Another late-night calculation of COVID-19 cases as a proportion of total tests done, so the figures will be out of date again, and I’ve also discovered that the total testing numbers some countries are giving are out of date. The ones with asterisks below are those that haven’t cited increased testing numbers (at least none […]
Tag: journalism
The playbook used against Wikileaks
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 […]
Navigating the Julian Assange arrest
I find 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 […]
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: the signs were there for years, if one only looked
Facebook’s 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 […]
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Wired’s Louise Matsakis did what no other journalist could: break the story on Facebook’s forced malware scans
With how widespread Facebook’s false malware accusations were—Facebook itself claims millions were “helped” by them in a three-month period—it 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 […]
Google News won’t rank you top, even when you broke the story and have the best article
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 […]
Google is telling fibs again when it says it’s dealing with “fake news” sites: more proof
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 results’ page. I had thought that I had […]
Saving the internet from itself—Sir Tim Berners-Lee sees the same dangers
Above: The Intercept is well respected, yet Google cozying up to corporate media meant its traffic has suffered, according to Alternet. There’s a select group of countries where media outlets are losing traffic, all because Facebook is experimenting with moving all news items out of the news feed and on to a separate page. […]
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Trading identities in the 2010s: when corporate branding and personal branding adopt each other’s methods
Above: Brand Kate Moss was probably seen by more people when the model collaborated with Topshop. In 1999, the late Wally Olins sent me his book, Trading Identities: Why Countries and Companies are Taking on Each Other’s Roles, a fine read published by the Foreign Policy Centre that argued that countries were trying to look […]
Secret “Asian” man (with apologies to Tak Toyoshima)
Matt Clark Above: Driving a silver Aston Martin. I’m citing the Official Secrets Act when I say I may or may not be on the tail of Auric Goldfinger. Oh dear, I’ve been outed. I’m a spy. Actually, Walter Matthau and I prefer ‘agent’. You can read between the lines in this New […]
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