Buzzfeedâs article, on departing Facebook staff who write âbadge postsâ, wasnât a surprise; what was a greater surprise was just how long it took for such news to surface.
Badge posts are traditional farewell notes at Facebook, and not everyone has had rosy things to say. One wrote, âWith so many internal forces propping up the production of hateful and violent content, the task of stopping hate and violence on Facebook starts to feel even more sisyphean than it already is ⌠It also makes it embarrassing to work hereâ (original emphasis). Buzzfeed noted, âMore stunning, they estimated using the companyâs own figures that, even with artificial intelligence and third-party moderators, the company was âdeleting less than 5% of all of the hate speech posted to Facebook,ââ a claim that Facebook disputes, despite its points having already been addressed in the badge post:
Thanks for the response. The data scientist's analysis took this difference between views and content into account and argued that their methodology was still sound. I've typed out the full part of their badge post detailing this for you and our readers. Any thoughts? pic.twitter.com/VvgxBYi8fC
The rest is worth reading here.
Meanwhile, this Twitter thread from Cory Doctorow, sums up a lot of my feelings and has supporting links, and it is where I found the above. Highlights:
The ones that joined to fix Facebook from the inside have overwhelming evidence that Facebook doesn't actually want to fix its problems, particularly disinformation.
Reality has a leftist bias, so any crackdown on disinformation will disproportionately affect conservatives.
When that happens, Ted Cruz gets angry at Zuck and drags him into the Senate. Plus, Zuck really enjoys the company of far right assholes, and his version of "listening to both sides" boils down to "I meet with Stormfront AND the RNC."https://t.co/7M4UWd0V95
I realize US conservatives feel they are hard done by with Facebook, but I know plenty of liberals who feel the same, and who’ve had posts censored. Even if Silicon Valley leans left, Facebook’s management doesn’t, so I’d go so far as to say right-wing views get more airtime there than left-wing (actually, also right-wing by anyone else’s standards) ones. On Facebook itself, during the few times I visit, I actually see very few conservatives who have complained of having their posts deleted or censored.
That isn’t a reason to shut it down or to break it up, but misinformation, regardless of whom it supports is. Inciting genocide is. Allowing posts to remain that influence someone to commit murder is. Facebook has proved over 15 years-plus that it has no desire to do the right thing, in which case it may well be time for others to step in to do it for them.
When I wrote this post in May 2018, ‘People are waking up to Wikipediaâs abuses’, even I didn’t expect that Wikipedia would act so harshly when it gets criticized on its own platform.
One editor decided to create a page on Philip Cross, who (or which) received a great deal of attention that month, and was probably deserving of a page detailing his notoriety. Cross, as I detailed in May 2018, is a person or entity that is anti-Jeremy Corbyn and favourable toward right-wing figures. He ‘has not had a single day off from editing Wikipedia between August 29, 2013 and May 14, 2018, including Christmas Days.’ Wikipediaâs reaction? Delete the page, and subject its creator to a lifetime ban. Then, any record of the Philip Cross page was scrubbed cleanâforget page histories. The story is detailed at Off-Guardian here.
In other words, Wikipedia was complicit in biased editing. I’ve been saying Wikipedia was questionable for over a decade, but to actually protect someone who engages in what some might call libel?
It’s entirely consistent with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’s attitude to the whole thing, as Craig Murray detailed at the time.
After five years of Cross’s inputs to Wikipedia, he was finally discussed by Wikipedia by a principled editor, KalHolmann, though not without opposition (KalHolmann was initially “punished” for even bringing it up). Like all big sites, Wikipedia decided to show people that it has some form of governance only after it had been outed (including a BBC World Service radio story that went out during the arbitration process) for allowing abuse.
And by means of a postscript to these events of mid-2018 that I missed till now, George Galloway, a regular target of Philip Cross’s Wikipedia activity, claims he has identified the man, and knows the background behind him.
Weâve had years of Google and Facebook acting like arses, but itâs disappointing to see Twitter give us more and more causes for concern.
In 2017, we saw them change their terms and conditions so speaking power to truth is no longer a requirement. You canât help but think that the decision to accommodate the US president is part of that: there is a policy within Twitter that President Trump is immune to their terms and conditions, and can Tweet with impunity what you and I would get kicked off for doing. We also saw Twitter, which is scrambling to show the US government that it is doing something about alleged Russian interference, kick off a privately developed bot that helped identify fake accounts. Youâd think that if Twitter were sincere about identifying fake accounts, it would embrace such technology.
One of my regular blog readers, Karen Tolfree, very kindly linked me a report from Hannity (which another friend later informed me was first revealed on Breitbart) which showed Twitter staff caught on video admitting to shadow-banning either because they disagreed with the userâs politics (with an admission that Twitter is 90 per cent US Democrat-leaning) or because of US government pressure (when discussing Julian Assangeâs account).
What was the old saying? I might not always agree with your politics but I will always defend to the hilt your right to express your views.
Therefore, I mightnât be President Trumpâs biggest fan but those who support him, and do so within the same rules that Iâm governed by on Twitter (e.g. not resorting to hate speech or attacking any individual or group), must have the same right to free speech as I should.
I do not wish them to be silenced because many of them have good reasons for their beliefs, and if I donât see them in my feed then how will I understand them? I donât wish to live in a bubble (meanwhile, Facebook and Google want you to; Facebookâs âcrowdsourcingâ its ranking of media sources is going to make things far worseâhave a look at Duck Duck Go founder Gabriel Weinberg’s series of Tweets at the end of this post).
Because you never know if Twitterâs shadow-banning is going to go after you, since, like Facebookâs false malware accusations, they could be indiscriminate.
In fact, two New Zealanders were shadow-banned over the last week: one with stated left-leaning views (Paul Le Comte), another (Cate Owen) who hasnât put her political leanings into her bio, and who was shadow-banned for reasons unknown. Itâs not just conservatives these guys go after, and neither was told just which Tweet netted them this âpunishmentâ.
I think itâs generally agreed that we have passed peak Twitter just as we have passed peak Facebook, but as itâs one of the original, mid-2000s social media services I still use, Iâm disappointed that I canât feel as happy being on there as I once did. After all, our presence is effectively our endorsement, and do we really endorse this sort of censorship against people because of either their politics, governmental pressure or reasons unknown? Twitter paints itself as a place where we can speak freely, provided we do so within certain rules, and the dick moves over the last 12 months make me wonder if itâs heading in the same direction as Google (tax-avoiding, hacking, lying about advertising tracking, allegedly pressuring think-tanks to fire someone over their viewpoints, biasing results in its own favour) and Facebook (forced downloads using the excuse of malware detection, kicking off drag queens and kings, tracking people after they have opted out, potential database issues that kick people off for days, endless bots and general ineffectiveness in removing them, lying about user numbers). Twitter always had bots and trolls, but weâre seeing what goes on inside nowadays, and it ainât pretty.
In 2018, we know Twitter is not a place for free speech, where rules apply differently depending on who you are, and where the identification of bots is not a priority.
And even though weâve had some happy news already this year (e.g. the prospect of Baby Clarcinda in five monthsâ time), these influential websites, whose actions and policies do affect us all, are âdoing it all wrongâ.
To be (more) clear, promoting trustworthy news sources is a reasonable idea.
Relying solely on crowdsourcing to determine trust, though, or making trust scores individualized, are both poor implementations that will create more negative unintended consequences.
I get that companies don't want to editorialize, but there are other paths than inscrutable algorithms, such as creating or working with independent non-partisan bodies to make the hard editorial decisions based on transparent and obviously measurable criteria.
[Prof Anne-Marie Brady of the University of Canterbury] said the Chinese-language media in New Zealand was subject to extreme censorship, and accused both Mr. Yang and Raymond Huo, an ethnic Chinese lawmaker from the center-left Labour Party, of being subject to influence by the Chinese Embassy and community organizations it used as front groups to push the countryâs agenda.
Mr. Huo strongly denied any âinsinuations against his character,â saying his connections with Chinese groups and appearances at their events were just part of being an effective lawmaker.
And:
Despite the criticism, Mr. Yang has continued to appear alongside Wang Lutong, Chinaâs ambassador to New Zealand, at public events, including for Chinaâs National Day celebrations this week, when he posed for photos with the ambassador and a Chinese military attachĂŠ.
I wound up at three events where the Chinese ambassador, HE Wang Lutong, was also invited. This makes me a spy, I mean, agent.
I even shook hands with him. This means my loyalty to New Zealand should be questioned.
I ran for mayor twice, which must be a sure sign that Beijing is making a power-play at the local level.
You all should have seen it coming.
My Omega watch, the ease with which I can test-drive Aston Martins, and the fact I know how to tie a bow tie to match my dinner suit.
The faux Edinburgh accent that I can bring out at any time with the words, âThere can be only one,â and âWe shail into hishtory!â
Helming a fashion magazine and printing on Matt paper, thatâs another clue. We had a stylist whose name was Illya K. I donât always work Solo. Sometimes I call on Ms Gale or Ms Purdy.
Jian Yang and I have the same initials, which should really ring alarm bells.
Clearly this all makes me a spy. I mean, agent.
Never mind I grew up in a household where my paternal grandfather served under General Chiang Kai-shek and he and my Dad were Kuomintang members. Dad was ready to ĺ塼 and fight back the communists if called up.
Never mind that I was extremely critical when New Zealanders were roughed up by our cops when a Chinese bigwig came out from Beijing in the 1990s.
Never mind that I have been schooled here, contributed to New Zealand society, and flown our flag high in the industries Iâve worked in.
All Chinese New Zealanders, it seems, are still subject to suspicion and fears of the yellow peril in 2017, no matter how much you put in to the country you love.
We might think, âThatâs not as bad as the White Australia policy,â and it isnât. We donât risk deportation. But we do read these stories where thereâs plenty of nudge-nudge wink-wink going on and you wonder if thereâs the same underlying motive.
All you need to do is have a particular skin colour and support your community, risking that the host has invited Communist Party bigwigs.
Those of us who are here now donât really bear grudges against what happened in the 1940s. We have our views, but that doesnât stop us from getting on with life. And that means we will be seen with people whose political opinions differ from ours.
Sound familiar? Thatâs no different to anyone else here. Itâs not exactly difficult to be in the same room as a German New Zealander or a Japanese New Zealander in 2017. A leftie won’t find it hard to be in the same room as a rightie.
So Iâll keep turning up to community events, thank you, without that casting any shadow over my character or my loyalty.
A person in this country is innocent till proved guilty. We should hold all New Zealanders to the same standard, regardless of ethnicity. This is part of what being a Kiwi is about, and this is ideal is one of the many reasons I love this country. If the outcry in the wake of Garnerâs Fairfax Press opinion is any indication, most of us adhere to this, and exhibit it.
Therefore, I don’t have a problem with Prof Brady or anyone interviewed for the pieceâit’s the way their quotes were used to make me question where race relations in our neck of the woods is heading.
But until heâs proved guilty, Iâm going to reserve making any judgement of Dr Yang. The New York Times and any foreign media reporting on or operating here should know better, too.
How right Kalev Leetaru is on Wikipediaâs decision to ban The Daily Mail as a source.
This decision, he concludes, was made by a cabal of 50 editors based on anecdotes. Iâve stated before on this blog how Wikipedia is broken, the abusive attitude of one of its editors, and how even luminaries like the late Aaron Swartz and Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger chose to depart. Itâs just taken three years or more for some of these thoughts to get picked up in a more mainstream fashion.
I made sure I referred to a single editor as my experience with someone high up in Wikipedia, not all of its editors, but you canât ignore accusations of certain people gaming the system in light of the ban.
Leetaru wrote on the Forbes site, âOut of the billions of Internet users who come into contact with Wikipedia content in some way shape or form, just 50 people voted to ban an entire news outlet from the platform. No public poll was taken, no public notice was granted, no communications of any kind were made to the outside world until everything was said and done and action was taken âŚ
âWhat then was the incontrovertible evidence that those 50 Wikipedia editors found so convincing as to apply a “general prohibition” on links to the Daily Mail? Strangely, a review of the comments advocating for a prohibition of the Mail yields not a single data-driven analysis performed in the course of this discussion.â
Iâm not defending the Mail because I see a good deal of the news site as clickbait, but itâs probably no worse than some other news sources out there.
And itâs great that Wikipedia kept its discussion public, unlike some other top sites on the web.
However, you canât escape the irony behind an unreliable website deeming a media outlet unreliable. Hereâs a site that even frowns upon print journalism because its cabal cannot find online references to facts made in its articles. Now, I would like to see it trust print stuff more and the Mail less, but that, too, is based on my impressions rather than any data-driven analysis that Leetaru expects from such a big site with so many volunteers. Iâve made my arguments elsewhere on why Wikipedia will remain unreliable, and why those of us in the know just wonât bother with it for our specialist subjects.
By all means, use it, and it is good for a quick, cursory “pub chat” reference (though science ones tend to be better, according to friends in that world). But remember that there is an élite group of editors there and Wikipedia will reflect their biases, just as my sites reflect mine. To believe it is truly objective or, for that matter, accurate, would be foolhardy.
Above: Facebook kept deleting Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph each time it was posted, even when Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten did so, preventing its editor-in-chief from responding.
Thereâs a significant difference between the internet of the 1990s and that of today. As Facebook comes under fire for deleting the ânapalm girlâ photograph from the Vietnam War shared by Norwegian writer Tom Egeland, then by prime minister Erna Solberg and Aftenposten newspaper, it has highlighted to me how the big Silicon Valley players have become exclusionary. In this latest case, it is about how one firm determines what is acceptable and unacceptable without regard to cultural significance or free speech; it even punished people who dared criticize it, and has failed to apologize. Earlier this year, in one of my numerous battles with Facebook, I noted how a major German company falsely claimed videos that did not belong to them, yet there was no penalty. An individual or a small firm would not have been so lucky: when we file copyright claims, we do so âunder penalty of perjuryâ on the form.
Google, never far from my critical eye, is the same. Iâve watched Google News, for instance, become exclusionary, too, or, rather, a service that prefers big players rather than the independents. When deciding to send traffic for a particular news item, Google News now ranks big media outlets more highly, and to heck with journalistic quality or any regard on who broke the story first. Itâs damaging to the independent voice, as Google concentrates power in favour of larger firms today, and itâs rather disturbing when you consider the implications.
Mainstream media can be homogeneous, and, in some cases, damaging, when bias and prejudice get in to the system. When it comes to politics, this can be detrimental to democracy itself. And why should a search engine prefer a larger name anyway? Many newsrooms have been stripped of resources, ever more reliant on press releases. Many now engage in click-bait. Some have agenda driven by big business and their technocratic view of the world, especially those that have their corporate headquarters outside the country in which they operate. Those who desire to wake people up from their slumber get short shrift. Google is aiding this world, because since it became publicly listed, it has had to adopt its trappings, and one might argue that it is in direct conflict with its ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra (one which never held much sway with me).
This is the world which Google and Facebook, and no doubt others, wish to serve up to users. They may well argue that theyâre only delivering what people want: if a lot of people get their news from the Daily Mail or The Huffington Post, then thatâs what theyâll show in their results. Thereâs little freshness online as a result, which is why people arenât as inclined to share in 2016 as they were in 2010.
Yet it was not always this way. The hope in the late 1990s and early 2000s was that Google et al would be tools in distributing power equally among all netizens. Started an independent online publication? If the quality is there, if youâre the first to break a story, then Google News will lavish attention upon you. If you have specialized news outside what mainstream media deliver, then youâll pop up regularly in the search resultsâ pages. The blogosphere rose because of this, with people seeking opinions and research outside of what the mainstream could deliver. The reason people blog less isnât just because of social networks making one-sentence opinions de rigueur; it is because people have found it harder to reach new audience members, and their own tribe is the next best thing.
It makes the ânet a far less interesting place to be. Without fresh, new views, we run the risk of groupthink, or we become particularly influenced by the biases of certain media outlets. We donât really want to surf casually as we once did because we donât learn anything new: itâs harder to find novel things that pique our interests.
There are potential solutions, of course. I tend not to Google, but use Duck Duck Go, so at least I donât get a filter bubble when I search for particular subjects. However, Duck Duck Go does not have a comprehensive news search, and Googleâs index size remains unbeatable. What we really need next is something that brings back that sense of equality online. I believe that if you put in the hours into good content and design, you should excel and get your site ranked above the same old sources. Google claims that it does that when it tweaks its algorithms but Iâm not seeing this. Facebook merely builds on what people have foundâso if you can’t find it, it won’t wind up being shared. Twitter, at least, still has some interesting items, but if you donât catch it in your feed at a given time, then too bad. Itâs not geared to search.
Duck Duck Go is a start, at least when it comes to general searches. It becomes easier to find views that you might not agree withâand thatâs a good thing when it comes to understanding others. Googleâs approach lulls you into a sense of security, that your views are sacrosanctâand all that does is give you the notion that the other half is wrong.
So what of news? Duck Duck Go could well be a starting-point for that, too, ranking news based on who breaks an item first and the quality of the site, rather than how much money is behind it. Or perhaps this is the space for another entrepreneur. Ironically, it might even come out of China; though right now itâs equally likely to emerge from India. What it then needs is a bit of virality for it to be adopted, spread by the very people it is designed to aid.
We need something that rewards the independent entrepreneur again, the people who drove so many innovations in the 1990s and 2000s. This isnât nostalgia kicking in, seeing the world through rose-coloured glasses while happily ignoring all those businesses that failed. I completely acknowledge there were sites that vanished at the time of the dot-com bust, triggered in no small part by 9-11, the anniversary of which we celebrate today.
Society needs those distinctive voices, those independent entrepreneurs, those people who are willing to put themselves forward and be judged fairly. What they donât need are reactionary media who want to silence them out of fear that the world will change too much for them to bear; and big Silicon Valley firms all too happy to join in these days.
Itâs high time the most influential websites served the many rather than the few again.
Found on my wall today. While it’s over three months old, the responses from Prof Reza Aslan of the University of California Riverside address a lot of the comments that have surfaced post-Charlie Hebdo head-onâwhich shows that we continue to go round and round the same arguments and not making an awful lot of progress.
In October, he contrasted the coverage between Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the Canadian Muslim who murdered Cpl Nathan Cirillo in Ottawa, and the Norwegian Christian mass murderer Anders Breivik who killed 77 people, in an opâed for CNN:
In the case of Bibeau, his violent behavior could have been influenced as much by his religious beliefs as by his documented mental problems, his extensive criminal past or his history of drug addiction. Yet, because Bibeau was a Muslim, it is simply assumed that the sole motivating factor for his abhorrent behavior was his religious beliefs âŚ
Nevertheless, a great deal of the media coverage surrounding [Breivik’s] actions seemed to take for granted that his crime had nothing to do with his Christian identityâthat it was based instead on his right-wing ideology, or his anti-immigrant views, or his neglectful upbringing, or even, as Ayan Hirshi Ali famously argued, because his view that “Europe will be overrun by Islam” was being censored by a politically correct media, leaving him “no other choice but to use violence.”
Aslan does accept that ‘religious beliefs can often lead to actions that violate basic human rights. It is also true that a great many of those actions are taking place right now among Muslims,’ which will require more than a blog post to analyse, but adds, ‘When we condemn an entire community of faith for sharing certain beliefs with extremists in their community, we end up alienating the very people who are best positioned to counter such extremism in the first place.’
Aslan probably came to most people’s awareness after his interview on Fox News about his new book Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, where he was questioned why, as a Muslim, he would write a book about Jesus Christ.
As a religion expert who has to defend his position academicallyâand in the mainstream mediaâAslan makes a far more compelling case, backed by research, than some of the anti-Islamic rhetoric that has made a reappearance in social media lately.
I found out a day after many netizens: Google is now forcing all YouTube account holders to merge their accounts with their Google ones.
As part of my de-Googling, I won’t be following suit. Instead, I plan to stay logged out of YouTube: it makes very little difference to me.
So I won’t be able to comment or like a videoânot the end of the world. In fact, I imagine I could very easily comment on videos on a blog and get any possible frustration I have out of my system that way. YouTube is still letting non-account holders embed. And I’m not really a YouTube video uploader: I can always go on Vimeo if I were that keen, or use SmugMug, which was in the digital photo-storage game long before Flickr, and which now hosts videos, too.
I felt very sympathetic when I found that there were people far more pissed off about this development than I am. The only news outlet to have reported on the compulsory linking that I could find, Brandchannel, has scores of unhappy users who are commenting that the move has even locked them out of YouTube. Others are concerned about their privacy, with good reason.
Looks like Google still hasn’t learned about user choices after the dĂŠbâcles last year over Buzz and the other services it offers. If anything, it seems to be getting worse.
Remember, too, how Google has stated on numerous occasions that it would not bias search results? Consider this: I wanted to search for an old post of mine so I could link it from the above text. The term: Google Buzz “de-Googling”.
On Duck Duck Go, I found the post immediately:
Out of interest, on Google, it cannot be seen: only positive things are mentioned and Google Buzz itself is the first result.
I know I have done more obscure tests to show that Google’s results are getting less precise. But the above is interesting.
It backs up an earlier article I read online about how Google treats search results, and that there is actually some bias in the system now.
I don’t begrudge Google for doing this, but it needs to stop saying that it doesn’t. We all know that it was quite happy to engage in censorship when it had Google China, already making its brand less idealistic than it once was.
Having set this precedent and created this brand association, it’s easy to believe that it now does this quite selectively for a lot more countries.
You might say that my one search is not a sign of bias, merely one where Google has a less than comprehensive search index and it could not find three old blog entries that have been around for a while. And which it used to be able to find.
It’s quite a coincidence that three negative posts about Google are no longer easily found with the relevant search terms.
That’s not great news for Google, either. Duck Duck Go is looking better by the day as the Google search engine, the one service to which its brand is tied, gets less precise.
At our campaign after-party: self, Karen King, and Chloe Oldfield and Aaron Hape.
It is perhaps no surprise that the last 24 hours saw more Tweets to me than any other period in my life, as the results from the local body elections came in.
I was overwhelmed by the messages, which were very positive about my securing a shade over 7,300 votesâquite some way off from the incumbent and Councillor Wade-Brown with their 24,000-plus, but, according to many of you, a creditable effort. Off the top of my head, thatâs around 12 per cent of the voteâconsiderably higher than any Fairfax Press poll stated, and within the margin of error of our own polling.
Most of the messages asked that I run again in 2013, something which I may well consider as I weigh up my options.
Last night, we held our post-campaign party at the Wellington Apartments, to which Councillors Wade-Brown and Ritchie came, as well as my opponent-turned-endorser, Bernard OâShaughnessy, who gave a very touching and meaningful speech. Many of our campaign team and core supporters attended, and I thank each and every one who has punched well above their weight. Some were out of town and could not attend. Nevertheless, I thank Albertus, Helen, Chelfyn, Stephen, Daniel, Kelly, Sonata, Craig, Brian, Sibylle, Aaron, Chloe, Jim, John, Natasha; I thank all those who donated to the campaign to get us even this far, including Brett and Tania at Soi who hosted our first campaign event back in April. We managed to get a third of the number of our chief opponents using roughly a tenth of the budget: thatâs how hard everyone worked. I think the campaign-spending stats, when they come out, will reveal that we secured the most voters for the least amountâshowing that the tide is turning against big money and âpolitics as usualâ.
I enjoyed proving some of the doubters wrong: those who believed that a non-politician could not possibly be in the top three, that we could not get some of our ideas on the agenda for Wellington, and that we could not engage a sizeable chunk of young people to come out to vote. I also enjoyed seeing the polls fall flat: so much for their margins of error and their claimed accuracy. (One from Fairfax gave Councillor Pepperell victory at 35 per cent [on Stuff] and another 25 per cent; the reality was 9 per cent. From memory, none gave Councillor Wade-Brown a figure near the 38 per cent she ultimately secured.)
Yesterdayâs Fairfax Press paper here had a sizeable article on technology: a realization, at last, of the things I have been talking about for a whole year. They are now recognized. Now let us hope that the new council puts some of these ideas into play: the need for free wifi beyond a self-congratulatory Fairfax front-page ad, how creative clusters can grow our GDP, and the need for a tech strategy to aid growth and exports in our city. I am happy to note that Councillor Wade-Brown recognizes the validity of many of these ideas, and, to put the cherry on the cake, that she had the decency in our debates to give credit where it is due. I have specifics on how to achieve them, and am willing to share this information with her if she wins.
There are 900 special votes that are yet to be counted in Wellington, plus 90-odd informal ballots. All need to be considered. I thank the High Sheriff, Ross Bly, and his deputy, Lauren Kemple, for their tireless work, along with the entire electoral office, as their work begins on Monday counting these last votes.
Someone asked me why I thought these last ones will tip the balance in favour of Councillor Wade-Brown as our Mayor-elect. I confess it was a gut instinct, and I had some intel from Bernard telling me that special votes tended to reflect the regular votes. However, I believe there is a difference this time.
When Sir Michael Fowler and I were interviewed at the beginning of the week, we were told by a member of the media that Mayor Prendergast had stopped campaigning the Friday before. Perhaps she was buoyed by her polling: she seemed confident of the âscientificâ polls that placed her comfortably ahead and relayed this to one of our mutual contacts. What I do know is that the last week, and the push to get special votes, saw Councillors Wade-Brown and Pepperell, Mr OâShaughnessy and I continue to campaign. (I do not know if Mr Mansell did.) If that effort translates to anything, I believe these last 900 votes will reflect those who did this work in the last few days.
The last 54 weeks were some of the best in my life. I look back at them with fondness, especially the last few where we debated one another. I was delighted to be on the trail alongside my opponents, and be reasonably successful at the many forums held around our city. But, most of all, it was an honour to stand and represent Wellingtonians in this campaign. I will be interested to see if we have secured change at the Mayor’s office come mid-week.
The Fairfax Press has been very interesting in its coverage since the beginning of my mayoral campaign. A Miramar Wharf hotelâtraining centre development that I pushed for missed any quotes from myself, while todayâs announcement of wifi for the waterfront by the incumbent and the Fairfax Press itself again does the same.
But, you might be asking, does this change any part of my mayoral strategy? No. We knew there could be the possibility of such a move since April 2010, and it came up in our Vista Group conversations in August as âa done dealâ.
We simply have to ask one question: does Wellington want a creative mayor, or a reactive mayor?
I know, a few of you cheeky ones will be posing the question back to me since I seem to be reacting to a newspaper article! In my mind I am preempting the questions you may have for me about my campaign.
Letâs say we have wifi: do we want it as part of a political move, or something that has been integrated into a proper technological strategy for Wellington?
Something well thought-out or something done for political reasons?
Looking at the early Tweets, the tech community who would benefit first from such a programme seems to recognize just where the impetus came from.
I consider it a partial victory that this has even come up on the radar at Wakefield Street, because if it were not for my pushing for it since September, I doubt it would even be on the political agenda. Or why Fairfax has kept wifi out of its pages during my campaign till now. The game has changed.
And those of us in the creative community who value originality and a global vision for Wellington wonât want someone who can now be branded a copycat, moving out of desperation.
In 2010, in a decade that is more complex than ever, and where processes and politicking have far less effect than they ever did, will you vote for creative, or reactive?
