Social Media

  • A family with the wrong members in control

    In 1941 in the midst of World War 2, George Orwell wrote his essay The Lion and the Unicorn on the state of England in wartime and examining what the England of the 1940s could have in common with the England of 1840.

    His line of reasoning resulted in him penning the following paragraph.

    England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control – that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

    There is so much in that one paragraph that is still pertinent today: the cupboards bursting with skeletons; the poor relations who are horribly sat upon; deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income; and above all a family with the wrong members in control.

    Which brings us very neatly to today’s Daily Mirror font page with some blunt advice for the current “wrong” members in control.

    Headline reads they still don't get it
    The ‘irresponsible uncles’ mentioned by Orwell

    When alleged prime minister Rishi Sunak entered Number 10 he promised: “this government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level.”

    His words have rung hollow, as revealed by his own actions – not wearing a seat belt in a moving car whilst being over 17 years of age – and those of others such as disgraced former alleged prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s cronysim. Furthermore, Sunak has revealed himself to be particularly foolish. Who else would video themselves breaking the law and then post the evidence on social media?

    However, perhaps far worse than that is the case of present Tory Party chair Nadhim “Stable Genius” Zahawi. It has now come to light that he was under investigation by the Revenue for tax irregularities while he was Chancellor Chancer of the Exchequer. It has emerged today that Zahawi actually had to pay overdue taxes as well as a penalty.

    Last time your ‘umble scribe looked, those who handle their tax affairs with integrity generally have to pay penalties to the taxman.

    Sunak’s fine words in respect of integrity, professionalism and accountability have a distinctly hollow ring, reminiscent of a phrase of Orwell’s regarding political speech in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language.

    Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

    One wonders whether Sunak’s answer to all the sleaze, corruption and general misbehaviour rife in his party with an updated version of John Major’s 1990s Back to Basics campaign. However, your correspondent doubts Sunak has the political skills.

  • Another data protection fine for Meta

    New logo as Facebook morphs into MetaAfter a record fine of €390 mn. at the start of January, the Irish Data Protection Commission is imposing a further fine of €5.5 mn. on Meta, this time for WhatsApp’s policy with regard to personal data under the GDPR, Le Monde Informatique reports.

    Has been welcoming (in tax terms) to American IT companies, but is proving to be as very sensitive area for implementation of the GDPR. Meta has just experienced this once again with a fine of €5,5 mn. imposed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner. This is the social network’s second fine in less than a month; on 4 January the same commission announced a record fine of €390 mn. on the personal data processing policy of Facebook and Instagram (posts passim).

    In this instance it’s WhatsApp’s policy that is being censured following a complaint filed on 25 May 2018 – the date the GDPR entered into effect – by a German user. After this date the messaging service updated its general conditions of use and informed its users they had to click on “accept and continue” to indicate their consent. If they did not reply, they no longer had access to the service.As in the decision of 4th January, WhatsApp regards its data processing policy must be considered like a “contract” according to the GDPR (Article 6.1) concluded between the company and the user.

    EDPB lays it on thick

    The Irish Data Protection Commission investigated and drew up a draft decision which was submitted to the European regulators parties involved in this case. It proposed not imposing additional financial penalties. WhatsApp had already been fined €225 mn. in September 2021 for similar actions. However, the DPC pleaded for recognition of the contractual and thus legal nature of WhatsApp’s personal data policy – a position which caused an outcry from other data protection regulators.

    The DPC approached the EDPB for a decision. It dismissed the legal basis of the contract and added an additional infringement of the transparency obligation. As a consequence, the Irish DPC is adding €5.5 mn. to the fine imposed on Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company.

  • GDPR"> Meta falls foul of GDPR

    Meta logoLe Monde Informatique reports that Meta, the conglomerate that owns both Facebook and Instagram, has been fined a total of €390 for breaches of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in respect of both platforms’ personal data processing policy.

    It has been a bad start to the year for Meta which has just been notified of a fine of €390 mn. by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC). The regulator is penalising the actions of Meta’s 2 subsidiaries, Facebook to the tune of €210 mn. and Instagram €180 mn. This decision concludes a case which started on 25 May 2018 (the date the GDPR entered into effect after 2 complaints had been filed – one by well-known Austrian privacy campaigner Max Schrems and the other by a Belgian citizen.

    In this case Meta Ireland changed its general terms and conditions before the date of entry into effect of the GDPR, in particular “the legal basis on which it relied to legitimise its processing of users’ personal data (including behavioural advertising)”. To adopt this new policy, existing and recent Facebook and Instagram users were asked to click on the “I Accept” button on pain of no longer being able to access the platforms’ services. The questions then arose as to whether users had been forced to give their consent and if the “contract” concluded between Meta and its users conformed to Article 6 of the GDPR.

    A fine increased by the EDPB

    The debate was long and heated, including at European regulator level. As a matter of fact, the Irish DPC’s analysis did not meet with agreement from other European data protection authorities. For example, it considered the aspect of “forced consent” could not be upheld. Many authorities likewise thought the original Irish financial penalties too lenient. The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) was contacted to settle the matter and gave its decision on 5th December. It judged that “Meta Ireland was not entitled to invoke the legal basis of the “contract” as a legal based for its personal data processing for behavioural advertising purposes”.

    It also demanded the fines proposed by the Irish regulator be raised. This is the second fine imposed on Meta in recent months by the CPD. Last November the American company was fined €275 mn. for so-called data scraping. In both cases, Meta still has the possibility of challenging the regulator’s decisions before the European judicial authorities.

    Facebook and Instagram have now been given three months to bring their terms and conditions into line with the GDPR.

  • Fools and social media

    Your ‘umble scribe has not bothered with social media since the obscenely wealthy and undertaxed man baby masquerading under the name Elon Musk took the helm of Twitter and promptly set about trashing it with his control freak approach to company management, sacking lots of the tech staff that keep the platform running and demanding those that survive show their dedication to the company by working excessive hours.

    This was a big wrench for your correspondent, as time not spent working was generally filled with social media discussion and debate, and so entailed a wholesale change in his daily activities (Note to self: must get round to getting on Mastodon some time soon. Ed.).

    Following his acquisition of the platform, Musk installed himself as Twitter’s CEO and now seems to have reached the conclusion his rather doubtful skills are up to the job.

    In recent days Musk held a Twitter poll to ask Twitter users whether he should remain as the platform’s boss. The results were not flattering if Musk has – as I suspect – a narcissistic streak.

    Poll shows 57.5% of Twitter users saying Musk should go
    On your bike, laddie!

    Musk has now confirmed he will indeed step down as CEO as soon as he can find someone ‘foolish enough‘ to replace him.

    One candidate springs to my mind immediately: an egomaniac with current experience of running a social media platform (albeit one misnamed Truth Social. Ed.). Step forward one Donald John Trump, disgraced 45th president of the United States, who spends a large share of his time playing golf (as he did whilst supposed to be occupying the Oval Office. Ed.).

    I do hope these two prime examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect play nicely with one another. 😀

    PS: The Register is also joining in the fun with its own poll.

  • Non-essential reading

    The corpse of the political career of one Mary Elizabeth Truss, briefly the English Empire’s shortest serving prime minister is scarcely cold and the vultures of the fourth estate have already surrounded the corpse and are tucking in heartily with the aim of depriving the gullible each to part with the sum of twenty of your English pounds; or so they would like to think.

    Harper Collins have somehow engaged Messrs Harry Cole and James Heale to draft her political biography.

    Screenshot of Harper Collons' forthcoming Truss biography
    That’s £19.99 too much.

    Cole’s Wikipedia page describes him as (journalist). Note the brackets; they are most important. Cole works for The S*n, so therefore cannot be a proper journalist. At this point, your ‘umble scribe is reminded of the wise words of John McDonnell MP, former shadow chancellor, as reported by Adam Bienkov of Byline Times.

    Tweet reads John McDonnell: I got a phone call saying I'm a journalist from The Sun. I said look you can be one or the other, but can't be both.

    James Heale is political editor of The Spectator, reputed to be the world’s oldest surviving weekly magazine. It also acts as a cheerleader for the Conservative Party.

    Your correspondent is wondering if, given the pedigree of the authors and their role to date as stenographers to the Blue Team, the original draft has been/is being written in crayon.

    Update 07/11/2022: The book is now out and Andrew Anothony in The Guardian has characterised it as “a 300-leaved lettuce that was past its sell-by date before it reached the shelves“.

  • The living dead

    While the interminable Conservative Party leadership contest between the 2 tenth-rate rivals, one Mary Elizabeth Truss and rich boy Rishi Sunak, draws tediously on, with government administration seeming to have almost ceased despite drought, rampant inflation, surging energy prices (with the promise of higher prices to come. Ed.) and the outgoing party-time alleged prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is hardly anywhere to be seen, not even for a photo opportunity as he dives into the dressing-up box to indulge his inner Mr Benn, a new phrase has been coined – zombie government.

    A still from the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead

    As Wikipedia states: “A zombie (Haitian French: zombi, Haitian Creole: zonbi) is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse.” The English word zombie was first recorded in 1819, in a history of Brazil by the romantic poet Robert Southey, in the form of zombi. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the word’s origin as West African and compares it to the Kongo words nzambi (god) and zumbi or nzumbi (fetish).

    Comparing Conservative Party ministers to reanimated corpses is disingenuous, as the latter have far more compassion.

    All the crises mentioned in the first paragraph all seem to be coming to a head and combining during what is traditionally known in Britain as the silly season, which occurs during the long parliamentary summer recess, when, having no – or very little – politics to report, the newspapers and other media resort to more frivolous and lightweight items of ‘news‘.

    However, all is not yet lost.

    Yesterday the Metro reported that the notoriously work-shy Johnson (remember those missed COBRA meetings at the start of the pandemic? Ed.) had actually managed to turn up for a meeting, although the outcomes of the meeting stated to accompany the headline hardly seem to have made the gathering worth the effort of organising and attending.

    Front page of Friday's Metro with headline PM TURNS UP FOR MEETING

    And to think all this will continue until after the closure of the leadership poll for the 160,000 or so Tory Party members at 5pm on Friday 2nd September…

  • Minister’s extended stay in Homophone Corner

    Last night saw a televised debate for the Conservative Party leadership between one Mary Elizabeth Truss and Rishi Sunak.

    This encounter was described as ‘acrimonious‘ by The Guardian, whilst the BBC characterised it as the two candidates’ ‘fiercest clash yet‘.

    Needless to say the cheerleaders for both contenders were out in force on social media, attempting to boost the image of their favourite candidate.

    These included one Nadine Vanessa Dorries, inexplicably elevated way beyond her competence to Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport by one Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who has relinquished the office of leader of the CONservative Party, but remains the party-time alleged prime minister of the English Empire (which some still call the United Kingdom. Ed.).

    Anyway, at some point in the proceedings Nadine took to TWitter and posted the following.

    Tweet reads Rishi really needs to stop talking over #Liz4Leader #LeadersDebate It’s a terrible look. He’s irritable, aggressive, bad tempered. He’s loosing it.

    Yes. gentle reader, you read that correctly: ‘loosing‘ instead of ‘losing‘.

    Off you go to Homophone Corner for a nice long sit down until you learn the error of your ways, Nadine!

    However, Nadine is not known for ever doing things by halves (ask the ostrich whose anus she ate. Ed.) and in response to being corrected (‘It’s ‘losing”. Ed.) by columnist Sarah Vine, the separated and soon to be divorced wife of Nadine’s Cabinet companion Michael Gove, responded by retweeting Ms Vine with no style at all and another howling homophone, as shown below.

    Dorries tweet reads: Very true. I had hoped to have a career as an author one day. Back to the drawing bored.

    An author? What has the English-speaking world done wrong to deserve such punishment?!

    Nadine’s efforts to date have kindly described asfull of Irish clichés‘.

    Your ‘umble scribe recommends that the fragrant Nadine refrains from inflicting further clichés – Irish or other – upon the reading public until she learns to write to a standard demanding a pen instead of a crayon. 😀

  • Counting to three

    According to Wikipedia, Tatler is a British magazine published by Condé Nast Publications which is targeted towards the British upper-middle class and upper class and those interested in society events. The topics it covers include fashion and lifestyle, plus high society and politics.

    Its coverage of politics cannot be said to be well researched if the following from its Twitter account is to be taken at face value.

    Tweet reads Could Liz Truss be the UK's second-ever female PM? Who is Liz Truss? The ‘true blue’ right-wing candidate standing in Conservati...

    Second-ever female PM, Tatler?

    Try counting again; and this time engage your brain!

    If the Tatler’s staff can’t even count to three, it has to be wondered how accurate the rest its coverage of politics actually is.

    The tweet has since been deleted.

  • Dorries goes to war – again and again and…

    In the beginning was World War One (1914-18), then World War 2 (1939-45).

    There have been various conflicts since 1945, but none has qualified being counted as a World War (note capitalisation) and their number has remained stuck firmly on two.

    Until today.

    Step forward one Nadine Vanessa Dorries, inexplicably elevated way beyond her subterranean ignorance threshold to serve as Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, concerning whose appointment former Tory Party chairman Chris Patten is on record as saying: “And nobody should ever see the words ‘Nadine Dorries’ and ‘culture secretary’ in the same sentence”.

    Following yesterday’s humiliating by-election defeats in Tiverton & Honiton and Wakefield, Nadine fearlessly took to social media as cheerleader in chief for the Cult of the Boris, tweeting the following.

    Tweet reads This gov will remain relentlessly focused and continue to deliver for people during a post pandemic mid-war, global cost of living challenge which no Prime Minister or gov has faced the likes of since WW11

    World War 11?

    That’s nine more than are acknowledged by the generally accepted historical record.

    Whether Nadine was tweeting under the influence of digital dyslexia, innumeracy or something psychoactive has yet to come to light, but remember that part of Nadine’s brief is matters digital and the above tweet shows she cannot even use a mobile phone app – an iPhone Twitter client – competently, which bodes ill for this country.

  • Good riddance, Internet Explorer

    Internet Explorer logoTwo days ago (and not before time. Ed.) Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer (IE) 11, the final version release of its web browser first introduced in 1994.

    Over the years, Microsoft has been steering Windows users away from IE and towards Edge, its newer browser which is based upon the free and open source Chromium browser.

    However, for those that still use sites and or pages that exploit the standards-ignoring qualities of IE, Edge does have an IE compatibility mode.

    IE’s inability to adhere to standards had in the past created lots of extra work for web developers who had to code work-arounds for IE just to get their pages to work in what was then the world’s most popular browser. It was the world’s largest browser mainly due to Microsoft bundling IE with its Windows operating system and integrating it deeply into the structure of the OS. This led to lots of angry comments in the code of webpages and style sheets, frequently employing intemperate language.

    Media – and social media – reactions to and reports of the news have been mixed. Business Matters on the BBC World Service got all misty-eyed and nostalgic earlier in the week. However, my favourite response to date is from the Twitter user known as beConjuror, drawing attention to the ‘not responding‘ feature of many of Microsoft’s fine products.

    Tweet reads Internet Explorer is NOT responding
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