Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Ad nausea

    Twitter informs me that it’s 15 years today since I first posted on the service. I don’t post there at all now; I’ve unfollowed everybody and locked my account, and unless there’s a change of ownership and a huge change in culture I don’t anticipate returning.

    It’s sad. For its first decade or so, Twitter was net positive: for all its flaws – and I’ve been reporting on and giving talks about the misinformation and disinformation on the service for many years now – it was an incredible communications platform for everything from breaking news to ridiculous flights of fancy. What Elon Musk has done to it in just one year is as tragic as it was predictable.

    Over the last few days big brands such as Apple, IBM, Sony Pictures, NBC Universal and many more (but not, so far, the BBC) have pulled their advertising from the service in response to Musk endorsing a blatantly antisemitic tweet. It’s a welcome move, but it’s also an overdue one: Musk has been endorsing, amplifying and paying money to the worst bigots on Twitter for a long time now, and these brands were quite happy to have their advertising dollars used to finance that.

    There are two things worth pointing out here. The first is that despite widespread publicity around Twitter’s lurch into bigotry the brands seemed perfectly happy with Twitter as recently as Friday, before a Media Matters investigation highlighted specific examples of the brands’ ads being positioned next to pro-Nazi content and even tweets praising Hitler. And secondly, the brands have not said they’re cancelling their advertising; they’re just pausing it. What we’re seeing here isn’t brands developing a backbone; it’s brands trying to ride out what they hope will be a short-lived PR storm.

  • Money for nothing

    There’s a fascinating article in 404 Media about the shameful shuttering of Jezebel, one of the most important feminist publications online. According to the CEO of parent firm G/O Media, which acquired the site from its previous publisher, “our business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s.”

    The audience here isn’t you or I. It’s advertisers. And those advertisers are worried about “brand safety”, which means in effect there’s no money to pay for anything potentially controversial.

    the advertising industry has singled out the issues the audience cares about most, like reproductive rights, as unsuitable to sell ads against, even though a ton of people want to read about them. This helps explain the precarity of publications like Jezebel, despite it being more vital to its audience than ever.

    Let’s see what sort of content is considered too risky for brand safety, shall we?

    words like “abortion,” “pro-choice,” “pro-life,” “wade,” “gay,” “transgender,” “sexual,” regularly show up on brand safety keyword blocklists, which four different industry experts told 404 Media are extensive, ever growing, and rarely updated.

    The goal, mostly, is to ensure that adverts are not placed next to abusive content – such as bigotry or conspiracy nonsense. But this broad brushstroke blocking means that adverts will not be placed next to legitimate content either, such as magazines for gay and trans people, or information about safe abortion. And it seems rather hypocritical when you see many of the brands who have brand safety divisions continuing to advertise on Twitter next to blatant homophobic, transphobic, racist and anti-semitic abuse and increasingly, illegal content.

    Blocklists are a fairly low-tech tool, and many advertisers are moving away from them to more sophisticated “sentiment analysis”. But that too can have a chilling effect:

    [one ad system giant says] advertisers can choose to block all sorts of potential topics, especially those that may elicit negative emotions as detected by its artificial intelligence: “Exclude content relating to negative news or sentiment around sensitive social issues such as immigration, abortion, euthanasia, vaccines

    As the advertising giant quoted above admits, that exclusion will also apply to:

    educational, informative, and scientific content related to the topic.

    In effect, then, online yahoos effectively get to censor what journalism is and isn’t funded: if it’ll get a bunch of far-right goons, Qanon reality deniers or other vocal minorities outraged, it won’t get funded. And if it won’t get funded, editors aren’t going to commission any more of it.

    This is the fundamental problem with an advertising funded economy. For decades, there was a wall between editorial and advertising, with the latter unable to influence the former. That’s because it was widely understood that the interests of advertisers and the interests of editorial often diverged and could even be in opposition. Now, though, advertising and editorial are linked – and because of this, many publishers are no longer in the business of telling, but of selling.

    The problem with that is by and large, it’s not a problem for right-wing media. The most rabid right-wing publications have generous funders with very deep pockets. It’s the publications on the left, which don’t tend to have billionaires backing them, that have the problem. If advertisers don’t want to be associated with potentially troll-attracting content – content such as information on climate change, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, vaccines and so on – then the only way to pay for it is to put it behind a paywall. And that creates an uneven playing field where the hate speech, misinformation and disinformation is free to read; the accurate stuff is locked away.

    As 404 Media puts it succinctly:

    there’s an entire advertising industry that has fucked the internet, and fucked society. 

    It’s hard to disagree.

  • Trans attacks don’t work

    The results of yesterday’s US elections make something very clear: attacking trans people, which Republicans did with great energy and at even greater expense, doesn’t work – and in fact such relentless demonisation of marginalised people may well motivate people to banish the bigots. This isn’t a huge surprise, because we saw the same in Australia and more recently in English by-elections, where anti-trans culture war bullshit was roundly rejected. But I doubt that it’ll change the planned ratcheting up of anti-trans rhetoric by the UK Conservative government and by their friends in the press in the run-up to the next election.

    As satisfying as it was to see so many bigots rejected yesterday, and as satisfying as it’ll be to see the same happen in the UK next year, that satisfaction doesn’t begin to compensate for the damage these hateful bastards and their useful idiots in the media have done, the lives that they have ruined and the lives that anti-trans policies and rhetoric will continue to ruin. The religious and conservative right have lit fires that will take a long time to extinguish.

     

  • Everyone isn’t everyone

    There’s an accidentally enlightening headline on the BBC report about blatantly obvious crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, who has been convicted of stealing billions of dollars by defrauding would-be crypto millionaires. The headline: “Everyone got duped by Sam Bankman-Fried’s big gamble.”

    But that isn’t true. There were lots of people pointing out that this emperor didn’t have any clothes for a very long time, but mainstream media chose not to listen to them in much the same way that most mainstream media was embarrassingly credulous about NFTs, most of which are now worthless. Long before the authorities moved in it was very clear to anybody with eyes to read or ears to hear that Bankman-Fried was as trustworthy as a three-dollar bill in an industry that’s an absolute paradise for fraudsters.

    Everybody got duped? No, a small section of people got duped because journalists didn’t do their jobs. As John Naughton wrote last year, “so many apparently serious media outfits let him get away with it… Some interviewers confessed apologetically that they knew nothing about the complex businesses he had run and allowed themselves to be bemused by the incomprehensible bullshit he was emitting.” All the signs were there, but supposedly reputable, authoritative news outlets didn’t want to tell that story because “the mainstream media were so invested in the founder-worship that is the curse of the tech industry, not to mention some of those who cover it.”

    All too often, journalists aren’t doing journalism: they’re doing PR. It may be PR for charismatic tech CEOs, or for the think tanks they and their cronies fund, or for more dubious attempts at controlling particular narratives. But it’s still PR. When “everyone” means “everyone who feeds me stories or makes me feel interesting and special”, many more people suffer the consequences.

  • Donating to hate

    The Huffington Post has a new article about another very rich American donating money to fund anti-trans groups. This one is Joseph Edelman, a billionaire hedge funder. He’s not alone: rich men’s money has been funding huge swathes of the anti-trans movement for some years now, and not just in the US and its UK affiliates: there’s a lot of Russian oligarch money in there too, especially in mainland Europe. You might argue that Paul Marshall, a significant funder of right-wing media in the UK including UnHerd and GB News, is part of the same pattern – the super-rich funding outlets that push division and portray the world’s most privileged people as victims of sinister, shadowy “elites”.

  • Acceptable damage

    My friend was humiliated on the Glasgow subway last night.

    My friend is a conventionally attractive thirtysomething cisgender woman with great fashion sense and brightly coloured hair. This, apparently, was enough to convince a carriage full of men that she was transgender. In between breaks to snort cocaine from a shared bag, the men loudly abused her, shouting the t-slur and other transphobic and homophobic abuse.

    She’s as okay as you can be in such circumstances, but it was a horrific experience – and it’s an experience that’s becoming increasingly common in public for anybody who doesn’t fit a very narrow view of acceptable femininity, because transphobia has become the bigotry it’s okay – and often even encouraged – to express. To the anti-trans mob, the abuse of cisgender women is simply acceptable, collateral damage mixed with victim blaming: if cis women don’t want to be abused by howling arseholes on public transport, they should present themselves more demurely.

  • Unethical. Unscientific. Unsafe

    The ever-growing waiting times for adult trans healthcare have effectively privatised medicine for trans adults: good luck waiting 25 years or more for a first appointment if you can’t afford a private GP and a life of private prescriptions; shared care, where a private GP prescribes your medicine and your local GP oversees it, is largely banned (so for example it’s been stopped in my bit of Scotland). And now the NHS in England is turning its attention to teenagers. Its new policies are unethical, unscientific and unsafe, and have effectively banned best practice healthcare for trans teens.

    Healthcare will be withheld – a clear human rights violation – if patients don’t agree to be part of research studies – another human rights violation; patients have the right not to be forced into such studies – and private clinicians who provide the care the NHS denies may be investigated by regulators with the threat of withdrawing their licence to practice medicine. The proposed protocols enshrine dangerous and discredited conversion therapy as a preferred course of action instead of providing evidenced and effective treatment we know to be life-enhancing and in some cases life-saving.

    This article by Susie Green goes into the detail.

    What we’re seeing here is healthcare decisions made not by clinicians but by columnists; not by medical experts but by propagandists.

    Green:

    So where did these protocols come from? Who created them? We don’t know and they aren’t telling us. It seems ridiculous that they would ignore WPATH Standards of Care V8, especially when you consider the rigorous work done to ensure that it is based on extensive literature review and contributions, and scrutiny from over 4,000 clinicians worldwide who specialise in transgender healthcare. But with a government hellbent on damaging trans people as a way to distract from their failings, I don’t think it is difficult to work out that NHSE has become a politically manipulated service. And trans people are the ones who are suffering because of it… [the NHS] doesn’t want to improve trans healthcare for children. They want to stop it.

    These new protocols aren’t medical. They’re political.

  • Training wheels of hate

    I don’t generally comment on modern horrors such as the deaths in Gaza or in US classrooms because I don’t have anything to say beyond heartfelt but trite platitudes. But there’s a detail about the ongoing situation in Maine, where a man recently discharged from a mental hospital has killed nearly 20 people, that’s worth highlighting.

    At the time of writing the mass murderer Robert Card is still on the run, but there’s a growing body of evidence showing what motivated him. And surprise surprise, Twitter is in there – so much so that Elon Musk apparently had Card’s account pulled from the service, presumably because it shows how much time Card spent on Musk’s timelines and on those of other right-wingers. The logs are widely available online and it’s very much a case of Musk Musk Musk Carlson Musk Donald Trump Musk… you get the idea.

    Not only that but one of the paths to his radicalisation appears to be that favourite of the far right, the supposed danger of trans people: among his recent likes on Twitter, Card liked posts from Donald Trump Jr and by Tucker Carlson railing against the supposed dangers of “trans/non-binary mass shooters” and how the trans movement is the “natural enemy” of Christians and “pushing their gender affirming bullshit on our kids”. As Wired puts it, his Twitter profile “was filled with conspiracy theories about trans mass shooters and pro-MAGA content.”

    I’ve written about this before: it’s called stochastic terrorism, a way of inciting violence while keeping your own hands clean. The Donald Trump Jrs, Tucker Carlsons and other sulphurous bastards of the world don’t commit acts of terrorism. But their words are read by and fuel the hatred of people who do. And in a country where severe mental illness and domestic violence convictions are no barrier to assault rifle ownership, that hatred can lead to unspeakable horrors.

    It’s too early to say definitively what caused Card to become a killer, and of course these things are multi-factorial: this particular toxic cocktail appears to include severe mental illness, among other things. But again and again we’re seeing the internet radicalising people to kill, and increasingly that radicalisation includes anti-trans propaganda – because the far right use that as a gateway to further radicalisation, the training wheels of hate.

  • Scared, tired and alone

    Huffington Post:

    The Conservative government has upped its anti-transgender rhetoric recently, leaving people “scared, tired and alone”, charities have told HuffPost UK.

    …It’s not just the prime minister, either. The health secretary Steve Barclay used the Tory conference to announce that he wants to introduce a policy where trans women would be banned from female-only wards. Five other cabinet ministers took aim at the community too.

    We’ve seen this happen in other countries and we are sadly very aware of where it leads. Scared, tired and alone doesn’t begin to describe how I feel right now.

  • “I no longer feel safe”

    Jane Fae writes in Metro about the UK government’s demonisation of trans women:

    “I no longer feel safe as a transgender woman. I no longer feel included.

    …Did I mention I was angry? Well, yes, that. But also scared; fearful for my future in a country that can contemplate this; and – having seen how vicious, how violent the anti-trans backlash has been in some parts of the world – wondering just where this one stops.”