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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Archive for April 2021
28.04.2021
When I was a kid and wanted to hit back at someone for being mean to me, my parents would often say that successful people, true leaders, would be 大ę¹, which is roughly akin to saying that one should rise above it. I would say that goes with nations as well: you can tell when a country is in a good state by the way its citizenry behaves, and online behaviour is probably a proxy for that.
As many of you know, my literacy in my mother tongue is just above the level it was at when I left Hong Kong, that is to say, itās marginally better than a kindergartenerās. And where I come from, that means age 3, which is already in the big leagues considering I started at 2Ā½, having passed the entrance exam, and had homework from then on. What I can write is in colloquial Cantonese, devoid of any formal structure that someone with a proper education in the old country would know. If youāre Cantonese, youāll be able to read what I write, but if your only idea of Chinese is Mandarin, youāll have little clue. (Bang goes the official argument in Beijing that Cantonese is a ādialectā. It canāt be a dialect if a speaker of one finds the other unintelligible.)
With Meizu having essentially shut its international forum, I decided to head to the Chinese one to post about my experience with its Music app, and was met by a majority of friendly, helpful people, and some who even went the extra mile of replying to my English-language query in English.
But there were enough dickheads answering to make you think that mainland China isnāt a clear global leader, regardless of all the social engineering and online credit scores.
When I used Facebook, I had ventured on to a few groups where people simply posted in their own language, and those of us who wished to reply but didnāt understand it would either use the siteās built-in translator, or, before that was available, Google Translate. I still am admin on a group where people do post in their own language without much issue. Thereās no insistence on āSpeak English, I canāt understand you,ā or whatever whine I hear from some intolerant people, such as the ones sampled below.
That makes you despair for some folks and one conclusion I can draw is that members of a country who demand such a monoculture must not see their country as a leader. Nor do they have much pride in it. For great nations, in my book, embrace, or believe they embrace (even if they fall short in practice) all tongues and creeds, all races and abilities. They revel in their richness.
Of the negative souls on the forum, there was the crap youād expect. āWrite in Chinese,ā āWhy is a Cantonese person writing in English?ā āThink about where you are,ā and āI donāt understand youā (to a comment I wrote in Cantoneseāagain supporting the argument that it isnāt a dialect, but its own distinct tongue).
Granted, these are a small minority, but itās strange that this is a forum where people tend to help one another. And it tells me that whether youāre American or Chinese, thereās nothing in the behaviour of ordinary folks that tells me that any one place is more likely to be a centre for 21st-century leadership than another.
Iāve had far worse responses to Tweets, by a much greater proportion of people (the UK still stands out as the worst when I responded to a Tweet about George Floyd), but itās the context. Twitter is, as Stephen Fry once put it, analogous to a bathing pool into which too many people have urinated, but a help forum?
Itās the globally unaware, those who engage in casual xenophobia, who are intolerant of other languages, who are the little people of our times, having missed out on an education or life experience that showed them otherwise. They reside in the old country as much as in so many other places. The leading nation of the 21st century does not look like itās one of the obvious choices. Future historians, watch this space.
Tags: 2020s, 2021, 21st century, China, Hong Kong, language, Meizu, nation branding, national image, social media, Stephen Fry, technology, Twitter, xenophobia
Posted in China, culture, Hong Kong, internet, leadership, New Zealand, technology, UK, USA | 1 Comment »
24.04.2021
This is why the Feedburner links have disappeared from the left-hand column of this website (desktop version):
Now I need to figure out a way to get off Google Podcasts. I had no idea that Anchor syndicated to them. Certainly there was no mention of that when I joined. Google really has too many tentacles everywhere.
Tags: 2021, blogosphere, Google
Posted in internet, technology | No Comments »
21.04.2021
That didnāt last long. Within a day, this was what Meizu Music showed:
The songs, all 1,229 of them that I had fed in manually, are still there, and they still play, but the question remains: for how long? If they don’t show in the listāI told you computing devices were forgetfulāthen how long before the program fails to play them at all? Not only were the songs gone from the list, the few MP3 files that were on the phone’s RAM (from dynamic wallpapers and recordings) don’t show, either!
I really didnāt want to chance it but you just have to conclude that Meizu has released a lemon, and if in a year they still canāt get it right, then itās time to abandon it.
I could go with Migu Music but I wanted something with the functionality of the old Meizu Music. After trying several apps, Iāve settled on an advertising-supported Muzio Player. Itās not perfectāthe cover artwork doesnāt show for everything, and updating it manually for an album doesnāt see it shared with the individual tracks withinābut it does the job for the most part. And, like every other app I trialled, it picks up the music on the SD card.
Since I keep phones for some timeāthe old M2 Note is repairedāitās going to be a long time before Iād contemplate a replacement for the M6 Note. But when I do I doubt itāll be another Meizu. After being a cheerleader for the brand in the late 2010s, theyāve really fallen behind in customer service and, how, software development. Whomever else is willing to go the Google-free route is going to get my vote.
Tags: 2021, cellphone, China, Meizu, software, technology
Posted in China, design, technology | 3 Comments »
19.04.2021
This is a pretty typical story: find fault with Big Tech, try to alert the appropriate people in the firm, get fired.
Julia Carrie Wongās excellent article for The Guardian shows a data scientist, Sophie Zhang, find blatant attempts by governments to abuse Facebookās platform, misleading their own people, in multiple countries. Of course Facebook denies it, but once again itās backed up by a lot of evidence from Zhang, and we know Facebook lies. Endlessly.
Facebook claims it has taken down over ā100 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior,ā but I repeat again: if a regular Joe like me can find thousands of bots really easily, and report some with Facebook doing next to nothing about them, then 100 networks is an incredibly tiny number in a sea of hundreds of millions of users. Indeed, 100 networks is tiny considering Facebook itself has claimed to have taken down milliards of bots.
And people like me and Holly Jahangiri, who found a massive number of bots that followed the Russian misinformation techniques, have been identifying these since 2014, if not before.
Zhang reveals how likes from pages are inflating various postsāforget the bots Iāve been talking about, people have manufactured full pages on the site.
She uncovered one in Honduras, and then:
The next day, she filed an escalation within Facebookās task management system to alert the threat intelligence team to a network of fake accounts supporting a political leader in Albania. In August [2019], she discovered and filed escalations for suspicious networks in Azerbaijan, Mexico, Argentina and Italy. Throughout the autumn and winter she added networks in the Philippines, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Ecuador, Iraq, Tunisia, Turkey, Taiwan, Paraguay, El Salvador, India, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Ukraine, Poland and Mongolia.
Facebook was inconsistent with what it did, and its own self-interest interfered with it taking action. In other words, Facebook is harmful to democracy, and not just in the US which has received most of the occidental news coverage. On Azerbaijan, Zhang wrote in a memo:
Although we conclusively tied this network to elements of the government in early February, and have compiled extensive evidence of its violating nature, the effective decision was made not to prioritize it, effectively turning a blind eye.
She was ultimately fired for her trouble, Facebook saying she wasnāt doing the job she had been hired for.
So if you are going to work for Big Tech, leave your conscience at the door. That blood on your hands, just ignore it. Redās such a fetching colour when itās not on a balance sheet.
Little Tech can be troublesome, too. Last year, Meizu updated its Music app after a few years of letting it languish (a familiar theme with this firm), and it was a real lemon. It wouldnāt pick up anything on my SD card, at the location the old Music app itself saved the files. When I could still access the Meizu (English-language) forum, I managed to post a comment about it. Only today did I realize someone had responded, with the same issue.
I can read enough Chinese to get the phone to do a search for local music files, and the only things it could pick up are whatās on the phone RAM itself, not the card. Thereās no way to point to custom locations such as a card (even though there is a custom search, but it applies to the phone only).
Above: Meizu Music will only find music on the phone’s RAMāin this case sound files that come with the dynamic wallpaper and a couple of meeting recordings I made.
Eventually I restored the old app through the settings, and all was well. It would occasionally forget the album cover art and Iād have to relink it (who says computers remember things?), but, by and large, Music 8.0.10 did what was expected of it.
Until this last week. The phone insisted on upgrading to 8.2.12, another half-baked version that could never locate any SD card music.
Sure I could just move the entire directory of 1,229 songs to the phone, but I wondered why I should.
Restoring the app would work only for a few hours (during which I would try to relink the album cover art, ultimately to no avail). Blocking the new version the app store did nothing; blocking the entire app from updating did nothing. Blocking network access to the Music app did nothing. Essentially, the phone had a mind of its own. If anyone tells you that computing devices follow human instructions, slap them.
Above: I asked the app store to ignore all updates for Meizu Music. The phone will ignore this and do what it wants, downloading the update and installing it without any human intervention.
I had a couple of options. The first was to make Migu Music the defaultāand I had used that for a while before I discovered I could restore the Music app. Itās passable, and it does everything it should, though I missed the cover art.
The other was to find a way to make Music 8.2.12 work.
There is one way. Play every one of the 1,229 songs one by one to have Music recognize their existence.
Using ES File Explorer, you head to the SD card, and click on each song. It asks which app youād like to open it. Choose Music. Repeat 1,228 times.
Above: I finally got there after doing something 1,229 times. As a non-tech person I know of no way to automate this easily. I can think of a few but developing the script is beyond my knowledge.
Whoever said computing devices would save you time is having you on. They may have once, but there are so many systems where things are far more complicated in 2021 than they were in 2011.
You may be asking: doesnāt ES let you select multiple files, even folders? Of course it does, but when you then ask it to play them, it ignores the fact youāve chosen Music and plays them in its own music player.
And even after youāve shown Music that there are files in an SD card directory, it wonāt pick up its existence.
Itās at odds with Meizuās Video app, which, even after many updates, will find files anywhere on your phone.
For a music player with the same version (8) itās vastly different, and, indeed, inferior to what has come before.
Howās the player? Well, it connects to the car, which is where I use it. But so many features which made it appealing before are gone. Editing a songās information is gone. Half the album cover art is unlinked (including albums legitimately downloaded through the old Meizu music service), and thereās no way of relinking it. European accented characters are mistaken for the old Big 5 Chinese character set.
The only plus side is that some songs that I had downloaded years ago with their titles in Big 5, as opposed to Unicode, now display correctly. That accounts for a few songs (fewer than 10) of the 1,229.
I know Meizu will do nowt, as its customer service continues to plummet. I may still file something on its Chinese BBS (the western one is inaccessible and, from what I can tell, no longer maintained by anyone from their staff), but itās highly unlikely Iāll be brand-loyal. It’s yet another example of a newer program being far, far worse, by any objective measure, than its predecessor, giving credence to the theory that some software developers are clueless, have no idea how their apps work, have no idea how people use their apps, or are downright incompetent. It’s a shame, as Meizu’s other default and system apps are generally good.
In the future, Iām sure someone else in China will be happy to sell me a non-Google phone when it’s time to replace this one.
Tags: 2019, 2020, 2021, Big Tech, bot, cellphone, China, computing, corruption, customer service, Facebook, justice, media, Meizu, music, newspaper, politics, software, technology, The Guardian
Posted in China, design, internet, media, politics, technology, USA | 3 Comments »
07.04.2021
Above: The Levdeo (or Letin) i3, not exactly the ideal model with which to commemorate another Autocade milestone.
Autocade will cross the 23 million page view mark today, so weāre keeping fairly consistent with netting a million every three months, a pattern that weāve seen since the end of 2019.
Just to keep my record-keeping straight:
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for 10th million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million)
October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million)
December 2019: 18,000,000 (just under three months for 18th million)
April 2020: 19,000,000 (just over three months for 19th million)
July 2020: 20,000,000 (just over three-and-a-half months for 20th million)
October 2020: 21,000,000 (three months for 21st million)
January 2021: 22,000,000 (three months for 22nd million)
April 2021: 23,000,000 (three months for 23rd million)
I see on my 22 millionth page view post I mentioned there were 4,379 entries. It hasnāt increased that much since: the site is on 4,423. I notice the pace does slow a bit once the year kicks off in earnest: itās the Christmas break that sees me spending a bit more time on the website.
Who knows? I may spend more on it again as Iām tiring of the tribalism of Twitter, and, most recently, being tarred with the same brush as someone I follow, even though I follow people I donāt always agree withāincluding people with offensive views.
On April 4, I wrote there:
Earlier today @QueenOliviaStR and I were tagged into a lengthy thread, to which I donāt think I have the right of response to the writer.
First up, I salute her. Secondly, she may disagree with how I use Twitter but I still support her. Thirdly, she should rightly do what she needs to in order to feel safe.
I donāt wish to single out any account but if you go through my following list, there are people on there whose views many Kiwis would disagree with.
Some were good people who fell down rabbit holes, and some Iāve never agreed with from the start. So why do I follow them?
As I Tweeted last week, I object to being in a social media bubble. I think itās unhealthy, and the cause of a lot of societal angst. Itās why generally I dislike Big Tech as this is by design.
Secondly, if I shut myself off to opposing views, even abhorrent ones, how do I know what arguments they are using in order to counter them if the opportunity arises?
I would disagree that I am amicable with these accounts but I do agree to interacting with some of them on the bases that we originally found.
Ian, who is long gone from Twitter after falling down the COVID conspiracy rabbit hole, was a known anti-war Tweeter. I didnāt unfollow him but I disagreed with where his thoughts were going.
The person who tagged us today didnāt want to be exposed to certain views and thatās fair. But remember, that person she didnāt like will also be exposed to her views through me.
Iāll let you into something that might shock you: for a few years, when the debate began, I wasnāt supportive of marriage equality, despite having many queer friends. It was more over semantics than their rights, but still, it isnāt a view I hold today.
If this happened in social media land, I might have held on those views, but luckily I adopted the policy I do today: see what people are saying. And eventually I was convinced by people who wrote about their situations that my view was misinformed.
And while my following an account is not an endorsement of its views, by and large I follow more people with whom I agreeāwhich means the positive arguments that these people make could be seen by those who disagree with them.
People should do what is right for them but I still hold that bubbling and disengagement are dangerous, and create a group who double-down on their views. Peace!
Maybe itās a generational thing: that some of us believe in the free flow of information, because that was the internet we joined. One that was more meritorious, and one where we felt we were more united with others.
We see what the contrary does. And those examples are recent and severe: weāve seen it with the US elections, with Myanmar, with COVID-19.
This isnāt a dig at the person who took exception to my being connected to someone, and yes, even engaged them (though being ‘amicable’ is simply having good manners to everyone), because if those offensive views targeted me I wouldnāt want to see them. And it is a poor design decision of Twitter to still show that person in oneās Tweets if they have already blocked them, just because a mutual person follows them.
It is a commentary, however, on wider trends where social media and Google have created people who double-down on their views, or opened up the rabbit hole for them to fall intoāand keep them there.
It did use to be called social networking, where we made connections, supposedly for mutual benefit, maybe even the benefit of humanity, but now it’s commonly social media, because we don’t seem to really network with anyone else while we post about ourselves.
Unlike Alice, people donāt necessarily return from Wonderland.
My faithāwhich I donāt always bring up because one risks being tarred with the evangelical homophobic stereotypes that come with it in mainstream media and elsewhereātells me that everyone can be redeemed, even those who hold abhorrent views.
Itās why I didnāt have a problem when Bill Clinton planned to see Kim Jong Il or when Donald Trump did see Kim Jong Un, because engagement is better than isolation. Unlike the US media, I donāt change a view depending on the occupant of the Oval Office.
Iāve also seen some people who post awful things do incredibly kind things outside of the sphere of social media.
Which then makes you think that social media just arenāt worth your timeāsomething I had already concluded with Facebook, and, despite following mostly people I do agree with, including a lot of automotive enthusiasts, I am feeling more and more about Twitter. Instead of the open forum it once was, you are being judged on whom you follow, based on isolated and rare incidents.
I donāt know if itās generational or whether weāve developed through technology people who prefer tribalism over openness.
Sometimes you feel you should just leave them to it and get on with your own stuffāand for every Tweet I once sent, maybe I should get on to some old emails and tidy that inbox instead. Or put up one of the less interesting models on Autocade. Not Instagramming muchāI think I was off it for nearly a month before I decided to post a couple of things on Easter Eveāhas been another step in the right direction, instead of poking around on a tiny keyboard beamed up to you from a 5Ā½-inch black mirror.
The computer, after all, is a tool for us, and we should never lose sight of that. Letās see if I can stick with it, and use Mastodon, which still feels more open, as my core social medium for posting.
Tags: 2021, Autocade, car, China, JY&A Media, Letin, Levdeo, Mastodon, publishing, social media, Twitter
Posted in cars, culture, interests, internet, media, technology | No Comments »
04.04.2021
While I saw Vodafoneās Super Wifi commercials, I never thought to act on them, since (mistakenly) I thought it was something to do with cellphones. Might have been the gadgets they used in the commercial.
But, after talking to Raghu, their salesā rep in Pune, a city outside of Mumbai that I know well, he convinced me to upgrade not just my cellular plan (which was from 2012 when a gig of data were a lot) but the home internet to Super Wifi.
This is really a laypersonās post as there isnāt much online about it, at least not from a New Zealand perspective.
The set-up consists of the Vodafone Ultra Hub (a modem that I was already familiar with, since I had mine since 2018), and two TP-Link Deco X20 units, which are for all-home wifi. The idea is that they transmit the wifi signal over the house. Theyāre equipped for wifi 6, which really just tells you the speedāand not 6G was I was told on the phone (a minor slip).
I knew about mesh wifi units since a friend had already told me how she and her partner used them in their home.
Weāre in a 290 mĀ² home so I had a suspicion that the two units would be insufficient, but Vodafoneās protocol is to begin with two.
The Ultra Hub is identical to the old oneāthe copyright notice on the box says 2017āso Iāll be returning it. The two Deco units plug in, one to the Ultra Hub, the other in another part of the house. The theory is that they communicate between each other.
I downloaded the TP-Link app first before plugging in the Deco unitsāin fact I had them the day beforeāand I was fortunate that it could be found at a public APK site, since I do not have Google, and, God willing, never will, on any cellphone of mine.
Itās a remarkably easy to use app, fortunately, with a Speedtest built in.
Iāve always had problems at one end of the house where I have a desktop PC thatās not wifi-enabled, and putting in a PCI-E adapter wouldnāt work due to space restrictions inside the case. My only option to pick up wifi would be a USB 3 adapter, which coincidentally was also made by TP-Link (itās the Archer T9UH).
I disliked the D-Link Powerlink units, which, despite the manufacturerās claims, lost 90 per cent of their speed between the two points. The signal at the modem end would come in at speeds of between 700 and 1,000 Mbit/s, but 40 to 90 Mbit/s at the other end was commonplace. The 1 Gbyte promised by all the marketing was a fantasy.
The previous owner of this house also used Powerlink units, but at different points.
Computer geeks still tell me these are good and I suspect they could work well in smaller homes or ones with newer wiring.
For context, using the old Saturn fibre cable that I had installed in 1999 at the old house, I would easily see over 300 Mbit/s via a cat 5 ethernet cable. Having to live with speeds between a ninth and a third of that in a house with Chorus fibre was tough going, and life proved too busy to get an extra internal cable installed.
I was glad to see the tail end of those powerline units as I was promised that 600 Mbit/s was going to be possible at the end of the house with the mesh.
It wasnāt. In fact, the second unit failed to pick up the first, and I was forced to bring it closer to the first in another room.
Speedtestās first result was 106 Mbit/s down and 58 Mbit/s up, which was an improvement, but not a good one, and far short of the promised levels.
The TP-Link app had a Speedtest result of over 916 Mbit/s no matter where I went. I didnāt realize that it was giving me the results at the point of entry on the first Deco unit.
Therefore, it should show a higher number. When I realized this, I began running Speedtests via speedtest.net, and was disappointed to see, even at the first unit via wifi, results in the 120 Mbit/s region.
I called tech support. The first person didnāt know much, but I explained that Raghu had promised two additional mesh units should my experience not be up to expectation. She said she was only authorized to send one. I decided to take it. She was also authorized to give me unlimited phone data for seven days in case I needed to use the cell as a hotspot.
I called again later and got to speak with a tech, Paul, who had the units at his home, and could tell me more.
First, the X20s have two LAN ports on the back. I had read somewhere that these were for the modem-to-unit link exclusively. It turns out that was wrong. You can plug in an ethernet cable and run it straight into your computerārendering my purchase of the TP-Link Archer adapter redundant. Secondly, I should employ a wifi test if I really wanted to see what was going on: I should plug in a device via ethernet into the Deco unit.
The results were then markedly different: between 600 and 700 Mbit/s from the first unit, but still low numbers with the second.
The third unit arrived and this helped somewhat, with 300-plus Mbit/s in a ground floor room when connected via ethernet.
In the meantime, I had got back in touch with Raghu and suggested that a fourth unit might do the trick, and get me at least back to the speeds I had in the late 2010s. Interestingly, he was only authorized to send two, which meant I would be in possession of five such units, all of which I had to pay the courier charges for.
Units four and five arrived. The fourth unit went into the upstairs office and I had a 3 m ethernet cable running from it, on the floor, to the PC. The speeds were still poor: 178 Mbit/s down, 175 Mbit/s up.
One thing TP-Linkās app does not tell you, at least not in diagrammatic form, is how the Deco units are all connected. I discovered through the web interface (tplinkdeco.net in a browser, using the password that you signed up to the app with) that the office one was stretching to get its signal from the first oneāand not the other two in the house.
This Reddit page told me what I needed to know: you reboot the unit that you want reconnecting elsewhere. I did that, and it found the third unit in the ādenā (as we call it) and speeds went up to between 200 and 270 Mbit/s both down and up.
Iām still dealing with speeds lower than what I had in 2018 using a 1999 cable but getting into the 200s is a far sight better than being in the double digits. If I have any serious downloading to do, thereās always the option of the laptop and a direct connection from the Ultra Hub, where I can work away at 700ā900 Mbit/s.
Iāll continue to tinker since the laptop managed to get over 300 Mbit/s during the tests, and I believe that that was down to the location of the office Deco unit. However, Iām hampered by the 3 m ethernet cable and Iām going to need 5 m, possibly (no one sells a 4 m). Possibly going to a cat 7 cable might do the trick there, too.
So there you have it, a real-world trial of Vodafone New Zealandās Super Wifi. Not as great as promised but less of a let-down than what powerline modems do in real life. And yes, you can hook ethernet cables from the units to your computer.
Tags: 1999, 2010s, 2018, 2021, Aotearoa, India, internet, Maharashtra, New Zealand, office, Pune, Speedtest, technology, TelstraClear, TP-Link, virtual office, Vodafone, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara, wifi
Posted in business, internet, New Zealand, technology, Wellington | No Comments »
01.04.2021
We already know that Facebook does nothing if you want to use scripts to join groups, even if the scripts all give roughly the same answers. Apparently thatās not enough to trigger the systems at this company thatās worth almost a billion dollars (thatās a proper billion, or what the Americans call a trillion). Unless, of course, they want these bot accounts on there to continue lying about reach, or run some other sort of scam.
But what about brand-new accounts that are clearly bots, that write nonsensical things that bots are programmed to do, and which friend other bots? These are bot nets, the sort I saw all the time when I used Facebook regularly. The nights in 2014 when I spotted over 200 bot accounts? A lot of them were in these nets, and I made it a mission to report them, since they tended to exist in groups of a few dozen, maybe a hundred at most.
Last night I saw nets of thousands. Imagine a new account thatās friended thousands of other new accounts, all using a series of names, and all pretending to work for a limited number of workplaces. Surely these are obviously bots, and Facebookās systems would detect them? I mean, if youāve been on Facebook for even six months youād know that these patterns existed, let alone 17 years.
Um, no.
Iāve been reporting a whole bunch of these bots and Facebookās reaction is to tell me, as they do with bot accounts running group-joining scripts, that no community standards have been violated.
Normally I would see a dozen or so bot accounts each time I pop in (and my friends who moderate on there tell me they can see many per minute). Even as an irregular user it means I see more bots than humans, but now that Iāve seen over 4,000 (just go to one of these botsā friendsā lists and take a sufficiently large sample) that Facebook allows, then come on, you canāt tell me that this site is still worth giving your money to.
In 2014 I called seeing 277 bots in one night an āepidemicā, on the basis that if a regular Joe like me could, then how many were really on there? Now I see 4,000 in one night. These two have over 4,000 and 3,000, with some overlap:
And in 2014, I could report them, and some would actually be deleted. Others would need repeated reports. In 2021, none are deleted, based on the ones I reported.
Therefore, Facebookās systems neither detect bots nor do a thing about them when a user blatantly points them out.
And given that this company is worth over US$800 milliard, then you know they exist with their blessingāat the least with their inaction. Because US$800 milliard buys a lot of technology, but apparently not enough to deal with bots or misinformation.
The scammers know this and the con artists know this. Governments know this. This is a danger zone for consumers, yet the last few years still werenāt sufficient for most western governments to act. It makes you wonder just what itāll take to wake people up, since folks donāt even seem to mind giving their money to a company that has such a poor track record and no independent certification of its metrics. Would shame work? āYou dumbass, you gave money to them?!ā Surely this now makes it more obvious than ever just what a terrible waste of money Facebook is?
PS.: Here’s another new account with what appears to be 4,326 bot friends (based on a reasonable sample).āJY
P.PS.: Only 4,326? How about one that’s hit the 5,000 limit filled with bots?
Tags: 2010s, 2021, computing, Facebook, scam, social media, spam, technology, USA
Posted in internet, technology, USA | 3 Comments »
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