What a pleasure it was to be back on The Panel on Radio New Zealand National today, my first appearance in a decade. That last time was about the Wellywood sign and how I had involved the Hollywood Sign Trust. Iâve done a couple of interviews since then on RNZ (thank you to my interviewers Lynda Chanwai-Earle and Finlay Macdonald, and producer Mark Cubey), but it has been 10 years and a few months since I was a phone-in guest on The Panel, which I listen to very frequently.
This time, it was about Hong Kong, and the new national security legislation that was passed last week. You can listen here, or click below for the embedded audio. While we begin with the latest development of social media and other companies refusing to hand over personal data to the Hong Kong government (or, rather, they are âpausingâ till they get a better look at the legislation), we move pretty quickly to the other aspects of the law (the juicy stuff and its extraterritorial aims) and what it means for Hong Kong. Massive thanks to Wallace Chapman who thought of me for the segment.
I didn’t read this thinking of Trump, which is what the Tweeter intended. I read it thinking of New Zealand. Heard the ‘If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?’ bullshit a lotâI dare say every immigrant to this nation has. English-born American columnist Sydney J. Harris, in 1969, answered it better than I ever could. (I hope the image appears in the embed below, since I see no img tagsâit seems reliant on Javascript.) Presumably this is either the Chicago Daily News or the SunâTimes.
Someone kept an American newspaper from 50 years ago for its historic #MoonLanding coverage. This opinion piece was in it.
As someone who read Confucius as a young man, and was largely raised on his ideas, free speech with self-regulation is my default positionâthough when it becomes apparent that people simply arenât civilized enough to use it, then you have to consider other solutions.
We have Facebook making statements saying they are âStanding Against Hateâ, yet when friends report white nationalist and separatist groups, they are told that nothing will be done because it is âcounter-speechâ. We know that Facebook has told the Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards, that it has done absolutely nothing despite its statements. This is the same company that shut off its âView asâ feature (which allowed people to check how their walls would look from someone elseâs point-of-view) after share price-affecting bad press, yet when it comes to actual humans getting killed and their murders streamed live via their platform, Facebook, through its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, essentially tells us, âThere are no problems, nothing to see here.â
Weâre just a platform
We take no responsibility at all for what gets shared through us. You can say what you like, but we think we can weather this storm, just as we weathered the last one, and just as weâll weather the next.
Kiwi lives donât matter
White nationalist groups make for great sharing. And sharing is caring. So we wonât shut them down as we did with Muslim groups. The engagement is just too good, especially when weâre only going to upset fewer than five million New Zealanders.
Hate is great
Hate gets shared and people spend more time on Facebook as a result. Whether it’s about New Zealanders or the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, we’ll be there to help distribute it. Genocide’s fine when it doesn’t affect our share price.
Facebook users are âdumb fucksâ
Our founder said it, and this is still our ongoing policy at Facebook. Weâll continue to lie because we know youâre addicted to our platform. And no matter which country summons our founder, we know you wonât have the guts to issue a warrant of arrest.
Actions speak more loudly than words, and in Facebookâs case, their words are a form of Newspeak, where they mean the opposite to what everyone else understands.
#Facebook: we had better turn off the âView asâ function, it could be open to abuse.
Also Facebook: live-streaming is fine, nothing to see here.#Facebooklies
Iâm not familiar with The Anti-Media, but New Zealand-based lawyer Darius Shahtahmasebi, who contributed to the site, notes that it was caught up in the Facebook and Twitter purge last week. The Anti-Media, he notes, had 2·17 million Facebook followers. âSupposedly, Facebook wants you to believe that 2.17 million people voluntarily signed up to our page just to receive all the spam content that we put out there (sounds realistic),â he wrote in RT.
After Facebook removed the page, Twitter followed suit and suspended their account.
Not only that, Shahtahmasebi notes that Anti-Media team members had their Twitter accounts purged as well. Its editor in chief received this message: âCareyWedler has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically, for:â. That was it. Sheâs none the wiser on what violation had been committed.
But here are the real kickers: their social manager had access to 30 accounts, and Twitter was able to coordinate the suspension of 29 of them, while their chief creative officer had his removed, including accounts he had never used. The Anti-Media Radio account suffered a similar fate, Twitter claiming it was due to âmultiple or repeat violations of the Twitter rulesââand it had no Tweets.
Shahtahmasebi has his theories on what was behind all of this. It does give my theories over the years a lot of weight: namely that Facebook targets individuals and its ârulesâ are applied with no reference to actual stated policies. Essentially, the company lies. Twitter has been digging itself more deeply into a hole of late, and itâs very evident now, even if you didnât want to admit it earlier, that it operates on the same lines. Google I have covered before, some might think ad nauseam.
One of his conclusions: âThere is nothing much that can be done unless enough people take a principled stand against such a severe level of censorship.â In some cases, including one Tweeter I followed, it has been to vote with oneâs feet, and leave these spaces to continue their descent without us.
Those who demanded Facebook & other Silicon Valley giants censor political content – something they didn't actually want to do – are finding that content that they themselves support & like end up being repressed. That's what has happened to every censorship advocate in history: https://t.co/IZHF8GVkgC
Unlike most leftists who laughed & celebrated when Infowars was purged by Big Tech, I vehemently oppose the censorship and deletion of left-wing pages by Facebook and Twitter.
If you don't support free speech for even your most ardent adversaries, you don't support free speech.
If you were one of the people caught up with âThe Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!â and a selection of Cold War paranoia resurrected by politicians and the media, then surely recent news would make you start to think that this was a fake-news narrative? Ian56 on Twitter was recently named by the UK Government as a Russian bot, and Twitter temporarily suspended his account.
He recently fronted up to the Murdoch Press’s Sky News, which a bot actually couldnât.
To be a Russian bot, you need to be (a) Russian and (b) a bot. The clueâs in the title.
If the British Government would like to understand what a bot looks like, I can log in to my Facebook and send them a dozen to investigate. They are remarkably easy to find.
It would be easy to identify bots on Twitter, but Twitter doesnât like getting shown up. But Ian56 has never been caught up in that, because he’s human.
His only âcrimeâ, as far as I can see, is thinking for himself. Then he used his right to free speech to share those thoughts.
Heâs also British, and proud of his countryâwhich is why he calls out what he sees are lies by his own government.
And if there is hyperbole on his Twitter account, the ones which the Sky News talking heads tried to zing him with, it’s no worse than what you see on there every day by private citizens. If that’s all they could find out of Ian56âs 157,000 Tweets, then he’s actually doing better than the rest of us.
We seem to be reaching an era where the establishment is upset that people have the right to free speech, but that is what all this technology has offered: democratization of communication. Something that certain media talking heads seem to get very offended by, too.
Ianâs not alone, because Murdoch’s The Times is also peddling the Russian narrative and named a Finnish grandmother as a âRussian trollâ and part of a Russian disinformation machine.
Iâve followed Citizen Halo for a long time, and sheâs been perfectly open about her history. Her account was set up nine years ago, long before some of the Internet Research Agencyâs social media activity was reported to have begun. Sheâs been anti-war since Vietnam, and her Tweets reflect that.
While she sees no insult in being labelled Russian (she openly admits to some Russian ancestry) she takes exception at being called a troll, which she, again, isnât. She also wasnât âmobilisedâ as The Times claims to spread news about the air strikes in Syria. She and Ian questioned the veracity of mainstream media views, and they certainly werenât the only ones. They just happen to be very good at social media. That doesnât make you part of a Russian disinformation machine.
As a result of The Timesâs article, Citizen Halo has gained a couple of thousand followers.
Meanwhile, Craig Murray, who ‘went from being Britainâs youngest ambassador to being sacked for opposing the use of intelligence from torture’ also sees similar attacks in the UK, again through The Times.
It headlined, ‘Apologists for Assad working in universities’. Murray adds:
Inside there was a further two page attack on named academics who have the temerity to ask for evidence of government claims over Syria, including distinguished Professors Tim Hayward, Paul McKeigue and Piers Robinson. The Times also attacked named journalists and bloggers and, to top it off, finished with a column alleging collusion between Scottish nationalists and the Russian state.
The net goes wider, says Murray, with the BBC and The Guardian joining in the narrative. On Ian, Murray noted:
The government then issued a ridiculous press release branding decent people as âRussian botsâ just for opposing British policy in Syria. In a piece of McCarthyism so macabre I cannot believe this is really happening, an apparently pleasant and normal man called Ian was grilled live on Murdochâs Sky News, having been named by his own government as a Russian bot.
The Guardian published the government line without question.
It does appear that in 2018, all you need to do is think independently and exercise your right to free speech for the UK Government and the media to sell a conspiracy theory.
That, if anything, begins weakening the official narrative.
Like most people, I do take in some of the news that I get fed. Yet this activity is having the opposite effect of what the establishment wants, forcing tenuous links usually associated with gossip sites and tabloids. If you had trust in these institutions before, you may now rightly be questioning why.
Above: Facebook kept deleting Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph each time it was posted, even when Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten did so, preventing its editor-in-chief from responding.
Thereâs a significant difference between the internet of the 1990s and that of today. As Facebook comes under fire for deleting the ânapalm girlâ photograph from the Vietnam War shared by Norwegian writer Tom Egeland, then by prime minister Erna Solberg and Aftenposten newspaper, it has highlighted to me how the big Silicon Valley players have become exclusionary. In this latest case, it is about how one firm determines what is acceptable and unacceptable without regard to cultural significance or free speech; it even punished people who dared criticize it, and has failed to apologize. Earlier this year, in one of my numerous battles with Facebook, I noted how a major German company falsely claimed videos that did not belong to them, yet there was no penalty. An individual or a small firm would not have been so lucky: when we file copyright claims, we do so âunder penalty of perjuryâ on the form.
Google, never far from my critical eye, is the same. Iâve watched Google News, for instance, become exclusionary, too, or, rather, a service that prefers big players rather than the independents. When deciding to send traffic for a particular news item, Google News now ranks big media outlets more highly, and to heck with journalistic quality or any regard on who broke the story first. Itâs damaging to the independent voice, as Google concentrates power in favour of larger firms today, and itâs rather disturbing when you consider the implications.
Mainstream media can be homogeneous, and, in some cases, damaging, when bias and prejudice get in to the system. When it comes to politics, this can be detrimental to democracy itself. And why should a search engine prefer a larger name anyway? Many newsrooms have been stripped of resources, ever more reliant on press releases. Many now engage in click-bait. Some have agenda driven by big business and their technocratic view of the world, especially those that have their corporate headquarters outside the country in which they operate. Those who desire to wake people up from their slumber get short shrift. Google is aiding this world, because since it became publicly listed, it has had to adopt its trappings, and one might argue that it is in direct conflict with its ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra (one which never held much sway with me).
This is the world which Google and Facebook, and no doubt others, wish to serve up to users. They may well argue that theyâre only delivering what people want: if a lot of people get their news from the Daily Mail or The Huffington Post, then thatâs what theyâll show in their results. Thereâs little freshness online as a result, which is why people arenât as inclined to share in 2016 as they were in 2010.
Yet it was not always this way. The hope in the late 1990s and early 2000s was that Google et al would be tools in distributing power equally among all netizens. Started an independent online publication? If the quality is there, if youâre the first to break a story, then Google News will lavish attention upon you. If you have specialized news outside what mainstream media deliver, then youâll pop up regularly in the search resultsâ pages. The blogosphere rose because of this, with people seeking opinions and research outside of what the mainstream could deliver. The reason people blog less isnât just because of social networks making one-sentence opinions de rigueur; it is because people have found it harder to reach new audience members, and their own tribe is the next best thing.
It makes the ânet a far less interesting place to be. Without fresh, new views, we run the risk of groupthink, or we become particularly influenced by the biases of certain media outlets. We donât really want to surf casually as we once did because we donât learn anything new: itâs harder to find novel things that pique our interests.
There are potential solutions, of course. I tend not to Google, but use Duck Duck Go, so at least I donât get a filter bubble when I search for particular subjects. However, Duck Duck Go does not have a comprehensive news search, and Googleâs index size remains unbeatable. What we really need next is something that brings back that sense of equality online. I believe that if you put in the hours into good content and design, you should excel and get your site ranked above the same old sources. Google claims that it does that when it tweaks its algorithms but Iâm not seeing this. Facebook merely builds on what people have foundâso if you can’t find it, it won’t wind up being shared. Twitter, at least, still has some interesting items, but if you donât catch it in your feed at a given time, then too bad. Itâs not geared to search.
Duck Duck Go is a start, at least when it comes to general searches. It becomes easier to find views that you might not agree withâand thatâs a good thing when it comes to understanding others. Googleâs approach lulls you into a sense of security, that your views are sacrosanctâand all that does is give you the notion that the other half is wrong.
So what of news? Duck Duck Go could well be a starting-point for that, too, ranking news based on who breaks an item first and the quality of the site, rather than how much money is behind it. Or perhaps this is the space for another entrepreneur. Ironically, it might even come out of China; though right now itâs equally likely to emerge from India. What it then needs is a bit of virality for it to be adopted, spread by the very people it is designed to aid.
We need something that rewards the independent entrepreneur again, the people who drove so many innovations in the 1990s and 2000s. This isnât nostalgia kicking in, seeing the world through rose-coloured glasses while happily ignoring all those businesses that failed. I completely acknowledge there were sites that vanished at the time of the dot-com bust, triggered in no small part by 9-11, the anniversary of which we celebrate today.
Society needs those distinctive voices, those independent entrepreneurs, those people who are willing to put themselves forward and be judged fairly. What they donât need are reactionary media who want to silence them out of fear that the world will change too much for them to bear; and big Silicon Valley firms all too happy to join in these days.
Itâs high time the most influential websites served the many rather than the few again.
An interesting weekend on Facebook. Despite regaining access, Iâm not allowed to post links (with the accusation that my computer is infectedâsee above), and after considerable research, I know this to be completely untrue. The Facebook malware accusations are targeted at certain users and, from the tiny sample of four that have responded to me, we are all heavy users. Just as I theorized back in June 2014 when Facebook shut down for me for 69 hours, some of us have reached a limit on their servers.
Boffins, and Facebook, say that thatâs impossible, but there have been countless signs of that over the years. Most were recorded on Get Satisfaction before Facebook shut down that community (how convenient). Among them were things such as Facebook being unable to show me every video I had uploadedâthe list began at 2011 and earlier ones were omittedâand the many occasions where I could no longer post, comment, like or share. Thereâs a direct parallel to my experiences on the former Vox.com, which Six Apart confirmed in 2009 and which they had no official answer for.
Whatâs the best course of action if Facebook accuses you of malware and forces you to download one of their programs from Trend Micro, F-Secure or Kaspersky? Delete your cookies. Once you do that, you can regain access, though, like me, youâll have a limited account where link-sharing is impossible. Initially, I was able to share a few links after my accessing Facebook, but it eventually became a blanket block, with the odd one getting through (two a day in my case).
If you want to be extra-safe, run the free version of Malware Bytes. The free one wonât conflict with your existing antivirus set-up (Iâm not trying to do Malware Bytes out of money), but, like the rest of us, youâll likely discover that your system is clean.
One woman got around this by downloading a new browser, although she was also limited on the link-posting.
Whatever you do, do not listen to these big firms. Facebook, Google et al are, as Iâve been documenting over the years, particularly deceptive. Iâve still had to deal with the remnants of Facebookâs scan switching off McAfee, nearly two days later.
Facebookâs apparently had many complaints about this since 2014, so Iâm hardly the first to encounter it. Blaming malware for their own databasing issues is cheap, but enough people will believe itâeven with my mistrust of these big Silicon Valley firms I still did their malware scan, not thinking I had a choice if I wanted to access the site again. What it really did during the scan is anyoneâs guess.
Iâd rather they come clean and tell people: you are allowed x posts a day, x links a day, and x photos and videos a day. I can work around that. But if they came clean about this and the number of click-farm workers and bots plaguing the site, what will that do to their share price?
And isn’t it ironic I can presently share more, and have more freedom of speech, on Weibo, monitored by the Chinese Communist Party?
PS.: As of the last week of April, I have had two reports that deleting cookies does not work, but switching browsers does. Facebook appears to find a way to identify you, your regular browser and your IP address together, without cookies.
P.PS.: Mid-May, and from my other thread on this topic, in the post-postscripts: âAndrew McPherson was hit with this more recently, with Facebook blocking the cookie-deleting method in some cases, and advises, “If you get this, you will need to change your Facebook password to something very long (a phrase will do), delete and clear your browsers cache and history, then delete your browser, then renew your IP address to a different number and then reinstall your browsers.” If you cannot change your IP address but are using a router, then he suggests refreshing the address on that. Basically, Facebook is making it harder and harder for us to work around their bug. Once again, if you sign on using a different account using the same âinfectedâ computer, there are no problemsâwhich means the finger of blame should remain squarely pointed at Facebook.’
P.P.P.PS.: November 30: it appears waiting it out is the best option for those who don’t want to mess around under the bonnet. Shawn Picker, in the comments, says to expect a five-day wait.
P.P.P.P.PS.: May 9, 2017: On the other post on this subject on my blog, a user called David suggested modifying your headers and to fool Facebook into thinking you are using another type of device. In comment no. 66 below, Stephan confirms that it works and gives more details about it. Check it out!
P.P.P.P.P.PS.: October 24: Again in the other thread on this topic, Don Dalton found that he was able to replace his Chrome profile with an older one to bypass Facebook’s block. Have a read of his comment here.
P.P.P.P.P.P.PS.: February 18, 2018: over the last few weeks, Mac users have been getting hit hard with this fake warning, and are being offered Windows software to download (which, of course will not work). Some have reported that changing browsers gets them around this. Downloading the equivalent anti-malware program from the same provider (e.g. Eset) does nothing, since the one user I know of who has done this came up with a clean Macâbecause, as we already know, the warnings are fake.
P.P.P.P.P.P.P.PS.: February 23, 2018: finally, a journalist has taken this seriously! Louise Matsakis, a writer for Wired covering the security and social media beats, has looked into the latest round of Facebook malware warnings being forced on Mac users. Facebook is still lying, in my opinion, claiming there could really have been malware (lie number one), but the company’s probably so used to saying one thing and doing another by now. Louise is right to seize upon the fact that no one knows what data are sent to Facebook during the scan. It’s a fine article, and I highly recommend it.
I know Iâm not alone among expats watching the Occupy Central movements in Hong Kong. More than the handover in 1997, itâs been making very compelling live television, because this isnât about politicians and royalty, but about everyday Hong Kong people. I Tweeted tonight that if I were a student there, Iâd be joining in. While the idea of direct elections is a recent developmentâthey started in 1985 for the Legislative Council, itâs important to remember that all UN member nations should permit its subjects the right of self-determination. It doesnât matter when they started, the fact is they did. The latest protests arenât about Legco, but the election of the Chief Executiveâthe successor to the role of Governorâwhich Beijing says can only be for candidates it approves.
Legal arguments aside, protesters are probably wondering why they could enjoy free and fair elections under colonial rule from London, and not by their own country from their own people.
I cannot speak for Beijing, but their perspective is probably more long-term: in the colonial days, the Legislative Council was appointed by London, not voted by Hong Kong subjects, for most of its existence. The Governor was always appointed by London. Surely what it is proposing for 2017 is far better?
And given that the Chief Executive currently is selected by an election committee of Beijing loyalists, then 2017 presents something far more open and akin to universal suffrage.
Those are the issues on the surface as I understand them, but they ignore some of the history of Hong Kong.
Hong Kong was a backwater until 1949, when the Communists revolted, and refugees poured in. My father was one of them, having made the trek from Taishan with his mother and sister. Other members of the family had got there on other journeys. The stories can happily fill chapters in a novel.
He recalls in his first days in Hong Kong, police officers had three digits on their shoulder. âI donât know how many policemen there were,â he recalls, âbut there couldnât have been more than 999.â
Hong Kongâs population swelled, and the colonial authorities found a way to accommodate the new arrivals.
I donât have the exact figures but at the dawn of the 1940s, the population of Hong Kong was 1·6 million, and it was close to 2Âœ million in the mid-1950s. When I left in 1976, it was 3 million.
The reason most people went there and risked their lives to escape the Communists: freedom. Most were skilled workers and farmers fearing prosecution.
Dad recalls that in the lead-up to the family home and farm being seized things were getting tough at school, with false accusations made against him by teachers and students. The vilification of land-owning families had begun.
The day he left, he saw a notice on the front door and the family departed for Hong Kong, where my paternal grandfather already had contacts from his military days.
Assuming a million people came across from the Peopleâs Republic of China, then itâs not hard to imagine a sizeable part of the modern population of Hong Kong to have grown up with negative impressions of Beijing.
Those same impressions saw to the mass exodus of Hong Kongers in the lead-up to the handover, with most expecting doom and gloom despite assurances under the Basic Lawâthough of course many have since returned to Hong Kong since things hadnât changed as badly as they feared.
They were the reasons my parents left in 1976. My mother simply thought a generation ahead and figured that by the 1990s, it would be hard to leave Hong Kong since some western countries would start going on about yellow peril again. (She was right, incidentally.)
While in the post-colonial days, there is more contact between Hong Kong and the rest of China, it will take a while for those impressions to subside.
It would be fair to say that culturally, we are predisposed to taking a long view of history, and the Cultural Revolution and the mismanagement of the economy in the earlier days of the Peopleâs Republic stick in our minds.
Even if the PRC proved to be a benevolent nation and made no wrong moves since 1997, the suspicion would remain.
It hasnât been helped by June 4, 1989 and its aftermath, continued censorship within China, and, more recently, some Hong Kongers feeling that theyâre a second class in their own city when mainland tourists pop over for a holiday.
Then you get people like me who cannot understand a word of Mandarin, which these days tends to be the second language many people learn. When the language of the colonials is easier to grasp, then that doesnât bode well for our northern friends. Thereâs a sense of separation.
This may explain a natural resistance to Beijing, because the way of life that the Chinese Communist Party envisages is so very different to what Hong Kongers believe they should enjoy.
Scholarism, meanwhile, from which Occupy Central has spawned, has come from this culture: a group protesting the introduction of âmoral and national educationâ as a compulsory subject in Hong Kong. The subject was seen by opponents to be pro-communist, with the teaching manual calling the Communist Party an âadvanced, selfless and united ruling groupâ.
Itâs hard, therefore, for Hong Kongers who grew up in this environment not to be suspicious of Beijing.
That explains the solidarity, the sort of thing that would have inspired me if I was a young uni student today in Hong Kong.
Now we are looking at two sides, neither of which is famous for backing down.
One possible resolution would be for Beijing to accede yet bankroll a pro-Beijing candidate come 2017, which could, in the long term, save face, but provide the protesters with a short-term victory. Itâs not what they are fighting forâthey want everyone to be able to stand for the post of CEâbut it may be one way events will play out.
Hong Kong isnât prepared to risk its economic freedom and progress, and it remains proud of its stance against corruption which has helped the city prosper. Citizens also place faith in the rule of law there, and the right to a fair trial.
Beijing, meanwhile, isnât prepared to risk the danger of an anti-communist CE being elected and having that trip up the development of the rest of the nation.
I have to say that such a fear is very remote, given the overriding desire of Hong Kongers to get ahead. If Hong Kongers are anything, they are pragmatic and ambitious, and a Chief Executive who is imbalanced to such a degree would never get elected. With the rise of the orient and the sputtering of the occident, the âcompetingâ ideas arenât so competing anyway. The United States and Australia have laws either enacted or at the bill stage in the name of national security that they can hardly serve as an ideal model for democracy. After all, Edward Snowden went to Hong Kong first.
The Cold War is over, and what is emerging, and what has been emerging, in Hong Kong and the rest of China since the 1990s has been a distinct, unique, Chinese model, one that has its roots in Confucianism and which takes pride in the progress of the city.
The ideal Chief Executive would more likely be a uniter, not a divider, balancing all sides, and ensuring those they represent a fair go. They would be a connecter who can work with both citizens and with Beijing.
Under my reading, there shouldnât be any concerns in Beijing, because pragmatic Hong Kongers would never elect someone who would risk their livelihoods or their freedoms.
And when Beijing sees that such a development can work in Hong Kong, it could be a model to the rest of China.
Taiwan, too, will be watching.
