Of my friends, about eight or nine voted for President Trump. Two voted for Brexit. These are my friends, who I vouch for, who I like. Other than a difference of opinion on these topics, we remain friends. I still think incredibly highly of them.
Since I know them well, I know a little bit about why they voted their way.
Of the Americans, some wanted an end to the neoliberal order and hoped Trump would deliver. Others saw Clinton as corrupt and that Trump would actually be better. Of the Brits, their reasons were more complex, but among them were the thought of an unwieldly EU bureaucracy, and the belief that a customsâ union would be sufficient to keep trade going with the Continent.
None of these people are racists or xenophobesâthe opposite, in fact. None of them are hillbillies or gun-loving, NRA-donating hicks, or whatever narrative the mainstream media would like to spin. Most of them would be regarded by any measure in society as decent, intelligent and compassionate.
I have found little reason to dislike someone, or not vote for someone, over one relatively minor disagreement. If their hearts are in the right place, it is not for me to condemn them for their choices. Indeed, when it comes to these issues, I find that while our actions differ (hypothetically, in my case, since I cannot vote in countries other than my own), our core views are actually quite similar.
In the US, strip away the hatred that vocal fringe elements stoke, and youâll find that most people have common enemies in big business, tax evaders, and censorship. In 2018 we have seen Big Tech silence people on both the left and the right for voicing opinions outside the mainstream. My two Brexit-voting friends share some concerns with Remainers.
Therefore, in August, when one of these American friends wrote a Tweet in support of her president, it was horrible to watch Tweeters, total strangers, pile on her.
Iâm not saying I like Trump (quite the contrary, actually), but I will give him props when he does things that I happened to agree with. If Iâve Tweeted for years that I disagreed with US military involvement in Syria, for instance, which at least one US veteran friend says lacks an objective, then Iâm not going to attack the man when he pulls his countryâs troops out. However, it was interesting to see some viewpoints suddenly change on the day. Those who opposed the war suddenly supported it.
I canât say that I praise him very often, but I like to think Iâm consistent. I was also complimentary about his withdrawal of the US from TPPA, something I have marched against.
And this friend is consistent, too.
In fact, her Tweet wasnât even one of actual support. Someone called Trump a âloonâ and she simply said, âYou don’t have to like my president,â and added a few other points in response.
The piling began.
It seems almost fashionable to adopt one prevailing view peddled by the mainstream (media or otherwise) but there was no attempt to dissect these opposing views. My friend was measured and calm. What came afterwards did not reciprocate her courtesy.
Since I was included in the Tweet, I saw plenty of attacks on her that day. I was included in one, by a black South African Tweeting something racist to me.
When the mob goes this unruly, and itâs “liked” or deemed OK by so many, then something is very wrong. These people did not know my friend. They didnât know why she supported Trump. They were just happy to group her in to what they had been told about Trump supporters being ill-educated hicks, and attacked accordingly.
Call me naïve, but social media were meant to be platforms where we could exchange views and get a better understanding of someone else, and make the world a little better than how we found it. The reverse is now true, with Google, Facebook et al âbubblingâ data so people only see what they want to see, to reinforce their prejudices, and having been convinced of their “rightness”, those espousing a contrary view must be inhuman.
I donât like dominant viewpoints unless it’s something like ‘Intolerance is bad’ or a scientific fact that is entirely provable, though you could probably take issue with where I draw the line. Generally, I like a bit of debate. No position is perfect and we need to respect those with whom we disagree. That day, Twitter was a medium where there was no such respect, that it was OK to pile on someone who fell outside the standard narrative. To me, thatâs as unhealthy was a socialist being piled upon by conservatives if the latter groupâs view happened to prevail. It doesnât take much imagination to extend this scenario to being a Chinese republican in the early 20th century in the face of the Ching Dynasty. Iâm always mindful of how things like this look if the shoe were on the other foot, hence I was equally upset when Facebook and Twitter shut down political websitesâ presences on both the left and the right wings. We should advance by expanding our knowledge and experiences.
It encouraged me to head more to Mastodon in 2018, where you can still have conversations with human beings with some degree of civility.
And, frankly, if you disagree with someone over something relatively trivial, then there is such a feature as scrolling.
Twitter became less savoury in 2018, and it has well and truly jumped the shark.
Above: Dad and I wait for his psychogeriatric ‘re-evaluation’ on November 30, or, treading a path of bullshit.
Even in the rest home, Dad remained very protective of the other residents, so much so that there was an incident involving a day care resident in late November that saw the home insist that he be re-evaluated.
I said to the head nurse, âI just want him to be given a fair go. What are the chances he will be allowed back there?â
âIt depends on what the psychogeriatrician says.â I sensed the insincerity in her voice.
For when the psychogeriatrician from Wellington Hospital called (actually, he told me he was a âpsychiatristâ and to this day I remain unsure if a psychogeriatrician or psychogeriatric nurse has seen him), he told me that he was told that they didnât want him back.
Lie number one, then.
This is despite a course of medication that has actually helped Dad with his alertness.
Of course, during this whole evaluation, Dad contracted pneumonia, for which he had to be on a course of Augmentin.
The âpsychiatristâ also told me that he would prescribe Risperidone to Dad as the original course of medication that I had discussed with our GP, Donepezil, was, in his opinion, ineffective.
When speaking to the nurses and health care assistants at Ward 6, I was always informed that Dad was taking Augmentin and Risperidone.
He was still having balance issues and a severe cough but deemed âmedically fitâ and had to leave the hospital.
The social worker worked extremely hard to find a dementia care unit for him. I have him on a waiting list at one home, but till that place is free, the closest is Bupa in Whitby.
Iâm now reading his discharge sheet, to discover that he is âBest suited for dementia level care or high dependency care if BPSD cannot be treated successfully.â Note the word if.
Frankly, they havenât had a chance to see if any course of medication has helped his BPSD. I have witnessed it, to my knowledge, they havenât.
Everyone seems dead keen to get Dad into dementia-level care that heâs being pigeonholed.
So he was, in my non-medical opinion, prematurely discharged and shipped off to Bupa.
And the discharge sheet doesnât mention anything about Risperidone other than that it is PRNâprescribed only when needed. It doesnât appear to be a regular medicine.
So, was I lied to at Wellington Hospital or is the discharge sheet bullshit?
Lie number two, then.
Iâm not saying that Dad wonât eventually have to go into dementia-level care but it doesnât seem necessary, and the Bupa staff agree.
Today I discovered him agitated because he was hungry.
The staff said he hadnât been eating.
He was brought his dinner but I noticed that his dentures were missing.
No shit, you took his dentures so he couldnât eat.
But no one put two and two together.
Seeing I was there he made a valiant effort to try to eat some cold meat they had served him and choked horribly on it. I had to stop him and said I would enquire what was going on.
The carers made a good effort looking in his room to no avail.
No one was at reception but fortunately there were some cellphone numbers posted on a notice there. I texted one of the RNs, who, despite not working today, made a massive effort to find out what had happened. God bless this man for digging.
Turns out they took Dadâs dentures for cleaning last night and no one thought to return them. They were in the office, locked away.
All of this has me deeply angry that they think they can treat elderly people like this. And how poor the communications are because they aren’t treating them as human beings.
If I wasnât a daily visitorâand driving from Rongotai to Whitby is no easy taskâthen would Dad have just starved?
He has aphasia so he can only point and show if heâs upset.
One RN told me he was agitated earlier today. Again, no shit.
Iâve texted the social worker my concerns. Discharging a patient prematurely is one thing but taking him to a facility where they have effectively starved him for a day is cruel and negligent.
All this sprung because of the clinical and inhuman way he was marginalized in late November.
It set off a chain of events that give you very little confidence in the treatment of Alzheimerâs and dementia sufferers.
Despite the kindness of the HCAs and the staff at Wellington Hospital, there are clear gaps here which I wonder whether others might question.
I will advise the GP tonight as he and the social worker have batted in our corner consistently.
He needs to be out of the clutches of a clumsy multinational corporation and put somewhere actually consistent with his level of dementia.
And if I donât get some satisfactory answers for once, then things will get ⊠interesting.
Megan McArdleâs excellent opâed in The Washington Post, âA farewell to free journalismâ, has been bookmarked on my phone for months. Itâs a very good summary of where things are for digital media, and how the advent of Google and Facebook along with the democratization of the internet have reduced online advertising income to a pittance. Thereâs native advertising, of course, which Lucire and Lucire Men indulged in for a few years in the 2010s, and I remain a fan of it in terms of what it paid, but McArdleâs piece is a stark reminder of the real world: there ainât enough of it to keep every newsroom funded.
Iâll also say that I have been very tempted over the last year or two to start locking away some of Lucireâs 21 years of content behind a paywall, but part of me has a romantic notion (and you can see it in McArdleâs own writing) that information deserves to be free.
Everyone should get a slice of the pie if they are putting up free content along with slots for Doubleclick ads, for instance, and those advertising networks operate on merit: get enough qualified visitors (and they do know who they are, since very few people opt out; in Facebookâs case opting out actually does nothing and they continue to track your preferences) and theyâll feed the ads through accordingly, whether you own a ârealâ publication or not.
It wasnât that long ago, however, when more premium ad networks worked with premium media, leaving Googleâs Adsense to operate among amateurs. It felt like a two-tier ad market. Those days are long gone, since plenty of people were quite happy to pay the cheap rates for the latter.
Itâs why my loyal Desktop readers who took in my typography column every month between 1996 and 2010 do not see me there any more: we columnists were let go when the business model changed.
All of this can exacerbate an already tricky situation, as the worse funded independent media get, the less likely we can afford to offer decent journalism, biasing the playing field in favour of corporate media that have deeper pockets. Google, as we have seen, no longer ranks media on merit, either: since they and Facebook control half of all online advertising revenue, and over 60 per cent in the US, itâs not in their interests to send readers to the most meritorious. Itâs in their interests to send readers to the media with the deeper pockets and scalable servers that can handle large amounts of traffic with a lot of Google ads, so they make more money.
Itâs yet another reason to look at alternatives to Google if you wish to seek out decent independent media and support non-corporate voices. However, even my favoured search engine, Duck Duck Go, doesnât have a specific news service, though itâs still a start.
In our case, if we didnât have a print edition as well as a web one, then online-only mightnât be worthwhile sans paywall.
Tonight I was interested to see The Guardian Weekly in magazine format, a switch that happened on October 10.
Itâs a move that I predicted over a decade ago, when I said that magazines should occupy a âsoft-cover coffee-table bookâ niche (which is what the local edition of Lucire aims to do) and traditional newspapers could take the area occupied by the likes of Time and Newsweek.
With the improvement in printing presses and the price of lightweight gloss paper it seemed a logical move. Add to changing reader habitsâthe same ones that drove the death of the broadsheet format in the UKâand the evolution of editorial and graphic design, I couldnât see it heading any other way. Consequently, I think The Guardian will do rather well.
I see British filmmaker Steve McQueen has remade Lynda La Planteâs Widows.
I was younger than he was when it aired, and didnât appreciate the storylines to the same extent, though I have recollections of it.
What I did recall was a Smith and Jones sketch, which had a voiceover along these lines: âFrom the makers of The Sweeney and Minder, Eusless Films presents Widows: exactly the same, but with women in it.â
The reality was that La Plante wrote Widows because she was unimpressed with how men wrote female parts in scripts (she was the actress Lynda Marchal, and I still remember a small role she had in The Professionals). It was actually ground-breaking. Verity Lambert produced.
I hope McQueen does well with his remake, with Viola Davis, and the setting shifted to Chicago.
I worry a bit given that Hollywood also remade Edge of Darkness or State of Play: pretty decent miniseries that werenât as good when transplanted and turned into feature films, according to period reviews.
I saw the former and while it was a pacy actioner, even as far as employing the same New Zealand director, Martin Campbell, it lacked the depth and suspense of the original; I darenât even see the latter as the original remains one of my favourite miniseries and I donât want to see it butchered, even if Scottish director Kevin Macdonald helmed it. It was a wave of American efforts to remake anything with John Simm and Philip Glenister.
But tonight I did think about the other famous Euston Films series that were remade or reimagined. The Sweeney was remade but with the action still in South London. The 2012 version by Nick Love had a tight budget but plenty of violence, perhaps recapturing the grittiness that audiences would have felt when they first saw the Armchair Cinema special of Regan. Ray Winstone, who guested on the original, took the lead, and channelled Jack Regan well; Ben Drew (Plan B) had even more of a coldness and wild tension on screen as George Carter than Dennis Waterman did. Itâs perhaps best known for a car chase involving the crew from Top Gear, who took the opportunity to build a sketch around it during production. It wasnât as special as the original, and I didnât rush to repeat the DVD. Reviewers didnât like it, but in my opinion it ranks above Sweeney!, the first attempt to turn the TV series into a silver screen film but using the original cast. There, we saw countless acts of violence explained away at the end in one meeting with Thaw and Michael Latimerâs characters after a plot that seemed to build up a complex conspiracy. Sweeney 2, by Troy Kennedy Martin (the brother of the creator), was far tenser and the better effort, and it was fun to spot the Ford press fleet vehicles with the VHK prefix on the number plates.
Minder never went to the big screen, but a remake, or sequel, appeared in 2009, with Shane Richie and Lex Shrapnel. I sat through the first, found it tolerable, and at least in the spirit of the original, but it always felt like an imitation trying to live up to its forebear, not something that carved its own direction. Many donât seem to remember that Minder was created as a vehicle for Dennis Waterman, not George Cole, even if more and more scripts wound up focusing on the latterâs Arthur Daley, leading to Waterman quitting the series. The 2009 seriesâ premiĂšre followed on from that later formula, whereas to me it always required the two stars being on par with each other.
So, will the Americanized Widows follow suit? Will it be âexactly the same, but with women in it,â or, with McQueen as talented as he is, will it be a solid retelling with the same sense of ambiguity at the conclusion as the original? I might have to see it because of McQueen and screenwriter Gillian Flynn, and McQueen says he has been a fan of the series since he saw it as a teenager. Even the original Dolly Rawlins (Ann Mitchell) has a cameo.
Now, who’ll star in a new Van der Valk?
The EU gets it when it comes to fines. Rather than the paltry US$17 million certain US statesâ attorneys-general stung Google with some years ago for hacking Iphones, theyâve now fined the search engine giant âŹ4,340 million, on top of its earlier fine of âŹ2,420 million over anticompetitive behaviour.
That US$17 million, I mentioned at the time, amounted to a few hoursâ income at Google.
As the EUâs competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager noted on Twitter, âFine of âŹ4,34 bn to @Google for 3 types of illegal restrictions on the use of Android. In this way it has cemented the dominance of its search engine. Denying rivals a chance to innovate and compete on the merits. Itâs illegal under EU antitrust rules. @Google now has to stop itâ.
Google forces manufacturers to preinstall Chrome if they want to install Google Play. The EU also notes that virtually all Android devices have Google Search preinstalled, and most users never download competing apps, furthering Googleâs dominance of search. Google pays manufacturers and cellphone networks to preinstall the Google search app on their phones, and prevented manufacturers from installing Google apps if their versions of Android were not approved by Google. DuckDuckGo, my search engine of choice, welcomed the decision. It noted:
Up until just last year, it was impossible to add DuckDuckGo to Chrome on Android, and it is still impossible on Chrome on iOS. We are also not included in the default list of search options like we are in Safari, even though we are among the top search engines in many countries.
Their anti-competitive search behavior isn't limited to Android. Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they'd like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension.
Thatâs consumer confusion on top of restrictive contracts that promote market dominance and anti-competitive behaviour.
This is a very petty company, one that shut down Vivaldiâs Adwords accountafter its CEO gave some interviews about privacy.
Of course Iâm biased, and I make no apology for itâand anyone who has followed my journey on this blog from being a Google fan to a Google-sceptic over the last decade and a half will know just how Googleâs own misleading and deceptive conduct helped changed my mind.
Googleâs argument, that many Android manufacturers installed rival apps, clearly fell on deaf ears, and understandably so. While Iâm sure Android experts can think up examples, as a regular person who occasionally looks at phones, even those ones with rival apps still ship with the Google ones. In other words, thereâs simply more bloat. Iâve yet to see one in this country ship without a Chrome default and Google Play installed, often in such a way that you canât delete it, and Google Services, without getting your phone rooted.
I did read this in the Murdoch Press and thought it was a bit of a laugh, but then maybe my own experience isnât typical:
The impact of any changes mandated by the EU decision on Googleâs ability to target ads to usersâand to its profitabilityâis an open question. The two apps targeted in the EU decision, Googleâs search and its Chrome browser, are extremely popular in their own right. Consumers are likely to seek them out from an app store even if they werenât preinstalled on the phone, said Tarun Pathak, an analyst at research firm Counterpoint.
I just donât believe they would, and I made it a point to get a phone that would, happily, have neither. By buying a Chinese Android phone, I escape Googleâs tracking; by seeking out the Firefox browser, I get to surf the way I want. That choice is going to create competition, something that Google is worried about. The Wall Street Journal also states that despite the earlier fine, Googleâs shopping rivals said little or nothing has actually happened.
With all of Googleâs misdeeds uncovered on this blog over the years, Iâm really not surprised.
The EU is, at the very least, forcing some to examine just how intrusive Google is. It might soon discover how uncooperative Google can be.
Welcome to another of my âI told you they were dodgyâ posts. This time, itâs not about Facebook or Google (which, finally, are receiving the coverage that should have been metered out years ago), but Wikipedia.
The latest is on a Wikipedia editor called âPhilip Crossâ, a story which Craig Murray has been following on his blog.
Start with this one, where Murray notes that Cross has not had a single day off from editing Wikipedia between August 29, 2013 and May 14, 2018, including Christmas Days.
And this one.
Both note that Cross edits Wikipedia entries on antiwar and antiestablishment figures, making them more negative and stripping away the positive, and concerns raised by other Wikipedia editors amount to naught. Cross is known to be against the UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and has devoted a lot of time to George Galloway’s page. However, he likes right-wing Times columnists Oliver Kamm and Melanie Phillips.
Matt Kennard Tweeted on May 12:
My wikipedia page is full of irrelevant and erroneous info but it is interesting that on the day I tweeted this https://t.co/fKTP7UYgft
'Phillip Cross' decided it was time to spend an hour editing my page https://t.co/OAUGGMfVfD
In other words, suggesting that someone play by the rules on Wikipedia will get you threatened with a ban from Wikipedia.
Now you get the idea, you can check out Murrayâs subsequent blog posts on the subject:
Whether you believe Philip Cross is one person or not, it highlights what Iâve said on this blog and formerly on Vox in the 2000s: that certain editors can scam their way to the top and not be questioned. I know first-hand that publicly criticizing Wikipedia could get me hate mail, as had happened last decade when I was subjected to days of email abuse from one senior editor based in Canada. That time I merely linked to a piece which talked about the dangers of Wikipedia and how some editors had scammed itâall that editor unwittingly did with her emails was confirm that position (no one says that all scammers are smart) and since then, observing Wikipedia has cemented it. Interestingly, both the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipediaâs remaining co-founder Jimmy Wales are quick to defend Cross, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that âheâ is biased. Facebookâs idea of using Wikipedia to combat âfake newsâ is about as moronic a decision one can make.
Now that there are voices adding to my own, and on far more serious matters than non-existent cars, I can only hope people will, at the least, treat Wikipedia with caution. If you choose to stop donating to them, I wouldnât blame you.
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.
Beyond all that had gone on with AIQ and Cambridge Analytica, a lot more has come out about Facebookâs practices, things that I always suspected they do, for why else would they collect data on you even after you opted out?
Now, Sam Biddle at The Intercept has written a piece that demonstrates that whatever Cambridge Analytica did, Facebook itself does far, far more, and not just to 87 million people, but all of its users (thatâs either 2,000 million if you believe Facebookâs figures, or around half that if you believe my theories), using its FBLearner Flow program.
Biddle writes (link in original):
This isnât Facebook showing you Chevy ads because youâve been reading about Ford all week â old hat in the online marketing world â rather Facebook using facts of your life to predict that in the near future, youâre going to get sick of your car. Facebookâs name for this service: âloyalty prediction.â
Spiritually, Facebookâs artificial intelligence advertising has a lot in common with political consultancy Cambridge Analyticaâs controversial âpsychographicâ profiling of voters, which uses mundane consumer demographics (what youâre interested in, where you live) to predict political action. But unlike Cambridge Analytica and its peers, who must content themselves with whatever data they can extract from Facebookâs public interfaces, Facebook is sitting on the motherlode, with unfettered access to staggering databases of behavior and preferences. A 2016 ProPublica report found some 29,000 different criteria for each individual Facebook user âŠ
⊠Cambridge Analytica begins to resemble Facebookâs smaller, less ambitious sibling.
As Iâve said many times, Iâve no problem with Facebook making money, or even using AI for that matter, as long as it does so honestly, and I would hope that people would take as a given that we expect that it does so ethically. If a user (like me) has opted out of ad preferences because I took the time many years ago to check my settings, and return to the page regularly to make sure Facebook hasnât altered them (as it often does), then I expect them to be respected (my investigations show that they arenât). Sure, show me ads to pay the bills, but not ones that are tied to preferences that you collect that I gave you no permission to collect. As far as I know, the ad networks we work with respect these rules if readers had opted out at aboutads.info and the EU equivalent.
Regulating Facebook mightnât be that bad an idea if thereâs no punishment to these guys essentially breaking basic consumer laws (as I know them to be here) as well as the codes of conduct they sign up to with industry bodies in their country. As I said of Google in 2011: if the other 60-plus members of the Network Advertising Initiative can create cookies that respect the rules, why canât Google? Here we are again, except the main player breaking the rules is Facebook, and the data they have on us is far more precise than some Google cookies.
Coming back to Biddleâs story, he sums up the company as a âdata wholesaler, period.â The 29,000 criteria per user claim is very easy to believe for those of us who have popped into Facebook ad preferences and found thousands of items collected about us, even after opting out. We also know that the Facebook data download shows an entirely different set of preferences, which means either the ad preference page is lying or the download is lying. In either case, those preferences are being used, manipulated and sold.
Transparency can help Facebook through this crisis, yet all we saw from CEO Mark Zuckerberg was more obfuscation and feigned ignorance at the Senate and Congress. This exchange last week between Rep. Anna Eshoo of Palo Alto and Zuckerberg was a good example:
Eshoo: It was. Are you willing to change your business model in the interest of protecting individual privacy?
Zuckerberg: Congresswoman, we have made and are continuing to make changes to reduce the amount of data âŠ
Eshoo: No, are you willing to change your business model in the interest of protecting individual privacy?
Zuckerberg: Congresswoman, I’m not sure what that means.
In other words, they want to preserve their business model and keep things exactly as they are, even if they are probably in violation of a 2011 US FTC decree.
The BBC World Service News had carried the hearings but, as far as I know, little made it on to the nightly TV here.
This is either down to the natural news cycle: when Christopher Wylie blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica in The Observer, it was major news, and subsequent follow-ups havenât piqued the news editorsâ interest in the same way. Or, the media were only outraged as it connected to Trump and Brexit, and now that we know itâs exponentially more widespread, it doesnât matter as much.
Thereâs still hope that the social network can be a force for good, if Zuckerberg and co. are actually sincere about it. If Facebook has this technology, why employ it for evil? That may sound a naĂŻve question, but if you genuinely were there to better humankind (and not rate your female Harvard classmates on their looks) and you were sitting on a motherlode of user data, wouldnât you ensure that the platform were used to create greater harmony between people rather than sow discord and spur murder? Wouldnât you refrain from bragging that you have the ability to influence elections? The fact that Facebook doesnât, and continues to see us as units to be milked in the matrix, should worry us a great deal more than an 87 million-user data breach.
Boris Johnson: usually a talented delivery, but with conflicting substance.
I spotted The Death of Expertise at Unity Books, but I wonder if the subject is as simple as the review of the book suggests.
Thereâs a lot out there about anti-intellectualism, and we know itâs not an exclusively American phenomenon. Tom Nichols, the bookâs author, writes, as quoted in The New York Times, âAmericans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told theyâre wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that arenât true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.â
I venture to say that the “death of expertise” is an Anglophone phenomenon. Head into Wikipedia, for instance, and youâll find proof that the masses are not a good way to ensure accuracy, at least not in the English version. Head into the German or Japanese editions and you find fewer errors, and begin to trust the pages more.
Given that many of âthe peopleâ cannot discern what is âfake newsâ and what is not, or who is a bot and who is not, then itâs absolutely foolhardy to propose that they also be the ones who determine the trustworthiness of a news source, as Facebook is wont to do.
I canât comment as much on countries I have spent less time in, but certainly in the Anglosphere, Iâve seen people advance, with confidence and self-authority, completely wrong positions, ones not backed up by real knowledge. You only need to visit some software support forums to see online examples of this phenomenon.
When I visit Sweden, for instance, thereâs a real care from individuals not to advance wrongful positions, although I admit I am limited by my own circles and the brief time I have spent there.
Itâs not so much that we donât value expertise, itâs that the bar for what constitutes an expert is set exceptionally low. Weâre often too trusting of sources or authorities who donât deserve our reverence. And I wonder if it comes with our language.
Iâll go so far as to say that the standing of certain individuals I had in my own mind was shattered when we were all going for the mayoralty in my two campaigns in 2010 and 2013. There certainly was, among some of my opponents, no correlation between knowledge and the position they already held in society. It didnât mean I disliked them. It just meant I wondered how they got as far as they did without getting found out.
Fortunately, the victor, whether you agreed with her policies or not, possessed real intelligence. The fact she may have political views at odds with yours is nothing to do with intelligence, but her own observations and beliefs. I can respect that (which is why I follow people on social media whose political views I disagree with).
In turn Iâm sure many of them disliked what I stood for, even if they liked me personally. Certainly it is tempting to conclude that some quarters in the media, appealing to the same anti-intellectualism that some of my rivals represented, didnât like a candidate asserting that we should increase our intellectual capital and pursue a knowledge economy. No hard feelings, mind. As an exercise, it served to confirm that, in my opinion, certain powers donât have peopleâs best interests at heart, and there is a distinct lack of professionalism (and, for that matter, diversity) in some industries. In other words, a mismatch between what one says one does, and what one actually does. Language as doublespeak.
So is it speaking English that makes us more careless? Maybe it is: as a lingua franca in some areas, merely speaking it might put a person up a few notches in othersâ estimation. Sandeep Deva Misra, in his blog post in 2013, believes thatâs the case, and that we shouldnât prejudge Anglophones so favourably if the quality of their thought isnât up to snuff.
Maybe thatâs what we need to do more of: look at the quality of thought, not the expression or make a judgement based on which language itâs come in. As English speakers, we enjoy a privilege. We can demand that others meet us on our terms and think poorly when someone speaks with an accent or confuses your and youâre. It gives us an immediate advantage because we have a command of the lingua franca of business and science. It gives us the impunity to write fictions in Wikipedia or make an argument sound appealing through sound bites, hoping to have made a quick getaway before weâre found out. Political debate has descended into style over substance for many, although this is nothing new. I was saying, although not blogging, things like this 20 years ago, and my students from 1999â2000 might remember my thoughts on Tony Blair’s 1997 campaign as being high on rhetoric and light on substance. Our willingness to accept things on face value without deeper analysis, lands us into trouble. We’re fooled by delivery and the authority that is attached with the English language.
Youâll next see this in action in a high-profile way when Facebook comes forth with more comment about Cambridge Analytica. I can almost promise you now that it wonât hold water.
