From one school shooting survivor to others

On February 14, 2008, my cousin Paul’s son Harold was shot and injured at a school shooting at Northern Illinois University. From memory, it was the fifth that week. Today, he wrote a letter to survivors and students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., who endured their day of horror on February […]

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Social media: not the evolution you might have expected

I’m getting a buzz seeing how little I update social media now. Around February 2016 I began updating Tumblr far less; I’ve gone from dozens of posts per month to four in December 2017 and seven in January 2018. (Here’s my Tumblr archive.) Facebook, as many of you know, is a thing of the past […]

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An accomplishment: debunking every single point in a Guardian article on Julian Assange

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. […]

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Twitter’s shadow-banning: not just in the US, as Kiwis get caught up, too

Anthony Quintano/Creative Commons We’ve had years of Google and Facebook acting like arses, but it’s disappointing to see Twitter give us more and more causes for concern.    In 2017, we saw them change their terms and conditions so speaking power to truth is no longer a requirement. You can’t help but think that the […]

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Developer creates a tool to expose bigoted, fake Twitter accounts; Twitter bans it

In theory, one of the positive things about social media should be the fact that a company has as much chance of succeeding as an individual. Another is that it shouldn’t matter who you are, you have the same opportunity to get your word out. No one should get special treatment.    But, on Twitter, […]

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Why in 2017, joining Facebook is a bad thing

Reddit, uploaded by GameAlex2005 Holly Jahangiri shared this link with me on Twitter yesterday: Facebook is asking people to upload photos of themselves to prove they’re human.    Good luck with that, because most of the bot accounts do have profile photographs, so this won’t solve a thing.    Of the many bots and fakes […]

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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 […]

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Are you close to quitting social media?

Above: Just another regular day on Facebook: find more bots, report them, Facebook does nothing. A friend asked today, for an article he is penning, whether we were close to quitting social media on his Facebook (I realize the irony). Here was my reply (links and styling added). What are your thoughts? Are the big […]

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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 […]

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No surprises as Facebook slips to third in Alexa, but tech press misses it

Above: Facebook’s latest move: ensuring that notifications for messages go to its own app. If you choose not to install it, tough. (Actually, you can reach your messages if you had bookmarked your old message index, and through some digging you can still get there. However, your old habit of clicking on the number won’t […]

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