Whichever side you are on with Facebook imposing a ban on Australians sharing news content, this says it all about the level of intelligence over at Menlo Park.
In Australia, Facebook has not only de-platformed legitimate governmental bodies and non-profits, it has de-platformed itself.
Maybe taxing these companies would have been easier, and the proposed legislation isn’t perfect, but I think most people see through Facebook’s rather pathetic tactics.
It’s crying foul, saying it would have invested in local media in Australia, but won’t any more. But since Facebook lies about everything, I’ve no reason to believe they ever would have helped media organizations anywhere.
And notice how quickly it was able to shut off pages, and remove an entire country’s ability to share newsâyet it still struggles with removing fake content about COVID-19, extremist content and groups, bots, videos of massacres, and incitement of genocide and insurrection. It has struggled for years.
We all know that Facebook can do as it wishes with a singular eye on its bottom line. It doesn’t want to pay Australian publishers, so it quickly acts to shut off what Australians can do. But fake content and all the restâthat makes them money, so it doesn’t act at all, other than issuing some empty PR statements.
We all see through it, and this is probably the best thing it could have done. If people spend less time on its stress-inducing platforms, they will be healthier. And returning Facebook to what it was around 2008 when we shared what we were doing, not what the newsmedia were reporting, is really a plus.
It’s a splendid own goal that benefits Australians, who will ingeniously find solutions pretty quickly, whether it’s telling their friends about articles via email (which is what I used to do pre-social media), finding alternative services, or, not that I advocate this, resorting to outright piracy by pasting the entire article as a Facebook status update. No news in your feed? There are services for that, like going straight to the sources, or using a news aggregator (if you don’t like Google News, the Murdoch Press actually has one in beta, called Knewz. Who would have guessed that the only organization that stepped up to my half-decade-old demand for a Google News rival would be Murdochs?).
I doubt New Zealand will have the courage to follow suit, even though last year I wrote to the Minister of Communications to ask him to consider it.
What a pleasure it was to be back on The Panel on Radio New Zealand National today, my first appearance in a decade. That last time was about the Wellywood sign and how I had involved the Hollywood Sign Trust. Iâve done a couple of interviews since then on RNZ (thank you to my interviewers Lynda Chanwai-Earle and Finlay Macdonald, and producer Mark Cubey), but it has been 10 years and a few months since I was a phone-in guest on The Panel, which I listen to very frequently.
This time, it was about Hong Kong, and the new national security legislation that was passed last week. You can listen here, or click below for the embedded audio. While we begin with the latest development of social media and other companies refusing to hand over personal data to the Hong Kong government (or, rather, they are âpausingâ till they get a better look at the legislation), we move pretty quickly to the other aspects of the law (the juicy stuff and its extraterritorial aims) and what it means for Hong Kong. Massive thanks to Wallace Chapman who thought of me for the segment.
A lot of the world’s population has come together in the fight against COVID-19. Except Facebook, of course, who is exploiting the virus for profit. Facebook has done well in the first quarter of 2020 with positive earnings. Freedom From Facebook & Google co-chairs Sarah Miller and David Segal note (the links are theirs): ‘Facebook has exploited a global pandemic to grow their monopoly and bottom line. Theyâve profited from ads boasting fake cures and harmful information, allowed ad targeting to âpseudoscienceâ audiences, permitted anti-stay-at-home protests to organize on the platform, and are now launching a COVID âData for Goodâ endeavour to harvest even more of our personal information.
âMake no mistake, Facebook having more of your data is never âgood”, nor will they just relinquish the collected data when the pandemicâs curve has been flattened. Rather, theyâll bank it and continue to profit from hyper-targeted ads for years to come.’
It’s been a few weeks (April 19 was my last post on this subject) since I last crunched these numbers but it does appear that overall, COVID-19 infections as a percentage of tests done are dropping, several countries excepting. Here is the source.
France 167,178 of 724,574 = 23·07%
UK 171,253 of 901,905 = 18·99%
Sweden 21,092 of 119,500 = 17·65%
USA 1,095,304 of 6,391,887 = 17·14%
Spain 239,639 of 1,455,306 = 16·47%
Singapore 17,101 of 143,919 = 11·88%
KSA 22,753 of 200,000 = 11·38%
Switzerland 29,586 of 266,200 = 11·11%
Italy 205,463 of 1,979,217 = 10·38%
Germany 163,009 of 2,547,052 = 6·40%
South Korea 10,774 of 623,069 = 1·73%
Australia 6,766 of 581,941 = 1·16%
New Zealand 1,479 of 139,898 = 1·06%
Taiwan 429 of 63,340 = 0·68%
Hong Kong 1,038 of 154,989 = 0·67%
Emmerdale fans will never forgive me. I’ve not been one to watch British soaps, finding them uninteresting. However, in this household, we have had Emmerdale on since it’s scheduled between TV1âs midday bulletin and the 1 p.m. government press conference on COVID-19, or, as some of us call it, The Ashley Bloomfield Show, named for our director-general of health who not only has to put up with all of this, but took a hit to one-fifth of his pay cheque. Naturally, one sings along to the Emmerdale theme, except I have no clue about its lyrics. Are there lyrics?
Never used to leave the TV on for #Emmerdale, but with #COVID19 I doâand like many, I sing along:
Who the hell cares what goes on at that farm? Donât really know who has come to some harm. Whatever you see, thereâs no cause for alarm, When we peer in the lives of Emmerdale.
Not a single like on Twitter or Mastodon. I’ve offended a heck of a lot of people.
We are supposedly at Level 3, which someone said was Level 4 (the full lockdown) with takeaways. However, we’ve gone from the 1960s-style near-empty motorways to this almost immediately.
As a dual national, I hope thereâs some exaggeration or selective quoting in the Bristol Post about its report of former police officer Mike Rowland, whoâs stuck in Auckland with his wife Yvonne. Apparently, New Zealand is in âpandemoniumâ and he feels like heâs in âAlcatrazâ.
As we are most certainly not in pandemonium, the British Crown may have to ponder if it needs to reopen some of the cases Mr Rowland was once involved in due to unreliable witness testimony. Then again, if it can keep a foreign national like Julian Assange indefinitely and subject him to psychological torture as well as the risk of COVID-19 infection, perhaps it wonât need to ponder a thing.
Mr Rowlandâs not a fan of our breakfast television, either, saying that it makes Piers Morgan a âgodâ. There actually is some truth to the quality of our breakfast telly depending on which channel he has come across (I wonât name names), and I recommend that he switch to another. Go a bit further up the dial, and Aljazeera English has a whole variety of ex-BBC presenters speaking in RP that might make him feel less at home.
And Iâve my own stories about the inability to get answers from the British High Commission, so I sympathize on this note.
But given the choice between being stuck in Aotearoa and being amongst the control group that is Great Britain and Northern Ireland, where the governmentâs sense of British exceptionalism meant that it delayed locking things down, so much so that the PM himself has COVID-19, I would be quite happy to be in the land Down Under.
Mr Rowland may have missed the (disputed) Murdoch Press (which usually leans right) report that suggested that Boris Johnson’s senior adviser said it was ‘too bad’ if ‘some pensioners die’, consistent with Mr Johnson’s own position that Britain would pursue a strategy of herd immunityâand consistent with what the British government initially announced, with sycophants in full agreement.
I admit Iâve called our government âa bunch of Blairitesâ but Iâd take them over their lot, including their Mr Johnson who does less convincing prime ministerial impressions than Neville Chamberlain. Their mass U-turn had to happen as it appeared the British people figured out their lives were being put in danger and forced the government’s hand.
I realize he misses the comforts of home and I would, too, in his shoes, though equally Iâd be grateful to be alive, in a country where even he acknowledges that food is readily available and we havenât suffered the extent of panic buying that the UK has seen. If only Alcatraz were this pleasant.
Iâd far rather have the action taken by our governmentthan the UKâs when it comes to flattening the curve on coronavirus, and the British response reminds me of this 2018 post.
Just because the chief scientific adviser there has a knighthood and talks posh isnât a reason to trust him, his judgement or even his âexpertiseâ if science says otherwise.
When my father went into hospital in September 2019, the doctorsâ lack of treatmentâbecause they determined he was âdyingâ and that that was sufficient reason to deny him the essentials of life and that it would be a âmiracleâ if he regained consciousness, whereas my partner and I determined he was âdehydratedâ (we were right)âI was forced to ask the palliative nurse about this so-called âpolicyâ. Dad did, after all, wake up after we demanded he be given saline and sustenance within hours, leading me to wonder just why a team of doctors were so obsessed with killing him.
âWhoâs next?â I asked.
She looked at me quizzically.
âWhoâs next? Is it the differently abled? Homosexuals? Jews? Iâm sorry, but the parallels are all too evident to me.â
During this time, a Dr Mark Jones in the UK came into my Twittersphere and we exchanged a number of Tweets.
Mark essentially said that this was an unwritten UK government policy, and showed me numerous examples of elder neglect and abuse in his country. Maybe I should say âour countryâ since itâs the only one I have a current passport for, having got too busy to renew my Kiwi one (not that it would have much use at present).
The reasons were financial. The fewer OAPs there were, the less theyâd have to pay out in pensions.
Therefore, it was no surprise that Dadâs treatment at a British-run rest home compared less favourably than Te Hopai, where he wound up, although in Bupaâs defence they have taken our complaints seriously, apologized, and have invited us to see the improvements.
The less generous might have branded Mark a conspiracy theorist but Sir Patrick Vallance, the UKâs chief scientific adviser, seems to advance a position directly compatible with Markâs observations.
From what I can make out, heâs quite happy for the UK to get infected with coronavirus with the expectation that 60 per cent of the Union will develop immunityâalthough from all my reading of this approach, a proportion of older people who contract it will die. It appears a callous approach to just let a disease comeâthe UK isnât closing its borders or banning mass gatherings, but instead is welcoming its microbic visitor with crumpets and tea. Yes, they are advising those who feel sick to self-isolate, and that is sensible, but it’s the rest that makes little sense.
Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson preempts this as he said without emotion, ‘Many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.’
Even Jeremy Hunt appeared to break ranks with the government in one interview.
The likely result will be a thinning out of British OAPs.
When I first told my partner this, she was shocked, but I advanced my own conspiracy theory: âIf you begin with the premise that Dominic Cummings is out to destroy Britainâits institutions, and now its peopleâthen all of this fits his agenda.â
The new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, after Sajid Javid found himself in a position where even he couldnât go along with what was being peddled by 10 Downing Street, making you wonder just what horrors await, will doubtless be thrilled at the savings to the UK pension fund.
PS.: Thank you, Tomas Pueyo (the man in the screen), for reacting the way you did to Prof John Edmunds’ position that the UK has given up on containing the virus and that people will die. You have spoken, silently, for many of us.âJY
I wanted to see what TV1 news (I can never remember its official name with all its rebrands over the yearsâis it One Network News, TVNZ1 News, One News, or something else?) had on GM’s decision to shut Holden, but I missed both the six o’clock and the Plus One screenings. I headed online with some trepidation because I recall that I could never find the most-watched programme on the channel on previous occasions. This time I decided to document my attempt.
Usually I would get stumped by the log-in process that made me lose my place, so this time I decided to log in first.
Nowhere to be seen. Ah, but it’s a TV1 show, so what if I go to the TV1 page?
Nope. Under news and current affairs, we have Breakfast, Seven Sharp, Fair Go and Te Karere. There’s a 1 News link at the top, what if I go there?
No joy, at least not for the full six o’clock broadcast. I did spy a Kiwi category, and surely TV1 news is Kiwi-made. Let’s see âŠ
Apparently only the Tonight and Midday bulletins count as Kiwi-made.
Despite my searching for it around 8 p.m., it wasn’t under ‘What’s new on TV’ either. Something that finished broadcasting an hour ago isn’t new.
By this time what I do is go on Twitter to ask for help and eventually someone finds it for me, which isn’t the most efficient way of doing it, but in the past that’s how I’ve solved it.
Tonight I put news into the search box and got it there after doing all the above, but why does TVNZ make it this hard? It’s their flagship news programme. And Conan Gorbey on Twitter found it for me tonight. Thanks, Conan!
Every year, I hear or read a news report along these lines here:
Itâs Chinese, or the lunar, New Year today, and Asian communities all over New Zealand are coming together with their families to celebrate. Itâs the Year of the Rat, which means it will be a lucky and prosperous year.
Sometimes theyâll append the last statement with âsays [insert prominent Chinese New Zealander]â or âsays [insert name], president of the New Zealand Chinese Association.â
I know this because one year I was the name inserted, but you need the context, and thereâs never any room for it since itâs usually the last story in the news.
Hereâs how the interview tends to unfold.
âItâs the Year of the Rat next year. Whatâs that going to bring?â
âWell, it really depends. Every year has its own energy, and it applies differently to every person depending on their bazi and the trend of their year. Itâs like western astrology: different strokes for different folks.â
âBut do you reckon for some itâs going to be lucky and prosperous?â
âYes, for some it will be.â
Bingo. Thereâs your closing sentence. âItâs the Year of the Rat, which means it will be a lucky and prosperous year, says local Chinese man Jack Yan.â And that’s why every year, the news report is a cookie-cutter item about an ethnic community really into luck and money.
I mean, if you lived in Wuhan right now, youâll probably be saying itâs going to be a shit year because your New Yearâs practically been cancelled and you canât see your whÄnau while your cityâs in lockdown. I think the closest equivalent would be, for an American, Thanksgiving being cancelled, and for many, Christmas being cancelled.
Incidentally, I’m not sure why the WHO held back on declaring the corona virus outbreak an international matter. Did they not know the New Year is the greatest migration of humans on this planet? Repatriating Brits after Thomas Cook collapsed is child’s play. And now we have the people suspected of having the virus arriving in certain other countries.
When I first wrote a satirical look back at the decade, which ran on this blog in December 2009 (on the old Blogger service, as I was helping a friend fight a six-month battle with Google to restore his blog), it was pretty easy to make up little fictions based on reality. This one, covering the decade just gone, was a different matter. No matter how you did it, often the reality would be stranger than the satire.
2010 The Australian establishment, especially large portions of its media, are shocked a woman could become prime minister. They spend her entire term telling the Australian public that this is morally wrong.
Americans decide that they needed less honesty from television, so Simon Cowell leaves the US version of Pop Idol, American Idol.
Donald Trump-hosted show The Apprentice gets its lowest ratings ever. He begins planning another show and brainstorms with his countrymen on Twitter.
Long-running shows Ashes to Ashesand Lost end with exactly the same conclusion. Frustrated at years of investment in the two shows, the Anglosphere is so turned off television that they would rather form silos on social media websites to make their owners rich. Two guys in San Francisco spot the opportunity and invent Instagram.
Jay Leno unquits The Tonight Show after discovering the $30 million per annum he made prior to leaving just couldnât sustain his car collecting hobby.
Kate loves Willy, so they get engaged.
2011 Itâs revealed that Arnold Schwarzenegger does films, politics, and the family maid.
Following the example of HH the Dalai Lama, Charlie Sheen decides to impart his wisdom to the masses, gaining an extra million Twitter followers as a result. Cheryl Cole starts on the US X Factor amid much buzz, then vanishes from the show. Only her dimples remain.
Proving Apple is either a cult or a religion, Steve Jobs shrines appear all over the world after his passing. How I Met Your Mother concludes as we find out River Song is Amy Pondâs daughter.
Kate loves Willy, so they get married.
Reality is stranger
Facebook launches Timeline, but it actually doesnât work on the 1st of each month as no one there has worked out there are time zones other than US Pacific. Still no one thinks theyâre stupid. Google gets busted over its advertising preferencesâ manager, which actually doesnât stop gathering your preferences after youâve opted out from having them gather your preferences. None of the other NAI members seem to have a problem with their opt-outs. As far as I can tell, Google has been lying about its opt-out for two years, affecting millions.
2012 President Obama finally figures out that same-sex marriage would not bring about disasterâthat could safely be left to Big Tech, as it enjoys monopolies. As a result, Facebook has its IPO.
Forget 2011âs Steve Jobs shrines, Jesus got a new look in Zaragoza, thanks to a repair job. Not everyone is enamoured with the updated Jesus, but it saves the town and numerous businesses.
Prince Harry parties and brings a new meaning to ‘Las Vegas strip’. Got to have something to mark his grandmotherâs 60th Jubilee. The Hunger Games makes stars of Jennifer Lawrence and Liam Hemsworth, although people over a certain age thought it was The Unger Games, a remake of The Odd Couple.
Kate loves Willy, so they expect a kid.
In the real world Malala Yousafzai kicks ass and a bullet to the head doesnât stop her. If anything, it makes her stronger and grows her reputation.
E. L. James gathers up her Twilight fan fic and puts it all into a book, called 50 Shades of Grey. Remember, this is where Boris Johnson is mayor: the London Olympics use the Kazakh national anthem from Borat. High five! Google gets busted over bypassing the âDo not trackâ setting on Iphone Safari browsers by The Wall Street Journal. Despite trying to look innocent, it stops this the same day. Several US statesâ attorneys-general decide this was such a gross violation of privacy that they fine Google a few hoursâ earnings.
2013 Jennifer Lawrence brings publicity to her new film, Silver Linings Playbook, by falling at the Oscars.
Miley Cyrus mainstreams twerking, which showed how far society had already descended. Her Dadâs âAchy Breaky Heartâ release in 1992 wasnât considered a cultural high-point at the time: the apple does not fall far from the tree.
Edward Snowden exposes mass surveillance on US citizens and even US allies. There is mass panic over the collection of data and the private sector pushes back, ensuring encryption of usersâ private information ⊠actually, nothing happened, and the NSA continued with its data collection while the Obama administration charged Snowden with a crime and tried to extradite him from Russia, where he had more freedom of speech.
HM Queen Elizabeth II evens things up with Helen Mirren by winning a BAFTA for playing HM Queen Elizabeth II.
Kate loves Willy, so they have a kid.
In the real world RIP Nelson Mandela.
2014
Ellen Degeneres broke Twitter with a selfie, but since everyone knew why, no one recalls if the fail whale went up.
The world got a reminder not to upload private stuff to the cloudâas celebrities found out the hard way when their intimate pics were leaked. En masse, the world stopped uploading images to the cloud and to social media while they waited for Big Tech to fix things with their privacy ⊠actually, nothing happened, and people uploaded more photos, in the hope that hackers would find them and release them.
Scotland decides to stay part of the Unionâfor now. Of course they could trust London not to do something silly like leave the European Union.
Bill Cosby makes Mel Gibson look respectable.
Jay Leno decides heâs made enough for his car collecting hobby and leaves The Tonight Show, though he might still unquit. Watch your back, Jimmy.
Kate loves Willy, so they expect another kid.
In the real world Youâve heard of the website You Park Like a C***? An American exchange student in Tübingen wanted to be featured on Youâre Stuck in a C***. RIP Robin Williams, one of the funniest actors on Earth.
2015 Volkswagen, trying to outdo its links to Nazism and allegations of labour relationsâ corruption, recalls tens of millions of diesel vehicles to see how far its brand would stretch. The US plans to fine VW way more than Ford or GM when they cheated on emissions, because, foreign.
Donald Trump hits on an idea for a new reality show where he runs for president. Casting begins.
Steve Harvey named the wrong winner at the Miss Universe pageant. At this point, being âHarveyedâ is a fairly innocent term.
Jon Snow is very much alive and continues fronting the news on Channel 4.
Kate loves Willy, so they have another kid.
2016 The Chicago Cubs win the World Series, as detailed in Greyâs Sports Almanac. In November, the unthinkable happens: Wellington has a massive rainstorm, followed by an earthquake that triggers a tsunami warning, followed by flooding and extreme fog that leave the city cut off from the rest of the country. Summer would be called off while citizens figured out what to do. The UFO invasion does not take place, though with local body elections, certain candidates were replaced by replicants.
Kate loves Willyâand Harry loves Meghan. Not a bad way to mark HM the Queenâs 90th birthday.
In the real world The UK votes to leave the European Union: Nigel Farage is overjoyed, but Boris Johnson and Michael Goveâs body language and facial expression reveal their dismay, and their words donât match. I discover first-hand that Facebook is forcing downloads on people with the guise of âanti-malwareâ, even though this claim is dubious, and Facebook admits data are transferred back to the mother ship. I spend two years finding a journalist with the guts to write about it. Potentially millions have already been affected stretching to the beginning of the decade.
RIP David Bowie.
2017 With the approval of the US audience, a massive, multi-channel series débuts, starring Donald J. Trump. It shows a dystopian America that elects a game show host its president, and warns us what can follow. This four-year experiment is expected to culminate in 2020 with an election special, which determines the seriesâ fate for a renewed batch of episodes.
Kendall Jenner can do anything. She can solve riots with cans of Pepsi. Forget flower power.
Kate loves Willy, so they expect another kid.
2018 Kanye West became Donald Trumpâs biggest fan and joins the cast of his experimental four-year show. He plays an unhinged character who believes slavery was a choice.
Harry loves Meg, and tie the knot. Meghanâs Dad, however, was too busy pursuing a career in modelling to attend.
Taylor Swift gets the voters out, and the public hasnât seen anything like this since David Hasselhoff brought down the Berlin Wall.
Kate loves Willy, so they have another kid.
2019 To keep the ratings up for his long-running show, Donald Trump gets jealous of Greta Thunberg, as she didnât have to fake her Time Person of the Year cover.
He heads to the UK for the D-Day commemorations, and bonds with HM the Queen, telling her, âMy Dad was German and my Mum was Scottish, too.â
The British attempt a remake of Donald Trumpâs show. They search for a man who is born in New York, cheated on his first two wives, has five kids, funny hair, used to espouse more liberal views, before trying to sell ethnonationalism as part of his schtick. They find him: Boris Johnson, best known for his earlier work on Little Britain USA. Within weeks heâs already cheated on his partner Carrie by giving everyone in the UK a weak pound.
Harry loves Meg, and this year, they didnât need Kate and Willy to provide the baby news.
There are websites such as CBS News in the US that no longer let us here in New Zealand view them. US Auto Trader is another one. Itâs a damned shame, because I feel itâs a stab at the heart of what made the internet greatâthe fact that we could be in touch with each other across borders. These two US websites, and there are plenty more, are enacting the âfortress Americaâ policy, and Iâve never believed that isolationism is a good thing.
Letâs start with the Auto Trader one. As someone who found his car on the UK Auto Trader website, it seems daft for the US to limit itself to its own nationâs buyers. What if someone abroad really would like an American classic? Then again, I accept that classic cars are few and far between on that site, and if photos from the US are anything to go by, the siteâs probably full of Hyundai Sonatas and Toyota Camrys anyway.
I went to the CBS website because of a Twitter link containing an interesting headline. Since weâre blocked from seeing that site, then I logically fed the same headline into a search engine and found it in two places. The first was Microsoft News, which I imagine is fine for CBS since they probably still get paid a licence for it. The second, however, was an illegal content mill that had stolen the article.
I opted for the former to (a) do the right thing and (b) avoid the sort of pop-ups and other annoying ads that content mills often host, but what if the Microsoft version was unavailable? These geo-restrictions actually encourage piracy and does the original publisher out of income, and I canât see that as a good thing.
Some blamed the GDPR coming into force in the EU, so it appears CBSâwhich apparently is against Donald Trump talking isolationism yet practises itâdecided to lump ânot Americaâ into one group and include us in it. But so what if GDPR is in force? Itâs asking you to have more reasonable protections for privacyâyou know, the sort of thing your websites probably had 15 years ago by default?
I still donât think itâs that hard to ask users to hop over to Aboutads.info and opt out of ad tracking on each of their browsers. We havenât anything as sophisticated as some websites, which put their controls front and centre, but we at least provide links; and we ourselves donât collect intrusive data. Yes, some ad networks we use do (which you can opt out of), but weâd never ask them for it. The way things are configured, I donât even know your IP address when you feed in a comment.
Ours isnât a perfect solution but at least we donât isolateâwe welcome all walks of life, regardless of where you hail from. Just like the pioneers of the web, such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Make the internet great again.
Jennifer Lawrence brings publicity to her new film, Silver Linings Playbook, by falling at 
