social media | Steve Woods

Ambushed by donkeys and a lettuce

14/08/2024 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics, Social Media

Today’s Guardian reports that Britain’s shortest-serving former prime minister, one Mary Elizabeth Truss, stormed off the stage at a book promotion event after being upstaged by a lettuce banner which dropped from the flies.

The banner bore the phrase “I crashed the economy” below a picture of a lettuce.

Truss was at Beccles Hall in Suffolk promoting her memoir, Ten Years to Save The West, once described as “the work of a failed politician whose historical legacy will be the unprecedented shortness of her premiership“, when the incident happened.

Campaign group Led By Donkeys had arranged the stunt and publicised it via its account on the Muskrat’s X-rated social media platform.

And here’s the video footage in all its (ahem) glory.

For once, Truss had no difficulty finding how to get off the stage; this has not always been the case.

In response to the stunt, Truss reportedly remarked:

What happened last night was not funny. Far-left activists disrupted the event, which then had to be stopped for security reasons. This is done to intimidate people and suppress free speech.

I won’t stand for it.

According to The Independent, Conservative political commentator Tim Montgomerie advised: “Liz Truss would be well advised to learn to laugh at herself”.
Cat educates thick rich man

10/08/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

The social media account of Larry the Cat, Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, is no stranger to this blog (posts passim).

Larry has now taken to his keyboard yet again to educate an ignorant, insulting rich man who owns a social media platform to educate the latter on the letter of the law in connection with the recent fascist riots in the Untied Kingdom*.

In recent days Elon Musk, (yes, him! Ed.) has waded into the debate about rioting thugs, claiming the disturbances to be a matter of free speech, not violence and racism against vulnerable people who have sought asylum in the country.

Amongst the many replies to Musk came one from the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, a canny political operator who has so far survived the premierships of six prime ministers – David ‘Call Me Dave’ Cameron, Theresa May, disgraced former alleged party-time PM Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, one Mary Elizabeth Truss and Rishi Sunak.

Although he started out life as a stray, Larry quickly became acclimatised to the political climate in Whitehall, famously being one of those resignations which led to the downfall of Johnson, a man unfit to clean a public lavatory, let alone occupy the highest elected public office in the land (posts passim).

Larry has posted the following response to Musk’s bland and blissfully ignorant exhortation.

Ouch!

* = Mis-spelling is deliberate.
Auntie aids fascist rioters

31/07/2024 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics, Social Media

On Monday an horrific attack took place in Southport at a children’s dance class in which three young girls were deprived of life.

The victims had been attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga class for children aged up to 11. Taylor Swift herself responded as follows to the news.

A seventeen year-old youth was arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder, although his motives remain unclear.

The BBC went to the trouble of reporting the suspect’s ethnicity.

The BBC can report that the teenage suspect, whose parents are from Rwanda, was born in Cardiff and moved to the Southport area in 2013.

It is at this point that questions arise as to why did the BBC point out that although the suspect is a British citizen, he is of African heritage, a fact that was sure to inflame the extreme right.

A vigil was planned near the scene of the attack on Tuesday evening. At about 19.45 hrs, it was followed by violent disorder in which those involved set alight cars, threw bricks at a local mosque, damaged a local convenience store and set wheelie bins on fire. The rioters are believed to have been members of the English Defence League (EDL).

After the riot, questions were asked including the one below by tax campaigner and top-flight accountant Richard Murphy.

Meanwhile in Scotland, The National reports that SNP leader Hamza Yousef has written to the Home Secretary demanding that the EDL be proscribed as a terrorist organisation, as well as posting the following on X/Twitter this morning.

Violence targeting police officers, the public, and mosques, all to drive forward the far-right’s hateful ideology.

Rhetoric is not enough.

We need to take action against the far-right. I have asked the Home Secretary to use her powers to proscribe the English Defence League.
Newspaper gives fascist geography lesson

22/07/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics, Social Media
An interesting mini-drama has played out on social media this morning in the wake of incumbent US president Joe Biden’s decision to step down from the impending campaign in that country’s presidential election.

The dramatis personae are as follows:
- Johannes Huber, a member of the far-right AfD party who serves as a member of the Federal Parliament (MdB); and
- The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), one of Germany’s major newspapers.
In common with the characteristics of the species homo politicus, i.e. approaching each and every subject with an open mouth, Huber took one look at the news of Joe Biden’s decision to step down from the forthcoming US presidential election (called a general election in the USA. Ed.), got straight on to X/Twitter to post the words ‘Biden is not my President!’.

Note the exclamation mark. 😀

This enabled the FAZ to reply sarcastically to the MdB in question ‘Dear Johannes Huber MP, correct, your president is Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Best wishes‘, giving him both a timely geography lesson reminding him not so subtly that he is in fact a German citizen.

Meanwhile in the actual presidential campaign itself, Biden has formally endorsed his vice-president Kamala Harris to be the Democrats’ candidate; and Harris looks like she’s relishing the prospect of putting victim-playing egomaniac and disgraced former president Donald John Trump in his place.

Ouch!

The next few months promise to be interesting times indeed.
Crowdstrike and Microsoft – culprit identified

19/07/2024 Steve WoodsOddities, Politics, Security, Social Media, Tech

The BBC reports that a massive IT outage is causing chaos around the world, affecting airports, railways, broadcasters and untold companies..

Cyber-security firm CrowdStrike Holdings has admitted that the problem was caused by a dodgy update to its software which is allegedly designed to protect Microsoft Windows devices from hacking.

At the same time, Microsoft has said it is taking “mitigation action” to deal with “the lingering impact” of the outage.

Although Crowdstrike has admitted liability, social media had long since decided who was to blame and where.

This is Alan Ferrier on Mastodon, who wins the prize for the best attribution of blame.

The disaster known as Mary Elizabeth Truss was ousted from her comfy job misrepresenting the long-suffering burghers of Norfolk at the 4th July election. She was recently seen at the extreme right-wing Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where the perpetual victim, one Donald John Trump, has been anointed its presidential candidate despite his being a convicted felon 34 times over, confirmed business fraudster, document thief, adjudicated sexual predator, congenital liar, oath breaker and golf cheat.
Auntie prefers football to politics

17/07/2024 Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

Yesterday’s The Jouker column in The National highlights a prime example of a colonial attitude in the media of the Untied Kingdom.

There were two two significant resignations on Tuesday, but as The Jouker points out, football – and English football at that – was prioritised on the BBC News website ahead of a major political development in Caerdydd, capital of England’s oldest colony.

That resignation was of the disgraced First Minister of Cymru, Vaughan Gething, who amongst other things, had refused to step down after, inter alia, losing a vote of confidence and accepting a £200,000 “donation” from a “businessman” convicted of environmental crimes. Gething’s hand was forced by a mass outbreak of ministerial resignations similar to that which ended the premiership of disgraced former alleged party-time prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Although he’d only been First Minister since March, when the BBC did finally send its political editor down the M4/Great Western railway line to Caerdydd, Chris Mason did helpfully point pout that Gething’s term of office was 2.4 times longer than that of another British premier, one Mary Elizabeth Truss, the ultimate free marketeer whose polices were roundly rejected by the, er, market.

The resignation story which took precedence yesterday was that of England football manager Gareth Southgate who managed to get his team to two consecutive European Football Championship finals, yet still disappointed the jingoistic English media by failing (yet again) to win a chunk of international silverware like his predecessor in 1966, Alf Ramsey.

Why should football take priority over politics? Critics on social media were not slow to notice the choice of priorities made in London, i.e. that only England matters and Wales is a lesser concern, as has been the case ever since Henry VIII’s 16th century Acts of Union.

There is however precedence for this attitude and it comes from another footballer; and one that is one of Scotland’s greatest football exports, Bill Shankly, who was manager of Liverpool FC from 1959 to 1974, a length of tenure of office which modern football managers can only dream of.

Shankly is famously on record as rating the importance of football as follows:

Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.

The above quote from Shankly can be found here with plenty of others from the sage of Anfield.
Commission sends preliminary findings to X for DSA breach

12/07/2024 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech
Today the EU Commission has informed X – the declining social media platform formerly known as Twitter – of its preliminary view that the company is in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers.

Based on an in-depth investigation that included, inter alia, the analysis of internal company documents, interviews with experts, as well as cooperation with national Digital Services Coordinators, the Commission has issued preliminary findings of non-compliance with the DSA on three grievances:
- First, X designs and operates its interface for the “verified accounts” with the “Blue checkmark” in a way that does not correspond to industry practice and deceives users. Since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a “verified” status, it negatively affects users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with. There is evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the “verified account” to deceive users.
- Second, X does not comply with the required transparency on advertising, as it does not provide a searchable and reliable advertisement repository, but instead put in place design features and access barriers that make the repository unfit for its transparency purpose towards users. In particular, the design does not allow for the required supervision and research into emerging risks brought about by the distribution of advertising online.
- Third, X fails to provide access to its public data to researchers in line with the conditions set out in the DSA. In particular, X prohibits eligible researchers from independently accessing its public data, such as by scraping, as stated in its terms of service. In addition, X’s process to grant eligible researchers access to its application programming interface (API) appears to dissuade researchers from carrying out their research projects or leave them with no other choice than to pay disproportionally high fees.
If the Commission’s preliminary views were to be confirmed, the Commission would adopt a non-compliance decision finding that X is in breach of Articles 25, 39 and 40(12) of the DS, which could entail fines of up to 6% of X’s total worldwide annual turnover and order the provider to take measures to address the breach. A non-compliance decision may also trigger an enhanced supervision period to ensure compliance with the measures the provider intends to take to remedy the breach. The Commission can also impose periodic penalty payments to compel a platform to comply.

Thierry Breton, Commissioner for the Internal Market said:

Back in the day, BlueChecks used to mean trustworthy sources of information. Now with X, our preliminary view is that they deceive users and infringe the DSA. We also consider that X’s ads repository and conditions for data access by researchers are not in line with the DSA transparency requirements. X has now the right of defence — but if our view is confirmed we will impose fines and require significant changes.
The new enemy within

06/07/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher infamously branded the leaders of the 1984–85 miners’ strike “the enemy within”.

In the wake of last weeks’ general election, there is a new enemy within; and one far more dangerous to the country than Arthur Scargill and his NUM colleagues.

There’s now an enemy within the walls of the House of Commons.

Step forward Nigel Farage and his four fellow MPs elected for pretend political party Reform UK, which is actually constituted as a limited liability company with Farage as the person with significant control and financed by perma-tanned “businessman” Richard Tice.

Disgraced former MEP Farage, who once famously had his MEP’s salary docked for misuse of EU funds, has finally become a member of the Westminster parliament at the eighth attempt. Your ‘umble scribe hopes that parliamentary watchdog IPSA keeps a beady eye on the new dishonourable member for Clacton given his past behaviour in Strasbourg and Brussels.

As is usual, social media has been awash the reactions to the general election result, including the following exchange.

No more needs to be said. Farage has been known to harbour extreme right wind views for decades, dating back to his schooldays at reassuringly expensive Dulwich College.
Election special: Tories pretend to be HMRC

27/06/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics, Security, Social Media

There’s only a week to go until the vote for the Untied Kingdom’s general election to end 14 years of Tory misrule will be taking place.

A wipeout of Conservative members of parliament has been/is being widely predicted, which will give the opposition Labour party what is now being erroneously called a supermajority. For the sake of clarity, a supermajority is a otherwise known as a qualified majority. Older readers may recognise that what is being actually being talked of is in fact a phenomenon known as an elective dictatorship, a thumping great parliamentary majority that makes political opposition little more than tokenistic, a subject tackled by Quintin Hogg in his 1976 Richard Dimbleby Lecture.

As is usual, this general election has seen its fair share of bad behaviour, which was first documented by the likes of William Hogarth in the mid-18th century.

Chairing the Member from William Hogarth’s 1755 Humours of an Election series. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The most egregious bad behaviour so far in the current campaign has been the Conservative election betting scandal, which has so far implicated 15 Tory candidates and officials who are being investigated by the Gambling Commission for using inside knowledge to place bets and gain unfair pecuniary advantage.

However, more bad behaviour by the Blue Team was uncovered earlier today by Alan Beattie who writes opinion pieces for the Financial Times, namely impersonation, trying to pass themselves off as a different organisation, in this case HMRC.

Mr Beattie has today posted the following on the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

Mr Beattie’s post contains 2 screenshots, the first of which is from the HMRC section of the government’s website, informing visitors what to look out for in genuine content and/or information from the tax authorities.

The other screenshot shows a letter to small businesses from the Conservative Party and purporting to come from an organisation calling itself Briefing for Business. Anyone who has been in communication with the tax authorities will immediately notice how the letter mimics the fonts, layout and colours used by HMRC. The giveaway is that all party political materials must bear an imprint indicating who is responsible for publishing the material and for whom they’re promoting it.

Your ‘umble scribe is aware that in the past political parties have passed themselves off as their opponents in election materials in an attempt to discredit them, but this is the first time he can remember a party trying to mimic a government department; if you know differently, please post details in the comments below.

And finally…

Don’t forget to vote and never forget that the emphasis on Conservatives is on the first syllable, i.e. con. 😀
X Man: thin skin meets humour

16/06/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media, Tech

The excessively wealthy man-baby commonly known as Elon Musk is a well-known egotist.

However, Musk, who has recently been awarded a massive and unwarranted boost to his already considerable riches by Tesla shareholders, has another asset that is less well-known, namely an excessively thin skin.

Whilst Musk is a deeply unpleasant character who will not hesitate to insult others, once famously calling one of the rescuers of a boys football team trapped in a Thai cave “pedo guy” as he felt slighted by his the person he insulted, Musk can’t handle the mildest of mocking, as the following exchange on Twitter/X shows.

Think before you tweet…

It is often said that with the wealthy the most sensitive part of their anatomy is the bank balance. Be that as it may, the above exchange proves this is not necessarily a default position for all plutocrats. In the case of Musk the ego is clearly his most delicate organ.

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