Two fantastic items in my Tweetstream today, the first from journalist Jehan Casinader, a New Zealander of Sri Lankan heritage, in Stuff.
Some highlights:
As an ethnic person, you can only enter (and stay in) a predominantly white space â like the media, politics or corporate leadership â if you play by the rules. And really, thereâs only one rule: blend in. Youâre expected to assimilate into the dominant way of thinking, acting and being âŠ
I sound like you. I make myself relatable to you. I communicate in a way that makes sense to you. I donât threaten you. I donât make you uncomfortable. And I keep my most controversial opinions to myself.
And:
Kiwis love stories about ethnic people who achieve highly: winning university scholarships, trying to cure diseases, inventing new technology or entering the political arena. These people are lauded for generating economic and social value for the country âŠ
We do not hear stories about ethnic people who work in thankless, low-skilled jobs â the refugees and migrants who stock our supermarket shelves, drive our taxis, pick our fruit, milk our cows, fill our petrol tanks, staff our hospitals and care for our elderly in rest homes.
Jehan says that now he is in a position of influence, heâs prepared to bring his Sri Lankan identity to the places he gets to visit, and hopes that everyone in Aotearoa is given respect ânot because of their ability to assimilateâ.
He was born here to new immigrants who had fled Sri Lanka, and I think there is a slight difference to those of us who came as children. Chief among this, at least for me, was my resistance to assimilation. Sure I enjoyed some of the same things other kids my age did: the Kentucky Fried Chicken rugby book, episodes of CHiPs, and playing tag, but because of various circumstances, as well as parents who calmly explained to me the importance of retaining spoken Cantonese at home, I constantly wore my Chineseness. I hadnât chosen to leave my birthplaceâthis was the decision of my parentsâso I hung on to whatever I could that connected me back to it.
I could contrast this to other Chinese New Zealanders I went to school with, many of whom had lost their native language because their parents had encouraged assimilation to get ahead. I canât fault themâmany of them are my dearest friendsâbut I was exposed to what Jehan wrote about from a young age.
It saddened me a lot because here were people who looked like me who I couldnât speak to in my mother tongue, and the only other student of Chinese extraction in my primary class who did speak her native language spoke Mandarinâwhich to many of my generation, certainly to those who did so little schooling before we left, find unintelligible.
At St Markâs, I had no issue. This was a school that celebrated differences, and scholastic achievement. (I am happy to say that sports and cultural activity are very much on the cards these days, too.) But after that, at one college, I observed what Jehan said: the Chinese New Zealanders who didnât rock the boat were safe buddies to have; those who were tall poppies were the target of the weak-minded, the future failures of our society. You just have to rise above it, and, if anything, it made me double-down on my characterâso much so that when I was awarded a half-scholarship to Scots, I found myself in familiar surroundings again, where differences were championed.
But you do indeed have to play the game. Want your company recognized? Then get yourself into the media. Issue releases just like the firms that were sending them to you as a member of the media. Donât bring your Chineseness into that, because you wonât get coverage. Jack Yan & Associates, and Lucire for that matter, always had a very occidental outlook, with my work taking me mostly to the US and Europe, with India only coming in at the end of the 2000sâbut then we were bound by the lingua franca of the old colonial power.
Despite my insistence on my own reo at home, and chatting every day to my Dad, I played the game that Jehan did when it came to work. I didnât as much when I ran for mayor, admittedlyâI didnât want voters to get a single-sided politician, but one who was his authentic selfâbut that also might explain why Stuffâs predecessor, which was at that stage owned by a foreign company, gave me next to no coverage the first time out. They werenât prepared to back someone who didnât fit their reader profile. The second time out, it still remained shockingly biased. Ironically the same publishing group would give me reasonably good coverage in Australia when I wasnât doing politics. Thatâs the price to pay for authenticity sometimes.
Jehan finishes his piece on a positive note and I feel he is right to. We still have issues as a nation, no doubt, but I think we embrace our differences more than we used to. There have been many instances where I have seen all New Zealanders rise up to condemn racism, regardless of their political bents. (What is interesting was I do recall one National MP still in denial, residing in fantasy-land, when I recalled a racist incidentâand this was after March 15, 2019!) People from all walks of life donated to my fund-raising when a friendâs car had a swastika painted on it. We have a Race Relationsâ Commissioner who bridges so many cultures effectivelyâa New Zealander of Taishanese extraction who speaks te reo MÄori and Englishâwho is visible, and has earned his mana among so many here. The fact that Jehanâs piece was even published, whereas in 2013 it would have been anathema to the local arm of Fairfax, is further reason to give me hope.
The second item? Have a watch of this. It’s largely in accord with my earlier post.
Well, that was a rather sycophantic interview with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, on Radio New Zealand, as the online encyclopĂŠdia turns 20.
So I was rather excited when a Tweeter said he was going to interview Wales and asked for questions from the public. I responded:
Why did your co-founder Larry Sanger accuse Wikipedia of being anti-expertise?
What are you doing to ensure that bad actors do not scam their way into senior editor positions?
Why is Wikipedia in English so much less reliable than Wikipedia in German or Japanese?
Letâs say theyâre not going to get asked. He wrote:
There's not really such a thing as a senior editor position. It is unlikely that a bad actor would make thousands of good edits just to get a reputation within the editor community only to then try to undermine the project. Openness means bad actors are identified quickly.
Semantics aside, are there not editors who rise up the ranks to have more editing privileges than others? They donât necessarily undermine the project within the Wikipedia domain. Happy to discuss more if youâre genuinely interested.
No reply. And of course there are senior editors: Wikipedians themselves use this term. I can only assume that it’s going to be another sycophantic interview. Why arenât some people willing to ask some hard ones here? I’m guessing that the only way tough questions are asked about tech is if a woman gets on to it (someone like Louise Matsakis or Sarah Lacy).
Thereâs plenty of evidence of all three of my positions, as documented here and elsewhere, and I didn’t even include a great question on bullying.
Another late-night calculation of COVID-19 cases as a proportion of total tests done, so the figures will be out of date again, and Iâve also discovered that the total testing numbers some countries are giving are out of date. The ones with asterisks below are those that havenât cited increased testing numbers (at least none that I can find; a search actually yielded lower and older figures in some cases), so I imagine the real percentages might be lower. The order of countries hasnât changed.
France 109,069 of 224,254 = 48·64%*
Spain 146,690 of 355,000 = 41·32%*
UK 55,242 of 266,694 = 20·71%
USA 400,549 of 2,082,443 = 19·23%
Italy 135,586 of 755,445 = 17·95%
Sweden 8,419 of 54,700 = 15·39%*
Switzerland 22,789 of 171,938 = 13·25%
Germany 109,178 of 918,460 = 11·88%
New Zealand 1,210 of 46,875 = 2·58%
Singapore 1,623 of 65,000 = 2·50%*
South Korea 10,384 of 477,304 = 2·18%
Australia 6,013 of 319,368 = 1·88%
Hong Kong 961 of 96,709 = 1·38%*
Taiwan 379 of 40,702 = 0·93%
I was buoyed by news on what some of us have cheekily dubbed The Ashley Bloomfield Show (the Ministry of Health director-general’s press conference) that we had only 29 new COVID-19 cases in the last 24 hours here. As a sporting nation I think we understand that you canât shirk when youâre playing the second half of the match. If anything, you need to go harder. By now I suspect many of us are finding the hand-washing and other advice second nature.
Hasn’t it been revealing to hear which journalists ask crappy questions at the Bloomfield press conference? Since the pressers are watched by a huge number of New Zealanders during lockdown, I think the scales have fallen from many eyes lately to see how the stories get edited and even editorialized. And which members of the media don’t seem to want to work with the good advice being given by our government, yet have nothing solid (e.g. other experts) to counter it with. In my opinion, it’s put TV1 in a good light, and shown its reasonable balance. It also reinforces that many of our talking heads are irrelevant (see below, from The Press in Christchurch). Science is saving the day and showing loud-mouthed opinions for what they are.
Now for something actually important beyond my first world problems. Journalist Suzie Dawson has a fantastic piece outlining how the smear of ‘serial rapist’ is part of the playbook used against senior members of Wikileaks. Her article is well worth reading, especially in light of how the mainstream media have spun the narrative against Julian Assange. He’s not alone: two other men have had campaigns launched against them, with no substantial evidence, thereby diminishing the seriousness of what rape is.
It is lengthy and well researched, but if you haven’t the time, at least consider the briefer post linked from here.
I’m finding it disturbing that some of the talking heads here we’ve seen are giving the Julian Assange story the same bias that much of the US mainstream media are. To me, it’s dangerous territory: it either shows that our media wish to be complicit with Anglo-American interests, that they do little more than repeat the UK Government’s official statements, that they lack any originality, or that they lack basic analytical skills expected of professional journalists. Or all of the above.
You don’t have to like Assange. You can find him rapey [even if the evidence doesn’t support thisâlink added] or creepy [and that’s subjective]. You don’t even have to respect Wikileaks. We can all disagree with whether we believe Wikileaks is a publication and Assange a journalist. But you should be also aware of how stories are being reported to paint a one-sided picture, and how this has been going on for seven years, with blatantly obvious factual omissions in all that time. Jonathan Cook sums it up incredibly well on his blog, and I recommend his piece.
The only major media outlet I have come across that is allowing commentators defending Assange is the Russian government-backed Russia Today.
Some of what Patrick Henningsen said in the wake of Assange’s arrest is already coming to pass, and confirms his suspicions that Assange will not get a fair trial.
The occident, especially the Anglosphere, cannot hold its head up high as a defender of basic human rights. It hasn’t been able to for quite some time with its interference over others’ sovereignty and its yielding to globalist multinationals at the expense of its own citizens. Now the rest of the world is watching this event and seeing how it’s desperate to crush one of its own to keep its wrongdoings from coming out. China, with its kidnappings of publishers and booksellers critical of the Communist Party, will simply say that the US and UK are pots calling the kettle black when this issue is raised in the future.
And given their willingness to join the throng, some of our media won’t be able to complain if any of our journalists are silenced using the same techniques in future.
PS.:It’s worth quoting Suzie Dawson on the word rapey and I now regret using it: ‘The term ârapeyâ is itself, offensive. With its use, the definition of rape is being willfully expanded into borderline meaninglessness and obscurity. As if there can be âracistyâ or âsexistyâ or âhomophobicyâ. There cannot. Rape is an absolute, and a serious crime against humanity. The term should not be callously invoked; watered down for the social convenience of he or she exercising the privilege inherently wielded when bastardising the language of the violated.’
Facebookâs woes over Cambridge Analytica have only prompted one reaction from me: I told you so. While I never seized upon this example, bravely revealed to us by whistleblower Christopher Wylie and reported by Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison of The Guardian, Facebook has shown itself to be callous about private data, mining preferences even after users have opted out, as I have proved on more than one occasion on this blog. They donât care what your preferences are, and for a long time changed them quietly when you werenât looking.
And itâs nothing new: in October 2010, Emily Steel wrote, in The Wall Street Journal, about a data firm called Rapleaf that harvested Facebook information to target political advertisements (hat tip here to Jack Martin Leith).
Facebook knew of a data breach years ago and failed to report it as required under law. The firm never acts, as we have seen, when everyday people complain. It only acts when it faces potential bad press, such as finally ceasing, after nearly five years, its forced malware downloads after I tipped off Wiredâs Louise Matsakis about them earlier this year. Soon after Louiseâs article went live, the malware downloads ceased.
Like all these problems, if the stick isnât big enough, Facebook will just hope things go away, or complain, as it did today, that itâs the victim. Sorry, youâre not. Youâve been complicit more than once, and violating user privacy, as I have charged on this blog many times, is part of your business practice.
In this environment, I am also not surprised that US$37,000 million has been wiped off Facebookâs value and CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw his net worth decline by US$5,000 million.
Those who kept buying Facebook shares, I would argue, were unreasonably optimistic. The writing surely was on the wall in January at the very latest (though I would have said it was much earlier myself), when I wrote, âAll these things should have been sending signals to the investor community a long time ago, and as weâve discussed at Medinge Group for many years, companies would be more accurately valued if we examined their contribution to humanity, and measuring the ingredients of branding and relationships with people. Sooner or later, the truth will out, and finance will follow what brand already knew. Facebookâs record on this front, especially when you consider how we at Medinge value brands and a companyâs promise-keeping, has been astonishingly poor. People do not trust Facebook, and in my book: no trust means poor brand equity.â
This sounds like my going back to my very first Medinge meeting in 2002, when we concluded, at the end of the conference, three simple words: âFinance is broken.â Itâs not a useful measure of a company, certainly not the human relationships that exist within. But brand has been giving us this heads-up for a long time: if you canât trust a company, then it follows that its brand equity is reduced. That means its overall value is reduced. And time after time, finance follows what brand already knew. Even those who tolerate dishonestyâand millions doâwill find it easy to depart from a product or service along with the rest of the mob. Thereâs less and less for them to justify staying with it. The reasons get worn down one by one: Iâm here because of my kidsâtill the kids depart; Iâm here because of my friendsâtill the friends depart. If you don’t create transparency, you risk someone knocking back the wall.
We always knew Facebookâs user numbers were bogus, considering how many bots there are on the system. It would be more when people wanted to buy advertising, and it would be less when US government panels charged with investigating Facebook were asking awkward questions. I would love to know how many people are really on there, and the truth probably lies between the two extremes. Facebook probably should revise its claimed numbers down by 50 per cent.
Itâs a very simplified analysisâof course brand equity is made up of far more than trustâand doubters will point to the fact Facebookâs stock had been rising through 2017.
But, as I said, finance follows brand, and Facebook is fairly under assault from many quarters. It has ignored many problems for over a decade, its culture borne of arrogance, and you can only do this for so long before people wise up. In the Trump era, with the US ever more divided, there were political forces that even Facebook could not ignore. Zuckerberg wonât be poor, and Facebook, Inc. has plenty of assets, so theyâre not going away. But Facebook, as we know it, isnât the darling that it was a decade ago, and what we are seeing, and what I have been talking about for years, are just the tip of the iceberg.
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
Techcrunch broke the news about Bahtiyar Duysak, the German who worked for Twitter who, on analysing one of US president Donald Trump’s Tweets, considered that he had broken the website’s T&Cs, and shut it down.
This blog post isn’t going to go in depth into the rights or wrongs of this. What it does illustrate, however, is how Google News serves up the news.
Remember I said that Google cozies up to corporate media these days? That even as recently as five years ago, if you broke the news, you got the hits, because Google News would rank you ahead of those others who followed you and possibly took your article?
I could only give my own example (at Lucire). But here’s another, where Techcrunch not only originated the story, its version is far superior to all those that followed. I think most of us would agree that the first and best should be ranked first. But look at the media names that appear. (One screen shot is from when I was logged in; the other when logged out. In neither case does Google rank Techcrunch at the top.)
I’m going to repeat something I said last month: there’s a gap in the market for a website that spiders news and serves the search results in meritorious fashion. It should also have a human team that can decide, initially, which media outlets should be considered, and potentially an AI that can learn how to pick the best.
That used to be Google News, but for years, it hasn’t been. And there are very negative consequences for the fourth estate and the societies served, including harming the incentive to create in-depth journalism.
Who will take up the challenge of creating a proper news spidering service using real sources, and treating us all the same regardless of one’s bank balance and influence?
Above: Good news, Newsroom and The Spinoff are there in Google News.
Further to my blog post last night, I decided to look at Google News to see who had the latest on our PM, Jacinda Ardern. Feeding in her name, the above is the resultsâ page.
I had thought that I had never seen Newsroom, which I make a point of checking out ahead of corporate, foreign-owned media such as Stuff and The New Zealand Herald, on Google News, but it turns out that I was wrong: its articles do appear. That’s a positive.
But scroll down this page and see what else does.
Above: Bad news: Google News is quite happy to have “fake news” content mills in its index, something that would never have happened 10 years ago.
I have said in the past that Google News has itself to blame for allowing, into its index, illegitimate websites that have no journalistic integrity. I think this screen shot proves it.
The last two sources: 10,000 Couples and Insider Car Newsâthe latter, in fact, so fake that it doesnât even use the ASCII letters for its name (it’s ĐnsŃdĐ”r CĐ°r NĐ”ws), which is a common spammersâ trickâhave made it into Google News. Neither is legit, and the latter has “content mill” writ large in its title. Surely an experienced editor at Google News would have seen this.
Once upon a time, Google News would never have allowed such sites into this part of its index, and it was strict on checking what would make it. Evidently there is no standard now.
If you want to look at âfake newsâ, here is a wonderful example: itâs not just on Facebook.
No wonder some legitimate, well regarded websites are suffering all over the world. If this is representative of Googleâs effort at shutting down fake-news operators, as it has claimed it is doing, then it is a dismal failure. Google, perhaps like Facebook, does not seem interested in dealing with fakes at all. In fact, it’s quite happy to shut legitimate sites down and accuse them of malware.
It reinforces my point that we need alternatives right now to save the internet from itself. The trouble is whether the internet community is going to bother, or if we’re happy being sheeple.
