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 AMERICA KITTENS AGAIN: https://t.co/Gg7mg3KGKL pic.twitter.com/wf5swmbtzT — Tom Royal (@tomroyal) February 27, 2016 Since then it’s been ticking…
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 find images of newsworthy events. It works a little like this. Something happens, and a user photographs it: Fire…
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 as gay. Except, you know, she didn’t. Ten seconds on Google tells you that Diana Kamuntu is, or at least was, married…
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 of amazing cover-up, in which case why would NHK (which is, essentially, the Japanese BBC) be showing…
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 crawled back out in January. I anxiously await the next outbreak in January 2013, summing up the results of a survey conducted…
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 nonetheless. And last week, while scrolling back, I came across a really remarkable bit of work. Witness this headline…
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 little digging it transpired that the whole thing had sprung from the continual re-hashing, muddling and alteration of a…
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 for $5.15 a day’). It says: …And senior political official Ichiro Ozawa suggested in an interview with The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)…
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. divorces (CBC News): “Facebook use has been cited in 1 of 5 U.S. divorce cases, according to a…
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 get it here. As with the Firefox version, it’s very simple: no options, just simple kitten-based blocking.…