I doubt there is any difference between the truth-telling or otherwise tendencies of the populist left and the populist right, save that the right are currently on the march worldwide.

FF43 said:

Nigelb said:

.

Taz said:

No wonder the EU leaders present were triggered by JD Vance.

Runs counter to everything the EU is about.

The vice-president told the summit the world was on the brink of a “new industrial revolution” but said that this would never be realised “if over-regulation deters innovators from taking the risks necessary to advance the ball.”

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/vance-storms-out-of-elysee-speech-as-chinese-vice-premier-praises-un/ar-AA1yNIpN?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=309cdd8004e74bc09a5d49790f56e095&ei=22

US and UK refuse to sign Paris summit declaration on ‘inclusive’ AI
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/11/us-uk-paris-ai-summit-artificial-intelligence-declaration
The US and the UK have refused to sign the Paris AI summit’s declaration on “inclusive and sustainable” artificial intelligence, in a blow to hopes for a concerted approach to developing and regulating the technology.

The two countries did not immediately explain their reasons for not signing a document backed by 61 nations on Tuesday, including China, India, Japan, Australia and Canada.

Confirmation of the snub came soon after the US vice-president, JD Vance, took to the stage at the Grand Palais to criticise Europe’s “excessive regulation” of technology and warn against co-operating with China in a hard-hitting speech.

The communique states that among priorities are “ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, taking into account international frameworks for all” and “making AI sustainable for people and the planet”...

Feels very significant. Not a lot to do with AI I suspect, but essentially a political decision to throw our lot in with America, Trump or no Trump.

If China are signing something saying "open, transparent .." it's not worth the paper it is written on.

Russia disappearing from the internet: cloaking digital presence brings strategic cyberwarfare advantage
https://cybernews.com/security/russia-disappearing-from-the-internet-cyberwarfare/

It looks as if Russia is following China in increasing censorship of its own people, and at the same time isolating itself from the worldwide internet.

.

MattW said:

Stocky said:

MattW said:

Stocky said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

Our latest voting intention poll (9-10 Feb) has Reform UK on their highest figure to date

Reform: 26% (+1 from 2-3 Feb)
Lab: 25% (+1)
Con: 21% (=)
Lib Dem: 14% (=)
Green: 9% (=)
SNP: 3% (=)

https://x.com/yougov/status/1889223282366579187?s=46

What do posters think the highest polling percentage will be for Reform in 2025? I'm going with 37%.

That was in the competition, so you can probably look it up.

I said 28% . So I'm still on target for a victory .

If you were to answer the question afresh would you still say 28%

Good counter.

I'd go a little higher but perhaps only 31%.

When I answered (I don't remember what I answered in the competition) I put, for all parties, what I thought was a reasonable upper/lower bound on polling average and then added/subtracted 6 or 7pp. It's common to have polls coming in at least that far from the smoothed trend - e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2024_United_Kingdom_general_election - outliers up to 10pp away from averages also happen, for the bigger parties at least.

So, if I thought Reform's real limit was ~30, I'd have said 35-36% for the highest poll result.

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Not surprising, but good to see the concrete evidence that the far right is the main disinformation culprit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/11/far-right-mps-fake-news-misinformation-left-study

Isn't this the study @bondegezou did a header on?

To me, it looked very much like circular logic - does left wing 'fact checker' agree with far right post? No? Then it is disinformation.

EDIT: I don't necessarily find the conclusion unbelievable. But I wasn't convinced that the studty counted as 'evidence'

The study attempted to be a bit more rigorous than that.
Unless you're saying the Wikipedia fact checkers are all left wing ?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612241311886#supplementary-materials
..To identify cases of misinformation, we scraped the MBFC and the Wikipedia Fake News list to create a database of 646,058 URLs with an associated factuality classification. MBFC offers the largest dataset covering biased and low factual news sources, and has been widely used to identify misinformation shared on social media (e.g., Baly et al., 2018; Gallotti et al., 2020; Sharma et al., 2020). MBFC describes each media outlet with a level factuality (“very low,” “low,” “medium,” “high,” “very high”), which represents the likelihood that articles from the source contain misleading information or misinformation. The Wikipedia Fake News list focuses specifically on news sources with very low factuality. Combining the database of misinformation links and the shared URLs, we produce a database of the level of factuality of the sources shared by the politicians, which covers 582,148 shared URLs. Using these, we create an indicator to measure the factuality of a politician or party based on the links they have shared. We create this variable by assigning values to each level of factuality (“very low”: 0, “low”: 0.25, “medium”: 0.5, “high”: 0.75, “very high”: 1.0) and calculating the mean value of the party. As we aggregate on the party level, the result is an indicator that captures the factuality of the links shared by a specific party. We refer to this indicator as their factuality score. It should be noted that the factuality score captures not only misinformation that is shared with the direct purpose of misleading but also sharing that is motivated by, for instance, the presence of a relationships between parties and media organizations with a culture of misinformation...

Note also that they weren't selective in what they analysed - they attempted to capture every social media post by every politician.

I'd say it's a not-ridiculous effort at objectivity - and certainly not a simple circular argument.

FFS, Wikipedia is now insanely left wing, even Jimmy Wales and his cofounders admit is is a problem

How can an encyclopaedia be left wing?

Presumably how it edits contentious issues such as Israel-Palestine, Gaza, cross dressers claiming to be women etc etc.

Evidence?

"Presumably - used to say what you think is the likely situation"

Based on what I have seen on some of the edit sections on contentious issues.

I don't use Wiki these days for anything other than reference for Film and TV

Well, I still edit as "Sunil060902" (also tend to upload tons of railway pics to Wikimedia). I don't think I'm particularly left wing!

I used to edit and add actor/actress profiles and shows. Not done it for a long time.

Are railway pics contentious ? Does railway fandom have splits and schisms and arguments like Sci Fi fandom does.

I've been partially banned from the "Rail UK" forum for repeatedly stating that the DLR is NOT a tramway, and OO gauge models are less accurate than H0 gauge. I can't post to the main sub-forums, but I can post to the others.

Your indefatigable will is indomitable Sunil. An inspiration to us all.

DavidL said:

Taz said:

MattW said:

Taz said:

Growth agenda latest.

Surely they just need to "make less profit" as some have said.

"Britain’s biggest retailers have warned that the high street will shed at least 300,000 jobs over the next three years in a blow to the Chancellor’s hopes of reviving local town and city centres.

Retailers including Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Tesco have fired a warning shot over the future of the industry, saying a “perfect storm” of higher costs and red tape meant they expected one in 10 shop floor workers to leave retail by 2028."

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/at-least-300-000-high-street-jobs-to-go-m-s-and-tesco-warn/ar-AA1yNSNd?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=dd65d8164f0c4904b13361523d5fcf18&ei=11

If they shed 300k jobs won't boost productivity, and free up workers to do other things, so Nonny Nonny Nigel can be less frightened of the reduced immigration?

;-)

It won't necessarily improve productivity. Of course stuff like increased minimum wage has led to some improvement of productivity but it does not always follow.

How does cutting head improve productivity when the likes of M&S are closing stores ?

Well, normally the stores that remain open have higher sales per member of staff than those whose stores are closed so sales per employee increase.

I get the theory and I am sure we would like to hope so but that has not exactly been the case on the high street in recent years. It is a highly competitive market already and that should have already driven productivity improvements, and in some cases has, like self scanning tills, scan while you go, ordering your Big Mac on a screen etc etc.

It also means Labour are at risk of not getting the extra money to fund rNHS they are hoping to get.

Gardenwalker said:

Britain’s AI industry is simply owned by the Americans.
So, no, it is not the “third power” of AI.

London is obviously a reservoir of AI talent, which is great, but it looks like Britain has decided to throw its lot in with US industrial interest on this one.

I wait to see more reporting on this, seems thin at the moment.

All powers are subsidiary to America and China in this field. I wish that weren’t so, it would be great if Britain was some dark horse…. But it isn’t

What we are however is a great hive of talent and innovation - from deep mind down (as you say). And quite frankly if you want to pick a side in this war America is the best bet because

1. America is still significantly ahead and has tons of money and remains democratic (albeit fragile)

2. China is even more amoral and nationalistic than Trump’s America and

3. The eu is sadly nowhere

London has a good chance of being one of three or four major AI cities on Earth that decide the future of all. We should seize it

Sam Kerr found not guilty.

That rozzer wasn't credible at all.

DavidL said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Not surprising, but good to see the concrete evidence that the far right is the main disinformation culprit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/11/far-right-mps-fake-news-misinformation-left-study

Isn't this the study @bondegezou did a header on?

To me, it looked very much like circular logic - does left wing 'fact checker' agree with far right post? No? Then it is disinformation.

EDIT: I don't necessarily find the conclusion unbelievable. But I wasn't convinced that the studty counted as 'evidence'

The study attempted to be a bit more rigorous than that.
Unless you're saying the Wikipedia fact checkers are all left wing ?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612241311886#supplementary-materials
..To identify cases of misinformation, we scraped the MBFC and the Wikipedia Fake News list to create a database of 646,058 URLs with an associated factuality classification. MBFC offers the largest dataset covering biased and low factual news sources, and has been widely used to identify misinformation shared on social media (e.g., Baly et al., 2018; Gallotti et al., 2020; Sharma et al., 2020). MBFC describes each media outlet with a level factuality (“very low,” “low,” “medium,” “high,” “very high”), which represents the likelihood that articles from the source contain misleading information or misinformation. The Wikipedia Fake News list focuses specifically on news sources with very low factuality. Combining the database of misinformation links and the shared URLs, we produce a database of the level of factuality of the sources shared by the politicians, which covers 582,148 shared URLs. Using these, we create an indicator to measure the factuality of a politician or party based on the links they have shared. We create this variable by assigning values to each level of factuality (“very low”: 0, “low”: 0.25, “medium”: 0.5, “high”: 0.75, “very high”: 1.0) and calculating the mean value of the party. As we aggregate on the party level, the result is an indicator that captures the factuality of the links shared by a specific party. We refer to this indicator as their factuality score. It should be noted that the factuality score captures not only misinformation that is shared with the direct purpose of misleading but also sharing that is motivated by, for instance, the presence of a relationships between parties and media organizations with a culture of misinformation...

Note also that they weren't selective in what they analysed - they attempted to capture every social media post by every politician.

I'd say it's a not-ridiculous effort at objectivity - and certainly not a simple circular argument.

FFS, Wikipedia is now insanely left wing, even Jimmy Wales and his cofounders admit is is a problem

How can an encyclopaedia be left wing?

Presumably how it edits contentious issues such as Israel-Palestine, Gaza, cross dressers claiming to be women etc etc.

Evidence?

"Presumably - used to say what you think is the likely situation"

Based on what I have seen on some of the edit sections on contentious issues.

I don't use Wiki these days for anything other than reference for Film and TV

Well, I still edit as "Sunil060902" (also tend to upload tons of railway pics to Wikimedia). I don't think I'm particularly left wing!

I used to edit and add actor/actress profiles and shows. Not done it for a long time.

Are railway pics contentious ? Does railway fandom have splits and schisms and arguments like Sci Fi fandom does.

I've been partially banned from the "Rail UK" forum for repeatedly stating that the DLR is NOT a tramway, and OO gauge models are less accurate than H0 gauge. I can't post to the main sub-forums, but I can post to the others.

Your indefatigable will is indomitable Sunil. An inspiration to us all.

Thanks!

The irony, stupidly, is that I still have permissions for the sub-forums for Light Railways and for Rail Modelling!

Gardenwalker said:

Britain’s AI industry is simply owned by the Americans.
So, no, it is not the “third power” of AI.

London is obviously a reservoir of AI talent, which is great, but it looks like Britain has decided to throw its lot in with US industrial interest on this one.

I wait to see more reporting on this, seems thin at the moment.

I don't think anyone disputes that AI in the UK is an outpost of US AI, I think the surprise is that the government seems to have recognised this and backed away from any communique that would jeopardise this relationship that does actually bring tens of billions into the economy and could be worth 10-15% of total GDP within 10 years.

As I said, I'm currently consulting with a Berlin based company that is lock stock moving it's data science, infrastructure and analytics to the UK over the next 18 months because the scope for user data processing wrt to AI is much less limited here and much less likely to be regulated so heavily. I'm sure they're not the only company doing the same. What's interesting about them is that they've also started hiring their marketing team here too starting at VP level with the expectation that the new VP of product will follow too, so in the end what's left in Berlin will be software engineering and operations, both of which face heavy attrition from AI.

Leon said:

bondegezou said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Not surprising, but good to see the concrete evidence that the far right is the main disinformation culprit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/11/far-right-mps-fake-news-misinformation-left-study

Isn't this the study @bondegezou did a header on?

To me, it looked very much like circular logic - does left wing 'fact checker' agree with far right post? No? Then it is disinformation.

EDIT: I don't necessarily find the conclusion unbelievable. But I wasn't convinced that the studty counted as 'evidence'

Why would you assume that the fact checkers are left wing? The one the Guardian story links to (mediabiasfactcheck.com) notes the Guardian' left-centre bias and notes the accuracy of its factual reporting as "mixed". Presumably if these sites were some kind of left wing hatchet job they would give a better rating to one of the internet's leading liberal news sources and do more to hide the Guardian's political bias?
If the very idea of checking for accuracy and bias is seen as left wing I think that in itself speaks volumes.

The Guardian headline is a bit misleading. The Guardian article is clearer. The research article highlights the populist right as being the main purveyors of disinformation. Populist right and far right aren't exactly the same thing.

That the populist right have problems with truth is hardly a surprise. (The Trump administration is making new hires sign up to pledges saying they think Trump won in 2020 and that Jan 6 was an inside job.) I think what is surprising in the study is that other categories of politicians, the populist left or the non-populist right, were not spreading comparable levels of disinformation. The "radical right" appear to have a particular troubled relationship with the truth.

This fits my broader view that the only divide in politics that matters right now is between a truth-denying authoritarian radical right, and everyone else. Traditional Conservative, Christian Democrat, centrist, socialist, green, whoever, we all share a belief in the rule of law. Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, they're on the other side.

lol

You’re STILL going round telling everyone Covid DEFINITELY came from the wet market, which is probably the biggest lie told about the biggest thing in the history of all humanity. And you have the temerity to accuse others of “misinformation”?!

I can never quite work out whether you are really stupid or really deluded, I have decided to compromise on the idea that you are quite stupid, quite deluded, very seriously mendacious, and I pity any students who get you as a prof

You are most definitely stupid or really deluded to believe that it MUST be a lab leak and not a coincidental cause. You have, so far as is evident, zero scientific training and zero understanding of anything relating to the subject. You do not know. You just want to be right, not because you have any knowledge of the subject, but because you have a kind of crazy religious and irrational fervour on any conspiratorial bandwagon that takes your fancy. Of course it could be a lab leak, but anyone with half a rational brain realises there is little evidence, concrete or indicative, to say for certain. It is unlikely that there ever will be.

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Not surprising, but good to see the concrete evidence that the far right is the main disinformation culprit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/11/far-right-mps-fake-news-misinformation-left-study

Isn't this the study @bondegezou did a header on?

To me, it looked very much like circular logic - does left wing 'fact checker' agree with far right post? No? Then it is disinformation.

EDIT: I don't necessarily find the conclusion unbelievable. But I wasn't convinced that the studty counted as 'evidence'

The study attempted to be a bit more rigorous than that.
Unless you're saying the Wikipedia fact checkers are all left wing ?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612241311886#supplementary-materials
..To identify cases of misinformation, we scraped the MBFC and the Wikipedia Fake News list to create a database of 646,058 URLs with an associated factuality classification. MBFC offers the largest dataset covering biased and low factual news sources, and has been widely used to identify misinformation shared on social media (e.g., Baly et al., 2018; Gallotti et al., 2020; Sharma et al., 2020). MBFC describes each media outlet with a level factuality (“very low,” “low,” “medium,” “high,” “very high”), which represents the likelihood that articles from the source contain misleading information or misinformation. The Wikipedia Fake News list focuses specifically on news sources with very low factuality. Combining the database of misinformation links and the shared URLs, we produce a database of the level of factuality of the sources shared by the politicians, which covers 582,148 shared URLs. Using these, we create an indicator to measure the factuality of a politician or party based on the links they have shared. We create this variable by assigning values to each level of factuality (“very low”: 0, “low”: 0.25, “medium”: 0.5, “high”: 0.75, “very high”: 1.0) and calculating the mean value of the party. As we aggregate on the party level, the result is an indicator that captures the factuality of the links shared by a specific party. We refer to this indicator as their factuality score. It should be noted that the factuality score captures not only misinformation that is shared with the direct purpose of misleading but also sharing that is motivated by, for instance, the presence of a relationships between parties and media organizations with a culture of misinformation...

Note also that they weren't selective in what they analysed - they attempted to capture every social media post by every politician.

I'd say it's a not-ridiculous effort at objectivity - and certainly not a simple circular argument.

FFS, Wikipedia is now insanely left wing, even Jimmy Wales and his cofounders admit is is a problem

How can an encyclopaedia be left wing?

Presumably how it edits contentious issues such as Israel-Palestine, Gaza, cross dressers claiming to be women etc etc.

Evidence?

"Presumably - used to say what you think is the likely situation"

Based on what I have seen on some of the edit sections on contentious issues.

I don't use Wiki these days for anything other than reference for Film and TV

Well, I still edit as "Sunil060902" (also tend to upload tons of railway pics to Wikimedia). I don't think I'm particularly left wing!

I used to edit and add actor/actress profiles and shows. Not done it for a long time.

Are railway pics contentious ? Does railway fandom have splits and schisms and arguments like Sci Fi fandom does.

Don't all fandoms have splits and schisms and arguments?

rottenborough said:

Nigelb said:

Gardenwalker said:

NYT is reporting that both Kennedy Jnr and Gabbard are likely to have their nominations confirmed this week after what Republican resistance there was seems to have melted away.

Senate just voted in invoke cloture on Gabbard - 52 GOP senators in favour - which means she's definitely going to be confirmed.

God help us all.

Given He has made Trump his communicator on earth, I would rather someone else comes to help us.

DavidL said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

Russia disappearing from the internet: cloaking digital presence brings strategic cyberwarfare advantage
https://cybernews.com/security/russia-disappearing-from-the-internet-cyberwarfare/

It looks as if Russia is following China in increasing censorship of its own people, and at the same time isolating itself from the worldwide internet.

I'll be very disappointed if they stop coming here on a Saturday morning.

Enjoy them whilst you can.

With the online safety bill we're going to be in a new world for registering on PB which I don't think they'll be able to muster.

Honestly, mostly as they keep on using the same IP address.

It's been a good few days for Sir Keir. The immigration issue being presented as he'd want it with plaudits from the Mail. Everyone agreeing he's played a blinder with AI. Maybe he just had a weird type of inverse honeymoon. The Right could do we another intervention from Elon to motivate them again.

bondegezou said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Not surprising, but good to see the concrete evidence that the far right is the main disinformation culprit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/11/far-right-mps-fake-news-misinformation-left-study

Isn't this the study @bondegezou did a header on?

To me, it looked very much like circular logic - does left wing 'fact checker' agree with far right post? No? Then it is disinformation.

EDIT: I don't necessarily find the conclusion unbelievable. But I wasn't convinced that the studty counted as 'evidence'

The study attempted to be a bit more rigorous than that.
Unless you're saying the Wikipedia fact checkers are all left wing ?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612241311886#supplementary-materials
..To identify cases of misinformation, we scraped the MBFC and the Wikipedia Fake News list to create a database of 646,058 URLs with an associated factuality classification. MBFC offers the largest dataset covering biased and low factual news sources, and has been widely used to identify misinformation shared on social media (e.g., Baly et al., 2018; Gallotti et al., 2020; Sharma et al., 2020). MBFC describes each media outlet with a level factuality (“very low,” “low,” “medium,” “high,” “very high”), which represents the likelihood that articles from the source contain misleading information or misinformation. The Wikipedia Fake News list focuses specifically on news sources with very low factuality. Combining the database of misinformation links and the shared URLs, we produce a database of the level of factuality of the sources shared by the politicians, which covers 582,148 shared URLs. Using these, we create an indicator to measure the factuality of a politician or party based on the links they have shared. We create this variable by assigning values to each level of factuality (“very low”: 0, “low”: 0.25, “medium”: 0.5, “high”: 0.75, “very high”: 1.0) and calculating the mean value of the party. As we aggregate on the party level, the result is an indicator that captures the factuality of the links shared by a specific party. We refer to this indicator as their factuality score. It should be noted that the factuality score captures not only misinformation that is shared with the direct purpose of misleading but also sharing that is motivated by, for instance, the presence of a relationships between parties and media organizations with a culture of misinformation...

Note also that they weren't selective in what they analysed - they attempted to capture every social media post by every politician.

I'd say it's a not-ridiculous effort at objectivity - and certainly not a simple circular argument.

FFS, Wikipedia is now insanely left wing, even Jimmy Wales and his cofounders admit is is a problem

How can an encyclopaedia be left wing?

Presumably how it edits contentious issues such as Israel-Palestine, Gaza, cross dressers claiming to be women etc etc.

Evidence?

"Presumably - used to say what you think is the likely situation"

Based on what I have seen on some of the edit sections on contentious issues.

I don't use Wiki these days for anything other than reference for Film and TV

Well, I still edit as "Sunil060902" (also tend to upload tons of railway pics to Wikimedia). I don't think I'm particularly left wing!

I used to edit and add actor/actress profiles and shows. Not done it for a long time.

Are railway pics contentious ? Does railway fandom have splits and schisms and arguments like Sci Fi fandom does.

Don't all fandoms have splits and schisms and arguments?

Dr Who fandom couldn't exist without it

MattW said:

Carnyx said:

Theuniondivvie said:

MattW said:

Do we have any Zoologists on PB?

I don't think it's a Golden Calf, but I'm not sure what manner of thing this might be in Mar-a-Lago. I'm tempted to go with "All Aboard the Sky Lark", or "All in the Best Possible Test" following Kenny Everett.

Welcome to Trump's Golden Calf covered in Fake $100 Bills.

"In Trump we Trust" - well, loboto-MAGAs may.

https://bsky.app/profile/mattwardman.bsky.social/post/3lhus3i25bc2k

Goat (or GOAT) to my eye.

Old friend of mine spent much time in Africa (E and S). Starting with a plantation childhood in what was then Tanganyika. He had a simple rule. If the tail points up, goat; if down, sheep ...

That's a thought - woolly liberal.

He was indeed a Liberal, as it happens!

Scottish Liberals tended then to come from sheep country ...

viewcode said:

Taz said:

DavidL said:

Nigelb said:

Vance would perhaps benefit from a long session looking in the mirror.
There was a time, fairly recently, when the US was slightly more qualified to voice such a reasonable criticism.

..Vance also referred to the risks of partnering with “authoritarian” regimes, a pointed allusion to China. Referring to exports of CCTV and 5G equipment – key Chinese tech products – by authoritarian governments, he said there was a cost: “Partnering with such regimes, it never pays off in the long term.”

Speaking yards away from the Chinese vice-premier, Zhang Guoqing, Vance added: “Some of us in this room have learned from experience partnering with them means chaining your nation to an authoritarian master that seeks to infiltrate, dig in and seize your information infrastructure. Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Quite like that one. It has a lot of truth in it. What do we get paid for contributing our thoughts to PB again?

Ah.

As someone used to say to people who moaned about Facebook "demand a refund".

I wonder what Vanilla gets from hosting this board ?

Information, Number 6. Vanilla can access your browser and so knows your browser history, favourites and bookmarks. It can also work out your location. Given this information it can construct a profile of @Taz. That profile can then be sold to advertisers, researchers and even the police and govt. In short, it is mining you. And, thinking about it, me too.

Is that so, now? And can one switch it off?

Stark_Dawning said:

It's been a good few days for Sir Keir. The immigration issue being presented as he'd want it with plaudits from the Mail. Everyone agreeing he's played a blinder with AI. Maybe he just had a weird type of inverse honeymoon. The Right could do we another intervention from Elon to motivate them again.

I think he was invented by AI. Someone said to a forerunner of ChatGPT; "Please describe the most boring, bland, grey politician you can, with zero leadership capability and no understanding of anything outside the public sector, and produce a sound effect of his monotonous voice.

AI delivered it's answer and the Labour Party went out and found the nearest approximation they could find to the description.

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Not surprising, but good to see the concrete evidence that the far right is the main disinformation culprit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/11/far-right-mps-fake-news-misinformation-left-study

Isn't this the study @bondegezou did a header on?

To me, it looked very much like circular logic - does left wing 'fact checker' agree with far right post? No? Then it is disinformation.

EDIT: I don't necessarily find the conclusion unbelievable. But I wasn't convinced that the studty counted as 'evidence'

The study attempted to be a bit more rigorous than that.
Unless you're saying the Wikipedia fact checkers are all left wing ?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612241311886#supplementary-materials
..To identify cases of misinformation, we scraped the MBFC and the Wikipedia Fake News list to create a database of 646,058 URLs with an associated factuality classification. MBFC offers the largest dataset covering biased and low factual news sources, and has been widely used to identify misinformation shared on social media (e.g., Baly et al., 2018; Gallotti et al., 2020; Sharma et al., 2020). MBFC describes each media outlet with a level factuality (“very low,” “low,” “medium,” “high,” “very high”), which represents the likelihood that articles from the source contain misleading information or misinformation. The Wikipedia Fake News list focuses specifically on news sources with very low factuality. Combining the database of misinformation links and the shared URLs, we produce a database of the level of factuality of the sources shared by the politicians, which covers 582,148 shared URLs. Using these, we create an indicator to measure the factuality of a politician or party based on the links they have shared. We create this variable by assigning values to each level of factuality (“very low”: 0, “low”: 0.25, “medium”: 0.5, “high”: 0.75, “very high”: 1.0) and calculating the mean value of the party. As we aggregate on the party level, the result is an indicator that captures the factuality of the links shared by a specific party. We refer to this indicator as their factuality score. It should be noted that the factuality score captures not only misinformation that is shared with the direct purpose of misleading but also sharing that is motivated by, for instance, the presence of a relationships between parties and media organizations with a culture of misinformation...

Note also that they weren't selective in what they analysed - they attempted to capture every social media post by every politician.

I'd say it's a not-ridiculous effort at objectivity - and certainly not a simple circular argument.

FFS, Wikipedia is now insanely left wing, even Jimmy Wales and his cofounders admit is is a problem

How can an encyclopaedia be left wing?

Presumably how it edits contentious issues such as Israel-Palestine, Gaza, cross dressers claiming to be women etc etc.

Evidence?

"Presumably - used to say what you think is the likely situation"

Based on what I have seen on some of the edit sections on contentious issues.

I don't use Wiki these days for anything other than reference for Film and TV

Well, I still edit as "Sunil060902" (also tend to upload tons of railway pics to Wikimedia). I don't think I'm particularly left wing!

I used to edit and add actor/actress profiles and shows. Not done it for a long time.

Are railway pics contentious ? Does railway fandom have splits and schisms and arguments like Sci Fi fandom does.

I've been partially banned from the "Rail UK" forum (nothing to do with Wiki) for repeatedly stating that the DLR is NOT a tramway, and OO gauge models are less accurate than H0 gauge. I can't post to the main sub-forums, but I can post to the others.

Brilliant.

I take it they are wrong, of course.

Of course

I think the key word is "repeatedly stating". People don't like reading threads where the same voice keeps interrupting to point out a "technicality". A bit like here somedays.

TheScreamingEagles said:

bondegezou said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Not surprising, but good to see the concrete evidence that the far right is the main disinformation culprit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/11/far-right-mps-fake-news-misinformation-left-study

Isn't this the study @bondegezou did a header on?

To me, it looked very much like circular logic - does left wing 'fact checker' agree with far right post? No? Then it is disinformation.

EDIT: I don't necessarily find the conclusion unbelievable. But I wasn't convinced that the studty counted as 'evidence'

The study attempted to be a bit more rigorous than that.
Unless you're saying the Wikipedia fact checkers are all left wing ?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612241311886#supplementary-materials
..To identify cases of misinformation, we scraped the MBFC and the Wikipedia Fake News list to create a database of 646,058 URLs with an associated factuality classification. MBFC offers the largest dataset covering biased and low factual news sources, and has been widely used to identify misinformation shared on social media (e.g., Baly et al., 2018; Gallotti et al., 2020; Sharma et al., 2020). MBFC describes each media outlet with a level factuality (“very low,” “low,” “medium,” “high,” “very high”), which represents the likelihood that articles from the source contain misleading information or misinformation. The Wikipedia Fake News list focuses specifically on news sources with very low factuality. Combining the database of misinformation links and the shared URLs, we produce a database of the level of factuality of the sources shared by the politicians, which covers 582,148 shared URLs. Using these, we create an indicator to measure the factuality of a politician or party based on the links they have shared. We create this variable by assigning values to each level of factuality (“very low”: 0, “low”: 0.25, “medium”: 0.5, “high”: 0.75, “very high”: 1.0) and calculating the mean value of the party. As we aggregate on the party level, the result is an indicator that captures the factuality of the links shared by a specific party. We refer to this indicator as their factuality score. It should be noted that the factuality score captures not only misinformation that is shared with the direct purpose of misleading but also sharing that is motivated by, for instance, the presence of a relationships between parties and media organizations with a culture of misinformation...

Note also that they weren't selective in what they analysed - they attempted to capture every social media post by every politician.

I'd say it's a not-ridiculous effort at objectivity - and certainly not a simple circular argument.

FFS, Wikipedia is now insanely left wing, even Jimmy Wales and his cofounders admit is is a problem

How can an encyclopaedia be left wing?

Presumably how it edits contentious issues such as Israel-Palestine, Gaza, cross dressers claiming to be women etc etc.

Evidence?

"Presumably - used to say what you think is the likely situation"

Based on what I have seen on some of the edit sections on contentious issues.

I don't use Wiki these days for anything other than reference for Film and TV

Well, I still edit as "Sunil060902" (also tend to upload tons of railway pics to Wikimedia). I don't think I'm particularly left wing!

I used to edit and add actor/actress profiles and shows. Not done it for a long time.

Are railway pics contentious ? Does railway fandom have splits and schisms and arguments like Sci Fi fandom does.

Don't all fandoms have splits and schisms and arguments?

I would put rail fans in the same catergory as Whovians.

Go over to Outpost Gallifrey and praise Chris Chibnall or ask which number Doctor John Hurt is.

Edit or which number(s) Doctor(s) David Tennant is.

God, it that place still going.

I remember when it was Gallifreybase, or is it vice versa, I cannot recall which came first. I have been banned from there multiple times.

There is also the forum of the crankly, middle aged, white men - roobarbs/Zeta Minor. They are also known for being argumentative over nothing.

@RobD's avatar being from a TV show that is popular there.

Nigelb said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Not surprising, but good to see the concrete evidence that the far right is the main disinformation culprit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/11/far-right-mps-fake-news-misinformation-left-study

Isn't this the study @bondegezou did a header on?

To me, it looked very much like circular logic - does left wing 'fact checker' agree with far right post? No? Then it is disinformation.

EDIT: I don't necessarily find the conclusion unbelievable. But I wasn't convinced that the studty counted as 'evidence'

The study attempted to be a bit more rigorous than that.
Unless you're saying the Wikipedia fact checkers are all left wing ?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612241311886#supplementary-materials
..To identify cases of misinformation, we scraped the MBFC and the Wikipedia Fake News list to create a database of 646,058 URLs with an associated factuality classification. MBFC offers the largest dataset covering biased and low factual news sources, and has been widely used to identify misinformation shared on social media (e.g., Baly et al., 2018; Gallotti et al., 2020; Sharma et al., 2020). MBFC describes each media outlet with a level factuality (“very low,” “low,” “medium,” “high,” “very high”), which represents the likelihood that articles from the source contain misleading information or misinformation. The Wikipedia Fake News list focuses specifically on news sources with very low factuality. Combining the database of misinformation links and the shared URLs, we produce a database of the level of factuality of the sources shared by the politicians, which covers 582,148 shared URLs. Using these, we create an indicator to measure the factuality of a politician or party based on the links they have shared. We create this variable by assigning values to each level of factuality (“very low”: 0, “low”: 0.25, “medium”: 0.5, “high”: 0.75, “very high”: 1.0) and calculating the mean value of the party. As we aggregate on the party level, the result is an indicator that captures the factuality of the links shared by a specific party. We refer to this indicator as their factuality score. It should be noted that the factuality score captures not only misinformation that is shared with the direct purpose of misleading but also sharing that is motivated by, for instance, the presence of a relationships between parties and media organizations with a culture of misinformation...

Note also that they weren't selective in what they analysed - they attempted to capture every social media post by every politician.

I'd say it's a not-ridiculous effort at objectivity - and certainly not a simple circular argument.

FFS, Wikipedia is now insanely left wing, even Jimmy Wales and his cofounders admit is is a problem

How can an encyclopaedia be left wing?

Presumably how it edits contentious issues such as Israel-Palestine, Gaza, cross dressers claiming to be women etc etc.

Evidence?

"Presumably - used to say what you think is the likely situation"

Based on what I have seen on some of the edit sections on contentious issues.

I don't use Wiki these days for anything other than reference for Film and TV

Out of curiosity I had a quick read of the 'Gaza' page.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip

No doubt it can be faulted in places, but it seems reasonably factual to me, as opposed to "insanely left wing".

YMMV.

I mainly use it for quick historical data - what happened in 1633: an outline of Paul Dirac's career, etc.
I don't know if it survives the coming AI storm, but for now it's quite reliable, and useful.

The greatest gift Paul Dirac gave to humanity was his surname being anagramised into the greatest Dr Who companion ever, Adric.

I am sure @viewcode would agree.

viewcode said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

bondegezou said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Not surprising, but good to see the concrete evidence that the far right is the main disinformation culprit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/11/far-right-mps-fake-news-misinformation-left-study

Isn't this the study @bondegezou did a header on?

To me, it looked very much like circular logic - does left wing 'fact checker' agree with far right post? No? Then it is disinformation.

EDIT: I don't necessarily find the conclusion unbelievable. But I wasn't convinced that the studty counted as 'evidence'

The study attempted to be a bit more rigorous than that.
Unless you're saying the Wikipedia fact checkers are all left wing ?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612241311886#supplementary-materials
..To identify cases of misinformation, we scraped the MBFC and the Wikipedia Fake News list to create a database of 646,058 URLs with an associated factuality classification. MBFC offers the largest dataset covering biased and low factual news sources, and has been widely used to identify misinformation shared on social media (e.g., Baly et al., 2018; Gallotti et al., 2020; Sharma et al., 2020). MBFC describes each media outlet with a level factuality (“very low,” “low,” “medium,” “high,” “very high”), which represents the likelihood that articles from the source contain misleading information or misinformation. The Wikipedia Fake News list focuses specifically on news sources with very low factuality. Combining the database of misinformation links and the shared URLs, we produce a database of the level of factuality of the sources shared by the politicians, which covers 582,148 shared URLs. Using these, we create an indicator to measure the factuality of a politician or party based on the links they have shared. We create this variable by assigning values to each level of factuality (“very low”: 0, “low”: 0.25, “medium”: 0.5, “high”: 0.75, “very high”: 1.0) and calculating the mean value of the party. As we aggregate on the party level, the result is an indicator that captures the factuality of the links shared by a specific party. We refer to this indicator as their factuality score. It should be noted that the factuality score captures not only misinformation that is shared with the direct purpose of misleading but also sharing that is motivated by, for instance, the presence of a relationships between parties and media organizations with a culture of misinformation...

Note also that they weren't selective in what they analysed - they attempted to capture every social media post by every politician.

I'd say it's a not-ridiculous effort at objectivity - and certainly not a simple circular argument.

FFS, Wikipedia is now insanely left wing, even Jimmy Wales and his cofounders admit is is a problem

How can an encyclopaedia be left wing?

Presumably how it edits contentious issues such as Israel-Palestine, Gaza, cross dressers claiming to be women etc etc.

Evidence?

"Presumably - used to say what you think is the likely situation"

Based on what I have seen on some of the edit sections on contentious issues.

I don't use Wiki these days for anything other than reference for Film and TV

Well, I still edit as "Sunil060902" (also tend to upload tons of railway pics to Wikimedia). I don't think I'm particularly left wing!

I used to edit and add actor/actress profiles and shows. Not done it for a long time.

Are railway pics contentious ? Does railway fandom have splits and schisms and arguments like Sci Fi fandom does.

Don't all fandoms have splits and schisms and arguments?

I would put rail fans in the same catergory as Whovians.

Go over to Outpost Gallifrey and praise Chris Chibnall or ask which number Doctor John Hurt is.

Edit or which number(s) Doctor(s) David Tennant is.

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,War,9,10,11,12,13,14. Apparently Fugitive is before 1. It's best to think of them as categorical data that can be ordered, instead of integers

The Timeless Child came first, surely ?

Taz said:

viewcode said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

bondegezou said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Not surprising, but good to see the concrete evidence that the far right is the main disinformation culprit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/11/far-right-mps-fake-news-misinformation-left-study

Isn't this the study @bondegezou did a header on?

To me, it looked very much like circular logic - does left wing 'fact checker' agree with far right post? No? Then it is disinformation.

EDIT: I don't necessarily find the conclusion unbelievable. But I wasn't convinced that the studty counted as 'evidence'

The study attempted to be a bit more rigorous than that.
Unless you're saying the Wikipedia fact checkers are all left wing ?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612241311886#supplementary-materials
..To identify cases of misinformation, we scraped the MBFC and the Wikipedia Fake News list to create a database of 646,058 URLs with an associated factuality classification. MBFC offers the largest dataset covering biased and low factual news sources, and has been widely used to identify misinformation shared on social media (e.g., Baly et al., 2018; Gallotti et al., 2020; Sharma et al., 2020). MBFC describes each media outlet with a level factuality (“very low,” “low,” “medium,” “high,” “very high”), which represents the likelihood that articles from the source contain misleading information or misinformation. The Wikipedia Fake News list focuses specifically on news sources with very low factuality. Combining the database of misinformation links and the shared URLs, we produce a database of the level of factuality of the sources shared by the politicians, which covers 582,148 shared URLs. Using these, we create an indicator to measure the factuality of a politician or party based on the links they have shared. We create this variable by assigning values to each level of factuality (“very low”: 0, “low”: 0.25, “medium”: 0.5, “high”: 0.75, “very high”: 1.0) and calculating the mean value of the party. As we aggregate on the party level, the result is an indicator that captures the factuality of the links shared by a specific party. We refer to this indicator as their factuality score. It should be noted that the factuality score captures not only misinformation that is shared with the direct purpose of misleading but also sharing that is motivated by, for instance, the presence of a relationships between parties and media organizations with a culture of misinformation...

Note also that they weren't selective in what they analysed - they attempted to capture every social media post by every politician.

I'd say it's a not-ridiculous effort at objectivity - and certainly not a simple circular argument.

FFS, Wikipedia is now insanely left wing, even Jimmy Wales and his cofounders admit is is a problem

How can an encyclopaedia be left wing?

Presumably how it edits contentious issues such as Israel-Palestine, Gaza, cross dressers claiming to be women etc etc.

Evidence?

"Presumably - used to say what you think is the likely situation"

Based on what I have seen on some of the edit sections on contentious issues.

I don't use Wiki these days for anything other than reference for Film and TV

Well, I still edit as "Sunil060902" (also tend to upload tons of railway pics to Wikimedia). I don't think I'm particularly left wing!

I used to edit and add actor/actress profiles and shows. Not done it for a long time.

Are railway pics contentious ? Does railway fandom have splits and schisms and arguments like Sci Fi fandom does.

Don't all fandoms have splits and schisms and arguments?

I would put rail fans in the same catergory as Whovians.

Go over to Outpost Gallifrey and praise Chris Chibnall or ask which number Doctor John Hurt is.

Edit or which number(s) Doctor(s) David Tennant is.

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,War,9,10,11,12,13,14. Apparently Fugitive is before 1. It's best to think of them as categorical data that can be ordered, instead of integers

The Timeless Child came first, surely ?

I am trying not to think of that...

TheScreamingEagles said:

Sam Kerr found not guilty.

That rozzer wasn't credible at all.

The Judge seems to have been distinctly unimpressed with Sam Kerr's behaviour.

She seems very much someone who's attitude is "Don't you know who I am?" when challenged over poor behaviour.

Foss said:

viewcode said:

Taz said:

DavidL said:

Nigelb said:

Vance would perhaps benefit from a long session looking in the mirror.
There was a time, fairly recently, when the US was slightly more qualified to voice such a reasonable criticism.

..Vance also referred to the risks of partnering with “authoritarian” regimes, a pointed allusion to China. Referring to exports of CCTV and 5G equipment – key Chinese tech products – by authoritarian governments, he said there was a cost: “Partnering with such regimes, it never pays off in the long term.”

Speaking yards away from the Chinese vice-premier, Zhang Guoqing, Vance added: “Some of us in this room have learned from experience partnering with them means chaining your nation to an authoritarian master that seeks to infiltrate, dig in and seize your information infrastructure. Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Quite like that one. It has a lot of truth in it. What do we get paid for contributing our thoughts to PB again?

Ah.

As someone used to say to people who moaned about Facebook "demand a refund".

I wonder what Vanilla gets from hosting this board ?

Information, Number 6. Vanilla can access your browser and so knows your browser history, favourites and bookmarks. It can also work out your location. Given this information it can construct a profile of @Taz. That profile can then be sold to advertisers, researchers and even the police and govt. In short, it is mining you. And, thinking about it, me too.

Web pages cannot access your favourites and bookmarks.

Foss said:

viewcode said:

Taz said:

DavidL said:

Nigelb said:

Vance would perhaps benefit from a long session looking in the mirror.
There was a time, fairly recently, when the US was slightly more qualified to voice such a reasonable criticism.

..Vance also referred to the risks of partnering with “authoritarian” regimes, a pointed allusion to China. Referring to exports of CCTV and 5G equipment – key Chinese tech products – by authoritarian governments, he said there was a cost: “Partnering with such regimes, it never pays off in the long term.”

Speaking yards away from the Chinese vice-premier, Zhang Guoqing, Vance added: “Some of us in this room have learned from experience partnering with them means chaining your nation to an authoritarian master that seeks to infiltrate, dig in and seize your information infrastructure. Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Quite like that one. It has a lot of truth in it. What do we get paid for contributing our thoughts to PB again?

Ah.

As someone used to say to people who moaned about Facebook "demand a refund".

I wonder what Vanilla gets from hosting this board ?

Information, Number 6. Vanilla can access your browser and so knows your browser history, favourites and bookmarks. It can also work out your location. Given this information it can construct a profile of @Taz. That profile can then be sold to advertisers, researchers and even the police and govt. In short, it is mining you. And, thinking about it, me too.

Web pages cannot access your favourites and bookmarks.

Happy to correct if wrong. It's not Intuitively obvious. Can it be overridden by the cookie consent? Is that browser specific or legislation specific?

Carnyx said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Not surprising, but good to see the concrete evidence that the far right is the main disinformation culprit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/11/far-right-mps-fake-news-misinformation-left-study

Isn't this the study @bondegezou did a header on?

To me, it looked very much like circular logic - does left wing 'fact checker' agree with far right post? No? Then it is disinformation.

EDIT: I don't necessarily find the conclusion unbelievable. But I wasn't convinced that the studty counted as 'evidence'

The study attempted to be a bit more rigorous than that.
Unless you're saying the Wikipedia fact checkers are all left wing ?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612241311886#supplementary-materials
..To identify cases of misinformation, we scraped the MBFC and the Wikipedia Fake News list to create a database of 646,058 URLs with an associated factuality classification. MBFC offers the largest dataset covering biased and low factual news sources, and has been widely used to identify misinformation shared on social media (e.g., Baly et al., 2018; Gallotti et al., 2020; Sharma et al., 2020). MBFC describes each media outlet with a level factuality (“very low,” “low,” “medium,” “high,” “very high”), which represents the likelihood that articles from the source contain misleading information or misinformation. The Wikipedia Fake News list focuses specifically on news sources with very low factuality. Combining the database of misinformation links and the shared URLs, we produce a database of the level of factuality of the sources shared by the politicians, which covers 582,148 shared URLs. Using these, we create an indicator to measure the factuality of a politician or party based on the links they have shared. We create this variable by assigning values to each level of factuality (“very low”: 0, “low”: 0.25, “medium”: 0.5, “high”: 0.75, “very high”: 1.0) and calculating the mean value of the party. As we aggregate on the party level, the result is an indicator that captures the factuality of the links shared by a specific party. We refer to this indicator as their factuality score. It should be noted that the factuality score captures not only misinformation that is shared with the direct purpose of misleading but also sharing that is motivated by, for instance, the presence of a relationships between parties and media organizations with a culture of misinformation...

Note also that they weren't selective in what they analysed - they attempted to capture every social media post by every politician.

I'd say it's a not-ridiculous effort at objectivity - and certainly not a simple circular argument.

FFS, Wikipedia is now insanely left wing, even Jimmy Wales and his cofounders admit is is a problem

How can an encyclopaedia be left wing?

Presumably how it edits contentious issues such as Israel-Palestine, Gaza, cross dressers claiming to be women etc etc.

Evidence?

"Presumably - used to say what you think is the likely situation"

Based on what I have seen on some of the edit sections on contentious issues.

I don't use Wiki these days for anything other than reference for Film and TV

Well, I still edit as "Sunil060902" (also tend to upload tons of railway pics to Wikimedia). I don't think I'm particularly left wing!

I used to edit and add actor/actress profiles and shows. Not done it for a long time.

Are railway pics contentious ? Does railway fandom have splits and schisms and arguments like Sci Fi fandom does.

I've been partially banned from the "Rail UK" forum (nothing to do with Wiki) for repeatedly stating that the DLR is NOT a tramway, and OO gauge models are less accurate than H0 gauge. I can't post to the main sub-forums, but I can post to the others.

Brilliant.

I take it they are wrong, of course.

Of course

BTW Sunil - news for you - you might have to come back up here. Or perhaps proper tramways don't count in your quest? Nothing wrong with being SpecificMARTargeted.

https://www.1722waggonway.co.uk/
https://www.1722waggonway.co.uk/about-the-project

Is it just a pipe-dream?

I absolutely do count tramways as rail transport, I've done London Tramlink, West Midlands Metro, Nottingham Express Transit, Manchester Metrolink, Sheffield Supertram, Blackpool Trams, and, of course, Edinburgh!

viewcode said:

Foss said:

viewcode said:

Taz said:

DavidL said:

Nigelb said:

Vance would perhaps benefit from a long session looking in the mirror.
There was a time, fairly recently, when the US was slightly more qualified to voice such a reasonable criticism.

..Vance also referred to the risks of partnering with “authoritarian” regimes, a pointed allusion to China. Referring to exports of CCTV and 5G equipment – key Chinese tech products – by authoritarian governments, he said there was a cost: “Partnering with such regimes, it never pays off in the long term.”

Speaking yards away from the Chinese vice-premier, Zhang Guoqing, Vance added: “Some of us in this room have learned from experience partnering with them means chaining your nation to an authoritarian master that seeks to infiltrate, dig in and seize your information infrastructure. Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Quite like that one. It has a lot of truth in it. What do we get paid for contributing our thoughts to PB again?

Ah.

As someone used to say to people who moaned about Facebook "demand a refund".

I wonder what Vanilla gets from hosting this board ?

Information, Number 6. Vanilla can access your browser and so knows your browser history, favourites and bookmarks. It can also work out your location. Given this information it can construct a profile of @Taz. That profile can then be sold to advertisers, researchers and even the police and govt. In short, it is mining you. And, thinking about it, me too.

Web pages cannot access your favourites and bookmarks.

Foss said:

viewcode said:

Taz said:

DavidL said:

Nigelb said:

Vance would perhaps benefit from a long session looking in the mirror.
There was a time, fairly recently, when the US was slightly more qualified to voice such a reasonable criticism.

..Vance also referred to the risks of partnering with “authoritarian” regimes, a pointed allusion to China. Referring to exports of CCTV and 5G equipment – key Chinese tech products – by authoritarian governments, he said there was a cost: “Partnering with such regimes, it never pays off in the long term.”

Speaking yards away from the Chinese vice-premier, Zhang Guoqing, Vance added: “Some of us in this room have learned from experience partnering with them means chaining your nation to an authoritarian master that seeks to infiltrate, dig in and seize your information infrastructure. Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Quite like that one. It has a lot of truth in it. What do we get paid for contributing our thoughts to PB again?

Ah.

As someone used to say to people who moaned about Facebook "demand a refund".

I wonder what Vanilla gets from hosting this board ?

Information, Number 6. Vanilla can access your browser and so knows your browser history, favourites and bookmarks. It can also work out your location. Given this information it can construct a profile of @Taz. That profile can then be sold to advertisers, researchers and even the police and govt. In short, it is mining you. And, thinking about it, me too.

Web pages cannot access your favourites and bookmarks.

Happy to correct if wrong. It's not Intuitively obvious. Can it be overridden by the cookie consent? Is that browser specific or legislation specific?

The TLDR is that a modern web browser interprets a webpage in a sandbox/'safe space' with defined and limited exit points from this sandbox. Out of the box, none of the modern browsers have an exit point to grab favourites. Actual browser history is the same - though there are other methods of tracking users across sites that don't rely on your local history.

viewcode said:

Foss said:

viewcode said:

Taz said:

DavidL said:

Nigelb said:

Vance would perhaps benefit from a long session looking in the mirror.
There was a time, fairly recently, when the US was slightly more qualified to voice such a reasonable criticism.

..Vance also referred to the risks of partnering with “authoritarian” regimes, a pointed allusion to China. Referring to exports of CCTV and 5G equipment – key Chinese tech products – by authoritarian governments, he said there was a cost: “Partnering with such regimes, it never pays off in the long term.”

Speaking yards away from the Chinese vice-premier, Zhang Guoqing, Vance added: “Some of us in this room have learned from experience partnering with them means chaining your nation to an authoritarian master that seeks to infiltrate, dig in and seize your information infrastructure. Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Quite like that one. It has a lot of truth in it. What do we get paid for contributing our thoughts to PB again?

Ah.

As someone used to say to people who moaned about Facebook "demand a refund".

I wonder what Vanilla gets from hosting this board ?

Information, Number 6. Vanilla can access your browser and so knows your browser history, favourites and bookmarks. It can also work out your location. Given this information it can construct a profile of @Taz. That profile can then be sold to advertisers, researchers and even the police and govt. In short, it is mining you. And, thinking about it, me too.

Web pages cannot access your favourites and bookmarks.

Foss said:

viewcode said:

Taz said:

DavidL said:

Nigelb said:

Vance would perhaps benefit from a long session looking in the mirror.
There was a time, fairly recently, when the US was slightly more qualified to voice such a reasonable criticism.

..Vance also referred to the risks of partnering with “authoritarian” regimes, a pointed allusion to China. Referring to exports of CCTV and 5G equipment – key Chinese tech products – by authoritarian governments, he said there was a cost: “Partnering with such regimes, it never pays off in the long term.”

Speaking yards away from the Chinese vice-premier, Zhang Guoqing, Vance added: “Some of us in this room have learned from experience partnering with them means chaining your nation to an authoritarian master that seeks to infiltrate, dig in and seize your information infrastructure. Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”..

Quite like that one. It has a lot of truth in it. What do we get paid for contributing our thoughts to PB again?

Ah.

As someone used to say to people who moaned about Facebook "demand a refund".

I wonder what Vanilla gets from hosting this board ?

Information, Number 6. Vanilla can access your browser and so knows your browser history, favourites and bookmarks. It can also work out your location. Given this information it can construct a profile of @Taz. That profile can then be sold to advertisers, researchers and even the police and govt. In short, it is mining you. And, thinking about it, me too.

Web pages cannot access your favourites and bookmarks.

Happy to correct if wrong. It's not Intuitively obvious. Can it be overridden by the cookie consent? Is that browser specific or legislation specific?

Viewcode: "how can a webpage access your bookmarks, favorites and browser history?"
CoPilot: "Webpages, by default, cannot directly access your browser's bookmarks, favorites, or browsing history due to the security and privacy measures enforced by modern web browsers. This is designed to protect your personal information and ensure your browsing activities remain private. However, there are a few ways that web pages or external services can interact with this data, but only with your explicit consent and involvement. They are:

* Browser Extensions: You can install browser extensions that request permission to access your bookmarks, favorites, and browsing history. Always ensure that these extensions come from trusted sources and review the permissions they request before installing them.
* APIs and Synchronization Services: Some browsers provide APIs that can be used by trusted applications or services to access your bookmarks and browsing history. Again, this access requires your explicit consent.

Sean_F said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

Sam Kerr found not guilty.

That rozzer wasn't credible at all.

The Judge seems to have been distinctly unimpressed with Sam Kerr's behaviour.

She seems very much someone who's attitude is "Don't you know who I am?" when challenged over poor behaviour.

I use a lot of Uber Execs/Luxury and other high end vehicles to get me out and about and speaking to a lot of drivers, they don't like sports starts and other celebs because they think they can trash a taxi and then it'll be okay if they leave a tip.

I think she fits into that category.

NEW THREAD

MattW said:

Carnyx said:

MattW said:

Carnyx said:

Theuniondivvie said:

MattW said:

Do we have any Zoologists on PB?

I don't think it's a Golden Calf, but I'm not sure what manner of thing this might be in Mar-a-Lago. I'm tempted to go with "All Aboard the Sky Lark", or "All in the Best Possible Test" following Kenny Everett.

Welcome to Trump's Golden Calf covered in Fake $100 Bills.

"In Trump we Trust" - well, loboto-MAGAs may.

https://bsky.app/profile/mattwardman.bsky.social/post/3lhus3i25bc2k

Goat (or GOAT) to my eye.

Old friend of mine spent much time in Africa (E and S). Starting with a plantation childhood in what was then Tanganyika. He had a simple rule. If the tail points up, goat; if down, sheep ...

That's a thought - woolly liberal.

He was indeed a Liberal, as it happens!

Scottish Liberals tended then to come from sheep country ...

Are Scottish Liberals in a historical tradition like Victorian East Anglian Non-Conformists, who were often Liberals - keeping out of the way and being quiet?

My favourite group of those were known as the Peculiar People *, who existed from 1838 to now, and later split into the Old Peculiars and the New Peculiars, depending on attitudes to medicine, then reunited.

They still have about 15 chapels under a less distinctive name ("Union of Evangelical Churches"), and have recently reopened several formerly closed chapels.

They have a web page as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peculiar_People

* KIng James Bible-ism for "chosen people". Roughly.

Deleted

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Sunil_Prasannan said:

Taz said:

Daveyboy1961 said:

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

Cookie said:

OnlyLivingBoy said:

Not surprising, but good to see the concrete evidence that the far right is the main disinformation culprit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/11/far-right-mps-fake-news-misinformation-left-study

Isn't this the study @bondegezou did a header on?

To me, it looked very much like circular logic - does left wing 'fact checker' agree with far right post? No? Then it is disinformation.

EDIT: I don't necessarily find the conclusion unbelievable. But I wasn't convinced that the studty counted as 'evidence'

The study attempted to be a bit more rigorous than that.
Unless you're saying the Wikipedia fact checkers are all left wing ?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612241311886#supplementary-materials
..To identify cases of misinformation, we scraped the MBFC and the Wikipedia Fake News list to create a database of 646,058 URLs with an associated factuality classification. MBFC offers the largest dataset covering biased and low factual news sources, and has been widely used to identify misinformation shared on social media (e.g., Baly et al., 2018; Gallotti et al., 2020; Sharma et al., 2020). MBFC describes each media outlet with a level factuality (“very low,” “low,” “medium,” “high,” “very high”), which represents the likelihood that articles from the source contain misleading information or misinformation. The Wikipedia Fake News list focuses specifically on news sources with very low factuality. Combining the database of misinformation links and the shared URLs, we produce a database of the level of factuality of the sources shared by the politicians, which covers 582,148 shared URLs. Using these, we create an indicator to measure the factuality of a politician or party based on the links they have shared. We create this variable by assigning values to each level of factuality (“very low”: 0, “low”: 0.25, “medium”: 0.5, “high”: 0.75, “very high”: 1.0) and calculating the mean value of the party. As we aggregate on the party level, the result is an indicator that captures the factuality of the links shared by a specific party. We refer to this indicator as their factuality score. It should be noted that the factuality score captures not only misinformation that is shared with the direct purpose of misleading but also sharing that is motivated by, for instance, the presence of a relationships between parties and media organizations with a culture of misinformation...

Note also that they weren't selective in what they analysed - they attempted to capture every social media post by every politician.

I'd say it's a not-ridiculous effort at objectivity - and certainly not a simple circular argument.

FFS, Wikipedia is now insanely left wing, even Jimmy Wales and his cofounders admit is is a problem

How can an encyclopaedia be left wing?

Presumably how it edits contentious issues such as Israel-Palestine, Gaza, cross dressers claiming to be women etc etc.

Evidence?

"Presumably - used to say what you think is the likely situation"

Based on what I have seen on some of the edit sections on contentious issues.

I don't use Wiki these days for anything other than reference for Film and TV

Well, I still edit as "Sunil060902" (also tend to upload tons of railway pics to Wikimedia). I don't think I'm particularly left wing!

I used to edit and add actor/actress profiles and shows. Not done it for a long time.

Are railway pics contentious ? Does railway fandom have splits and schisms and arguments like Sci Fi fandom does.

I've been partially banned from the "Rail UK" forum (nothing to do with Wiki) for repeatedly stating that the DLR is NOT a tramway, and OO gauge models are less accurate than H0 gauge. I can't post to the main sub-forums, but I can post to the others.

You are correct, on both counts.

Leon said:

DavidL said:

Leon said:

Well done Starmer and Labour for siding with Trump’s America and refusing to sign this absurd Paris accord; without the USA and the UK - the first and third biggest powers in this arena - Macron’s pact is dead in the water

Starmer is moving towards Trump: this is good. He has chosen

Now if he would just reinstate the funding for the supercomputer in Edinburgh that he cancelled we might well attract some useful inward investment. Being committed to AI development but refusing the means to develop it is simply incoherent.

Tell me about it. From that moment on I realised this government would be shite. Utterly utterly clueless

Basically this Labour government has been a painful exercise in catching-up-with-reality after a catastrophic first six months, but political history says you probably don’t get a second chance

I realised in 2020

Call me a visionary