29 April 2024
I saw a Facebook post from a friend that caught my interest. A weird thing happened to him on the morning of the 17th of April; he explained it as something from a horror movie. He had a doorbell where he had never put batteries in the ringer unit, but despite the lack of batteries at 6:30 am it started to ring, and continued to ring as he picked it up and shook it to double check it didn't have batteries. Indeed, it didn't.
30 October 2023
I recently received a friend request from Judy Eliassan, the office admin for the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists - an Auckland-based organisation I'm involved with that fights for secularisation of our country. This friend request was odd, as I was a little surprised that I wasn't already friends with her. But at first glance the account looked legitimate, as we already had a mutual friend. So, not thinking too much of it, I clicked the Accept button. A couple of hours later I realised that, no, I was already Facebook friends with the real Judy, and the account I had just friended was a cloned account (the cloned account is on the right below):
6 March 2023
Have you ever received spam messages from an obscure Christian church on Facebook? I did, and it led me down a rabbit hole into the mysterious world of Eastern Lightning. I started investigating Eastern Lightning, aka the Fellowship, aka The Church of the Almighty God, at the end of January. A cult-like, doomsday Christian church, I joined the religion on the 1st of February. It's been a long and gruelling month. I have lots to share, but for this week I'll try to analyse what I've managed to find out about their local membership.
12 December 2022
In this week's newsletter I look at a video I watched recently on Facebook, promising a life hack for getting more bang for your buck when it comes to disposable batteries. Although, from what I can tell, the only bang you're likely to get with this hack is exploding batteries.
29 August 2022
At The Society for Science Based Healthcare we believe that public health measures in New Zealand should have a clear basis in science and evidence, and we work to counter misinformation in New Zealand. Over the years, our complaints had made many a few people unhappy, especially people from alternative medicine organisations. We've had people throw insults at us, rant against us, call us racists, personally target us on social media and threaten us with a lawsuit, all because we asked: "where is the evidence?".
25 April 2022
A friend (Gaylene Middleton from the New Zealand Humanists) contacted me on the weekend as she had been messaged by one of her Facebook friends about a Government Grants assistance program she is apparently eligible to receive funds from. She immediately looked up the name of the program - Federal Grant For Family Home And Care Support (FGHS) - and found an article warning that it was a scam, and then she messaged me to double check and because she thought I may be interested in it. Here are the messages she received from her FB friend, which she passed on to me (apologies for the really bad grammar):
22 November 2021
For those who use Facebook - you may have seen a video advert recently using Jacinda Ardern as a way to promote a cryptocurrency. Obviously this is fake - Jacinda does not want you to “invest” your money in any crypto currency, and it's very likely that there's not even a real crypto currency or crypto company - just a website that will get you to transfer your hard earned money to scammers. Even if there was a real cryptocurrency involved, you would likely lose most or all of the money you risked. I saw people talking about this scam on Facebook, but I have enough layers of ad blocking at home that it proved too hard to get Facebook to show me any adverts at all, so I don't have a copy of the video.
26 October 2021
I'll preface this by saying that this is a topic I'm certainly not qualified to talk about.
13 September 2021
I've written in the past about Sue Grey, the lawyer and past candidate for The Outdoors Party. She's an out and out conspiracy theorist and her Facebook page is a magnet for the most rabid anti-vaxxers.
2 August 2021
Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.
2 August 2021
In good news this week, Facebook has finally shut down the anti-vax, conspiracy-theory-mongering group Voices for Freedom's page. They're upset:
12 April 2021
Research by the American Center for Countering Digital Hate has revealed that almost two-thirds of all misinformation about vaccines being spread on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter arose from just twelve individuals and their associated organisations. And on Facebook they account for 73% of all anti-vax content.
2 April 2017
13 December 2015
Australian Anti-vaccination activist's 11 week old daughter hospitalised for whooping cough, which kills 1 in 200 children who pick up the infection.
1 May 2013
Alison Campbell has been spending time on Facebook recently.