Kitten Block – Now for Chrome
Kitten Block for Firefox now has over 1,000 users and has been verified by Mozilla, but I’ve also had dozens of requests for a version that works with the Chrome browser. So, er, I made one. You can...
View ArticleFacebook news: divorced from the facts
Everyone loves a good Facebook news story – or rather, a bad one. And over the past few days, a classic has emerged: Facebook will wreck your marriage. See for example: Facebook cited in 20% of U.S....
View Article“Uninhabitable” Japan? No, unchecked sources
Saw this on the front page of Twitter today. Sounds awful, obviously. The source? This article, from, ahem, ‘Natural News’ (which carries on the same page an advert promising to ‘cure almost cancer...
View ArticleZombie News: ‘Facebook Causes Divorce’ just will not die
Pic: The Telegraph covers the original press release Back in March 2011 I wrote about a sudden flood of news articles claiming that Facebook was being cited in 20% of US divorce cases. After doing a...
View ArticleLies, Damned Lies, and Daily Mail Headlines
Every so often I receive an email from the Press Complaints Commission with a list of its latest adjudications. As a tech journalist it’s not as useful as the ASA’s list*, but it is interesting reading...
View ArticleRun for the hills – the Facebook Divorce Zombie returns
I’ve written on a number of occasions about the fascinating-but-flawed ‘Facebook causes x% of Divorces’ story that pops up in the media every year or so.It first lurched around in 2011, and then...
View ArticleWhen bad news makes money, making up bad news is good business
The other day a message scrolled past in my Twitter feed: Which made me think: if the sea off Fukushima really were boiling, I’m pretty sure we would have heard about it. Except if there were some sort...
View ArticleThe Buzzfeedification of Bullshit
Hey, heard the one about the Ugandan President’s daughter? She’s trending on Twitter, and for the best possible reason – right after her father backed some really hideous homophobic laws, she came out...
View ArticleWhat the Robot Reporter learned from 10,000 news tweets
In January 2015 I put together a simple twitterbot called Robot Reporter. The idea was to see if I could keep track of breaking news by monitoring Twitter for the journalists who use it as a way to...
View ArticleMake America Kittens Again
It’s been a weird week. Back in February, someone* asked if I could do a Trump version of my UKIP blocking plugin. About five small code changes later, I had one in the Chrome store: By request: MAKE...
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