The descent of Owen Jones this year has been watched through the fingers of journalists and Labour politicians and aides alike. It seems that almost every day Owen is falling out with people who should be his allies, getting involved in nasty Twitter spats with Labour moderates, making uncharacteristically foolish mistakes, starting embarrassing fights and acting like a pro-Corbyn Andrew Adonis. As he seeks to overcompensate for his betrayal of Corbyn before the election, Owen has alienated his Guardian colleagues, probably the majority of Labour MPs, and today he has put a bomb under what was left of his reputation among journalists with the type of ill-thought out moan that has sadly become all too common:
The main thing I’ve learned from working in the British media is that much of it is a cult. Afflicted by a suffocating groupthink, intolerant of critics, hounds internal dissenters, full of people who made it because of connections and/or personal background rather than merit. https://t.co/K9rnYNvCS1
— Owen Jones🌹 (@OwenJones84) April 20, 2018
Cue some harsh but fair takedowns:
Like @janemerrick23, @haynesdeborah and others I went to comprehensive school in Yorkshire and university in Newcastle. Had no friends or family in journalism and worked hard to get this job. But … https://t.co/iGzd5GlPau
— Kate McCann (@KateEMcCann) April 20, 2018
You may have “worked in media”, but you have never put a deliberate gap between your own opinions and what you write. You are a very effective pamphleteer, not a journalist and that’s why you’re an exception.
— David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) April 20, 2018
Owen I’m sorry but you regularly appear on Sky News and other channels – if we, or others, were “intolerant of critics”, then why would we ask you on? Our guest producers work very hard to get diverse guests on air, with a range of views, to create balanced debate.
— Alistair Bunkall (@AliBunkallSKY) April 20, 2018
No, that’s what he learned from working at the Guardian. Endless tedious contradictory columns.. and bitter sniping at working hacks. The man couldn’t break a window let alone a story. And the realisation that the Corbyn team will never, ever forgive him seems to be eating him up pic.twitter.com/tzDFHIZgpJ
— Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) April 20, 2018
This last point seems to be the trigger for Owen’s behaviour. Corbynistas who Guido speaks to freely admit that Jezza’s inner circle will never let him back in after what he did to them last year. He does not seem to be taking that well, to put it mildly. The sad demise of someone who was once the rising star of the left…
Owen Jones has written a long whinge about Andrew Neil calling for him to be “freed” from the BBC. The last person to demand Brillo’s sacking was Andrew Adonis, which tells you everything you need to know about the state of Owen at the moment. His article has also been endorsed by Kremlin useful idiot Chris Williamson, who was never really one for press freedom.
Brillo is objectively Britain’s best political interviewer – and he dishes it out equally to Brexiters, Remainers, Tories and Labour spokesmen. The only people with a reason to want him out are those seeking to swerve accountability, something which caught up with Owen in the video above. Naturally we have never heard any complaints from Owen about the likes of James O’Brien presenting the Beeb’s political programmes. A taste of Corbyn’s Britain, where his commissars choose which journalists get to interview Labour politicians on the BBC. Chilling…
UPDATE: It seems like only yesterday that Momentum were lionising Brillo…
This @BBC journalist hasn’t held back 😲 pic.twitter.com/nTTwFLv0Dn
— Momentum (@PeoplesMomentum) February 21, 2018
The Observer’s main revelation over the last couple of weeks has been their claim that Cambridge Analytica harvested data from 50 million Facebook accounts. They found that CA’s Aleksander Kogan collected data from 270,000 accounts and was able to access data from all their friends – on average 185 users per account – making up a total of 50 million. This does seem to add up, the most recent figures suggest the median number of Facebook friends per account is just under 200.
The Guardian app’s privacy policy reveals they also collect data from your Facebook account, and the accounts of all your friends. This data includes “your name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID and any other information you choose to share according to your Facebook account settings, as well as the user details of your Facebook friends”. You have to give permission to have your data, and that of your friends, collected if you want to use the app. This has been happening for years…
The Guardian say their app has 3.2 million active users. If those users have on average 185 Facebook friends each, that means the Guardian has potentially accessed the personal Facebook data of something like 592 million accounts. That is more than ten times the number Cambridge Analytica reportedly got hold of. This is a conservative estimate as it only includes “active” users of the Guardian app – it will have been downloaded by many more down the years. Will Damian Collins be hauling the head of data and CEO of the Guardian in front of his select committee?
The Guardian app harvests your personal data from your Facebook page and also the data of all of your friends – the exact same central allegation the Observer has been making against Cambridge Analytica. The privacy policy of the Guardian Facebook app makes clear if you don’t grant permission to have your and your friends’ social media data harvested you cannot use the app:
“When you first access the App, for example by clicking on a link to a Guardian article from your Facebook newsfeed, you will be presented with a Facebook permissions page, which will advise you about the Facebook information you will be sharing with the App and other Facebook users. You can then decide whether or not to share your Facebook information by using the App. If you decide not to grant permission you will not be able to use the App.
By granting permission you will be agreeing to share your Facebook user details (including your name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID and any other information you choose to share according to your Facebook account settings) as well as the user details of your Facebook friends, and information about your use of the App, for example, the articles you are reading.”
The Guardian’s general privacy policy also reveals they sell your “behavioural data” to third parties:
“We may also share anonymised behavioural data with advertising partners, including commercial organisations that fund content labelled ‘Supported by’, ‘Paid content/Paid for by’ or ‘Advertiser content/from our advertisers’. This may mean that when you are on other websites, you will be shown advertising based on your behaviour on theguardian.com. We may also show you advertising on our site based on your behaviour on other sites.
They also reveal the Guardian uses data from third-party surveys – this is exactly how Aleksandr Kogan got his data for Cambridge Analytica:
“To assist us in our marketing, in addition to the data that you provide to us if you register, we may also obtain data from trusted third parties to help us understand what you might be interested in. This ‘profiling’ information is produced from a variety of sources, including publicly available data (such as the electoral roll) or from sources such as surveys and polls where you have given your permission for your data to be shared.”
Did the Guardian sell your behavioural data to Cambridge Analytica? Are they the missing piece of the jigsaw that blows this whole conspiracy wide open? Over to you, Carole…
Curious about-turn at the Guardian over the last 24 hours. Thursday’s paper ran this strong leader criticising Corbyn and backing Theresa May’s conclusion on Russian responsibility:
“Mr Corbyn’s reluctance to share Mrs May’s basic analysis of the Salisbury incident made him look eager to exonerate a hostile power… Britain has been targeted with a chemical weapon and it is almost certain that there is only one plausible culprit with the means and the motive. The prime minister might not have as many tools for retaliation, unilateral or international, as she would like. But she has judged correctly that the time for equivocation, given the sinister nature of Mr Putin’s regime, is over.”
Yet this morning’s paper pours scorn on the previous day’s leader, running a story headlined: “UK’s claims questioned: doubts voiced about source of Salisbury novichok”. It echoes Seumas Milne’s line comparing the situation to Iraqi WMD, and quotes “arguments” on “social media” that the novichok could have come from “some non-state group, maybe criminals”. It even links to the infamous conspiracy theorist Craig Murray’s blog claiming “Israel undoubtedly has as much technical capacity as any state to synthesise Novichoks”. The decision to promote a source like Murray, a man who has spent time in a residential mental health facility, has caused bewilderment in the Guardian newsroom…
Guardian hacks are wondering why their paper’s line has changed so dramatically in such a short space of time. They doubt a respected journalist like Ewan MacAskill would write such an odd piece without instructions from above. Surely nothing to do with Seumas giving his old friend Kath Viner Corbyn’s big op-ed this morning…
The trans versus feminist culture war has a new battleground: the Guardian newsroom. Owen Jones has been leading the fight for self-defining trans people – those who identify as women without any medical change to their gender – to be allowed onto Labour’s all-women shortlists. This viewpoint is extremely unpopular with many non-millennial feminists, who have serious concerns about whether it really advances gender equality. There is increasing angst among feminist journalists at the Guardian who believe that Owen and other men on the trans side are mansplaining all-women shortlists to them. When Owen gloated on Tuesday that feminists had “overplayed their hand”, a few hours later Guardian writer and feminist Hadley Freeman sent what King’s Place colleagues are calling two epic subtweets:
A senior Labour figure told me one of the main reasons the party has updated their position on trans rights is because of the anti-trans backlash.
In other words anti-trans activists overplayed their hand so much, they made Labour *more* pro-trans rightshttps://t.co/POrWr6VZPN
— Owen Jones🌹 (@OwenJones84) March 6, 2018
Love the idea of Labour punishing women for speaking out about an issue that affects them. What a great tactic to win votes among women!
— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) March 6, 2018
But really, thank heavens for all the men schooling us silly ladies about how all women’s shortlists should work. How would we cope without your manly guidance?
— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) March 6, 2018
Several female Guardianistas believe Owen’s influence and platform pushing the trans issue is causing large numbers of feminists to regard the Guardian as anti-women. They have been sharing Mumsnet chats which show Owen’s campaigning is immensely unpopular among female Guardian readers (Mumsnet, founded by Justine Roberts, the wife of Ian Katz, is at the centre of the Guardianista world). They are noting that this week’s Spectator carries a piece from Judith Green, one of the co-founders of Woman’s Place UK, making the feminist case on all-women’s shortlists. Several Guardian feminists have been arguing internally this week that: “Even the Spectator is more feminist than us”. Owen’s trick of calling feminists who disagree with him bigots is hardly repairing relations with Guardian women who feel feminists are finding it easier to get a platform in the Spectator than the Guardian…
