Social media

Twitter has been quick on the draw when responding to tweets by President Trump in the last month, as he furiously and mistakenly attempts to make his case for winning an election he did not win. Within minutes, Trump’s tweets are flagged as containing disputed information regarding the election. Twitter is very invested in babysitting the President of the United States, sometimes with cause. But the tech giant’s scrutiny of spurious posts from other governments is not as close: if Twitter will not label a tweet as containing false or ‘disputed’ information, it is by default suggesting that it is accurate. This is the dilemma Jack Dorsey has created for himself in assigning his company to be the absolute arbiter of truth.

I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business — until I discovered it was under threat. The new fashion is for elopement, just the happy couple, one or two friends and a photographer, all perched on the edge of some picturesque cliff or on a mountain top. It makes sense while we’re all social distancing, but I suspect the elopement trend is set to continue — and I think it’s dismal. I first saw the signs when I asked a friend what he was up to this Saturday. ‘Oh, I’m just off to an elopement,’ he said. My immediate instinct was that he should call the police.

Worth a shot? How worried should we be about people refusing to have a Covid-19 vaccine if one is developed? In a YouGov poll for the Centre for Countering Digital Hate this week, 6% said they would definitely refuse a vaccination, a further 10% said they would probably refuse and a further 15% said they weren’t sure. A better guide, perhaps, is how many allow their children to be vaccinated. According to government statistics, the rate of vaccination among children varies from 86.5% for the MMR2 vaccination at five years to 94.2% for the DTaP/IPV/Hib at two years. Poor third The rapper Kanye West launched his campaign for the US presidency. What is the record of third candidates in the US presidential election?

For decades, people worldwide have dreamed about being famous. What would it be like to live like a celebrity? To have even a glimpse of celebrity life? Well, as technology has been democratized, so has fame and the many trappings that come with it. People flock to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube to share their random thoughts, uninformed opinions, dance moves, animal photos, children’s names, and much more. The masses want to feel special. They want to be celebrated. They seek out an R.O.E. — return on ego — which comes with digital likes, comments and a hit of dopamine, instead of an R.O.I. —  return on investment — which allows you to pay your mortgage.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey opened up a Pandora’s box two days ago by dropping a fact-check on a tweet by Donald Trump regarding mail-in ballots. That raised all sorts of hell from a bombastic President, as well as more questions than answers. There are several problems with Twitter deciding to put its thumb on the scale of ‘truth’ on its social platform. The site has previously come under enormous scrutiny over widely perceived political and ideological bias. The charges against the company include its unfair and unbalanced actions in banning conservative or politically right-leaning accounts, as well as shadow-banning and limiting views and engagements on trending topics which it deems problematic.

Just over a decade ago, I published one of those books with an annoying subtitle beginning with the word ‘how’. It was called Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History. My targets included Michael Moore, Creationists and homeopaths. I concluded that we couldn’t stop anyone circulating their ‘counter-knowledge’ on the internet, but we could at least hold to account ‘lazy, greedy and politically correct academics’ who had abandoned scientific methodology in favour of postmodernism. Otherwise, I warned pompously, quoting the title of an etching by Goya, ‘the sleep of reason will bring forth monsters’.

Almost every American has undergone a lifestyle change in the wake of the deadly and infectious coronavirus. Almost three million have lost gainful employment and patiently wait on government assistance. None of these circumstances have, however, stopped our brave news media from carrying out their dutiful mission — dividing us.In the latest Gallup poll, the president, hospitals and even Congress are all rated favorably. The only institution whose disapproval rating has increased is the news media, with 55 percent viewing it unfavorably. It’s not particularly hard to understand why. At almost every turn, the news media has attempted to make this pandemic about themselves, and the pointless work they choose to engage in.

I was a young tech journalist in the years when Facebook and Twitter were growing fast. In retrospect, one of the biggest oversights made by the tech press (myself very much included) was that for the most part, we’d cover one product launch after another with little attention to the security or privacy implications. When a data breach or privacy scandal came along, we’d cover that, and all too often then let the story drop. But now a decade-plus later, our lack of media attention to security in social media seems glaring.Part of this was structural.