Satire, truth and The Onion

WITHIN HOURS OF the latest mass shooting in America, the same 2014 news article inevitably begins popping up in my social-media troughs. The story is a scant 200 words long, and accompanied by a familiar-looking photo of college-aged mourners standing at a candlelight vigil. I’ve seen the headline so many times, I’ve pretty much committed it to memory, and maybe you have, too: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

That’s from The Onion, of course—just one of the many sneakily corrosive, sadly spot-on pieces the satirical outlet has published in its 20-year online history, which also includes the likes of “Nation Celebrates Full Week Without Deadly Mass Shooting” and “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule.” These are the kind of dark-hearted stories that tend to recirculate after a five-alarm nightmare such as the one that occurred last weekend, when 49 people were shot and killed in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida. And their appeal, not to mention their near-reflexive shareability, is pretty clear: When the world feels like a wet piñata full of shit and spite, it’s comforting to know that there are people who not only share your frustrations, but who can articulate them in a way you can’t.

The line between advertising and content

Inflated beauty, marketed perfection

Violence and nudity: Facebook’s spectacular error?

So now we know. In Facebook’s world, a beheading is OK but an exposed nipple is not. The social media behemoth has decided that a 13-year-old – for that is the permitted minimum age of a Facebook user – can watch a video of a decapitation, but must be protected from the potentially scarring effects of seeing a breastfeeding mother and child briefly pause for breath.

How else to read its latest decision to lift restrictions in place since May and allow users once again to post head-chopping videos, even as it maintains its ban on images of the most mild form of naturally occurring nudity? (“Photos that show a fully exposed breast where the child is not actively engaged in nursing do violate the Facebook terms” is how the site puts it.)

The absurdity of that position shows just how confused even the masters of the online universe become when confronted with the perennial dilemmas of free expression. The simplest, most logically consistent position would be one of absolute free speech, in which Facebook would allow everything within the law. Beheading videos would take their place alongside porn in a great, unfettered free-for-all.

But that’s not what Facebook does. It knows that if it did, it would lose vast chunks of its huge, global customer base: parents especially wouldn’t let their kids go anywhere near it. So it imposes rules and “community standards,” meaning it allows some things and forbids others.

Once it’s made that move, deciding that there are lines that should not be crossed, then Facebook is in the business of deciding where to draw those lines. In this case, it has got the decision spectacularly wrong.

The lunacy of allowing beheadings while banning nursing mothers would be bad enough. But Facebook has tied itself up in further knots of illogic by explaining that such snuff videos are OK if they are posted to “condemn” the killing rather than glorify it. But that distinction is not always so obvious. A bit of lip-service condemnation would not be hard to construct for someone whose motive was altogether less benign. Besides, isn’t it possible to condemn a decapitation without actually showing it? When the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was brutally murdered that way in 2002, news media around the world managed to denounce it without airing the video.

Which brings us to the nub of the matter. Facebook and the other social media giants are reluctant to be thought of as akin to news organisations or even publishers. They want to be seen as something looser and vaguer, a mere arena for others. There are good reasons for that: social media are indeed different.

But there is a less noble motive behind that reluctance too. Publishers are responsible for the content they publish and Facebook and the others don’t want that level of responsibility: for one thing, maintaining standards requires people, which costs money.

But it’s getting harder and harder to maintain the pretence that Facebook doesn’t make editorial judgments, including ones that have serious consequences. It does – and it’s just made a very bad one.

Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian

Are awards worth the hype?

How many people rushed off to see “Argo” after it won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards? Meanwhile it looks like Taylor Swift’s single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” could garner even more downloads now that it’s up for a Grammy. But do nominated artistic works always deserve such fanfare and attention?

In that vein, do awards dictate too often what we decide to view, listen to or read? Or do they lose their appeal once the hype wears down?

Read the discussion on NYT

Defending free speech in the digital age

Freedom of speech is under threat around the world. On one side of this battle are governments and corporations seeking, to various degrees, to set limits on what is acceptable to say and what is not. On the other are ordinary citizens and activists demanding that their voices be heard — voices that, in this new age of smartphones and social media, are harder than ever to silence, even as technology puts new implements of censorship into the hands of autocrats. In many cases, the battle is being joined in societies that are struggling with the powerful repercussions of free expression for the first time.

The Kickstarter Revolution

Time was, in the olden days, that in order to create a video game, or fund a film or album, or make a comic, you needed a generous and deep-pocketed patron, or a corporation behind you which thought there was something – profit, in other words – in it for them. There might have even been a grant from an arts body somewhere. Remember them?

Crowdfunding, where large numbers of people donate small sums of money to a project, has changed that. Kickstarter is not the first online funding site for creative projects – ArtistShare was launched in 2003 to enable musicians to bypass record labels, and was followed by other sites such as IndieGogo – but it has gained the most traction and attention.

Since the site launched in April 2009, more than 2.5 million people have helped to successfully back more than 30,000 creative projects. It has helped fund Oscar-nominated short films and put new products on the market. Earlier this year, the creators of a watch that can wirelessly connect to a smartphone raised more than $10m (£6m) on the site after being turned down by traditional investors. The singer Amanda Palmer raised $1.2m (£745,000) to record her album and tour; this week, the film director David Fincher reached his goal to fund part of an animated film. In October, a role-playing game developer raised nearly $4m (£2.5m) from more than 73,000 backers. The site estimates that around 10% of the films accepted into the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals this year were funded by Kickstarter.

US tightening web privacy rule to shield the young

The moves come at a time when major corporations, app developers and data miners appear to be collecting information about the online activities of millions of young Internet users without their parents’ awareness, children’s advocates say. Some sites and apps have also collected details like children’s photographs or locations of mobile devices; the concern is that the information could be used to identify or locate individual children.

These data-gathering practices are legal. But the development has so alarmed officials at the Federal Trade Commission that the agency is moving to overhaul rules that many experts say have not kept pace with the explosive growth of the Web and innovations like mobile apps. New rules are expected within weeks.

Pursuing soft power, China puts stamp on African news

NAIROBI, Kenya — China’s investment prowess and construction know-how is widely on display in this long-congested African capital. A $200 million ring road is being built and partly financed by Beijing. The international airport is undergoing a $208 million expansion supported by the Chinese, whose loans also paid for a working-class housing complex that residents have nicknamed the Great Wall apartments.

But Beijing’s efforts to win Kenyan affections involve much more than bricks and concrete. The country’s most popular English-language newspapers are flecked with articles by the Chinese state news agency, Xinhua. Television viewers can get their international news from either CCTV, the Chinese broadcasting behemoth, or CNC World, Xinhua’s English-language start-up. On the radio, just a few notches over from Voice of America and the BBC, China Radio International offers Mandarin instruction along with upbeat accounts of Chinese-African cooperation and the global perambulations of Chinese leaders.

The way we read now

THE case against electronic books has been made, and elegantly, by many people, including Nicholson Baker in The New Yorker a few years ago. Mr. Baker called Amazon’s Kindle, in a memorable put-down, “the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of.”