Friday, February 19th

I’m watching with interest what’s going on with Facebook in Australia. As far as I can tell, Facebook has removed all news media using its pages. Since the term ‘news media’ is notoriously vague, it has meant that all kinds of odd pages, including those run by members of parliament, have disappeared. Predictably the pages of far-rightists and conspiracy theorists remain. 

Australia may be about to discover what life without FB might be. They may well decided they like it.  We shall see. It’s not a bad testing ground, after all. It’s a big country with a relatively small population, and plenty of space for organizations like QAnon to grow.  Oh, and a history of colonial racism, too, let’s not forget that.