Fake Plastic News

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There's an awful lot of talk about fake news online, a background rumbling that occasionally erupts as indeed it has this week. We have all enjoyed the controversy surrounding the US intelligence dossier that purportedly places the future President of the land of the free and home of the brave in a Moscow hotel room watching gleefully as a number of ladies of dubious reputation perform vengeful lewd acts involving micturating on a bed previously used by the previous President of the LOFTAHOFB.

The fun thing about the story, which is more than likely total bunkum, is how deliciously fun it is. Liberal America would just love to believe it. So would most of us, no?

The trouble is that it's getting very hard indeed to sift the wheat from the chaff. But fake news is nothing new: we've always been rather surrounded by it. Was King Richard III really a vile, drooling hunchback who murdered two little princes? Probably not, but we've been just a tad under 500 years late coming to that conclusion. At the time, the spread of rumour was mostly by word of mouth - Gutenberg had only just invented the printing press and printed his celebrated bible - and so it was word of mouth, together with a wee dose of Shakespearean bile a hundred years later, that was to seal Richard's poor reputation.

Gutenberg's press - and pretty much every innovation in media and communications since - merely accelerated the process.

Richard was just one of a million historic examples of fake news, many of them classic examples of history being written by the victor. Sitting in Dubai, the issue of the Al Qassimi 'pirates' comes to mind - opposed to the invading British, they were quickly labelled brigands and pirates and so, for a good hundred years, the whole area was happily referred to as 'the pirate coast'. My own novels have often played with the idea that my freedom fighter is your terrorist and vice versa.

From Gutenberg to the Internet we see the rapidly evolving role of news media - from the invention of the 'newspaper' through to the era of press barons and the dominance of media by politics and big business. Idealistic journalists have constantly found themselves challenged by repressive forces, from political interference through to commercial censorship, our media has represented a combination of people telling truth to power and power telling lies to people.

We used to depend on those solid journalists and their editors to help us better understand the world around us from an informed viewpoint and we were, up until pretty recently, happy to buy whatever narrative they decided to shape for us. If we suspected any interference behind the scenes, we tended to gloss it over. For our media and governments would never tell us porky pies, would they? Our government, after all, governs in our name, does it not? Represents us? Why, then, would they lie to us?

It's not just governments, of course. Big business loves fake news. Advertising and PR agencies have long placed fake news stories in media. You can spot the weasel words, 'studies say' and 'most folks agree' are just two of many sure-fire signs that studies don't and most folks wouldn't. Palm oil, gun lobbies, Israeli settlers, big pharma selling GMOs to Africa - you name 'em, they've been manipulating news by seeding untruths and obfuscation disguised as surveys, research and expert opinion.

As the Internet has whipped the news cycle into a news cyclone, we have seen the erosion of trust in 'mainstream media' and politics become a dominant force in our society. Last year's two most savage political upsets were arguably driven by public anger and disaffection with politics, following on from the waves of disaffection which washed around the Middle East and made their way to Europe with the riots in Britain and Occupy Wall Street in the US. We've seen growing disaffection with big business, too. That wave of disaffection has moved with blinding speed because of the Great Networks of our age.

In the face of that disaffection, our media has been failing - plummeting revenues and the slow death of print have led to staffing cuts and a growing pressure to keep up with the twin-headed Gorgon of Twitter and Buzzfeed. We need clicks, boys, and we need them fast - realtime if you please.

If you want to see the result of this dual pressure to make old media models perform in the new media age, you only have to wander around the Daily Mail, the world's most popular news website. It's not a terribly edifying experience, especially if you believe (as I do) that we tend to get the media we deserve. The difference between the Mail's mainstream content and the stories in the 'Taboola' tabs is getting frighteningly slim. Real 'news' is starting to mimic fake news.

Making it all worse, alongside these pressures we have the very nature of the Internet. Ubiquitous, always-on, filled with people, animals, trolls and lice and all their spurious motivations and agendas. What would have been irrefutable proof in Richard's day (a letter, say) or Nixon's (a tape, say) is worthless today. We can Photoshop images, edit sounds, manipulate documents and fake testimony.

We can harness the news cycle and network effects to put untrue stuff out there and by the time anyone's got around to saying, 'Wait, what?' it's too late. Site X has run it, sites A-W have picked up from site X in the relentless rush to harvest those early clicks and suddenly the whole Web is full of the Spurious Thing. You can probably correct Site X, but that's about as far as you're going to get in terms of actually slipping a cork in the bottle. By about now you've got yourself a nice little hashtag and you're the talk of the town.

But this all has just democratised demonisation. We've always had fake news. It used to be the preserve of the wealthy, powerful and the victors. Now spotty Herberts in tenement bedrooms can do it. And there are companies out there who are harvesting clicks by the million by intentionally creating alarmist rubbish and pushing it with 'clickbait' headlines. Filtering the truth from the fake these days can be a bewildering game. And most people couldn't be bothered.

Which is, to be honest, a worry...

The Problem With The Problem With Hijab

The sensitive little darlings, The Sun, subsequently deleted this tweet.

You may have seen The Sun's Kelvin MacKenzie protesting that UK Channel 4 TV's coverage of the Nice attack featured a young lady (Fatima Manji) wearing a hijab. I don't recommend you read it, but here it is in case you feel you have to.

As the Nice news broke, I was to be found shouting at the TV, infuriated by mainstream sources crowding each other in the rush to denounce terrorism, ISIS and Islamic terror in general. I was shouting because it seemed to me to be a lone wolf attack and I couldn't believe how fast ISIS came up, conflated with a senseless and barbaric killing with absolutely no reason whatsoever to suspect a link to 'Islamic' motivation of any sort. The Daily Mail led all the next day with ISIS Kills 84, a story that wasn't stood up on a single link to ISIS, a lone 'expert' trotted out to give any reason to draw a link or one - one - fact tying the perpetrator to ISIS or any other radical group.

It's only when ISIS itself claimed responsibility that anyone actually pulled themselves up and questioned the spurious and widespread claim of ISIS' involvement being made in our media.

And so now - belatedly - we start to explore whether this was, in fact, a lone wolf attack by a man who was clearly no practising Muslim. The idiocy of 'quickie radicalisation' was brought into play and, thankfully, quickly extinguished. He's emerging as a wife beating substance abuser with a range of issues that clearly bring his mental state into much starker linkages with relation to his motivations than Islam. But the damage has already been done.

And in the wake of the atrocity and the mischaracterisation of the killer's motives, we have the question of whether it is appropriate for a woman in hijab to cover such news. Because it was a Muslim attacker? Because he attacked in the name of Islam (which, it would appear, is highly unlikely to be his motivation) or because we don't want ladies in hijab on our TV screens?

MacKenzie makes the point: "Would the station have used an Orthodox Jew to cover the Israeli-Palestine conflict?" Which neatly plays into labelling Manji as somehow belonging to 'the other side' responsible for the carnage in this 'conflict' between two opposing forces.

The comments to Roy Greenslade's typically thoughtful piece on MacKenzie's Islamophobic rant show how fractured we have become in the West over the wearing of hijab. I have worked and socialised extensively with women who wear hijab for much of my adult life. As far as I can see, they do so out of choice (not a 'subtle social pressure'; I know many devout Muslim women who have chosen not to wear it and many who wear it as a conscious choice with no pressure to do so, who have previously not done so) and many would point out that, as women, if they chose to wear a Micky Mouse t-shirt, hijab or a yellow polka dot bikini that is their choice and they would very much prefer if men would stop telling them what to wear.

What constantly amazes me is to listen to Western Christians complaining about hijab. It's a Christian tradition, too, you know. Here. Do a Google Image Search for 'Virgin Mary'. Fill yer boots.

Shocking, isn't it? A woman in hijab covering your screen. The mother of the man you hold to be the Son of God, the core of your Trinity.

Quick. Fetch the religious police...

Manaa - Abu Dhabi Names And Shames

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Abu Dhabi Quality and Conformity Council has launched a new portal called 'Manaa' which lists the products it has recalled from the Abu Dhabi market because of safety concerns - over 15,000 items have been taken off the shelves in the last year.

The story ran on national news agency WAM and, therefore, in all the papers.

It's a remarkable move in its own quiet little way - it's unusual to see acceptance of a 'name and shame' strategy around here and this website certainly does that. Each nonconformant product is identified with a photograph and its brand name, product number and batch number. Categorised into product types, the archive of recalled products is searchable and a search through the database quickly reveals a number of surprises.

The first surprise is in the electrical appliances category. There's a huge dominance of Chinese products for a start, sort of what you'd expect, but there are also some major brands featured, including Moulinex and Kenwood. Added to that, a number of locally known brands are prominent, too, with multiple product recalls from Elekta, Geepas, Nikai and Aftron. Nearly every supermarket in the country will sell you Oshtraco socket strips and electrical accessories, and yet they've had recalls too. Who knew?

Some of the reasons for recalling products can seem a bit obtuse. The Aftron AFGSM1800 contact grill (sounds more like a mobile to me!) was withdrawn because "The temperature rise beyond the standard limit" and an Elekta fan withdrawn because "Fan blade is accessible with the test finger which may cut the users fingers when running." Another Elekta fan didn't make the grade because "The temperature rose beyond the standard limit of motor winding by resistance method the and ball pressure test of speed selector insulation did not comply."

I'm sure it didn't...

Perhaps amusingly, one of the recalled brands of socket strip was 'Terminator'.

But the real surprise comes when you dig into the archive beyond the electrical appliances and children's toys categories. Because beyond these, the cupboard is bare. Not a thing. All the other categories are empty, including vehicle tires,vehicle parts, containers and packaging, cigarette fuel, lighter, firework and chemicals and cosmetics. Presumably these have yet to be regulated.

The scheme, albeit young, is a good one and great news for consumers. The Council is a relatively new body with a huge job ahead of it - and, from the website, appears to be implementing a rounded standards, regulation and conformity system for product safety. For instance, it only announced its electrical appliances certification initiative in January this year. So we can presumably look forward to the database being further populated as that work continues.

The Council appears to have a remit to cover Abu Dhabi emirate only rather than being a Federal body - however a chat with Abdalla Muami on Twitter clarifies that ADQCC liaises with Federal bodies on non-conforming products, which would mean, presumably, that products Abu Dhabi finds unsafe are withdrawn from all markets.

However, now you can actually check for yourself before buying stuff thanks to the database!

Hamad? Hamad? Who On Earth Is Hamad?

Image via CrunchBase

Yes, the headline on this post does indeed come to you courtesy The Ministry Of Polite Headlines.

The Emirates Identity Authority, or EIDA, has announced a new campaign to 'enhance interaction with customers'. This will no doubt be a source of some considerable glee to many 'customers' who have lacked in some way 'interaction', although I have to say as the whole process has bedded in over the past six years - yes, it has taken that long and yes, they did think it was all going to take six months - there are plenty of points of interaction already.

However, if they see the need to open up another, who am I to complain? After all, I have complained often enough in the past about one-way communications, wilfully obtuse communications and sheer blindingly, infuriatingly mendacious communications. What better than to be answerable to your customers 24x7 at Twitterspeed?

Gulf News carries the story, courtesy of national news agency WAM but labelled as a 'staff report', in which an EIDA official tells them, apparently, the initiative is "in line with Emirates ID’s keenness to consistently communicate with its customers and interact with them through their favourite channels, especially on smart phones and tablets in an innovative way through a cartoon character derived from the UAE heritage."

Hamad is that cartoon character. He comes, apparently, as part of the Emirates ID strategic plan 2010-2013 that aims to enhance customers' satisfaction. He has his own hashtag, #AskHamad, which at the time of writing consisted of two lonely tweets, both carrying a picture of the cartoon character and reading, "Can you guess why I'm here?"

No, Hamad. I have no idea why you're there.

The clincher for me was the fact that Hamad is only going to be there from 12-2pm every Thursday. That's it. You have a two hour window to use the world's biggest always-on real-time communications channel. That's why there are only two lonely tweets there - they haven't opened Hamad for business yet. You wait until Thursday - this baby's gonna trend! Or perhaps not.

Emirates ID already has a Twitter account, @emiratesID_help. Why it needs a two-hour account with a cartoon of a small boy splashed on it, I really don't know.

Anyway, they must know what they're doing. Gulf News tells us Emirates ID won two international awards in social media management last June (the Golden Award for “Best use of social media measurement” and the Sliver Award for “Best use of Communication Management- Public Sector”, says Gulf News.

I have no idea what a sliver award is, but can only assume it's a very small award.

New Zealand Bacteria Scare. What New Zealand Bacteria Scare?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Whenever the role of journalism in the social age is questioned, you get the snap answer that breaking news on Twitter is all very well, but 'proper' journalism gives us context and analysis. It has long been my contention that this is one of those qualitative arguments that points to the inevitability of disintermediation.

This was certainly the first thing that went through what passes for my mind as I read in Gulf News over the weekend that 'New Zealand Products Safe To Consume'. This headline inevitably means there is an issue of some kind with New Zealand products, but in the name of 'context and analysis' we're certainly not going to be told what the issue is, just that it's not an issue.

If I read a headline in Gulf News 'Big Gnarly Sabre Toothed Banjax Not About To Eat You', for instance, I know not to turn around. I'd rather not have to confront my impending messy end.

The scare in question is actually quite old by today's standards, dating back to May of last year in fact, when a dirty pipe in one of Fonterra's plants contaminated a batch of whey protein concentrate used in 'Nutricia Karicare', an infant formula product, as well as other drinks including sports drinks, protein drinks and other beverages. 90% of New Zealand's dairy produce comes from Fonterra, a massive agro-business which accounts for something like 7% of New Zealand's GDP. Imagine the lobbying power!.

For some reason the contamination didn't come to light until March of this year, finally causing China to announce a ban of certain products in early August of New Zealand dairy products. The Chinese are, understandably, somewhat nervous about contaminated dairy products and import something like 80% of their infant formula from New Zealand. Recall products are known to have been shipped to China, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia.

Fonterra's news release on the 'quality issue' makes interesting reading. Eight Fonterra customers had been affected by the 'issue' which 'surfaced' in March but didn't require any action other than 'intensive testing' over the subsequent months until finally, on Wednesday 31st July, a sample tested positive for Clostridium botulinum.

The recall affects some 38 tonnes of whey protein but would appear to have impacted over 2,000 metric tonnes of nutritional products that use the protein product - Fonterra has been pretty cagey about the identities of its customers - and presumably has been depending on the considerable clout it must have in New Zealand to minimise the coverage of a food contamination scare that begs questions about who knew what and when - and how thousands of tonnes of contaminated products can be put on the market but the identities of the companies producing those products be protected.

It all reads a little like the horse meat scare in Europe - one producer's product can contaminate thousands of tonnes of downstream products. There are other whiffs of sulphur around the story, too - scientists questioning how a 'dirty pipe' could have been involved, the timescale of the testing and recall, why expensive tests for Clostridium, not normally required for whey protein products, were being carried out and so on. Fonterra's head of milk products has subsequently resigned.

In any case, New Zealand Government laboratories have now confirmed that the samples tested were not actually contaminated with botulism causing clostridium botulinum but with the just as worrying-sounding but relatively benign Clostridium sporogenes. So that's all okay, then.

All of which has been brilliantly boiled down by Gulf News to a reassuring blue 'don't panic' - in fact there's no problem to the point you don't even need to know what the problem there isn't is.

Careful What You Tweet For

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News today carries a roundup of recent cases of bloggers and tweeters in trouble around the Gulf and it's an extensive and growing list.

Flagged as being 'with inputs from AFP', 60% of the story is lifted directly from an AFP file, (the rest being made uo of this report from Habib Touma, which is the only bit available online) but we mustn't cavil, must we?

Tweets aren't a joking matter anymore - imagine facing this one in court: "undermining the values and traditions of Bahrain's society towards the King on Twitter". The six Bahraini 'tweeters' who did have just been sentenced a year in prison for 'misusing the right of free expression'.

It's as neat an illustration of the conundrum posed by social media in the Middle East as you're likely to get. Here we all are in possession of these powerful and far-reaching technologies that support widely sharing information and opinion and when we use them we're suddenly very far above the parapet indeed.

All this freedom of expression stuff suffers from the problem that it is, of course, that it's an absolute. You're either free to express or not, surely? But then we also apply 'filters' to that absolute in the West (whilst being all to ready to be scandalised by the hypocrisy of societies that don't allow total freedom of expression) - incitement, hate speech, holocaust denial and a number of other things our society deems to be unacceptable.

We also saw how fragile our freedoms are when British Prime Minister David Cameron, faced with lawless rioting across the country organised via Facebook and Twitter made it clear he would favour 'switching the Internet off'. That's the kind of thing despots do, isn't it?

The trouble is, of course, that government is government the world over - there's that lovely definition of democracy - "Say what you like, do what you're told." which works well as long as when you say what you like it doesn't have the benefit of a platform open to every man and with enormous power to allow messages to be shared and reach audiences far wider than are possible with 'traditional media'. Let's not forget, there are now over double the number of users of Facebook Arabic in the Middle East and North Africa than there are newspapers sold every day (in English, Arabic and French combined) in the region. That's Arabic alone - most users in the region still prefer the English interface, whatever language they are posting in.

It doesn't take insulting a leader or inciting religious hatred to get into trouble with the law on Twitter - you can just break any old law that would have applied in the 'analogue world' - for instance, a lady was fined Dhs 1,000 in Dubai earlier this week for calling an Egyptian gentleman 'stupid'. The law in the UAE does take the issue of personal respect very seriously indeed - it's not something limited to the rulers alone. So, logically, calling someone stupid on Twitter could potentially open you up to a Dhs 1,000 fine.

It's a reminder - whether you're going to put your life on the line for something you believe in or whether you're just sounding off. The law is peering over your shoulder - and those little 140 character blipverts are subject to its full might and weight...

Arab Media Forum Faces New Media Challenges. Shock Horror.

This is in no way a gratuitous plug for the 'book of the blog,' you understand.

This blog, as readers of Fake Plastic Souks - The Glory Years will know, started around The Arab Media Forum 2007. This was mere coincidence, not by any means a result of the forum which I have never attended and likely never will attend. In fact, as the first post attests, we were sitting at home eating Lebanese takeaway.

There seems to be even more intense debate at this year's forum (judging from the reports one sees on Twitter) about the 'role of new media' and all that. It's an interesting debate - some may argue taking place a little late in the day - particularly in this region, where reporting is so very dangerous and the conflicts so very real - and, as all conflicts necessarily are - polarised and messy. Making sense of these things is tough, dangerous and hard - journalism, true journalism, is a thankless and wearying job. But some people are just plagued with that need to delve down to uncover the truth and then get it out there into our hands so we can make more informed judgements about the world around us.

Shame there are all too few of these in the Middle East, but that's the breaks.

The Great Debate, of course, has moved on. It's no longer about whether digital media are relevant, but whether traditional media is relevant. You'd hardly have thought that from the Forum, which includes the session, "Digital Media: Authority Without Responsibility". Apart from a few 'digital heads' the debate at the Forum remains principally analogue and although there are nods to a process of transition, there is no sense that this transition could easily well take the form of disintermediation.

The Forum's first session was, in fact, "Conventional Media vs. New Media" - the program outlines the problem as this:

News industry is remarkably challenged by the emerging “new media” platforms. This synthetic prelim produced unprecedented dilemma for traditional journalism and undoubtedly added more complications.

Quite.

Of course, what the debate lacks is a sense of where humanity's eyeballs are going. Are people consuming as much local media as before? Does it carry as much weight with the public? Is the Arab News media seen as credible compared to online and first hand sources? Where are people going for news these days? Gulf News or the Daily Mail Online?

That research could have underpinned a viable and vibrant debate framed by the scale of the challenge facing print media and the practicses of print media journalism. Events in Syria and even the recent Beirut bombing which I posted about at length here, comparing Twitter to a Lorenzian water wheel, have shown that trying to adapt conventional 'big' media reporting to Twitter and YouTube can have disastrous effects - and have arguably eroded the weight we give to mainstream media. Never has there been more need for careful, considered journalism - and never have we seen so little of just that.

Instead, we have the same old ground being gone over - with a distinct under-representation of the 'new media' everyone is so upset about (although nice to see Maha from Google there). Although it's nice for everyone from the region's media to get together for a chat, I can't help but feel the actual eyeballs have, well, moved on...

Blue Lasers. The UAE's Newest Toy.

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News reports, bothering to give us remarkably little background, on the arrest of a Yemeni man in Sharjah for selling 'blue lasers'. The report is linked for your scanty erudition here. It was Sharjah CID wot made the nick.

Blue lasers are nasty little things. Thanks to quantum advances in laser technology, you can now buy a hand held 1.5 Watt 450nm laser 'pointer' for under Dhs 1,000. They're freely available on the web with sellers such as this one happy to mail you a device.

Most will be aware of the prevalence of red laser pointers in the UAE's cinemas - and there have been numerous reports of dolts pointing red lasers at planes. Well, blue lasers are the Chuck Norris of hand held laser devices - they can actually burn skin, pop balloons, ignite matches and cut plastic. Needless to say, merely a passing flash of one of these babies directly into an unprotected eye could cause permanent retinal damage. In fact the reflected light from a handheld blue laser can cause retinal damage.

They're every schoolboy's dream.

In a number of applications, they're useful things. They're the technology behind Blu-Ray discs - basically, blue lasers operate at a lower waveband than red or green lasers and so can be more tightly focused, allowing manufacturers to read more data in a smaller space. But that also means they can be used to produce more powerful lasers with lower power requirements - in this case actually dangerous devices with no useful application beyond burning things and hooning around. They're based, in case you were wondering, on gallium arsenide diodes.

It would appear from Sharjah CID's action that hand-held blue laser 'pointers' are being effectively banned in the UAE (although I've seen no announcement to that effect - and Gulf News certainly doesn't bother to clarify this). But I would submit that's no bad thing...