Suzi Dawson’s 2016 post debunking a biased Guardian article on Julian Assange is quite an accomplishment. To quote her on Twitter, ‘The article I wrote debunking his crap was such toilet paper that I was able to disprove literally every single line of it, a never-before-achieved feat for me when debunking MSM smears. Check it out.’ Here is a link to her post.
I will quote one paragraph to whet your appetite, and you can read the rest of what I consider a reasoned piece at Contraspin. To date there have been no comments taking issue with what she wrote.
To the contrary, other than solidarity from close friends and family, these people usually end up universally loathed. In the cases of Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Bill Cosby, these men were protected for decades by the very establishment that they served. It took decades for their victims to raise awareness of what happened to them yet once they finally managed to achieve mainstream awareness, their attackers became reviled, etched in history as the monsters they are. The very speed and ferocity with which the Swedish (and other) governments targeted and persecuted Assange speaks volumes. Were he an actual everyday common rapist it is more likely than not that the police would have taken little to no action. Were he a high society predator, it would have taken decades for the public to become aware of it. But because he is neither, and is in fact a target of Empire, he was smeared internationally by the entire worldâs media within 24 hours of the allegations and six years later is still fighting for the most basic acknowledgements of the facts â such as that he has still never been charged with any crime, which Ms Orr fails to mention even once in her entire piece.
It’s important to keep an open mind on what we are being toldâthere are many false narratives out there, and neither left- nor right-wing media come to the table with clean hands.
Weâve had years of Google and Facebook acting like arses, but itâs disappointing to see Twitter give us more and more causes for concern.
In 2017, we saw them change their terms and conditions so speaking power to truth is no longer a requirement. You canât help but think that the decision to accommodate the US president is part of that: there is a policy within Twitter that President Trump is immune to their terms and conditions, and can Tweet with impunity what you and I would get kicked off for doing. We also saw Twitter, which is scrambling to show the US government that it is doing something about alleged Russian interference, kick off a privately developed bot that helped identify fake accounts. Youâd think that if Twitter were sincere about identifying fake accounts, it would embrace such technology.
One of my regular blog readers, Karen Tolfree, very kindly linked me a report from Hannity (which another friend later informed me was first revealed on Breitbart) which showed Twitter staff caught on video admitting to shadow-banning either because they disagreed with the userâs politics (with an admission that Twitter is 90 per cent US Democrat-leaning) or because of US government pressure (when discussing Julian Assangeâs account).
What was the old saying? I might not always agree with your politics but I will always defend to the hilt your right to express your views.
Therefore, I mightnât be President Trumpâs biggest fan but those who support him, and do so within the same rules that Iâm governed by on Twitter (e.g. not resorting to hate speech or attacking any individual or group), must have the same right to free speech as I should.
I do not wish them to be silenced because many of them have good reasons for their beliefs, and if I donât see them in my feed then how will I understand them? I donât wish to live in a bubble (meanwhile, Facebook and Google want you to; Facebookâs âcrowdsourcingâ its ranking of media sources is going to make things far worseâhave a look at Duck Duck Go founder Gabriel Weinberg’s series of Tweets at the end of this post).
Because you never know if Twitterâs shadow-banning is going to go after you, since, like Facebookâs false malware accusations, they could be indiscriminate.
In fact, two New Zealanders were shadow-banned over the last week: one with stated left-leaning views (Paul Le Comte), another (Cate Owen) who hasnât put her political leanings into her bio, and who was shadow-banned for reasons unknown. Itâs not just conservatives these guys go after, and neither was told just which Tweet netted them this âpunishmentâ.
I think itâs generally agreed that we have passed peak Twitter just as we have passed peak Facebook, but as itâs one of the original, mid-2000s social media services I still use, Iâm disappointed that I canât feel as happy being on there as I once did. After all, our presence is effectively our endorsement, and do we really endorse this sort of censorship against people because of either their politics, governmental pressure or reasons unknown? Twitter paints itself as a place where we can speak freely, provided we do so within certain rules, and the dick moves over the last 12 months make me wonder if itâs heading in the same direction as Google (tax-avoiding, hacking, lying about advertising tracking, allegedly pressuring think-tanks to fire someone over their viewpoints, biasing results in its own favour) and Facebook (forced downloads using the excuse of malware detection, kicking off drag queens and kings, tracking people after they have opted out, potential database issues that kick people off for days, endless bots and general ineffectiveness in removing them, lying about user numbers). Twitter always had bots and trolls, but weâre seeing what goes on inside nowadays, and it ainât pretty.
In 2018, we know Twitter is not a place for free speech, where rules apply differently depending on who you are, and where the identification of bots is not a priority.
And even though weâve had some happy news already this year (e.g. the prospect of Baby Clarcinda in five monthsâ time), these influential websites, whose actions and policies do affect us all, are âdoing it all wrongâ.
To be (more) clear, promoting trustworthy news sources is a reasonable idea.
Relying solely on crowdsourcing to determine trust, though, or making trust scores individualized, are both poor implementations that will create more negative unintended consequences.
I get that companies don't want to editorialize, but there are other paths than inscrutable algorithms, such as creating or working with independent non-partisan bodies to make the hard editorial decisions based on transparent and obviously measurable criteria.
[Prof Anne-Marie Brady of the University of Canterbury] said the Chinese-language media in New Zealand was subject to extreme censorship, and accused both Mr. Yang and Raymond Huo, an ethnic Chinese lawmaker from the center-left Labour Party, of being subject to influence by the Chinese Embassy and community organizations it used as front groups to push the countryâs agenda.
Mr. Huo strongly denied any âinsinuations against his character,â saying his connections with Chinese groups and appearances at their events were just part of being an effective lawmaker.
And:
Despite the criticism, Mr. Yang has continued to appear alongside Wang Lutong, Chinaâs ambassador to New Zealand, at public events, including for Chinaâs National Day celebrations this week, when he posed for photos with the ambassador and a Chinese military attachĂŠ.
I wound up at three events where the Chinese ambassador, HE Wang Lutong, was also invited. This makes me a spy, I mean, agent.
I even shook hands with him. This means my loyalty to New Zealand should be questioned.
I ran for mayor twice, which must be a sure sign that Beijing is making a power-play at the local level.
You all should have seen it coming.
My Omega watch, the ease with which I can test-drive Aston Martins, and the fact I know how to tie a bow tie to match my dinner suit.
The faux Edinburgh accent that I can bring out at any time with the words, âThere can be only one,â and âWe shail into hishtory!â
Helming a fashion magazine and printing on Matt paper, thatâs another clue. We had a stylist whose name was Illya K. I donât always work Solo. Sometimes I call on Ms Gale or Ms Purdy.
Jian Yang and I have the same initials, which should really ring alarm bells.
Clearly this all makes me a spy. I mean, agent.
Never mind I grew up in a household where my paternal grandfather served under General Chiang Kai-shek and he and my Dad were Kuomintang members. Dad was ready to ĺ塼 and fight back the communists if called up.
Never mind that I was extremely critical when New Zealanders were roughed up by our cops when a Chinese bigwig came out from Beijing in the 1990s.
Never mind that I have been schooled here, contributed to New Zealand society, and flown our flag high in the industries Iâve worked in.
All Chinese New Zealanders, it seems, are still subject to suspicion and fears of the yellow peril in 2017, no matter how much you put in to the country you love.
We might think, âThatâs not as bad as the White Australia policy,â and it isnât. We donât risk deportation. But we do read these stories where thereâs plenty of nudge-nudge wink-wink going on and you wonder if thereâs the same underlying motive.
All you need to do is have a particular skin colour and support your community, risking that the host has invited Communist Party bigwigs.
Those of us who are here now donât really bear grudges against what happened in the 1940s. We have our views, but that doesnât stop us from getting on with life. And that means we will be seen with people whose political opinions differ from ours.
Sound familiar? Thatâs no different to anyone else here. Itâs not exactly difficult to be in the same room as a German New Zealander or a Japanese New Zealander in 2017. A leftie won’t find it hard to be in the same room as a rightie.
So Iâll keep turning up to community events, thank you, without that casting any shadow over my character or my loyalty.
A person in this country is innocent till proved guilty. We should hold all New Zealanders to the same standard, regardless of ethnicity. This is part of what being a Kiwi is about, and this is ideal is one of the many reasons I love this country. If the outcry in the wake of Garnerâs Fairfax Press opinion is any indication, most of us adhere to this, and exhibit it.
Therefore, I don’t have a problem with Prof Brady or anyone interviewed for the pieceâit’s the way their quotes were used to make me question where race relations in our neck of the woods is heading.
But until heâs proved guilty, Iâm going to reserve making any judgement of Dr Yang. The New York Times and any foreign media reporting on or operating here should know better, too.
How right Kalev Leetaru is on Wikipediaâs decision to ban The Daily Mail as a source.
This decision, he concludes, was made by a cabal of 50 editors based on anecdotes. Iâve stated before on this blog how Wikipedia is broken, the abusive attitude of one of its editors, and how even luminaries like the late Aaron Swartz and Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger chose to depart. Itâs just taken three years or more for some of these thoughts to get picked up in a more mainstream fashion.
I made sure I referred to a single editor as my experience with someone high up in Wikipedia, not all of its editors, but you canât ignore accusations of certain people gaming the system in light of the ban.
Leetaru wrote on the Forbes site, âOut of the billions of Internet users who come into contact with Wikipedia content in some way shape or form, just 50 people voted to ban an entire news outlet from the platform. No public poll was taken, no public notice was granted, no communications of any kind were made to the outside world until everything was said and done and action was taken âŚ
âWhat then was the incontrovertible evidence that those 50 Wikipedia editors found so convincing as to apply a “general prohibition” on links to the Daily Mail? Strangely, a review of the comments advocating for a prohibition of the Mail yields not a single data-driven analysis performed in the course of this discussion.â
Iâm not defending the Mail because I see a good deal of the news site as clickbait, but itâs probably no worse than some other news sources out there.
And itâs great that Wikipedia kept its discussion public, unlike some other top sites on the web.
However, you canât escape the irony behind an unreliable website deeming a media outlet unreliable. Hereâs a site that even frowns upon print journalism because its cabal cannot find online references to facts made in its articles. Now, I would like to see it trust print stuff more and the Mail less, but that, too, is based on my impressions rather than any data-driven analysis that Leetaru expects from such a big site with so many volunteers. Iâve made my arguments elsewhere on why Wikipedia will remain unreliable, and why those of us in the know just wonât bother with it for our specialist subjects.
By all means, use it, and it is good for a quick, cursory “pub chat” reference (though science ones tend to be better, according to friends in that world). But remember that there is an élite group of editors there and Wikipedia will reflect their biases, just as my sites reflect mine. To believe it is truly objective or, for that matter, accurate, would be foolhardy.
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.
I’m one of the few living in the occident who watched President Putin’s end-of-year press conference (all right, I listened to a good part of it while working). While the live translations coming through were distracting, it was better than not knowing what he was saying. It was a rare thing, to see a president front up to a roomful of journalists, some from western countries who weren’t going to make life easy for himâespecially over the Crimeaâand give his point of view. The three-hour event, which you can watch on YouTube, showed a world leader prepared to give answers face to face, and it wasn’t even for an election campaign. I don’t agree with everything he saidâI have friends there who tell me of the pressures they face over free speech and the right to express a dissenting political viewpoint. While a lot of what he gave were stock politicians’ answers, I’d still give the guy some credit.
Which makes it all the more amazing that at least one medium turned the thing into a joke. Here’s The Independentâs take on it, entitled, ‘What you missed at Vladimir Putin’s quite crazy press conference’. I’m not saying the report is false, but cherry-picking a few anomalies does not make it a fair summary. I know the ‘I100â section is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but these days when people might come across reports via Google News, that mightn’t be obvious. You’d have better luck going to a website like this. The Washington Post, meanwhile, did a reasonably good job and its report gels with what I recall.
It’s a bit of shame about the lack of prominence this item got, not just from the point of view of learning more about world affairs, but reminding us that many political leaders wouldn’t, or couldn’t, front up for a prolonged Question Time in front of international media. I don’t know if President Putin gives regular press conferences, but assuming he does, this lengthy end-of-year appearance is a decent bonus and not unlike a shareholders’ AGM in business. Of course, he is a politician, and you have to treat a lot of what he says as spin, but better to appear to give a perspective than allowing the dialogue to build against you.
As Google Plus nears yet another anniversaryâI believe itâs its third next weekâitâs interesting to reflect back on the much-hyped launch. Or, more accurately, on the number of people who drank the Google Kool-Aid and believed this would be the biggest thing since Facebook. Have a glance at the cheerleading: a handful of links I could find quickly today included Testically, Techcrunch, Ghacks (though I don’t blame them, since they are run for the Google community) and Readwrite. It had allies like this in the blogging community. Forbes was still championing it as late as December 2013. As I wrote this, Mashable was one that raised the issue of privacy back then, though Iâm sure there were others.
I want to clear up that I am not criticizing a single person here for a lapse of ethics. I’m simply pointing out the buzz: many tech experts pumped up Plus. I know one (there could have been more) who backtracked less than half a year later when it failed to make much of an impact and stated what he really meant.
I realize that there are some opinion leaders on there who are doing remarkably well. However, generally, fewer people are on it actively compared with Facebook, and fewer threads and conversations take place. Despite Googleâs methods of forcing people on it, by linking it to YouTube, where a lot of people comment, it still hasnât taken off in the publicâs imaginations.
Youâre always going to get a biased view from me about Google, but not one borne out of a philosophical reason or some dislike of Californians or Americans (and I have cousins and an aunt who are both). It was borne out of the disconnect between what the firm said and what the firm did: everything from the outright lies over years of the Ads Preferences Manager (a system that has since been replaced) to the blacklisting system (where, it was discovered, only two part-time people were devoted to it, leaving queries unanswered on its forums and sites unfairly and wrongly blacklisted with no resolutions). Yet I was once a Google cheerleader, if you go back far enough on this blog, let down by its actions. This blog itself was once on Blogger.
I took the stance (which I read from Stowe Boyd) that if the original Google organized the web, and Facebook organized your friends, then that didnât leave Google Plus an awful lot to do. What I cannot get is, with Googleâs endless dismeanours, why people would continue to take its PR departmentâs hype at its word.
You might argue that others havenât been as upset by these faults as I have. That, for the overwhelming majority, they just go to Google for search and it rarely suffers downtime. In fact, itâs very good in delivering what people wanted there. This was Googleâs âkiller appâ, the thing that toppled Altavista, the biggest website in the world.
But, Google tells us, it owns all these other things, and we now know that it sends all those data to the NSA and is complicit in snooping. We know it got round browser settings in Safari through hacking so it could spy more on the publicâuntil it was busted by the Murdoch Press. Courageous American attorneys-general punished Google by docking it a massive four hoursâ pay.
Surely that would be enough to turn people off? Apparently not.
No one really seems to mind having this happen, and I am a hypocrite because I use Facebook and know itâs up to the same tricks. I had to go to the Network Advertising Initiative to block Facebookâs new ad cookie from targeting me, fetching my data when Iâm off-site. But you donât see me pump up Facebook very often. Iâll give it kudos when itâs deserved (I thought Timeline was a great interface when new) and flak when itâs not. Itâs not a blind admiration, and thatâs what I sense of the big G.
And itâs not the brand. A good brand is one that is transparent and has integrity. It walks its talk. Sure, Google does well in those surveysâso what does that really say? Enron did well in surveys, too. It even won an award for climate change action.
So why the love from some quarters of the media? Did it take Snowden and PRISM for there to be more than just casual reporting on Googleâs faults? And shouldnât there be more depth than this?
Maybe, at the end of the day, itâs community. What the big G has done wellâand Facebook, for that matterâis bring people together. Hereâs a story on a man who is a tech lead on Google Glass, innovating at a university. Folks like this come together because of innovations pushed by these big tech firms. One of my good friends, who is supportive of Google, says the positives outweigh the negatives. So when Google or YouTube goes downâmy queries took minutes to resolve over the weekendâmost people see that. Ditto with Facebook: even when it was down for some users last week (which, incidentally, didnât make the news, though the 20-minute global outage on Thursday didâI still maintain there is some limit people are hitting on one or some servers, and Facebook acknowledges it was a software bug, not an attack from China), I was still checking in to see if things were back. I liked my communities and the people I engaged with.
So when it comes to pointing out a bug with Googleâas I had to last year when its robot would not whitelist clean, previously blacklisted sitesâthat same community bands together, ignoring the pleas of innocent users, and maintaining the high-and-mighty stance that there could not possibly be anything wrong with its systems. Blogger was the same, when âtech supportâ and the main Blogger contact were complicit, to the point of deleting evidence that proved a fault, and it took the then-product managerâs intervention to be ethical, honest, transparent and proactive. One good guy (who has since moved on to other parts of Googleâyet he still helped me out on a remaining bug last year), but one messed-up support system. And I have to wonder if that is symptomatic of the bigger picture at the big G. It’s not all fun with Owen Wilson trying to be an internâbut it sure does well getting itself into films to portray the positive, upbeat, and inspiring side of the business.
However, itâs the task of media not to be sucked in to any of this, and to provide us an objective view. To report fairly and dispassionately, and to put aside a press junket or a Silicon Valley gathering. There are polite ways of providing criticism, if itâs about maintaining some level of mana within that community and to ensure a steady flow of inside news. I always findâand again I admit I am biasedâthat I can’t really read anything about Google without my mind going first to some of these deeper problems, so why not offer such a balance when they are directly relevant?
Google Plusâs anniversary might go largely unnoticed. But it would be interesting if someone in the media noted just how many colleagues hyped it up at the time. Will we see such a report next week?
