Catfishing and how to avoid it

I’m on the wrong side of 70. This means there are a lot of things about contemporary New Zealand life and manners that I don’t understand.

For one thing, I don’t know what catfishing is. At least, I didn’t until I looked it up online this morning. It turns out that catfishing is what happens when a person assumes someone else’s identity online and uses it to deceive people. It appears to be one of those terms that have crossed over from [anti]social media to mainstream platforms.

NZME – the company that publishes the New Zealand Herald and provides news to a chain of provincial titles – assumes that I, and all its other readers, know what catfishing is, since it used the term in a news story this morning without explaining the meaning. NZME even used it as the key word in the headline: “Teacher’s catfishing ruse”.

Of course there comes a point when every neologism is absorbed into popular usage and no longer needs any explanation, but I don’t think that time has arrived in this case. “Catfishing” is in the Merriam-Webster and Cambridge dictionaries, but that says nothing about the word’s uptake. Prestidigitation and toponymy are in the dictionaries too, but you don’t hear the words in everyday conversation. If I’m derided as a dinosaur because I’m not familiar with catfishing, I’ll wear it.

My guess is that the reporter who wrote the story is of a generation that’s familiar with Twitter-era jargon and didn’t think any clarification was necessary. This is a safe assumption because there seem to be very few working reporters left over the age of 40. Any trained journalist older than that is likely to be working as a strategic communications adviser in a government department.

Something else I don’t understand, notwithstanding that last fact, is why there’s no longer anyone in the newsroom whose job it is to throw badly written, incomplete or factually erroneous stories back at reporters and demand they fix them.

There used to be such people; they were called sub-editors, or “subs”. But subs were pensioned off years ago in the belief that reporters could check their own stories. How that was supposed to work was never clear, because how can anyone be expected to correct a mistake if they don’t realise they’ve made it in the first place?

In any case, there could be no place in 21^st century newsrooms for cantankerous, old-school subs like the one at the Dominion who once bellowed, in a voice loud enough to be heard in Petone, that he would stand me on the subs’ desk and kick my f***ing arse if I hadn’t learned how to spell “accommodation” by the following day.

If a sub tried that today he or she (there were some pretty tough women on subs’ desks) would be fired for bullying and I’d be on leave with post-traumatic stress disorder (I was 18 at the time). But I’ll tell you what: I never again spelled accommodation with only one “m”.

In the case of the catfishing story, it could also have been pointed out to the reporter that AFL stands for Australian Football League, not Australian Federal League. Many of NZME’s readers would know this and spot the error immediately.

Does it matter? Well, yes, because readers seeing that the reporter got this tiny thing wrong are entitled to wonder what else he might have stuffed up. Credibility is everything.

In fact there’s a bigger problem here, because the news media must now come to terms with the awkward reality that “consumers of content” (to use a vile, dehumanising media term for readers, viewers and listeners) are often far more knowledgeable than most journalists, and snort with derision at the obvious errors and solecisms that confront them every day.

But all this is by way of a preamble to my main topic. The NZME story reported that a female teacher had “catfished” two women colleagues by pretending to be a man, striking up relationships with them on dating platforms and persuading them to send her naked or semi-naked pictures of themselves. She used the photograph of an Aussie Rules football star – hence the reference to the AFL.

The big question here (the one I sat down to write about before being diverted by catfishing) is this: why do so many people get themselves into these humiliating and totally avoidable situations? It seems self-evident that sending compromising pictures of yourself to someone you’ve never met, and can’t be sure even exists, is freighted with risk. 

The answer can only be that it fulfils a need in people who are either narcissistic, exhibitionist or desperately in need of approval – possibly even a combination of all three. Sadly, [anti] social media provides fertile ground for predatory men seeking to exploit the vulnerable.

I started out by saying there are things about contemporary New Zealand life and manners that I don’t understand. This is one of them. The astonishing thing is that people continue to share intimate photos despite knowing the downsides (after all, countless cases have been reported), and then seem surprised as well as traumatised by the outcome.

This morning we also read about a woman, identified only as “Hazel”, who allowed her former partner to film them having sex together. After the relationship had broken up, the spiteful ex-partner placed the sex video on a global porn website.

It’s hard to imagine a more despicable or vindictive act – but in this case it has potentially far-reaching public consequences, because a District Court judge has overruled ACC’s decision to reject the woman’s claim for compensation. That could result in a flood of claims from others who have similarly had their trust betrayed. RNZ suggests they could run into the hundreds.

ACC made its decision on strictly legal grounds. It held that the harm the woman suffered wasn’t recognised under the relevant legislation.

The novel aspect of the claim is that Hazel’s lawyers argued in court – and the judge apparently accepted – that her consent to the video was voided when it was put online without her permission. It therefore became a case of sexual abuse.

It’s worth mentioning that she brought a civil case against her ex-partner and was awarded reparation, but it wasn’t paid – at least, not in full. It seems the public, through ACC, is now left carrying the can for her unwise choice of partner.

I can see this case provoking serious anger and resentment from the thousands of people who have struggled in vain, or had to jump through endless hoops, to get ACC cover for what they believed were legitimate claims arising from real physical injuries.

Such people would be justified in taking the view that what happened to Hazel, while deplorable, was not an accident in the customary sense. She agreed to the video and only later retracted her consent in the light of what was subsequently done with it. In other words, she had control – or to use a fashionable term, “agency” – over her actions. To put it another way, and to use a popular euphemism often used to excuse folly, she made a “bad choice”.

I hope ACC appeals the judge’s decision. Compensation for sexual abuse wasn’t on the radar of the scheme’s architects in the 1970s but now accounts for thousands of claims annually, and eligibility will be widened further if the decision stands.

In the meantime, the case should serve as an object lesson to all those women who think it’s a good idea to pander to the voyeurism of dodgy males. But that may be too much to hope for.

Useless information: Since posting this, I've learned that the term "catfish" comes from a reality TV series (so-called) of that name about online dating. The origin of the metaphor is explained on Wikipedia but hardly seems worth repeating here.

On freedom of expression and that $55 million media handout

 

It seems I’ve achieved the great distinction of being deleted from Reddit. A friend emailed me recently to advise that my Spectator Australia article – ‘NewZealand is being transformed, but not in a good way’ – had been uploaded to Reddit several days previously, but had then been taken down. A notice explained: “Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators”. This was followed by what appeared to be a standard explanatory note: “Moderators remove posts from feeds for a variety of reasons, including keeping communities safe, civil and true to their purpose”.

Who are these moderators? They’re not identified. Neither did the weasel-word explanatory note say exactly what the problem was with my article. I’m left to conclude that the anonymous moderators deemed it “unsafe” – but in what way?

We should be very suspicious of the word “safety” when used in this type of context. It has become another cover for the Stalinist authoritarianism that infects public discourse and seeks to silence and marginalise dissenters. “Unsafe” used to apply to situations where one’s health or physical wellbeing was at risk. Generations of New Zealanders grew up being told that it wasn’t safe to play with matches or go too close to the water. Then we started hearing the phrase “cultural safety”, especially in the context of health care. An invention of neo-Marxism, it broadened the definition far beyond its traditional and accepted meaning. Ensuring “cultural safety” became a coded synonym for purging the health system of supposed institutionalised racism. Notions of power and identity were central to this approach. Nursing students who pushed back against the doctrine, insisting that the same standard of care should apply to all patients regardless of ethnicity, paid a price for their defiance. Some readers of this blog may recall the celebrated case of Christchurch Polytech nursing student Anna Penn, who was branded as “culturally unsafe” – a term then new to most of us – by the polytech’s kaumatua in 1991 for daring to challenge the denial of her right as a woman to speak on a marae. Penn failed the “culture and society” component of her course and was subsequently described in a vindictive Polytech report as having demonstrated “such flaws of judgment and behaviour that she would not now be welcome back as a nursing student”. (She later graduated in Brisbane.) Soviet-style suppression of dissent was emerging even then, and today is nowhere more rampant than in the health sector, where the New Zealand Nurses’ Organisation – to take just one example – has been convulsed by bullying race politics.

Since the Penn affair, this highly inventive concept of “safety” has widened even further, to the extent that it’s now invoked if there’s a risk that some fragile soul might feel offended or psychologically damaged by something written or said. But in the case of my Spectator article there’s more to it than that, because talk of “safety” is, of course, a red herring. The only threat my article presented is that it challenged the woke Left’s attempt to control the public conversation.  That’s what we’re really talking about here.

And how interesting that the sanctimonious moderators should mention the need to keep things civil. Let’s examine that for a moment.

My article wasn’t abusive or insulting.  It didn’t use offensive language, it didn’t attack anyone personally and it didn’t seek to incite hatred, violence or ridicule. It merely expressed opinions that the people who control Reddit think should be suppressed.

Yet the same moderators who took down the link to my column, supposedly out of concern for safety and civility, were obviously untroubled by some of the comments that appeared beneath it, which they left on the page. These included one (anonymous, of course – aren’t they all?) that attacked me in terms so coarse that I refuse to dignify my attacker’s words by reproducing them here. Civil? Pffft.

This was my first encounter with Reddit, and it seemed to validate my impression that much of what we inaccurately call “social” media is a seething, toxic snake pit. Reddit, which Wikipedia describes as a social news aggregation and discussion platform, is supposedly the world’s 18^th most visited website. But like many “social” media platforms it seems infested by angry, raging cowards hiding behind puerile pseudonyms.

It probably doesn’t need to be said that I won’t lose any sleep over my article being pulled, and still less from the accompanying comments. When something I’ve written provokes a keyboard warrior into anonymously responding with infantile vituperative, I take that as a moral victory. But the deletion of my article, and the conveniently vague and self-serving justification given by the Reddit moderators, says something about the profound change in the tone and scope of public conversation in New Zealand.

At the dawn of the Internet era, we were encouraged to think of social media platforms as anarchic and liberating. They were supposed to free us from the shackles of the “old” media, where editors (who were routinely caricatured as old, conservative white men) served as gatekeepers controlling the dissemination of news and comment. That promise now stands exposed as fraudulent; a giant con. Many social media platforms have turned out to be far more controlling and authoritarian than the despised “legacy” media they displaced, which were committed to principles of fairness, accuracy and balance.

As Chris Trotter (an old-school socialist, but a courageous champion of free speech) wrote recently, “citizens determined to spread ‘unacceptable’ ideas can no longer rely upon the major social media platforms for their dissemination. Increasingly, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are ‘de-platforming’ individuals and groups (including a former President of the United States!) whose beliefs have been anathematised by the woke”.

There’s an irony here. The young(ish) entrepreneurs who control social media, such as Mark Zuckerberg, are infinitely wealthier, greedier, more powerful and more controlling than the reviled press barons of old, the sole survivor of whom is Rupert Murdoch. They exercise their power in a way that acknowledges no public accountability or responsibility for the consequences of the harm they do. They use their resources to influence public opinion in a far more direct and active way than the “old” media. Yet they seem magically immunised against criticism.

The crucial difference, presumably, is that in age and appearance they are not dissimilar to the commissars of wokeness. They wear jeans and tee-shirts rather than suits and ties, and they give the impression of being anti-establishment (which they are, though not in the sense that the term was originally used a generation ago). Perhaps this makes their ruthless style of capitalism acceptable.  

Unfortunately the malaise isn’t confined to social media. In a recent blog post about Magic Talk’s sacking of John Banks, I wrote that both the range of subjects New Zealanders feel free to discuss, and the language they may use in discussing them, is constantly being narrowed down. Authoritarian wokeness is increasingly crowding out alternative conservative views, even where those views may represent mainstream thinking.

Since Banks’ sacking, of course, Sean Plunket has been added to the list of deplorables – not because of any fresh complaint against him (the one upheld by the Broadcasting Standards Authority in December related to a broadcast last May), but because Magic Talk, panicked by pressure from woke vigilantes and virtue-signalling advertisers, threw him under the bus.

Peter Williams, as the only surviving high-profile conservative host at Magic Talk, must now be feeling rather lonely and exposed – the more so since deputy prime minister Grant Robertson announced he would no longer be making his regular weekly appearance on Williams’ show because he objected to the host’s valid questions about the so-called Great Reset, which Robertson huffily dismissed as a “giant conspiracy theory”.

Jordan Williams of the Free Speech Coalition called the decision petulant and suggested Robertson should harden up. “Maybe Mr Robertson should seek the advice of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who has fronted often extremely hostile interviews with Mike Hosking,” Williams suggested. “Would she enjoy such grillings? Unlikely. But the PM clearly understands that she has a duty to not only address misinformation, but to engage with Kiwis on the other side of the political fence.

“We counter bad ideas with better ideas, and address misinformation with facts. This is why free speech is so central to democracy: bad and false ideas can be freely aired precisely so they can be addressed by more informed speech.”

Amen to all that. But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Robertson’s decision was the timing, which made it look like a calculated attempt to undermine Williams (who, incidentally, is no-one’s idea of a far-Right ranter) when his position already seemed precarious following the defenestration of his fellow hosts. That would be contemptible.

It’s in this worryingly censorious environment that the government recently announced funding of $55 million for the news media. Broadcasting minister Kris Faafoi framed the decision as one driven solely by noble public interest motives, aimed at helping the media through a rough patch. But an alternative view is that virtually all politicians secretly dream of controlling the media, and it’s possible this government has cynically chosen an opportune moment to ensure the industry’s co-operation in achieving it.

Don’t be fooled by seductive talk of the government wanting to subsidise “public interest” journalism. Any journalism that provides citizens with “the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies and their governments”* is, by definition, public interest journalism.  But when used by left-wing academics in journalism schools, the phrase has a much narrower and more ideological meaning. In that context, “public interest journalism” is code for journalism that attacks power structures – that “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable”, to use a definition much favoured by those who see journalism principally as a form of activism, and who believe the only journalism worth supporting is that which has an ideological purpose.

So here, for what it’s worth, is my take on the proposed government media bailout:

■ If I could be confident that the government was truly and wholly committed to a vigorous, balanced, independent, non-partisan media;

■ If I could be confident that media owners were capable of resolutely asserting their independence while simultaneously accepting state funding;

■ If I could be assured that most media bosses weren’t already ideologically aligned with the government on such crucial issues as climate change and hate speech;

■ If I could be confident that media bosses were truly and wholly committed to the principles of editorial balance and freedom of expression;

■ If I could be confident that government politicians could be trusted not to exert influence over where the money went, and what type of journalistic activity it supported;

■ If I could be confident that government appointees charged with deciding how the money should be spent could be trusted not to worry about getting offside with their political masters should they give it to the wrong people;

■ If my confidence in the media were not already gravely undermined by journalists who consistently confuse journalism with activism and advocacy, and who bombard us relentlessly with their own opinions;

■ If I could be confident that some of that $55 million wouldn’t be used to further swamp us with fashionable wokeism;

… then I might think the proposed state bailout of the media was a good thing. But that adds up to a lot of worrying “Ifs”, and somehow I don’t think my misgivings will be easily assuaged.

*The definition comes from The Elements of Journalism (2001), by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. I’ve yet to see a more succinct description of what journalism should be about.

Not everyone wants the news in "real time"

(First published in The Dominion Post, October 31.)

I ALWAYS make a point of reading Mike O’Donnell’s contributions in the Saturday business pages of the Dominion Post. He’s an entertaining columnist who shatters the peculiar conceit that the only people capable of writing well are those who do it for a living.

He’s smart, witty, perceptive and well-informed. You can see why he’s highly regarded in the business and digital technology worlds where he made his name.

Even more appealing is that he seems an unpretentious bloke with an enthusiasm for cars, motorbikes and shooting, which makes his columns all the more readable.  

Until earlier this year, O’Donnell was the chief operating officer for TradeMe. He now heads a new $5.3 million project set up to market New Zealand public sector intellectual property to other governments.

I translate that as meaning, in essence, that his job is to persuade other countries to pay for the right to copy clever ways of doing things that have been pioneered by our public sector – a position for which he seems admirably suited.

Given my respect for him, you can probably understand my reluctance to challenge him, least of all on an issue where he’s regarded as an authority. But I balked at his column last Saturday in which he speculated about the impact of social media on journalism.

O’Donnell suggests that by the time of the next general election, social media may have rendered the evening television news bulletin extinct. His theory seems to be that consumers of news (a ghastly phrase) will no longer be prepared to wait until 6pm for their fix, but will update themselves constantly throughout the day by accessing news on their smartphones and tablets.

People have the capability to do that now. But do the vast number who still get their news from newspapers, TV and radio really have such a voracious appetite for information that in future they will demand it in (to use another ghastly phrase) “real time”?

I somehow doubt it, and I wonder whether people like O’Donnell have been misled by their own enthusiasm for the digital revolution and their missionary desire to promote its assumed benefits.

O’Donnell is certainly correct when he says that digital media – Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere and online news services such as Stuff – have changed the way journalists operate.

Reporters no longer write only to fill the morning paper or the 6 pm bulletin; they’re constantly updating stories or breaking news online. Competition to be first is more intense than ever. But in a sense, it’s artificial competition.

There may be prestige and status to be gained (and bosses to be impressed) by being the first journalist to break a story on Twitter, but does it really matter to anyone besides other journalists, politicians and a minority of tragic news junkies?

Again, I doubt it. Once something has happened, it’s happened – and I suspect that to most people, it doesn’t really matter whether they learn of it instantaneously or wait for tonight’s TV bulletin or tomorrow morning’s Dom Post. 

Not everyone is so obsessed with politics or news in general that they feel compelled to constantly check Twitter, Stuff or Cameron Slater’s latest blog post.

People who are so obsessed – and O’Donnell may or may not be one of them – could easily fall into the trap of assuming that everyone else is, too. But most people I know, and they represent a reasonably wide demographic cross-section, seem to have a healthy grip on life’s priorities and manage perfectly well without getting hung up on Twitter or any other online news outlet.

If they are on Twitter at all (and I know few people who are, or at least who are prepared to admit it), then it takes its place along with all the other things going on their lives. It doesn’t occupy their every waking thought.

And thank God for that, because what sort of world would it be if police officers, bus drivers, construction workers, shop assistants, schoolteachers, forestry workers, nurses, farmers and plumbers constantly interrupted whatever they were doing to look at their digital devices for fear they might have missed something?

Call me a Luddite, but I think it still suits a lot of people to get their news from the 6 pm bulletin, the morning paper or Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report. Trouble is, the noise from those predicting the end of the traditional media often drowns out everyone else.

The baneful influence of social media

(First published in The Dominion Post, August 5.)

EVERYONE agrees this has been the ugliest, most vicious election campaign period in memory.

The previous benchmark was set in 1975, when the Citizens for Rowling campaign foolishly lit Robert Muldoon’s fuse. But the past few weeks have been even more ill-tempered than Muldoon at his most belligerent.

What’s different this time?  Well, there’s Kim Dotcom, for starters. The big German’s motive for entering politics was wholly negative: he wants to get rid of John Key. It may be the first time in New Zealand history that a party has been founded on the basis of a personal grudge.

Dotcom likes to play the amiable prankster, but the “F--- John Key” video was an attempt to legitimise mindless abuse as a political tactic – something not seen here before.

Then of course there was the cleverly timed launch of Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics – a limpet mine attached to the hull of National’s supposedly unsinkable dreadnought.

But underlying all this is a bigger incendiary influence: the role of social media.

Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere have played a large hand in dictating the tone of this election. Cameron Slater’s Whale Oil is just the tip of a large and dirty iceberg.

Much of the political commentary in online forums, both on the Left and Right, is extraordinarily toxic and abusive.

Mercifully, much of it fails to penetrate the mainstream. And to their credit, most politicians try to stay above it.

But among activists on both sides of politics, overheated online forums have created an atmosphere of rage and bigotry that has reshaped political dialogue. You can sense this baneful influence filtering through into media coverage, which is more intense and aggressive than ever before.

How could this happen in a country with a deserved reputation for being civilised, liberal and tolerant?

A couple of factors come to mind. The first is that the Internet enables instantaneous comment. Someone feeling a rush of anger can be on Facebook or Twitter within seconds.

In a previous era, if you wanted to comment on politics, you wrote a letter to the paper. That allowed time for sober reflection – a cooling-down period.  

Then there’s the fact that in online forums, the person you’re attacking is unseen. You’ve probably never met. In such circumstances it’s all too easy to demonise your imagined enemies.

Online, you’re safely distanced from those you’re attacking and feel less compunction about putting the boot in. I’ve succumbed to this depersonalising effect myself and know how easily it can happen.

And politics has become intensely tribal. Each political blog, whether it’s Whale Oil on the Right or The Daily Blog on the Left, has its own tribe. They are united in hatred against the other tribe. There are even factions within tribes that hate each other.

Any member of the Left-wing tribe foolhardy enough to stray into the Right-wing tribe’s territory, or vice-versa, will be eviscerated.

How did we arrive at this point? At the risk of being ridiculed for romanticising the past, I believe it has come about partly as a result of the decline of the traditional news media.

The old-style newspaper was a “broad church”, presenting a wide range of information and comment from which readers were able to form their own conclusions. But the digital revolution has given politically minded people an alternative.

They now tend to gravitate to the online forum that represents their tribe. They show no interest in hearing what the other side thinks, still less considering whether an opposing view might have some merit.

The newspaper was also the traditional forum for political debate via its correspondence columns. Good newspapers took the trouble to ensure a broad spectrum of opinion was published, and still do.  

Crucially, letters were subject to an editing process which filtered out abusive and defamatory comment. And just as important, anonymity was prohibited. The price of being able to comment publically was that you had to identify yourself. No such constraints apply online, where anonymity emboldens cowards.

Champions of the Internet applaud the fact that public comment is no longer controlled by gatekeepers in the mainstream media, and they’re right, up to a point. But the gatekeepers were a civilising influence whose absence from social media we may come to regret.

Twitter shmitter

Today’s Dominion Post has an article (not available online, as far as I can see) by New Zealand pollster Stephen Mills, of UMR Research, who is in the US observing the presidential campaign. His theme is that Twitter has usurped American bloggers in  terms of political impact and significance. He quotes someone called Garance Franke-Ruta (is he sure that's not a made-up name?) from the Atlantic as saying the "conversation" has moved off the blogs on to Twitter, "especially for political insiders".

Problem is, the article doesn't really bear that out. Sure, it cites some superficially impressive numbers: in 2008 the two major party conventions generated 360,000 tweets; this year the figure was nearly 14 million. Mitt Romney's speech peaked at 14,000 tweets a minute, we were breathlessly informed. Michelle Obama's speech doubled that figure and Barack Obama nearly doubled it again, to 54,000. 

Holy habadashery, Batman, there's obviously something deeply significant going on here. But is there?

Mills' piece tends to confirm my suspicion that Twitter proselytes are transfixed by numbers and speed. It's all about being first with a piece of information, regardless of its value.   But elections are still determined by voters, not Twitter users. And even though the US reportedly has 140 million Twitter users (many of them not active), most people have lives to get on with. I can't imagine that more than an infinitesimally small minority feverishly pounce on every fresh morsel from the candidates' speeches.

Political "insiders" can excitedly tweet to their hearts' content, but are they just babbling among themselves? How much of their digital chatter penetrates beyond their own self-absorbed realm to the masses who will choose the next president?

How many people are interested enough to absorb all this information? Years ago, someone came up with a clever analogy to describe the impossibility of keeping up with the flow of information online. They said it was like trying to drink from a firehose. If it was impossible then, how futile must it be now?

Mills quotes someone named Adam Sharp as suggesting Twitter is ushering in an exhilarating new era when people can be "directly engaged in the political process on a one-to-one basis again". But he would say that, because he's a highly paid Twitter executive. Mills' article certainly doesn't bear out his extravagant claim.

More and faster doesn't equate with better, least of all when you're considering politics. Quite apart from anything else, how much intelligent analysis can be packed into 140 characters?

Thankfully Mills allows himself some scepticism, but only towards the end of his piece. "There is certainly a risk," he writes, "that Twitter will lead to ever faster-moving but even more shallow politics." Quite so. He quotes expatriate New Zealander Hamish McKenzie, a reporter for tech blog Pandodaily, as saying that as stories emerge faster and burn out faster, full consideration of their importance is lost. Sam Weston, another Kiwi who works for digital company Huge, says work and thought go into most blogs, whereas Twitter is instant and easy.

It's encouraging to see that not everyone working in digital media has been sucked in by the noisy evangelists overselling its benefits.