Quotulatiousness

October 9, 2025

Britain is only a few steps further than Canada in the war on free speech

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Peter Menzies looks at the worsening situation for freedom of speech and freedom of expression in Britain, noting that what’s happening over in Blighty is our immediate future with current Liberal bills before Parliament to give government bureaucrats more power to silence us:

Everyone may know, for instance, that Kimmel got suspended by ABC for a week following statements made in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But not a lot of people consuming Canadian media know that in the U.K., comedians weren’t just getting one-week suspensions. Nope. Last month they were getting arrested.

Right-wing icon Katie Hopkins, best known for her Batshit Bonkers Britain clips and Silly Cow tour, hadn’t been charged at the time of writing, but was arrested and, as they say in Blighty, “interviewed under caution”. Previously, Graham Linehan was arrested upon his return from the United States by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport. At issue were posts he had made on X in April.

“If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space,” one Linehan post declared, “he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Currently on bail, Linehan returns to court on Oct. 29. The charges are harassment, criminal damage and suspicion of inciting hatred.

The merits of the cases can be debated, but my point today is that when it comes to digital policy and policing you, and the internet, Canadians and their media should be paying a lot more attention to the U.K.

Because it is there that the true illiberalism of modern Western so-called liberalism is most menacingly embraced. Even prior to the U.K.’s Online Safety Act coming into effect, pre-existing British legislation had been used to, for instance, convict six retired police officers for making comments “deemed to be offensive” within their private WhatsApp chat group. Following the Southport mass stabbing murders of little girls, at least two women with no prior history with police were given prison sentences — one for 15 months for a Facebook post calling for a mosque to be blown up, another 31 months for a tweet calling for hotels full of migrants to be burned. While their comments were certainly worthy of vigorous condemnation, the intervention of the state into private, closed conversations and the involvement of police, courts and the penal system has taken matters in the U.K. to a level inconsistent with liberal traditions.

Now that the Online Safety Act has supplemented those laws, hundreds of people have been arrested and dozens so far convicted for social media posts. The government calls the act a “new set of laws that protect children and adults online” in much the same way Justin Trudeau explained Canada’s own Online Harms Act. It’s all about “safety”.

Online Harms may have died when Parliament was prorogued last winter, but a successor is anticipated and, given Prime Minister Mark Carney’s obvious Anglophilia, it’s easy to speculate — fear is a better word — that he is taking inspiration from the Brits. After all, up until a few months ago, he was one of them.

Fighting back in the U.K. is, among others, Lord Toby Young, the Conservative peer, associate editor of The Spectator and founder of the Free Speech Union, which now has a Canadian branch featuring, among others, journalist Jonathan Kay. Young has protested that criminalizing disinformation hands governments the power to determine truth. Nevertheless, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has muttered that maybe the police have more important things to do, he shows — despite the meteoric rise in the polls of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party — no inclination to order a digital retreat.

In fact, Starmer just doubled down with the introduction of legislation imposing mandatory digital IDs. A petition opposing it and the potential to enable mass surveillance and state control has already gathered close to three million signatures.

There’s a good chance the Canadian Free Speech Union will be similarly engaged in the years ahead. The Trudeau government’s instincts when it came to digital legislation were not as extreme as Britain’s. And there are very real differences in the legal structure of free-speech rights in Canada and the U.K. — we have the Charter, and the British don’t. So our laws would be enacted and enforced differently here than they can be the the U.K.

August 12, 2025

Britain warns online platforms about “overzealous” interpretation of online safety law

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

“Ben the Layabout” posted a note over at Founding Questions linking to a Telegraph article [archive.ph link] that seems to indicate the British government is demanding that online services both enforce the letter of the law and the spirit … whatever that might mean at any given moment in time:

Social media giants face huge fines for curbing free speech by “overzealous” enforcement of online safety laws.

Ministers have told platforms including Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok they must not restrict access to posts that express lawfully held views.

The warning, in an apparent change of tone from ministers, comes amid a backlash over websites blocking users from viewing material, including parliamentary debates about grooming gangs.

Campaigners have said that free speech is threatened by the Government’s application of the Online Safety Act, which is meant to protect children from harmful content.

JD Vance, the US vice-president, used a visit to the UK this week to warn ministers against going down the “dark path” of censorship.

Whitehall sources have expressed concern that social media firms, some of which have criticised the law, “have been overzealous” in enforcing it and must be “mindful” of the right to freedom of expression.

The Science Department, which oversees the legislation, told companies they could face fines if they failed to uphold free speech rules.

A spokesman said:

    As well as legal duties to keep children safe, the very same law places clear and unequivocal duties on platforms to protect freedom of expression.

    Failure to meet either obligation can lead to severe penalties, including fines of up to 10 per cent of global revenue or £18m, whichever is greater.

    The Act is not designed to censor political debate and does not require platforms to age gate any content other than those which present the most serious risks to children such as pornography or suicide and self-harm content.

    Platforms have had several months to prepare for this law. It is a disservice to their users to hide behind deadlines as an excuse for failing to properly implement it.

So online sites big and small are required to obey the British law, but only as and how the British government wants it enforced or they’ll levy massive punishment. Too lax? Punishment. Too strict? Also punishment. It’s almost as if Britain wants to be cut off from the rest of the internet …

July 22, 2025

The internet keeps getting worse. Let’s talk about why.

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jared Henderson
Published 16 Jul 2025

Why do major online platforms keep getting worse? Cory Doctorow’s work helps us understand the pattern of growth, decline, and eventual demise.

→ Timestamps
00:00 Beginning
00:51 How Platforms Die
08:29 The Death of a Platform (From the Inside)
12:14 Ads, Everywhere
14:47 Yes, I Make Money from Ads
16:32 Bots
22:04 The Internet We Need
(more…)

June 29, 2025

Carney’s insane determination to keep the Digital Services Tax

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the most noted features of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s attitude toward, well, everything is his unwillingness to take the concerns of his opponents into account. He seems to feel that he always knows best and therefore any opposition is therefore, by his definition, wrong. The government had been warned by pretty much every observer that the attempt to impose a protectionist digital service levy had incredibly high chances of triggering blowback … and it has:

Mark Carney’s thought process when he encounters dissent, probably

In other words, you can have many reactions to the current DST battle, but surprise should not be one of them. Canada pushed ahead despite efforts at an international agreement on the issue and later dismissed the increasing friction over the issue with the U.S., which has been signalling its opposition to the DST for many years. Donald Trump has taken action, but his views are not dissimilar from Joe Biden’s on the issue nor Members of Congress from both parties. Further, the companies directly affected by the rules have been similarly responsive. For example, Google began levying a 2.5% DST fee on Canadian advertisers last year in anticipation of the DST taking effect in 2025, thereby passing along much of the DST cost to Canadian businesses and consumers.

To be clear, Canada is free to adopt whatever tax policies it wants and tech companies should pay their fair share of taxes. Ensuring tech companies collect and remit sales taxes on digital sales and services is now well established in Canada. But the government’s policy of “making web giants pay” by going above taxes all companies pay with a percentage of revenues to support Canadian film and television, millions for the news sector, and now the DST was always going to spark a reaction.

Further, the Canadian DST is exceptionally complex, covering a wide range of digital revenues that occur in Canada. The baseline applicability is for companies that generate 750 million euros (about C$1.1 billion) in global revenue of which at least $20 million is digital services revenue in Canada. Digital services revenue can arise from (1) online marketplace services revenue (which would cover an Ebay, Airbnb or Uber), (2) online advertising services revenue (Google or Microsoft), (3) social media services revenue (Facebook or TikTok), and (4) user data revenue (any company that collects and sells user data). Targeting these services means there is a lot stake, estimated by the Parliamentary Budget Officer at $7.2 billion over five years.

Other countries have DSTs, but Canada was the only one to introduce one despite an agreement to institute a moratorium on new DSTs years ago at the OECD. And then it was one of the only countries to reject an extension of that moratorium. The government insisted it would move ahead without delays and indicated it was confident it could avoid retaliation.

Given the trade tensions with the U.S. since the election of Donald Trump, unilaterally dropping the DST in the midst of a trade battle did not make much sense as we needed policy certainty under a broader deal. In other words, the DST was a card we had to play as part of a negotiation. But once we played that card by announcing the tax would take effect next week, it virtually guaranteed the U.S. would respond as it did. The priority should have been a broader deal. The government could have adopted a Trump-style delay for a month to give more time for negotiations. It could have have followed the UK model of weaving it into a broader agreement and committing to a larger digital trade deal. Instead, the government continued years of dismissing the trade risks associated with the DST, potentially creating bigger economic problems in the process.

Dan Knight on how Ottawa deliberately baited Trump, despite all the warnings that this was an incredibly stupid idea:

Donald Trump has officially walked away from the negotiating table. The trigger? Canada’s ill-conceived Digital Services Tax (DST) — a reckless, retroactive grab for revenue targeting U.S. tech firms. Trump isn’t mincing words: he’s calling it a “blatant, discriminatory attack” on American innovation, and now he’s moving to punish Canada economically for it.

So what exactly is this tax?

The Digital Services Tax, passed by the Liberal government and implemented under Mark Carney’s leadership, applies a 3% levy on revenue — not profits — earned by large digital firms operating in Canada. And it’s retroactive. That means it’s being applied to earnings from as far back as January 1, 2022, with companies forced to make lump-sum payments by June 30, 2025.

This tax specifically targets companies with global revenue of at least 750 million and Canadian digital revenue of at least CAD 20 million. Translation: It’s a direct hit on American giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, Airbnb, and Uber, and it spares Canadian firms and EU-based entities from equivalent exposure. It’s not tax fairness — it’s protectionism with a smiley-face sticker.

Trump has responded in kind. As of June 27, all trade negotiations with Canada are suspended. Retaliatory tariffs — already mounting since February — are set to escalate. Trump is drawing a red line, and he’s daring Canada to cross it.

What’s at stake?

Everything. Canada sends over 75% of its exports to the United States. We’re talking about nearly a trillion dollars in annual trade. With Trump now actively leveraging tariffs and ending negotiations, entire sectors — from automotive to agriculture, energy to manufacturing — are in the crosshairs.

Already this year, Trump has slapped 25% tariffs on Canadian imports, with specific hits to steel, aluminum, vehicles, and auto parts, and 10% tariffs on Canadian oil, gas, and potash. These moves have already disrupted markets. Ending trade negotiations is a body blow to an already wobbly Canadian economy — still reeling from Trudeau-era mismanagement and Carney’s corporate globalist agenda.

So who could have seen this coming?

Almost everyone.

June 2, 2025

QotD: How to use your billions to influence those in power, without risking prosecution

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Nobody really knows why your standard corporate merger happens, which is why they often seem so bewilderingly stupid to outsiders. Someone out there invents the next greatest web-based whatzit, which gets acquired by MySpace, which gets acquired by Yahoo, which gets bought out by Microsoft, all because the Accounting boys saw something on a spreadsheet cell … which 99% of the time, in tech anyway, turns out to be ass-pulled bullshit, and everyone loses bigly. Or never makes any money in the first place — e.g. Twitter and YouTube, neither of which have ever turned a profit so far as I know. Hell, I’m not sure Facebook (or “Meta” or whatever they’re calling it now) ever has; it has always floated along on its share price, which has always been buoyed up by … what, exactly? Even Amazon, which still depends to a large degree on the (eventual, shitty) delivery of an actual physical object (a cheap Chinese knockoff of what you actually ordered), took years to turn a profit.

In other words, there are no lessons there for us (except that people will tolerate shit like Fakebook and Amazon, which is indeed disturbing, but we already knew that). But blogs? Consider the Bulwark, or the Dispatch, or whatever it is (and if those are actually different things). Jonah Goldberg’s new outfit. I don’t follow this stuff, all I know is Ace of Spades calls it “The Cuckshed”, which is awesome, so let’s go with that. When Goldberg was pitching The Cuckshed to that Persian billionaire, he no doubt promised him all kinds of filthy, degrading acts of propaganda … in person.

I have to assume that the Cuckshed exists largely as his personal brand — he can go on whatever cable news shout show needs a “conservative” and the chryon says “Founder of leading conservative opinion site ‘The Cuckshed'” — and that’s what he pitched to the Persian, rather than reams of marketing data about the site’s literally hundreds of subscribers … but then again, maybe not, because I think we can all take it as read that 95% of the people who subscribe to The Cuckshed are fellow Swamp Things, no? Persians are a crafty lot, and this guy is no dummy, he understands the cardinal rule: Never write when you can speak, and never speak when you can nod.

To get his message into the [Washington, DC] intellectual ecosystem, then, the Persian Billionaire has two choices: He could either circulate a memo with “The Persian Billionaire’s Position on X”; or he could just have a flunky come into the room and start reading off a list of options, and he’ll nod when the flunky reaches the right one. Then the flunky slaps the list on the desk of a slightly lower-ranking flunky, pointedly tapping his finger at the chosen option. Then the lower-ranking flunky calls up one of his fart catchers, pulls out a highlighter, colors in the correct option, and hands it to him. Take that out through about six more levels of toadies, rump-swabs, and catamites, and it finally lands on Jonah Goldberg’s desk, at which point he starts punching up his “Word ’95” macros into a “column” telling the world what the Persian Billionaire wants them to hear.

Thus, if he’s ever called on the carpet by the Emperor’s Truthsayer, the Persian Billionaire can in all honesty say “I never told Goldberg to write that!” It just kinda worked out that way. As it always seems to. Every time.

Severian, “On Selling Out”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-26.

October 30, 2024

Zuckerberg’s bad bet on Virtual Reality

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia notes the anniversary of Mark Zuckerberg’s worst financial decision — the plunge into virtual reality:

A big birthday happens tomorrow. But don’t expect a celebration.

There will be no party, no disco. There will be no cake, no clown, no bouncy house for the kids. No Marilyn Monroe cooing the birthday song.

Just dead silence. But make no mistake — this is a very expensive birthday.

Exactly three years ago, Mark Zuckerberg placed a huge bet on virtual reality. On October 28, 2021, he even changed the name of his company — from Facebook to Meta.

A new company was born. But that’s now a huge embarrassment.

The name Meta is a lasting reminder of the most foolish decision Zuck ever made — even worse than Facemash or those ugly T-shirts.

Of course, that’s not how he saw things three years ago.

“Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life,” the company announced. “In the metaverse,” Zuckerberg bragged, “you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine.”

There was a catch — the tech billionaire needed to convince millions of people to wear virtual reality headsets.

But they looked ridiculous — you literally had to wear blinders if you wanted to enter Mr. Zucker’s neighborhood.

The very next day, I declared that “Meta is for losers”.

“This will never be cool.”

Zuckerberg was “making the wrong bet”, I warned — and gave my reasons:

    The interface looks goofy and cartoonish. Instead of entering the gritty, exciting world of Blade Runner, you’re trapped inside a bad episode of Family Guy …

    And users will look creepy too. You need to lock yourself into a headset to get the full benefit of the metaverse — and there’s no way that Zuckerberg can make that look cool. The people who spend hour after hour in his metaverse will be the subject of jokes and mockery …

    They will be nerds and incels and the most disgruntled members of society, each desperate for escape.

Mark Zuckerberg eventually figured this out. But the company lost more than $20 billion over the next two years in a desperate attempt to convince normal people to abandon reality and enter his fake world.

Even as consumers resisted, Meta refused to admit it had made such a colossal mistake. Just last year, Zuckerberg still denied that he was abandoning virtual reality.

“A narrative has developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse,” he told shareholders. “So I just want to say upfront that that’s not accurate.”

Then he did exactly that — retreating from the metaverse he had spent so much money building.

Fortune warned three months ago that Mr. Z’s metaverse “may finally be running out of cash”. Then in August, Meta cancelled the development of a next generation VR headset.

August 29, 2024

Pavel Durov’s arrest isn’t for a clear crime, it’s for allowing everyone access to encrypted communications services

Filed under: France, Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille explains the real reason the French government arrested Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram:

It’s appropriate that, days after the French government arrested Pavel Durov, CEO of the encrypted messaging app Telegram, for failing to monitor and restrict communications as demanded by officials in Paris, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that his company, which owns Facebook, was subjected to censorship pressures by U.S. officials. Durov’s arrest, then, stands as less of a one-off than as part of a concerted effort by governments, including those of nominally free countries, to control speech.

“Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov is expected to appear in court Sunday after being arrested by French police at an airport near Paris for alleged offences related to his popular messaging app,” reported France24.

A separate story noted claims by Paris prosecutors that he was detained for “running an online platform that allows illicit transactions, child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud, as well as the refusal to communicate information to authorities, money laundering and providing cryptographic services to criminals”.

Freedom for Everybody or for Nobody

Durov’s alleged crime is offering encrypted communications services to everybody, including those who engage in illegality or just anger the powers that be. But secure communications are a feature, not a bug, for most people who live in a world in which “global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023”, according to Freedom House. Fighting authoritarian regimes requires means of exchanging information that are resistant to penetration by various repressive police agencies.

“Telegram, and other encrypted messaging services, are crucial for those intending to organise protests in countries where there is a severe crackdown on free speech. Myanmar, Belarus and Hong Kong have all seen people relying on the services,” Index on Censorship noted in 2021.

And if bad people occasionally use encrypted apps such as Telegram, they use phones and postal services, too. The qualities that make communications systems useful to those battling authoritarianism are also helpful to those with less benign intentions. There’s no way to offer security to one group without offering it to everybody.

As I commented on a post on MeWe the other day, “Somehow the governments of the west are engaged in a competition to see who can be the most repressive. Canada and New Zealand had the early lead, but Australia, Britain, Germany, and France have all recently moved ahead in the standings. I’m not sure what the prizes might be, but I strongly suspect “a bloody revolution” is one of them (if not all of them).”

July 9, 2024

QotD: “No official Propaganda Department has ever been half as effective as Twitter and Facebook”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Straight off, we know one thing they wouldn’t do — create a Reich Culture Chamber or Department of Enlightenment. To be fair to the Commies and Nazis, they probably didn’t have much of a choice in their home countries — totalitarianism being what it is, and Europeans being what they are — but the Soviets, at least, soon saw the error of their ways, and let the free market handle it overseas. 99% of the USSR’s propaganda effort was done pro bono by Western “intellectuals”, and that’s how it’s done — convince cripplingly insecure dorks that they’re oh so smart for parroting your party line, and they’ll do all your dirty work for free.

Our overlords figured that out, give credit where it’s due. No official Propaganda Department has ever been half as effective as Twitter and Facebook. But that’s a problem, too, as we’re starting to see. The problem with freelance propaganda is the free market problem of marginal utility.

Facebook and Twitter are SJW cesspools. Everyone knows this. Even your sweet old granny, who is only on Facebook to exchange pie recipes and knitting ideas, knows this, because the #WokeStapo came for knitting years back. When the “trust and safety council” goes so far as to ban the sitting President of the United States, even hermits living in remote Himalayan caves got the message — toe the Party line on social media, or else.

This reduces the value of ALL information on social media to, effectively, zero. Sure, it might be true — and propaganda, as we know, works better the closer to the truth it steers — but given that they’ve even gone after knitting, for pete’s sake, means that any even halfway sorta quasi rational person assumes everything on social media is nothing but propaganda.

Severian, “If They Were Clever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-08.

March 31, 2024

“Nobody trusts the technocracy anymore. People suffer from it.”

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia is both surprised and pleased that so many people responded to his recent anti-technocatic message:

When I launched The Honest Broker, I had no intention of writing about tech.

My main vocation is in the world of music and culture. My mission in life is championing the arts as a source of enchantment and empowerment in human life.

So why should I care about tech?

But I do know something about the subject. I have a Stanford MBA and spent 25 years at the heart of Silicon Valley. I ran two different tech companies. I’ve pitched to VCs and raised money for startups. I’ve done a successful IPO. I taught myself coding.

I’ve seen the whole kit, and most of the kaboodle too.

I loved it all. I thought Silicon Valley was a source of good things for me — and others.

Until tech started to change. And not for the better.

I never expected that our tech leaders would act in opposition to the creative and humanistic values I held so dearly. But it’s happened — and I’m not the only person who has noticed.

I’ve published several critiques here about the overreaching of dysfunctional technology, and the response has been enormous and heartfelt. The metrics on the articles are eye-opening, but it’s not just the half million views — it’s the emotional response that stands out.

Nobody trusts the technocracy anymore. People suffer from it.

Almost everybody I hear from has some horror story to share. Like me, they loved new tech until recently, and many worked in high positions at tech companies. But then they saw things go bad. They saw upgrades turn into downgrades. They watched as user interfaces morphed into brutal, manipulative command-and-control centers.

Things got worse — and not because something went wrong. The degradation was intentional. It happened because disempowerment and centralized control are profitable, and now drive the business plans.

So search engines got worse — but profits at Alphabet rose. Social media got worse — but profits at Meta grew. (I note that both corporations changed their names, which is usually what malefactors do after committing crimes.)

Scammers and hackers got more tech tools, while users got locked in — because those moves were profitable too.

This is the context for my musings below on the humanities.

I don’t want to summarize it here — I encourage you to read the whole thing. My only preamble is this: the humanities aren’t just something you talk about in a classroom, but are our core tools when the human societies that created and preserved them are under attack.

Like right now.

March 29, 2024

QotD: Pay no attention to the empty suit behind the social media curtain!

Filed under: Business, Media, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

These days, there’s no discernible relationship between “content” and “revenue”, because Facebook doesn’t have “revenue”. All it has is a ticker symbol. Much like Enron, whatever physical product Facebook might once have theoretically produced — all those cat pictures — has been totally subsumed into share price fuckery. Yeah yeah, theoretically their “revenue” comes from ads, but as is well known, a) there is not, and never has been, in any industry, a discernible causal relationship between ads and revenue, and b) Facebook lies through its teeth about it anyway. How many times have they been caught now, including in sworn testimony to Congress?

Given all that, why not censor? Why not let your freak flag fly? Just as being innovative actually counts against you in the music biz these days — sure, sure, y’all might be the next Beatles, but we know Taylor Swift’s lab-grown replacement will move fifty million units — so there are considerable drawbacks, in the social media moguls’ minds, to letting just any old schmoe post anything he wants up on their platforms. What if Faceborg’s ad-generation algorithm decides to put a #woke company’s ad on a badthinker’s page? Faceborg’s entire business model rests on getting #woke companies to keep buying ads, since those ad buys are the only thing that keep the stock price up. And since those #woke corporations have made it abundantly clear that they don’t want those people’s business …

Swing it back to the top. Faceborg et al have figured out a surefire way to “make money” by manipulating their stock price. They don’t need a physical product to do it, but what they absolutely must have, the one thing from which all others flow, is “clicks”. Eyeballs. Whatever you want to call it, the whole house of cards is built on the premise that there are actual users out there — real, physical people, who exist in meatspace — who might theoretically buy the advertisers’ products. But … what if there aren’t?

Zuck et al have been pretty good at faking it so far, but as everyone knows, they are faking. For one thing, they keep getting caught. For another, even academics — the dumbest critters in captivity, Commodore 64-level NPCs who can be counted on to swallow the SJW narrative hook line and sinker — keep publishing studies showing that some huge number of all social media accounts, on all platforms, are bogus.

Indeed, you can test it for yourself. I know, I know, FED!!!!, but hear me out: Get a VPN. Sign up for a burner email. Rejigger the VPN, then use the burner email to sign up for Faceborg, Twitter, whatever. Don’t actually post anything; just sign up. It’s 1000 to 1 that even with no activity whatsoever, you’ll still be deluged with friend requests. The algorithms will take care of that, because as we’ve noted, they have to push the illusion that people are using these platforms, that eyeballs are landing on pages, that fingers are clicking on ads. You’ll get a whole list of “suggestions” of which accounts to follow, all of which — surprise surprise — are never more than a click away from some big advertiser.

Severian, “Own Goals”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-21.

February 22, 2024

QotD: Why companies continue to irritate their customers with online social justice marketing

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So, up top, when I said that Facebook “can’t or won’t” stop this kind of stuff? I lied. There’s no “can’t” about it. It’s “won’t”, for the simple reason that Facebook understands its market and the Daily Mail writers obviously don’t. You’d think that the legendarily trashy British tabloid media would get this — and as I understand it, the Daily Mail is somewhere in the bottom half of the barrel — but Facebook’s market isn’t its users. Not even big companies like Starbucks. Facebook’s market is advertisers, and what they, Facebook, are selling is views. Eyeballs. “Engagement”, I think the Ad Biz term d’art is. In short: It doesn’t matter what the comments are; it matters that the comments are.

Ad company execs are walking into a meeting with a Starbucks-sized company right now. They’re pitching a bold new social media strategy to their clients. And they know it works, these ad men say, because look at all this data from Starbucks. Their posts average so much “engagement” every time, but look, when they post on “social justice” topics, their “engagement” jumps 350%!!

In case you were wondering how all this “social justice” shit keeps appearing in ads, despite the well-known effect of pissing off companies’ established client base, well, there you go — the company execs, being #woke Cloud People, want to do it anyway, and they’ve got whole binders full of data from the marketing department that prove “social justice” ups social media “engagement” with “the brand” umpteen zillion percent.

Severian, “Internet Tough Guys”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-10.

February 8, 2024

North American newspaper economics

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, History, Media, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall discusses some of the issues ailing Canadian and American newspapers which are not easily solvable (government subsidies, as attempted in Canada, just turn the recipients into an underpaid PR branch of the governing party … not a good look in a democratic nation):

“Newseum newspaper headlines” by m01229 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

So, as a little corrective, a quick jaunt through what actually ails American journalism. The concentration is upon the big newspapers because that’s where the problem is worst. The conclusion is that it’s gonna get a lot, lot, lot, worse too. Because the industry is facing a base economic problem that it’s not willing to actually face up to. Or, at least, all the journalists writing about it aren’t — there’s the occasional sign that some of the business side of the equation grasp it.

[…]

Before Y2K American newspapers were segmented along geographic lines. The size of the country, the lack of a long distance passenger railroad network, meant that this was just so. If you’re printing a daily paper then you’ve got to deliver it daily. On the day it’s meant to refer to as well. If Chicago is 1,100 miles (no, I’ve not looked it up but that’s within an order of magnitude of being right, which is better than many newspapers manage with numbers) from New Orleans then the same newspaper is going to find it difficult to print and deliver to both markets. Add in the fact that trains take a week to traverse that distance, passenger trains – anyone who has ever travelled Amtrak will say it feels that long at least — included.

You could not and therefore did not have national newspaper (USA Today, with satellite printing plants, was an attempt to deal with this and slightly earlier than our cut off date but doesn’t change the basic story) distributions. What you had was a series of local and regional monopolies. Each one centred on a large population centre and serving the area around it that could be reasonably reached by truck overnight. Chicago and Cincinnati, not 1,100 miles away from each other, did have entirely different newspapers.

By contrast, and just as an example, the British newspaper market was national from pre-WWI. We simply did have overnight at worst passenger rail that covered the country. Partly it’s a much, much, smaller place, partly the passenger rail system was just different. So, printing overnight (and some maintained separate Scottish editions and plants) meant that those papers that came off the press in London at 8pm were on sale in Glasgow at 8 am, those that came off the press in London at 4 am were on sale in London at 8am. That’s not exact but it’s a good enough pencil sketch.

Cincinnati newspaper(s) served Cincinnati. Chicago, Chicago and New Orleans the area of New Orleans. There simply wasn’t a “national press” in the US in that British sense.

OK. But this also meant that American newspapers were much more like a monopoly in their local area than anything else. Network effects still exist even before computer networks after all. The most important of which was the classifieds.

As with Facebook, we’re all on Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook. So, if we’re to join a social network we’re going to be on Facebook where everyone else is — except those three hipsters who are where it isn’t cool yet. This applies to classifieds sections. Folk advertise in the one with the most readers, the widest market. Readers buy the one with the most ads in it, the widest market. You advertise the bronzed baby shoes, unused, where there are the most people looking for bronzed baby shoes, unused.

So, the dominant paper will suck up the classifieds in any particular market. Classifieds, fairly obviously back in the days of prams, cheap used cars, waiters’ jobs and so on being geographically based.

No, this is important. A useful pencil sketch of American newspaper revenues pre-Y2K was that subscriptions produced some one third of revenues. They also, around and about, covered print costs and distribution. They were, roughly you understand, about a face wash in fact.

Display ads produced another one third and classifieds the final one third. Classifieds were also wildly profitable — no expensive journalists to pay, no bureaux, just a few women waiting to get married on the end of the phone line.

December 9, 2023

The coming Micro-Macro culture war … and who’s going to win it

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia outlines the dismal state of the “macro” culture — television, movies, newspapers, book publishing and all the big corporations that control them — with the dynamism of the “micro” culture:

In the beginning, all culture was microculture.

You knew what was happening in your tribe or village. But your knowledge of the wider world was limited.

So you had your own songs and your own stories. You had your own rituals and traditions. You even had your own language.

But all these familiar things disappeared when you went off into the world. That was dangerous, however. That’s why only heroes, in traditional stories, go on journeys.

You learn on the journey. But you might not survive.

But all that changed long before I was born.

In my childhood, everything was controlled by a monoculture. There were only three national TV networks, but they were pretty much the same.

    When I went to the office, back then, we had all watched the same thing on TV the night before. We had all seen the same movie the previous weekend. We had all heard the same song on the radio while driving to work.

The TV shows were so similar that they sometimes moved from CBS to NBC, and you never noticed a change. The newscasters also looked pretty much the same and always talked the same — with that flat Midwestern accent that broadcasters always adopted in the US.

The same monoculture controlled every other creative idiom. Six major studios dominated the film business. And just as Hollywood controlled movies, New York set the rules in publishing. Everything from Broadway musicals to comic books was similarly concentrated and centralized.

The newspaper business was still local, but most cities had 2 or 3 daily newspapers — and much of the coverage they offered was interchangeable. Radio was a little more freewheeling, but eventually deregulation allowed huge corporations to acquire and standardize what happened over the airwaves. [NR: I suspect the “freewheeling” went away once the government started imposing regulations, and the corporate consolidation was enabled when they “deregulated” the radio licensing regime several decades later.]

When I went to work in an office, back then, we had all watched the same thing on TV the night before. We had all seen the same movie the previous weekend. We had all heard the same song on the radio while driving to work.

And that’s why smart people back then paid attention to the counterculture.

The counterculture might be crazy or foolish or even boring. But it was still your only chance to break out of the monolithic macroculture.

Many of the art films I saw at the indie cinema were awful. But I still kept coming back — because I needed the fresh air these oddball movies provided. For the same reason, I read the alt weekly newspapers and kept tabs on alt music.

In fact, whenever I saw the word alt, I paid attention.

That doesn’t mean that I hated the major TV networks, or the large daily newspaper, or 20th Century Fox. But I craved access to creative and investigative work that hadn’t been approved by people in suits working for large organizations.

The Internet should have changed all this. And it did — but not much. Even now the collapse in the monoculture is still in its early stages.

But that’s about to change.

If you don’t pay close attention, the media landscape seems pretty much the same now as it did in the 1990s. The movie business is still controlled in Hollywood. The publishing business is still controlled in New York. The radio stations are still controlled by a few large companies. And instead of three national TV networks plus PBS, we have four dominant streaming platforms — who control almost 70% of the market.

So we still live in a macro culture. But it feels increasingly claustrophobic. Or even worse, it feels dead.

Meanwhile, a handful of Silicon Valley platforms (Google, Facebook, etc.) have become more powerful than the New York Times or Hollywood studios or even Netflix. It’s not even close — the market capitalization of Google’s parent Alphabet is now almost ten times larger than Disney’s.

But here’s the key point — these huge tech companies rely on the microculture for their dominance.

Where is Facebook without users contributing photos, text and video? Where is Google’s YouTube without individual creators?

In terms of economic growth or audience capture, the microculture has already won the war. But it doesn’t feel that way.

Why not?

First and foremost, Silicon Valley is a reluctant home for the microculture. To some extent Alphabet and Facebook are even going to war with microculture creators — they try to make money with them even while they punish them.

  • So Mark Zuckerberg needs creators, but won’t even let them put a live link on Instagram and limits their visibility on Facebook and Threads.
  • Alphabet needs creators to keep YouTube thriving, but gives better search engine visibility to total garbage that pays for placement.
  • Twitter also claims it wants to support independent journalists — but if you’re truly independent from Elon Musk, your links are brutally punished by the algorithm.

This tension won’t go away, and next year it will get worse. The microculture will increasingly find itself at war with the same platforms they rely on today.

And legacy media and non-profits are even more hostile to emerging media. Go see who wins Pulitzer Prizes, and count how many journalists on alternative platforms get honored.

I’ll save you the trouble. They don’t.

November 30, 2023

Canadian government declares victory over Google, then lays down its arms and marches into captivity

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Trudeau government has won a glorious, historic victory over the evil capitalistic powers of Google in the war of Bill C-18. Let all patriotic Canadians raise their hands to cheer our victorious politicians before they have to admit out loud that they fucked up real good:

Heritage Minister Pascale St. Onge has surrendered to Google and Canadian media have avoided what would have been a catastrophic exclusion from the web giant’s search engine.

In the short term, this is very good news. The bureaucrats at Heritage must have performed many administrative contortions to find the words needed in the Online News Act‘s final regulations to satisfy Google, a beast which isn’t easily soothed. In doing so, they have managed to avoid what Google was threatening — to de-index news links from its search engine and other platforms in Canada. Given that Meta had already dropped the carriage of news on Facebook and Instagram in response to the same legislation, Google’s departure would have constituted a kill shot to the industry.

Instead, the news business will get $100 million in Google cash. For this, all its members will now fight like so many pigeons swarming an errant crust of bread.

The agreement will also allow the government, while surrounded by an industry whose reputation and economics have been devastated by this policy debacle, to attempt to declare victory. Signs of that are already evident.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that while 100 million bucks is nothing to sneeze at, in the grand scheme of things it is a drop in the bucket for an industry in need of at least a billion dollars if it is to recover any sense of stability. Indeed, when News Media Canada first began begging the government to go after Google and Meta for cash, some involved were selling the idea that sort of loot was possible.

This did not turn out to be so.

Instead of the $100,000 per journo cashapalooza that was once hoped for, the final tally will be more like $6,666.00 per ink-stained wretch.

That figure is based on two assumptions. The first is that the government has agreed to satisfy Google’s desire to pay a single sum to a single defined industry “collective” that would then divide the loot on a per-FTE (full-time employee) basis to everyone granted membership in the industry’s bargaining group. Google had made it clear it had no interest in conducting multiple negotiations and exposing itself to endless and costly arbitrations. So, as we have a deal and Google held all the cards, it’s fair to assume it got what it wanted — a single collective with a single agreement and a single cheque.

November 10, 2023

Canadian media’s self-immolation an object lesson for British media

Filed under: Britain, Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Marc Edge discusses how Canada’s legacy media joined together in a virtual suicide-pact to force Google and Facebook to give them millions in unearned revenue:

The best-laid plans of Canada’s biggest media owners went badly awry this summer, when Meta began blocking news across the country on its social media networks Facebook and Instagram in response to the Online News Act passed in June. Newspaper publishers lobbied the federal government relentlessly to force Google and Meta to compensate them for supposedly “stealing” their news stories by carrying links to them. But instead of bringing them hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the digital giants, as a similar law has in Australia, their campaign backfired badly in what has been described as “a massive policy blunder“, and “the most spectacular legislative failure in Canada’s living political memory“.

Not only will publishers not be getting any money from Meta, they likely won’t get any from Google either, as they have threatened to similarly block news in Canada when the law comes into effect in December. Ironically, publishers will instead lose millions instead, as the agreements they already have with at least Meta will be cancelled, and probably those with Google as well. The knock-on effect makes it a triple-whammy when you also consider the traffic that news media will lose to their websites from the platforms. Worst affected will be online-only publications which have depended on that traffic to build an audience. Most did not want the Online News Act and many spoke out against it, but they were drowned out by the newspaper lobby led by industry association News Media Canada. It is dominated by the country’s two largest chains, which are now owned by a private equity firm and US hedge funds.

The Online News Act is the second in a series of bills designed to regulate the Internet, which, when taken together, include many of the same elements as the UK’s omnibus Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill now before Parliament. An Online Streaming Act passed in April will tax and regulate digital video services in Canada, which are mostly owned by U.S. companies such as Netflix, Disney, and Amazon. A so-called Online Harms Act designed to combat hate speech and online bullying was introduced in 2021 but died on the order paper with an election call. It was criticised by civil libertarians for potentially prohibiting otherwise lawful speech and was thus being revised, but so far it has not been re-introduced. Legislation aimed at increasing online privacy and consumer rights is also planned.

One of these things, on closer scrutiny, is not quite like the other ones, and a realisation is growing in Canada that the government may have been co-opted in its enthusiasm to regulate the Internet to participate in what has been called a “shakedown” of the digital giants. Canada’s news media have literally been on the dole for the past five years since they lobbied the government for a five-year $595-million bailout that expires next spring. This has prompted publishers to adopt Rupert Murdoch’s successful strategy in Australia of persuading the government to force the digital giants to share their advertising revenues with newspapers.

Canadian publishers lobbied for the Online News Act in part by running blank front pages for a day and also spiked several opinion articles by academics that had been accepted for publication by editors. Canada has long had one of the free world’s highest levels of media ownership concentration, along with Australia. It went to another level in 2000 with the “convergence” of newspaper and television ownership, against which Canada had no regulatory safeguards, unlike most other countries. The multimedia business model collapsed with the 2008-09 recession, when advertising revenues dropped sharply, and Canada’s news media have been lurching from bad to worse ever since. The country’s largest newspaper chain, Postmedia Network, was acquired out of bankruptcy in 2010 by a consortium of US hedge funds which had bought much of its previous owner’s high-interest debt on the bond market for pennies on the dollar. They have since taken more than $500 million out of the company in debt payments. The country’s second-largest chain, Torstar, was bought from its owning families at the outset of the pandemic in 2020 by private equity firm NordStar Capital, which has been similarly stripping the company with closures, redundancies, and asset sales.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress