Atkins read through every article published on The Drum website during the election campaign and scored each individual sentence as follows:

Each time a value-laden remark was made about Julia Gillard (or her campaign) that was positive or negative, it was noted as G+ or G-. For Tony Abbott, it was given the value A+ or A.

Yup, that’s it. It’s all very well to call this system moronic or pathetically simplistic, but why?

Because it assumes that everything Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott did during the election campaign was equally credible or unbelievable and that all critiques or praises published on The Drum were equally fair. This is demonstrably not the case.

For example, every time Tony Abbott claimed interest rates would always be lower under a Coalition government than under Labor, this was:

• Historically inaccurate, when referring to past governments
• Completely impossible to prove or disprove, when referring to future governments

In other words, it was complete bullshit.

But if an article in The Drum criticised this comment, Atkins would give it an A-, thus confirming in his mind that the ABC was full of socialists.

The Atkins system also makes no differentiation between an article that criticised Julia Gillard for proposing a citizens’ assembly to develop a new policy on climate change – a dumb idea – and one that bitched about the Prime Ministerial earlobes or dress sense. Both would get a G- under this scale.

Being critical of politicians’ stupid ideas is a journalist or commentator’s job. If an article simply reports what a politician said without any analysis or comparison to reality, that is bad journalism. So is an article that ridicules a politician’s personal attributes.

To demonstrate bias, Atkins would therefore need to show not only that The Drum criticised one side or another more, but also that those critiques were unfair or unjustified. Otherwise, his results could just as easily be explained by the fact that Tony Abbott said and did a lot more stupid things that were worthy of criticism.

I can’t argue with the ‘bad idea’ part, but the ‘everyone’ part is simply delusional. Yet many quite sensible people I speak to are genuinely bewildered that the filter is almost completely ignored by the mainstream media and barely registers on the radar of political debate.

(To be fair, the mainstream media’s reporting of internet censorship has been woeful and a prime example of what Jay Rosen calls “he said, she said journalism“, where a reporter simply records the opinions of opposing sides of an issue without subjecting their claims to any analysis. Most recently, on last night’s Q&A, Tony Jones only gave Small Business Minister Craig Emerson enough time to claim the government should filter all pornography that children shouldn’t see before shutting down the topic, preventing any debate.)

This is the kind of conversation I’m talking about:

renailemay: So let me get this straight. No #1 election issue on Twitter is the filter. And yet no questions from the floor during #ausvotes debate

vealmince: @renailemay Do you really not understand? Twitter is NOT the Australian public. It’s a tiny fraction of mostly like-minded people. #ausvotes

renailemay: @vealmince do you really not understand? Twitter is the Australian public. We live in Australia and we vote. Stop telling me I’m a minority

vealmince: @renailemay You and your 1000 mates. Either it’s not enough people, or you’re not organised enough to make a political difference.

Late last year, I argued that filter opponents were failing to cut through because they spent too much time agreeing with each other, debating nomenclature and deploying logic and sarcasm, rather than actual political lobbying, to sway the discussion in their favour.

But I think another factor at work is the inability of many in the twittersphere to see outside their small and mostly like-minded online social circle. This groupthink has led many online news outlets to publish polls finding that 95% or more of their readers were against an internet filter, unaware of or deliberately ignoring the massive selection bias inherent in asking that question to that audience.

The harsh reality is, even if everyone on Twitter thought and voted the same way, it would make no difference.

There are 13.9 million registered voters in Australia. There are 1.2 million Twitter accounts, of which no more than half could be active users who are eligible to vote. That makes 600,000 or about 4% of registered voters. It’s not a huge number, but 4% could gain a Senate seat, depending on how preferences fell, or swing the whole election.

Nice try. But of course, not all Twitter users would change their votes.

If Twitter is a representative sample of the Australian population (there are reasons to argue why it’s not), according to the latest polls, its users are split 50:50 on the two-party preferred vote. That means even if you could persuade every active Twitter user in Australia to vote for one party, it would only deliver a 2% swing.

But of course, you couldn’t get them all to vote the same way. Even though the filter is bad, some might argue that on the balance of all its policies, Labor is the less worse choice. Some of them might not care about the filter or, believe it or not, actually support it. (OMG, nowai!)

Still, a swing of less than 2% could be an election winner if Twitter users were disproportionately located in marginal seats such as western Sydney and the Brisbane suburbs. Whereas if a large number of Twitter users lived in safe seats, such as those in inner-city Melbourne and Sydney, even a 4% swing would make no difference.

Which do you think is more likely?

The impotent rage many Twits feel about the political-media establishment’s nonchalant treatment of the censorship issue is palpable. But it’s merely a symptom of the increasing influence of numbers men, marketing wonks and political strategists who use business intelligence technology to slice-and-dice, drill-down focus on winning a dozen or so marginal seats. If the issue that arouses your passion is not one that boils the blood of the residents of those seats, you’re irrelevant to the political process.

Viva democracy.

Based on Bob’s track record, I suspect the five ministries he had in mind where:

1. Department of Corruption and Bribe-taking
2. Department of Under-investing in Infrastructure
3. Department of Selling Public Assets at Ridiculously Low Prices to Macquarie Bank
4. Department of Planning, the Environment and Overturning Any Regulations That Might Inconvenience Property Developers
5. Department of Spin, Hypocrisy and Emergency Services

Any other suggestions?

Vague non-words like significant and substantial look like they’re telling us something, but they aren’t. They’re useful for people who have a deadline but no clear idea what they’re writing about; or people who know the numbers, don’t want to tell us what they are, but want to waste our time anyway because that’s what they’re paid to do. Often they are paid by the word, so chucking in a “substantial” here and there is basically free money.

To demonstrate this, he searches through the Factiva database. He found the number of media releases containing words such as ‘significant’ and ‘unique’ has remained fairly constant since 2002. However, the number of media releases containing all four words – significant and substantial and meaningful and unique – has tripled.

Matthew Stibbe picks up this theme and advises PRs to de-hype their text if they want to achieve better results. Sound advice; very few pieces of writing these days could not be vastly improved by taking out all the adjectives. And journalists are just as bad as PRs, in my opinion. Stibbe is rather cynical about the reasons behind it.

I think it is because PRs are paid by effort expended not results achieved and their primary audience is not (as you might think) journalists and their readers, but their corporate masters who pay the bills.

So how do we explain this incredible run of adjective inflation?

Phillips puts this down to “meaninglessness … becoming more concentrated”. Though to be truly scientific, he should not discount a significant growth in substantial uniqueness in the real world over the same period of time.

Which would you rather have in your home: Eddie McGuire or a steaming pile of poo?

The results were emphatic:

• Eddie McGuire: 2 votes (3%)
• Steaming pile of poo: 61 votes (97%)

While this was a terribly entertaining result, I did it to point out some of the problems with the many, many survey stories we see in the media.

If a journalist received a media release with these survey results in it, would he or she carefully scrutinise the details? Or write an amusing story to fill a gap in the news section? After all, nobody likes Eddie McGuire.

But a careful examination would reveal a large number of flaws in my technique.

Sample size

How many people did the survey interview? Is this a representative sample of the population the study claims to represent?

In this case, there were 63 respondents, which is definitely not enough to gain a valid idea of the opinions of all 22 million Australians. For a population of that size, you would need hundreds or thousands of votes to be statistically valid. Even then, there would be a large margin of error (ie, the true result could be 5% higher or lower than the one in the survey).

Avoiding duplication

How rigorous was the survey? Did it take any efforts to ensure people weren’t counted twice, such as deduplicating data? In the case of an online survey, did it use cookies or prevent people from voting from the same IP address?

My survey was not at all rigorous. I allowed people to vote multiple times if they wanted. I voted three times. If I were writing up a media release about my survey, I wouldn’t mention this, or I’d put it in tiny print at the bottom. No one would check.

Selection bias

Were the people who responded to the survey from a reasonable and broad cross-section of society or from a particular group? Would this affect their likelihood of voting one way or another?

My survey had 63 respondents, but who were they and how were they selected? In this case, I posted the survey on Twitter and Facebook. A couple of people retweeted it. Which means the respondents were:

• Regular internet users
• (Mostly) people I know

Would these factors make them more keen on poo? Or less likely to be fans of Eddie McGuire? Especially given the timing of the survey, after Eddie made homophobic comments about American figure skater.

A good example of selection bias is the recent, widely reported survey on ISP-whinge community site Whirlpool which found that 92% of its members were against mandatory ISP filtering. But 32.5% of respondents said they worked in IT. 70.9% were aged under 40. 72.1% said they were technical ‘gurus’ or ‘power users’.

So, the fact that 92% of the people most likely to oppose internet censorship were against internet censorship was hardly surprising. But it would be a giant leap to say this figure could translate to the broader Australian population.

Leading language

Did the language of the question favour one result over another? Why did the survey ask that particular question?

There is a definite art to choosing and framing survey questions. Asking the right question – or often not asking the wrong one – is a great way to get the answer you want.

I was quite deliberate in my choice of words, asking people which they would rather have in their homes. Not, for instance, which they would rather watch on TV. My aim was to make people contemplate the idea of having a steaming (smelly) pile of poo in their houses, which I thought would swing a few votes Eddie’s way.

Clearly I underestimated how much people disliked Eddie.

Manipulation

When people took the survey, how were they directed to the question? Did the surveyors couch it with a preamble or introduction that might sway the respondents one way or the other?

In directing people to the survey, I started out just tweeting the question but gradually became more manipulative.

• Which would you rather have in your home: Eddie McGuire or a steaming pile of poo?
• Disturbingly, a steaming pile of poo is outpolling Eddie McGuire 7 votes to 0. Can this be true? Have your say.
• I really thought at least one person would prefer Eddie McGuire to a steaming pile of poo. Do you?

Is it a coincidence that people only started voting for Eddie after I sent the third tweet?

Some thoughts for journos

Survey stories are great fun. They make for great headlines: a number, then a provocative or contentious topic. What’s more they give these matters of opinion or controversy a pseudo-scientific rigour.

But it’s fair to say of nearly all the survey press releases you receive that:

• The organisation paying for the survey has a very strong interest in the result being a particular way
• The organisation conducting the survey is aware of this interest (or is the same organisation that commissioned the survey)
• Surprise surprise, the survey results turn out the way the commissioning organisation wanted them to.

Journalists who reprint media releases verbatim, or rewrite them with no additional research, are often subjected to scathing criticism from their peers.

But journos who publish the results of obviously biased and flawed surveys without any critical analysis usually seem to get away with it. It’s time we got a lot smarter.

Sure, it’s one way to attract a lot of attention to an otherwise dull job ad, but everyone from female job hunters to company management was not impressed. The company and police are looking into it.

In Melbourne’s western suburbs a transport company employee was killed after a server fell on him while it was being unloaded from a truck. He reportedly saw the 200kg fridge-sized machine coming loose from a forklift and decided he would try to save it.

It wouldn’t be the first time someone put their body on the line to try and save an expensive piece of gear. With photographers, for instance, there’s a strong instinct to save the camera even while risking their own health, or body parts. But no matter how expensive the gadget, chances are a limb – or a life – are much harder to replace.

This could lead me to believe the majority of Australians are as passionate about internet censorship as me and my friends. But then I remember that most of my friends are university educated, left-leaning types who work in journalism or the IT industry.

This same selection bias is at work in the online community, particularly on Twitter. The sort of people who use Twitter, who blog, who read the IT media are precisely the sort of people who would oppose internet censorship.

This has led many people to believe if they make enough noise about it online, the Government will drop the filter. Unfortunately, this greatly overestimates the importance and influence of Twitter and social media generally when it comes to real-world politics.

Even an infinite number of angry posts on Twitter, sarcastic blog posts and articles in the IT press would still have no effect on Government policy. Politicians only care about who can deliver them blocs of votes in important electorates.

Online fame is fleeting, but mine was the top article on ABC's The Drum for a little while

As I argue on ABC’s The Drum blog, so far the Christian lobby – which is for the filter – is doing this a lot better than the disparate anti-filter coalition.

This is not to say the anti-censorship campaign is doomed. However, it needs to focus less on preaching to the choir and more on real-life, professional political lobbying.

It’s a big ask, particularly because many of the anti-censorship groups have little experience in direct political action. But it must be done if we are to convince the Government of the immense folly and dire (supposedly) unintended consequences of its current plans.

New South Wales upper-house member Penny Sharpe railed against the filter in her blog. Yes, she is from the Labor party, but the NSW and federal arms aren’t exactly best buddies right now.

Three younger Liberal parliamentarians – MPs Alex Hawke and Jamie Briggs and Senator Simon Birmingham – have also come out against the filter, although this is mainly confirming their previous positions. Most interestingly, Hawke says he has advised the Christian lobby against the filter proposal, even though he is himself a Christian.

As I mentioned the other day, Senator Kate Lundy has been painfully fence sitting. Despite her well known and vociferous opposition to internet filtering while she was in opposition, Lundy wouldn’t say much at all when I spoke to her. Subsequently she posted a lengthy piece on her blog, the gist of which was that she opposed filtering but it was Labor policy before the election, we voted for them and she can’t speak against party policy.

Although there is still an open question about whether Labor’s pre-election policy made it clear the filter would be mandatory – the language was pretty fluffy.

While these small brushstrokes begin to paint of picture of widespread opposition to the filter, no one seems to have an overall idea of how the anti-censorship movement might achieve its goals. Stay tuned…

Asked if Mr Rees had his full support or whether he also needed to get his act together, Mr Rudd replied “Yes”, although it was unclear to which part of the question he was responding.

The last issue of Nett with my mug on the editor’s page came out last Friday, including my interview with twin brothers Brian and Vincent Wu, founders of clothing retailer Incu.

The best interviews to do are the ones that defy your expectations. Plenty of small business owners aren’t shy about telling you how great they are, which gives you plenty of material for the story, but leaves you feeling a bit cheap and dirty at the end of it. Not these guys! You definitely don’t expect successful fashionistas to be friendly, humble and modest, but Brian and Vincent really are and I’m sure that has a lot to do with their success.

Over the last year, Incu managed to land a coveted deal: the rights to distribute UK brand Topshop in Australia. Considering how many Australian women buy from Topshop UK online, this is very big. The guys from Incu also told me exclusively about their plans to (finally) open an online store next year, and once again I think they have exactly the right approach.

I’ve also been doing some exciting news stories for ZDNet on stuff like telecommunications tenders, state government IT policies, how bad state governments are at looking after our personal data and ERP consolidation projects.

Aside from this, it’s all been about making clients happy by meeting their insane deadlines, finding somewhere to live and even showing up at the odd IT industry Christmas party. Phew!