Brianna Ghey and stable-door logic
A few years ago I wrote an article on what I called “stable-door logic”: the tendency, after a disaster or atrocity, to look for ways to make sure that said disaster could not have...
Category: Social media
Threads: Strangled at Birth
Today Instagram, a division of Meta which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, launched their social media app, Threads. This has been marketed as a “Twitter killer” for several weeks as Elon Musk continues to...
Age like wine, age like milk?
This morning I was alerted to a video on Twitter by an Internet personality who calls himself “The Sunnah Guy”, a young man with no apparent qualifications dishing out advice to whomever might be...
Clients made Twitter what it is
Today it was finally made official that third-party Twitter clients are to be locked out of the system, rendering them useless unless they are rewritten to use other social media platforms, such as Mastodon...
Twitter’s collapse would be a great loss
This weekend, Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, shuttered the company’s headquarters and told staff they would have no access until Monday. This has prompted widespread fears that the site is about to...
On the takeover of Twitter
So, this past week the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, the CEO of the Tesla car company, finally went through. Musk has announced that he plans to reform the rules of Twitter to...
Carrier indemnity must stay
In the most recent episode of the BBC tech series Click, it was revealed that the new US president Joe Biden is seeking to repeal the law that indemnifies “big tech” from what people who use their services say.
Guardian Daily: nice new app, shame about the upgrade
Yesterday The Guardian published the new version of its “daily” app (which delivers the digital version of the printed Guardian and Observer newspapers, as opposed to the news app which delivers most of that...
Yes, he is a thug
There’s an image which has been circulated on Facebook which compares two articles about violent crimes in London. One refers to a ‘thug’ named Kersan Euell who kicked a female police officer into the...
Why did I just lose 25 followers?
The other day I logged onto an unfollower tracker and discovered that I’d lost 19 followers, which is rather unusual (I often lose a few over the average week, often suspended accounts — which...
Why I’m not closing my Facebook account (yet)
Since the scandal broke about Facebook data being leaked to Cambridge Analytica, a New York-based political consultancy which served the Trump and Brexit campaigns and used the data to channel propaganda to susceptible voters,...