articles: hate debunking, long dogs and pubs
I have a lot of posts in drafts and a weeknotes I'm trying to finish. Sometimes you just have to write something else.
Someone's been writing this graffiti all over town
File it under "I fucking knew it": "Hate brings views": Confessions of a London fake news TikToker. I'm glad this is being reported on, and there are people who do actually care about trying to shine a light on where this stuff is coming from and what the motivation behind it is. In this case, literally just making money, and the mindset behind these quotes is so fucking bleak:
The TikToker appears to have no concept of the potential real-world impact of his uploads, instead considering everything in terms of view counts and pieces of content. He even suggests that Wasserstrum should not be concerned by London Centric’s reporting because our own video didn’t attract anything like as many viewers as his original hate-filled fake uploads.
“It wasn’t racist,” the man says of his account. He argues that if the videos had really been racist, TikTok’s algorithm would have downgraded the content. Instead, he was rewarded with millions of views. He was just an entrepreneur following a simple content strategy: “Every single video I would basically copy paste the same thing. I wrote down ‘illegal migrants’.”
I'm a big pub fan. I recently read this article from a photographer who decided to document pub culture in Yorkshire starting in the 1970s. The photographs are great and it's a fantastic rabbit hole - he ends up talking about becoming a photographer for a legendary blue singer, Champion Jack Dupree, who'd ended up marrying a Northern woman and moving to Halifax. I came to it via one of Boak and Bailey's round ups on pub writing.
A lot of the discussions about pubs intersect with similar discussions on the internet about third spaces, although I guess there's the complication of adding alcohol. I like reading in pubs, writing in pubs, my boyfriend and I will go there to do crosswords. They can be in-between spaces where you go to kill time before something else, or a social destination themselves.
Finally, I recently learned that a cross between a sighthound and another sighthound is called a Longdog.