At the beginning of July I noticed Facebook had changed its reporting options. Gone is the option labelled ‘Fake account’, replaced by ‘Harmful or spam’. It’s a small change that, I believe, is designed to get Facebook off the hook for failing to remove fake accounts: since you can’t report them, then you can’t say […]
Read More… from Facebook continues to give in to fake accounts, much like the UK with COVID-19
This is a pretty typical story: find fault with Big Tech, try to alert the appropriate people in the firm, get fired. Julia Carrie Wong’s excellent article for The Guardian shows a data scientist, Sophie Zhang, find blatant attempts by governments to abuse Facebook’s platform, misleading their own people, in multiple countries. Of course […]
I’ve heard world leaders describe the fight against COVID-19 as a war, and there are some parallels. As any student of history knows, there was such a thing as the Munich Agreement before World War II. I’ve managed to secure the summarized English translation below. For those wondering why the UK initially thought […]
Megan McArdle’s excellent op–ed in The Washington Post, ‘A farewell to free journalism’, has been bookmarked on my phone for months. It’s a very good summary of where things are for digital media, and how the advent of Google and Facebook along with the democratization of the internet have reduced online advertising income to a […]
Read More… from Why paywalls are getting more prevalent; and The Guardian Weekly rethought
Everybody wants PS2. Still from The Professionals episode ‘Servant of Two Masters’. I read this article in The Guardian, thinking: surely, after Microsoft rolled out some terrible updates, it wouldn’t be so stupid as to do one that bricks customers’ computers again? Especially after the bug was reported a month ago. The April update worked reasonably […]
Read More… from PS/2 keyboard one way to get your Windows 10 computer back after bricking
If you were one of the people caught up with ‘The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!’ and a selection of Cold War paranoia resurrected by politicians and the media, then surely recent news would make you start to think that this was a fake-news narrative? Ian56 on Twitter was recently named by […]
Read More… from UK picks on independent Tweeters, falsely calls them Russian bots and trolls
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg came out and made a statement on Facebook that had no apology (though he gave a personal one later on CNN) and, at a time when people demanded transparency, he continued with opaqueness. First, he told us nothing we didn’t already know about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Secondly, he avoided […]
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 […]
Read More… from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: the signs were there for years, if one only looked
Instruct Studio It’s easy to dismiss comedians as, well, comedians, there to tell a joke and to get a laugh out of us. But what if the comedian—such as Frankie Boyle—is one of those who sees the state of the world we’re in, and “tells it as it is”? His opinion for The Guardian makes […]
Read More… from Orange may be the new black but the difference is less than you think
Elekhh/Creative Commons Suzi Dawson’s 2016 post debunking a biased Guardian article on Julian Assange is quite an accomplishment. To quote her on Twitter, ‘The article I wrote debunking his crap was such toilet paper that I was able to disprove literally every single line of it, a never-before-achieved feat for me when debunking MSM smears. […]