the point since Facebook seems to love these?
I’ll be interested to read the judgement, should it get to that point: Facebook is being sued over allegedly inflating its audience numbers, and COO Sheryl Sandberg and financial officer David Wehner are also named.
The plaintiff alleges that Facebook has known this for years. The suit dates from 2018 but there are new filings from the lawsuit.
I’ve blogged on related topics for the majority of the previous decade, and in 2014 I said that Facebook had a bot ‘epidemic’.
Finally another publication has caught on this, namely the Financial Times. The FT notes something that I did on this blog in 2017: ‘In some cases, the number cited for potential audience size in certain US states and demographics was actually larger than the population size as recorded in census figures, it claimed.’ Its own 2019 investigation found discrepancies in the Facebook Ads’ Manager tool.
The complaint also says that Facebook had not removed fake and duplicate accounts. Lately I’ve found some obvious fake accounts, and reported them, only for Facebook to tell me that there’s nothing wrong with them. On Instagram, I have hundreds, possibly thousands, of accounts that I reported but remain current. Based on my user experience, the plaintiff is absolutely correct.
Facebook only solves problems it puts its mind to, and all seem to be bolstering its bottom line. This is something it could have solved, and since it’s plagued the site for the good part of a decade, and it continues to, then you have to conclude that there’s no desire to. And of course there isn’t: the more fakes there are, the more page owners have to pay to reach real people.
Over a decade ago, I know that it cost a small business a decent chunk of money to get an independent audit (from memory, we were looking at around NZ$6,000). Facebook doesn’t have this excuse, and that tells me it doesn’t want you to know how its ads actually perform.
As I said many times: if a regular person like me can find a maximum of 277 fakes or bots in a single night, then how many are there? I’m surprised that not more of the mainstream media are talking about this, given that in 2018 Facebook posted an income of US$22,100 million on US$55,800 million of revenue, 98·5 per cent of which came from advertising. Is this one of the biggest cons out there? Here’s hoping the lawsuit will reveal something. Few seem to care about Facebook’s lies and erosion of their privacy, but maybe they might start caring when they realize they’ve been fleeced.
A few days ago, Facebook became disconnected with my IFTTT applet, which takes the Tweets made on the Lucire account (which themselves are fed through another service) and reposts them to Lucire’s Facebook page, so that none of us have to visit either.
IFTTT is good enough to send an email to tell you things are broken, but all their ‘Fix it’ links that you get taken to do not remedy the problem. You’ll just get IFTTT’s ‘There was an error during check process.’
After an hour, which actually necessitated my visiting that horrid Facebook site to see if there was anything there (there isn’t), I found the solution. This is from my reply on Reddit to someone asking something similar, when they got stuck (it seems with both Twitter and Facebook). Italics added other than the one in the last sentence.
This should show what you need to link, in my case, Facebook—I clicked on that, it took me to a verification page on Facebook, I allowed it. Twitter will be the same, and I think you’ll have to select Twitter as well.
Then head to https://ifttt.com/my_services
Select My Services
Choose Facebook pages
Go to Settings
Select Edit your account info
For Twitter, I imagine you would have to go to the My Services page again and choose the Twitter account you want to connect, and tinker with the settings.
Then if you head back to your list of applets, run the check again, and it should work.
I’ll leave this here for anyone else who might come across this problem. It may well be me, since this is the third time I’ve had to do it in the last few months, once because I tried to delete my Facebook account and this was holding me back.
It’s true. I spent time on business development, answering emails, doing tech stuff on our sites, and generally kept on top of things. I often wonder if I would have become an active Facebooker or Tweeter had they been invented and come into my orbit in, say, 2002. We all may have been too busy with our own ventures. The fact they surfaced (for me) in 2007, and became part of my routine the following year as the economy slowed can’t be a coincidence. Instagram, in 2012, also falls into this period. I convinced myself that these social media would provide some advantage, or bring opportunities that otherwise couldn’t be readily located elsewhere, but that wasn’t the case. Like Linkedin, I’m not sure if any of these websites have brought work opportunities that resulted in an invoice.
Once you fall out of the habit, then the device itself isn’t that useful, either, for someone who never really embraced the cellphone as a primary means of communication—I maintained a landline all these years. I never even had a regular cellphone number till 2006: I got people to call my colleagues who did carry them (I was paying for the damned things, after all). I’m not sure I want to be contactable in my waking hours that readily. I’ll take work calls in my office, thank you, and personal calls elsewhere; and if I’m out, then I’m driving or meeting with someone, and neither is a good time to be interrupted. The landline has this amazing feature called an answerphone, and it records and plays back messages when I’m good and ready to hear them. Since Dad passed, there’s one fewer need to be contactable day and night, and realistically I only see it as something that other members of my family and close friends should reach me on now. The number has never appeared on a single business card of mine, for good reason. As we head into the 2020s I’m hoping each of us decides where lines should be drawn. I think mine’s right here: no more cellphones for work; at best, they’re a last resort. I need to organize my schedule better and cellphones just don’t help, apps even less so. It comes back to this crazy belief of mine that technology is here to serve us, not the other way round. By all means, if your cellphone serves you, then use it—I can think of countless professions where it is a must. But for the rest of us, it’s a relief not to be burdened with it.
I see Billie Eilish is singing the next James Bond title song, and it sounds pretty good.
The last one, ‘Writing’s on the Wall’, wasn’t one of my favourites and while I didn’t mind Sam Smith’s composition, I felt a female voice might have suited it better. On a Bond music forum on Facebook (when I was still using it), I voiced disappointment, only to get comments in the thread essentially saying, ‘Everyone who dislikes this song is a homophobe.’
Up until that point I had no clue about Smith’s sexuality—didn’t care then, don’t care now. I didn’t think much of this until tonight, when it dawned on me that when I say I’m not a fan of Brexit, on busier social media threads I’ll get, ‘Stop calling British people racists.’
In neither case was homophobia or racism even hinted but it puzzles me that people can somehow go into Mystic Meg clairvoyant mode and see things that aren’t there—and get it completely wrong. And that has to be one of the things wrong with social media these days: people far too much in their own heads to even see what is right in front of them, letting their imaginations run riot. Could they be projecting? In any case, a discussion, or even an argument, is pointless if parties are unwilling to stick to the facts in front of them, preferring to go into snowflake mode and fling out accusations. It does them little credit.
And folks wonder why so many of us have social media fatigue and would be quite content if certain sites vanished overnight.
It’s pretty hard to deactivate one’s Facebook. When I ceased posting in 2017 and reduced my activity to client stuff and group management, I made sure that I had no more Facebook sign-ons left. But it turns out that Lucire’s Twitter-to-Facebook page script relies on my account.
I did look today and got caught up in a thread which reminded me why I don’t tend to look at the feed. Usual behaviour: person offended by a friend’s post. Spewed out opinions disguised as fact. Got called out. Couldn’t back them up. Then began obfuscating and attacking the messenger.
It would be funny if it weren’t so obvious these days—and that this person thinks they are intelligent. Social media have allowed those under the average IQ to believe they are the superior beings in the human race, because they have an audience and enough dopamine hits from likes to back up that feeling.
To heck with facts. We also find the same folks despise expertise, and truth is the obvious casualty.
I still remember last year one gentleman having a go at me for a Tweet that joked about MSG in ‘white people food’ (a term, I should note, that whites use), then proceeded to tell me all the incidents of racism perpetrated by my race that he had witnessed—all without recognizing that what he was doing was putting forth a “master race” argument on how his race was better and more tolerant. A racist who slams others over race. It stuck in my mind as a brilliant exemplar of ignorance and pigheadedness. I’d link it but he’s deleted it—I hadn’t expected the cowardice—but it was a great example of how the original message became the pretext to attack someone rather than engage. (Incidentally, there’s plenty of MSG in occidental food—just look out for those 600 numbers, and fast food joints are particularly nasty.)
I know there’ll always be more sheeple than independent thinkers. I know there’ll always be more who’ll swallow BS than analyse something for themselves. But it’s still disappointing to see it writ so large in this social-media-democratized world of ours.
Of course everyone should have a voice, a freedom to say their piece.
But in a bigger forum it would also be useful for all of us to have some sense of self-control and admit it when we don’t have evidence or we’re not experts in the area. I don’t think that’s likely unless schools are training kids some netiquette, what an actual debate looks like, and how social media “debates” are not debates.
I’d never go on a forum to debate my GP over medicine. And if I did, I’d qualify my statements with ‘As a layman, I would have thought …’ and allow myself to be corrected by people who know more than me in their specialist area.
In the 1980s, the Scots comedian Robbie Coltrane said the difference between a Briton and an American was that the Brit might recognize their limitations and say, ‘I didn’t go to a very good school,’ whereas the American would say, ‘If he comes over here, I’ll shoot him.’ But in 2020 I doubt such a distinction exists, certainly not online. A Briton is as likely as an American, or a New Zealander for that matter, to be anti-expert and truth- and fact-resistant.
I don’t know where that puts society. When I talked about leaving Twitter, one very active and knowledgeable friend in the South Island said he would stay because he ‘didn’t want to let the bastards win,’ or a sentiment to that effect. Sometimes I feel retreat leaves some of us in a gated community while the Morlocks go wild in Big Tech forums. And there would be absolutely no point to such an arrangement, because we enrich each other in society through contact, not isolation.
So how do you educate others who are so resistant to education, so unwilling to enter into a debate without character assassinations? Is this why the social media sites love us so much, because some of us think that the only way to get through with facts is to shout?
A religious person might advance the idea of living life better and to lead by example. Don’t preach it, show it. That doesn’t mean isolation, but it does mean demonstrating that not being an arsehole is enriching. Sounds good to me, except, with some so self-obsessed with ignorance, will they even recognize that that’s what’s happening? When this person on Facebook was called out today, I don’t think she realized it. It’s easier in the real world, and not so much in the virtual one where people are so caught up in their own head.
PS.: Let my friend and colleague Peter Fraterdeus have the last word here:
It turns out that Facebook etc are the perfect Petrie dish for extracting Dunning-Kreuger syndrome.
