Last week Facebook announced that it had decided to up the ante in its fracas with the Australian government and ban mainstream media news on its platform. The move meant that all Facebook users – not just Australians – would not be able to share or view news on Australian news Pages on Facebook. This move by Facebook was in response to the Australian government introducing a new law that would force Big Tech to pay media companies a fee…
‘Trust’ was the major theme for discussion in the January episode of The Hobson and Holtz Report podcast aka FIR 203 that Shel and I recorded last weekend and published on Monday. It underpinned all other topics we discussed as we started the episode reviewing the key analysis in the Edelman Trust Barometer 2021 – the report concludes that there is a ‘crisis of leadership’ with a growing trust gap and declines in trust worldwide; and without a trusted leadership…
In the first episode in 2021 of our monthly Small Data Forum podcast, Thomas, Sam, and I discussed the big picture of Trump and what’s next for him, Joe Biden and America post-Trump, and in the context of our predictions in episode 42 in December. Those predictions weren’t that shabby, as it turns out. We considered what social media is: platform, publisher, or leech, which provoked some lively and trenchant opinion. We pondered the consequences and outcomes of the Capitol…
The eye-opening scenes of hundreds of people storming the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on Wednesday January 6 – broadcast live and shown on television screens around the world – will have significant effects in the long term on society in general in ways that are hard to immediately imagine or understand. In the US, outrage at what happened that day is growing as greater clarity emerges on those events that many see as encouraged by President Trump. ‘Insurrection’ and…
