|
Share this page
Quick links
Add feed 
|
|
The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘Facebook’
24.03.2023
The Hon Debbie Ngarewa-Packer MP was right when she questioned our governmentâs decision to ban Tiktok from parliamentary devices.
If itâs about foreigners getting hold of data, then why not ban Facebook and Instagram?
Last I looked, Tiktok had not, unlike Facebook, been party to any genocides.
Parliamentary Services says at least Meta is American and operates in line with our values. So being party to genocide is in line with our values? So information leaking to the likes of Cambridge Analyticaâand its effects on democracyâare in line with our values?
Itâs all about hopping on an occidental bandwagon over unproven claims that Tiktok hands stuff over to the PRC.
And if it is proven, then let us see the proof.
Letâs say our government doesnât have the proof but itâs using Edward Snowdenâs revelations about the US as a proxy of how data from social media companies wind up with their governments. Thatâs actually a fair point and we should expect that itâs probably happening. We can make a pretty reasoned guess that it is.
In that case, itâs all the more reason we should consider banning the lot of them, not just Tiktok. Keep our data in our country.
Remember, we’re not banning any of these platforms from private citizens, just what can be used by our Parliament. If it’s about private citizens, I’d be advising that we take out known disinformation ones, which are often funded or manipulated by shady overseas backers or even nation states. They’re literally placing New Zealanders in harm’s way. That would mean a pretty wide net, too, and I imagine no one in power would want to wield that responsibility. Or that the penny will drop, as it usually does, 10 years too late. (Hello, readers of 2033!)
Literally as I was completing the title and meta (small m) description fields for this, this Mastodon post from an ethics’ professor appeared.
In case it ever disappears, she writes:
As your resident TikTok micro-celebrity + tech ethics/policy professor, I have a lot of feelings about the proposed TikTok ban. I think that this statement from Evan Greer of Fight for the Future articulates some points well. If the sole argument is “but China” I would very much like to see something beyond speculation. And if it’s just not that, then go after Meta too. And either way maybe you could pass LITERALLY ANY DATA PRIVACY LAWS.
The image is from the Fight for the Future website, and the text reads:
âIf it werenât so alarming, it would be hilarious that US policymakers are trying to âbe tough on Chinaâ by acting exactly like the Chinese government. Banning an entire app used by millions of people, especially young people, LGBTQ folks, and people of color, is classic state-backed Internet censorship,â said Evan Greer (she/her), director of Fight for the Future. âTikTok uses the exact same surveillance capitalist business model of services like YouTube and Instagram. Yes, itâs concerning that the Chinese government could abuse data that TikTok collects. But even if TikTok were banned, they could access much of the same data simply by purchasing it from data brokers, because there are almost no laws in place to prevent that kind of abuse. If policymakers want to protect Americans from surveillance, they should advocate for strong data privacy laws that prevent all companies (including TikTok!) from collecting so much sensitive data about us in the first place, rather than engaging in what amounts to xenophobic showboating that does exactly nothing to protect anyone.â
Tags: 2023, Aotearoa, China, Douyin, Facebook, government, Instagram, law, New Zealand, privacy, technology, Tiktok, USA, xenophobia
Posted in China, globalization, internet, New Zealand, politics, technology, USA | No Comments »
21.02.2023
Two great pieces by Cory Doctorow came my way today on Mastodon.
The first is an incredibly well argued piece about why people leave social networks. Facebook and Twitter wonât be immune, just as MySpace and Bebo werenât.
One highlight:
As people and businesses started to switch away from the social media giants, inverse network effects set in: the people you stayed on MySpace to hang out with were gone, and without them, all the abuses MySpace was heaping on you were no longer worth it, and you left, too. Once you were gone, that was a reason for someone else to leave. The same forces that drove rapid growth drove rapid collapse.
The second is about all the hype surrounding chatbots, and Google and Bing. Cory begins:
The really remarkable thing isn’t just that Microsoft has decided that the future of search isn’t links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a chatbot who happens to be a habitual liarâeven more remarkable is that Google agrees.
Microsoft has nothing to lose. It’s spent billions on Bing, a search-engine no one voluntarily uses. Might as well try something so stupid it might just work. But why is Google, a monopolist who has a 90+% share of search worldwide, jumping off the same bridge as Microsoft?
He goes on, analysing how Google is not really an innovator, and most things it has have come to it through acquisition. They wouldnât know a clever innovation if they saw it.
And:
ChatGPT and its imitators have all the hallmarks of a tech fad, and are truly the successor to last season’s web3 and cryptocurrency pump-and-dumps.
I had better not quote any more as itâs way more important you visit both these pieces and see the entire arguments. Farewell to Big Social then.
Though if Cory is right, and my own thoughts have come close, then is there any point to web searching if these chatbots are going to unleash machine-authored crap, complementing some of the already godawful spun sites out there? Search engines should be finding ways of weeding out spun and AI-authored junk, rather than being in league with themâbecause that could mean the death of the web.
Or maybe just the death of Google and Bing, because Mojeek might be there to save us all.
Tags: 2023, AI, Bing, Cory Doctorow, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, search engines, social media, social networking, Twitter
Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
09.12.2022
Apparently the New Zealand government says Big Tech will pay a âfair priceâ for local news content under new legislation.
Forget the newcomers like Stuff and The New Zealand Herald. The Fairfax Press, as the former was, was still running âThe internet is scaryâ stories at the turn of the century. What will Big Tech pay my firm? Any back pay? We have been in this game a long, long time. A lot longer than the newbies.
And what is the definition of âsharingâ?
Because Google could be in for a lot.
Think about it this way: Googleâs ad unit has enabled a lot of fake sites, scraped sites, spun sites, malware hosts, and the like, since anyone can sign up to be a publisher and start hosting their ads.
While Google will argue that they have nothing to do with the illegitimate usage of their services, some might look at it very differently.
Take the tort of negligence. To me this is classic Donahue v. Stevenson [1932] AC 562 territory and as we’re at 90 years since Lord Atkinsâ judgement, it offers us some useful pointers.
Lord Atkin stated, âYou must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour. Who, then, in law is my neighbour? The answer seems to beâpersons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question.â
If you open up advertising to all actors (Google News also opens itself up to splogs), then is it foreseeable that unethical parties and bad faith actors will sign up? Yes. Is it foreseeable that they will host content illegally? Yes. Will this cause harm to the original copyright owner? Yes.
We also know a lot of these pirate sites are finding their content through Google News. Some have even told me so, since I tend to start with a softly, softly approach and send a polite request to a pirate.
Iâd say a case in negligence is already shaping up.
If Google didnât open up its advertising to all and sundry, then there would have been far fewer negative consequencesâletâs not even get into surveillance, which is also a direct consequence of their policy and conduct.
Do companies that are online owe a duty of care to internet users? Iâd say this is reasonable. I imagine some smaller firms might find it more difficult to get rid of a hacker, but overall, this seems reasonable.
Was this duty of care breached? Was there causation? By not vetting people signing up to the advertising programme, then yes. Pre-Google, ad networks were very careful, and I had the impression websites were approved on a case-by-case, manually reviewed basis. The mess the web is in, with people gaming search engines, with fake news sites (which really started as a way of making money), with advertising making pennies instead of dollars and scam artists all over the show, can all be traced to Google helping them monetize this conduct. There’s your obiter dicta right there. (Thanks to Amanda for remembering that term after all these years.)
Google hasnât taken reasonable care, by design. And itâs done this for decades. And damages must be in the milliards to all legitimate publishers out there who have lost traffic to these unethical websites, who have seen advertising revenue plummet because of how Google has depressed the prices and how it feeds advertising to cheap websites that have cost their owners virtually nothing to run.
Make of this what you will. Now that governments are waking up after almost two decades, maybe Big Tech is only agreeing because it fears the rest of us will figure out that they owe way, way more than the pittance theyâll pay out under these legislative schemes?
Anyone with enough legal nous to give this a bash on behalf of the millions of legitimate publishers, past and present, directly harmed by Google and other Big Tech companiesâ actions?
Tags: 1932, 2020s, 2022, advertising, Aotearoa, Big Tech, copyright, copyright law, Doubleclick, Facebook, Google, law, legislation, negligence, New Zealand, publishing, tort law, UK
Posted in business, internet, media, New Zealand, publishing, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
21.11.2022
Nathan Griffiths finally answers why Facebook used to freeze on the 1st of each month. I think his theory is very plausible. Now I know, after over a decade!
Meanwhile, I see CBS News has suspended its Twitter account (after the likes of Balenciaga deleted theirs altogether). This was before Donald Trump was let back on after Musk (whose followers are probably 70 per cent bot) ran a poll approving of the former president’s return to what must now be called OnlyKlans. (MySpaceX seems passĂ© now.)
CBS News’s words: ‘In light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform.’
It’s still live on Facebook, so I guess the genocide of Rohingya Muslims and abundant misinformation are fine.
We’ve already had an account be temporarily suspended over on Mastodon.art but there’s a very reasonable moderator there and the appeal was granted within hours. You can read up on this over at Lucire, which is now on a fashion-friendly instance at fashionsocial.host. (The art account remains open, probably to post covers and photography on, a bit like Lucireâs old Tumblr account.)
With all this fediverse talk, what a pity my Hubzilla account has gone. I was there in the 2010s, probably around the time I signed up for Mastodon in 2017, possibly before. I did get myself a Pixelfed this time, so spot me at [email protected], and Lucire is at [email protected]. Will I use them? Time will tell, but possibly not. I’d still prefer focusing on our own sites, unless we can figure out how to bring this in-house.
Tags: 2022, CBS, computing, Facebook, fediverse, Hubzilla, internet, Mastodon, Pixelfed, social media, technology, Twitter, USA
Posted in business, internet, media, technology, USA | No Comments »
13.11.2022
I canât find the original toot on Mastodon but I was led to this piece in the MIT Technology Review by Chris Stokel-Walker, âHereâs how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeksâ.
As Iâve cut back on my Twitter usage, I havenât witnessed any issues, but it does highlight the efforts Big Tech goes to in order to maintain their sites. If anything, it explains why Facebook failed so regularly and so often, as documented on this blog.
The prediction? An anonymous engineer tells the Review:
âThings will be broken. Things will be broken more often. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. Things will be broken in more severe ways,â he says. âEverything will compound until, eventually, itâs not usable.â
Twitterâs collapse into an unusable wreck is some time off, the engineer says, but the telltale signs of process rot are already there. It starts with the small things: âBugs in whatever part of whatever client theyâre using; whatever service in the back end theyâre trying to use. Theyâll be small annoyances to start, but as the back-end fixes are being delayed, things will accumulate until people will eventually just give up.â
I wonder if they will give up, since Iâve encountered Facebook bugs almost since the day I joined, and there are still people there. In fact, like tech experts, some fellow users even blame me, saying that I encounter more bugs than anyone they know. I doubt this: I just remember the bugs better than they do. Weâve all been subject to the well publicized global outagesâjust that the majority donât remember them.
While one contact of mine disagrees, I think Twitter wonât collapse on its own. Mastodon could be an alternative, encouraging people away, just as Google enticed Altavista users over; or Facebook saw to the end of Myspace. There seems to be a new era coming, sweeping away the old, especially as Big Tech falters. Twitter has lost a huge chunk of its staff, and Facebook has slashed its ranks by 11,000. Mojeek has emerged as a credible, privacy-respecting alternative to Googleâas Microsoft Bing collapses, taking with it its proxies, Duck Duck Go, Ecosia, Yahoo! and others. The webâs future feels more open, more optimistic, with these technologies spurring civilized dialogue and sparking ideas. It could almost be time to bring back the day-glo on a Wired cover.
On the other hand, maybe Twitter can collapse on its own, with a fake blue-tick EIi LiIIy, looking to the world like Eli Lilly, announcing free insulin and sending Eli Lillyâs share price tumbling, wiping milliards off its value. With advertisers pulling out (little wonder if their Twitter account managers are fired) it may look very different come Christmas.
Tags: 2020s, 2022, Big Tech, Bing, Facebook, internet, Mastodon, Mojeek, technology, Twitter, World Wide Web
Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
06.11.2022
Warner Bros.
Even though Twitter is now in its MySpaceX era, I wonât shut my account. I have scripts that run through it, and I donât wish for some schmuck to come in later and claim my username. Mastodon has taken off this week, my Twitter notifications are at a low, and as I cross-post between them, Mastodon is likely going to become my main social network.
But I get those who donât wish to leave outright. I have a 5,555-strong following including my personal interests on Twitter. However, it does seem that once a social medium becomes a personal-interest one, ironically I lose interest in it! It was the case with Instagram, and Pinterest never held my interest for that long because it encouraged you to post and browse based on your interests! Maybe itâs me, but I prefer to enjoy my interests in the real world, or using them to build up my own sites and publications, not someone elseâs.
Iâm not going to criticize anyone who chooses to stay on a platform for longer than its sell-by date, because that would make me a hypocrite.
Facebook
I donât hide my disdain about Facebook, but it took me over a yearânearly twoâbetween the time it forced me to download their malware (well, they said it was a malware scanner, but there were plenty of suspicious things about it) in 2016 and updating my wall for the last time in 2017. That incident did force me to reconsider using the site, but I hung in there, in part to investigate what was going on, but also because I was still fooled into thinking it could be good for business and our own site traffic. (Those algorithms will see to throttling any links for your work, as they have been doing for over a decade.)
But in late 2017, I wrote a farewell post and stopped updating my wall. People still tagged me, and those went up, but I havenât posted anything on my own wall since. Some work pages still get the odd update but I canât even remember when was the last time I headed in to do anything on my public page. I have frequented the occasional group and looked after client pages but those visits are infrequent.
Instagram
I began using Instagram more for cars and model cars, but by the end of 2019 I had had enough, even for things I was interested in. There were too many ads, and Instagram was still collecting (laughably incorrect) interests on me despite opting out. I went from a multiple-post-per-day user to someone whoâd update with a month in between, then a quarter, and I barely bother now. The last time I visited, my most favoured filters had vanished as well, a long string of feature removals that began with the maps years before. There just wasnât a point to the site any more. But it still took a long time between my initial boredom and frustration with the site to what is currently my last post. Might I go on once more? Maybe, to do a more fitting farewell or to test something.
It also didnât help that Instagram locked Lucire out in 2021 for a week. Lucireâs âGram is still active, but not that active. Weâve never really been bothered with social media as a company, and thanks to Zoho Social, I donât even need to go to Instagram in order to post to it.
Twitter
Twitter also locked Lucire out in 2021 and it took a threat addressed to their lawyers to get that reinstated. Their proper processes never worked, nor does knowing a senior member of staff at Twitter UK.
But it is a place thatâs polarizing and unpleasant. Iâm all for diverse viewpoints but Iâd like the other party to consider mine as much as I consider theirs. That doesnât happen as often any more. And with Mastodon holding up (only one abusive message so far, unprompted, from a total stranger in Portland, Oregon) why would we stay on Twitter? But itâs only November 2022, Musk has only taken ownership, and I saw the AprilâMay 2022 influx eventually go quiet, too.
Nevertheless, I feel Twitterâs days as my main social media site are coming to a close, with cross-posting between Mastodon and Twitter a breeze. Before, Iâd post mainly on Twitter and let things flow to Mastodon, and check both. In April I began originating posts on both sites. Now in November, there doesnât seem to be much call to originate anything on Twitter, with my own follower count going from 330-odd to over 550. It may be a tenth of what I have at Twitter, but the unpleasantness is gone, for now. My regret is that my personal interestsâin the last year Twitter became my place for interacting with other car enthusiasts, especially in Ireland and Scotlandâarenât really on Mastodon, but it follows the earlier patterns. Once personal interests become a big part, for some reason I donât feel I need the fix any more.
Then there were Tumblr and NewTumbl, discussed in earlier posts, where censorship based around some 1950s US puritanical standards became problems.
Overall, as someone who owns sites, I would prefer to create something for my readers. That gives me an infinitely bigger thrill than participating in most social media threads. And if I were to participate in social media, it seems fairer to be in the federated system, owning my own data, than being part of a plutocratâs plaything where you hand him a perpetual licence to your mahi.
Tags: 2010s, 2022, Big Tech, communications, culture, Facebook, history, Instagram, Mastodon, social media, technology, Tumblr, Twitter, website
Posted in business, culture, interests, internet, publishing, technology | No Comments »
08.10.2022
If you think some of us were being uppity about New Zealand Chinese Language Week, howâs this for a real-life report?
Speak Cantonese, get banned from a social media platform.
Thatâs whatâs happening in China right now. And I had already mentioned schoolchildren being told off for using their reo.
The Google Translate translation is actually pretty good for a change, if you canât read Chinese.
And here we are in New Zealand, kowtowing (derived from a Cantonese word, incidentally) to the Chinese Communist Party with its policy.
Tags: 2022, Aotearoa, China, Chinese, Chinese Communist Party, culture, Douyin, Facebook, language, New Zealand, social media, Tiktok
Posted in China, culture, internet, New Zealand, technology | No Comments »
02.07.2022
As embedding from Mastodon is not working tonight, I’ll copy and paste Per Axbom’s post:
Nice bit of reporting from Swedish Radio. They built an online fake pharmacy and activated Facebook advertising tools. Thousands of simulated visits to the pharmacy were made each day, and the reporters could see all the sensitive, personal information being stored by Facebook.
Facebook sent no warnings to the pharmacy, despite saying they have tools in place to prevent this from happening.
A few weeks ago they revealed how this was happening with real pharmacies.
He links this article from Sveriges Radio.
So, how long has it been since Cambridge Analytica? We can safely conclude that this is all by design, as it has been from the start.
Tags: 2020s, 2022, Facebook, media, privacy, social media, Sweden
Posted in internet, media, Sweden, technology, USA | No Comments »
16.05.2022
Itâd be unfair if I didnât note that I managed to see a âCreate postâ button today on Lucireâs Facebook page for the first time in weeks. I went crazy manually linking everything that was missed between April 25 and today.
Maybe I got it back as it would look even worse for Facebook, which still live-streams massacres as a matter of course in spite of its âpromisesâ after March 15, 2019, if white supremacist murderers had more functions available to them on the site than honest business people.
The upshot still remains: get your supporters going to your website as much as possible, and wind down whatever presence you have on Facebook. You shouldnât depend on it, because you never know when your page might disappear or when you lose access. Both are very real possibilities.
Bob Hoffmanâs newsletter was gold this week. It usually is, especially as he touches on similar topics to me, but at a far higher level.
This weekâs highlights: âBlogweasel calculations indicate that adtech-based targeting adds at least 100% to the cost of an online ad. In order for it to be more efficient it has to be more than twice as effective. I’m slightly skeptical.
âAn article in AppleInsider this week reported that, “Apple has revealed to advertisers that App Store search ads served in a non-targeted fashion are just as effective as those relying on targeting via first-party data.”â
Indeed, ads that might use the page content to inform their contents (contextual advertising) work even better. Why? The publisher might actually get paid for them.
Iâve seen so many ads not display at all, including on our own sites. Now, our firm doesnât use trackers, but we know the ad networks we use do. And for whatever daft reason, there are ad networks that wonât show content if you block trackers. (Stuff is even worse: their home and contentsâ pages donât even display if you block certain cookies.)
If we went back to how things were before tracking got this bad, the ads would be less creepy, and I bet more of them would displayâand that helps us publishers pay the bills. If you donât like them, there are still ad blockers, but out of my own interests, I would prefer you didnât.
I came across Drew Magarryâs 2021 article, âThereâs No Middle Class of Cars Anymoreâ, in Road & Trackâs online edition.
âYouâre either driving a really nice new car, a deeply unsatisfying new car, or a very old used car.â Drew notes that there are nasty base models, and also fully loaded ones, and the former âtreat you like absolute shit, and everyone on the road knows it.â
It seems whatâs happening is that the middleâthe âGLsâ of this world, as opposed to the Ls and GLSsâis getting squeezed out.
It says something about our society and its inequality.
Interestingly, itâs not as bad here with base models, and that might reflect our society. But look at the US, as Drew does, or the European top 10, where cheap cars like the Dacia Sandero do exceptionally well.
This goes back many years, and Iâve seen plenty of base models in US rental fleets that would make a New Zealand entry-level car seem sumptuous.
Finally, the legacy pages are reasserting themselves on Autocade. When the latest version was installed on the server and the stats were reset, the top 20 included all the models that appeared on the home page, as Mediawiki recommenced its count. Search-engine spiders were visiting the site and hitting those the most.
Fast forward two months and the top 20 are exclusively older pages, as visits from regular people coming via search engines outnumber spiders.
Until last week, the most visited page since the March reset was the Renault MĂ©gane II. It seems the Ford Taunus 80 has overtaken the MĂ©gane II. Peugeotâs 206+ (207 in some markets) follows, then the Ford Fiesta Mk VII and Renault MĂ©gane III.
Before the reset, the Ford Fiesta Mk VII was the top model page, followed by the Taunus 80, then the MĂ©gane II, Opel Astra J, and Nissan Sunny (B14).
Probably no one cares, but as itâs my blog, hereâs the old, just before the switchover:
And hereâs where we are as of tonight:
You can see the ranking for yourself, as the stats are public, here.
Tags: 2022, advertising, Autocade, Bob Hoffman, Dacia, Facebook, inequality, JY&A Media, marketing, Mediawiki, privacy, society, technology
Posted in business, cars, internet, marketing, publishing, technology | No Comments »
08.05.2022
Last nightâs hour-waster was chatting to Facebook Business Support. No, thatâs unfair. I was actually assigned an incredibly good rep who took me seriously, and concluded that Facebook did indeed have a bug which means, of all the pages I can manage, the one for Lucire is alone in not allowing me, or any of its admins, to do anything. How coincidental, after losing Instagram and Twitter for periods during 2021.
Ironically, one editor canâof course someone who is supposed to have fewer privileges can do more. Such is Facebook.
A few things I learned. Thereâs a Meta Business Suite, which a whole bunch of pages got shoved into, whether you wanted it or not. My public page is there, for instance. It seems if you have Facebook and Instagram accounts for the same thing, youâre going to be in there.
Despite the two-factor authentication discussed in the previous post, I actually can get into the Business Suite, via another page I administer for a friend. From there I can get to Lucireâs tools.
I donât need two-factor authentication for any of the other pages in there, including my own, and have full access.
Trisha, or Trish as she said I could call her, walked me through the steps, and asked me to get to the Suite page. Then she asked me to click âCreate adâ, and I get this:
She asked me to check the account quality, and of course there are no issues:
She wrote: âThanks for letting me know. It’s weird because I have checked all your assets here and it looks good. But, here’s what I suggest, Jack. We’ll need to report this to our Internal team so they can investigate. You might experience a bug or glitch.â
I theorized: âJust so you know, this page dates back to 2007 so maybe it is so old that Facebookâs servers canât handle it?â
It wasnât something she responded to, as she stayed on-subject, but itâs a theory worth entertaining, as it wouldnât be the first time Iâve witnessed this.
So, for now, the one team member who can still go on Facebook for us posted this at my request:
I doubt theyâll ever fix it, and two years ago I did say I wouldnât really bother if Facebook went buggy and prevented us from updating again. Clearly I am bothering, as I know we have readers who use Facebook. But I have very little faith this will ever be fixed, since I have seen other reported bugs (some covered on this blog) get ignored for years, and this isn’t a fleeting bug, from what I can make out.
The lesson, as I have probably hinted at more than once, is never rely on a Big Tech service. The sites are so unwieldy that they get to a point where no one knows how to fix them. If earlier experiences are any indication, such as what I experienced at Vox, we have arrived at the end of Facebook pages.
Tags: 2020s, 2022, bug, bugs, Facebook, Lucire, publishing, social media, social networking
Posted in internet, publishing, technology | No Comments »
|
