By David Farrell
Quoted
Billion Dollar Lies
Apparently, some of Facebook's lies are going to be costly. Reports emerged this week that the FTC has finally gotten off its ass and is considering muilti-billion dollar fines against the Zuckerborgs for their lying about their privacy policies.
As predicted in my book (plug alert) BadMen, the Cambridge Analytica scandal brought these lies to light and gave the world a first glimpse at how irresponsible, dangerous, and incompetent Facebook is.
I have no idea what kind of agreement Facebook will be made to sign with the FTC but I can guarantee you this -- the minute they sign it they will be in violation of it. – Bob Hoffman, The Ad Contrarian
Alleged investor scam entangles Corus, Bell in class action suit
Paid advertising shows plugging investment strategies draw ire from people who lost money to an allegedly fraudulent foreign exchange investment company promoted on Ontario radio stations. – Rosa Marchitelli & Ana Komnenic, CBC News
How my friend Joe Schlesinger ‘scooped the New York Times’ even in retirement
How will Joe Schlesinger be remembered as a journalist by friends and family at his memorial on Saturday in Toronto?
He will be remembered as the finest Canadian journalist of his generation, and one of the world’s best, who made us care about stories that otherwise seemed remote. – Tony Burman, The Star
From Battery Radio to Radiolab, Annie McEwen is a radio star
Annie McEwen, a producer at Radiolab in New York City, discovered radio and audio storytelling during the six years she lived in St. John's. – Heather Barrett, CBC
Streaming and a podcast boom may kill the radio star
Spotify appears to be gunning for talk radio and this begs the question, are traditional radio stations proactive about protecting their business? Many are. But how can radio stations to facilitate on-demand listening? How do they get their head around all the new ways that consumers can find their content - from podcasts to skills on Amazon Alexa?
And crucially, how can they measure their audience across these platforms and report this audience back to advertisers? – Steve Dempsey, Independentonline
Journalism isn’t dying. It’s returning to its roots
What is dying, perhaps, is that flavor of “objective” journalism that purports to record an unbiased account of world events. We take journalistic objectivity to be as natural and immutable as the stars, but it’s a relatively short-lived artifact of 20th-century America. Even now it’s foreign to Europeans—cities such as London cultivate a rowdy passel of partisan scribblers who don’t even pretend there’s an impregnable wall between reportage and opinion. – Antonio Garcia Martinez, Wired
Facebook: A digital gangster destroying democracy
Facebook behaves like a “digital gangster”. It considers itself to be “ahead of and beyond the law”. It “misled” parliament. It gave statements that were “not true”. Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has treated British lawmakers with “contempt”. It has pursued a “deliberate” strategy to deceive parliament.
In terms of how lawmakers across the globe need to think about Silicon Valley, the report is a landmark. The first really comprehensive attempt of a major legislative body to peer into the dark heart of a dark economy of data manipulation and voter influence. – Carole Cadwalladr, The Guardian
