media

The Best Way To Avoid Spreading Misinformation

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

It’s likely at some point we’ve all spread some misinformation involuntarily. It can have dire consequences, too. Washington Post has an article on misinformation but they forgot the most important thing, I think.

Waiting.

‘Trusted sources’ has been a problem that I’ve been studying since we were working on the Alert Retrieval Cache. In an actual emergency, knowing which information you can trust from the ground and elsewhere is paramount. I remember Andy Carvin asking me how Twitter could be used for the same and I shook my head, explaining the problem that no one seemed to want to listen to: The problem is that an open network presents problems with flawed information getting accepted as truth.

Credentialism is a part of the problem. We expect experts to be all-knowing when in fact being an expert itself has no certification. It requires being right before, all the while we want right now and unfortunately the truth doesn’t work that way.

We see a story on social media and we share it, sometimes without thinking, which is why bad news travels faster than good news.1

The easiest way to avoid spreading misinformation is to do something we’re not very good at in a society that pulses like a tachycardic heart: We wait and see what happens. We pause, and if we must pass something along to our social networks, we say we’re not sure it’s real, but since headlines are usually algorithm generated to catch eyes and to spread them like Covid-19, we have to read the stories and check the facts before we share rather than share off the cuff.

Somewhere along the line, the right now trumped being right, and we see it everywhere. By simply following a story before sharing it, you can stop spreading misinformation and stop the virus of misinformation in it’s tracks. Let the story develop. See where it goes. Don’t jump in immediately to write about it when you don’t actually know much about it.

Check news sources for the stories. Wait for confirmation. If it’s important enough to post, point out that it’s unconfirmed.

It’s that simple.

  1. There’s a pun or two in there. ↩︎

AI and the Media, Misinformation and Narratives.

~ Taran ~ 3 Comments
    Rendition of Walter Cronkite.

News was once trusted more, where the people presenting the news were themselves trusted to give people the facts. There were narratives even then, yet there was a balance because of the integrity of the people involved.

Nowadays, this seems to have changed with institutional distrust, political sectarianism and the battle between partisan and ideological Identities versus anti-establishment orientations.

In short, things are wonky.

Now the world’s first news network entirely generated by artificial intelligence is set to launch next year.1 This seems a bit odd given that the Dictionary.com word of the year is ‘hallucinate’ because of artificial intelligence, as I’ve written about before.

What could possibly go wrong with a news source that is completely powered by artificial intelligence?

Misinformation. Oddly enough, Dr Daniel Williams wrote an interesting article on misinformation, pointing out that misinformation could be a symptom instead of the actual problem. He makes some good points, though it does seem a chicken and egg issue at this point. Which came first? I don’t think anyone can know the answer to that, and if they did, they’d probably not be trusted because things have gotten that bad.

At the same time, I look through my Facebook memories just about every day and note more and more content that I had shared is… gone. Deleted. There’s no reasoning given, and when I do find out that something I shared has been deleted, it’s as informative as a random nun wandering around with a ruler, rapping people’s knuckles and not telling them why she’s doing it.

Algorithms. I don’t know that it’s censorship, but they sure do weed a lot of content and that makes me wonder how much content gets weeded elsewhere. I’m not particularly terrible with my Facebook account or any other account. Like everyone else, I have shared things that I thought to be true that ended up not being true, but I don’t do that very often because I’m skeptical.

We would like to believe integrity is inherent in journalism, but the water got muddied somewhere along the way when news narratives and editorials became more viewed than the actual facts. With the facts, it’s easy to build one’s own narrative though not easy enough when people are too busy making a living to do so. Further, we have a tendency toward viewing that which fits our own world view, the ‘echo chambers’ that pop up now and then such as echoed extremism. To have time to expand beyond our echo chambers, we need to find time to do so and be willing to have our own world views challenged.

Instead, most people are off chasing the red dots, mistaking sometimes being busy as being productive. At a cellular level, we’re all very busy, but that doesn’t mean we’re productive, that we’re adding value to the world around us somehow. There is something to Dr. Daniel Williams’ points on societal malaise.

A news network run completely by artificial intelligence mixed with the world as we have it now doesn’t seem ideal, yet the idea has it’s selling points because media itself isn’t trusted largely because media is built around business, and business is built around advertising, advertising in turn is a game of numbers and to get the numbers you have to get eyeballs looking at the content. Thus, propping up people’s world views is more important when the costs of doing all of that are higher. Is it possible that decreasing the costs would decrease the need to prop up world views for advertising?

We’ll be finding out.

  1. 2024 ↩︎

Damnatio Memoriae

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

In discussion with another writer over coffee, I found myself explaining biases in the artificial intelligences – particularly large language models – as something that is recent. Knowledge has been subject to this for millenia.

Libraries have long been considered our centers of knowledge. They have existed for millenia and have served as places of stored knowledge for as long, attracting all manner of knowledge to their shelves.

Yet there is a part of the library, even the modern library, which we don’t hear as much about. The power of what is in the collection.

‘Strict examination’ of library volumes was a euphemism for state censorship

Like any good autocrat, Augustus didn’t refrain from violent intimidation, and when it came to ensuring that the contents of his libraries aligned with imperial opinion, he need not have looked beyond his own playbook for inspiration. When the works of the orator/historian Titus Labienus and the rhetor Cassius Severus provoked his contempt, they were condemned to the eternal misfortune of damnatio memoriae, and their books were burned by order of the state. Not even potential sacrilege could thwart Augustus’ ire when he ‘committed to the flames’ more than 2,000 Greek and Latin prophetic volumes, preserving only the Sibylline oracles, though even those were subject to ‘strict examination’ before they could be placed within the Temple of Apollo. And he limited and suppressed publication of senatorial proceedings in the acta diurna, set up by Julius Caesar in public spaces throughout the city as a sort of ‘daily report’; though of course, it was prudent to maintain the acta themselves as an excellent means of propaganda.

“The Great Libraries of Rome“, Fabio Fernandes, Aeon.com, 4 August 2023

Of course, the ‘editing’ of a library is a difficult task, with ‘fake news’ and other things potentially propagating through human knowledge. We say that history is written by the victors, and to a great extent this is true. Spend longer than an hour on the Internet and you may well find something that should be condemned to flame, or at least you’ll think so. I may even agree. The control of information has historically been central, and nothing has changed in this regard. Those who control the information control how people perceive the world we live in.

There’s a fine line between censorship and keeping bad information out of a knowledge base. What is ‘bad’ is subjective. The flat earth ‘theory’, which has gained prominence in recent years, is simply not possible to defend if one looks at the facts in entirety. The very idea that the moon could appear as it does on a flat earth would have us re-examine a lot of science. It doesn’t make sense, so where is the harm in letting people read about it? There isn’t, really, and is simply a reflection on how we have moved to such heights of literacy and such lows of critical thought.

The answer at one time was the printing press, where ideas could be spread more quickly than the manual labor, as loving as it might have been, of copying books. Then came radio, then came television, then came the Internet – all of which have suffered the same issues and even created new ones.

What gets shared? What doesn’t? Who decides?

This is the world we have created artificial intelligences in, and these biases feed the biases of large language models. Who decides what goes into their training models? Who decides what isn’t?

Slowly and quietly, the memory of damnation memoriae glows like a hot ember, the ever present problem with any form of knowledge collection.

Political And AI Intrigue In Social Media.

~ Taran ~ 6 Comments

I normally don’t follow politics because politics doesn’t really follow me – it tends to stalk me instead. Yet today, with social media in the headline, I paid attention – because it’s not just politics involved. There’s artificial intelligence as well, or what is accused of it.

From the first article:

A US federal judge has limited the Biden administration’s communications with social media companies which are aimed at moderating their content.

In a 155-page ruling on Tuesday, judge Terry Doughty barred White House officials and some government agencies from contacting firms over “content containing protected free speech”.

It is a victory for Republicans who have accused officials of censorship.

Democrats said the platforms have failed to address misinformation.

The case was one of the most closely-watched First Amendment battles in the US courts, sparking a debate over the government’s role in moderating content which it deemed to be false or harmful…

“Biden officials must limit contact with social media firms“, BBC News, Annabelle Liang, 5th July, 2023.

By itself, it’s pretty damning for the Democrats, who like the Republicans, aren’t my favorite people in the world. It isn’t an either/or proposition, but it’s usually simplified to that so that both sides keep reading for advertising.

Now here’s the second article.

Evidence of potential human rights abuses may be lost after being deleted by tech companies, the BBC has found.

Platforms remove graphic videos, often using artificial intelligence – but footage that may help prosecutions can be taken down without being archived.

Meta and YouTube say they aim to balance their duties to bear witness and protect users from harmful content.

But Alan Rusbridger, who sits on Meta’s Oversight Board, says the industry has been “overcautious” in its moderation…

“AI: War crimes evidence erased by social media platforms“, BBC Global Disinformation Team, Jack Goodman and Maria Korenyuk, 1 June 2023.

The artificial intelligence angle is from a month ago. The political angle dealing with Democrats and Republicans (oh my!) is today, because of the Federal Judge’s ruling. Both deal with content being removed on social media.

The algorithms on social media removing content related to Ukraine is not something new when it comes to Meta, because yours truly spent time in Facebook jail for posting an obvious parody of a Ukrainian tractor pulling the Moskov – before it was sunk. It labeled it as false information, which of course it was – it was a parody, and any gullible idiot who thought a Ukrainian tractor was pulling the Moskov deserves to be made fun of.

Clearly, the Moskov would need 2 Ukrainian tractors to pull it. See? Again, comedic.

These stories are connected in that the whole idea of ‘fake news’ and ‘trusted information’ has been politicized just about everywhere, and by politicized I also mean polarized. Even in Trinidad and Tobago, politicians use the phrases as if they are magical things one can pull out of… an orifice.

Algorithms, where they are blaming AI, are injecting their own bias by removing and leaving some content. Is some of this related to the ruling about Biden officials? I imagine it is. How much of a part of it is debatable – yet, during Covid, people were spreading a lot of fake news that worked against the public interests related to health.

The political angle had a Federal Court intervene. No such thing has happened with the artificial angle. That’s disturbing.

Looks like getting beyond Code 2.0 is becoming more important, or more late. What you see in the echo chambers of social media are just red dots, shining on the things others want us to see, and not necessarily the right things.

Trinidad and Tobago and/vs AI.

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

When I wrote ‘Artificial Extinction‘, I briefly touched on coverage related to artificial intelligence here in Trinidad and Tobago. It’s hard to explain just how out of mind it is, so I’ll just write a bit of the local scene.

Today, as I stood in line waiting an annoying amount of time waiting to pay for the 5l bottle of water at a local convenience store, I glanced at the headlines. As usual, there was someone having trouble with something at the head of the line, the other register was closed, and the line formed.

One of the benefits of that line is that I get to run my eyes across the front pages of the local newspapers: Newsday, Trinidad Express and Trinidad Guardian.

The Rastafarian gentleman in front of me found something of interest in the Trinidad Express. I saw something about the need for Constitutional Reform, a picture of “Indian Arrival Day Stalwarts”, ‘Paradise in Peril’ and a plea from the mother of a kidnapping victim. Having been back and forth over the decades, the news seems to say the same with only names changing. The politicians play politics, the crime has spiraled so long that it is now in control of the criminals, and nobody has fresh ideas. They all seem to be foreign and abused ideas, much like some of the used cars you can buy from Japan.

This is the canvas upon which local news is painted daily. I thought about seeing Trinidad and Tobago represented on Planet Earth (Episode 6) through Grand Riviere Village’s volunteer work to assist and protect the leatherback turtles. when I did a web search, I found the leatherback turtle site offline (something I’m considering digging into). That’s a shame. Keeping a website online for something with international attention seems important.

I get home, walking past the condo’s office, I wave briefly at the administrator who was busy talking with someone. 15 years as a corporate secretary, retired, decades of experience that could soon be replaced with something purchased off the shelf. The latent thought of my own experience being replaced looms quietly in the background as I enter the elevator, my thoughts on how to connect the local perspective on technology and thus artificial intelligence to the larger global perspective of “this could end very badly“.

My friends and neighbors are more worried about their family’s security than some online application spitting out gobs of text when asked a question. In a land where there are no questions, no one needs an oracle. The economic diversity of Trinidad and Tobago is simply not there, the oil money stolen or squandered (or both), and the youths see increasingly little opportunity outside of crime, as we talked about while I was at the barber shop last week.

Artificial intelligence is not going to help with these things, because these are largely broken systems that those who profit from do not want to fix. ChatGPT can go blue in the face telling the politicians what they should do. They’ve been told what it has to offer thousands of times before over the decades. The faces largely have not changed, only grown older and in one case distinctly more cadaverous.

Years ago, I had a Minister message me once because something I wrote, and he asked where I got the data from – I cited the source that he should have been aware of, the open data portal of Trinidad and Tobago. He was agog. He’d been asking for that information for over a year and no one seemed to know where it was. The website has since been updated, the data not so much.

Meanwhile, the largest employer in Trinidad and Tobago is the government, where many good people participate in overcomplicated wheels of bureaucracy. We could use technology to replace much of that, but then where would the people work? And since they vote, who would they vote for if they lose their jobs?

With this context, now, I can now discuss AI in Trinidad and Tobago in the context of jobs, particularly the last 3 paragraphs:

“…Taking charge of this rapidly evolving scenario of workplace change will demand one fundamental and overdue evolution in governance, the continuous gathering and distribution of actionable information about how this country operates.

It was a note that Jonathan Cumberbatch, Assistant VP, Human Resources and Administration at UTT touched on cautiously when he noted that, “Data drives most of the conversation outside of TT, but we don’t have a sense of that in TT.”

The propensity of governance to proceed on feelings, hunches and political expedience might have worked in the past, but the national distaste for transparently gathered, publicly available information cannot continue into an era hallmarked by a reliance on reliable, continuously updated datasets.”

“AI and your job“, Mark Lyndersay, TechNewsTT and BitDepth#1408 for May 29, 2023

Of course, it wasn’t a global roundup of people related to AI, just those with local interests talking to the local Chamber of Commerce related to their products. Microsoft was definitely there, others… not here.

The short answer is that Trinidad and Tobago isn’t ready. Neither is most of the rest of the world, which is why there’s concern by some. I’ve seen firsthand government offices and even business offices completely ignore data driven approaches. Just recently, I proposed starting with the basics in the condo’s office, only to hear that without actual data they’re just pushing forward into a ticket system to solve all the problems. In time they will find it creates new ones, but that will be another story.

The point is that if you can’t even do data driven stuff, keep a volunteer website up when there’s international attention, the wave of artificial intelligence that will drive the world economy will leave many people stranded on islands, perhaps even twin island Republics. What will be done about this?

Maybe they’ll talk about it in Parliament. Then, if history repeats itself, nothing will happen.

Or, things could change. Things definitely should change, but those changes need to happen faster and faster as the government slides into the Pitch Lake, dragging it’s citizens with it. .

You Ain’t Just the Medium.

~ Taran ~ 7 Comments

There are some topics I’ve been writing about that people may not realize are connected, but they are. When I wrote about how we humans, we algorithms are doing bonsai on ourselves and artificial intelligences, it was not just happenstance.

We are a medium. Just one on the planet, but we are a medium, built upon a medium of a planet, and we’re building other mediums even while we interact in increasingly positive ways with other mediums as we grow to understand them.

The medium is the message.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man (1964)

This is important to understand. Regardless of how you believe this world came into being, we all should know by now about DNA and how we recognize that other living creatures also have DNA. Some of it is close to matching ours, but the results are different to us.

We’re a 96% match to chimpanzees, and I’m fairly certain chimpanzees know we’re very different from them in many ways.

Our DNA varies within our species as well, with what we call recessive and dominant genes and all their complexity of impacting everything from hair color to deciding whether our big toe is dominant on our feet or not.

We have social attributes, which could also be seen as mediums since they too are canvases upon we decorate our pieces of time. Language, culture, religion (or lack thereof) are some of the substrates upon which we grow our own mediums.

We aren’t just surrounded by information. We are information. We are history without words, a strand of our DNA tells us the path we traversed through time to get where we are.

It doesn’t tell us why we traversed the particular path we got here by. That’s for the archaeologists and others to piece together from fragments of physical history.

We are our own bonsai, where our trunk and branches show where we have grown from – the trail through time and the history of how we got where we are.

Each one of us, as an individual, has our own root system, our own trunk, our own branches. Each one of us is both medium and message, impacting our societal medium and message, all part of a planetary ecosystem of mediums and messages.

Everything we see has information, from the tree outside that has evolved over millions of years to that one specimen, to the street which follows a path dictated by many human variables.

If we stand back and look at our planet, allowing ourselves to fade into the background, we’re not too far of Douglas Adams‘ allegory of the Earth being a computer designed to figure out the meaning of life. In fact, many people who have read Douglas Adams don’t necessarily understand how true it is.

It’s sort of like the Gaia hypothesis, though there are issues with mixing metaphor with mechanism, among other things. Popular thought on evolution ascribes intentionality to evolution, as if there were some guide to it all, but adaptation to survive is quite possibly the only intention.

We tend to ascribe intention and look for intention where there may be none. Intention makes us feel more comfortable, but it isn’t necessarily true.

“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt (2002)

We tend to think ourselves the center of our universe of existence, and we often treat ourselves as the North Star of the planet. This is likely natural; everything we know, every bit of information we process, comes to us through our senses.

Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the “content,” which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)

This is why McLuhan balanced what he said in his over-used quote, “The medium is the message” with what was the technological equivalent of machine learning of his time: Radio.

Radio connected a world over distances previously daunting during that period, and while mostly a broadcast medium then, his focus needs to be understood.

Communication has evolved long beyond that in a little over half a century. ‘Programming’, now thanks to Web 2.0, is a matter of choosing people’s social media messages so they build their own narratives. Web 2.0 provided us the illusion of choice.

The medium was the message, the message became medium, the media became the message, and so on.

We forget that we, too, are medium, though we don’t altogether understand the message and maybe we’re in the process of finding out what that is.

It gets deeper, too, but I’ll leave you with one more quotation from McLuhan, who happened to say and write quite a few things that continue to make sense to this day.

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

Marshall McLuhan, “The Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation”, Dinner Address to Conference on 8 mm Sound Film and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 8 November 1961.

Google and The New York Times: A New Path?

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

A few days ago I mentioned the normalization of Web 2.0, and yesterday I ended up reading about The New York Times getting around $100 million over a period of 3 years from Google.

“…The deal gives the Times an additional revenue driver as news publishers are bracing for an advertising-market slowdown. The company posted revenue of $2.31 billion last year, up 11% from a year earlier. It also more than offsets the revenue that the Times is losing after Facebook parent Meta Platforms last year told publishers it wouldn’t renew contracts to feature their content in its Facebook News tab. The Wall Street Journal at the time reported that Meta had paid annual fees of just over $20 million to the Times…”

New York Times to Get Around $100 Million From Google Over Three Years, Wall Street Journal, May 8th, 2023.

That’s a definite punch in the arm for The New York Times, particularly with the ad revenue model that Web 2.0 delivered from. Will it lower the paywall to their articles? No idea.

This is a little amusing because just on May 2nd, the New York Times called out Google’s lack of follow through on defunding advertising related alongside content denying climate hoaxes.

Still, it may demonstrate the move to a more solid model for actual trusted sources of news, and that could be a good thing for all of us. Maybe.

Personally, if it reduces paywalled content while allowing the New York Times to be critical of those that hand them money… well. It could be a start.

Media Tourists

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

_Media TourismEvery morning I set aside my morning coffee to travel the world through my mobile phone as if it were a spaceship, hermetically sealed. I peer through the window as I travel from point to point I find of interest that morning. One moment I’m checking on my friends in Ukraine inobtrusively, keenly aware that there’s more spin than the media frenzy of a hurricane hitting the United States.

The next moment, I’ll visit friends and family throughout the world as I read their Facebook posts. Then I’ll look at what the talking heads of tech think is important enough to hype, then I’ll deep dive into a few of them to discreetly consider most of it nonsense. I am a weathered traveler of space and time, and the Internet my generation extended around the world has not been wasted on me. I am a tourist of tourists, as are we all. It’s what we humans do.

When people take those all inclusive vacations to resorts, they get to see a sanitized version of the country they are visiting that doesn’t reflect the reality of that country. You’ll hear people talking about when they visited this place or that, and how wonderful this or that was – you’ll rarely hear what was wrong with the country because… well, that would be bad for tourism, and tourism is about selling a dream to people who want to dream, much like politics, but with a more direct impact on revenue that politicians can waste.

Media, and by extension, social media, are much the same. We see what’s ‘in the frame’ of the snapshot we are giving, and that framing makes us draw conclusions about a place. A culture. A religion, or not. An event. A person.
Some of us believe that we’re seeing everything clearly, as in the image at the top of this post. You can look at any point in the picture and see detail, but that’s not how we really see it, and therefore, in our mind, it’s not the way it is. What we see is subject to the ‘red dots’ I wrote of, things looking for our attention directed consciously by someone else (marketing/advertising) and by subconsciously by our own biases.

_Media Tourism perspectiveThe reality of our experiences is usually more like something to the right. Our focus is drawn by red dots and biases, and in the periphery other things are there, poorly defined.  This example is purely visual. And because we generally like what we see, there’s generally a positive emotion with what we see that reinforces wanting to see it again.

This is not new, and it can be good and bad. These days an argument could be made that the red dots of society have run amok.

A group of really smart people with really good intentions created a system that connects human experiences across the planet in a way that is significantly faster than before. Some of our ancestors could not send a message around the world within their lifetime, and here are presently discussing milliseconds to nanoseconds as if we even would notice a millisecond passing ourselves. Our framing was simpler before, we didn’t have nearly as significant a communicating global network back then. Technologies that spread things faster range from the wheel to sailing to flight to the Internet, in broad strokes. As Douglas Adams would write, “Startling advances in twig technology…”

_venn-diagram-41217_960_720However we got here, here we are.

If one group has a blue focus, another purple, another yellow, we get overlaps in framing and the immediate effect has been for everyone to go off in their corners and discuss all that is blue, purple and yellow respectively.

An optimist might say that eventually, the groups will recognize the overlaps in the framing and maybe do a bit better at communicating, but it doesn’t seem like we’re very near that yet. A pessimist will say that it will never happen, and the realist will have to decide the way forward.

I’m of the opinion that it’s our duty as humans to work toward increasing the size of our frames as much as possible so that we have a better understanding of what’s going on within our frame. I don’t know that I’m right, and I don’t know that I’m wrong. If I cited history, the victories would be few that way – there’s always some domination that seems to happen. Personally, I don’t see any really dominant perspective, just a bunch of polarized frames throwing rocks at each other from a distance.

We’ll get so wrapped up in things that we forget sometimes that there’s room for more than one perspective, as difficult as it may be for people to understand. We’ll forget our small knowledge of someone else’s frame does not define their frame, but defines our frame. We forget that we’re just tourists of frames, we visit as long as we wish but do not actually live in a different frame.

Sounds messy? You bet. And all of that mess is being used to train large language models.  Could it homogenize things? Should it? I am fairly certain we’re not ready for that conversation, but like talking about puberty and sex with a teenager… we do seem a bit late on the subject.

I’m just a cybertourist visiting your prison, as you visit mine. Please don’t look under the carpet.

Media Responsibility and Learning.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

I often cringe when I read what people share on social media. Aside from the inner proofreader that was so necessary as a youth, I run across things like, “TTPS: Illegal entry into T&T is a crime“.

What else is illegal that is a crime? 

If the goal was to make the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service look illiterate – mission accomplished. If the goal was to make The Morning Brew, a local program, look a bit foolish – mission accomplished. And it’s there for all the world to see.

If you watch the video, though, the headline is does not represent what was actually said – a distillation that demonstrates a lack of thought and consideration.

Who came up with this headline, and do they even understand their mistake?

This prompted me to immediately mock it, of course – pondering with a friend as to what else that is illegal might be a crime.

Murder is illegal, so is it a crime?  Littering is illegal, so is it a crime? And so on and so forth – which amused me for a few minutes, but then it struck me:

There are people who may seriously be thinking in that way.

Words have a power all their own, and the way we all learn is not by reading dictionaries but through context.

So yes, I’m picking on this particular headline, which is unfair. In a world where all too often people share without reading the associated link, we’re implicitly showing people how to communicate by example. There could be a secondary school student right now writing an essay that may reach pull the ‘illegal’ and ‘crime’ thing out of their bag unwittingly… only to be openly mocked by an English teacher and their class.

Why? Because they made the mistake of learning from a media headline.

The Failure To Communicate. [Updated 22 Aug 2018]

~ Taran ~ 4 Comments

Giant cucumbers from Doug and Ariana.
Cucumbers, which are not sex toys, provided here as a neutral image for this article. Use through a Creative Commons License which can be found by clicking the image.

I found yesterday (21 Aug 2018) that I had made an error in this; the Customs Act does in fact have something on obscene materials. The mistake I made was in assuming that they had searchable text. They do not have searchable text in the PDFs they have online, something worthy of note – but not an excuse. Lesson learned. 

When the Great Ban on Sex Toys in Trinidad and Tobago was announced, I was both slightly amused and curious. It’s not that I write about such topics, it’s that I’m human and that Trinidad and Tobago in it’s entirety doesn’t cease to surprise me when it comes to odd things.

You see, there were articles written as if it weren’t a developing story – there was no notation, as an example, that the Government of Trinidad and Tobago’s Customs and Excise Division website did not make mention of ‘sex toys’. Of course, maybe it just wasn’t updated, but a search of the Trinidad and Tobago Gazette didn’t reveal any new changes either. That took me less than 30 minutes to go through as an uninterested person, not a journalist. And I’m not a lawyer. So it seems to be a spurious claim, one that doesn’t jive. Update: Section 45 l of the Customs Act does mention things that can be related to ‘sex toys’, but not directly. 

The law being quoted is Section 46(g) of the Criminal Offences Act which says: “Any person who offers for sale or distribution or who exhibits to public view any profane, indecent, or obscene, paper, print, drawing, painting or representation may be deemed a rogue and a vagabond and if found liable, to imprisonment for two years.” Update: They were quoting the wrong law in the article. The Customs Act was the appropriate Act to quote, which would have been 45 L. 

It says nothing about importation. Granted, the last group of people I’d want to know what I do with myself would be the government and it’s employees, but the published Acts and Amendments related to Customs and Excise says nothing about sex toys, or anything profane, indecent, or obscene…

So I’m writing this, despite my misgivings about the topic, because to me the topic at issue is not sex toys, but instead appropriate research for an article that is supposed to inform the public. There is a big question here that, sure, Ministers should be able to answer – but they’re ducking it.

Selling the items is one thing. Importing for personal use seems to be quite another.

And while I wouldn’t want to know what the government would tax on sex toys, given how much I paid on a simple book recently, I don’t know that anyone would think it worthwhile – but articles that are about an alleged ban of importation of sex toys doesn’t make sense to anyone who bothers with a short amount of research.

And can someone, please, give a legal definition of a sex toy that isn’t subjective?

This is a failure of the media, in my eyes, though my eyes see the world differently than others. I view the media’s job to inform and question appropriately. The very first article should have been able to say that no one has mentioned the laws related to customs and excise, that the law quoted was about the sale of the items.

This has blaring questions attached that are so apparent that they might as well be painted bright neon pink.

And made to vibrate.

Now, if they start dealing with Internet Enabled… devices… and privacy issues, such as this data breach, I’ll write more about it. But to me, this is all about improper communication from the people we depend on to communicate.