Did Facebook really mean it when it apologized to the drag community for freezing their accounts?

04.04.2015/10.13

I’m getting quite used to the hypocrisy behind the likes of Google and Facebook. Remember last year, when Facebook received criticism for freezing accounts because users did not use their real names? It’s not dissimilar to the furore that came up when Google brought in the same policy a few years ago, affecting the people […]

Found a Facebook bot? Facebook wants you to leave it as reporting option vanishes

06.03.2015/03.35

PS.: As of 11.28 a.m. GMT, eight hours after the post below, Facebook has put its normal reporting options back.—JY Facebook appears to be giving up on the bot fight. As of today, you can no longer mark an account as a fake one: the closest option is to say that it is using a […]

Remember back when we wrote status updates on Facebook?

01.03.2015/05.40

I said things along these lines for a while: there’s Facebook fatigue, Facebook is the new Digg, etc. Based on who I am seeing leave Facebook lately, there’s increasingly more truth to this. I scrolled down my own wall earlier today to find a bunch of links to other stuff. If you’re wanting to know […]

The trials of being a dual national (or, Kiwis are better at this stuff than Brits)

28.02.2015/10.36

I have just under a year before my British passport expires. In the great tradition of apartheid, it’s a British overseas national passport for those of us born in the colonies, and both in 1996 and 2006, I had to use a different form to British citizens. I presume Britain was worried about overseas British […]

Geely Vision: as fast as a Citroën 2CV ﬂat out

23.01.2015/10.25

I was very interested to see this graphic on the Geely Instagram account today: Spot the issue? I commented (and I wonder if they will delete it): ‘I would be a bit worried if the Geely GC7 found 71·5 mph its “flat out” speed. That would make it only as fast as a Citroën […]

Time for a rewatch: Reza Aslan interviewed on CNN about Muslim violence

14.01.2015/05.00

Found on my wall today. While it’s over three months old, the responses from Prof Reza Aslan of the University of California Riverside address a lot of the comments that have surfaced post-Charlie Hebdo head-on—which shows that we continue to go round and round the same arguments and not making an awful lot of progress. […]

Everything’s perfect with those Auckland systems, nothing to see here

28.11.2014/12.37

I contacted Auckland Airport through its Facebook on Tuesday over the matter in my previous post, and got an immediate reply from someone monitoring its social media. She tells me that she will ask them to furnish me with an urgent response. I am still waiting. It’s a bit of a worry when this is […]

The descent of social media as a debating tool

17.10.2014/05.53

Jo Komisarczuk referred, on Twitter, this piece by Rory Cellan-Jones. The title, ‘Twitter and the poisoning of online debate’, gives you a good indication of the topic, and it centres around an incident dubbed ‘Gamergate’. While I haven’t followed the Gamergate controversy, I am told that it centres around sexism and misogyny in the gaming […]

Where the action is on social media, and it’s not Facebook

16.10.2014/13.41

I’ve blogged several times about the bot problem that Facebook has, and this is an issue that runs alongside the click farms that operate on the website. One of my groups has over 12,000 members, and it’s a magnet for click farm participants, who target these bigger ones. And when you look through the […]