Man Marries Goat (again)

Interesting analysis of Facebook’s seamless sharing by the FT last week. Hat tip @mikewhills 

Apparently, old stories are being rediscovered as they go viral for the first time…

Throughout this week, most or all of the “most shared” and, by extension, “most viewed” stories on Independent.co.uk have been from the late 1990s. Most are oddball stories with eye-catching headlines, including “Sean, 12, is the youngest father” (January 1998), “Eton pupil died in ‘fainting game’” (March 1999) and “Scotland’s ugliest woman honoured”(May 1999).The new prominence given to “most shared” is driving the “most read”, and the recent redesign of independent.co.uk is a complicating factor. This is just a short sample of data. But there are indications that the same “Facebook effect” is happening at other sites, too: the Guardian has seen a similar phenomenon, although older stories are less prominent in the most-read column, perhaps because it has a much larger online readership.

The Independent has not made any special effort to promote its archive content and its team are somewhat mystified as to what originally surfaced these older stories. One theory is that they have arrived via search but been absorbed into Facebook through the seamless sharing, then passed around through a combination of sensationalist headlines and absence of a timestamp to indicate their age.

But is this so new? I remember the man marries goat in South Sudan story from 2006. The story surfaced again on online news sites a year later, propelled by the fact it continued to rank as one of the BBC’s most-read stories. Bloggers and news editors assumed it was new. Such was the story’s longevity that the BBC suspected there may have been a co-ordinated campaign to keep it in the news.

Ridicule is Nothing to be Scared of

I wrote most of this a week ago. As my post gathered pace, I didn’t notice that I gradually lost access YouTube, most of the BBC News website, the New Scientist, Wikipedia, twitter and hundreds of other sites. It was only when WordPress was blocked here in Pakistan that I realised what was happening. Anyway, I finished it off today

Yesterday it seemed a bit of an inconvenience. A silly, pointless inconvenience but at worst it meant I wouldn’t know who had found a lonely black sheep which had wandered into their mafia wars, or something. Today, Pakistan’s facebook ban has meant Mobilink, my mobile phone service, has switched off its BlackBerry connections – leaving my BlackBerry as nothing more than a large, overpriced, not very good telephone.

So what’s going on?

The origins of the row seem subversive, satirical and frankly quite amusing. A Seattle-based cartoonist, Molly Norris has a pop at censorship (of the now notorious South Park episode featuring The Prophet Mohammed in a bear costume) with an image of half a dozen household objects each claiming to be Mohammed. The cartoon is titled Everybody Draw Mohammed Day – a spoof contest.

In there is a reasonable question. Why are many Muslims so unwilling to question – or be questioned on – elements of their faith? For people brought up in the post-Enlightenment West, scepticism and cynicism are tools applied to faith, politics, philosophy and pretty much anything else. Many liberal, moderate Muslims are of course open to exactly these discussions. But many others are closed to debate.

But here is where things break down. As usual, the issue has been hijacked by an anti-Muslim element, intent on conflating freedom of speech with the freedom to gratuitously offend a population. You don’t need me to tell you that having the right to do something is not the same thing as going out and doing it. Just like the newspapers who reprinted the offending cartoons in 2006, it seems that to do so would be to put our right of freedom of expression above other people’s right to not be offended, or harmed or outraged, or upset.

Those are the trade-offs and balances that have to be made every time we exercise a right: in short we have to consider what other rights it might infringe. A pathetic cartoon contest to prove a point does not seem to be one of those occasions where freedom of speech comes first. We still have the right, of course, but just choose not to use it.

The saddest part of all of this, though, has been the reaction of a small number of people in Pakistan and the subsequent decision of the court (a system incapable of tracking down the thousands of “disappeared”) to shut down facebook. Once again a small number of nutters have fallen right into the trap set for them by another set of nutters. The only winners are the extremists who have found fresh ammunition to lump at the other side. Suggesting that censorship is somehow justified in preventing outrage rather misses the point. Censorship never helps anything. For as Brendan O’Neill at spikedonline points out…

Indeed, these two camps – the Muhammad-knockers and the Muslim offence-takers – are locked in a deadly embrace. Islamic extremists need Western depictions of Muhammad as evidence that there is a new crusade against Islam, while the Muhammad-knockers need the flag-burning, street-stomping antics of the extremists as evidence that their defence of the Enlightenment is a risky, important business. And as this mutually masturbatory performance of a new culture clash continues, the true threat to freedom and Enlightenment goes unanalysed and unexplained.