Some visiting Australian friends have said that they are finding New Zealand politics as interesting as their own, although I donāt think this was meant as a compliment.
Those of us in New Zealand had a few days of House of Cards-lite intrigue, in that it was stirred up by a conservative whip, in an attempt to take down his party leader. Except it was so much more condensed than the machinations of Francis Urquhart, and, if you were Chinese, Indian or Filipino, in the words of Taika Waititi, it was āracist AFā.
Two of my Tweets garnered hundreds of likes each, which generally doesnāt happen to me, but I am taking that as reinforcing something I truly believe: that most New Zealanders arenāt racist, and that we despise injustices and treating someone differently because of their ethnicity.
Botany MP Jami-Lee Ross and opposition leader Simon Bridgesā phone call, where the former stated that two Chinese MPs were worth more than two Indian ones, drew plenty of thoughts from both communities, where we felt we were treated as numbers, or a political funding source, with none of us actually getting into a National Cabinet (or the Shadow Cabinet) since Pansy Wong was ousted last decadeāmaking you feel that had other Cabinet ministers been held to the same standard, they would have been gone as well. Here was my first Tweet on the subject:
In a bid to win National Party clients, Iām changing my business slogan to āWorth more than my mate Krishna.ā
Thereās the inevitable look back through the history of Chinese New Zealanders, who have largely been humiliated since the gold-mining days by earlier generations, and the Poll Tax, for which an apology came decades after during the previous Labour government.
And the scandal also inspired Tze Ming Mok to write an excellent op-ed for The New Zealand Herald, which I highly recommend here. Itās one of the most intelligent ones on the subject.
Sheās absolutely right: those of us with few connections to the Peopleās Republic of China donāt like being grouped in among them, or treated as though weāre part of the Chinese Communist Party apparatus.
Her research showed that roughly half of Chinese New Zealanders were born on the mainland, and that the group itself is incredibly diverse. My fatherās family fled in 1949 and I was raised in a fairly staunch anti-communist household, images of Sun Yat Sen and the ROC flag emblazoned on my paternal grandfatherās drinking glasses. My mother, despite being born in Hong Kong, grew up behind the Bamboo Curtain and survived the famine, and didnāt have an awful lot of positive things to say about her experiences there, eventually making her way out to her birthplace during her tertiary studies.
Tze Ming writes:
This chilling effect is harming Chinese people in New Zealand. Many people cannot differentiate Chinese people from the actions of the CCP (I mean hey, many people canāt tell a Chinese from a Korean), but this is made worse when hardly any authorities on the topic will address the issue openly. Concerns can only erupt as xenophobia against the Chinese and āAsianā population ā¦
CCP-linked politicians parroting Xi Jinping and promoting Beijingās Belt & Road priorities don’t speak for at least half of us.
āAt leastā is right. My father was born in the mainland where åå ± was a catch-cry in his young adult life. Iām willing to bet thereās an entire, older Chinese-born generation that thinks the same.
She continues:
It’s endlessly irritating and insulting that both Labour and National have lazily assigned Chinese communities as the fiefdoms of politicians openly backed by the Chinese government.
Thatās true, too. In 2014 I was approached by the National Party asking how best to target the Chinese community. My response was to treat us the same as any other New Zealanders. Iām not sure whether the advice was taken on board, as within months I was invited to a Chinese restaurant for a $100-a-head dinner to be in the presence of the Rt Hon John Key, a fund-raiser that was aimed at ethnic Chinese people resident here. It certainly didnāt feel that I was being treated like my white or brown neighbours.
The other point Tze Ming touches on, and one which I have written about myself, is the use of the term Asian in New Zealand.
Let me sum it up from my time here, beginning in 1976, and how I saw the terms being used by others:
1970s: āChineseā meant those people running the groceries and takeaways. Hard working. Good at maths. Not good at politics or being noticed, and Petone borough mayor George Gee was just an anomaly.
1990s: āAsianā became a point of negativity, fuelled by Winston āTwo Wongs donāt make a whiteā Peters. He basically meant Chinese. Itās not a term we claimed at the time, and while some have since tried to reclaim it for themselves to represent the oriental communities (and some, like super-lawyer Mai Chen, have claimed it and rightly extended it to all of Asia), itās used when non-Chinese people whine about us. Itās why āMy best friend is Asianā is racist in more than one way.
2010s: āChineseā means not just the United Front and the Confucius Institute (which has little to do with Confucius, incidentally), but that all Chinese New Zealanders are part of a diaspora with ties to the PRC. And weāre moneyed, apparently, so much that weāve been accused of buying up properties based on a list of āChinese-sounding namesā by Labour in a xenophobic mood. Iāve been asked plenty of times this decade whether I have contacts in Beijing or Shanghai. If youāre born in Hong Kong before July 1, 1997, you were British (well, in a post-Windrush apartheid sense anyway), and unlikely to have any connections behind the Bamboo Curtain, but youāve already been singled out by race.
Now, I donāt want to put a dampener on any Chinese New Zealander who does have ties back to the mainland and the CCP. We share a history and a heritage, and since I wasnāt the one who had any experience of the hardships my parents and grandparents suffered, I donāt have any deep-seated hatred festering away. My father visited the old country in 2003 and put all that behind him, too. A republic is better than the imperial families that had been in charge before, and if I’ve any historical power to dislike, I’d be better off focusing on them. So in some respects, there is āunityā insofar as Iāll stick up for someone of my own race if theyāre the subject of a racist attack. Iāll write about Chinese people and businesses without the derision that others do (e.g. here’s an article on the MG GS SUV that doesn’t go down the Yellow Peril route). But weāre not automatons doing Beijingās bidding.
Iāll lazily take Tze Mingās conclusion in the Herald:
We deserve better than to be trapped between knee-jerk racists and Xi Jinping Thought. Abandoning us to this fate is racism too.
I havenāt even begun to address the blatant sexual harassment that has since emerged as a result of the scandal, but others are far better placed to speak on that.
Above: I must report and block dozens of Instagram accounts a day, not unlike getting over the 200-a-day mark on Facebook in 2014.
For the last few days, I made my Twitter private. It was the only time in 11 years of being on the service where I felt I needed that level of privacy; I only made things public again when I realized that I couldnāt actually contact people who werenāt already following me.
However, it was relatively blissful. Accounts with automated following scripts were blocked as I had to approve them manually. I had far fewer notifications. And I only heard directly back from people I liked.
It actually reminded me of the āold daysā. Itās why Mastodon appeals: since there were only a million people on there at the end of last year, it felt like Twitter of old (even if it has already descended far enough for actor Wil Wheaton to get abused, compelling him to leave).
The quieter few days also got me thinking: I had far more business success prior to social media. I was blogging at Beyond Branding, and that was a pretty good outlet. I emailed friends and corresponded like pen pals. Those werenāt fleeting friendships where the other party could just ālikeā what you said. If I really think about it, social media have done very little in terms of my business.
Iām not saying that social media donāt have a purposeāa viral Tweet that might get quoted in the press could be useful, I supposeābut I really didnāt need them to be happy in my work and my everyday life.
Since giving up updating my Facebook wall in 2017, I havenāt missed telling everyone about what Iām up to, because I figured that the people who needed to know would know. Twitter remained a useful outlet because there are some people on there whose interactions I truly value, but as you can surmise from what I said above, the number of notifications didnāt matter to me. I donāt need the same dopamine hit that others do when someone likes or re-Tweets something of theirs.
Interestingly, during this time, I logged into Whatsapp, an app I load once every three months or so since I have a few friends on it. I saw a video sent to me by Stefan Engeseth:
When I look at my Instagram stats, theyāre back to around 2015 levels, and with these current trends, my usage will drop even further as we head into 2019.
And I really donāt mind. The video shows just why social media arenāt what theyāre cracked up to be, and why they arenāt ultimately healthy for us.
I can add the following, that many of you who read this blog know: Facebook is full of bots, with false claims about their audience, and engages in actual distribution of questionable invasive software, charges Iāve levelled at the company for many years, long before the world even heard of Christopher Wylie. Twitter is also full of bots but actually disapproves of services that help them identify them; they have double standards when it comes to what you can and canāt say; and, perhaps most sadly, those people who have viewpoints that are contrary to the mainstream or the majority are shat on by disorganized gangs of Tweeters. Thatās not liberty. Instagram is also full of botsālike when I was on Facebook, when I reported dozens to hundreds of bots a dayāand there seems to be no end to them; it also lies when it talks about how its advertising works. Given all of these problems, why would I provide these services with my precious time?
I engage with these social media in more and more limited fashion and I wouldnāt be surprised if Iām completely away from these big tech names in due course.
Itās not as though young people are active on them, so the idea that they are services where you can get the next generation of customers is bogus. If you say youāre on Facebook, you might be considered an old-timer now. I asked a Year 11 student here on work experience what he used. Facebook wasnāt one of them. He said most of his friends Snapchatted, while he was in to Reddit. He didnāt like Facebook because it wasnāt real, and we have a generation who can spot the BS and the conceit behind it.
It does make the need for services such as Duck Duck Go even greater, for us to get unbiased information not filtered by Googleās love of big corporations, in its quest to rid the web of its once meritorious nature. Google is all about being evil.
As we near the 2020s, a decade which we hope will be more caring and just than the ones before, itās my hope that we can restore merit to the system and that we find more ethical alternatives to the big names. I canāt see as great a need to show off fake lives on social media when itās much more gratifying, for me at least, to return to what I did at the beginning of the century and let the work speak for itself.
It appears my friend Justin was spot on: I probably was part of a test group trialling longer Instagram videos since April.
Today, Instagram announced that people could upload 10-minute videos, and an hour for those with big followings. This news article (hat tip to Cachalot Sang on Twitter) says thereāll be a new app called IGTV, although Iāve always just uploaded mine via regular Instagram. I havenāt cracked nine minutes yet, but Iāve uploaded videos in the high eights. Regular Instagram seemed to balk at doing anything too large. Also bear in mindāarguably from someone who has had more experience of this than anyone in Instagram-landāthat these uploads take ages and can sometimes fail.
Donāt be disappointed if your views are low, since Instagram only counts full views. I have videos still saying they have had zero views, yet I have likes and, in some cases, comments. Not everyoneās going to sit back and watch these in full.
I had noticed that in the last week, my videos, all of which are over a minute, have successfully uploadedāup from the one in two ratio that I experienced when Instagram first gave me the ability to upload videos longer than one minute in April. No wonder, if the official announcement was made today: they probably began allowing all the big ones through.
As the one user (that I know of) who has publicly been uploading videos of over a minute for nearly two months, welcome to the club. I hope youāll enjoy it.
As you saw in the previous postās postscripts, it is possible to upload videos of longer than one minute to Instagram, but Instagram may or may not let the public see them. If you want people to see your videos for sure, then keep them to the standard minute. But if you want to chance it, so far my experience is 50ā50, and there’s no correlation with length. Like all things Facebook, there is no consistency, and you are at the whim of the technology and its questionable database integrity. Here are the ones that have worked, the first at 2ā²50ā³, the second at 4ā², the third at 3ā²51ā³, and the fourth at 7ā²03ā³ (this had to be uploaded twice as Facebook hid the first attempt).
PS., April 28, 12.37 a.m.: A few more tries and the odds of a video lasting longer than one minute being visible to other Instagram users are definitely 1:2. The latest is this, at 7ā²53ā³.
Don’t be surprised if these record zero views on Instagram. I believe their stats only count full views, and no one’s going to sit watching a video there for that long unless it’s particularly compelling.
P.PS., May 4: I attempted a 9ā²03ā³ video. No joy. Instagram will allow the upload but the actual process takes an incredibly long time. The progress bar goes back a few times. Eventually it says there is an error. In theory, I think it’s possible, but right now I haven’t managed to exceed 7ā²53ā³.
Either Mark Zuckerberg is woefully ignorant of what happens at his company or he lied during his testimony to US lawmakers last week. As reported by Chris Griffith in the Murdoch Press, Zuckerberg said, āAnyone can turn off and opt out of any data collection for ads, whether they use our services or not.ā
Actually, you canāt. As proven many times on this blog.
If youād like to read that earlier post, here it is. This is still going on in 2018, and confirmed by others.
I canāt speak for shadow profiles because I am a Facebook user.
Summary: Facebook will ignore opt-outs done on its own site and at industry sites, and compile ad preferences on you. Been saying it, and proving it, for years.
I decided thereād be no harm getting that Facebook archive since I was no longer using it. And while I didnāt see phone logs as Dylan McKay did (I only had the app for about a month or so in 2012), what I did find was entirely in line with the privacy breaches I had been accusing Facebook of for years.
It relates to the Facebook ad preferences. In December 2016, I filed a complaint with the US Better Business Bureau over the fact that Facebook continued to compile data on your advertising preferences even after you opted out. During 2016, Facebook repopulated all my preferences not once, but multiple times, and I found a direct link between one of the advertisements it displayed in my feed and the recompiled preferences. This was the āsmoking gunā the BBB asked me to find, though I never heard back from them.
As of 2018, knowing that Facebook will not respect your opt-outs, just as Google failed to do in 2011 (and potentially for two years before that), I visited the ad preferencesā page (here’s the link to yours, if you use Facebook and are logged in) regularly to keep it empty. What the download showed was very damning: Facebook has preferences compiled on me that do not appear on its ad preferencesā page.
Below are two screen shots, one of Facebookās ad preferencesā page, and what is recorded in the archive. This is a direct violation of not only what the BBB says is one of its principles, it is a violation of the code advertisers subscribe to in industry bodies like the Network Advertising Initiative.
Above: Facebook’s own advertising preferences’ page, yet its user archive records something entirely different.
The archive is also interesting in claiming what ads I have supposedly interacted with. The ad preferencesā page says I have only clicked on an ad from my Alma Mater, St Markās Church School. The download says otherwise, recording clicks but not describing which device. However, I can categorically state that the downloaded record is 100 per cent false. I have not only never clicked on those ads (in either Facebook or on Instagram), I have not heard of some of these organizations. It is tempting, therefore, to conclude that if this is Facebookās record of my activity, then it is misrepresenting click activity to advertisers, which I regard as extremely dishonest. We already know Facebook lies about users that ads can reach. Even if you donāt take my word for it, then you must ask yourself why the Facebook page and the Facebook download tell two very different stories. Which is right?
It’s the same story when it comes to which advertisers I have interacted with. The second list, in the user archive, is 100 per cent false. Has Facebook lied to advertisers over click activity?
This is not the end of it. As to which advertisers have my contact information, the ad preferencesā page say none. The download, however, says Spotify (which I have never used or downloaded), Shutterstock (whose site I have been on) and Emirates (and I am on their email list, but separately from Facebook). Again, why the two different records? And why has Facebook passed on this information to three advertisers without my consent?
Once again, when it comes to who has my contact information, Facebook tells me one story on an easily accessible page, and another one inside my user data archive. Which is true?
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg came out and made a statement on Facebook that had no apology (though he gave a personal one later on CNN) and, at a time when people demanded transparency, he continued with opaqueness.
First, he told us nothing we didnāt already know about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Secondly, he avoided the most pressing points.
No mention that Facebook had covered this up for two years. No explanation of why he failed to answer journalists about this for two years. No explanation on why Facebook tried to gag the story in The Observer by threatening legal action. No mention that it had failed, by law, to report a data breach that it knew about.
From the clips I saw on CNN, Zuckerberg claims he wants to restrict access to developers, and he still doesnāt know if there are other Cambridge Analyticas out there. Nothing about Facebook gathering more and more data on you and using it improperly themselves, which has actually been an ongoing issue. From the clips online provided by CNN, it wasn’t a hard-hitting interview, with the journalist going very easy on the milliardaire in what amounted to a puff piece. I really hope there was more meat than what we were shown, given how much ammo there is.
The site has countless more failings, including its bots and its bugs, but Iāve mentioned them before.
Iām unimpressed and for once, the market agreed, with shares dipping 2Ā·7 per cent after Zuckerbergās first comments in the wake of the scandal.
However, CNN Money thinks Cambridge Analytica is an anomaly, even when Facebookās own boss says they are still to āmake sureā whether there are other firms out there in the same boat. āWeāre going to go now and investigate every app that has access to a large amount of information.ā In other words, it hasnāt been done, and yet Facebook knew about this since 2015.
In other words, the world is seeing what I and others have talked about for years: Facebook is irresponsible, it does nothing till itās embarrassed into it, and it collects a lot of data on you even after youāve opted out of certain features on their site.
Not a lot has changed since 2009, when he gave this interview with the BBC. Say one thing, do another.
Facebookās woes over Cambridge Analytica have only prompted one reaction from me: I told you so. While I never seized upon this example, bravely revealed to us by whistleblower Christopher Wylie and reported by Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison of The Guardian, Facebook has shown itself to be callous about private data, mining preferences even after users have opted out, as I have proved on more than one occasion on this blog. They donāt care what your preferences are, and for a long time changed them quietly when you werenāt looking.
And itās nothing new: in October 2010, Emily Steel wrote, in The Wall Street Journal, about a data firm called Rapleaf that harvested Facebook information to target political advertisements (hat tip here to Jack Martin Leith).
Facebook knew of a data breach years ago and failed to report it as required under law. The firm never acts, as we have seen, when everyday people complain. It only acts when it faces potential bad press, such as finally ceasing, after nearly five years, its forced malware downloads after I tipped off Wiredās Louise Matsakis about them earlier this year. Soon after Louiseās article went live, the malware downloads ceased.
Like all these problems, if the stick isnāt big enough, Facebook will just hope things go away, or complain, as it did today, that itās the victim. Sorry, youāre not. Youāve been complicit more than once, and violating user privacy, as I have charged on this blog many times, is part of your business practice.
In this environment, I am also not surprised that US$37,000 million has been wiped off Facebookās value and CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw his net worth decline by US$5,000 million.
Those who kept buying Facebook shares, I would argue, were unreasonably optimistic. The writing surely was on the wall in January at the very latest (though I would have said it was much earlier myself), when I wrote, āAll these things should have been sending signals to the investor community a long time ago, and as weāve discussed at Medinge Group for many years, companies would be more accurately valued if we examined their contribution to humanity, and measuring the ingredients of branding and relationships with people. Sooner or later, the truth will out, and finance will follow what brand already knew. Facebookās record on this front, especially when you consider how we at Medinge value brands and a companyās promise-keeping, has been astonishingly poor. People do not trust Facebook, and in my book: no trust means poor brand equity.ā
This sounds like my going back to my very first Medinge meeting in 2002, when we concluded, at the end of the conference, three simple words: āFinance is broken.ā Itās not a useful measure of a company, certainly not the human relationships that exist within. But brand has been giving us this heads-up for a long time: if you canāt trust a company, then it follows that its brand equity is reduced. That means its overall value is reduced. And time after time, finance follows what brand already knew. Even those who tolerate dishonestyāand millions doāwill find it easy to depart from a product or service along with the rest of the mob. Thereās less and less for them to justify staying with it. The reasons get worn down one by one: Iām here because of my kidsātill the kids depart; Iām here because of my friendsātill the friends depart. If you don’t create transparency, you risk someone knocking back the wall.
We always knew Facebookās user numbers were bogus, considering how many bots there are on the system. It would be more when people wanted to buy advertising, and it would be less when US government panels charged with investigating Facebook were asking awkward questions. I would love to know how many people are really on there, and the truth probably lies between the two extremes. Facebook probably should revise its claimed numbers down by 50 per cent.
Itās a very simplified analysisāof course brand equity is made up of far more than trustāand doubters will point to the fact Facebookās stock had been rising through 2017.
But, as I said, finance follows brand, and Facebook is fairly under assault from many quarters. It has ignored many problems for over a decade, its culture borne of arrogance, and you can only do this for so long before people wise up. In the Trump era, with the US ever more divided, there were political forces that even Facebook could not ignore. Zuckerberg wonāt be poor, and Facebook, Inc. has plenty of assets, so theyāre not going away. But Facebook, as we know it, isnāt the darling that it was a decade ago, and what we are seeing, and what I have been talking about for years, are just the tip of the iceberg.
As my final post on Google Plus, I posted 
