Today begins the 72-hour observance of the Climate Reality Project’s “24 hours of reality” info-event on the so-called “climate crisis” on Facebook and Twitter. I know, I know. Why call it “24 hours of reality” when you’re going to spend 72 hours doing it? Because SHUT UP YOU DENIALIST NAZI SYMPATHIZER!
I’m not on Twitter, but let me share what I’ve communicated to my friends on Facebook:
If ANYONE allows that fat bastard access to their Facebook account in order to spam me with their “THE SKY IS FALLING AND IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT, WINGNUTZ” crap; not only will I de-friend you and refuse to speak to your dumb ass strictly out of principle, I solemnly vow that I will mail a LIVE OPOSSUM to your house in a big box full of styrofoam peanuts.
LIVE. OPOSSUM.
Please don’t test me. I’m serious here. Much like me, live opossums don’t care about fake science. They’re more interested in breaking stuff and having panicked bowel movements on the top shelf of your china hutch.
“Russ from Winterset”, “My Response to ‘The Climate Reality Project'”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2011-09-13
September 13, 2011
QotD: Responding to the “Climate Reality Project”
August 18, 2011
The comfortable myth that the London rioters were “incited” by Facebook and Twitter
Brendan O’Neill points out the absurdity of the notion that the rioters in London and other English cities were organized and co-ordinated by use of social media like Facebook and Twitter:
The nonsense notion that the riot was orchestrated by thugs on social media is exposed in the fact that Twitter and Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger were stuffed with rumour and misinformation during the nights of rioting, rather than with clear instructions for where and how to cause mayhem. The use of social media was secondary to the violence itself, which sprung from the fact that urban youth now seem to have so little moral or emotional attachment to the communities they live in that they are willing to smash them up, and the fact that the police, the so-called guardians of public safety, had no clue how to respond and therefore stood back and let it happen. Incapable even of acknowledging, far less discussing, this combination of urban social malaise and crisis of state authority which inflamed the riots and allowed them to spread, our rulers prefer instead to fantasise that England was simply rocked by opportunists who love a bit of violence. And to fantasise that taking away their BlackBerries or restricting what they can say on Facebook — that is, curtailing youths’ freedom of speech — will make everything okay again.
August 15, 2011
QotD: Trying to look tough once the fight is over
It’s hard to know which is more pathetic: the short-lived cheap bravado of those looters (which sometimes turned to weeping and wailing in court); or the belated show of phoney toughness from government ministers and police chiefs. The authorities have put on a hardman act in the days since the riot — from staging theatrical police raids to sending chumps to jail for months for stealing chewing gum or bottled water — to try to cover up the institutional impotence they displayed when it mattered, in the middle of the trouble that began in London last week.
The more canny looters wore face masks to hide their true identities. The authorities have now donned an iron mask in a desperate bid to conceal the confusion, fear and moral cowardice in high places that was exposed at the time. Everybody is up in arms about the way that rioters allegedly exploited BBM (Blackberry Messenger) and other social media to promote their illegitimate ‘cause’. The government meanwhile has been busy exploiting the weakness of the MSM (Mainstream Media) to get the dubious message of their ‘fightback’ across to their target audience.
Those braggartly idiots who posed for grinning Facebook photos with their hoard of stolen loot have naturally attracted ridicule and contempt. There has been little or no criticism of the way that the authorities have contrived swaggering media coverage of small armies of riot cops raiding suspected looters’ homes, supposedly to show that they are in control and did not really panic when faced with a few hundred barely organised looters and arsonists.
Mick Hume, “Theatrical ‘fightback’ turns to farce”, Spiked, 2011-08-15
August 11, 2011
You have to wonder why it took them this long
The New York City police department announced that it’s setting up a group to monitor Facebook, Twitter, and other social media in order to detect criminals who are stupid enough to boast about their crimes online:
According to The New York Daily News, freshly-appointed assistant commissioner Kevin O’Connor — styled as the NYPD’s “online and gang guru” — will head the new unit, which will trawl Web 2.0 for information on “troublesome house parties, gang showdowns, and other potential mayhem”.
The idea is to pinpoint
net-savvyun-savvy juveniles who divulge their criminal plans on the web or boast about crimes already committed. You might think of them as Idiots 2.0.In his former post with a north Manhattan gang unit, O’Connor apparently tapped the net for vital information on “a number” of shooting cases. In March, the Daily News says, the NYPD nabbed an eighteen-year-old who was part of a fatal beating after he boasted about the killing on Facebook.
August 8, 2011
China discovers that “You can’t stop the signal” again
Strategy Page looks at the way news was disseminated about the high speed rail crash despite the Chinese government’s attempts to quash the story:
Since July 27th, China got another reminder that it no longer can control the news. On July 27th, China’s high-speed “bullet train” had a fatal accident, leaving over 30 dead and many more injured. The cause was inadequate safety and communications systems. In this case, one train was halted by a flaw in the signalling system and another came up from behind and there was the collision that sent four train cars off the tracks, and a bridge. The government immediately tried to keep the accident out of the news. This effort failed because of the ingenuity of Chinese Internet users, despite the government ban on Twitter in China. The ban was meant to impede the rapid spread of news the government wanted to control. Given enough time, the state controlled media could get out a story the government could live with. But blog, RSS and other Internet tools have been tweaked to do the same thing Twitter does. This was especially true of “micro-blogs” that quickly distribute the same 140 character messages Twitter does. Not as well, but good enough, and the news the government wanted to control spread uncontrollably. This included pictures and video of the accident, which the government planned to keep out of the news.
July 25, 2011
More on that Chinese rail crash
The official story has changed a few times since the accident, and at least some Chinese feel they are entitled to the truth about the accident:
Internet users attacked the government’s response to the disaster after authorities muzzled media coverage and urged reporters to focus on rescue efforts. “We have the right to know the truth!” wrote one microblogger called kangfu xiaodingdang. “That’s our basic right!”
Leaked propaganda directives ordered journalists not to investigate the causes and footage emerged of bulldozers shovelling dirt over carriages.
Wang, the railways spokesman, said no one could or would bury the story. He said a colleague told him the wreckage was needed to fill in a muddy ditch to make rescue efforts easier.
But Hong Kong University’s China Media Project said propaganda authorities have ordered media not to send reporters to the scene, not to report too frequently and not to link the story to high-speed rail development. “There must be no seeking after the causes [of the accident], rather, statements from authoritative departments must be followed,” said one directive. Another ordered: “No calling into doubt, no development [of further issues], no speculation, and no dissemination [of such things] on personal microblogs!”
July 6, 2011
“Scouring your own Facebook profile for information your friends shared with you is in violation of Facebook’s terms of service”
Facebook really, really doesn’t want you leaving for Google+ — in fact, they don’t even want you looking too closely at your friends’ personal data:
With the introduction of Google+ last week, the search/ad giant is finally in direct competition with Facebook. Or it will be, once Google gets over the opening week willies and reopens the service to allow the teeming hordes inside.
The biggest barrier to Google+’s success? All the time and effort we’ve already put into building our Facebook posses. Personally I am too old and cranky to start over from scratch. I just want to be able to click a button and automatically add everyone from Facebook to Google+.
That is, of course, exactly what Facebook does not want you to do, as an open source developer named Mohamed Mansour just discovered.
[. . .]
As Mansour noted (on his Google+ page, naturally):
“This is what happens when your extension becomes famous :sigh: Facebook just removed the emails from their mobile site. They implemented a throttling mechanism that if you visit your ~5 friends in a short period of time, it will remove the email field.
“No worries, a new version is on the making … I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every users data on Facebook. You don’t own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again.”
It turns out that scouring your own Facebook profile for information your friends shared with you is in violation of Facebook’s terms of service. Nice, eh?
July 4, 2011
Internet absolved of charges
Apparently the smear campaign against the internet — you know, the meme that we were all being turned into morons by video games, social networking sites, and Google — has no factual basis:
Has Google been making us stupid? Are young people nothing but mindless husks, helplessly addicted to Facebook? Is the very internet itself some sort of insidious virus, creeping through the fibre optics, rewiring our brains, deadening neurons, stunting IQs, stymieing human interaction?
You could be forgiven for worrying. You don’t have to go far to read a scare story about what the upsurge in digital life over the past 20 years has apparently done to our brains. Yet help is at hand.
A report released this morning (The impact of digital technologies on human well-being) claims that the internet has actually been the victim of some sort of vicious smear campaign. An analysis of current research by the Nominet Trust, a UK charity dedicated to increasing access to the internet, claims that we’ve really been worrying about nothing all along. Relax, get online and stop worrying, is about the gist of it.
July 1, 2011
Guardian contributer learns not to confuse “sociopathy” with “social network”
Kia Abdullah will think twice before letting her inner sociopath out on Twitter in future:
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, three young British men were killed in a bus crash in Thailand, just days after starting their gap year travels. A deeply tragic case — and one that will have left many British parents sick with worry. Annually about 100,000 young Brits take gap years.
But here’s a Twitter reaction from Kia Abdullah, a Guardian contributor:
Even if you think this sort of thing, sending it out immediately over Facebook or Twitter is just asking for a landslide of public abuse to land on your head. People who work in media have the least excuse for this kind of absent-minded faux pas, as they often pounce on celebrity or politician errors of exactly this sort.
June 23, 2011
Your social media reputation and your future employment prospects
Chris Greaves posted this link, which should be a warning to everyone to be (even more) careful about your online reputation:
Camille Cacnio, a part-time receptionist at a car dealership, was caught in a 3-second video clip, stealing clothing from a looted store during the Stanley Cup riots.
She was fired.
Professional mountain biker Alex Prochazka posed in front of a burning car, while wearing a T-shirt from his sponsor Oakley.
The sunglass company promptly dropped him.
Carpenter Connor Mcilvenna declared the riots “awesome” on his Facebook page, and posted several pro-riot status updates, such as “atta boy vancity!!! show em how we do it!!!” and “vancouver needed remodeling anyway….”
RiteTech Construction was listed as his employer on his Facebook profile, and the next morning, Mcilvenna was fired.
His boss said he was flooded with emails and didn’t want the company’s reputation linked to the man.
“I think this will be a turning point in how employers look at social media,” said Peter Eastwood, a partner at Borden Ladner Gervais in Vancouver. “This is an extremely powerful tool that has potentially enormous and immediate consequences for a business.”
This is something the early bloggers had to face, that what you post online (or what is posted about you) will be there forever. No rational employer is going to offer you a job in future without at the very least running a Google search on you, and there’s already a niche market for employers to explore (doing a deeper search on prospective employees). Background check and personal references? I’m starting to wonder why employers even bother going through the motions any more.
June 18, 2011
Is it right to name and shame the Vancouver “fans”?
Ken at Popehat discusses the charges that outing the misbehaving fans on Facebook is somehow “vigilantism”:
Vigilantism: Exposing people to the social consequences of their misbehavior is not vigilantism. Subjecting them to physical danger is. That’s why decent people involved in this process don’t post home addresses or phone numbers, and delete them when they are posted.
Proportionality: The proportionality argument is at least somewhat misguided. First of all, bad behavior doesn’t go viral on the internet unless it’s really notable. Garden-variety assholes don’t get top Google ranking. You’ve got to be somewhat epic to draw this modern infamy — by, say, being a water polo star on a scholarship trying to torch a cop car because your hockey team lost. Second, lack of proportionality is self-correcting. If conduct is actually just not that bad, then future readers who Google a bad actor’s name will review the evidence and say “meh, that’s not so bad. Everyone acts up now and then.” Saying that bad behavior should not be easily accessible on the internet is an appeal for enforced ignorance, a request for a news blackout. It’s saying, in effect, I’m more wise and measured than all the future people who might read about this; they can’t be trusted to evaluate this person’s actions in the right light, like I can.
“They Just Made A Mistake”: The argument that bad actors shouldn’t become infamous because they “just made a mistake” is a riff on proportionality. The same criticisms apply: it takes a hell of a mistake to go viral, and future viewers can make up their own minds. Plus, this argument is often sheer bullshit. Trying to torch a cop car because your hockey team lost is not a mere faux pas; normal and decent people don’t do it.
June 7, 2011
Not funny: Germany tops another international poll
Some national stereotypes are apparently more accurate than we think:
Now an international poll appears to reinforce the humourless national stereotype after concluding that Germany is the least funny country in the world.
More than 30,000 people in 15 countries were asked to rank the nations with the worst sense of humour and Germany came out on top.
But before Britons become too smug, the survey did not rank the UK a great deal higher, placing us fourth behind Russia and Turkey.
Countries including Canada, Holland and Belgium all performed better than the UK when it came to demonstrating wit.
The UK boffins are scrambling to find an answer, as Lester Haines points out:
As the Telegraph notes, humour doesn’t translate too well, so it’s a bit difficult for the average Johnny Foreigner to understand just how complex and advanced we are in this most challenging of fields.
Having said that, the pollees were spot on about the Germans.
May 30, 2011
Yet another politician has Twitter exposure issues
First, it was the turn of congressman Anthony Weiner to have his Twitter account hacked. Now it’s an Ontario Tory candidate whose Blackberry was stolen, and a picture of his genitals posted on his Twitter account:
Rookie PC candidate George Lepp says he’s embarrassed that a photo of his family jewels was posted on his campaign Twitter account for about 20 minutes before it was quickly unzipped.
Alan Sakach, communications director for the Ontario Conservatives, said the photo was inadvertently taken by Lepp’s BlackBerry when it was in his front pocket. The photo was posted after someone took it from the candidate for the riding of Niagara Falls, according to Sakach.“He is pretty upset and embarrassed,” Sakach said of a photo that was posted on Lepp’s account Sunday. “It was removed as soon as it came to his attention.”
The Toronto Sun obtained grainy copies of the Twitter page images before they were removed.
The pictures — too graphic to reproduce in the newspaper — are of a man naked from the waist down, showing a close up of his penis and his crossed legs.
As commenters on that article point out, it’s hard to believe the “official” story in this case:
Antinephalist:
George Lepp’s pockets are transparent, are they? And the photo was taken while he wasn’t wearing pants, that apparently have transparent pockets?jaysfan33:
so wait…this guy’s phone took a picture of his twig and berries from his pocket??!?! Then his phone happened to be stolen…then the thief looked through all the guys pictures on the phone found the shot in question and then uploaded it to twitter…yeah that sounds pretty likely.what probably happened: this prev took a shot of his junk when boozed up and then thought it would be funny to post it online, some time passed and he remember oh wait, im running for office, this might not look good, so he took it down…unfortunately for him the snake was out of the bag
H/T to “Lickmuffin”, who posted this link in a comment on the original article about Congressman Weiner.
May 29, 2011
Jim Treacher calls for investigation into hacking of Rep. Anthony Weiner’s Twitter and Facebook accounts
He’s quite right: this sort of thing must be stopped:
I don’t agree much with Rep. Weiner politically, but he’s a congressman and this is a serious crime he’s alleging. Not to mention that identity theft can happen to any of us at any time. Therefore, Rep. Weiner must call for an official investigation. He owes it to himself, to all other victims of cybercrime, and to his fellow members of Congress who might also be at risk. Defrauding someone’s online accounts in order to embarrass and defame them is unconscionable. The culprit must be brought to justice.
And if Rep. Weiner doesn’t want an investigation, somebody should ask him why not.
If you haven’t been following this, the smart money is betting that he won’t want any such investigation to be launched.
May 10, 2011
Is Facebook “managing” your friends for you?
An interesting (and potentially disturbing) article from Mike Elgan may help explain why you don’t see as much activity from some of your Facebook friends as you might expect:
Every action you take on Facebook — clicking “Like,” commenting, sharing, etc. — is called an “Edge” internally at Facebook. Each Edge is weighted differently according to secret criteria.
What you need to know is that relationships and content that don’t get enough “Edges” will get “edged” out of existence. Facebook will cut your ties to people — actually end the relationships you think you have — and block content that doesn’t earn enough Edge points.
For example, many Facebook friendships exist solely through reading each other’s Status Updates. An old friend or co-worker talks about a new job, shares a personal triumph like reaching a weight-loss goal, and tells a story on Mother’s Day about how great his mom is. He posts and you read. You feel connected to his life.
Without telling you, Facebook will probably cut that connection. Using unpublished criteria, Facebook may decide you don’t care about the person and silently stop delivering your friend’s posts. Your friend will assume you’re still reading his updates. You’ll assume he’s stopped posting.
Any friends who fail to click or comment on your posts will stop getting your status updates, too. If you have 500 friends, your posts may be actually delivered to only 100 of them. There’s no way for you to know who sees them and who doesn’t.
I don’t use Facebook too often: certainly not every day. My Twitter updates are echoed to Facebook (but not retweets), so I don’t find it surprising that I haven’t seen everyone’s status updates lately: I just assume they’ve scrolled too far down the page by the time I get around to opening Facebook. This article implies that I never had the chance to see many of these status updates because they have “Edged” out of my feed.
