A text message from Sharon's sister
Not popping her bottom at the camera this time
When is somebody going to teach people my age that uploading photographs on Facebook is not the equivalent of keeping them in an album at home and showing them to friends and family when and if you want to?
Facebook is the internet, and it’s by definition the most public medium of all, accessible by billions of people the world over, people who know you, people who don’t know you, people who give a damn and people who don’t.
Fixing some privacy settings isn’t going to keep your photographs or your stupid comments/conversations private. Any one of the people who have access can copy anything you put on Facebook and do what he or she likes with it – send it on, upload it on their own Facebook page or dispatch it this blog.
A lot of people – mainly the younger crowd – understand this. But the older crowd don’t. They see the internet as a closed world that is separate from the rest of their lives, when really it is the most open world of all.
Sharon Ellul Bonici’s sister appears to be one of them. Oblivious to the fact that Sharon herself uploaded that ‘bottom photograph’ on her own Facebook page, presumably because she was so thrilled with it and wanted to show it to people, she has taken umbrage at me for giving it a wider audience here.
I have just received this text message from her:
“I am Sharon’s sister. I have never bothered you. So please do not use me on your blog. I am now telling you nicely. Next time I won’t be so nice, so kiss my ass.”
No, thank you, Sharon’s sister. There may be some around who’d get a kick out of kissing your ass, but I’m not one of them.
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Daphne is Sharon’s sister a public figure as well? See you in church. Very Christian of you to involve people who have never done you any harm. What goes around comes around.
[Daphne – Does Sharon’s sister’s face show? Only her bottom does, and she consented to the photograph and presumably – unless her sister foxed her – to it being uploaded on the internet for all to see.]
Oooooh, is that a threat? Or a promise?
If she didnt want people to make fun of her, she shouldn’t have let her sister post a picture on Facebook, end of story. L-ewwel jaxquha then they moan and groan.
That’s why it’s called the world wide web. Once you post something the whole wide world can see it. It’s not the internet’s fault but your own.
We, the younger generation, learned this through using chatting programmes. Copying the picture or not is irrelevant. One can also simply post a link to your site without copying the actual photograph. Yes, the younger generation understood this during the 1990s.
I don’t think that this is a question of how Christian a person is Oscar. I don’t know if you use Facebook, Oscar, but whoever posts pictures on Facebook is giving the option to people to post a comment on them. So both Sharon and her sister and for that matter Consuelo Scerri Herrera were asking for it.
Did I miss something? Was saying ‘kiss my ass’ telling you nicely?
In the last few weeks you’ve given Malta a Facebook complex. Do you know how many of my Maltese Facebook friends have either removed themselves altogether (they are not magistrates or judges) or have removed all their pics or limited access to their data – “ma tmurx Daphne tavvilina”. Most of these are total nonentities, so why Daphne ser tavvilihom totally beats me. Most of the ones gone are the “fun and games” menopausal/andropausal ones.
[Daphne – I’m planning on writing a piece about arrested development in Maltese adults. It’s true that wherever you go in the world, the age cohort 35-55 is the most disillusioned, hence the mid-life crisis. But I’ve had no experience other than in Malta of seeing people in their 40s speak, behave and sometimes even dress exactly the same way they did at 20. Sometimes I find myself at a party with the weirdest sensation of being back at a Neptunes disco, but with bingo wings and hair loss. What happened? Our parents’ generation were not like that. They grew up.]
Now I have two things to say about that. The first is that as I had foreseen you’ve ruined my bit of fun, and the second is that I find these people somewhat hypocritical. Why is it OK if it’s your friends who are seeing you play the fool, but another thing if the same pics are seen by others?
Why post pics that you’re embarrassed of in the first place? Speaking for myself, “dik Daphne li tavvilina” can browse through all my pics on Facebook and my PC in general and paste any she likes on her blog – simply because I have no embarrassing pics and if I did the last thing I would do is upload them on Facebook.
I’m not a public figure nor am I a prude, but just respectful of myself, my family and society in general. I get the impression (and this mainly with Maltese friends of a certain age) that they seem to compete in exposing their “naughtiness” to their “friends list” – as evidence of kemm huma hipp u with it! Ah but God forbid the rest of Malta sees it – AHJAR MA NGHID XEJN.
Having said that, in my opinion the “kiss my ass” pic was innocuous. It’s just two sisters having fun, so I don’t see why they should have taken offence to it’s being posted on the blog.
[Daphne – They took offence because it suddenly dawned on one of them that she’s a Labour politician, so perhaps showing her bottom to the camera and uploading the result of Facebook wasn’t such a great idea, even for a candidate of a progressive movement.]
The one on the Berlin wall shows a degree of immaturity. To any average sensible person the Berlin wall would not have inspired mirth and taking pics in silly poses – but perhaps a reflection of what man is capable of doing to members of his same race and in this case, nation.
I get very much the same sensation. I come down to Malta twice or three times a year and I find most of my friends more ‘out there’ each year. Some of them are actually behaving worse than they did when they were 16, because now they have some money and no parental constraints.
Now even those who back then were nerds have pepped up. I find myself like an observer at most of the social events I attend in Malta, even those with my ‘best friends’.
There are two elements which I think instigate this behaviour in middle-aged Maltese (and no, I have never yet met any people my age who behave like that in the country where I live now).
In Malta, everybody now has to be the best. Everybody is oozing ‘happiness’ and ‘money’ even if they’re indebted to their nose. Hence they have to make merry in the most ostentatious fashion to prove to everybody how happy they are.
[Daphne – I agree with you. And that accounts for the Facebook phenomenon of people in their 30s, 40s and 50s plastering the internet with ‘out on the razzle’ photographs showing them displaying their wares in swimming-pools, on boats, in restaurants, at parties, drunk or not drunk, champagne, holidays, and so on. Above all, it’s just so very naff that I can’t get my head round it. This kind of showing off used to be considered a New Money thing. Now even those who have had money for some generations are jumping on board the ‘look at me’ bus. What are they afraid of – that their peers might run away with the idea that they don’t ‘have a life’?]
Then to keep up with the Joneses they force their husband’s nose to the grindstone, to pay the loans and their capricci. So the men are never with their families and then suspicions of infidelity start creeping in. Because they fear that this putative Other Woman is almost certainly going to be younger (Musumeci is the exception here), they start competing with that imaginary younger woman in their heads.
It’s a little different where I live now. People are not looking at each other and competing all the time. Yes, they try to make money and to live comfortably, but they do so for themselves, because they enjoy their pleasures, and not to be one up on their peers.
They don’t normally give a rat’s arse about what their neighbours are doing. Then there’s divorce, which means that women are not so desperately clinging on to their husbands, nor their husbands clinging on to a fiction. When a man tires of his wife (or a woman tires of her husband) and they find somebody else, they do so publicly and divorce – end of story.
Another thing about this country where I live now is that most women of our age and our sort of social background, Daphne, work. They have a real life, as opposed to a fantasy one. They don’t hang around cafes and play tennis at the Marsa, or its equivalent, which is tantamount to begging the devil to find ‘work’ for idle hands.
Sitting here at a distance and looking on, I know that the more time I spend away from Malta, the less I have in common with the Maltese of my generation, especially the women.
[Daphne – You don’t have to live away from Malta to feel that way. I live here, and I feel exactly the same way about it. I might as well be from another planet.]
‘In Malta, everybody now has to be the best. Everybody is oozing ‘happiness’ and ‘money’ even if they’re indebted to their nose. Hence they have to make merry in the most ostentatious fashion to prove to everybody how happy they are.’
I think Italians are very much ostentatious in this sort of way, hence the ‘bella vita’:clothes, cars and lifestyle. Italians I know blame it on the sudden economic success of many Italians in the 1960s and 70s. Could have something similar happened in Malta?
[Daphne – I think the person who wrote that other comment might actually live in Italy.]
@dudu – I live in Italy. I agree that Italians like the best in everything. They all want to drive a Ferrari, eat and dine in the best restaurants and wear the latest designer clothes etc.
However, you missed my point – most of them (there are exceptions of course) do it for themselves. I’ll give you an example. It makes me laugh when I come to Malta and everybody is flashing their designer labels. If a pair of Armani jeans has an inside label nobody would buy it in Malta. Here in Italy, people actually look for designer clothes without labels.
The Maltese have not realised that their D&G and Armani labels are considered terribly naff elsewhere. The really classy people do not buy pret-a-porter: that’s the lower level designer wear with labels on the outside.
The real designer stuff has no labels. What’s more, anybody considered to have any taste would never ever show more than one brand name at most. If you’re wearing a Chanel bag, unless you’re a total “cafone” you don’t ever flash another six or seven brands -as I’ve seen in Malta.
Same goes for the rest. I can’t imagine anybody picking up their kids from school in a Ferrari. Ferraris are driven on the highway usually in rallies with other Ferraris.
Also, Italy is a very big country (things come into perspective when one realises that the province I live in – not the region, the province – is twice the size of Malta) so it’s difficult to generalise.
Some people in the big cities like Milan or Rome do move in certain circles and may have a certain degree of exclusivity and follow stereotyped behaviour such as holidaying in Cortina D’Ampezzo in a certain period. However, believe me – there we’re talking mega bucks rich. We’re not talking of Maltese middle class ‘rich’.
And one final comment, I must clarify that I’m only referring to a certain sector of Maltese society. Not everybody is like that, and the irony of it is that the Maltese who are really and truly rich hide it. They live very much out of the limelight and park their yachts in Porto Fino and party in their farmhouses in Tuscany. Trust me.
Marie. When people venture out of their homes, they are also exposing themselves to public contact. Now the Christian way of acknowledging someone would be to nod, say “Hi”, smile at them etc. The un-Christian way would be to slap them, spit at them (just for being someone’s sister) and ridicule them. One can, of course, add a comment to a picture. Either to compliment or vilify. If that is your preference, then ‘Peace be with you too”.
[Daphne – Let’s not drag religion into it, shall we?]
Oscar: Plenty of Christians slap and spit and many non-Christians nod, say “Hi” and smile.
Why not? “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s …ox, nor his ass.”
In ancient Rome anyone who was not Roman or Greek was considered to be a barbarian. The Christian way of life is just one of many others.
I am not a Christian and I don’t go around slapping and spitting at people. Perhaps you chose those words out of habit and without Cthinking too much, but you should be aware that non-Christians could find such comments very offensive.
This echos everyone telling me yesterday ‘taf li ma jiswiex laham illum?’ Feel free to practise your rituals, but understand and accept the fact that we do not all have the same religious beliefs and that some of us have no religious beliefs at all.
I use Facebook and I don’t give permission to anyone EXPECT my friends to see and comment on my pictures. Defenitely Daphne does not have my permission to use/publish the pictures.
[Daphne – I don’t need your permission if they’re online already, John. This isn’t hard to understand. When you upload photographs on the internet, you have breached your own privacy. You cannot then complain that somebody else has breached your privacy by uploading that same picture elsewhere on the internet. Posting on the internet is publication, no matter how many privacy settings you might use. If you don’t want your photographs to be public, keep them at home on your hard drive or a DVD, or print them out and stick them in an album.]
I still have all the rights on my pictures even though I “publish” them on Facebook to my close circle of friend.
[Daphne – That’s copyright you’re talking about, not the right to privacy. It’s a completely different law.]
Making copies of them is like copying software/music or videos. It is intellectual property and you need the authorisation of the owner to publish them/make copies.
[Daphne – It’s more complicated than you think. For a start, you must have a professional interest. This clearly does not apply to people taking fun pictures of their friends. Secondly, you have to be prepared to sue for breach of copyright. No one can be bothered with that, which is why people who do have a professional interest take it for granted that anything they upload on the internet might be re-used without their permission on other sites. They allow for that, and where they do not wish to do so, they ‘watermark’ the picture as professional picture agencies do, or make downloads possible only after payment.]
The only think you can do is write on the photos that it is prohibited to copy your pictures. But then anyone can still paste a link to them.
It’s amazing how you nit pick parts of my comments. Well so much for democracy. One day I’ll put up my own blog making fun of the comments you conveniently do not publish.
[Daphne -I do so to save you from yourself. As for setting up your own blog, go ahead. It’s been tried before.]
Pasting a link to photos is OK. Obviously only my close circle of friends are allowed in so no matter how much you paste links only my friends will be allowed in. Copying them is not. Publishing them is even worse. Digital photos are in the end made up of same 1’s and 0’s that make up software and digital videos and digital music.
[Daphne – Again, you’re confusing private and commercial interests. The laws governing each are different.]
Publishing a photo on Facebook to my close circle of friends is not the same as publishing a video clip on Youtube. You get the difference Mrs. Caruana Galizia? You are infringing intellectual property. You are breaking the law.
[Daphne – No, I am not. Photos uploaded voluntarily on Facebook are de facto not private, because you upload them to be seen by others. The law does not allow you to select those others, unless there is a specific interest, as with internet banking (your bank’s employees only). Uploading your pictures onto Facebook and expecting the law to help you in restricting access to these 100 people but not those other 100 people is like printing them on a leaflet, giving it out to 100 people, and then trying to call in the law when one of the leaflets ends up in the street being looked at by strangers. Publication is publication, whether it’s on the internet, in print or broadcast, and the sooner you and other sillies understand this, the better.]
Daphne, with your reasoning I can copy the logo of HSBC for example and make use of it as I deem fit.
[Daphne – No. Logos and trademarks have specific protection at law.]
It’s only a picture after all and they publish it on their website so it’s public property. No, it’s not. HSBC never wrote do not copy this logo on their website. But it’s still illegal to copy it.
[Daphne – You are confusing matters.]
Victor Scerri just won an interesting case in court because ONE TV published a telephone conversation without his consent. I agree with Victor Sammut 100%. What about taking you to court for publishing my pictures without my consent?
[Daphne – Again, you are ill-informed and confused. Victor Scerri did not take Super One to court. He filed a complaint with the Broadcasting Authority, which has the authority to fine broadcasters if they are in breach of ethics (not the law, which is handled by the law courts). Journalistic ethics decree that when you interview somebody over the telephone or in person, you require their permission before recording them. Broadcast journalism has a sanctioning body – the Broadcasting Authority. Published journalism does not, so anyone who has a telephone interview recorded by a newspaper without his permission has no means of recourse to a sanctioning body. But then the recording of interviews without consent is an irrelevance there because newspapers cannot play back quotes, unless it is via an online portal.]
Daphne, no doubt you know lots about the use of the Internet but you are getting something fundamentally wrong. The Web is a combination of the Internet, Extranets and Intranets. The basic distinction comes through security settings which you refer to privacy settings. These are implemented using software, firewalls, routers, switches, etc… With the right tools I can bypass your home PC privacy settings once your PC is connected to the internet – that’s illegal but technically possible. It is also technically possible (with the right tools/method) to bypass the Facebook privacy settings in a similar way that I can bypass your PC privacy settings.
[Daphne – I know all that. But round here, we have to use simple language, because there are people about who don’t know the difference between GDP and the Central Bank’s reserves, or between a family photograph and the logo of an international conglomerate. In fact, to prove your point that everything on the internet can be tracked and traced, we’ve even managed to identify the person who is obsessively hovering over my Wikipedia entry (which I didn’t upload, by the way) and sabotaging it. He used to be in my eldest son’s class at school as it turns out. And we’ve even managed to link him to a person who repeatedly posts comments on this blog, which I don’t upload, using ‘random’ IP numbers ranging from Khazakstan to Illinois. I guess I’m going to have to ring his mother. He’s more of a danger to himself than anyone else really – your classic Lord of the Rings bearded loner.]
I know more or less what I’m talking about. I’m in I.T. (reading for a B.Sc (Hons) degree).
In short. Once you upload them to Facebook, they automatically belong to Facebook which is open to all (regardless of privacy settings).
Since it is open and on their server anybody can use the photo just as long as it doesn’t have a copyright.
Usually if you obtain a copyright (or want to fake a copyright) you still need to place a watermark on the photo to show it is copyrighted (or the person copying the photo will just say there was no indication that it was copyrighted and case is closed).
I have some copyright nonsense on my profile, but I know I cannot take anybody to court with it. It’s there to scare the misinformed away.
If you remove your photos, the references from your account to the Facebook database to the Facebook storage devices, will be set to null from your point of view, although the photos are still on the storage device and ultimately Zuckerburg still has access to them.
Get this, every single photo uploaded from you drinking tequila out of a hookers’ ass to you making silly faces on your webcam will never be erased from Facebook. They harvest all that and that’s one of the reasons why buying Facebook is so valuable.
A trademark is different. To be able to sue somebody for it, you must own it legally.
HSBC owns and pays for their trademarks. You are free to use the HSBC logo and open up another Bank call it Aychesbeesee.
You’d get sued, because its’ their intellectual property legally speaking.
Actually she should have started her text: “I am Sharon’s sister’s ass…”
If ” … kiss my ass” is considered nice I wonder what “Next time I won’t be so nice” would amount to. No need to satisfy my curiosity.
What a cheek. No pun intended.
Sorry all. Mentioning Christian is force of habit (pun intended). Seeing that most of you support the (holy) NP, I was under the impression that you would all be church going Christians (you know, anti abortion, anti divorce etc). No insult intended.
[Daphne – X’mohh maghluq. And by your reasoning, everyone who supports Labour is a divorced gay racist who may or may not have had an abortion or tried to stop his pregnant ex from leaving the country just in case she had one?]
The’re businessmen too now, Daphne, in case you forgot.
Daph, most children of 12 know that plopping something onto the internet means you’ve given the world the opportunity to see it. Amazing how some adults over 40 fail to understand this.
What really concerns me, and, I believe, some other people my age is that when we were taking silly photos in our teens (1972 to 1979 in my case, a little later in yours) we never dreamed of the idea of someone scanning them and posting them on a medium which anyone in the world could access. Computers were a magical thing which NASA had (and which Mintoff famously said he would never allow to come to Malta). Only a select few people over 50 could have imagined, when they were 16, that one day everyone would have a computer, that it could store and display photos and that it could be linked with any other computer in the world.
When my elder brother (only two years older) decided to take the incredible step of taking a ‘computer course’ around 1975 he had to go to London, and he made use of machines the size of wardrobes with huge reel-to-reel tapes that stored data – and they still couldn’t print a photo.
Those ‘stupid’ photos – never intended to be seen by any but close friends and relatives – can now be seen by anyone, anywhere.
Now THAT is rather unfair. We were never warned.
[Daphne – Another difference between then and now: then, when somebody brought out a camera at a party, everyone piled in with a silly face or a smile. Now, the best to disperse people at a social event is to bring out that camera.]
Daphne, mohhi miftuh aktar milli tahseb! By your reasoning, anyone who supports Labour is a moron. By your reasoning, anyone who does not support your point of view should be shot. You would have fitted in nicely in the Gozo of the 1960’s! You know, stone them and all that. I stopped supporting Labour in 1977 (GWU marriage) but will never let myself be brainwashed by Net or Super 1 or by the 1981perverse,perverse, perverse brigade. The latter never mention the 1971close shave. Several thousand vote majority for the MLP and innumerable recounts requested by the PN to create a 1981 perverse, perverse result. That’s political dishonesty at its worst.
There is a huge difference between 1971 and 1981.
To start with “the several thousand vote majority in 1971” was just over 2800 and less than the nationalist majority of 1981 (4100).
The 1981 rip-off was the result of a deliberate plan by Labour in government. It came as no surprise to anyone but readers of l-orrizont or Dardir Malta viewers. It was repeatedly pointed out to Labour BEFORE the election that the crazy districts would produce the result they eventually did. But what did labour care? They’d planned it all along.
It was also followed by the continuation of the strategy geared at turning us into the North Korea of the Mediterranean.
Intellectual dishonesty? Your post is a textbook definition of it.
It is also an insult to all those of us who lived through those times and watched the MLP make us ashamed to be Maltese (a trait it has not yet abandoned).
But keep at it. Its the sort of reasoning which keeps labour in opposition. Sure, Labour might win the next election as things stand, but the only way is down and Labour is great at that.
Hey, there’s the Winter Olympics on, I wonder if we could persuade the IOC to create a new event combining the slalom gigante with the discesa libera. We’d send Joey, Toni and the inspector and maybe one of them would come back with Malta’s first gold medal in an olympic event…..
Daphne, you are the only person who is using other people’s photos from Facebook, until now, no one ever did this sort of trash. If it’s stuff we have a right to know, well and good, but now you have gone too far as you are using ordinary people to attack, nobodies, leave private people alone, as you are getting on alot of people’s nerves.
[Daphne – Try telling Sharon Ellul Bonici she’s a nobody. Another point: I’m not the only one using Facebook photographs. But I am one of the few with a blog to post them on. See Michael Carabott’s comment elsewhere.]
Jason, a magistrate should never indulge in these shenanigans. Her vulgarity makes her a liability to the justice system. Or are you so ashamed of all this that now you are calling those who blew the whistle on this magistrate and her lover character assassins? You want omerta. We need to expose those ‘saints by day, sinners by night’ who make a mockery of our institutions and make themselves liable to blackmail.
I read with glee. Facebook is a mass medium that is evolving and morphing all the time. It all began with MySpace and Beebo and the real phenomenon that struck me was the way the Maltese reacted to social networking sites.
While many use it to keep in touch with friends and family and to state their thoughts and moods, the Maltese decided to go one further.
Invite upon invite accosted my in-box from people I have never even met, let alone feel comfortable with having as a friend (a real life friend).
It almost seems as if the Maltese decided they would use Facebook to create a virtual Malta where it is considered rude to refuse a ‘friend’ invitation from people you don’t even know.. sheer madness.
Many people use Facebook and they use it sensibly. You will see that the vast majority of youngsters (let’s call it the 18-30 bracket) will upload loads of stuff – photos, links, jokes…. And get this.. .they don’t quite give a damn about what they have posted.
Why? Because they are not supposed to. They are still growing up. It’s all part of the fun to show your tanned body at the beach. It’s fun to show people your holiday snaps.
But it’s definitely not clever to upload a picture of yourself with a dodgy cigarette, or a compromising photograph with members of the opposite sex. This is what the youngsters understand and the ‘grown-ups’ do not.
Younger people will show you exactly what they want to show you. Older people, unfortunately, think that if they click a setting or two it will all be private.
The people who were 20- or 30-something during the 1980s had no life as the rest of Europe did. Now, we are supposedly European, liberal and modern.
So, in an effort to claw back time, this ‘lost’ generation shows off its wares on Facebook and then complains when people say “Look at that tart” and “Oh my god, look at that prick next to her with the greased hair that’s combed over.”
It’s just the way it is. When you browse, you will come across links to profiles and whatnot and if people have uploaded pics of you, or tagged you then that’s it – you’re fair game.
If you don’t want people to see you half-naked looking like a prat, then don’t bloody well upload stuff like that.
Everyone’s on Facebook. If you post a pic of yourself half dressed looking like a bleached blonde scarecrow, you can guarantee that people you don’t know will be sniggering at you and forwarding links to their mates on MSN before you can say “shite”.
Don’t these people know that if you Google-search a name, you are provided with their Facebook page as a first result?
Nuts. Humans are gossip machines. They always have and always will be. What you do on the most public medium in the world will inevitably be shared by all who use it.
She’s threatening you by SMS. Deserves a police report I think. I wouldn’t let it go.
This exhibitionism has gone too far. Last Christmas, I was at a friend’s Christmas party, and someone was clicking away with a camera. I accepted to be photographed thinking it was just pics for the host.
A week later they were plastered on a Sunday magazine. This is really quite ridiculous.
@John Tabone
If you think that it’s OK for “close friends” to see your pics on Facebook, you’re in for a surprise. It’s so often I get links from friends to have a look at other friends’ ridiculous pics (some a lot more compromising than the magistrate’s), to have a good laugh.
I find facebook an excellent way to keep in touch with some of my yonks-gone-by close friends, immediate family etc, particularly since I studied overseas, some of my family is abroad etc.
It is a great place to put so much of my life in one place to share ….but with whome I choose
Since I created my facebook space, I have all my privacy settings set to “Only Friends”.
This means that only the people I have accepted as my friends can see ANYTHING about me.
In any search (Google, Facebook or otherwise), if I have not accepted you as my friend on facebook, you will see absolutely nothing about me, not even my profile picture if I want to, which is the only image I have left “public”.
Nobody except my direct friends can see what I write, reply, or whatever.
The crux of the matter is that you have to implicity trust your friends on facebook. That is the ticket.
And it is why I have the astronomical number of 16 friends. I trust them all not to do anything with the information they have access to.
Not that anyone else would give a rat’s ass anyway lol !
I am by no means a public figure, but I still have these settings, because I feel comfortable like that.
This is the downfall of public figures. They accept any Tom Dick or Harry as friends (tigiex tghidli they implicitly trust 1,195 people !), and may also have their privacy settings on “Friends of Friends”.
They are therefore allowing all the thousands of friends, of those 1,195 friends of theirs, to access their information !
The multiple numbers of who can see “all of you”, therefore become many, many, many thousands.
That’s where control on facebook is lost.
As I said, it is however possible to only allow whoever you very specifically choose, to see whatever you specifically wish.
In fact, if I wanted to, I could completely obliterate my very existance on facebook by selecting the option there is. I would not even show up on a facebook search. And this while still existing on facebook, to only my friends.
Throught Facebook, I have found a few friends who I had been looking for sometimes for over 20 years. It is wonderful to see what they have been up to since then, the families they have etc.
Facebook is not a “bad” place. It’s gives me the feeling of being in a social gathering, whenever I wish, with the people who are very dear to me.
It becomes a nightmare only if used unwisely.
Mike C: Please do not even go there! What does the size of majority have to do with it. Even 1 vote would have sufficed. I note that you did not dispute the fact that the NP tried to overturn the result by winning the Zebbug seat despite knowing full well that Labour had a majority of votes.
They later tried to stae they they should govern because they won the majority of the districts.You state that 1981 was pre planned implying that the 1971 result was a fluke. Any honest person would admit that it was a perfect plan gone awry. The 2008 result was a 1500 majority which is wafer thin considering that we have no idea who is entitled to vote.
Representation without taxation for most of them any way. Why don’t we put our money where our mouth is and give anyone in possession of a Maltese passport the right to vote (here I am including the thousands of Maltese Australians/Americans/Canadians who emigrated in the 1960’s). That’s democracy in action. After all, what makes them so different from recent emigres who reside within the EU boundaries?