For anyone out there who was following the saga: the Australian government has indeed backed down in its stoush with Facebook. Media outlets here are trying to depict it as a big win against Facebook, but the truth is pretty clear with even a cursory glance at the details 😜
Posts tagged ‘media’
Bookmarked “Sky News Australia is tapping into the global conspiracy set – and it’s paying off”
For those who don’t know, Sky News Australia has long been an extremely marginal cable news channel in a country with low pay TV penetration. But, owned by Rupert Murdoch as it is, in recent years it’s assembled quite a crew of right-wing ne’er-do-wells to fill its “Sky After Dark” programming, and many clips from that are getting huge circulation on sites like YouTube. (And I mean, I never watch news on YouTube and the site is constantly trying to force Sky News garbage into my recommendations, so clearly YouTube/Google is pretty complicit in this.) Just another example of how pandering to right-wing nuts is a highly profitable endeavour in this hellish economic system…
On the AusGov vs Google/FB Stoush
So, the House of Representatives has passed a bill requiring Google and Facebook to pay money to certain media outlets for content they link to within Australia. Initially Google threatened to block Australians from using their search engine if the legislation passed, but they came around and started negotiating compromise deals with commercial media outlets instead. Facebook, on the other hand, …
Wow, they’ve gone and done it. While Google has tried to reach a compromise with commercial news outlets, Facebook has blocked Australians from sharing news on their platform, and suspended not only news accounts but even emergency warnings accounts. This is one of those disputes where I hate everyone involved 🤯
Liked “Massive Texas gas failure during climate extremes gets blamed on wind power” by Ketan Joshi
It’s only been a half year since blackouts spread across California during intense summer heat. Those blackouts were immediately blamed on renewable energy; of course it turned out later on that a string of failures in the state’s gas plants were to blame. In fact, it turned out later on that a major part of those blackouts was an instance of a misheard verbal instruction issued to a gas generator. Instead of turning up as instructed, they decreased their output. And it’s five years since South Australia’s 2016 blackout, in which precisely the same sequence of events occurred. A pattern is now clear.
Major blackout events, usually instigated by grid stress related to climate extremes, become opportunities to attack renewable energy. Media articles, political pronouncements, tweets, Facebook posts, everything – the entire media ecosystem assumes that renewable energy must have done it and runs hard with it. And of course, later, it comes out that fossil fuel failures played a significant or even majority role in the cluster of causes of the event – none of which is covered with the intensity of the original stories.
Jessica Smith is a left-wing feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also very interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.