For anyone who has followed my battles with bot-written and bot-based junk this year, this should come as no surprise: The UK riots were fuelled by the same kind of website, with the same raison d’être. This one was in Pakistan, where, sadly, some of the disinformation sites about me have come from. […]
Tag: journalism
The trouble with the two-horse-race narrative
Maybe what happened here over a decade ago doesn’t apply in the US today. But then maybe it does: the notion of the two-horse political race. When I stood, some media, notably the foreign-owned newspapers (as they were), were obsessed with it. Which made it tricky for the guy polling third (in real polls, not […]
Read More… from The trouble with the two-horse-race narrative
Why ad tracking is bad: it puts democracy in jeopardy
An excellent reminder from Don Marti on just why ad tracking is bad on the web: The tracking is not there to identify the individual (the data doesn’t have to be accurate) but to enable getting the highest-priced ad onto the cheapest possible site Cross-context tracking puts higher value and lower value sites into competition […]
Read More… from Why ad tracking is bad: it puts democracy in jeopardy
To our Sunday colleagues, you should still be on air
Above: Sunday host Miriama Kamo. [Originally published in Lucire] To our colleagues at Television New Zealand’s Sunday, including Lucire alum Mava Moayyed, we bid you godspeed and good luck. Your programme didn’t deserve cancellation. This country needs proper, long-form current affairs, and with Sunday airing its final episode [on Sunday] night, this has come […]
Read More… from To our Sunday colleagues, you should still be on air
Do you really want a Nazi brand association?
Dan Gillmor wrote: I share Dan’s view. Not only that, why would anyone want their brand—corporate or personal—to be tarnished by Musk and his simplified swastika? Yes, my account is still there, inactive (and locked), making sure no one takes the handle. That’s just prudent, because the one thing worse than having your […]
Read More… from Do you really want a Nazi brand association?
A decade after Google, Meta dishes out fake cybersecurity warnings
There’s nothing original with Big Tech It shouldn’t matter what Little Green Footballs’ politics are, as long as its blogger, Charles Foster Johnson, isn’t advocating anything hateful, and from what I can see of his current stance, he doesn’t. However, he’s found his blog links are being cancelled on Facebook. Links to posts going […]
Read More… from A decade after Google, Meta dishes out fake cybersecurity warnings
The crunch time media face is nothing new
Talking Points Memo showed the amounts programmatic advertising brought in to them over the last eight years. (The above graphic is from their card preview on Mastodon.) I’ve never been convinced of programmatic since no one in the ad business could ever explain it in plain language. I say just figure out what’s on […]
NPR leaving OnlyKlans: six months on, they barely felt a thing
How interesting to read in Nieman Reports that six months on, NPR has barely felt a thing after leaving OnlyKlans, the site formerly known as Twitter. NPR told its staff that its traffic has dropped by ‘a single percentage point’, according to Nieman Reports, and before that, traffic from OnlyKlans made up less than two […]
Read More… from NPR leaving OnlyKlans: six months on, they barely felt a thing
A second excellent piece by Eda Tang: where New Zealand Chinese Language Week gets its money
Eda Tang’s excellent piece revealing that New Zealand Chinese Language Week receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party came out last week, but unfortunately illness kept me from blogging about it properly. It was to have been my final post for September. Many of us suspected this from the start, […]
A celebration of Chinese languages by The Post
I take my hat off to Eda Tang of The Post (formerly The Dominion Post) for highlighting six Chinese New Zealanders and our reo tūpuna (ancestral languages). As many of us said last year (and for many years prior) during “Chinese Language Week” (NZCLW), it’s not all about Mandarin, a relatively new tongue that […]
Read More… from A celebration of Chinese languages by The Post