UK political parties on track to spend £1m on election day online ads

Posted on July 4, 2024 by Admin

Digital campaigning gets round media blackout rule restricting broadcasters’ coverage while polls are open

UK election live – latest updates

The UK’s political parties are on track to spend more than a million pounds on online adverts on Thursday, circumventing a media blackout rule that forces television and radio stations to stop their election coverage when polls open.

British parties have traditionally ceased top-level campaign activity when voting began as they had no way to get out their message out. This is because of a longstanding broadcasting rule, enforced by the media regulator Ofcom, that states: “Discussion and analysis of election and referendum issues must finish when the poll opens.”

Revealed: the tech entrepreneur behind a pro-Israel hate network

Posted on June 29, 2024 by Admin

The Guardian used public records and open source materials to identify Daniel Linden of the Shirion Collective

A prime mover behind the Shirion Collective, a conspiracy-minded, pro-Israel disinformation network seeking to shape public opinion about the Gaza conflict in the US, Australia and the UK, is a tech entrepreneur named Daniel Linden living in Florida who co-wrote a guidebook for OnlyFans users, the Guardian can reveal.

Shirion has harassed pro-Palestinian activists, including many Jews, offered bounties for the identity of pro-Palestinian protesters, spread conspiracy narratives centered on figures like George Soros, and boasted of an AI-surveillance platform but offered few concrete details of how the technology functions.

Fatima Payman admits she ‘upset a few colleagues’ by crossing the floor – as it happened

Posted on June 28, 2024 by Admin

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Housing minister Julie Collins is speaking to the ABC RN about Labor’s build-to-rent bill which was knocked back in the Senate yesterday, with the Greens and the Coalition combining to delay it:

What we want to do is get this done. We’ve already been consulting, we announced it in the previous budget. Any delays will actually stop the pipeline of construction and the certainty for the sector.

What we want to do is get more affordable homes and more homes of every type on the ground as quickly as we can.

We’re saying they have to have a minimum of 10% to be eligible for the tax concessions that we’re talking about for each development.

That’s what our consultations and our discussions with the sector have done and, as I said, this is not the only thing we’re doing for affordable homes … My point here is that they continually delay and block housing up every time by coming together and having this unholy alliance between the Liberals and the Greens in the Senate, because they’re more interested in votes than they are about people.

We’re not open to negotiation and we want to get this done.

Nigel Farage outperforms all other UK parties and candidates on TikTok

Posted on June 26, 2024 by Admin

Exclusive: Videos on Reform leader’s account show more engagement and average views than any other candidate

UK election live – latest updates

Nigel Farage is outperforming all other parties and candidates on TikTok throughout the general election campaign, analysis shows, eclipsing politicians considered most popular among young people.

Since the election was called, videos posted to the Reform leader’s personal account had more engagement and views on average than any other candidate – as well as the main channels of other parties.

Australia politics live: Julian Assange leaves Belmarsh prison after plea deal and will return to Australia, WikiLeaks says

Posted on June 24, 2024 by Admin

WikiLeaks X account has tweeted that ‘Julian Assange is free’. Follow today’s news headlines live

‘It’s just a lazy delay’

Bill Shorten says a further delay of the Senate vote on the NDIS bill won’t actually lead to any changes:

There’s no good reason on God’s green earth to have another eight weeks of review, which isn’t actually eight weeks.

There won’t be a whole lot of new submissions come in, there won’t be some brand new arguments not considered.

I’m horrified after 12 months of reviewing the NDIS and then another six months of discussing the review including [in] the last three a Senate committee having public hearings calling for submissions.

The opposition has used words never ever said before by them.

Shadow energy minister says system in ‘dire trouble’ – as it happened

Posted on June 20, 2024 by Admin

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Australia needs more gas supply on east coast, Albanese says

Anthony Albanese is speaking to the ABC from Devonport.

We’ll work those issues through with Aemo.

We need more gas supply. We announced our future gas strategy a short while ago because we understand that we need more supply. Gas has an important role to play in manufacturing in particular. But also in providing firming capacity for the renewables rollout.

Hip-hop mimes and breast jokes win Farage a valuable gen Z following

Posted on June 20, 2024 by Admin

Reform leader’s strategy to engage with young voters online pays off as he hits 776,000 TikTok followers

While Nigel Farage has written off many in generation X for being hopelessly woke and leftwing, he is much more interested in gen Z.

“Support is exploding among young gen Z 18-25 voters,” he told an audience in Runcorn in Cheshire on Thursday. “Something remarkable is happening out there. There’s an awakening in a younger generation who have had enough of being dictated to, have had enough of being lectured to, and they’re seeing through the BS they’re getting in schools and universities.”

Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest can sue Meta over Facebook scam ads, US court rules

Posted on June 18, 2024 by Admin

The Australian mining magnate can try to prove that Meta was negligent in allowing scam ads on Facebook, judge says

A US judge has rejected Meta Platforms’ bid to dismiss a lawsuit by billionaire Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest over scam Facebook advertisements that use his likeness to promote fake cryptocurrency and other fraudulent investments.

In a decision on Monday, US district judge Casey Pitts in San Jose, California, said Forrest could try to prove that Meta’s negligence in allowing the ads breached its duty to operate in a commercially reasonable manner.

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Peter Dutton wants a social media ban for children. But would ‘real life’ rules work?

Posted on June 13, 2024 by Admin

The opposition leader’s announcement that age-verification would be a Coalition government priority is a big promise that technology may not be able to fulfil

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Both the federal government and opposition say they are on board with the idea to ban teens under 16 from using social media, but the prime minister set an important qualifier on Thursday when he said he would support such a ban “if it can be effective”.

Guardian Essential poll last week found two-thirds of voters were in favour of raising the age teens can access social media from the 13 that the companies have set themselves up to 16.

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‘Crank’ Tory candidates accused of sharing online conspiracy theories

Posted on June 9, 2024 by Admin

Labour has expressed concerns about the calibre of would-be Tory MPs after a some shared outlandish views online

The Conservative party has been accused of becoming a home for “cranks” after some of its candidates at the general election were revealed to have shared conspiracy theories on social media.

The posts seen by the Observer include the suggestion that positive tests for Covid-19 were “mass psychosis at work” and that the Black Lives Matter movement might be an attempt to “bring down British society”.

Elon Musk does not grasp EU fears about disinformation on X, official says

Posted on June 4, 2024 by Admin

EU commissioner Vera Jourová says tech firms must hire staff versed in legal and historical context of free speech in Europe

Europe live – latest updates

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, lacks understanding of European concerns over the hatred and division that can result from the spread of disinformation, a senior EU commissioner has said.

Speaking just days before the European parliamentary elections, in which disinformation, particularly Russian-backed propaganda, has been a key issue, Věra Jourová criticised what she said was a clear deterioration in content moderation on X since Musk bought the platform in 2022.

Labour is already dominating the online general election campaign | Matthew McGregor

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Admin

Starmer’s party was quicker out of the digital gate, with slicker, more engaging content than the Tory offering

The video opens with an old clip of Cilla Black singing her classic ‘Surprise, Surprise!’. The caption reads “POV: Rishi Sunak turns up at your 18th birthday to send you to war.”

This appeared on Labour’s TikTok account the day after the Conservatives launched their national service policy. It fitted perfectly with TikTok’s meme-heavy, wry and sarcastic culture and has been watched 4.5 million times. The video racked up almost 700,000 likes, more than double the likes on all the Tories’ TikToks put together.