Facebook: Kiwi lives don’t matter

As someone who read Confucius as a young man, and was largely raised on his ideas, free speech with self-regulation is my default position—though when it becomes apparent that people simply aren’t civilized enough to use it, then you have to consider other solutions.    We have Facebook making statements saying they are ‘Standing Against […]

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The Facebook and Twitter purge: you can violate policies by doing nothing

I’m not familiar with The Anti-Media, but New Zealand-based lawyer Darius Shahtahmasebi, who contributed to the site, notes that it was caught up in the Facebook and Twitter purge last week.    The Anti-Media, he notes, had 2·17 million Facebook followers. ‘Supposedly, Facebook wants you to believe that 2.17 million people voluntarily signed up to […]

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Facebook’s censorship purge is a joke

Facebook has continued its purge of pages and individual accounts, and proudly proclaimed, ‘Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior’.    Long-time readers of this blog will know why I think this is a massive joke.    If I can find 277 […]

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UK picks on independent Tweeters, falsely calls them Russian bots and trolls

If you were one of the people caught up with ‘The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!’ and a selection of Cold War paranoia resurrected by politicians and the media, then surely recent news would make you start to think that this was a fake-news narrative?    Ian56 on Twitter was recently named by […]

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The big difference with the internet of the ’90s: it served the many, not the few

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.   There’s a significant difference between the internet of the 1990s and that of today. As Facebook comes under fire for deleting the “napalm girl” photograph from the Vietnam […]

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If Facebook says you have malware, do not download their program—here’s a way around it

  An interesting weekend on Facebook. Despite regaining access, I’m not allowed to post links (with the accusation that my computer is infected—see above), and after considerable research, I know this to be completely untrue. The Facebook malware accusations are targeted at certain users and, from the tiny sample of four that have responded to […]

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An expatriate’s view of Occupy Central and what Hong Kong wants

Equal access: an audio recording of this blog post can be found here. I know I’m not alone among expats watching the Occupy Central movements in Hong Kong. More than the handover in 1997, it’s been making very compelling live television, because this isn’t about politicians and royalty, but about everyday Hong Kong people.   […]

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