More things that don’t work: Google knowledge panels, and typing in te reo Māori in Facebook

A guide to emojis for 2020.

Just for clarification:

😷 = happy
😷 = angry
😷 = laughing
😷 = sad#COVID19 #emoji

— Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) September 5, 2020

At least Twitter works. Google, as usual, doesn’t.
I had a check to see how Lucire was performing in a Google search yesterday and noticed there was a Wikipedia box to the right, and a message saying that if it was about us, I could ‘claim’ the box. I clicked on the link, and as Google knows my email address is associated with Lucire through its search console, it verified me. ‘Congratulations, you’ve been verified’, according to the Google website, and I could ‘Add or change info’, with a ‘Review info’ box that I could click on.

Actually, it’s just a coloured rectangle. Clicking on it does nothing.
Maybe it’s my privacy settings, so I used my fresh, unblocked, Google-can-plant-what-it-likes Chromium browser. I log in as me on Google. And here’s what I get.

Another variant is the below:

‘This account doesn’t have permission to publish on Google Search.’ Um, it does. You just told me I did.
The box remains claimed but there’s not a damned thing I can do.

Long-time readers will remember my pointing out many years ago how the Google Dashboard isn’t accurate, especially when it comes to arithmetic. Nothing has changed.
Google says I have one task. Well, I can’t, since I’ve never used it. Click through: I have none, and Google returns a ‘Get started’ page. Google says I have two albums. Again, impossible. Click through: I have none. It says I belong to one group. Click through: zero. I’m honestly astonished at how bad they are. If you can’t do maths, you probably shouldn’t be working with computers.

Finally, I see Facebook has forced a lot of people to change to its new template. I actually don’t care what the UI looks like, as I’m not there sufficiently to care. And I bet that if you were Māori, you’d want to have the old template back, since you can’t type macronized vowels. The macron just winds up on the baseline on any Chromium browser.

One friend tried to replicate this on Windows and couldn’t, so this might not be a universal issue.
The font being called by the stylesheet is Segoe UI Historic. I have it installed, and it’s not something I’ve ever edited. I will point that that, according to Character Map, no macronized vowels are visible in the relevant Unicode range, though I haven’t opened it in Fontlab to confirm. If the browser has to substitute, that’s fine. But what font (indeed, which of the Segoe fonts) has macrons on the baseline? It appears to be Microsoft’s Segoe, so if it’s not a Facebook linked font (the code inspector suggests it isn’t), then we can point the finger at Microsoft for a buggy font on a standard Windows 10 computer. Either way, someone in a Big Tech outfit goofed.

I had bookmarked this on my cellphone but because it’s my cellphone, it takes a long time to get it on this blog. I have to remember to grab the phone, then look up the post. But it’s your regular reminder that Facebook usually does nothing, despite saying it actively takes down hateful content. As I noted on The Panel in late August, eight copies (I believe in part) of the Christchurch massacre still exited on the platform as of March 15, 2020. The lies are laid bare once more.

Two people murdered by a white supremacist called to arms by a Facebook post Facebook refused to take down is an ‘operational mistake’.

Genocide. Subverted elections. Holocaust denial. A live-streamed massacre. What evidence do we need? https://t.co/qRaPgV1OeX

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) August 29, 2020

Marky now says: said Facebook is now "proactively out there looking for content" that praises the shooting.

"Now"? Hasn't there been PLENTY of warning??

— Jacqueline (@jacque_davis) August 30, 2020

As a company, they also take their sweet time in removing bots. Here’s Instagram in a message to me on August 27 (it’s not the only 2018 report they responded to that week):