Posts by Russell Brown
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COMING DOWN THE PIKE ….
It appears that the police getting Ambrose’s texts wasn’t the only news in that case file.
Winston Peters says it shows that the police tried to get his phone records too.
He alleges that Key’s office was “in the loop” on the investigation. And that police were told to brief Wayne Eagleson on everything they did.
He says the reason given for police interest was the spotting of someone in a NZ First t-shirt near the cafe.
Holy shit. I see why the police tried so hard to prevent release of that file.
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Hard News: A handful of battling billionaires, in reply to Gary Young,
Just curious as to how Juan Cole can be characterised as a warmonger.
Let's put it this way: he's not.
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Hard News: A handful of battling billionaires, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
You mean that whole Koch Brothers joining with George Soros to fund the ACLU to challenge the USA PATRIOT Act while Bush was President?
No, more the way they've bankrolled school board candidates to defeat diversity schemes, their massive support for voter ID laws and other vote suppression efforts, the tens of millions they've poured into risible climate-denial groups and their own company's dreadful record on corruption and environmental pollution. That sort of thing.
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Up Front: Everyone is Wrong. And Right. Whatever., in reply to Lilith __,
What DID happen was a whole bunch of my tweeps rushed to assist. That was nice. Community is powerful.
That's great. In the end, community sanction may be more powerful than anything else.
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Up Front: Everyone is Wrong. And Right. Whatever., in reply to Deborah,
Likewise, if Twitter can’t operate a decent service because it can’t moderate tweets effectively, then it needs to look at its business model.
To be fair, Twitter runs an amazing service, and none of its competitors -- the IM services, Tumblr, Blogger, Google+, Facebook, etc -- do that level of moderation. I'm very sure the overwhelming majority of users would rather have Twitter with the current level of moderation than not have it at all.
But as you say ...
There’s a whole lot of ways of doing that, including doing exactly what some of the commenters here have suggested, such as empowering junior staff to make moderation decisions, or creating algorithms so that the abuse-report button doesn’t get misused. I dunno, something like if a person gets reported for abuse and gets investigated, and it turns out there’s absolutely nothing wrong with her or his tweets (however you judge that), then she or he gets an automatic protection for a certain period of time, and the complainant gets dumped instead.
Maybe. I'd still be wary of any kind of automatic dumping at all. It's extremely likely that the majority of reporting disputes would not be clear-cut and would involve sincerely-held contrary views. And in the US, it's pretty much a given that someone who gets dumped in that way will try and sue Twitter.
I'm not trying t be negative or deny the problem -- it's painfully obvious there's a problem -- but it does seem really difficult. And whatever you do with Twitter won't fix the internet, or fix the nasty, cowardly ways people behave at their keyboards.
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Hard News: A handful of battling billionaires, in reply to James George,
You have to be joking. Murdoch’s News Ltd/plc/international/corp has committed all of those sins and more.
As odious as Murdoch might be, he's nowhere near the Koch brothers.
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Hard News: It's worse than you think, in reply to Hilary Cameron,
So… Key just apparently used the teapot tapes in HIS defence. My god.
I know, right?
But this is clearly the line they’ve settled on. It’s the one Steven Joyce was hammering on The Nation:
Transcript here, if you’re a glutton for punishment.
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Newspapers are now restored to their former status as playthings of the rich, rather than market-driven profit centers.
An intriguing column by The Guardian's Emily Bell.
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David Simon on the Koch brothers' plans:
“When I heard that the Koch brothers, bless their hearts, were interested in purchasing newspapers–and the Baltimore Sun, my alma mater, in particular–I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of the last nail in the coffin,’” Simon said. “There’s a lot of damage that’s been done to print journalism in the last 15 years, much of it self-inflicted.” He noted that the “original sin” for American journalism was going to Wall Street for funding, which led companies to “put out a shittier newspaper and make more money.”
When he heard that the “ideological” Koch brothers were looking to buy the “husk” of the Tribune Company papers, he thought, “That’s the end game.” He added, “It’s not enough for you to lobby government, it’s not enough for you to influence elections. There’s an awful lot of capital that’s already introduced into our electoral process. Newspapers, the fourth estate, are supposed to be outside of that.”
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Craig has directed me to this link detailing quite how much Bezos got for his $250m. Not just A masthead, but a publishing empire.