media

A man who can be identified only as B4 left the UK to go to Syria to join al Qaeda, the UK government alleges. A citizen of Libya, he took UK citizenship in addition. The UK Home Department (part of the Home Office) decided to cancel his British citizenship and passport. He has appealed and, at the same time, applied for anonymity. His appeal is stayed pending a determination of his application for legal aid.

Any aeroplane crash is newsworthy. Media organisations, bloggers and opportunists race to publish anything, just so long as it gets picked up by major search engines within minutes. Even venerable reporting organisations fall into the trap of just getting something, anything onto their website so they don't seem to be behind. Grabbing eyeballs is the primary objective. But as the BBC found out yesterday, sometimes that rush to publish leads to questionable content....

In the dying days of the parliament dominated by Malaysia's now disgraced prime minister Najib Razak and those close to him the government passed its Anti-Fake News Act 2018. Its stated aims were sensible but in a country where the government had regularly arrested and held without trial those who expressed opinions contrary to those of or critical of the government and the ruling United Malay National Organisation (UMNO), its true purpose was widely regarded as a tool to further suppress legitimate dissent. Its repeal was an election promise that has been kept.

Not long ago, it's hours not even a day, a man drove, at high-speed a rented van along pavements and up streets in the face of incoming traffic in Toronto, Canada.The man has been arrested and is in custody. He has been named as Alek Minassian, aged 26. Whatever Minassian's motive, one thing is clear: publicity was inevitable because the choice of weapon, the fact that it's in Canada and the fact that it took place only a few kilometres from a G7 ministers meeting convened to discuss developments in terrorism and counter-terrorism. Media has provided blanket coverage around the world. It's time to think about that.

Mark Twain has popular credit for coming up with“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” but he didn't think it up: that was Virgil in The Ænid translated by H Rushton Fairclough, he wrote "Forthwith Rumour runs through Libya's great cities, rumour of all evils the most swift, Speed lends her strength and she wins vigour as she goes, small at first, soon she mounts up to heaven and walks the ground with head hidden in the clouds." That, research shows, is exactly what happens on Twitter...

The entire premise of Web 2.0 was that access to content (and content services) would be free for users and that the value of web-based businesses depended on the nebulous concept of "eyeballs" and how "sticky" they could be made to be. The theory was that advertisers would flock to the busiest websites and that money could be made for click-through adverts (or adverts paid-for according to the number of times it was displayed). It was always a bad model, relying as it did on fickle "traffic" And the situation has become ever worse as those eyeballs have become harder to attract and even harder to both retain and make return.

Today, FoxNews carries an article about badly behaved tourists being arrested during a pub crawl in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and a raucous pool party, some being accused of having pornographic images on their phones taken while participants, clothed, were "demonstrating" a variety of sex acts and positions in a villa rented for the night. But that's not the story that matters: what's important are the comments that appear, including comments that carry political messages that have no direct relation to the story, demonstrating that low-level trolling is at least as important as the bots attacking major social media websites.

Today, The Guardian carries the following headline: "Historian finds German decree banishing Trump's grandfather " Doing a websearch for it produces hundreds of copies of cutting and pasting of the headline and the article, or significant chunks of it. It's time that search engines were made responsible for the consequences of their promotion of breaches of copyright, says Nigel Morris-Cotterill

Writing about the scandal of claims companies charging thousands of millions to fill in forms people can do for free, the Independent carried two ads for one such company - on the same page as the article!

The bombing of the Boston Marathon gained justifiably widespread publicity. But it was not the biggest terrorist event of the long weekend, nor even the event which could have proved the most deadly. But another event went largely unnoticed by the "western" media. Why? It happened in Taiwan.Then there's the 16 killed in an attack in Pakistan.