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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘California’
21.10.2021

Shared on my social media on the day, but I had been waiting for an opportunity to note this on my blog.
It was an honour last week to guest on Leonard Kimâs Grow Your Influence Tree, his internet talk show on VoiceAmerica. Leonard knows plenty about marketing and branding, so I thought it might be fun to give his listeners a slightly different perspectiveânamely through publishing. And since I know his listenersâ usual topics, I didnât stray too far from marketing.
We discuss the decrease in CPM rates online; the importance of long-form features to magazines (and magazine websites) and how that evolution came about; how search engines have become worse at search (while promoting novelty; on this note Iâve seen Qwant do very well on accuracy); how great articles can establish trust in a brand and falling in love with the content you consume (paraphrasing Leonardâs words here); Lucireâs approach to global coverage and how that differs to other titlesâ; the need to have global coverage and how that potentially unites people, rather than divide them; how long-form articles are good for your bottom line; how stories work in terms of brand-building; how Google News favours corporate and mainstream sources; and the perks of the job.
This was a great hour, and it was just such a pleasure to talk to someone who is at the same level as me to begin with, and who has a ready-made audience that doesnât need the basics explained to them. It didnât take long for Leonard and me to get into these topics and keep the discussion at a much higher level than what I would find if it was a general-audience show. Thank you, Leonard!
Listen to my guest spot on Leonardâs show here, and check out his website and his Twitter (which is how we originally connected). And tune in every Thursday 1 p.m. Pacific time on the VoiceAmerica Influencers channel for more episodes with his other guests!
Tags: 2021, branding, California, Google, internet, interview, Jack Yan, Leonard Kim, Lucire, marketing, media, radio, Twitter, USA, VoiceAmerica Posted in branding, business, internet, marketing, media, New Zealand, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
11.06.2021

I was surprised to find that I could access my Facebook advertising preferences again, after the section stopped working in January 2019. What was there was still way off, in June 2021, but itâs nice to be able to edit (read delete) them again after two-and-a-half years. Things move slowly in Menlo Park when it comes to user privacy. Frankly, they shouldnât even be collecting preferences after youâve opted out of preference-targetingânot even Google is stupid enough to do that (possibly as they have other nefarious means).
I was chatting to one friend who is as principled as me when it comes to Facebook bots. She screen-grabbed one who tried to send her a friend request, and we got chatting about the thousands-strong bot nets Iâve encountered.
She noted there was some fan fiction connected to one of the surnames, and I was able to find the Filipino TV series Halik. So are these accounts, accused by me of being bots, simply role-playing ones?
The reason I even know about them is that they attempt to join a group I oversee, usually with bot software that incorrectly answered the questions we had put up to weed out the fake accounts. (As I noted recently, Facebook has got rid of these, allowing bots to come in to every public group.) Why do they do this? They come in, hoping to hide among groups (and they also become page fans), to make themselves look legitimate. What happens instead is that we report them, and watch as Facebook does nothing about them, telling us that these automated scripts are allowed, and never mind the damage they do to pages wanting to reach their members. Youâll just have to pay more and more and more to boost the posts to reach the people you once reached for free.
Secondly, itâs concerning that accounts marked as newly started ones on Facebook already have hundreds, if not thousands, of friends within days. These just arenât normal patterns. They also talk to each other like nonsensical bots, responding with the same emojis or words.
On both these counts, the fact the accounts have names from a Pinoy TV series has little bearing. Facebook doesnât care either way.
Tags: 2021, Big Tech, California, Facebook, privacy, retro, USA Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
21.03.2020

Iâll be interested to read the judgement, should it get to that point: Facebook is being sued over allegedly inflating its audience numbers, and COO Sheryl Sandberg and financial officer David Wehner are also named.
The plaintiff alleges that Facebook has known this for years. The suit dates from 2018 but there are new filings from the lawsuit.
Iâve blogged on related topics for the majority of the previous decade, and in 2014 I said that Facebook had a bot âepidemicâ.
Finally another publication has caught on this, namely the Financial Times. The FT notes something that I did on this blog in 2017: âIn some cases, the number cited for potential audience size in certain US states and demographics was actually larger than the population size as recorded in census figures, it claimed.â Its own 2019 investigation found discrepancies in the Facebook Adsâ Manager tool.
The complaint also says that Facebook had not removed fake and duplicate accounts. Lately Iâve found some obvious fake accounts, and reported them, only for Facebook to tell me that thereâs nothing wrong with them. On Instagram, I have hundreds, possibly thousands, of accounts that I reported but remain current. Based on my user experience, the plaintiff is absolutely correct.
Facebook only solves problems it puts its mind to, and all seem to be bolstering its bottom line. This is something it could have solved, and since itâs plagued the site for the good part of a decade, and it continues to, then you have to conclude that thereâs no desire to. And of course there isnât: the more fakes there are, the more page owners have to pay to reach real people.
Over a decade ago, I know that it cost a small business a decent chunk of money to get an independent audit (from memory, we were looking at around NZ$6,000). Facebook doesnât have this excuse, and that tells me it doesn’t want you to know how its ads actually perform.
As I said many times: if a regular person like me can find a maximum of 277 fakes or bots in a single night, then how many are there? Iâm surprised that not more of the mainstream media are talking about this, given that in 2018 Facebook posted an income of US$22,100 million on US$55,800 million of revenue, 98·5 per cent of which came from advertising. Is this one of the biggest cons out there? Hereâs hoping the lawsuit will reveal something. Few seem to care about Facebookâs lies and erosion of their privacy, but maybe they might start caring when they realize they’ve been fleeced.
Tags: 2010s, 2018, 2020, advertising, California, deception, ethics, Facebook, law, Sheryl Sandberg, USA Posted in business, internet, marketing, technology, USA | 4 Comments »
20.03.2019

Above: Flowers at the Islamic Centre in Kilbirnie, Wellington on Monday.
On 9-11, I wrote an editorial in Lucire immediately. It was clear to me what I needed to write, and the editorial got quite a few readers at the time.
Today is March 20, five days after a terrorist attack on our country, and itâs only now Iâve had some idea of how to put my thoughts into a longer-form fashion, rather than a lot of Tweets, some of which have had a lot of support.
I guess itâs different when the attack happens to your own people in your own country.
One of the earliest points I made, when the death toll hit 49, was that this was âour 9-11â, at least when you consider the per capita loss of life. When it hit 50, it actually exceeded the number of lives lost per capita in 9-11. This helps put the matter into some context.
While the terrorist is a foreign national, who was most likely radicalized by foreign ideas, it has generated a great deal of soul-searching among New Zealanders. Even the right-wing talking heads have suddenly changed their tune, although, if a friend and colleagueâs experience as a waiter in New York City in September 2001 is anything to go by, they will return to their regularly scheduled programming in two weeksâ time. Certain media bosses, especially among foreign-owned companies, would have it no other way, since they are not here to benefit New Zealanders, only their foreign shareholders and their own pockets. Stoking division is their business and I do not believe leopards change their spots.
Therefore, the majority of right-thinking New Zealanders are not complicit, but a minority of us harbour bigoted thoughts, and enough of that minority infect the commentsâ sections of mainstream media websites and social networks to make it seem as though they are more numerous in number. The outpouring of support for our Muslim community highlights that the good far outnumber the rotten eggs in our society. And I think more of us are now prepared to call out racism and bigotry knowing that, in fact, public opinion is behind us.
So many Kiwis, myself included, say that hatred toward Muslims is not in our national character. But it is sufficiently in our national character when Muslim groups have pleaded with government agencies to step up, to be met with endless bureaucratic roadblocks; and many political parties have stains on their records in appealing to Islamophobia, something which indeed was foreign to this nation for all of my childhood.
I grew up with a Muslim boy and we remain friends to this day, but I never thought of him by his creed. If I was forced to âlabelâ him I would have called him a Pakistani New Zealander. I am willing to bet many Kiwis were in the same boat: we probably knew Muslims but never thought once about their religion.
It takes certain people to make changes in mainstream thinking. I thought I might be labelled a âChinese New Zealanderâ till Winston Peters, now our deputy PM, droned on about âAsiansâ out of some fear about the weakness of New Zealand culture; and we might have only become aware of Islam to any degree after 9-11. But these are, in fact, foreign ideas, adopted here by those who lack imagination or a willingness to do some hard work. They have been imported here through the sharing of culture. While I support the exchange of ideas, in some misguided utopian belief that dialogue is good for us all, I certainly did not anticipate, during the first heady days of the web, that we would have so much of the bad come with the good. I believed in some level of natural selection, that educated people would refrain and filter, and present their countryâs or community’s best face. But as each medium boganfied (yes, I am making up words), the infection came. Newspapers changed thanks to Rupert Murdoch cheapening them, eventually morphing into publications that sensationalized division, especially against Muslims after 9-11. Television went downhill as well largely thanks to the same bloke and his lieutenant, Roger Ailes. The web was fine till each medium became infected with negativity, but Google, Facebook and Twitter were all too happy for it to continue because it increased engagement on their properties. Each fuelled it more with algorithms that showed only supporting views, deepening each userâs belief in the rightness of their ideas, to the exclusion of everyone elseâs.
Most Americans I know believe in civility. Iâve spoken often enough in their country to know this. They donât believe their freedom of speech is absolute, and personally draw the line at hate speech, but their big websites act as though this is absolute, and allow the negative to fester. It seems it is for profit: we see Twitter remove Will Connollyâs (âEgg Boyâ) account but not racist Australian politician Sen. Fraser Anning. It is tempting to believe that Twitter is following the dollars here without regard to their stated policy. We have, after all, seen all Big Tech players lie constantly, and, for the most part, they get away with it. We let them, because we keep using them. Mark Zuckerberg doesnât need to say anything about Christchurch, because weâll keep using his websites (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp) and heâll keep finding ways of monetizing us, dehumanizing us. He wonât show up to the UK when summoned, and Facebook will continue to lie about removing videos and offensive content when we know many reports go unheeded.
Umair Haque wrote in the wake of the Christchurch terrorist attacks: âFacebook and Twitter and YouTube etcetera really just bring the American ideal to life that there should be extreme, absolute freedom of speech, with zero consequences whatsoever, even for expressing hate and violence of the most vile and repellent kinds.â
As people become dehumanized through words and campaigns, it makes it easier for people to commit violence against them. They no longer see them as deserving of respect or protection. In the foulest version, they no longer see them as having a right to life.
Now, I donât believe that this absolute approach can be branded American. And I do believe Big Tech has very different values to Americans. Their newsmedia have, too. When regular people are censored, when big money talks more loudly than their laws, then there is something very wrong with their companiesâand this is the common enemy of both Republicans and Democrats, not each other. And this wrongness is being exported here, too. Iâve said it for years: we are a sovereign nation, and we have no need to copy their failed idea of a health system or even their vernacular (on this note: retailers, please cease using Black Friday to describe your end-of-year sales, especially this year). We do not need to import the political playbooks, whether you are a political party, a blogger, or a local newspaper. There are Kiwis who actually talked about their âFirst Amendment rightsâ because they may have watched too much US television and are unaware we have our own Bill of Rights Act. Even the raid on Kim Dotcomâs home seemed to be down to some warped idea of apeing their cop shows, about impressing the FBI more than following our own laws on surveillance and our own beliefs on decency.
I honestly donât see the attraction of turning us into some vassal state or a mutant clone of other nations, yet foreign-owned media continue to peddle this nonsense by undermining the Kiwi character and everyday Kiwi unity.
Did the terrorist see any of this? I have no idea. I equally have no idea if the people he came into contact with here cemented his hate. However, I think he would have come across sufficient international influences here to validate his imagined fears of non-whites and women. By all means, we should call out bad behaviour, but when we do, we shouldnât restrict it to individual cases we see in our daily lives. There are entire institutions that are doing this, strings pulled from faraway lands, and to them we must also say: enough is enough. The way you do business isnât in line with who we are. We need to be aware of who the non-Kiwi players are, often masquerading under locally grown brand names (such as âNewstalk ZBââa quick peek of shareholders suggest the majority are as Kiwi as Ned Kelly), and, if need be, vote with our time and money to support those who really understand us. Be alert to whoâs really trying to influence us.
Tags: 2019, 9-11, Aotearoa, Big Tech, California, Christchurch, Facebook, FBI, Google, Islam, Islamophobia, mainstream media, media, Murdoch Press, New Zealand, politics, social media, terrorism, Twitter, USA, Winston Peters Posted in culture, globalization, internet, media, New Zealand, politics, USA | 1 Comment »
19.10.2018
In amongst all the political fallout of the National Party this weekâwhat Iâm dubbing (and hashtagging) âcaught in the Rossfireââwas a series (well, over 100) Tweets from Morgan Knutson, a designer who once worked for Google. Unlike most Googlers, especially the cult-like ones who refuse to help when you point out a fault with Google, Knutson decided he would be candid and talk about his experience. And it isnât pretty. Start here:
Or, if you prefer, head to the Twitter page itself, or this Threader thread.
As anyone who follows this blog knows, Iâve long suspected things to be pretty unhealthy within Google, and it turns out that itâs even worse than I expected.
A few take-outs: (a) some of the people who work there have no technical or design experience (explains a lot); (b) there’s a load of internal politics; (c) the culture is horrible but money buys a lot of silence.
Knutson claims to have received a lot of positive feedback, some in private messaging. His Tweets on the aftermath:
This, I thought, summed it up better than I could, even though I’ve had a lot more space to do it:
Tags: 2011, 2012, 2018, business, California, design, employment, Google, oligopoly, software, technology, USA Posted in business, culture, internet, leadership, USA | No Comments »
07.07.2018

Anton Troynikov’s banner on his Twitter account.
I really enjoy Yakov Smirnoff’s old jokes about the Soviet Union, and the Russian reversal that is often associated with him. In the 21st century, I’ve used the odd one, such as, ‘In Russia, Olympics game you!’ and ‘In America, internet watch you!’. I’m sure I’ve done wittier ones, but I’ve yet to post, ‘In America, president Tweet you!’
Today on Twitter, Anton Troynikov, while not doing exactly the above, had a bunch of Tweets about how similar the USSR was to Silicon Valley today. Although he’s not pointing out opposites, it’s humour in the same spirit. In Tweeting, he outdid the few modernized Russian reversals I’ve used over the years.
Tags: 2010s, 2018, Bay Area, California, history, humour, Russia, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, social media, Twitter, USA, USSR Posted in culture, humour, interests, technology, USA | No Comments »
04.05.2018

Maurizio Pesce/Creative Commons
At the F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook will offer a âclear historyâ option.
Considering that opting out of Facebook ad tracking does nothing, individually deleting the ad preferences that Facebook claims it would not collect only sees them repopulated, and hiding categories of ads does nothing, why would I believe Zuckerberg now?
What he probably means is a page that fools you into thinking your history has been cleared, but Facebook itself will still know, and youâll be targeted as you always were.
Here’s a parallel: your interface might say your password is secure, but Facebook knows, and the boss can still use your failed password attempts to hack your email account.
At Facebook, it appears the deceptions are always the same, just the areas they deal with differ.
Tags: 2018, California, conference, deception, email, Facebook, San Francisco, social media, technology, USA Posted in business, internet, marketing, technology, USA | No Comments »
24.02.2018

With how widespread Facebook’s false malware accusations wereâFacebook itself claims millions were “helped” by them in a three-month periodâit was surprising how no one in the tech press covered the story. I never understood why not, since it was one of many misdeeds that made Facebook such a basket case of a website. You’d think that after doing everything from experimenting on its users to intruding on users’ privacy with tracking preferences even after opting out, this would have been a story that followed suit. Peak Facebook has been and gone, so it amazed me that no journalist had ever covered this. Until now.
Like Sarah Lacy at Pando, who took the principled stand to write about Ăber’s problems when no one else in the tech media was willing to, it appears to be a case of ‘You can trust a woman to get it right when no man has the guts,’ in this case social media and security writer for Wired, Louise Matsakis. I did provide Louise with a couple of quotes in her story, as did respondents in the US and Germany; she interviewed people on four continents. Facebook’s official responses read like the usual lies we’ve all heard before, going on the record with Louise with such straw-people arguments. Thank goodness for Louise’s and Wiredâs reputations for getting past the usual wall of silence, and it demonstrates again how dishonest Facebook is.
I highly recommend Louise’s article hereâand please do check it out as she is the first journalist to write about something that has been deceiving Facebook users for four years.
As some of you know, the latest development with Facebook’s fake malware warnings, and the accompanying forced downloads, is that Mac users were getting hit in a big way over the last fortnight. Except the downloads were Windows-only. Basically, Mac users were locked out of their Facebook accounts. We also know that these warnings have nothing to do with malware, as other people can sign on to the same “infected” machines without any issue (and I had asked a few of these Mac users to do just thatâthey confirmed I was right).
Facebook has been blocking the means by which we can get around the forced downloads. Till April 2016, you could delete your cookies and get back in. You could also go and use a Linux or Mac PC. But steadily, Facebook has closed each avenue, leaving users with fewer and fewer options but to download their software. Louise notes, ‘Facebook tells users when they agree to conduct the scan that the data collected in the process will be used “to improve security on and off Facebook,” which is vague. The company did not immediately respond to a followup request for comment about how exactly it uses the data it collects from conducting malware checks.’ But we know data are being sent to Facebook without our consent.
Facebook also told Louise that a Mac user might have been prompted to download a Windows program because of how malware spoofs different devicesânow, since we all know these computers aren’t infected, we know that that’s a lie. Then a spokesman told Louise that Facebook didn’t collect enough information to know whether you really were infected. But, as she rightly asks, if they didn’t collect that info, why would they force you to download their software? And just what precedent is that setting, since scammers use the very same phishing techniques? Facebook seems to be normalizing this behaviour. I think they got themselves even deeper in the shit by their attempts at obfuscation.
Facebook also doesn’t answer why many users can simply wait three days for their account to come right instead of downloading their software. Which brings me back to the database issues I discovered in 2014.
Louise even interviewed ESET, which is one of the providers of the software, only to get a hackneyed responseâwhich is better than what the rest of us managed, because the antivirus companies all are chatty on Twitter till you bring this topic up. Then they clam up. Again, thank goodness for the fourth estate and a journalist with an instinct for a great story.
So please do give Louise some thanks for writing such an excellent piece by visiting her article, or send her a note via Twitter, to @lmatsakis. To think this all began one night in January 2016 âŠ
Tags: 2016, 2018, California, CondĂ© Nast, deception, Facebook, Germany, journalism, Louise Matsakis, media, New Zealand, privacy, Silicon Valley, social media, transparency, USA, Wired Posted in internet, media, publishing, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
28.12.2017

In theory, one of the positive things about social media should be the fact that a company has as much chance of succeeding as an individual. Another is that it shouldnât matter who you are, you have the same opportunity to get your word out. No one should get special treatment.
But, on Twitter, theyâve come out and said a few very disappointing things over 2017. First is that weâre not equal. President Donald Trump of the US may say odd things regularly, things that Twitter would kick you and me off for, but because itâs ânewsworthyâ, thereâs an express policy to let him stay. (Believe me, Iâd be equally unhappy if a US Democratic president, or anyone, behaved this way, which goes against basic netiquette. This is nothing to do with politicsâas a centrist and swing voter I follow people on the left and the right.)
There are numerous things wrong with Twitterâs position, not least who gets to decide what is newsworthy. Can someone working from Twitter in the US decide if a Tweet of mine is newsworthy in New Zealand? Iâm unconvinced. One US news app thought Steven Joyce getting hit with a dildo was of greater significance to us than the death of Martin Crowe, for example.
Secondly, one would have thought their country was founded on the notion that everyone is created equal, but clearly thatâs not the case on Twitter. Maybe no one in charge there read their countryâs Declaration of Independence (second paragraph, wasnât it?), and hanker for the days of Empire again. Thereâs some truth, then, when Silicon Valley is accused of élitism.
More recently, Twitter changed one of its rules. Formerly, it was, âWe believe in freedom of expression and in speaking truth to powerâ; now, itâs a simpler âWe believe in freedom of expression and open dialogue.â Iâve had to read up on what truth to power means, and as far as I can discern, it is an American term with the meaning of âspeaking out with your truth to those in powerâ. That seems a perfectly reasonable position: that if you are going to have a dialogue with someone (in power or otherwise), you should do so with integrity and honesty. To me, the alteration in wording suggests integrity and honesty arenât needed, as long as the dialogue is open. Perhaps at odds with the author of this rule, I always thought Twitter was open anyway, if you did a public Tweet.
Now I see that Twitter is effectively allowing bots, in the wake of it and Facebook being investigated for allowing bots that might have influenced their countryâs presidential election.
Iâve warned about Facebook bots reaching an epidemic level in 2014 and those who follow this blog know how frustrating it has been to have them removed, even in 2017. Facebookâs people tend not to recognize what any average netizen would, which suggests to me that theyâre desperate to keep their user numbers artificially highâeven after getting busted for lying about them, when researchers discovered there were actually fewer people in certain demographics than Facebook claimed it could reach. (That desperation, incidentally, could be the reason the company lies about malware detection on websites.)
Twitter has had a bot problem from the start, as itâs very easy for someone to create an automated account. They tended not to bother me too much, as I followed back humans. However, now I read that some netizens developed a tool that would identify neo-Nazis, only to have Twitter ban it.
Even under Twitterâs own rules, these accounts impersonate others, at the least by stealing profile photographs from real people. Yet according to journalist Yair Rosenberg in The New York Times today, who said he had received âthe second-most abuse of any Jewish journalist on Twitter during the campaign cycle,â Twitter, it seems, is fine with this.
âThese bigots are not content to harass Jews and other minorities on Twitter; they seek to assume their identities and then defame them.
âThe con goes like this: The impersonator lifts an online photo of a Jew, Muslim, African-American or other minority â typically one with clear identifying markers, like a yarmulke-clad Hasid or a woman in hijab. Using that picture as a Twitter avatar, the bigot then adds ethnic and progressive descriptors to the bio: âJewish,â âZionist,â âMuslim,â âenemy of the alt-right.ââ
The account would then send out bigoted Tweets in order to defame the group of people that their profile photo or name suggested they belonged to.
A developer, Neal Chandra, created a tool to unmask neo-Nazis, and the program went on Twitter to alert people that their discussions had been interrupted by an impostor. However, these accounts began mass-reporting the bot, says Rosenberg, and Twitter ultimately took their side.
This is exactly like Facebook refusing to remove bots and spammers, even after users have reported them. Chandraâs tool does the same thing in alerting people to fake accounts (which, like Facebook’s, steal someone’s image), albeit in automated fashion, yet again fake accounts have won.
I find this particularly disturbing at a time when both companies are being questioned by their government: youâd think they would hold back on tools that actually helped them do their jobs and ensured their T&Cs were being complied with. This either speaks to Twitterâs and Facebookâs sheer arrogance, or their utter stupidity.
These platforms will stand or fall by their stated ideals, and Twitter is genuinely failing its users with this latest.
It really is like someone coming to a company saying, âI will solve one of your biggest problems, one that a lot of your customers complain the most about, free of charge,â and being trespassed from the premises.
Iâve quit updating my private Facebook wall (though others continue to tag me and I allow those on my wall), and I wonder if Twitter is next. I reckon weâve passed peak Twitter, and going to 280 charactersâsomething I was once told by a Twitter VP would never happenâseems like the sort of scrambling that went on at Altavista and Excite when they realized Google had them beat for search.
Iâve defended this platform because I believe the charges levelled against it by some are unfair: itâs not filled with angry people who want to politicize and divide, if you choose to follow decent ones back. I donât see much of that in my Tweetstream, and when I do, I might choose to ignore it or, in some cases, unfollow those accounts.
But if Twitter continues to make dick moves with its policies and practices, then we may feel that our values no longer align with theirs.
In 2017, Twitter only really worked properly for 11 minutes.
Thereâs a lot of work in branding that shows that people choose to support brands that express their values, and that corporate social responsibility is one of the ways to make that connection. Twitter is going the right way in alienating users. Could it be the next one to go, as Mastodon picks up the slack? Sooner or later, one of the alternatives, services which let you keep your identity, something that users are getting increasingly concerned about, is going to get a critical mass of users, and both Twitter and Facebook should fear this.
Tags: 2017, bigotry, California, equality, media, politics, prejudice, racism, social media, social networking, software, Techcrunch, The New York Times, Twitter, USA Posted in business, culture, internet, social responsibility, technology, USA | 5 Comments »
15.12.2017
Interesting to get this perspective on âBig Techâ from The Guardian, on how itâs become tempting to blame the big Silicon Valley players for some of the problems we have today. The angle Moira Weigel takes is that there needs to be more democracy in the system, where workers need to unite and respecting those who shape the technologies that are being used.
I want to add a few far simpler thoughts.
At the turn of the century, our branding profession was under assault from No Logo and others, showing that certain brands were not what they were cracked up to be. Medinge Group was formed in part because we, as practitioners, saw nothing wrong with branding per se, and that the tools could be used for good. Not everyone was Enron or Nike. There are Patagonia and Dilmah. That led to the original brand manifesto, on what branding should accomplish. (I was generously given credit for authoring this at one point, but I was simply the person who put the thoughts of my colleagues into eight points. In fact, we collectively gathered our ideas into eight groups, so I canât even take credit for the fact there are eight points.)
In 2017, we may look at Ăberâs sexism or Facebookâs willingness to accept and distribute malware-laden ads, and charge tech with damaging the fabric of society. Those who dislike President Trump in the US want someone to blame, and Facebookâs and Googleâs contributions to their election in 2016 are a matter of record. But itâs not that online advertising is a bad thing. Or that social media are bad things. The issue is that the players arenât socially responsible: none of them exist for any other purpose than to make their owners and shareholders rich, and the odd concession to not doing evil doesnât really make up for the list of misdeeds that these firms add to. Many of them have been recorded over the years on this very blog.
Much of what we have been working toward at Medinge is showing that socially responsible organizations actually do better, because they find accord with their consumers, who want to do business or engage with those who share their values; and, as Nicholas Ind has been showing in his latest book, Branding Inside Out, these players are more harmonious internally. In the case of Stella McCartney, sticking to socially responsible values earns her brand a premiumâand sheâs one of the wealthiest fashion designers in the world.
I just canât see some of the big tech players acting the same way. Google doesnât pay much tax, for instance, and the misuse of Adwords aside, there are allegations that it hasnât done enough to combat child exploitation and it has not been a fair player when it comes to rewarding and acknowledging media outlets that break the news, instead siding with corporate media. Google may have open-source projects out there, but its behaviour is old-school corporatism these days, a far cry from its first five years when even I would have said they were one of the good guys.
Facebookâs problems are too numerous to list, though I attempted to do so here, but it can be summed up as: a company that will do nothing unless it faces embarrassment from enough people in a position of power. Weâve seen it tolerate kiddie porn and sexual harassment, giving both a âpassâ when reported.
Yet, for all that they make, it would be reasonable to expect that they put more people on the job in places where it mattered. The notion that three volunteers monitor complaints of child exploitation videos at YouTube is ridiculous but, for anyone who has complained about removing offensive content online, instantly believable; why there were not more is open to question. Anyone who has ventured on to a Google forum to complain about a Google product will also know that inaction is the norm there, unless you happen to get to someone senior and caring enough. Similarly, increasing resources toward monitoring advertising, and ensuring that complaints are properly dealt with would be helpful.
Googleâs failure to remove content mills from its News is contributing to âfake newsâ, yet its method of combatting that appears to be taking people away from legitimate media and ranking corporate players more highly.
None of these are the actions of companies that want to do right by netizens.
As Weigel notes, thereâs a cost to abandoning Facebook and Google. But equally there are opportunities if these firms cannot provide the sort of moral, socially responsible leadership modern audiences demand. In my opinion, they do not actually command brand loyaltyâa key ingredient of brand equityâif true alternatives existed.
Duck Duck Go might only have a fraction of the traffic Google gets in search, but despite a good mission its results arenât always as good, and its search index is smaller. But we probably should look to it as a real alternative to search, knowing that our support can help it grow and attract more investment. There is room for a rival to Google News that allows legitimate media and takes reports of fake news sites more seriously. If social media are democratizingâand there are signs that they are, certainly with some of the writings by Doc Searls and Richard MacManusâthen there is room for people to form their own social networks that are decentralized, and where we hold the keys to our identity, able to take them wherever we please (Hubzilla is a prime example; you can read more about its protocol here). The internet can be a place which serves society.
It might all come back to education; in fact, we might even say Confucius was right. If youâre smart enough, youâll see a positive resource and decide that it would not be in the best interests of society to debase it. Civility and respect should be the order of the day. If these tools hadnât been used by the privileged few to line their pockets at the expense of the manyâor, for that matter, the democratic processes of their nationsâwouldnât we be in a better place? They capitalized on divisions in society (and even deepened them), when there is far more for all of us to gain if we looked to unity. Why should we allow the concentration of power (and wealth) to rest at the top of tech’s food chain? Right now, all I see of Google and Facebookâs brands are faceless, impersonal and detached giants, with no human accountability, humming on algorithms that are broken, and in Facebookâs case, potentially having databases that have been built on so much, that it doesnât function properly any more. Yet they could have been so much more to society.
Not possible to unseat such big players? We might have thought once that Altavista would remain the world’s biggest website; who knew Google would topple it in such a short time? But closer to home, and speaking for myself, I see The Spinoff and Newsroom as two news media brands that engender far greater trust than Fairfax’s Stuff or The New Zealand Herald. I am more likely to click on a link on Twitter if I see it is to one of the newer sites. They, too, have challenged the status quo in a short space of time, something which I didn’t believe would be possible a decade ago when a couple of people proposed that I create a locally owned alternative.
We donât say email is bad because there is spam. We accept that the good outweighs the bad and, for the most part, we have succeeded in building filters that get rid of the unwanted. We donât say the web is bad because it has allowed piracy or pornography; its legitimate uses far outweigh its shady ones. But we should be supporting, or trying to find, new ways to advertise, innovate and network (socially or otherwise). Right now, Iâm willing to bet that the next big thing (and it might not even be one player, but a multitude of individuals working in unison) is one where its values are so clear and transparent that they inspire us to live our full potential. I remain an optimist when it comes to human potential, if we set our sights on making something better.
Tags: 2010s, 2017, advertising, book, brand equity, branding, California, Confucianism, corporate social responsibility, CSR, Doc Searls, Duck Duck Go, Facebook, fashion, Google, Hubzilla, innovation, internal branding, Kogan Page, media, Medinge Group, Nicholas Ind, politics, Richard MacManus, Silicon Valley, social media, society, Stella McCartney, technology, transparency, unity, USA Posted in branding, business, internet, leadership, politics, publishing, social responsibility, technology, USA | 3 Comments »
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