I had an unnerving experience while reading Caitlin Moranâs Times column today about the internet and free culture â namely, I thought she was wrong. Now, obviously, Caitlin Moran isnât allowed to be wrong about things. It upsets the natural order; itâs like the world has been thrown off its axis. Up is down, black is white, cats are marrying dogs, Toploader were a good band. And so on.
The thrust of the article is the pretty widespread belief that the internet has, in effect, deranged us: itâs led us to expect everything for free, to the point where we refuse to pay for the art and the journalism we used to pay for; and that by letting ourselves become freeloaders, weâre screwing ourselves and our future, because the only people whoâll be left doing art and journalism will be those from wealthy enough backgrounds that they donât need to worry about being paid. Because, as she says,
â¦thereâs no such thing as a free lunch, and thereâs no such thing as a free internet. I liked the old system we used to have â where, if you wanted something, you paid for it.
Now: I am a huge, huge fan of people who create things earning a living from it. I am also a huge, huge fan of giving my money to people who create things I like, or to the corporations that enable them to create â as evidenced by the fact that Iâve spent most of today trying to do just that, even though ITUNES IS A COMPLETE DICK that keeps moaning on about âunkown errorsâ when ALL I WANT TO DO IS WATCH THE AVENGERS. If Iâd pirated it, Iâd be on the post-credits sequence by now, but I wonât do that because I believe Joss Whedon deserves nice things in his life. And, crucially, Iâm not alone in this â the claim that the internet is busily laying waste the creative industries doesnât really hold true.
In the article, Caitlin says that âthe music industry has shrunk 40 per cent since 1999â³, which is something of a zombie statistic. As far as I can tell, itâs traced back to a mis-labeled chart from a report by analysts Bain & Co (Mitt Romneyâs old stomping ground). Actually, thatâs not the global music industry turnover â itâs the US recorded music industry turnover (as the corrected report now makes clear). Yes, revenues from recorded music alone have declined by about that much, in the US and the UK alike, albeit from a historically unnatural peak â but the music industry as a whole is actually doing pretty bloody well. The industry has only collapsed if you only look at one single form of revenue stream, for the large record companies that were traditionally the gatekeepers for the whole music industry, but arenât any more.
The idea that, because of the internet, people just want stuff for free and wonât pay for it is simply wrong; as Mike Masnickâs The Sky Is Rising study points out, US household expenditure on entertainment grew by 15% as a proportion of income between 2000 and 2008. The number of actual transactions in the recorded music industry has almost doubled since 2000. People are buying cheaper recorded music, certainly, but itâs hardly evidence that the population has developed a sudden allergy to the act of paying. Despite piracy, the film industry is growing â worldwide box office rose from $26billion in 2006 to $32billion in 2010. Despite piracy, the games industry is exploding â the amount weâve spent on gaming around the world has more than tripled in the past decade . We havenât turned into a society of cheapskates â weâre sluicing our money at an ever-increasing rate towards creators.
Thatâs not to suggest everythingâs peachy. Some particular businesses and business models (often based on a historically temporary and somewhat artificial scarcity) have been screwed hard by the newly negligible costs of replicating and transmitting information, and thatâs been traumatic for large numbers of people affected by it. But blaming it on people becoming âfreeloadersâ is not just over-simplifying the issue, itâs untrue and unfair.
The idea that the internet is a big, confusing magnet messing with our moral compass also comes up when she discusses punishing pirates â but again, Iâm not sure itâs a fair charge:
When the Government proposed prosecuting illegal downloading, and punishing it with internet disconnection, a lobbying group called FAC (Featured Artists Coalition) campaigned against it â âIt would reduce the civil liberties of every one of us in the country.â
But how? How is not having access to the internet, because you have committed a crime there, any different to not having access to, say, a library, because you committed a crime there? The internet isnât a necessity. Itâs wholly thrilling and brilliant and useful â most of the time, Iâd rather spend an afternoon there than, say, Bath â but itâs not a right to be able to use it.
Because, for pedantic starters, it isnât a crime. Because the internet is increasingly central not just to where we have fun, but to where we do all the tedious, necessary bits of our lives â itâs where we work, we bank, we pay our bills, we stay informed. Itâs where we live. Because the level of intrusion and surveillance of everybodyâs private actions in order to detect supposed pirates, and the knock-on effect for other individuals and businesses, was out of proportion to the problem. Because the standard of proof, and the quality of evidence, involved in âconvictingâ people for it would not have met any of the standards we demand for just punishment to be served. Because this was an actual policy, not a metaphor, and policy-by-metaphor is a terrible idea. Those who opposed it, by-and-large, werenât objecting to the metaphor; they were objecting to the actual details of what it meant in the real world, because those are the bits that actually cause harm.
A lot of the article echoes something that Moran said during her book launch at the Bloomsbury Theatre a week or so ago, about her support for The Timesâ paywall â helpfully transcribed by my friend Kat. Now, personally, Iâm happy to pay The Times a fair amount every month to scramble over their wall, and I have done from the start (after all, thatâs how I read the article in the first place). Iâm also glad that different news organisations are experimenting with different approaches to not going massively bankrupt. Try ALL the business models!
Moreover, Iâm a journalist, and I very much like getting paid for being a journalist. But the thing is, Iâve never once worked for an organisation that actually charged for its journalism â and yet they still paid me, and they still made money (well, mostly). The news industryâs problems are far more complex than âpeople stopped payingâ and âgoing free online was a bad ideaâ, and thereâs no simple connection between whether you charge for online content and whether you pay your journalists properly. Much like the discussion of the music industry, it seems to elevate a particular business model to the level of a moral absolute â not simply that itâs wrong to take things for free, but itâs also wrong to give things away for free, even if thatâs part of your plan to make money.
And itâs that underlying idea â that not charging for some stuff devalues everything â that brings me back to the part of the article which most niggled away at me. Not so much because itâs factually wrong, but because it seems to express an attitude towards culture that makes me feel itchy:
We think that, as soon as something is on the internet, it turns into something else â that itâs not quite real. Things, somehow, donât count on the internet.
Take, for instance, a song. When is a song not a song? When itâs on the internet. If a song is on a CD, or vinyl, in a shop, we would not hesitate for a moment to pay for it. Put the selfsame song on the internet, though, and millions of people would be steadfast in their conviction that you can simply take it without paying. Itâs still exactly the same song youâd pay for on vinyl â written by the same people, who spent the same hours and same money recording it â but press a button, and itâs yours.
I sort of see the point, but itâs a deeply weird way of expressing it: the idea that things are only things if you have paid for them. It yokes together economic value and cultural value and objecthood and claims that theyâre all one and the same thing. More importantly, as an example of how the internet makes us lose our minds and act in uniquely strange and immoral ways, itâs completely off target, because thereâs nothing unusual or new about the internet in this respect. Weâve always had songs that we havenât paid for, and weâve never thought of them as un-songs because of it. The folk song passed down the generations from mother to daughter: not a song? The nagging chorus drifting over from a neighbourâs radio: not a song? The pissed-up pub closing time singalong of a chart hit from back in the day: not a song? The tune in my head that reminds me of that night when I first met that person: not a song? The things people danced to in fields in the early 90s, because someone had turned up with a soundsystem and someone else had turned up with loads of drugs: you know, Iâm pretty sure they were songs. The world is full of songs; theyâre in the air, all around us, inside us, and I bloody well am steadfast in my conviction that I can simply take them without paying. Because not everything is a transaction, and a world where everything is turned into a transaction is a smaller and greyer and more bitter world than we deserve.
(For the past few years, some friends and I have run a silly blog called Sexy A-Levels, collating and mocking the pictures used in the British press of attractive young girls jumping in the air to celebrate their A-Level exam results. Itâs basically the only kind of picture most papers illustrate these stories with, because non-attractive girls and all boys apparently donât take exams. Anyway, itâs become quite popular and sort of A Thing on Twitter, and so naturally we decided to stop doing it. Hereâs a slightly extended version of the post explaining why, cross-posted here merely for the sake of posterity and completeness and personal archiving and shit. A rewritten and partly expanded version of the below was also published in The Independentâs blogs. Most of these words were written by @JoeTheDough, gentleman of the internet; all the boring bits are my additions.)
Tomorrow, students across England, Wales & Northern Ireland get their A-Level results (Scotland got their results last week, because Scotland). This is our moment. Our Christmas and Chanukah and DFS Sale and Flying Ant Day all rolled into one. Naturally, weâve been getting asked what weâve got in store for the site this year. And the answer is⦠well, weâre basically done here, kids. For all the funtimes itâs provided, weâre stopping. And a nation weeps.
Reasons? HERE ARE REASONS:
1) Our weapons are useless. In the 3 years (4 years? Jesus) weâve been doing this, we couldnât help noticing that most media outlets remain totally unchanged in their skeevy coverage. Also, some of them have started being knowing and arch in their skeeviness, because this is clearly a great British tradition to rank alongside the rude seaside postcard. âLook! Weâre being ironically appalling. Arenât we adorable?â Our failure to overturn the entrenched patriarchal edifice of the entire corporate media via the medium of a joke Tumblr is profoundly disheartening to us, in ways we cannot fully express through GIFs.
2) Twitter kind of has it covered. The hashtag #sexyalevels does the job just fine, and over the years has basically come to feel like itâs actually the best way to do this thing.
3) You guys knew this was a joke, right? (Part I) People send us emails and lose their tempers about this. And we kind of get why. And â eh â theyâre kind of right. Is there such a thing as âglorifying through contemptâ? Because there should be. And this is starting to feel like it.
4) You guys knew this was a joke, right? (Part II) People also link to the site saying things like âlovely knockers on hereâ, and oh god.
5) This thing has become a feedback loop. Cf. âWeâre being ironically appallingâ. As Chris Cook noted in the FT last year, this isnât just something that newspapers do in isolation. The news agencies only submit the kind of pictures they think news publishers want; the photographers only take pictures they think their agencies are looking for; and the more publicity-savvy schools only pick and choose their most âbeyootiful girlsâ to pimp out to the snappers. So it goes, right? Nobody is shocked, shocked by this stuff. But itâs sort of begun to feel like giving it a name and making it a big jolly media in-joke is only reinforcing that â what originated as a piss-take starts to feel like itâs become a pro bono branding exercise for the whole sweaty-palmed business.
6) We are all fabulously important people now. Seriously you guys. Weâre like the 1% now and this does not look good on golf club applications.
7) Feminism, amirite? Weâre dicking about here, of course, but at the heart of this one-joke website is the tiniest, most serious core of fundamental truth: This weird institutional boner that Fleet Street has for a particular type of soft, young female flesh is something we all pay a subtle psychic toll for. Now youâd be right to point out the psychic toll we pay is vastly smaller than that which we pay for all the other sexist bullshit in the world, and also thereâs WARS, but thatâs not really the point. It feels all enabley.
8) Dude, arenât you like, old? Yeah. We are old, old men. One of us â weâre not saying who* â is 36. He has a wife and a son and he moderates a website that collates pictures of 18 year old girls for a joke that even its creators struggle to justify. As the great man once said, itâs no way to run a fucking ballroom.
OK. Thatâs us nailed to our crosses. And yes, OBVIOUSLY itâs absurdly po-faced and over-the-top to post something like this on a website like this â but, well, there you go. Weâre out.
That said, if someone else wants to take up the reins, weâd be happy to let you. Hit us up.
Many thanks for all the links, tweets and submissions over the years. Also, please follow us on our new website, nothingbutgifsoftomdaleysarse.tumblr.com.
@JoeTheDough, @qwghlm and @flashboy
*Itâs Joe.
Remember when everybody said âTHE FUCKING QUEENâ at the same time? twitter.com/flashboy/statuâ¦
â Tom Phillips (@flashboy) July 27, 2012
This was the best bit of last night though. Such fun reading it in retrospect. twitter.com/JoeTheDough/stâ¦
â Joe Saunders (@JoeTheDough) August 12, 2012
You guys.
@qwghlm@flashboy@juniorc0@simonnricketts twitter.com/kanedr/status/â¦â David Kane (@kanedr) August 12, 2012
(Inspired by @orbynâs piece here.)
We take a look at the made-up winners and losers under the new budget:
Susan and Barry Hopkins, professional married couple, Ludlow
Susan and Barry are each in work â Barry as a quantity surveyor, Susan as an administrator â and they have three children, a fixed-rate mortgage and a car that really needs to be repaired. Under the budget, they will lose £204 per year, which sadly will pale into insignificance compared to the debts Barry has got into with a Triad gang.
Doris Heppelthwaite, retired, Swansea
Doris is a 67-year-old former nurse who lives in a small, run-down maisonette and keeps three cats. In cold winters, she struggles to both heat her home and feed herself and her cats, and the Chancellorâs raid on pensionersâ income tax allowance would be expected to hit her especially hard. Fortunately, however, the losses from that will be more than offset by her discovery of an enchanted kettle that grants her the magical power to predict the derivatives market, so thatâs all right then.
Plonko Sadface, entertainer, Cramlington
Plonko is a 34-year-old self-employed clown from the North-East who makes approximately £19,500 a year from his work in local shopping centres and with educational charities, and who is terrified of sex. He will lose out to the tune of £117 a year under the budget, but the tears he cries that slowly dissolve the tears painted on his face are not over the budget, but over Arthur, and that night five years ago when he could have said something, should have said something, but instead stood silent and petrified, and now they can never be together.
Lord Henry Dashington, industrialist aristocrat, Hampshire
Lord Dashington owns a series of failing manufacturing businesses, which he inherited after his father mysteriously vanished in the Congo, that have been hit hard by both the recession and his apparently dissolute lifestyle. But secretly, Lord Dashington is actually Britainâs greatest crime fighter â taking on the worldâs most evil villains from his hi-tech base at Dash Hall, helped by his plucky niece Felicity and autistic savant butler Gerald. The budgetâs moves on corporation tax, the 50p income tax rate and the decision to not implement a mansion tax will be of significant help to Lord Dashington â saving him enough money that he will be able to confront his greatest foe yet, the infamous Red Glove and his dreaded Six Fingers Gang, in the thrilling Adventure of the Bamboo Fish. Hurrah!
Jeremy Dysart, businessman, Fort William
Jeremy owns a local fish & chip shop, is an enthusiastic scuba diver and golfer, smokes 20 cigarettes a day, enjoys online gambling and collecting antique Toby jugs, and is an old school classmate of Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander. He will be hit unusually hard by the budget, thanks to its raising of duty on cigarettes and the introduction of a new gaming duty; its imposition of taxes on scuba gear, golf clubs and âjugs or other receptacles that have facesâ; its introduction of a âwedgie levyâ on 39-year-old men in the Lochaber region; and the unexpected canceling of tax credits for anybody whose name rhymes with âeyes fartâ. It is understood that the Lib Dem team under Danny Alexander fought particularly hard for these measures.
Rhahlgur, George Osborneâs former brood nurse
Vast and silent, she lies deep and cold in the darkness.
She is patient, as all her kind are; for a thousand years she has waited here, alone in the void, drawing her faint glimmers of sustenance from the baleful dull-red glow of a long-dead star.
All she has had, for aeons, are her memories. She can still recall the day that George Osborne and his countless nameless siblings clawed their way through her flesh and tasted life for the first time. Then they were things of teeth and scales; she remembers the cold flash of talons and the wordless screeching of a thousand thousand writhing children. That was in the time before they discovered the Dance of Forms, and played their way among the stars, wearing the flesh of lesser beings. Those were the good days.
She will not be affected by the budget, for she is a horror older than time itself, and she was not in the 50p tax band.
Of late, she has grown used to waiting; biding her time since she sent George Osborne and his terrible multitude of brothers howling across the wastes of space, seeking new sustenance. She knows that soon he will sing the song; the old nightmare song that summons his kin from across the stars, and that on the day that dread song is sung they shall be together again, as they were always intended to be, and that the ancient stars will burn anew, and the suffering will be reborn, and â at last â they shall feast once more.
Being a massively over-long Storify of a Twitter discussion about the death of the printed Encyclopaedia Britannica, and why it wasnât necessarily Wikipediaâs fault.
Sky News has, by common acclaim, just shot itself painfully in the foot by effectively banning its staff from using Twitter in most of the important ways that Twitter is used. As reported by The Guardianâs Josh Halliday, the new rules say, in short: Do not retweet any non-Sky News account â not journalists from rival organisations, and not members of the public; do not tweet news without passing it to the news-desk first; and do not tweet about topics that arenât part of your beat or a story you are working on. In other words⦠er, donât use Twitter.
(Itâs worth noting that Josh tweeted virtually all the key details of his story in advance of it being published â presumably without running his tweets past Alan Rusbridger first â and yet still managed to file and publish quicker than anyone else. And in doing so, you have to suspect, made it far more likely the Guardianâs story would become the canonical telling of the tale once it was published.)
The reaction of Twitter users to this has been neatly Storified by Elena Zak â a concise summary would probably be âWT actual F?â. Itâs reminiscent of the kerfuffle that broke out last year when Associated Press told its reporters not to tweet breaking news, because they were scooping the wire. While I broadly agree with the slightly incredulous reaction of Anthony De Rosa from their rivals Reuters, you could at least see APâs point â they have clients who pay a lot of money for the privilege of getting APâs scoops first, and getting them accurately. If they can just follow APâs staffers on Twitter, bang goes the business model.
Like AP, but in different ways, Sky News is all about the scoops and the breaking news â far more so, even, than directly competing news channels. For such a prominent channel, it has relatively few viewers â around 0.6% of total viewing, less than Channel 4+1, CBBC, Dave or Yesterday, for example. But what it does have is a high percentage of viewers in lots of important places. Anywhere where breaking news is vital (like, say, every newsroom in the country) is likely to have Sky News on its TVs. With the best will in the world, theyâre not there for its analysis or its coverage of under-reported topics â theyâre there to find out about news a few minutes ahead of anywhere else. The old joke that you watch Sky News to find out whatâs breaking, and then turn over to the BBC to find out if itâs actually true, is terribly unfair to the journalists behind Skyâs editorial and fact-checking processes â but it is also a fairly accurate description of how a lot of people behave.
So itâs not entirely unreasonable that Sky might want to control its journalistsâ Twitter output in some way. At the time of writing, neither Sky nor any of their journalists have commented on the new rules, so thereâs still a lot of ambiguity over how they will be applied. With that in mind, hereâs five things I think Sky News could do that would downgrade its approach from âbrain-fryingly incomprehensibleâ to âmildly bafflingâ:
1. Clarify what accounts will be affected
The Guardian story says that the new rules apply to âprofessional accountsâ â and thus, presumably, not to personal accounts (and itâs hard to see how Sky could expect to police that). But Sky really need to clarify this further; on Twitter, that distinction isnât a black-and-white issue. Does it just mean to accounts that explicitly have the Sky branding â e.g. with âSkyâ in the username, or the Sky logo in the avatar or background? Does it mean anybody who openly identifies themselves as a Sky News employee? Does it mean anybody who could be identified as a Sky News employee, even if they donât explicitly say it? This matters â Skyâs Neal Mann, aka @fieldproducer, is a big figure in the UK journotwittosphere, to the extent that a hefty proportion of the reactions to this news were essentially wondering if a Neal Mann-shaped hole had just been left in the wall of Skyâs HQ. His account falls into the second category â itâs clearly a part professional, part personal account, where he explicitly identifies himself as a Sky employee, but without any Sky branding. Does he have to follow the rules? What about the large percentage of Sky staffers who are freelancers (as sometime Sky freelancer Dave Lee asked)?
I expect Sky will clarify the rules to say that it only applies to explicitly Sky-branded accounts (and that Sky reporters will be given a chance to change their accounts to remove the Sky branding if they wish to carry on tweeting as before). Anything else would be needlessly draconian, and would completely miss the positive effect that staff personal accounts have on humanising an organisation.
2. Have it only apply to breaking news
Given that the rationale for this move has to lie with the importance of both getting scoops, and fact-checking news, Sky would do well to explicitly restrict it to that area. Thereâs a fair argument for making sure that news coming from Sky-branded Twitter accounts has gone through the same editorial checks that news coming from any other Sky-branded news platform would do. Likewise, it makes a certain kind of sense to stop reporters on official Sky accounts from straying into news areas that arenât their beat, just as you wouldnât expect your chief football writer to file a 1200-word review of the Lana Del Rey album* in lieu of a match report from the Reebok Stadium. But it makes no sense to apply it to anything else â if a Sky News journalist wants to retweet another journalistâs interesting analysis, or a good joke, or a link to the genuinely brilliant Rats In Hats Tumblr, then why on earth stop them? Once again, humanising = good.
3. Get serious about giving credit
Regrettably, Sky already has a bit of a dodgy reputation when it comes to crediting the work of other journalists, thanks to their habit of having ticker items (and, indeed, tweets) prominently ascribe news that was already broken by someone else to âSky sourcesâ. In their defence, they say people have misunderstood what they mean by this: itâs not that theyâre claiming to have broken the news, just that theyâre saying they have independently confirmed it with their own sources. Which is fine, as far as it goes, even if it doesnât quite match up to how many other organisations use that form of words. But the âno retweets of rivals journalistsâ policy pushes it into a territory where, once again, it might start to look like an organisation thatâs trying to mislead its audience about how many stories it breaks compared to its rivals. It may seem like a small thing â journalists fretting over bruised egos at not getting credit, added to the Twitteratiâs mad obsession with getting a tweet out seconds before someone else â but if they want to avoid accusations of dishonesty, Sky will need to work out robust and transparent ways of clearly acknowledging that a scoop isnât theirs.
4. Acknowledge that exceptions must be allowed
During the UK riots in August last year, Sky Newsâs journalists were extremely prominent on Twitter, helping to report, fact-check and amplify useful (indeed, potentially life-saving) information. They were outstanding, and I suspect they did a huge amount to improve the reputation of the station in the minds of a lot of people. The Guardianâs Reading The Riots analysis of how Twitter was used during the unrest showed how professional journalists â both breaking news and retweeting others â played an important role in stopping false rumours from spreading and getting good information to those who needed it (itâs worth noting that at least four Sky News journalists, as well as a several centrally-controlled Sky accounts, were among the most retweeted users during that time). There are times when the public service aspect of journalism â even in news organisations that donât have an explicit public service remit â has to take precedence over everything else. And there are times when a story gets too large, and too important, for any organisation to pretend its coverage can be comprehensive. These rules would utterly crush the potential for them to do that again.
5. Trust your journalists
Ultimately, a lot of this kind of palaver â micro-managing your employeesâ social media accounts â comes down to how much you trust your staff. If you donât think you can trust them not to tweet unverified information, or to produce interesting output related to their beat, then these kind of rules make sense. If you donât think they can understand the norms and practises of social media, then you donât let them try (itâs notable that Mann, Skyâs Digital News Editor and one of the UKâs top experts on the intersection of news and social media, said that he âdidnât take part in the discussionsâ that led to the policy). But I honestly donât think Skyâs journalists are deserving of that lack of trust, and I donât think this will magically make them better reporters, or Sky a better news channel. I think Skyâs staff are smart, talented and professional, and Sky should be celebrating that fact, rather than trying to hide them away behind a mountain of managerial dictats.
If Sky clarify those points and apply the guidelines as liberally as possible, then the new policy might at least make some sort of coherent sense â even if many would still see it as narrow-minded, short-sighted and rather Cnutish. But if they go in the opposite direction⦠well, that sound you hear is a thousand social media gurus preparing ten thousand slides for a hundred thousand presentations with Sky as their number one example of âold media not getting itâ. And I think thatâs a fate we all want to avoid.
*Though why youâd need 1200 words to say âitâs crapâ, Iâm not sure.
Update: Oh dear. Now the BBCâs getting roughly the same stick that Sky got, prompted by another Guardian story titled âDonât break stories on Twitter, BBC journalists toldâ. I think this criticism is likely mistaken, though. Itâs based around this blogpost written by Chris Hamilton, BBC Newsâ s social media editor, clearly in response to the Sky brouhaha. The key line that everyone seems to be picking up on is the final one:
ââ¦weâve been clear that our first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible â and certainly not after it reaches Twitter.â
But in interpreting this, everybody seems to be completely ignoring the directly preceding line:
âWeâre fortunate to have a technology that allows our journalists to transmit text simultaneously to our newsroom systems and to their own Twitter accounts.â
Iâm honestly not sure how you go from âthe BBC have developed technology specifically to allow their reporters to break news on Twitter while keeping the newsdesk informedâ to âdonât break stories on Twitter, BBC journalists toldâ â it doesnât seem to me like thereâs any ambiguity there. Itâs just flat-out misleading. Chris Hamilton made this clear himself, in a slightly world-weary tweet:
@darrenwaters @stuartdhughes Iâm not sure the 2nd last par of my blog could be much clearer, but i will be clarifying things
â Chris Hamilton (@chrishams) February 8, 2012
Of course, thereâs still an argument to be made that even simultaneously filing to Twitter and your newsdesk is now unnecessarily restrictive. But I think of all news organisations, the BBC is clearly the one where keeping your colleagues updated through centrally controlled mechanisms is of the most obvious importance. Even on large national newspapers, you can reasonably use Twitter as an ad hoc internal comms tool â teams are small enough for pretty much everybody to follow each other, and you only need to co-ordinate news awareness across a relatively limited number of platforms. The BBC, meanwhile, has several national TV stations, a global TV station, quite a few national radio stations, 48 regional and local radio stations, a global radio station broadcasting in 27 languages to several hundred million listeners, a website available in 32 different language editions⦠all run by a constantly shifting workforce thousands of staffers, casuals and freelancers. Oh, and a statutory duty to not mislead people. When news breaks, you really need to be able to let everybody know in a predictable and controllable wayâ¦
This video, âA Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Workâ, is getting passed around a lot right now. From the description: âTechnology codes our minds, changes our OS. Apple products have done this extensively. The video shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives. It shows real life clip of a 1-year old, growing among touch screens and print. And how the latter becomes irrelevant. Medium is message. Humble tribute to Steve Jobs, by the most important person : a baby.â
To which, might I humbly point out: ITâS A BABY. Iâm not sure it tells us much about the nature of user interfaces because ITâS A BABY and it DOESNâT UNDERSTAND WHAT MAGAZINES ARE. It also doesnât understand what an iPad is, or what a user interface is, because itâs a one year old baby and it doesnât even understand what itself is. Babies arenât âdigital nativesâ (and by the way oh god stop calling your daughter that), because they arenât even themselves-natives yet. I know it was kind of cute when Clay Shirky said that thing about the four-year-old looking for the mouse on a television and videos of babies always seem really meaningful and stuff, but ultimately what weâre dealing with here is a thought process thatâs going âOOH LOOK SHINY THING want milk now OOH LOOK SHINY THING letâs see if I can break it WANT MILK also I have done a poo.â Babies donât offer much insight into the functionality of information transmission mediums because fundamentally, brilliant as they are in many ways, BABIES ARE IDIOTS. In fact, if youâve ever tried to give a baby a present of any kind, youâll realise that to them an iPad is a broken Box That The iPad Came In, because itâs harder to make it part of a tower you can knock over and Daddy gets nervous when you try. At the most basic level, to a baby, everything that isnât Mum is broken. An iPad is a Mum that doesnât work. A Samsung Galaxy Tab is a Mum that doesnât work. A magazine is a Mum that doesnât work. Dad is a Mum that doesnât work. Because, as I might have mentioned, itâs a BABY.
Also the video actually seems to show that the baby canât operate the iPad at all in a meaningful way, but giggles when shiny thing does whooshy bright light stuff, while sheâs already getting the hang of the page-turning interface of the magazines pretty well.
So the other weekend, I took part along with mâcolleague Chris in NomNomNom â11 â a kind of Mastercheffy cooking contest for bloggers. It was, as always, huge fun (also as always, I didnât win.) I was hoping to write up my full experience, but unfortunately I find myself in a field in Derbyshire with only my phone to blog from. As such, this is a bit truncated⦠but it does give you probably the most requested recipe I cooked on the day, for Billionaireâs Shortbread.
Billionaireâs Shortbread is like Millionaireâs Shortbread, except MUCH MORE CLASSY. By which I mean itâs got peanuts in it, and is decorated with gold dust. Peanuts, of course, are noted for their exclusivity and connotations of a luxury jet-set lifestyle. Note: the alternative name for this recipe, which it was given on the day, is âPosh Snickersâ.
Billionaireâs Shortbread
For the shortbread
Ingredients:
250g Plain Flour
75g Caster Sugar
185g Butter
Mix the ingredients up in a big bowl until youâre got a nice, smooth, malleable gloop that â assuming youâve measured all the things right â should be substantial enough that you can pick it up and shape it without it trying to escape.
Stick this into a pre-greased cake tin, or similar receptacle â youâll want something roughly a foot square. Ish. Slap it about a bit until itâs roughly flat and evenly distributed across the tin. Whack this into an oven pre-heated to 180°C for around twenty minutes (until the surface starts to turn golden), then once itâs done, allow it to cool and harden. Because youâre probably impatient, âallow it to coolâ means âstick it in the fridgeâ.
For those of you who like to keep up with such things, this is whatâs technically known as a âbuttery biscuit baseâ.
For the peanut butter layer
Ingredients:
A jar of crunchy peanut butter
Scoop about half the peanut butter into a bowl, and stick it in the microwave on a medium heat until itâs a bit runnier than it normally is.
Once your buttery biscuit base is cool and solid enough that you can do things to it, slop your slightly melty peanut butter all over it and spread it out evenly.
This is definitely the easiest step of the recipe, which given that the rest are also very easy is saying something. Also, youâve got half a jar of peanut butter left over. Bonus.
For the caramel layer
Ingredients:
40g Butter
50g Light Muscavado Sugar
400g Condensed Milk
1 tsp Cornflour
Large handful of salted peanuts
First, pummel the crap out of your peanuts with a pestle & mortar (or other peanut-destroying device), until your large handful of peanuts becomes a large handful of small peanut fragments. Retain your fragments in a bowl for later.
Splodge the butter, sugar and condensed milk into a saucepan, and stir constantly over a medium heat for some time until it starts to thicken. At this point, carry on stirring over a medium heat for longer than you might think. Basically, the point is it needs to be really rather thick â if itâs too runny, itâll RUIN EVERYTHING. Once youâre convinced itâs really quite thick (little bits will probably have started caramelising), stir in the cornflour for added thickening, then stir in the peanut fragments.
Spread all this lot over your buttery biscuit base and peanut layer, then âallow it to coolâ (stick it in the fridge) again.
For the chocolate layer
Ingredients:
150g Milk Chocolate
50g Dark Chocolate
Gold Dust (edible type)
Obvious bit: once your caramel later has solidified a bit, melt the chocolate in a bowl in the microwave. If you do this cleverly and just stir it gently, the milk and dark chocolate should make a pretty swirly pattern. Put your melty swirly chocolate over the caramel and spread until itâs even.
Then comes the pointless but fun tarting-up section. Get a small amount of edible gold dust, and using a very fine sieve, scatter it lightly over the chocolate.
(Edible gold dust note: you know how the phrase âitâs like gold dustâ normally denotes that something is very rare and extremely expensive? Turns out you can get small pots of it in Waitrose for under four quid.)
Allow to cool (FRIDGE) again, then serve (ideally) when the chocolate is mostly solid but still slightly gooey. If youâve done it right, it should have roughly the density of a neutron star, and should be able to give a horse diabetes at fifty paces.
Thereâs been a bit of a wailing and a gnashing of teeth on the interwebs today about the libel decision handed down yesterday by Justice Tugendhat which found against the Telegraph and Lynn Barber, over a review Barber wrote in 2008 of Dr Sarah Thorntonâs book âSeven Days in the Art Worldâ. Possibly because of how the case is being reported â for example, the BBCâs report begins with the line âAn author has won £65,000 in libel damages over a âspitefulâ book review that was written by a journalist for a broadsheet newspaperâ â lots of writers appear under the impression that the libel damages (and £65,000 isnât really that much for a libel case) have been awarded because the judge found that the review was just too nasty.
Obviously, this would be profoundly worrying for anybody in the business of reviewing things, where spitefulness is sometimes, regretfully, a necessary literary tool. And because the judgment itself is a) very long, and b) mostly quite boring, very few people seem to have read the full thing â which would reveal that their concerns are unfounded. In fact, the judgment appears to be entirely fair, and moreover it casts the actions of Lynn Barber and (to a lesser extent) the Telegraph in a very unflattering light.
Mostly to save me trying to make the same point over and over again on Twitter, hereâs the three major misconceptions about the case:
1) A review being âspitefulâ now places you at risk of a libel action
No, it doesnât. The libel decision has very little to do with the tone of Barberâs piece, and a lot to do with the fact that it made several highly defamatory â and entirely false â allegations about Dr. Thorntonâs work. Tugendhat J is crystal clear about this in paragraph 76 (highlighting mine):
âA reviewer is entitled to be spiteful, so long as she is honest, but if she is spiteful, the court may more readily conclude that misstatements of fact are not honest, since spite or ill will is a motive for dishonesty.â
Good news, reviewers! You can carry on being as spiteful and vitriolic and snarky and pissy as you ever were. The one caveat there (as weâll see in a bit) is that if you do make some entirely false claims in your review, and if the tone of your piece is extremely spiteful, you might find it a bit harder to claim in court that you made an honest mistake, and that you werenât attempting to damage the reputation of the person whose work youâre reviewing.
2) All Lynn Barber is guilty of is being forgetful
Nope. Not only does the judge conclude that itâs unlikely Lynn Barber was actually forgetful, but it doesnât really matter: the crucial question isnât whether she forgot a key fact, but that she apparently didnât care (and never bothered to check) whether what she wrote was true or not. Which, when youâre making an extremely damaging claim, is really not on.
The libel claim, which made up for the majority of the damages (there was also a secondary claim of malicious falsehood), was over Barberâs claim that Thornton had falsely said she had interviewed Barber for the book (about her experiences of being a Turner Prize judge). As it happens, Thornton had interviewed Barber for the book; Barberâs claim that she hadnât (âI gave her an interview? Surely I would have noticed?â) was completely untrue.
In her defence, Barber said sheâd simply forgotten that the interview had happened. Indeed, she noted that sheâs written before about how poor her memory is, for example in her memoir âAn Educationâ. That would seem to be a reasonable thing to say in her defence â but Tugendhat considered this, and found it a poor excuse on two eminently reasonable grounds.
First (and treading carefully here) he found reason to doubt that Barberâs memory was quite as bad as she made out. Not only did he find that her descriptions of her poor memory in An Education to actually be examples of perfectly ordinary memory (in parargraph 92 of the judgment he goes through her examples one by one, dismissing each with a deliciously blunt âThat is normalâ), but he specifically suggests that she only introduces the idea of poor memory as âa literary device to warn the reader that the memoir does not purport to be completely accurateâ.
Moreover, Tugendhat suggests that Barberâs supposed bad memory appears, on the basis of her evidence, to be selective at best â for example, being able to remember clearly an email in the afternoon of one day that supports her case, but not another email that same evening that hinders her case (paragraphs 84 and 85).
In summation, the judge writes: âMs Barber wrote in her witness statement in a number of places that she has a notoriously bad memory. In reading the documents and in listening to her oral evidence, I did not see any sign that that was true. On the contrary, her memory of events in 2006, as recounted in the Review, and her memory of events when she gave evidence, seemed to me to be normal or in some respect better than might be expected. I do not accept the accuracy of her statement that her memory is bad.â
And regardless, he secondly notes that it makes very little difference to the judgment whether her memory really is that bad â because if she knew she had a bad memory, then relying on her memory to make as damaging and defamatory claim as sayng that a bookâs author lied without checking if it was true is enough to turn the case against her. The defence admitted that Barber had in fact made a mention of having done the interview in her diary (paragraph 28); it would have been the work of minutes to check the facts. Tugendhat writes (paragraph 127): âIt is with some hesitation that I reached the conclusion that Ms Barber knew the interview allegation was false at the time she wrote the Review. I have had no hesitation in reaching the alternative conclusion that (if she did not know it was false) she was reckless, that is indifferent as to whether it was true or false.â
3) It was an honest mistake
On the basis of the judgment⦠er, not so much. In fact, the judgment really is quite brutal about Lynn Barberâs actions, and also shows the Telegraphâs response to an entirely reasonable complaint in a fairly bad light. As noted, Tugendhat repeatedly says that Barber was âindifferentâ to whether the claims she had made were true or false (paragraphs 121 through to 127). He says (paragraph 106) that âI found nothing in her demeanour which suggested to me that she cared one way or another whether the interview allegation was true or false. She manifested no sign of caring at all.â Thatâs a pretty damning indictment of any journalist â a profession in which, youâd hope, caring about whether things are true would be a pretty central character trait.
Furthermore, Barber didnât respond to emails from Thornton, shortly after the review was published, pointing out the mistake (paragraphs 35, 102); the Telegraph took four months to remove the review from their website, and a further six months to issue an apology (paragraph 187), none of which suggests much in the way of good faith in their approach to the issue. Then the Telegraph, in their first full response to Dr Thorntonâs complaints, chose to use the the quite baffling (to me) argument that the 35-40 minute interview hadnât actually been an interview, because it hadnât yielded much useful information (paragraph 55, given shortest possible shrift in paragraphs 94 and 95).
I think that for most journalists this will come as quite a surprise: the idea that slightly rubbish interviews retrospectively stop having been interviews at all. I mean, I was quite excited when I got to interview Matt Smith â heâs The Doctor, for goodness sake â even if it was just a 15 minute phoner where he straight-batted everything right back at me. Turns out that, according to the Telegraphâs legal team, I never interviewed him at all, which is definitley some sort of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey shenanigans about which Iâm not very happy.
It gets worse for Barber â in papragraph 96, Tugendhat bluntly states that, in her evidence, âshe told what is certainly a lie.â As he notes a while later (parargraph 107) âit is a very serious matter for a judge to find that a witness has liedâ â but heâs in no doubt that she did, based on what she wrote in her original review.
ââ
In summary: the judge found that Lynn Barber lied in her evidence, didnât care whether the allegations she made were true or false (when it was easy for her to have checked and found out that they were false), and both she and the Telegraph were slow and obstructive in their response to Dr Thorntonâs complaint. The only area where the âspitefulnessâ (or otherwise) of the review comes into play is that itâs indicative of Barberâs âstate of mindâ (see paragraph 76, the only time in the entire judgment where spite is mentioned) when writing it; itâs a factor that harms her particular defence, not a cause of action in itself. Spite as a journalistic method lives to fight another day.
While many journalists may be worried about this judgment based on some stray headlines, in actual fact itâs a result that all good journalists should be able to support â even though many of us, myself included, have enjoyed and admired Lynn Barberâs work for many years. Because ultimately itâs about the basics of journalism, our version of âfirst, do no harmâ â âFirst, donât say something that isnât true.â
At work today, I wrote the following review of the new levels of Angry Birds Seasons â an update that celebrates St. Patrickâs Day, following on from previous batches of fresh levels themed around Halloween, Christmas and Valentineâs Day. After a brief discussion with my line manager, we mutually agreed that the piece wasnât entirely right for the tone of our site.
As such, Iâm publishing it here instead.
ââ
Dear Finland,
Ah. We see youâve updated Angry Birds with some new levels â all in celebration of our patron saint, St. Patrick. That was nice of you! However, one or two quibbles. Now, we might be reading a bit too much into this here, but having had a brief glance at our history books just to remind ourselves, we canât help but wonder at your decision to depict Irish people as pigs. Thieving pigs, to put not too fine a point on it. Is that possibly, we donât know, a touch insensitive? A little awkward on the symbolism front? Thieving green pigs in green hats with big red beards, in fact. No. Wait. Thick evil thieving green pigs with stupid beards WHO HABITUALLY STORE LARGE AMOUNTS OF EXPLOSIVES IN THEIR RAMSHACKLE HOUSES.
Jesus, honestly, why didnât you just superimpose Oliver Cromwellâs face on the Red Bird and have done with it? Look, perhaps weâre getting a little paranoid here â that is probably because we are ALWAYS DRUNK, by the way â but still, weâre picking up a pretty strong âthe thieving Irish pigs must be destroyed at all costsâ vibe from this thing.
We suppose we should be thankful that weâre just portrayed as stealing eggs. We half expected it to be Lucky Charms.
Still, itâs all just a bit of fun, isnât it? So, in the spirit of jovial national fraternity, let us simply say: Finland, go fuck yourselves, you reindeer-munching, Renny Harlin-producing, forty-four places below us in the FIFA rankings, havenât made a decent smartphone in years, can only win Eurovision when dressed as a bat, so boring we had to look you up on Wikipedia to find out enough bloody stereotypes runkkarit.
To be sure.
Lots of love,
Ireland
P.S. Donât suppose you could lend us some money? Weâre a bit short.
I can already see some old-school journalists tearing up. This poor kid, he looks at the numbers and ergo, that’s all he cares about. “Traffic,” they spit. And I get it. The word has been used to bludgeon you into dumb shit. To put great stories on the shelf to build slideshows. To give up on quality and focus on quantity. I do get all that. But that’s precisely why we (journalists) must understand the numbers! The business side of any publication knows them inside and out. If we don’t understand how to tell good stories with our own data, who do you think wins any argument that involves data, which they all do? You can know money is important without succumbing to the idea that cash rules everything around you.
Let me try to convince you of this: We can have binocular vision. We can understand these numbers. And we can know that the mission of a place like The Atlantic is to bring moral purpose, interesting ideas, great arguments, and excellent reporting to the world and to drive these stories as far as they will go into the public consciousness.
Furthermore, looking at the numbers teaches you about the social reality of the Internet. In a very real sense, unless you look at the numbers, you do not know what (the dynamic sociotechnical space that is) the Internet looks like. Your view lets you see its boulevards and parks, but it is like a photograph from the 1850s when the exposure times were too long to capture moving people. Your Paris is empty.
OK, sorry, I will wipe the spittle off my screen now.
“Giganta, a robot that automatically produces fun.”
His head is a cage full of imprisoned children. A technowicker man, filled with sacrificial mini-Woodwards.
(via Retronaut)
The horned lizard fends off predatory coyotes by shooting five-foot streams of its own blood from its eye. Evolution, please seek psychiatric help.Â
Always with the drama, horned lizard. Always drama.
- mr. pego
- fount of love
- rampant machine
- dark little cavernÂ
- stiff-stander
- grotto of love
- magnificent stones
- glorious cods
- the male part
- the extraordinary lubricity
- battering ram
- the rosy-tinted
aperture of her cavernous recess
The 12 weirdest animal penises on Earth. I made a gallery of some of the worst ones.
I like that this article is regularly updated as new penises come to light. For example, the alligator and the sea slug.
(via @aljwhite)
“…under the leadership of this prime minister, Canada will never become a safe haven for zombies, ever.”
(via BuzzFeed)
Goats Yelling Like Humans - Super Cut Compilation (by RSVLTS)
I’ve watched this about ten times today and I can’t make up my mind about which one is my favourite. I think it’s either the third one that sort of goes “eeerrrrrrrr”, the spitting one that has an argument in Spanish with a man, or the last one, which is amazing.
On reflection I think my favourite one is all of them.
How did the Galactic Empire ever cement its hold on the Star Wars Universe? The war machine built by Emperor Palpatine and run by Darth Vader is a spectacularly bad fighting force, as evidenced by all of the pieces of Death Star littering space. But of all the Empireâs failures, none is a more spectacular military fiasco than the Battle of Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back…
When Vader enters the Hoth System with the Imperial Fleet, heâs holding a winning hand. What follows next is a reminder of two military truths that apply in our own time and in our own galaxy: Donât place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command, and never underestimate a hegemonic powerâs ability to miscalculate against an insurgency.
“Postal Workers Cancelling Stamps At The University of Ghana Post Office” is my new jam.
âThe Lun-class (harrier) ekranoplan was a seaplane used by the Soviet and Russian navies from 1987 to sometime in the late 1990s.
âThe 240-foot long Lun-class vessels were designed to skim just over the surface of the sea at up to 340-miles per-hour while carrying six, P-270 Moskit guided missiles meant to take out NATO ships.â Â
âThe only Lun completed is now sitting unused at a naval station in the town of Kaspiysk.âÂ
-Â Wikipedia
EKRANOPLAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If Matt is going to use an Ekranoplan in a comic before me, Iâm going to be FURIOUS.
Ever since reading about the Ekranoplan in Gibsonâs Zero History, I have wanted one as a toy.
No.
This is how #India looks like from outer space on Diwali Night. Happy Diwali to entire world. Wish you brightness. Pic twitter.com/MindbIowingFacâ¦
â Mindblowing Facts (@MindbIowingFact) November 12, 2012
It’s actually, as Simon Ricketts points out, a false-colour composite image of India, made up of images taken over the course of a decade. As the picture caption explains:
Satellite data from 2003 is coloured red, 1998 is coloured green and 1992 is blue. The three data sets are composited to form the image. Nighttime lights on the map that are white are lights that were present throughout the entire period. Areas that are marked by red have only appeared in 2003. Areas coloured green and blue were only present in 1998 and 1992 respectively but are no longer visible. This image was created by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, USA.
It should be noted that not only does this have the benefit of being true, it also makes the image much more awesome than something that just says “India does pretty colours sometimes”.
It’s also worth pointing out that the tweet above has over 14,000 retweets and 4,500+ favourites, and hasn’t had a follow-up correction. As a general rule, if you see a Twitter account that’s called something like “Mindblowing Facts”, it’s probably fairly safe to mentally substitute the words “Deluge of Bollocks” in place of the name.
No.
Amazing picture of hurricane #Sandy decending in New York twitter.com/J7mster/statusâ¦
â JAMSTER(@J7mster) October 29, 2012
Hurricane Sandy approaching New York. twitter.com/efitz6/status/â¦
â Eamonn Fitzmaurice (@efitz6) October 29, 2012
It’s actually a picture from 2011, of a thunderstorm over Manhattan during a tornado alert (which turned out to be uneventful in the end, although the US and other countries were struck with an unusually high number of tornados that year). The original source appears to be this Wall Street Journal article, and the picture was taken through a tinted window by a finance professional called Charles Menjivar (from his workplace, most likely - his current employers are situated pretty much where this picture looks to be taken from).
It is traditional, when the US is menaced by a weather event, for people to tweet pictures of things that aren’t it. Generally they’re pictures of supercell thunderstorms, because they look way cool and a lot more threatening than actual hurricanes, which mostly just look sort of grey and wet and blurry unless you’re looking at them from above. Here are some of the more usual supercell picture suspects, which have previously been claimed to be hurricanes Isaac, Irene and (from the pre-Twitter days) Isabel, but weren’t. Keep a weather eye out for them.
UPDATE: Oh look, another one:
Eery pic as Sandy moves closer RT @sparky4886: Brooklyn Bridge #HurricaneSandy twitter.com/maxzchua/statuâ¦
â Sarah Simmons (@SimmonsFox5) October 29, 2012
That, as Elliot Bentley points out, is actually a stock picture of the George Washington Bridge from 2009.
UPDATE UPDATE: Hey, you know who might want to stop tweeting pictures of “Sandy” without checking them? BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski (who’s normally a bit more reliable than this):
RT @sirgutz: So it begins..pic of NYC right now!! Here we go Sandy. twitter.com/efitz6/status/â¦
â Andrew Kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) October 29, 2012
That second one is so fake (not just misattributed, it’s actually a Photoshopped picture of - naturally - a supercell thunderstorm) that it’s even on Snopes. (In his defence, he has corrected the latter one.)
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: Another one getting retweeted all over the place (and even written up by The Washington Post, although they’ve since killed the link) is this one of soldiers standing guard over the Tomb of the Unkowns even as Sandy rages around them:
Amazing soldiers standing at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier during hurricane Sandy. twitter.com/OMGFacts/statuâ¦
â OMG Facts (@OMGFacts) October 29, 2012
It’s also not true - the picture is from September, as the 3rd US Infantry Regiment (aka The Old Guard), the regiment that keeps watch over the Tomb, themselves tweeted:
@washingtonpost We truly appreciate the support.However, this photo was taken in Sept. This is #Sandygoo.gl/OC5lz
â The Old Guard (@The_Old_Guard) October 29, 2012
The general claim, at least, has truth to it: the Old Guard are still maintaining their vigil at the Tomb, as the pictures they posted on Facebook show. (Thanks to Tom Mason for the tip.)
UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: LOLZ
The Statue of Liberty right now - twitter.com/Lauren_LaPoint⦠| #sandy
â Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) October 29, 2012
(That’s from the well-known cinéma vérité documentary The Day After Tomorrow, in case you hadn’t spotted it. Here’s what it actually looks like at the Statue of Liberty right now. It’s… a bit grey and blurry. And very noisy.)
UPDATE ^ 5: Special congratulations to BuzzFeed, who in their post debunking misattributed pictures that aren’t Sandy manage to misattribute the very first picture:
At this point, regular readers may already be saying “hey, that looks an awful lot like a supercell thunderstorm!” Yep. Once again, Snopes is already there.
UPDATE ^ 6: Ace work from Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic, who’s doing the same thing but with the excellent idea of putting big FAKE/REAL graphics on the images so people can spread them on social media without worrying they’ll get taken out of context. Canny.
UPDATE ^ 7: SHARKS! There’s a bunch of pictures doing the rounds of sharks supposedly swimming around flooded streets. This one, we’re still unsure about (Alexis Madrigal is trying to track down the supposed photographer). It’s reportedly from Brigantine, New Jersey - if anybody recognises the street, holla:
But this one:
Is totally a fake. First page of image search results for “shark fin”, you get this - which, helpfully, has really distinctive markings:
In case you’re in any doubt, Alexis produced this nice overlay of the two (also available in GIF form in The Atlantic’s article). They’re identical:
While we’re on shark duty, be on the lookout for this one, which did the rounds following Irene, and is also a Photoshop job:
Oh, hey, there’s a surprise, it’s already going round again:
I TOLD Y’ALL! Shark on the highway in New Jersey!!!! @maxthewanted would appreciate this. #HurricaneSandy twitter.com/kdekranis9/staâ¦
â Katina DeKranis (@kdekranis9) October 29, 2012
UPDATE ^ 8: Right, I’m calling it. That first shark pic is a fake. Probably.
Michael J. Faris alerts us to what’s been reported as the original source of the shark picture - this guy’s Facebook page. He gives his location as Brigantine, NJ; he’s also got lots of other pictures of the flooding there. And he has the shark picture.
But he also has the second shark picture - the one we know is definitely a fake. And he keeps insisting it’s real, while his friends in the comments congratulate him on his Photoshop skills. And, in what my finely honed internet detective skills suggest could possibly be the giveaway comment beneath the first shark picture, one of his friends says “That’s the leopard shark from la jolla cove nice try kevO”. So, yeah. Fakety fakety fake.
UPDATE ^ 9: Might go to sleep now. Please keep following Alexis Madrigal’s post over at The Atlantic, which is still being updated. It has now attained epic length, and features a seal.
MORNING: A nice easy sharky one to wake up to:
A new one for you, @istwitwrong twitter.com/Anel_K/status/â¦
â Fabiola(@PHAVZ) October 30, 2012
That’s a pretty well-known Photoshop job that goes back to the flooding of a Toronto’s Union Station on June 1 this year (it subsequently got passed around as “the collapse of the shark tank at a scientific centre in Kuwait”).
Also, someone helpfully seems to have collated lots of fake shark pictures into a single tweet that gathers all the wrongness into one place:
WOW, can’t believe sharks are swimming the streets/yard of NYC/New Jersey. Scaryîî keep yourselves safe guys #Sandy twitter.com/69D_b/status/2â¦
â D彡 (@69D_b) October 30, 2012
DAY 2: Let’s have some pictures that are real, shall we?
@istwitwrong #sandy from Jon Passantino: Wow: Floodwaters inundate Ground Zero construction site in NYC (via AP) twitter.com/passantino/staâ¦
â Aaron S. Kurland (@DrASK) October 30, 2012
That picture of the construction works at Ground Zero flooding is definitely real, and is likely to become one of the iconic images from Sandy - it was taken by John Minchillo, a photographer with the Associated Press. So, shamelessly jacking The Atlantic’s verification style:
@flashboy I’ve seen this pic coming up all over the place yesterday.I say it’s fake.Can you confirm? twitter.com/dancorey714/stâ¦
â Dan Corey (@dancorey714) October 30, 2012
We can’t confirm it 100%, but… this Twitter account seems to be the original source for the image, supposedly of a trampoline entangled in power lines in Milford, Connecticut. However, they then give credit to a different Twitter user, who has a protected account. But a Spokeo search gives an address for someone of that name in Milford, CT, and both Bing and StreetView show images of houses on that street which seem to match the building in that picture (as does the layout of the power lines.) So on balance, we’re happy to call this one real.
This one doesn’t seem to offer much to go on (via Brandon Gressette):
But it’s real - it’s a picture of Casino Pier in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. It was taken by Brian Thompson of NBC New York - here’s a better quality version of it, and here’s another of the same scene from a different angle.
Here is a picture of a man saving a dog. However, the man is not saving the dog from Sandy, as the New Statesman’s Alex Hern (author of this handy guide to basic image verification) points out:
@aljwhite @amolrajan @shazzard Wow, he looks identical to a man who was saving a dog in Fijiâs floods 6 months ago! hamishinauckland.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/fiji-fâ¦
â Alex Haunt (@alexhern) October 30, 2012
The Atlantic traces it back even further, to Tropical Storm Sendong in the Philippines in December 2011: So:
AS BEFORE: If youâve spotted any non-Sandy pictures that are being tweeted (or facebooked, or instagrammed) as Sandy, do give us a shout on @IsTwitWrong (or my regular account @flashboy) and Iâll look at them.
Yes.
Jasmin, who is home-schooled, is worried that same sex marriage laws will lead to ducks taking over the world: twitter.com/leigh_howard/sâ¦
â leigh_howard (@leigh_howard) October 4, 2012
The letter from 14-year-old, homeschooled Jasmin - warning that “if homosexuality spreads… it could threaten the human position on the evolutionary ladder, and say, ducks, could take over the world” - is definitely real, in the sense that it was published in New Zealand’s Northern Outlook newspaper on October 3, 2012 - you can read it online here, although you’ll you need to register (hat-tip to Padraig Reidy).
Not only that, but there’s been quite a bit of follow up in the subsequent letters pages of Northern Outlook. On October 6, several readers wrote in to question Jasmin’s grasp of evolutionary theory and duck sexual behaviour, and suggesting that the fact she was home-schooled may be to blame for this:
On October 10Â (the Northern Outlook publishes twice a week)Â another letter was published, also disagreeing with Jasmin’s position, and making a broader liberal point about tolerance of homsexuality. It was published along with a nice picture of a duck:
On October 13, there was some pushback against those correcting Jasmin - including one letter which states that “there is no scientific proof for evolution” and that “homosexuality is a sin and one of the reasons for Canterbury’s earthquakes”. The other letter, while significantly less entertaining, is more interesting from a verification point of view - it comes from someone who appears to be a relative of Jasmin, and who discusses her homeschooling and how she came to her opinions:
This leads us to the other question about whether the letter is real - it was certainly published, but was the paper taken in by a hoax letter? It’s impossible to say for sure without actually tracking down and speaking to the family - but the non-standard spelling of Jasmin’s name, along with knowing roughly the area she is said to live in and the name of a supposed relative, gives us some indications that she is a real person. For example, the name is mentioned in this PDF from a New Zealand Christian group (as spotted by Anya Palmer). Both Jasmin and her relative appear to have signed this petition against gay marriage in New Zealand. Both give their location on the petition as being in the same area as the letters in the paper. Someone with her relative’s name also appears to run workshops on homeschooling from a Christian perspective, and so on. So, on balance, it seems likely that the letter is entirely genuine.
(Note: we haven’t included Jasmin’s surname or particular details of where in New Zealand she lives in the text of this post, because she’s 14 years old and we don’t really want to contribute to a set of Google results that might follow her around for many years to come. We also haven’t gone any further in attempting to dig up details of the family, because writing a silly letter to a newspaper isn’t a crime, and they should be left in peace, even if they are wrong about ducks and gays.)
No.
How The Sun reported the invention of the World Wide Web. twitter.com/hififidelity/sâ¦
â Nic English (@hififidelity) September 4, 2012
How the Sun reported in the new fangled “Internet” in 1992yfrog.com/mmc1ejsj
â Old Holborn (@Old_Holborn) September 4, 2012
This is an odd one, because the picture above is very obviously a joke - from the byline onwards - but nonetheless does appear to have been passed around Twitter for most of the day as though it was real. Or, at the very least, with a degree of uncertainty.
Partly this is because the most commonly shared version of the picture, above, strips it of its context. Here’s what the full page looks like:
So, it’s clearly not from 1991, as it claims, because it’s very noticeable that the design has been done on a relatively modern computer. (Also, on a pedantic point, while there was a web server running by late 1990, Tim Berners-Lee didn’t publicly announce the World Wide Web project until August 1991, so for the Sun to have front-paged it in May would have been a hell of a scoop…)
Compare it with this real Sun front page from later in 1991, and the difference is pretty obvious, from the overall look and feel to small details (like how the date and price are written, byline style, etc.):
So where does it come from? The answer is that it was actually made by The Sun themselves - it’s from Hold Ye Front Page, their (really rather good) educational site that features mocked-up front pages for historical events (there was also a book). In fact, the Hold Ye Front Page team are on Twitter, and have been cheerfully spending the day retweeting people saying that this picture proves how stupid The Sun are.
It seems unlikely.
Extraordinary figures. Athens pre-sold 1,000 Paralympic Games tickets. Beijing pre-sold 5,000. London has pre-sold 2.3 million tickets.
â Richard Hawkes (@R_Hawkes) August 30, 2012
That claim is from a tweet by Richard Hawkes, the chief executive of disability charity Scope. Mr Hawkes provides no source for his figures, and (so far) hasn’t responded to questions about where he got the numbers from. His tweet has, at the time of writing, been retweeted over 5,000 times.
We can’t find any figures close to the ones he suggests - which, on the face of it, sound deeply implausible. Matthew Somerville dug out some alternative figures that sound much more likely:
Actual Beijing Paralympics ticket presales were 1.19 million as of 1st September 2008 (ref: news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-0⦠). Not, umm, 5,000.
â Matthew Somerville (@dracos) August 31, 2012
The Athens Paralympics sold 450,000 before the Opening Ceremony - en.olympic.cn/news/world/200⦠. We’ve sold loads, sure, yay. But you know, facts.
â Matthew Somerville (@dracos) August 31, 2012
We’ve found other figures roughly in this ballpark - such as this story about Athens Paralympic ticket pre-sales “slumping” that puts the figure at 200,000; this official story from the Beijing organisers boasting of 480,000 sales almost two weeks before the Paralympics began. There’s little doubt that London 2012 is by far the most popular and highly anticipated Paralympics ever, with the 2.5million tickets available (almost a million more than the total available in 2008) almost entirely sold out in advance. That’s brilliant, and fitting for the country where the first ever Paralympics were held. But there’s no need to make up nonsense figures for previous Games to make ourselves look better.
No of COURSE they didn’t.
Apple recently won a $1.05 billion copyright battle against Samsung and Samsung paid the amount by sending 30 trucks full of 5 cents coins.
â What The F*** Facts (@WhatTheFFacts) August 29, 2012
For one thing: as much as the IP wars in the tech industry may have sometimes given this impression, multinational companies generally don’t act quite so much like petulant children as this. For another: the idea that Samsung would pay up just a couple of days after the initial judgement is hilarious. This thing’s getting appealed and appealed and appealed again.
But if you want some more facty responses, here you go. As the US Department of the Treasury helpfully notes, while 21billion nickels would technically be legal tender (unlike in the UK, where there are limits on the amount you can pay with small denomination coins), it’s still the case that Apple would be under no obligation to accept the coins as payment. And furthermore, there’s the issue of practicality. That many coins would weigh a grand total of 5,250,000kg. Split across (as is claimed) 30 trucks, that works out at 175,000kg per truck. Good luck with that; the maximum permitted vehicle weight both on Interstate Highways and in the state of California, where Apple are headquartered, is just under 36,300kg.
Also, it wasn’t a copyright battle, it was a patent battle.
Anyway: it’s been admitted that it’s not true. And as @elliot_bentley points out, it appears to have originated from a website that helpfully puts the words “humour” and “satire” directly above it, which should have been a clue. (Update: Charles Arthur, in his excellent Guardian debunking published at almost exactly the same time as this one, pegs the original source as being this Mexican website.)
Last Tweet Correction: Samsung paid $1.05 billion to Apple by sending 30 trucks full of 5 cents coins is just an internet HOAX.
â What The F*** Facts (@WhatTheFFacts) August 29, 2012
Worth noting: at the time of writing, the tweet with the false claim has over 6,000 retweets. The correction has just over 1,000. Bullshit spreads.
NO.
NO NO NO NO NO AARRGH GOD NO.
Erm? Richard and Judy in rude picture? My whole world is upside down. I’m happier seeing Prince Harry’s arse. bit.ly/NIwkjF
â SimonNRicketts (@SimonNRicketts) August 22, 2012
Don’t click that link. As you value your life or your reason, keep away from that link. (This is roughly how everybody reacted to seeing it.)
Here is a version of the image, but with any elements that might cause distress pixellated:
The image appears to show popular British TV presenting couple Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan semi-naked and performing sexual acts. However, it’s not real.
THANK the lord. The Richard and Judy picture is FAKE. Here is it’s origin. (This is ‘yeuch’ too). bit.ly/SUnekE
â SimonNRicketts (@SimonNRicketts) August 22, 2012
This is the original, non-Richard & Judy version. Don’t click that link either.
Er… do we have to do this one? It’s complicated and messy.
UK government threatened to enter Ecuador’s London embassy to arrest Julian Assange, Ecuador foreign minister says bbc.in/PdH6RE
â BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) August 15, 2012
UK threatening to enter Ecuadorian embassy and arrest #Assange. Your support needed at 3 Hans Crescent, London SW1 #Wikileaks #occupy #ows
â Occupy London (@OccupyLondon) August 15, 2012
Time to remind ALL media that there AREN’T ANY CHARGES against #Assange yet UK police wants to raid AN EMBASSY in order to arrest him.
â Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) August 15, 2012
There’s really no way to answer this definitively at the moment. What’s known: the Ecuadorean foreign minister, Ricardo Patino, claimed that such a threat had been made. This is apparently based on a diplomatic letter from the British embassy in Quito, which is (reportedly) this one here. Here is an (unverified) English translation of the letter. The Foreign Office says it was merely intended to keep the Ecuadoreans informed. Is that a threat? It’s certainly not an overt threat of planned or imminent action - the tone of the letter is stern but broadly aimed at making conciliatory gestures; it merely notes that the UK government believes it would have the legal right to enter the embassy premises to conduct an arrest should all other diplomatic efforts fail. But then, when in diplomatic language is an overt threat ever made? Ultimately, it’s a matter of interpretation, in which most people’s interpretations seem to be aligning with their previously held opinions of the Assange case, with sound and fury heavily outweighing actual facts.Â
What seems clear is that the main aim of the letter is to dissuade Ecuador from unilaterally announcing a decision on the Assange asylum case before the UK-Ecuadorean diplomatic negotiations have been allowed to run their course - as a Guardian report had suggested they were going to. Speculative interpretations of the facts have included: this being sabre-rattling on the part of the UK; this being sabre-rattling on the part of Ecuador; and this being mutual sabre-rattling to disguise the fact that a deal has already been reached, and that the letter is merely a way of providing Ecuador with cover.
The Ecuadorean foreign minister says that the decision has now been made, and will be announced at 1pm UK time on Thursday.
Police have been seen entering the embassy building tonight (although possibly not the embassy itself, which is only one flat within the building), but for what purpose is unclear. And reports suggest the entry was not forced, as phrases like “storm” and “raid” would suggest. No arrests appear to have been made.
Police source says officers outside “embassies in the news” is routine. But also warns raids are not announced, perhaps as hedge. #Assange
â Ravi Somaiya (@ravisomaiya) August 16, 2012
Police say they are not storming Embassy as Foreign territory & would be 7 days to apply based on clause.Vans leaving #assange #Ecuador
â Pete Maclaine (@petemaclaine) August 16, 2012
Legal blogger Carl Gardner lays out the actual law here - and while the UK does retain such a right under the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987, he is unsure that the apparent UK interpretation of the international law regarding how such a decision can be made is sound. However, as comparable events are rare and the case law is even more limited, such assessments of the legal situation are necessarily speculative. Gardner does additionally suggest that such a step would be a counterproductive move on the part of the UK government, not least because it would likely allow Assange to seek a judicial review, tying the case up in the courts for even longer.
One super-pedantic point: whatever the interpretation of the “threat”, strictly speaking no storming of an embassy would take place, as the legal mechanism for allowing the entry would be to strip the premises of their embassy status. There is no evidence that this process - which in any case would require a week’s notice to be given - has been set in motion.
This is why we normally prefer trying to verify pictures of Spider-Man.
No of course she bloody isn’t. Just like she wasn’t dead the last hundred times she was dead.
Oh, sad. RT @officialskynews: BREAKING NEWSFormer Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has passed away at age of 86 after prolonged illness.
â Meg Currell (@MeggyVC) August 14, 2012
This time, the “news” was tweeted by an account named @OfficialSkyNews, which is not an official Sky News account (and has now been deleted). Her Wikipedia page was also briefly updated to reflect the news, which was not true.
The last time Margaret Thatcher was not dead was May this year, when a French news outlet got taken in by a tweet from an account called @CBruniOfficial, which was not an official account of former French first lady Carla Bruni.Â
We will attempt to update this post every time Margaret Thatcher is not dead. However, in the absence of updates, it is generally safe to assume that the answer to the question “Is Margaret Thatcher dead?” is always “no.”
CAVEAT: At some point, it seems plausible that Margaret Thatcher will in fact be dead. When that time comes, here are some actual real accounts of major news organisations: @BBCBreaking, @reuters, @AP, @AFP, @SkyNewsBreak, @guardian, @thetimes, @nytimes, @washingtonpost, @AJEnglish , @BreakingNews, @BreakingNewsUK and, what the hell, @TMZ. Allowing for the possibility of hacks, falling for hoaxes, and so on, we would recommend waiting for at least three of these to independently report the news of Lady Thatcher’s demise before believing it.
Not really, no.
Still shocked by Newsnight news that Team GB male rowers, even ones that didn’t get to Olympics - got BMWs. Women didn’t. Even with 3 golds.
â Stephanie Flanders (@BBCStephanie) August 11, 2012
Good fact - BMWs went to men who won medals in the #Olympics for GBR but not the women. #Newsnight
â emily bell (@emilybell) August 10, 2012
So all male GB athletes get given a free BMW yet the females, even the ones that won gold don’t? What are we? Back in the 19th century??
â Jodie Normoyle (@JodieNormoyle) August 11, 2012
The claim originated from comments made on Newsnight by gold medal-winning Team GB rower Anna Watkins, specifically about the situation within the rowing team. That statement then got amplified over numerous tweets to the point where BMW were apparently giving all the men free cars and none of the women.Â
BMW gave a statement to the Guardian denying the claim. In short, it makes three main points:
Anna Watkins herself clarified her comments, backing up BMW’s claims.
To be fair to BMW plenty of female athletes got cars, it was just within the rowing team that it ended up wonky
â Anna Watkins (@watkinsteamgb) August 10, 2012
Unfortunate but not deliberate. They have done a great job with the games overall.
â Anna Watkins (@watkinsteamgb) August 10, 2012
It was the dealerships not the BMW HQ who chose the athletes so not a coordinated system. Lots of individual decisions all in favour of boys
â Anna Watkins (@watkinsteamgb) August 10, 2012
So while there did end up being a gender disparity in terms of the support different athletes in the rowing team got, it wasn’t as a result of a policy on BMW’s part - merely a cluster of independent local decisions all going a certain way in a single specific discipline. Frankly, it would be unlikely that any such decentralised system could operate without producing occasional clusters like this. (Of course, it doesn’t rule out the possibility that individual local dealerships could have been acting in a biased way.)
While there is certainly a strong argument to be made that sponsorship funds disproportionately flow towards male sportspeople, it’s not clear that this is good evidence for that case.
No (mostly).Â
This is unreal! First HD panorama of Mars! panoramas.dk/mars/greeley-hâ¦
â Cory Morton (@corymorton) August 8, 2012
That picture certainly is an HD panorama of Mars. But itâs nowhere near being the first, and it wasn’t taken by the Curiosity rover which landed on the planet a few days ago. It was taken by the still-functioning Opportunity rover between December 2011 and May 2012 (you can find the original TIFF, with added data, on NASA’s site). If you look at the home page of the site itâs on, they have HD panoramas from the MER mission (which comprised the twin rovers Opportunity and Spirit) dating back to January 2004. And the first panorama from Mars was actually taken by Viking 1 back in 1976.
Curiosity has sent back a panorama of its location, but it looks like this:
UPDATE: NASA have just released Curiosity’s first colour panorama.
And the picture of âsunrise on Marsâ being attributed to Curiosity is also not actually taken by Curiosity:
No need for photographic competitions this year. NASA has already won with: Sunrise on Mars. #Curiosity #Breathtaking twitter.com/skydavidblevinâ¦
â David Blevins (@skydavidblevins) August 9, 2012
It was taken by the Spirit rover in 2005. And itâs of sunset, not sunrise. It is on Mars, though.
Thereâs no shortage of genuinely stunning images coming out of the Curiosity mission, however (there’s even a GIF!) so not every picture ascribed to Curiosity is necessarily misattributedâ¦
UPDATE: Another Martian picture that’s been doing the rounds, also attributed in many places to Curiosity, is this one:
Earth seen from Mars last Saturday twitter.com/Newstalkfm/staâ¦
â Newstalk 106-108 fm (@Newstalkfm) August 19, 2012
Unlike the others, this isn’t just misattributed to the wrong rover - it’s not a genuine picture from Mars at all. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy has a convincing debunking of the image, which he suggests is most likely a rendering from a piece of astronomy software.
No.
The line was said, but not by Bradley Wiggins, who was merely copied in on the exchange. It was actually written by Colm Quinn:
.@piersmorgan I was disappointed when you didn’t go to jail for insider dealing or phone hacking, but you know, each to his own @bradwiggins
â Colm Quinn (@mrcolmquinn) August 2, 2012
Yes, but also no.
At a London childrenâs hospital, window cleaners dress like this. They are awesome. twitter.com/PhoebeWedding/â¦
â PhoebeMiller Wedding (@PhoebeWedding) July 19, 2012
Those Spider-Men are actually cleaning the windows of the Sheraton hotel in Shanghai. The vagueness of “a London children’s hospital” in the description is a bit of a giveaway - as is the fact that, as far as we can tell, none of the children’s hospitals in London (Great Ormond Street, Evelina Children’s Hospital, Barts and The London Childrenâs Hospital, The Portland Hospital) have windows that look like that…
But one of those hospitals has indeed employed superhero-costumed window cleaners (including one Spider-Man) - the Evelina Children’s Hospital, as can be seen in this article.
(Thanks to Terence Eden for the original tip, and Dan Williams for the information about the Evelina window-cleaners)