Stuff, New Zealand’s biggest independently owned news business, today announced it will stop sharing content to X (formerly Twitter), effective immediately.
A media statement said that decision followed Stuff’s increasing concerns about the volume of mis- and disinformation being shared, and the “damaging behaviour being exhibited on and enabled by the platform”.
All Stuff brands including stuff.co.nz, and publishing mastheads brands The Post,The Press and Waikato Times will no longer post on X, with the exception of stories that are of urgent public interest — such as health and safety emergencies, said the statement.
Stuff will also publish these stories on Neighbourly, to reach communities fast and with hyper-local information.
The following message was sent to all staff from CEO Laura Maxwell:
Trusted storytelling
“When Stuff returned to New Zealand ownership in 2020, we set growth in public trust as a key measure of success. Three years on, our mission is to grow our business through trusted storytelling and experiences that make Aotearoa New Zealand a better place,” she said.
“As a business we have made the decision that X, formerly known as Twitter, does not contribute to our mission.
“We are increasingly concerned about the volume of mis- and dis-information being shared on the platform, and the damaging behaviours we have observed, and experienced.
Stuff’s CEO Laura Maxwell . . . “We will also continue to assess our use of other social platforms.” Image: Linked-in/PMW
“So, as of today, we will stop sharing our content on X. An exception to this will be stories that are of urgent public interest, such as health and safety emergencies. We will also publish these stories on Neighbourly.
“We also encourage you all to consider how much you personally engage with X, if at all. The platform is diametrically opposed to our own values, as outlined in our Editorial Code of Practice and Ethics. It deliberately and actively seeks to undermine the value of our journalism.
“We are aware many of you might use X for news gathering and as a way to share information with others. However, as a company that values truth and trust, this platform is no longer a tool for us.
“As many of you know, this is not the first time Stuff has taken such a stance.
“In July 2020, Stuff paused posting activity on Facebook. The move built on the decision to stop paid advertising on Facebook in 2019, following the live streaming and widespread dissemination of footage of the Christchurch mosque shootings on the platform. We will also continue to assess our use of other social platforms.
“As New Zealand’s biggest news organisation, we benefit from a loyal audience, who engage with us every single day on our platforms, our papers, magazines and at our events.
“As restless creators, our innovation mindset is enduring and so we’ll continue to innovate and invest in our platforms to deliver high-quality, trustworthy journalism that is relevant and reflective of Aotearoa.”
Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, has removed headlines from article previews in posts on the platform, placing a huge barrier on access to news and information from media outlets in the right-wing billionaire’s latest attack on journalism. For many users, links to news articles on the website now look similar to a post with an image attached, but with small text showing the domain of the…
Kia ora koutou. Ko Ngāpuhi tōku iwi. Ko Ngāti Manu toku hapu. Ko Karetu tōku marae. Ko Myles Thomas toku ingoa.
I grew up with David Beatson, on the telly. Back in the 1970s, he read the late news which I watched in bed with my parents. Later, David and I worked together to save TVNZ 7 and also regional TV stations.
The Better Public Media (BPM) trust honours David each year with our memorial address, because his fight for non-commercial TV was an honourable one. He wasn’t doing it for himself.
He wasn’t doing it so he could get a job or because it would benefit him. He fought for public media because he knew it was good for Aotearoa NZ.
Like us at Better Public Media, he recognised the benefits to our country from locally produced public media.
David knew, from a long career in media, including as editor of The Listener and as Jim Bolger’s press secretary, that NZ’s media plays an important role in our nation’s culture, social cohesion, and democracy.
NZ culture is very important. NZ culture is so unique and special, yet it has always been at risk of being swamped by content from overseas. The US especially with its crackpot conspiracies, extreme racial tensions, and extreme tensions about everything to be honest.
Local content the antidote
Local content is the antidote to this. It reflects us, it portrays us, it defines New Zealand, and whether we like it or not, it defines us. But it’s important to remember that what we see reflected back to us comes through a filter.
This speech is coming to you through a filter, called Myles Thomas.
Better Public Media trustee Myles Thomas speaking beside the panel moderator and BPM chair Dr Peter Thompson (seated from left); Jenny Marcroft, NZ First candidate for Kaipara ki Mahurangi; Ricardo Menéndez March, Green Party candidate for Mt Albert; and Willie Jackson, Labour Party list candidate and Minister for Broadcasting and Media. Image: David Robie/APR
Commercial news reflects our world through a filter of sensation and danger to hold our attention. That makes NZ seem more shallow, greedy, fearful and dangerous.
The social media filter makes the world seem more angry, reactive and complaining.
RNZ’s filter is, I don’t know, thoughtful, a bit smug, middle class.
The New Zealand Herald filter makes us think every dairy is being ram-raided every night.
And The Spinoff filter suggests NZ is hip, urban and mildly infatuated with Winston Peters.
These cultural reflections are very important actually because they influence us, how we see NZ and its people.
It is not a commodity
That makes content, cultural content, special. It is not a commodity. It’s not milk powder.
We don’t drink milk and think about flooding in Queenstown, drinking milk doesn’t make us laugh about the Koiwoi accent, we don’t drink milk and identify with a young family living in poverty.
Local content is rich and powerful, and important to our society.
When the government supports the local media production industry it is actually supporting the audiences and our culture. Whether it is Te Mangai Paho, or NZ On Air or the NZ Film Commission, and the screen production rebate, these organisations fund New Zealand’s identity and culture, and success.
Don’t ask Treasury how to fund culture. Accountants don’t understand it, they can’t count it and put it in a spreadsheet, like they can milk solids. Of course they’ll say such subsidies or rebates distort the “market”, that’s the whole point. The market doesn’t work for culture.
Moreover, public funding of films and other content fosters a more stable long-term industry, rather than trashy short-termism that is completely vulnerable to outside pressures, like the US writer’s strike.
We have a celebrated content production industry. Our films, video, audio, games etc. More local content brings stability to this industry, which by the way also brings money into the country and fosters tourism.
BPM trust chair Dr Peter Thompson, senior lecturer in media studies at Victoria University, welcomes the panel and audience for the 2023 media policy debate at Grey Lynn Library Hall in Auckland last night. Image: Del Abcede/Asia Pacific Report
We cannot use quota
New Zealand needs more local content.
And what’s more, it needs to be accessible to audiences, on the platforms that they use.
But in NZ we do have one problem. Unlike Australia, we can’t use a quota because our GATT agreement does not include a carve out for local music or media quotas.
In the 1990s when GATT was being negotiated, the Aussies added an exception to their GATT agreement allowing a quota for Aussie cultural content. So they can require radio stations to play a certain amount of local music. Now they’re able to introduce a Netflix quota for up to 20 percent of all revenue generated in Aussie.
We can’t do that. Why? Because back in the 1990s the Bolger government and MFAT decided against putting the same exception into NZ’s GATT agreement.
But there is another way of doing it, if we take a lead from Denmark and many European states. Which I’ll get to in a minute.
The second important benefit of locally produced public media is social cohesion, how society works, the peace and harmony and respect that we show each other in public, depends heavily on the “public sphere”, of which, media is a big part.
Power of media to polarise
Extensive research in Europe and North America shows the power of media to polarise society, which can lead to misunderstanding, mistrust and hatred.
But media can also strengthen social cohesion, particularly for minority communities, and that same research showed that public media, otherwise known as public service media, is widely regarded to be an important contributor to tolerance in society, promoting social cohesion and integrating all communities and generations.
The third benefit is democracy. Very topical at the moment. I’ve already touched on how newsmedia affect our culture. More directly, our newsmedia influences the public dialogue over issues of the day.
It defines that dialogue. It is that dialogue.
So if our newsmedia is shallow and vacuous ignoring policies and focussing on the polls and the horse-race, then politicians who want to be elected, tailor their messages accordingly.
There’s plenty of examples of this such as National’s bootcamp policy, or Labour’s removing GST on food. As policies, neither is effective. But in the simplified 30 seconds of commercial news and headlines, these policies resonate.
Is that a good thing, that policies that are known to fail are nonetheless followed because our newsmedia cater to our base instincts and short attention spans?
Disaster for democracy
In my view, commercial media is actually disaster for democracy. All over the world.
But of course, we can’t control commercial media. No-one’s suggesting that.
The only rational reaction is to provide stronger locally produced public media.
And unfortunately, NZ lacks public media.
Obviously Australia, the UK, Canada have more public media than us, they have more people, they can afford it. But what about countries our size, Ireland? Smaller population, much more public media.
Denmark, Norway, Finland, all with roughly 5 million people, and all have significantly better public media than us. Even after the recent increases from Willie Jackson, NZ still spends just $44 per person on public media. $44 each year.
When we had a licence fee it was $110. Jim Bolger’s government got rid of that and replaced it with funding from general taxation — which means every year the Minister of Finance, working closely with Treasury, decides how much to spend on public media for that year.
This is what I call the curse of annual funding, because it makes funding public media a very political decision.
National, let us be honest, the National Party hates public media, maybe because they get nicer treatment on commercial news. We see this around the world — the Daily Mail, Sky News Australia, Newstalk ZB . . . most commercial media quite openly favours the right.
Systemic bias
This is a systemic bias. Because right-wing newsmedia gets more clicks.
Right-wing politicians are quite happy about that. Why fund public to get in the way? Even if it it benefits our culture, social cohesion, and democracy.
New Zealand is the same, the last National government froze RNZ funding for nine years.
National Party spokesperson on broadcasting Melissa Lee fought against the ANZPM merger, and now she’s fighting the News Bargaining Bill. As minister she could cut RNZ and NZ On Air’s budget.
But it wouldn’t just be cost-cutting. It would actually be political interference in our newsmedia, an attempt to skew the national conversation in favour of the National Party, by favouring commercial media.
So Aotearoa NZ needs two things. More money to be spent on public media, and less control by the politicians. Sustainable funding basically.
The best way to achieve it is a media levy.
Highly targeted tax
For those who don’t know, a levy is a tax that is highly targeted, and we have a lot of them, like the Telecommunications Development Levy (or TDL) which currently gathers $10 million a year from internet service providers like Spark and 2 Degrees to pay for rural broadband.
We’re all paying for better internet for farmers basically. When first introduced by the previous National government it collected $50 million but it’s dropped down a bit lately.
This is one of many levies that we live with and barely notice. Like the levy we pay on our insurance to cover the Earthquake Commission and the Fire and Emergency Levy. There are maritime levies, energy levies to fund EECA and Waka Kotahi, levies on building consents for MBIE, a levy on advertising pays for the ASA, the BSA is funded by a levy.
Lots of levies and they’re very effective.
So who could the media levy, levy?
ISPs like the TDL? Sure, raise the TDL back up to $50 million or perhaps higher, and it only adds a dollar onto everyone’s internet bill. There’s $50 million.
But the real target should be Big Tech, social media and large streaming services. I’m talking about Facebook, Google, Netflix, YouTube and so on. These are the companies that have really profited from the advent of online media, and at the expense of locally produced public media.
Funding content creation
We need a way to get these companies to make, or at least fund, content creation here in Aotearoa. Denmark recently proposed a solution to this problem with an innovative levy of 2 percent on the revenue of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney.
But that 2 percent rises to 5 percent if the streaming company doesn’t spend at least 5 percent of their revenue on making local Danish content. Denmark joins many other European countries already doing this — Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France and even Romania are all about to levy the streamers to fund local production.
Australia is planning to do so as well.
But that’s just online streaming companies. There’s also social media and search engines which contribute nothing and take almost all the commercial revenue. The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill will address that to a degree but it’s not open and we won’t know if the amounts are fair.
Another problem is that it’s only for news publishers — not drama or comedy producers, not on-demand video, not documentary makers or podcasters. Social media and search engines frequently feature and put advertising around these forms of content, and hoover up the digital advertising that would otherwise help fund them, so they should also contribute to them.
A Media Levy can best be seen as a levy on those companies that benefit from media on the internet, but don’t contribute to the public benefits of media — culture, social cohesion and democracy. And that’s why the Media Levy can include internet service providers, and large companies that sell digital advertising and subscriptions.
Note, this would target large companies over a certain size and revenue, and exclude smaller platforms, like most levies do.
Separate from annual budget
The huge benefit of a levy is that it is separate from the annual budget, so it’s fiscally neutral, and politicians can’t get their mits on it. It removes the curse of annual funding.
It creates a funding stream derived from the actual commercial media activities which produce the distribution gaps in the first place, for which public media compensates. That’s why the proceeds would go to the non-commercial platform and the funding agencies — Te Mangai Paho, NZ On Air and the Film Commission.
One final point. This wouldn’t conflict with the new Digital Services Tax proposed by the government because that’s a replacement for Income Tax. A Media Levy, like all levies, sits over and above income tax.
So there we go. I’ve mentioned Jim Bolger three times! I’ve also outlined some quite straight-forward methods to fund public media sustainably, and to fund a significant increase in local content production, video, film, audio and journalism.
None of it needs to be within the grasp of Melissa Lee or Willie Jackson, or David Seymour.
All of it can be used to create local content that improves democracy, social cohesion and Kiwi culture.
Myles Thomas is a trustee of the Better Public Media Trust (BPM). He is a former television producer and director who in 2012 established the Save TVNZ 7 campaign. Thomas is now studying law. This commentary was this year’s David Beatson Memorial Address at a public meeting in Grey Lynn last night on broadcast policy for the NZ election 2023.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
An award-winning website with an archive of thousands of Pacific news reports, videos, images and research abstracts regarded as a pioneering initiative for a university based media programme has “disappeared” from its cyberspace location.
The PMC Online website . . . disappeared. Image: Screenshot/PMW
Pacific Media Centre Online, founded in 2007, was the website of the research and publication centre established at Auckland University of Technology as a component of the Creative Industries Research Institute.
It was a platform for student journalists and independent media contributors from other media schools and institutions across the Oceania region such as the University of the South Pacific as well as at AUT.
One of it PMC Online’s components, Pacific Media Watch, was awarded the faculty “Critic and Conscience of Society” award in 2014 and contributing student journalists won 11 prizes in the annual Ossie journalism awards of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA).
The new default page for http://pmc.aut.ac.nz Image: Screenshot PMW
When the PMC effectively closed in early 2021, the website continued as an archive at AUT for more than two and a half years under the URL pmc.aut.ac.nz — a total life of 16 years plus.
However, suddenly the website vanished earlier this month with pmc.aut.ac.nz defaulting to the university’s Journalism Department with no explanation from campus authorities.
Founding director of the Pacific Media Centre and retired professor of Pacific journalism Dr David Robie called it a disappointing reflection on the decline of independent journalism and lack of respect for history at media schools, saying: “Yet another example of cancel culture.”
Jemima Garrett, co-convenor of the Australia Asia Pacific Media Initiative (AAPMI), described it as an “appalling waste and disrespectful”.
The Google directory for the Pacific Media Centre – all files have now disappeared. Image: Screenshot/PMW
Investigative journalist and Gold Walkley winner Peter Cronau, who is co-publisher of Declassified Australia, wrote: “That’s disgraceful censorship of Pacific stories — disturbing it’s been done by AUT, who should be devoted to openness and free speech. What avenues exist for appeal?”
Another investigative journalist and former journalism professor Wendy Bacon said: “This is very bad and very glad that you archived all this valuable work. Unfortunately the same thing happened to an enormous amount of valuable files of Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at UTS [University of Technology Sydney].”
The Pacific affairs adviser of the Pacific Islands Forum, Lisa Leilani Williams-Lahari, said: “Sad!”
Pacific Media Centre student contributors filed more than 50 reports for the Australian journalism school collaborative platform The Junction and they can be read here.
For author Ellen Miles, planting in public spaces is a radical act that’s about community ownership and belonging
Anarchism gets a bad rep. In the popular imagination, anarchists dress in black, they smash windows and hurl firebombs at police. Or else, they are young social misfits with green hair and too many piercings. Often they are both.
But what if anarchy could be beautiful, what if it could bring local communities together planting flowers in the streets? For Ellen Miles, the new doyenne of guerrilla gardening, it is. “I call it botanarchy,” she says.
On Thursday, the whole world celebrated the International Day of Peace. Although the UN day is not as famous as others, like World Press Freedom Day, International Women’s Day or World Teacher’s Day, it is important nevertheless.
The UN General Assembly has set aside the special day to help strengthen the ideals of peace, by observing 24 hours of nonviolence and ceasefire. Why? Because never has our world needed peace more.
Just look around us. The Ukraine-Russia war seems like a never-ending fight. Despite efforts made globally to end it, the armed conflict continues to rage on in Europe.
In the continent of Africa, clashes continue in the war-torn Sudan.
According to the UN reports, Sudan is now home to the highest number of internally displaced anywhere in the world, with at least 7.1 million uprooted.
More than six million Sudanese are one step away from famine and experts are warning that inaction could cause a spill over effect in the volatile region. In the Middle East, strife can be heard and seen in the mainstream media every second day.
The scourge of hunger, HIV/ AIDS, strange diseases, famine, climate change and natural disasters continues, without any end in sight. On the other hand, for many people living in stable, well-educated and prosperous communities, every day is an invaluable gift to wake up to.
Peace seems invisible
Peace in these places seems invisible because people’s hearts are filled with contents and happiness. People enjoy living in good homes, going to good schools, walking on safe streets and lawbreaking is unusual.
However, this environment and type of living is absent or different in some parts of the world around us.
In some countries, every year wars kill hundreds of lives, including women and children, poverty puts millions more through a life of struggle and low levels of education makes people unemployed and in need of the many offerings of life.
With military conflicts, humanity takes a significant step backwards, as many things have to be recovered instead of going forward. Just look at the past two world wars to understand this.
Both wars caused the loss of human lives, property loss, economic collapse, poverty, hunger and infrastructural destruction. But among the trail of destruction the wars left behind emerged humans’ insatiable desire for peace.
The absence of comfort and the overriding feeling of anxiety and fear brought about by conflicts, created spaces in the human heart that allowed humans to, once again, yearn for goodwill, friendship and unity.
That is why the celebration of the International Day of Peace, which is aimed at conveying the danger of war, is very important.
Actions for Peace
This year’s IDP theme was Actions for Peace: Our Ambition for the #GlobalGoals, a call to action that recognises individual and collective responsibility to foster peace.
On the day, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, “Peace is needed today more than ever.”
“War and conflict are unleashing devastation, poverty, hunger, and driving tens of millions of people from their homes. Climate chaos is all around. And even peaceful countries are gripped by gaping inequalities and political polarisation.”
Defined loosely, peace simply means being in a place, where no hatred and no conflict exists and where hatred and conflict are replaced by love, care and respect. We are now in the year 2023.
We find that fostering peace is becoming impossible without justice and fairness, without the values of respect and understanding, without love and unity, and without equality and equity.
Crime continues to escalate, our women and children continue to get raped, there is a lot of hatred and rancour, our streets are not safe at night and our homes are not secure.
People don’t respect people’s space, people’s human rights and people’s property. The internet and social media have revolutionised the world, the way we do things and the way we live our lives.
But some of these are extinguishing peace instead of disharmony. Despite efforts to use the internet to prevent conflict, social media is fueling hatred, radicalisation, suspicion, rallying people to disturb the peace, spreading untruths and creating disunity.
Defences of peace
The Preamble to the Constitution of UNESCO declares that “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”.
Therefore, for us in Fiji, every day and every opportunity must be exploited to support people to understand each other, work together to build lasting peace and make a safer world for diversity and unity.
Because we are all anticipating Fiji’s upcoming games in the Rugby World Cup 2023, we should think seriously about how we can use sports as instruments of peace.
Our Flying Fijians are doing this superbly every time they erupt in singing, give a handshake or a smile, and lift their hands and eyes to the skies in prayerful meditation. There are no wars in Fiji yet we are still struggling to instill peace in our hearts, mind and lives.
We still need peace in our families and communities. Peace is more than the absence of war.
It is about living together with our imperfections and differences — of sex, race, language, religion or culture. At the same time, it is about striving to advance universal respect for justice and human rights on which peaceful co-existence is grounded.
Peace is more than just ending strife and violence, in the home, community, nation and the world.
It is about living it everyday. UNESCO says peace is a way of life “deep-rooted commitment to the principles of liberty, justice, equality and solidarity among all human beings”.
Have a peaceful week with a quote from the Bible (Matthew 5:9) “Blessed Are the Peacemakers, for They Will Be Called Children of God”.
Until we meet on this same page, same time next week, stay blessed, stay healthy and stay safe.
John Mitchell is a Fiji Times journalist and writes the weekly “Behind The News” column. Republished from The Sunday Times with permission.
New Zealand’s Stuff media group has joined other leading news organisations around the world in restricting Open AI from using its content to power artificial intelligence tool Chat GPT.
A growing number of media companies globally have taken action to block access to Open AI bots from crawling and scraping content from their news sites.
Open AI is behind the most well-known and fastest-growing artificial intelligence chatbots, Chat GPT, released late 2022.
“The scraping of any content from Stuff or its news masthead sites for commercial gain has always been against our policy,” says Stuff CEO Laura Maxwell. “But it is important in this new era of Generative AI that we take further steps to protect our intellectual property.”
Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) is the name given to technologies that use vast amounts of information scraped from the internet to train large language models (LLMs).
This enables them to generate seemingly original answers — in text, visuals or other media — to queries based on mathematically predicting the most likely right answer to a prompt or dialogue.
Some of the most well-known Gen AI tools include Open AI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E, and Google’s Bard.
Surge of unease
There has been a surge of unease from news organisations, artists, writers and other creators of original content that their work has already been harvested without permission, knowledge or compensation by Open AI or other tech companies seeking to build new commercial products through Gen AI technology.
“High quality, accurate and credible journalism is of great value to these businesses, yet the business model of journalism has been significantly weakened as a result of their growth off the back of that work,” said Maxwell.
“The news industry must learn from the mistakes of the past, namely what happened in the era of search engines and social media, where global tech giants were able to build businesses of previously unimaginable scale and influence off the back of the original work of others.
“We recognise the value of our work to Open AI and others, and also the huge risk that these new tools pose to our existence if we do not protect our IP now.”
There is also increasing concern these tools will exacerbate the spread of disinformation and misinformation globally.
“Content produced by journalists here and around the world is the cornerstone of what makes these Gen AI tools valuable to the user,” Maxwell said.
“Without it, the models would be left to train on a sea of dross, misinformation and unverified information on the internet — and increasingly that will become the information that has itself been already generated by AI.
Risk of ‘eating itself’
“There is a risk the whole thing will end up eating itself.”
Stuff and other news companies have been able to block Open AI’s access to their content because its web crawler, GPTBot, is identifiable.
But not all crawlers are clearly labelled.
Stuff has also updated its site terms and conditions to expressly bar the use of its content to train AI models owned by any other company, as well as any other unauthorised use of its content for commercial use.
OpenAI has entered into negotiations with some news organisations in the United States, notably Associated Press, to license their content to train ChatGPT.
So far these agreements have not been widespread although a number of news companies globally are seeking licensing arrangements.
Maxwell said Stuff was looking forward to holding conversations around licensing its content in due course.
Oil and gas companies are paying popular social media content-makers to publicise their climate-wrecking products. Young online celebrities best known for posting about video games, dogs, or holidays to millions of followers are also dropping in unexpected plugs for petrol stations, fuel rewards, and club cards. As such, we’ve reached a bizarre new frontier of late capitalism: fossil fuel influencers.
The climate disinformation monitor DeSmog said it had found more than 100 influencers, some of them in the UK, who had promoted fossil fuel companies. The outlet reported that:
The influencers have included a popular former BBC presenter, a polar explorer, and an exasperated father of five who needs a break and finds it in the form of BP’s rewards app.
The campaigns have been deployed across a number of social media platforms and are part of a global effort to give “millennials a reason to connect emotionally” with oil and gas firms, and to tackle their perception as “the bad guys”.
DeSmog also stated that Shell was making the most use of influencers. Their paid advocates included Dallas Campbell, best known for BBC pop science show Bang Goes the Theory. He presented interviews with two Shell executives as part of a five-part YouTube series.
Fossil fuel influencers
News agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) conducted separate research on fossil fuel influencers across multiple social media platforms. It found cases of such spots in India, Mexico, South Africa. and the US. Influencers were promoting major fossil fuel firms such as BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies on platforms including Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch.
The revelations follow an increasing resurgence in climate disinformation on social media. For example, as the Canary has previously reported, since Musk took over Twitter, the platform has fomented an uptick in climate denial.
One TikTok user that viewers have dubbed ‘The Petrol Princess’ said in a video:
Come with me to get some snacks at my family Shell gas station
The influencer usually models wigs for her 2.7m followers. Her account is tagged as a “paid partnership” in line with the platform’s rules. AFP also found videos promoting products for US oil giant ExxonMobil. This included a video of an influencer showing off the company’s rewards program. A wedding-themed influencer also produced another promotion for the scheme.
Seeking ‘social capital’
Analysts say companies are targeting young people on social media in a cynical attempt to shore up their oil and gas-based business. Professor of communication and information at Rutgers University Melissa Aronczyk has said that:
Many young people are well aware of the urgency of the climate crisis and take a dim view of fossil fuel companies
She therefore suggested that these firms are now seeking to “build up social capital” with such audiences.
In recent years, fossil fuel companies have doubled-down on targeting young people with their greenwashing messaging. In 2019, the Intercept highlighted how oil and gas corporations had been “youth-washing” their majority-fossil-fuel-oriented activities. Specifically, the news site detailed multiple oil majors’ efforts to co-opt Student Energy, a key youth climate organisation.
Meanwhile, fossil-fuel-funded free-market thinktank the Heartland Institute has even worked with a young German Youtuber. In 2020, the Washington Post described 19-year-old Naomi Seibt as “the anti-Greta”. Seibt has put out Youtube videos denouncing the science behind the climate crisis to her nearly 50,000 followers.
Graham Brookie of the Digital Forensic Research Lab – part of the nonprofit Atlantic Council, which works to expose disinformation – stated that Seibt’s campaign bears resemblance:
to a model we use called the 4d’s — dismiss the message, distort the facts, distract the audience, and express dismay at the whole thing.
Pitiful green efforts
When contacted for comment, Exxonmobil company media relations spokesperson Lauren Kight stated that:
ExxonMobil, like many companies, works with influencers to educate consumers about the full benefits of our fuel rewards program
A Shell spokesperson stated that the company used advertising and social media to promote its low-carbon products. However, it declined to provide examples. In addition, it wouldn’t comment on the paid partnerships for petrol products.
In a search of Shell renewable fuel-related hashtags, AFP found just a handful of Instagram posts promoting its electric car-charging application.
Of course, this is perhaps unsurprising given that renewables make up a tiny fraction of fossil fuel companies’ business. For example, the Canary recently reported on Greenpeace findings that European fossil fuel giants had funnelled only around 7% of their investments into renewables and low-carbon energy.
‘Ethically suspect’
Clean Creatives is a campaign to encourage PR and advertising professionals to abandon fossil fuel clients. Executive director Duncan Meisel suggested that the fossil fuel influencer ads were not strictly direct acts of greenwashing per se. Instead, he judged them:
more ethically suspect in other ways, because it’s encouraging more use of a product that is actively harming people.
Moreover, he said it was hard to gauge the scale of such advertising due to inconsistent labelling.
Instagram and TikTok demand users label branded content. In particular, content-makers must do so when companies have paid them or provided gifts. In addition, the sites have restrictions on advertising dangerous products. However, they do not list fossil fuels among these. Analysis published in 2021 by the thinktank InfluenceMap found that oil companies spent $10m on Facebook ads in a year.
Although endorsements by “third-party” personalities are a long-standing technique in advertising, Meisel and Aronczyk said fossil fuel firms’ bid to court influencers could backfire. Meisel said that:
Influencers that work with fossil fuel companies should expect their reputation to take a hit. Fossil fuel companies are the world’s biggest polluters, deeply disliked by young people – and for anyone who sees these videos, the unfollow button is never far away.
As ever, climate criminals hell-bent on profits will use any devious means to maintain their fossil fuel hegemony. Unsurprisingly, they’re not above manipulating young people on social media – whatever keeps the oil riches flowing.
Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse.
Feature image via Solen Feyissa/Wikimedia, cropped and resized to 1910 by 1000, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.
The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.
Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.
This last point is particularly disturbing.
Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.
In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.
Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
Flagging you as a danger based on your phone and movements. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels.
Flagging you as a danger based on your face. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business.
Flagging you as a danger based on your behavior. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations.
Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. With every dollar we spend, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.
Flagging you as a danger based on your public activities. Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies.
Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. As The Interceptreported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.
Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals.
Flagging you as a danger based on your car. License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars.
Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, concluded that the government had carried out “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.” The report continued: “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles… Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.” Nothing has changed since then.
Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.
Don’t believe it.
The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.
Moreover, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity, and that is the whole point.
Weaponized surveillance is re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear.
The reality is that most of us are not ready for the truth. We want reassurance. We cling to our comfort blankets because the idea that we live in a world in which our and our families’ interests are not paramount is too disturbing.
The idea that our fates are entirely dependent on a giant Ponzi scheme that might come crashing down at any moment from any one of multiple design flaws – an ecological crisis, a nuclear catastrophe, a pandemic or a hubristic mis-step with Artificial Intelligence – is simply too terrifying.
So, even as we mock a figurehead like Donald Trump, Joe Biden or Boris Johnson, we remain deeply invested in the system that keeps producing them. We need to believe – and just as desperately as a child refusing, a little longer, to give in to suspicions that Father Christmas might not exist. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, our societies, we insist, are on a continuous upwards trajectory named progress.
Few are willing to consider that we might actually be in a death spiral. So instead of doing something to change the world, we bury our heads. We ignore every sign, however blatant, of the system’s inherent dysfunction and corruption.
These dark thoughts are prompted in part by the very belated concession from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – whispered by government lawyers in a court hearing – that for two years it has been peddling disinformation about both Ivermectin and the fact that doctors were not authorised to prescribe it in the treatment of Covid.
Ok, let’s pause right there. Because already I sense you reaching for the remote to change channels. Isn’t Ivermectin a horse drug that only anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers ever talk about?
Before I lose you entirely, let me hurriedly issue a disclaimer. This piece isn’t really about Ivermectin – least of all its efficacy in the treatment of Covid. I’m not a doctor and I’m not qualified to judge. I talk about things I am familiar with, that I have some insight on.
I’m not interested in medical debates about Ivermectin. I’m interested in deconstructing the political debates around it – and what they tell us about the way medical matters, and much else besides, have been entirely captured by political and commercial interests.
I can assure you I have no shares in Ivermectin and won’t profit either way, whether its use increases or declines. Unlike Big Pharma, that’s not the reason I’m taking an interest.
It just so happens that Ivermectin is a particularly fascinating case study – both of the corruption of our governance and regulatory systems, and of our own unwillingness to recognise that corruption out of fear of what it might signify.
Ivermectin provides one more data point that might help drag each of us out of our carefully constructed cocoon of ideological comfort.
The World Health Organisation has finally acknowledged the two-year global crisis of excess deaths. But still nothing is being done to understand *what* is causing it, as I explained in my recent article:https://t.co/RXHdTh2wAbpic.twitter.com/k3noqjOmaO
This article can be seen as a follow-up to my recent piece on the refusal by precisely the same actors – Big Pharma, medical regulators, the corporate media – to investigate why over the past two years far higher numbers of people than was to be expected have been dying across the Western world of unexplained causes not related to Covid.
Both of these post-pandemic issues ought to make us angry, and more willing to fight for our species’ survival.
‘Merely quips’
After all, the general assumption that Ivermectin is a horse dewormer didn’t come from nowhere. It was a view cultivated in us by the FDA and the corporate media. Here is the tweet the agency sent out exactly two years ago to persuade us that only dangerous nutjobs talk about Ivermectin:
I am guessing that those 108,000 likes make it one of the most influential tweets ever by the FDA. There is a reason why it went so viral.
The corporate media worked overtime to promote exactly the same messaging: that Ivermectin was only good for horses and cows. The media echoed the FDA in implying very strongly that the drug’s use in humans was not safe. There was not a late-night show host who did not mock Ivermectin as a horse drug and ridicule its supporters, even leading doctors.
Super-star podcaster Joe Rogan’s admission that he had been prescribed Ivermectin by his doctor when he fell ill with Covid were enough to foment demands for his banning from social media for spreading misinformation.
Social media giants like Youtube played their own part, treating any reference to Ivermectin, in pretty much any positive context, even by doctors, as “misinformation”. The algorithms were adjusted accordingly, which is why I will have to avoid mentioning Ivermectin when I post this story on social media.
And yet now, two years on, the FDA is quietly admitting that it, not Rogan, outright lied. Ivermectin isn’t a medicine used only by vets. It’s a human drug that’s been prescribed billions of times – and so successfully that it won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2015. A leading science journal called it a “wonder drug” in 2017 – before the pandemic changed what could be said publicly – highlighting “its unexpected potential as an antibacterial, antiviral and anti-cancer agent”.
It is the FDA – not Rogan – now admitting that Ivermectin is safe and that doctors, including Rogan’s, do indeed have the authority to prescribe the drug, not just to treat parasites but to treat Covid too.
It was tweets like the one above that instigated a witch-hunt by US state medical boards against doctors who prescribed Ivermectin, the matter at the heart of the case currently before the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
With the FDA’s statements about Ivermectin now being harshly criticised by the judges hearing the case, the US government has fallen back on the barely credible argument that its comments were meant as “merely quips”.
So why would the FDA lie about Ivermectin – and maintain that lie for at least two years until forced to come clean under cross-examination by the courts?
And why did all those expert medical correspondents working for Big Media, journalists who knew only too well that Ivermectin was a human drug, conspire with the FDA in promoting a blatant lie?
Here, for example, is Dr Sunjay Gupta of CNN being put on the spot by Rogan when he appeared on his show. He is forced to admit, uncomfortably, that the media were not telling the truth about Ivermectin.
Emergency use
Which brings us to the politics surrounding Ivermectin – which is far more revelatory than any medical debate about it.
Remember, the FDA’s drug division receives three-quarters of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry. That doesn’t just mean the continuing salaries of many thousands of government officials depend on keeping Big Pharma happy. It also ensures wider political pressures. Washington prefers not to alienate Big Pharma and then have to foot the FDA’s budget through higher taxes. And, as we shall see, leading politicians have every incentive to avoid picking a fight with a corporate America.
The reality is that Ivermectin and other drugs that might have been repurposed for Covid posed an enormous threat in principle to the FDA and its funders in Big Pharma – completely aside from the practical question of whether those drugs actually work against Covid.
The new, experimental mRNA vaccines could only be rushed out for use in humans on the basis of an emergency authorisation so long as no other drug could be shown to be an effective treatment for Covid.
Well, that was a good thing, I hear you say. Those vaccines reduced the severest symptoms, even if sadly they didn’t actually stop transmission.
Let’s pull back a second and try to see the bigger picture for a moment. Let’s do precisely what the FDA and Pfizer don’t want us to do: engage our critical faculties.
Ivermectin has been off-patent for years. No one can make any serious money from it, and certainly not giant pharmaceuticals based in the United States. Any Indian factory with the right approvals can knock out the tablets for a few cents.
So in short, Big Pharma, which was poised to become fabulously enriched by its new vaccines, had every financial incentive imaginable to make sure there were no rivals in the stakes for a Covid miracle cure. The focus had to be entirely and exclusively on the vaccines.
Endless profiteering
The corporate media had exactly the same priorities. Why?
A superficial, if truthful analysis is that companies like Pfizer subsidise the corporate media as heavily as they do the FDA. Just watch this short compilation video to get a sense of quite how complete Big Pharma’s stranglehold of sponsorship is on the main TV networks:
But a deeper analysis is that Big Pharma and Big Media are just separate wings of the same Big Business empire headquartered in the US. What’s good for Big Pharma is good for Big Weapons is good for Big Farming is good for Big Food is good for Big Media, and so on.
What is important for all of them is the maintenance of a political and economic climate that allows for Big Everything’s permanent profiteering. What is good for one of them is good for all.
So Ivermectin was never going to be allowed a look-in, irrespective of whether it worked.
But that doesn’t really matter, I hear you interject, because Ivermectin doesn’t work against Covid.
And how do we know that? The anwer is we don’t. Our assumption that Ivermectin is useless against Covid is nothing more than that. It is an assumption. Some studies suggest it doesn’t help, while others suggest possible effectiveness.
Medicine has an established way to deal with such uncertainties. It settles them with an expensive, large-scale, randomised, controlled study.
In a time of profound crisis such as a pandemic, politics has an additional way to settle such questions: move heaven and earth to carry out emergency trials of drugs that look like they may be suitable for repurposing against the threat. Shift into a war footing.
Which is exactly what would have happened – not just for Ivermectin but for other promising potential treatments like the mis-named sunshine hormone Vitamin D – if we lived in a world in which scientific principles, not profiteering by a tiny wealth-elite, guided our societies’ decisions.
Instead, all of us – even children who were under no threat from Covid – were forced to worship exclusively at the altar of the novel vaccines.
That should make your blood boil.
Many millions of people died. Some of them might have been helped through the use of safe, potentially beneficial treatments before the vaccines were rolled out.
Some of those who refused to take the vaccines – the heretics – might have had their lives saved through the approval of other treatments.
Everyone, even the vaccinated and multi-boosted, might have had even better outcomes with the help of treatments to complement the vaccines.
Instead, the response to the pandemic prioritised one thing only: not saving lives, but maximising to the greatest extent possible the profits of Big Pharma.
I don’t know whether Ivermectin would have helped. You don’t know whether it would have helped. But what’s important – what is scandalous – is that the FDA doesn’t know either, and still doesn’t care to know whether lives would have been saved through the use of treatments in place of, or in addition to, the vaccines.
That is a violation both of fundamental medical ethics and of the social contract. I can barely believe I need to spell it out – and even less that I will be called irresponsible for doing so by the vaccine cultists.
Smears and insinuation
The issue isn’t whether Ivermectin works against Covid. That narrow issue is the one Big Pharma, Big Media and the FDA want you focusing on. Because they have made sure the question will only ever be settled in the arena of official smear and insinuation, in misleading social media soundbites like the FDA’s horse drug one.
That isn’t science, it’s propaganda.
If the FDA has good arguments against Ivermectin, it needs to use them, not play mind games with us – games that can have only one possible outcome: further eroding public trust in our compromised, financially captured medical authorities. Revealingly, those most worried about the “Trump misinformation threat” are also the ones, it seems, least concerned about the FDA’s record of promoting falsehoods.
To run a controlled trial of Ivermectin for treating Covid – even now, three years too late – costs a small fortune. One that can be afforded only by Big Pharma or governments. And in the circumstances, neither has any interest to find out.
Why does this matter? It shouldn’t need stating. But from reactions on social media, I see that it very much does.
It matters because it shows that we live in a world where “facts” are of no interest, where science is not followed, unless it can be monetised. Science is no longer for the benefit of all. It has become private property – the property of powerful, unaccountable corporations – like everything else in our societies. Science has been weaponised to further enrich a corrupt wealth-elite.
It matters because, if we continue to resign ourselves so passively to these constant mind-games and manipulations, we must also accept that the profiteering they conceal should take priority over our health, over saving lives.
Ivermectin isn’t the issue. It’s a waymark: to the depths of corruption to which our supposedly Enlightened, rational civilisation has been sunk by money and its worship.
Papua New Guinea’s opposition has called on Prime Minister James Marape to immediately recall Parliament to address the escalating killings in the upper Highlands provinces.
The opposition also wants the debate to include other law and order issues that have spiralled out of control in other parts of the country.
The call was made by Deputy Opposition leader Douglas Tomuriesa following images of victims lined up along the highway in the Enga Province.
“I strongly urge the Prime Minister to recall Parliament for us leaders to come together as one and discuss the possibility of passing an Emergency Act as allowed for by the Constitution to address this serious issue,” he said.
“These gruesome images of human beings been murdered, stripped naked and lined up next to the highway by their enemies or criminal elements, especially in the upper Highlands provinces of Enga, Hela and Southern Highlands, is becoming a regular activity and the government and elected leaders must not take this lightly, its human lives we are talking about.
“It’s a national emergency and I call on the Prime Minister to immediately recall Parliament for a bipartisan committee to be formed to address this issue,” Tomuriesa said.
He said parliamentarians were elected to lead and address such serious issues affecting citizens and the country as a whole.
‘Killings too frequent’
“We as elected leaders shouldn’t be taking long breaks — these killings are becoming too frequent and we should be addressing them head on during Parliament sessions.
“We just cannot ignore it as fake social media posts,” he said.
Tomuriesa said he was making this call as a concerned citizen, a Papuan leader and deputy opposition leader.
“The spillover effects of what is happening up in the upper Highlands region will be felt everywhere — in Mamose, New Guinea Islands and the Southern Region. So as mandated leaders we must do something.”
Republished from PNG Post-Courier with permission.
Analysis by Human Rights Watch finds the country’s major platforms ‘do not routinely address’ pervasive online racism
Chinese social media is littered with racist videos, particularly content that mocks black people or portrays them through offensive racial stereotypes, research by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has found.
The human rights watchdog analysed hundreds of videos posted on Chinese social media since 2021 and found that major platforms, including Bilibili, Douyin, Kuaishou, Weibo and Xiaohongshu, “do not routinely address racist content”.
News media in Indonesia act as “government loudspeakers” by advancing a one-sided narrative regarding the conflict in West Papua, a new study reveals.
The human rights abuses against indigenous Papuans, who have been under military occupation of the Indonesian armed forces since 1962-63 and their struggle for independence from Jakarta, remains a sticking point for the Indonesian government in the region.
However, the Indonesian national media provides an unfair coverage on the plight of the West Papuans by only amplifying the state’s narrative, according to research published in Pacific Journalism Review.
The latest Pacific Journalism Review . . . July 2023.
The paper, which looks at how six dominant news media organisations in Indonesia report on the Free West Papua movement, found that they “tend to be only a ‘loudspeaker’ for the government” by using mainly statements issued by state officials when reporting about West Papua.
The findings come from in-depth interviews that were conducted between 2021 and 2022 with six informants and journalists who have a history of writing on West Papua in the last five years.
Additionally, the research analysed over 270 news items relating to West Papua issues that appeared in the six Indonesian online media — Okezone, Detik, Kompas.com, Tribunnews, CNN Indonesia and Tirto — in the week after the Indonesian government formally labelled the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement (TPNPB-OPM) as a terrorist group in April 2021.
“The Indonesian media does not use a balanced frame, for example, in terms of explaining why and how acts of violence are chosen on the path to fight for West Papuan independence,” the author of the research from Universitas Padjadjaran, Justito Adipresto, writes.
‘Prolonging human rights violations’
Non-state actors have acknowledged that “labelling West Papuan separatist groups as terrorist will not only not solve the problem, but that it also has the potential to prolong the human rights violations that have been taking place in West Papua,” Adipresto says.
While some point to the economic disparities as a starting point to the West Papua conflict, the research shows that the media fall significantly short of providing a nuanced coverage by ignoring the “haunting track record of violence and militarism, ethnicity and racism” in their reports.
“The imbalance of representation that occurs in relation to reporting on West Papua cannot be separated from Indonesia’s treatment of ethnic groups and the region of West Papua,” Adipresto says.
He says the government’s labelling of the Free West Papua movement has “severe implications for the current and future situation and conflict in West Papua”.
“Media in Indonesia is under the shadow of the state,” he said adding that reporting on West Papua lacks “explanation and sufficient context”.
He said Indonesian media were “very concerned about the readers clicks”, and therefore on the quantity of reports rather than the quality.
“The concentration of reporters in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, also leads to reporting from reporters not located in or never having visited West Papua, potentially reducing empathy and understanding of human rights or economic aspects in their reporting.
‘Quality, ethics of journalists are an issue’
“The quality and ethics of journalists are an issue in reporting on West Papua, considering that journalists do not tend to cover the issue of labelling a ‘terrorist’ comprehensively.”
The research shows Indonesian media place greater importance on comments from government officials, often ignoring or not providing space for other voices, in particular the West Papuan community.
“It is necessary to develop a more systematic and consolidated strategy for the national media to cover West Papua better,” the author concludes.
In January 2010, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, doing what she does best, grasped a platitude and ran with it in launching, of all things, an institution called the Newseum. “Information freedom,” she declared, “supports the peace and security that provide a foundation for global progress.”
The same figure has encouraged the prosecution of such information spear carriers as Julian Assange, who dared give the game away by publishing, among other things, documents from the State Department and emails from Clinton’s own presidential campaign in 2016 that cast her in a rather dim light. Information freedom is only to be lauded when it favours your side.
Who regulates, let alone should regulate, information disseminated across the Internet remains a critical question. Gone is the frontier utopianism of an open, untampered information environment, where bright and optimistic netizens could gather, digitally speaking, in the digital hall, the agora, the square, to debate, to ponder, to dispute every topic there was. Perhaps it never existed, but for a time, it was pleasant to even imagine it did.
The shift towards information control was bound to happen and was always going to be encouraged by the greatest censors of all: governments. Governments untrusting of the posting policies and tendencies of social media users and their facilitators have been, for some years, trying to rein in published content in a number of countries. Cyber-pessimism has replaced the cyber-utopians. “Social media,” remarked science writer Annalee Newitz in 2019, “has poisoned the way we communicate with each other and undermined the democratic process.” The emergence of the terribly named “fake news” phenomenon adds to such efforts, all the more ironic given the fact that government sources are often its progenitors.
To make things even murkier, the social media behemoths have also taken liberties on what content they will permit on their forums, using their selective algorithms to disseminate information at speed even as they prevent other forms of it from reaching wider audiences. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, heeding the call of the very screams and bellows of their own creation, thought it appropriate to exclude or limit various users in favour of selected causes and more sanitised usage. In some jurisdictions, they have become the surrogates of government policy under threat: remove any offending material, or else.
Currently under review in Australia is another distinctly nasty example of such a tendency. The Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 is a proposed instrument that risks enshrining censorship by stealth. Its exposure draft is receiving scrutiny from public submissions till August. Submissions are sought “on the proposed laws to hold digital platform services to account and create transparency around their efforts in responding to misinformation and disinformation in Australia.”
The Bill is a clumsily drafted, laboriously constructed document. It is outrageously open-ended on definitions and a condescending swipe to the intelligence of the broader citizenry. It defines misinformation as “online content that is false, misleading or deceptive, that is shared or created without an intent to deceive but can cause and contribute to serious harm.” Disinformation is regarded as “misinformation that is intentionally disseminated with the intent to deceive or cause serious harm.”
The bill, should it become law, will empower the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to monitor and regulate material it designates as “harmful online misinformation and disinformation”. The Big Tech fraternity will be required to impose codes of conduct to enforce the interpretations made by the ACMA, with the regulator even going so far as proposing to “create and enforce an industry standard”. Those in breach will be liable for up to A$7.8 million or 5% of global turnover for corporations.
What, then, is harm? Examples are provided in the Guidance Note to the Bill. These include hatred targeting a group based on ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion or physical or mental disability. It can also include disruption to public order or society, the old grievance the State has when protestors dare differ in their opinions and do the foolish thing by expressing them. (The example provided here is the mind of the typical paranoid government official: “Misinformation that encouraged or caused people to vandalise critical communications infrastructure.”)
John Steenhoff of the Human Rights Law Alliance has identified, correctly, the essential, dangerous consequence of the proposed instrument. It will grant the ACMA “a mechanism what counts as acceptable communication and what counts as misinformation and disinformation. This potentially gives the state the ability to control the availability of information for everyday Australians, granting it power beyond anything that a government should have in a free and democratic society.”
Interventions in such information ecosystems are risky matters, certainly for states purporting to be liberal democratic and supposedly happy with debate. A focus on firm, robust debate, one that drives out poor, absurd ideas in favour of richer and more profound ones, should be the order of the day. But we are being told that the quality of debate, and the strength of ideas, can no longer be sustained as an independent ecosystem. Your information source is to be curated for your own benefit, because the government class says it’s so. What you receive and how you receive, is to be controlled paternalistically.
The ACMA is wading into treacherous waters. The conservatives in opposition are worried, with Shadow Communications Minister David Coleman describing the draft as “a very bad bill” giving the ACMA “extraordinary powers. It would lead to digital companies self-censoring the legitimately held views of Australians to avoid the risk of massive fines.” Not that the conservative coalition has any credibility in this field. Under the previous governments, a relentless campaign was waged against the publication of national security information. An enlightened populace is the last thing these characters, and their colleagues, want.
Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel Jack Smith obtained a warrant from a federal judge earlier this year to retrieve data and messages from Donald Trump’s now-dormant Twitter account as part of his investigation into the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The details of Smith’s request and the subsequent pushback by Twitter — the social media platform now known as…
As humanity recons with a never ending cavalcade of catastrophes, large segments of the population have succumbed to despair or distraction through culture wars or a series of vain cultural phenomena. [Insert Barbenheimer joke here.]
Many youth, particularly in France, have channeled this hopelessness into rage. For the past several months the country had been seeing a series of strikes and riots in response to the raising of the retirement age, and these riots intensified in late June after the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk during a traffic stop. As the dust settles, inept politicians blame bad parenting and TikTok.
Meanwhile in Peru, protesters from around the country have gathered in Lima calling for the resignation of President Dina Boluarte and the dissolution of congress.
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.
Seventy years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.
Welcome to the age of technocensorship.
On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.
In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.
By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.
This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.
Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.
The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.
The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.
This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.
In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.
Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combating fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.
Watch and learn.
We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.
Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.
Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.
The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.
Be warned: it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.
Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.
If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.
The federal government should be handed powers to ban social media providers from operating in Australia if they repeatedly fail to meet minimum transparency requirements, a bipartisan senate committee has found. This finding is contained in Foreign Interference through Social Media inquiry report, which also urged the government to consider extending its ban of TikTok…
There’s a meme that circulated on social media a while back that perfectly sums up the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today:
If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?
Whether red ants will really fight black ants to the death is a question for the biologists, but it’s an apt analogy of what’s playing out before us on the political scene and a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps us fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of focusing on who’s really shaking the jar.
This controversy over Jason Aldean’s country music video, “Try That In a Small Town,” which is little more than authoritarian propaganda pretending to be respect for law and order, is just more of the same.
The music video, riddled with images of militarized police facing off against rioters, implies that there are only two types of people in this country: those who stand with the government and those who oppose it.
Yet the song gets it wrong.
You see, it makes no difference whether you live in a small town or a big city, or whether you stand with the government or mobilize against it: either way, the government is still out to get you.
Indeed, the government’s prosecution of the January 6 protesters (part of a demographic that might relate to the frontier justice sentiments in Aldean’s song) is a powerful reminder that the police state doesn’t discriminate when it comes to hammering away at those who challenge its authority.
It also serves to underscore the government’s tone-deaf hypocrisy in the face of its own double-crossing, double-dealing, double standards.
Imagine: the very same government that violates the rights of its citizenry at almost every turn is considering charging President Trump with conspiring against the rights of the American people.
It’s so ludicrous as to be Kafkaesque.
If President Trump is indicted over the events that culminated in the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, the government could hinge part of their case on Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which makes it a crime for two or more people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate” anyone “with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege” the person enjoys under the U.S. Constitution.
That the government, which now constitutes the greatest threat to our freedoms, would appoint itself the so-called defender of our freedoms shows exactly how farcical, topsy-turvy, and downright perverse life in the American police state has become.
Unfortunately, “we the people” are partially to blame for allowing this double standard to persist.
While we may claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government rulers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.
Even though the government continues to betray our trust, invade our privacy, and abuse our rights, we just keep going back for more.
And then there’s our supposed love-hate affair with technology, which sees us bristling at the government’s efforts to monitor our internet activities, listen in on our phone calls, read our emails, track our every movement, and punish us for what we say on social media, and yet we keep using these very same technologies all the while doing nothing about the government’s encroachments on our rights.
By tacitly allowing these violations to continue and legitimizing a government that has long since ceased to operate within the framework of the Constitution, we not only empower the tyrant but we feed the monster.
This is exactly how incremental encroachments on our rights, justified in the name of greater safety, become routine, wide-ranging abuses so entrenched as to make reform all but impossible.
The tactics follow the same script: first, the government lures us in with a scheme to make our lives better, our families safer, and our communities more secure, and then once we take the bait, they slam the trap closed and turn “we the people” into Enemy Number One.
Despite how evident it is that we are mere tools to be used and abused and manipulated for the power elite’s own diabolical purposes, we somehow fail to see their machinations for what they truly are: thinly veiled attempts to expand their power and wealth at our expense.
So here we are, caught in a vicious cycle of in-fighting and partisan politics, all the while the government—which never stops shaking the jar—is advancing its agenda to lockdown the nation.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, until we can face up to that truth and forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.
In that scenario, no one wins, whether you live in a small town or big city.
— Aeschylus, Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC – 456 BC)
How many of us learn about Russia from a Russian point of view? Or about Syria from a loyal Syrian? Or Cuba from a Cuban supporter? Or Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, China or many others on our current list of adversaries, from the point of view of those adversaries? We supposedly pride ourselves on listening to both or many sides of an issue before forming an opinion (or, better still, a sound analysis). It’s the core of our system of justice, however flawed. It’s why we value free speech.
It’s not that the viewpoints we commonly hear are not different from each other, or that we don’t hear from people with foreign accents from the parts of the world in question. It’s that mainstream news, information and analysis are from a very narrow spectrum. The differences in the viewpoints are in the details, not the fundamentals. In the case of Ukraine, for example, the differences are mainly about how, and how much, to support Ukraine, not whether to do so. Do we hear the Russian view that they were compelled to come to the rescue of Ukraine’s Russian population, which was being massacred by racist, pro-Nazi elements running the Ukrainian government and supported by NATO? Not from the mainstream news, we don’t.
Similarly, when we hear from nationals of adversary countries, our media rarely offer space or air time to persons who represent the adversarial point of view. We are rather more likely to hear from exiles seeking to overthrow the government and hoping for western support. When have we heard from a representative of Hezbollah or Hamas? Or of the government of China or North Korea, or the Sandinista government of Nicaragua? The point is not whether their point of view is correct or whether we decide that it’s reasonable or not, but rather whether we even know what it is, and whether we try to understand it. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do in order to negotiate with our adversaries, solve our differences and achieve peace? The closest we come to that in our media is to invite such representatives to an on-air ambush where we browbeat them and shout them down instead of listening to them.
But it’s worse than that. Our vaunted “free press” closes down the offices and facilities of journalists from countries or movements selected for vilification, and blocks their websites within the boundaries of our country. Thus, the Russian RT media channel and the Iranian Press TV, among others, are no longer permitted to operate within most western countries. Apparently, their words are considered hazardous to western ears. Similarly, many journalists and other individuals have found themselves banned from western-based social media for revealing unwelcome facts or contradicting official truth. Many have been banned from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms.
It’s not just censorship, either. Our journalistic media have been taken over by advertising and PR principles, going so far as to fabricate stories and substitute lies for the truth on a massive scale. Even “fact checking” has become the province of distortion, where the “authorized” version of events has displaced actual facts. The mainstream media remove journalists who tell too much truth, contradicting the lies. The New York Times “disappeared” war correspondent Chris Hedges for reporting on war crimes committed by Israel and similar news. Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal used to report their investigative journalism on Democracy Now, which has now ceased inviting them, in order to become more of a mainstream outlet. Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersch migrated from The New Yorker and the New York Times to foreign media and eventually alternative outlets as his investigative journalism began to cast doubt on mainstream accounts of the Syrian war, the death of Osama Bin Laden, the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipelines and other events. Julian Assange is paying the highest price for publishing a modern-day equivalent of the Pentagon Papers, originally published by a younger, more courageous New York Times.
Sadly, many members of the public consider themselves well-informed and openminded if they read the most prestigious U.S. newspapers, watch or listen to the BBC and Deutsche Welle, and subscribe to Asia Times. To the extent that this may have been true in the past, it no longer is. Today, the ownership and funding sources of the major news media are all oligarchs and powerful corporations. Their job is no longer to inform the public, but rather to inculcate them with whatever information and ideas will manufacture consent for the policies that the powerful wish to enact. And no more, please.
This explains the actions of those who rule us, who are not just the elected leadership. In fact, even the elections themselves are limited to candidates selected by the powerful interests, and centered upon a few issues that do not threaten those interests (e.g. abortion and civil rights), and where the campaigning takes place almost exclusively in the few “swing” states that will determine the outcome of the election. As Emma Goldman said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
If we want to be worthy of calling ourselves educated, we cannot depend solely upon the mainstream press; we will have to do a lot of the work ourselves. There is bias in all media, but we can expose ourselves to opposing biases in order to get a wider variety of facts and analyses, and form our views accordingly. We have choices, if we only seek them out. The biases of Yahoo and Google are different from those of Russian and Chinese search engines. If we don’t find what we’re looking for on one, we might find it on another. The same is true with social media. Telegram is becoming increasingly popular, especially with those who have been banned elsewhere. Substack.com is a website that thus far has accommodated most subjects and viewpoints. Many of the journalists who are less than welcome in the mainstream media can be found at serenashimaward.org, a project that rewards journalists who present alternate views and information (and for which I am proud to serve as Treasurer). Due diligence is worth the rewards.
Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press Action’s Florín Nájera-Uresti about preserving journalism for the July 14, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Well, they all suggest that the legislation found the right enemies. So why do advocates like our guest think that it’s good news, really, that the act in its current form has been shelved for the moment?
Florín Nájera-Uresti is California campaign organizer for the advocacy group Free Press Action. She joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome to CounterSpin, Florín Nájera-Uresti.
Florín Nájera-Uresti: Thank you, Janine. Happy to be here.
JJ: Let me just ask you, what did the California Journalism Preservation Act, also known as Assembly Bill or AB886, what did it say it would do, and why is it that, at least in its current form, you don’t think it would get us there, and might even take us somewhere worse?
Florín Nájera-Uresti: “There is no guarantee that any of the money funneled through this bill would go to supporting high-quality local content and journalists.”
FN: So the California Journalism Preservation Act is a bill that was designed to create a mechanism that would allow news outlets to extract payments from Big Tech companies, including search engines that feature content linking to their news sites. And so there was a lot of excitement around the bill for that reason.
Unfortunately, due to the mechanism of the bill as a link tax, the intended outcome was unlikely to be achieved, and there is no guarantee that any of the money funneled through this bill would go to supporting high-quality local content and journalists.
This bill was modeled in many respects after the Federal Journalism Competition Preservation Act, which was recently reintroduced in Congress after failing to pass in the last session. The CJPA, the California version of the bill, differs from the proposed federal bill in that it creates an even more explicit link tax, where payment is based directly on the number of online impressions of links to news sites on social networks and search engines.
And because of this current approach that rewards clicks, it creates more of an incentive for the production of clickbait and low-quality journalism, in addition to altering the way the open internet works.
So the bill as drafted fails to consider the news and information needs of Californians, and instead of uplifting the production of civic information as a public good, it creates a giveaway to the bill’s most vocal proponents, which include large corporate media outlets, conglomerates. And these are the folks who have actually stopped investing in local news, and are responsible for a majority of the mass layoffs in local newsrooms.
JJ: So when you say “link tax,” I think that’s something that might be a new phrase to people. That really was going to be, if a search engine or if Facebook links to a local news story, they were going to be taxed on that? I mean, is it as direct as it sounds?
FN: Yeah, that’s right. So the bill, as it was written, would essentially tax the number of impressions, or the amount of times a link is shown on social media sites and search engines.
Now, this doesn’t mean that the content of the publisher’s website is available on the social media or search engine site, but simply that it is linked to it, perhaps with a short snippet or a headline.
JJ: And then what turned up in pretty much all of the articles that I read was, with this tax—and we can talk about in a second who is going to be considered a journalistic outlet that can even get in this process—but the big selling point, as far as news coverage, was the proceeds from this tax, 70% of them, were going to be spent on “news journalists…and maintaining or enhancing the production and distribution of news or information.”
That, on its face, sounds good. And 70% sounds like a good number, but it wasn’t clear how that was going to work.
FN: Yeah, it’s exactly like you said. It seems like a very attractive point of the bill, but unfortunately, this provision that at first seems to hold publishers accountable for hiring more journalists or increasing salaries—salaries to the journalists that they already employ, actually, through regular accounting practices—could easily result in an extremely difficult way to track where these funds are spent.
Policy initiatives such as these rarely have this desired impact, because money is fungible, and it’s extremely difficult to ensure that these funds are spent according to the purpose or intent of this legislation.
JJ: I think language is so formative here. Like, bigger picture, including with the federal legislation, there’s a difference between “Let’s shore up our existing newspapers” and “Let’s meet the information needs of the community.” Obviously, there can be overlap or confluence there, but those are really two different goals, aren’t they? And they entail different processes.
FN: Exactly. That’s exactly what we’re trying to get at. What we want to uplift in our communities, and what Californians really need, is community-centered, truly local and responsive journalism, not just propping up an industry that the ad-supported market is already not supporting.
So what we want to see is the increase of this public good, and that’s where policy intervention should come in.
JJ: We often hear—and particularly with, as you know, the very imperfect work of legislative politics—we often hear not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Sometimes something starts out not great, but you work with it, and it gets better.
But we also know that inadequate or wrongly directed reform efforts can make it harder, then, for better ones to advance. People sort of feel like, well, we already tried that, or they just get issue fatigue.
So it seems important to say, with regard to this, that this is not just saying no to this, it’s the fact that we actually have better alternatives, right?
FN: Absolutely. And, fortunately, in our work partnering and working with local stakeholders and community newsrooms across the state, like El Tímpano, the coalition of local newsrooms known as LION Publishers, and other individuals, including local journalists, we know that there are much better alternatives to consider.
Our work in New Jersey and elsewhere has shown us that lawmakers can pass really innovative legislation that can actually lead to more informed communities, more reporters on the ground, and sustainable, independent and community-rooted locally.
JJ: And I always think, every time I talk about fighting privatization or making something public, making institutions more public or more accountable, it’s not just an outcome—it’s a process.
And I know that this is part of what you’ve been trying to say, is that it’s not like we’re going to make something for the community and then give it to them. People have to be involved in the earliest stages of creating something, so that it is accountable.
FN: Yeah. And we are in a position where lawmakers can really listen to the concerns of local news advocates and communities that have actually suffered due to the absence of this quality coverage.
So we really hope to work with both our communities and lawmakers in this next phase of the legislative process, to make sure that these folks are heard, and that this results in well-designed policy that actually achieves the goals we’re setting out to achieve.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Florín Nájera-Uresti, California campaign organizer for Free Press Action. You can track their work online at FreePress.net. Florín Nájera-Uresti, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Social media companies are not doing enough to tackle abusive content involving non-human animals on their platforms, a recent study suggests. In this instance, researchers found that an initiative by Instagram to flag content that risks encouraging cruel wildlife tourism interactions is severely lacking. But the issue goes beyond Instagram, as prior investigations into abusive content involving non-human animals on other platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, have shown.
Tourism-related abuse
Instagram introduced a pop-up alert on its platform in 2017 that would display when people searched for hashtags about selfies with wild animals. The pop-up explains that animal abuse and the selling of endangered animals, or their body parts, isn’t allowed on the platform. It further warns:
You are searching for a hashtag that may be associated with posts that encourage harmful behaviour to animals or the environment.
As the pop-up suggests, tourist interactions with wildlife can involve cruelty. Firstly, these interactions often involve captivity, an unnatural environment for wildlife. Moreover, forcing wild animals to interact with people can be distressing for them and their captors may subject them to abusive treatment in order to make them compliant.
As the Canary has reported, for example, training elephants to endure people riding on their backs and other interactions can involve extreme cruelty. Some are snatched from the wild as youngsters, and most endure a brutal training regime known as ‘pajan’ to subdue their wild natures. The process can involve beating, crushing and starving the elephants, among other abuses.
Global Head of Wildlife Research at World Animal Protection, Dr Neil D’Cruze said:
The trend of posting wildlife selfies on social media involves the suffering and exploitation of some of the world’s most iconic wild animals from across the globe. The animals suffer both in front of, and behind the camera.
People need to be made aware of the cruelty that typically lies behind tourism experiences that offer direct interactions with wild animals. We need to shift the social acceptability of visiting irresponsible wildlife tourist attractions, which offer everything from elephant rides, walking with lions, and swimming with captive dolphins – and then plastering it all over social media.
The researchers looked into 244 relevant hashtags to see if the pop-up appeared. Instagram users had utilised the reviewed hashtags in at least one post – oftentimes many more – involving images of concerning interactions with elephants. But only 2% of the hashtags, amounting to five in total, triggered the pop-up. In other words, 98% of the hashtags slipped under the radar of Instagram’s alert. For instance, the hashtags #elephantselfie and #elephantride did trigger the pop-up but similar ones such as #elephantselfies and #elephantrides did not.
Explaining some background to the findings, research associate at WildCRU, Dr Lauren Harrington said:
We set out aiming to explore the effect of viewers reading Instagram’s pop-up alert on the resultant popularity of the post and the perceptions of viewers commenting on the post. The reality is that most viewers will not even have seen the alert.
Instagram and other large social media platforms undoubtedly have considerable resources and technological expertise at their disposal – they can and need to do far more in terms of taking responsibility for the cruel and inappropriate wild animal content they host on their platforms.
The Canary contacted Instagram for comment. It did not respond by the time of publication.
Platforms have a responsibility to stop abusive content
The study makes a number of recommendations on how Instagram could strengthen the initiative. It calls for the social media platform to implement the alert more consistently and widely at various points in the user process. Moreover, it argues for Instagram to remove posts that depict animal cruelty and use technology to stop people uploading them in the first place.
D’Cruze said:
Instagram and other social media platforms have a responsibility to prevent harmful content being posted on their platform. In the longer term, they should be taking full advantage of the technological advances of artificial intelligence (AI).
A powered image recognition tool could detect and remove content that depicts all forms of wild animal cruelty, removing the burden from users to identify animal abuse content and prevent this content from being uploaded in the first place.
A disturbing BBC investigation in June made clear how urgent it is that platforms to do more to tackle cruel content. It investigated a global network of people who created and distributed torture and murder videos involving infant monkeys. As the BBC explained, the torture ring began on YouTube before moving to the private messaging app Telegram. The BBC also found “dozens of groups sharing extreme content” on Facebook.
Both YouTube and Facebook told the BBC that they do not permit animal abuse on their platforms. YouTube said it had removed “hundreds of thousands of videos and terminated thousands of channels” for violative content this year. Facebook also said that it removes abusive content “when we become aware of it”. Meanwhile, Telegram indicated that its moderators can only tackle abusive content in private groups when users in those groups report it to them.
However, World Animal Protection says that social media companies’ efforts thus far to detect and remove abusive content “is not sufficiently thorough”.
From playing their part in eliminating the social acceptability of selfies with abused wild beings, through to stopping the uploading and distribution of torture and murder videos involving animals, these companies clearly have a lot more work to do.
Suva lawyer Richard Naidu is a free man after the Suva High Court ruled this week that no conviction be recorded against him.
High Court judge Justice Daniel Goundar ruled on Tuesday that the charge of contempt scandalising the court against Naidu be dismissed.
He said summons to set aside the judgment that had found Naidu guilty in November last year was by consent and was dismissed as he did not have jurisdiction.
Justice Gounder ordered the parties to bear their own costs.
While delivering his judgment, Justice Gounder said while mitigation and sentencing were pending, a new government had come into power and a new Attorney-General had been appointed.
He said that after the change of government [FijiFirst lost the general election last December], Justice Jude Nanayakkara, who had been previously presiding over the case, had resigned as a Fiji judge and left the jurisdiction without concluding proceedings.
Justice Gounder said the new Attorney-General, Siromi Turaga had taken a different position regarding the proceedings, which he had expressed in an affidavit filed in support of the summons to dismiss the proceedings.
Ruling set aside
Turaga stated that his view was that the proceedings should never have been instituted against Naidu in the first place.
In the affidavit, Turaga said he had conveyed to Naidu that his view was that the ruling of 22 November 2022 ought to be set aside and the proceedings dismissed.
He added that Naidu had confirmed he would not seek to recover any costs he had incurred in defending the proceedings.
Justice Gounder said the Attorney-General played an important function as the guardian of public interest in contempt proceedings which alleged conduct scandalising the court.
Lawyer Richard Naidu’s conviction ruled not to be recorded and the charge of contempt dismissed. Video: Fijivillage.com
He said the position of the Attorney-General had shifted and he was not seeking an order of committal against Naidu.
The judge said Turaga dkid not support the findings that Naidu was guilty of contempt scandalising the court.
He said it had not been suggested that the present Attorney-General was acting unfairly as the representative of public interest in consenting to an order setting aside the judgement.
Facebook posting
Naidu was found guilty in November last year by High Court judge Justice Jude Nanayakkara for contempt scandalising the court.
Naidu posted on his Facebook page a picture of a judgment in a case represented by his associate that had the word “injunction” misspelt [as “injection”], and then made some comments that he was pretty sure the applicant wanted an injunction.
The committal proceeding was brought against Naidu by the then Attorney-General, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum.
Naidu was represented by Jon Apted while Feizal Haniff represented the Attorney-General.
Rashika Kumaris a Fijivillage reporter. Republished with permission.
This week on CounterSpin: Media talk about “the economy” as though it were an abstraction, somehow clinically removed from daily life, instead of being ingrained & entwined in every minute of it. So white supremacy and economic policy are completely different stories for the press, but not for the people. Our guest’s recent work names a simple, obvious way development incentives exacerbate racialized inequality: by transferring wealth from the public to companies led by white male executives. Arlene Martínez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First, which has issued a trenchant new report.
Also on the show: CounterSpin listeners are well aware of the gutting of state and local journalism, connected to the corporate takeover of newspapers and their sell-off to venture—or, as some would say it, vulture—capitalists. Florín Nájera-Uresti is California campaign organizer for the advocacy group Free Press Action. We talk to her about better and worse ways to meet local news media needs.
CounterSpin230714Najera-Uresti.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Israel/Palestine and cluster bombs.
A new lawsuit filed against Twitter claims that the company has refused to pay out severance payments after it laid off thousands of workers when right-wing billionaire Elon Musk took over. The proposed class action lawsuit, filed on behalf of former employee Courtney McMillian in a federal district court in California on Wednesday, claims that the company has failed to pay at least $500 million…
And thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s spy network of fusion centers, we are all now sitting ducks, just waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.
Although these pre-crime programs are popping up all across the country, in small towns and big cities, they are not making us any safer but they are endangering individual freedoms.
Nationwide, there are upwards of 123 real-time crime centers (a.k.a. fusion centers), which allow local police agencies to upload and share massive amounts of surveillance data and intelligence with state and federal agencies culled from surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, gunshot sensors, social media monitoring, drones and body cameras, and artificial intelligence-driven predictive policing algorithms.
While these latest expansions of the surveillance state are part of the Biden Administration’s efforts to combat domestic extremism through the creation of a “pre-crime” crime prevention agency, they have long been a pivotal part of the government’s plans for total control and dominion.
Yet this crime prevention campaign is not so much about making America safer as it is about ensuring that the government has the wherewithal to muzzle anti-government discontent, penalize anyone expressing anti-government sentiments, and preemptively nip in the bud any attempts by the populace to challenge the government’s authority or question its propaganda.
As J.D. Tuccille writes for Reason, “[A]t a time when government officials rage against ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ that is often just disagreement with whatever opinions are currently popular among the political class, fusion centers frequently scrutinize peaceful dissenting speech.”
Indeed, while the Biden Administration was recently dealt a legal blow over its attempts to urge social media companies to do more to combat so-called dis- and mis-information, these fusion centers are the unacknowledged powerhouses behind the government’s campaign to censor and retaliate against those who vocalize their disagreement and discontent with government policies.
Already, the powers-that-be are mobilizing to ensure that fusion centers have the ability to monitor and lock down sectors of a community at a moment’s notice.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.
What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
The American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick have all been rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.
In this way, the novel 1984 has become an operation manual for an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state in which ordinary Americans find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s pre-crime sensors.
With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.
One fusion center in Maine was found to have been “illegally collecting and sharing information about Maine residents who weren’t suspected of criminal activity. They included gun purchasers, people protesting the construction of a new power transmission line, the employees of a peace-building summer camp for teenagers, and even people who travelled to New York City frequently.”
This is how the government is turning a nation of citizens into suspects and would-be criminals.
This transformation is being driven by the Department of Homeland Security, the massive, costly, power-hungry bureaucracy working hard to ensure that the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful.
Yet here’s the thing: you don’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.
In fact, all you need to do is live in the United States.
It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.
Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.
Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.
Combine predictive policing with surveillance, over-criminalization and pre-crime programs, then add in militarized police trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, you’ll be lucky to escape with your life.
Janine Jackson interviewed Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer about the Kids Online Safety Act for the June 9, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230609Greer.mp3
Janine Jackson: Louisiana just banned abortion at six weeks, before many people even know they’re pregnant, while also saying 16-year-old girls are mature enough to marry.
Arkansas says there’s no need for employers to check the age of workers they hire. As one state legislator put it, “There’s no reason why anyone should get the government’s permission to get a job.”
And Wisconsin says 14-year-olds, sure, can serve alcohol. Iowa says they can shift loads in freezers and meat coolers.
Simultaneously and in the same country, we have a raft of legislation saying that young people should not be in charge of what they look at online. Bone saws: cool. TikTok: bad.
The way this country thinks about young people is odd, you could say. “Incoherent” would be another word.
When it comes to the online stuff, there seem to be some good intentions at work. Anyone who’s been on the internet can see how it can be manipulative and creepy. But are laws like the Kids Online Safety Act the appropriate way to address those concerns?
We’ll talk about that now with Evan Greer, director of the group Fight for the Future. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Evan Greer.
Evan Greer: Thanks so much for having me. Always happy to chat.
JJ: Let’s start specifically with KOSA, with the Kids Online Safety Act, because it’s a real piece of legislation, and there are things that you and other folks are not disputing, that big tech companies do have practices that are bad for kids, and especially bad for some vulnerable kids.
But the method of addressing those concerns is the question. What would KOSA do that people may not understand, in terms of the impact on, ostensibly, those young people we’re told that they care about?
EG: Yeah, and I think it’s so important that we do start from the acknowledgement that big tech companies are doing harm to our kids, because it’s just not acceptable to pretend otherwise.
There is significant evidence to suggest that these very large corporations are engaging in business practices that are fundamentally incompatible with human rights, with democracy, but also with what we know young people, and really everyone, needs, which is access to online information and community, rather than having their data harvested and information shoved down their throat in a way that enriches companies rather than empowering young people and adults.
And so when we look at this problem, I think it is important that we start there, because there is a real problem, and the folks pushing this legislation often like to characterize those of us that oppose it as big tech shills or whatever.
It’s hard for me not to laugh at that, given that I’ve dedicated the better part of my adult life to confronting these big tech companies and their surveillance-capitalist business model, and working to dismantle it.
But I think it’s important that we say very clearly that we oppose these bills, not because we think that they are an inappropriate trade off between human rights and children’s safety. We oppose these bills because they will make children less safe, not more safe.
And it’s so important that we make that clear, because we know from history that politicians love to put in the wrapping paper of protecting children any type of legislation or regulation that they would like to advance and avoid political opposition to.
It is, of course, very difficult for any elected official to speak out against or vote against a bill called the Kids Online Safety Act, regardless of whether that bill actually makes kids safer online or not. And so what I’m here to explain a bit is why this legislation will actually make kids less safe.
It’s important to understand a few things. So one is that KOSA is not just a bill that focuses on privacy or ending the collection of children’s data. It’s a bill that gives the government control over what content platforms can recommend to which users.
And this is, again, kind of well-intentioned, trying to address a real problem, which is that because platforms like Instagram and YouTube employ this surveillance-advertising and surveillance-capitalist business model, they have a huge incentive to algorithmically recommend content in a way that’s maximized for engagement, rather than in a way that is curated or attempting to promote helpful content.
Their algorithms are designed to make them money. And so because of that, we know that platforms often algorithmically recommend all kinds of content, including content that can be incredibly harmful.
That’s the legitimate problem that this bill is trying to solve, but, unfortunately, it would actually make that problem worse.
And the way it would do that is it creates what’s called a broad duty of care that requires platforms to design their algorithmic recommendation systems in a way that has the best interest of children in mind.
And it specifies what they mean by that, in terms of tying it to specific mental health outcomes, like eating disorders or substance abuse or anxiety or depression, and basically says that platforms should not be recommending content that causes those types of disorders.
Now, if you’re sticking with me, all of that sounds perfectly reasonable. Why wouldn’t we want to do that? The problem is that the bill gives the authority to determine and enforce that to state attorneys general.
And if you’ve been paying attention at all to what’s happening in the states right now, you would know that state attorneys general across the country, in red states particularly, are actively arguing, right now today, that simply encountering LGBTQ people makes kids depressed, causes them to be suicidal, gives them mental health disorders.
They are arguing that providing young people with gender-affirming care that’s medically recommended, and where there is medical consensus, is a form of child abuse.
And so while this bill sounds perfectly reasonable on its face, it utterly fails to recognize the political moment that we’re in, and rather than making kids safer, what it would do is empower the most bigoted attorneys general law enforcement officers in the country to dictate what content young people can see in their feed.
And that would lead to widespread suppression, not just of LGBTQ content, or content related to perhaps abortion and reproductive health, but really suppression of important but controversial topics across the board.
So, for example, the bill’s backers envision a world where this bill leads to less promotion of content that promotes eating disorders.
In reality, the way that this bill would work, it would just suppress all discussion of eating disorders among young people, because at scale, a platform like YouTube or Instagram is not going to be able to make a meaningful determination between, for example, a video that’s harmful in promoting eating disorders, or a video where a young person is just speaking about their experience with an eating disorder, and how they sought out help and support, and how other young people can do it too.
In practice, these platforms are simply going to use AI, as they’ve already been doing, more aggressively to filter content. That’s the only way that they could meaningfully comply with a bill like KOSA.
And what we’ll see is exactly what we saw with SESTA/FOSTA, which was the last major change to Section 230, a very similar bill that was intended to address a real problem, online sex trafficking, that actually made it harder for law enforcement to prosecute actual cases of sex trafficking while having a detrimental effect for consensual sex workers, who effectively had online spaces that they used to keep themselves safe, to screen clients, to find work in ways that were safer for them, shut down almost overnight, because of this misguided legislation that was supposed to make them safer.
Evan Greer: “This is cutting young people off from life-saving information and online community, rather than giving them what they need, which is resources, support, housing, healthcare.”
And so we’re now in a moment where we could actually see the same happen, not just for content related to sex and sexuality, but for an enormous range of incredibly important content that our young people actually need access to.
This is cutting young people off from life-saving information and online community, rather than giving them what they need, which is resources, support, housing, healthcare. Those are the types of things that we know prevent things like child exploitation.
But unfortunately, lawmakers seem more interested in trampling the First Amendment, and putting the government in charge of what content can be recommended, than in addressing those material conditions that we actually have evidence to suggest, if we could address them, would reduce the types of harms that lawmakers say they’re trying to reduce.
JJ: Thank you. And I just wanted to say, I’m getting Reefer Madness vibes, and a conflation of correlation and causality; and I see in a lot of the talk around this, people pointing to research: social media use drives mental illness.
So I just wanted ask you, briefly, there is research, but what does the research actually say or not say on these questions?
EG: It’s a great question, and there’s been some news on this fairly recently. There was a report out from the surgeon general of the United States a couple weeks ago, and it is interesting because, as you said, there is research, and what the research says is basically: It’s complicated. But unfortunately, our mainstream news outlets and politicians giving speeches don’t do very well with complicated.
And so what you saw is a lot of headlines that basically said, social media is bad for kids, and the research certainly backs that up to a certain extent. There is significant and growing evidence to suggest that, again, these types of predatory design practices that companies put into place, things like autoplay, where you just play a video and then the next one plays, or infinite scroll, where you can just keep scrolling through TikToks forever and ever, and suddenly an hour has passed, and you’re like, “What am I doing with my life?”
There is significant evidence that those types of design choices do have negative mental health effects, for young people and adults, in that they can lead to addictive behaviors, to anxiety, etc.
There’s also evidence in that report, that was largely ignored by a lot of the coverage of it, that showed that for some groups of young people, including LGBTQ young people, there’s actually significant evidence to suggest that access to social media improves their mental health.
And it’s not that hard to understand why. Anyone who knows a queer or trans young person knows online spaces can provide a safe haven, can provide a place to access community or resources or information, especially for young people who perhaps have unsupportive family members, or live in an area where they don’t have access to in-person community in a safe way. This can be a lifeline.
And so, again, there is research out there, and it is important that we build our regulatory and legislative responses on top of actual evidence, rather than conjecture and hyperbole.
But, again, I think what’s important here is that we embrace the both/and, and recognize that this is not about saying social media is totally fine as it is, and leave these companies alone, and we can all live in a cyber-libertarian paradise.
That’s not the world we’re living in. These companies are big, they are greedy, they are engaging in business practices that are doing harm, and they should be regulated.
But what we need to focus on is regulating the surveillance-capitalist business model that’s at the root of their harm, rather than attempting to regulate the speech of young people, suppress their ability to express themselves, and take away life-saving resources that they need in order to thrive and succeed in this deeply unjust and messed-up world that we are handing to them.
JJ: All right then. We’ve been speaking with Evan Greer. She’s director of Fight for the Future. They’re online at FightForTheFuture.org. Evan Greer, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The RNZ board is meeting tonight to begin setting up an independent review on how pro-Russian sentiment was inserted into a number of its online stories.
An RNZ digital journalist has been placed on leave after it came to light he had changed copy from news agency Reuters on the war in Ukraine to include pro-Russian views.
Since Friday, hundreds of stories published by RNZ have been audited, and 16 Reuters stories and one BBC item had to be corrected, with chief executive Paul Thompson saying more would be checked “with a fine-tooth comb”.
The journalist told RNZ’s Checkpoint he had subbed stories that way for a number of years and nobody had queried it. Thompson said those comments appeared to be about the staffer’s overall role as a sub-editor.
Board chairperson Dr Jim Mather said the public’s trust had been eroded by revelations and it was going to take a lot of work to come back from what had happened.
“We see ourselves as guardians of a taonga and that taonga being the 98 years of history that RNZ has in terms of trusted public media and high standards of excellent journalism and so it is fair to say we are extremely disappointed,” he told RNZ’s Checkpoint on Monday.
“We need to demonstrate that we are prepared to review every aspect of what has occurred to actually start the restoration process in terms of confidence in RNZ.”
The board would discuss who will run the investigation and its terms of reference, and would make a decision “very soon”.
Currency is trust
“The role the board is going to take is we are going to appoint the panel of trusted individuals, experienced journalists, those that do have editorial experience to undertake the review. This is going to be done completely separate from the other work being undertaken by management,” he said.
Dr Mather said the currency of the public broadcaster was trust, and the revelations had impacted the organisation’s journalists.
“I know that we pride ourselves as having the highest standards of journalistic quality so I can just say that it’s had a significant impact also on our journalism team.”
Reuters said it had “addressed the issue” with RNZ, noting in a statement that RNZ had initiated an investigation.
“As stated in our terms and conditions, Reuters content cannot be altered without prior written consent,” the spokesperson’s statement said.
“Reuters is fully committed to covering the war in Ukraine impartially and accurately, in keeping with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.”
‘Important that politicians don’t interfere’ – Hipkins Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said while he would never rule out a cross-party parliamentary inquiry, he had not seen anything so far to suggest the need for an wider action.
Hipkins told RNZ’s Morning Report he was not sure a cross-party parliamentary inquiry on issues around editorial decisions would be a good way of protecting the editorial independence of an institution like RNZ.
“Having said that, we always monitor these kinds of things to see how they are being handled, it’s really important that politicians don’t interfere in that,” he said.
“I think if it reached a point where public confidence in the institution was so badly tarnished that some degree of independent review was required, I’d never take that off the table.”
But in the first instance, it was important to allow RNZ’s management and board to deal with it with the processes that they had in place, Hipkins said.
“I haven’t seen anything in the last few days that would suggest that there’s any case for us to trigger something that’s more significant than what’s being done at the moment.”
Hipkins said he had not sought, nor had, any briefings from New Zealand’s security services in relation to the incident because it was a matter of editorial independence and it was important that politicians did not get involved in that.
“RNZ, while it’s a publicly-funded institution, must operate independently of politicians.”
Not an issue for politicians – Willis
National Party deputy leader Nicola Willis agreed that it was not an issue for politicians to be involved in.
She said it was important the investigation was carried out, and the concern was about editorial standards that let the situation go unnoticed for such a long time.
Trust in media was important and people reading mainstream media expected stories to go through a fact-checking process and reflect appropriate editorial independence, she told RNZ’s First Up.
“I think it will be a watch for newsrooms around the country, and I hope that it’s a thorough investigation that comes out with robust recommendations.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
_en_Zacango_10.jpg){kind=link}