Showing 1 - 6 of 6
Beware the AI bots
Life, James Hein, Published on 04/06/2025
» I recently joined a Facebook group that supposedly represented Kat Timpf, a regular presenter on the Gutfeld! show. I posted a couple of comments and a couple of weeks later, I received a tag in social media purportedly from Dana Perino, a regular on the Fox show The Five. Initially this was a surprise. Why would a famous TV star want to chat with me? After a few chats, it became obvious something was off. The tag name in Messenger was just Dana Perino but the conversation had a few structural errors, not something a former press secretary would make.
YouTube hypocrisy deserves flagging
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/09/2023
» YouTube is behaving badly again. A prominent presenter I occasionally watch, who has millions of subscribers, has been demonetised, for some possible actions 20 years ago. This is not a commentary on potential innocence or guilt, but on YouTube's processes. There are people whose lives are supported by revenue from their presentations on YouTube. This ranges from small fries all the way up to the big fish like the one here. When an individual is demonetised they can lose the ability to support themselves. In this case allegations were made by the media, not the police or authorities, and at the time of writing there have been zero charges made. YouTube is essentially saying, bring us all your viewers so we can hit them with ads and we can make lots of money, but you will be getting nothing for your work.
Who checks the fact checkers?
Life, James Hein, Published on 30/08/2023
» The information landscape has changed a great deal over the past five years. Back in the 1990s, information exchange was mostly between academics and IT people. The majority of the information was accurate and typically scientific or technical in nature. The communication was polite and debates were just that, debates. It was an inclusive community, though in some cases you were required to stick to the topic at hand. Then came the social media platforms.
Reddit trumps Google search
Life, James Hein, Published on 15/02/2023
» Since my last column Twitter has had a number of technical issues, but I also found out that many of the problems I wrote about last time stem from the Content Management Head, not from Elon himself. Musk is putting in some very long days to try and get things sorted out at Twitter so it looks like he is nothing like the old boss in that respect. There remain a lot of traps in the code he inherited that will take time to sort out and may need a complete rewrite to address.
SA follows CCP's lead?
Life, James Hein, Published on 19/08/2020
» The South African government is working to pass the Films and Publications Amendment Bill. Any quick read will give the conclusion that South Africa wants to be like China, i.e. they can censor anything they don't like from animated GIFs to non-commercial bloggers. Basically, anything that can be streamed, written or posted online will be subject to review. The strange thing about this story is that I have yet to see even the tiniest mention of it in the usual media sources. Instead I found it in a Parler post echoed by a blogger I follow there. Covid seems to have overrun all the other world news.
Help kids navigate the social media roller coaster
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/01/2018
» A study has come out recently, confirming what we already know. Children spending more than an hour a day engaged in social media can make them less happy. Take something like Facebook for example. You post something, people read it then they give it a like and sometimes make a comment. Now imagine you are a young impressionable child somewhere under 18. You post something and get 50 likes. Sometime later you post something else and get 65 likes and feel better. Then the third time you only get five likes and some comments about how lame it was. Now you feel worse. Multiply this by a few hundred times and the emotional roller coaster can have someone with a developing emotional platform spiralling into their first depression.