Thomas Baekdal
@baekdal
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Author, Professional Writer, Magazine Publisher, and Media Analyst.
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Joined April 2008
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Twitter is no longer my primary platform. If oyu want to connect, head over here (list of my channels)
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I think we need to have a discussion about how Google's burger emoji is placing the cheese underneath the burger, while Apple puts it on top
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One of the problems with Hollywood today is that all the movie editors are now using HDR screens with 1000 nits brightness, and they don't realize that they are making every movie and TV show way too dark to see.
Take this example... how the f... will you be able to watch this?
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Danish news site reminds people of being skeptical of how news photographers take pictures. Here is the same place, one picture taken with a zoom lense, and the other with a wide-angle lense:
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My gaming laptop has 300 nits maximum brightness... and, during the day, it has become impossible to watch many TV shows and movies ... I have to wait until it's dark and turn off all lights.
This was never a problem in the past.
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And here is what it looks like adjusted... but there was so little color information left that it's basically impossible to correct.
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Here I have opened this up in my photo editor, and you can see that the colors/brightness of this entire scene has been completely crushed.
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And just like that, the White House becomes a fake news site.
The White House site now says that "killings have risen by 50%" in D.C. That is incorrect. They were up in 2015, down in 2016.
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One of the problems in my country (Denmark) is that everyone has decided that COVID doesn't exist anymore, and part of the reason is that if you just look at the data, it doesn't look that bad.
But this is deceptive, and let me explain why.
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Okay, Zuckerberg is definitely preparing to run for President in 2020...
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In other words, both the health authorities and the Danish press is misleading the public about this. This is not a 'small' part. It's the opposite. It still means that the majority of people are hospitalized because of COVID.
If we put this into a graph, it looks like this:
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To all the people now saying "It's not the same people" ... look again:
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I want to make a very important point. A narrative here in Denmark is that we can't trust hospitalizations because only some of the hospitalizations are because of COVID, while others are just people with broken arms who then also happen to have COVID.
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Also, this should be a call for every website to use HTTPS by default. With that ISPs can only see the domain, but not the page you visit.
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This whole thing is utter madness. Nobody is wearing masks. In fact, you are an outcast if you put one on. We have basically stopped testing. We have closed down contact tracing. We are not (yet) vaccinating people for the next wave ... we just pretend it doesn't exist.
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In the movies, epidemiologists are the professionals who saves the world, and they all have a very clear goal: “Stop the virus”… so I’m quite surprised by how many times over the past year we have seen epidemiologist argue that “things are stable” when they clearly are not …1/
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Here in this country, we are just ignoring this. We are just pretending it isn't happening.
I'm still one of the few people who are trying not to get COVID, but this makes me an outcast. In the eyes of everyone around me, I'm a weirdo who worries too much.
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As you can clearly see, the number of hospitalized *because* of COVID is now higher than it was during the second wave ... so when the Danish authorities and the press say the opposite, that's just straight-up misinformation.
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The Danish CDC (SSI) is estimating that, since November 2021, 70% of the Danish population has had COVID ... 70%.
This is how you completely fail to handle a pandemic. Letting everyone get COVID is not 'handling it'. It's unhandling it.
And the numbers are still extremely high.
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BTW: Just to put things into perspective. In Denmark, 135 people was killed in traffic accidents in 2021 (the whole year)
In 2022, in the past three weeks alone, 140 people died of COVID. Three weeks!!
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Or what about deaths? Same problem. Every single day people are dying from COVID because basically, we are now living in a never-ending wave.
And this is during summer when we know COVID is low. What do you think will happen when it gets colder again?!?
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I got an email this morning asking for my views on 'Google won't pay french publishers for snippets" ... so here is a quick reply: [thread]
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The problem is that the data is skewed by how many who got infected during the 3rd wave.
So what happens if we instead restrict the Y-axis to when the first wave peaked. Well, we get this:
In other words, every single day, we have more case than during the first wave peak.
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If you want more proof... same piece of cardboard on the sidewalk
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Note to publishers: Over the past several days, you have been screaming that Facebook should for links, so why do you think this is okay?
Offer to pay for the media others produce or shut up.
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And it isn't just about cases. If we look at hospitalization, we see that every day, we basically have just as many in the hospitals as during the earlier peaks.
This is insane.
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We can instead use the second wave peak (Delta) as our baseline, and now we get this:
Okay, so yes, there are fewer people per day getting COVID than during the peak of the 2nd wave ... but it's still massively high!
We have a never-ending rapid spread across society
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This was just published. It's basically yet another "we expect COVID to spread even more. And it's here to stay, but few people will get seriously ill ... and then not a single word or any considerations to anything related to long-COVID" 🤬
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In the past two months alone, 445 people have died of COVID in Denmark ... during the slow summer months. That's 2,670 people if this continues for a year (but it's likely to get worse).
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For f... sake, newspapers. You seriously need to start thinking about what impact your reporting has on the public.
Take this headline. Sounds pretty bad, right?
So what impact will this have when people see this? Well, it's obvious. You are fueling the anti-vaxxers. Right?!
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And remember, Denmark is a small country (5.8 million), so if we scale this up to the EU, that's 206,000 people dead ... with many more having to be hospitalized, and even more people suffering for long COVID.
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We have created a world where those who don't believe in science, who don't care about others, and who will not even put on a mask for 10 minutes while visiting a supermarket ... are now the ones who get to decide how society should exist.
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Now that Steve Balmer has bought the LA Clippers, here is their new logo ;)
http://t.co/DuLnx3WfD3
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Journalists, please print out this quote from Sherlock Holmes and hang it on the wall in your newsroom.
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During this pandemic, I have come to learn about two different kinds of health experts (in my country). The first type of health experts are those used by the media, are very inconsistent, and who have no solution to preventing spreading the virus. It's just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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We need to bring back floppy disks as a metric of how big a web page is. I just visited AdAge, and their pages are 15 MB in size ... or about the same size as Windows 3.11.
To see one article (with ads), you are downloading the equivalent of an entire operating system. ;)
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Via
@laurabrown99
The most obvious but only one of the devastating passages in ‘Why the Pandemic is So Bad in America’ by Ed Jong in
@TheAtlantic
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Now, some of the largest newspapers are trying to undermine the integrity of the foreign experts who are criticizing the Danish numbers:
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“The British variant is not worrying”, ‘Delta is not worrying”, and now “Omicron may not be so bad, so, let’s just wait and see what happens once more people are infected by it”
Not to mention how many who have said: “Oh we should just learn to live with this”
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So let's do a little fact-checking.
What is the number of cases of people hospitalized *with* and not *because* of COVID. Well, according to SSI (the Danish CDC). Well, according to the latest data (from today), it's 30-40% who were hospitalized because of other reasons
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For instance, here is a news article in one of the largest Danish newspapers basically arguing that these foreign experts are wrong because they don't understand the nuances (they do):
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This argument has been used by both the politicians and increasingly by the press as to prove that you shouldn't listen to the experts (like
@DrEricDing
)
:
@DrEricDing
Dear Eric,
Once again we would like to stress that the numbers, you are sharing with your followers, shows deaths with C-19. Not deaths because of C-19. We would recommend that you read our weekly report for more information on the subject:
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As Katy Perry just said ... "We will not be silenced!" ... that's your front page headline for every single newspaper tomorrow.
This is how the world responds to terrorism. Do you get it now newspaper editors? This is your audience. Do you get it now?
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I worry that what we see here is the same as what we did with climate change. In 2007, more than 95% of the climate scientists agreed that the problem was critical and caused by humans… and yet, in the press, we mange to make it sound like it was still unknown for another decade
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Seriously Motherboard? You asked PR what articles to write, and just did what they told you to do???
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As a media analyst, however, I also worry about how much this is caused by the press. Are epidemiologists actually all over the place, or are we just finding the ones who are … ‘for balance’?
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When newspapers try to optimize their traffic it often leads them to focus on more drama, more problems, scandals, and negativity ...exactly the things what are driving people away from the news.
Newspapers often ask why only 10% pay for news. This is why.
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Is that really a correct representation of the medical profession? Do 75% believe that masks don’t work, despite the fact the doctors have been wearing masks for as long as viruses have been known?
Or is this a skewed narrative caused by the press’ desire to find contradictions?
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This is then followed up with several news reports that have explained that: "Only a small part of them [people hospitalized] have been admitted due to covid-19, according to the National Board of Health"
A small part...
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The Danish Health Authority: People under 50 cannot get vaccinated for COVID.
Also Danish Health authority: Long COVID is something you should avoid, so stay at home.
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Mind you, there are good epidemiologists too, but what this world needs is a clear direction. It’s been almost two years, and we are still fumbling around as if we have no actually goal or plan.
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One thing that many people here in Scandinavia don't understand is 'why' the virus is happening the way it is.
Let me explain by comparing Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. (well, mostly Denmark and Sweden)
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And we have created a world where those who do believe in science, who do care about others, and who take steps at personal expense to protect others from getting sick ... they are scorned, threatened, and called zero-COVID extremists.
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I suspect that reality is actually quite different than we read in the news. That epidemiologists are very focused on stopping the virus as fast as possible, but that focus is contradicted by us in the press by finding the opposite view.
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Actually, what is really going on is that a tiny group of people are making a lot of noise, which we in the media then amplify so that it suddenly becomes a problem.
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I hate saying this, but I fundamentally believe that news journalism is broken. Let me give you an example:
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I don't understand the fascinating so many have with offices. One of the most important things I discovered when I started working from home was how much more work I get done.
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I could be wrong, though. I could be wrong about any of this. I just find it really strange to see so many articles interviewing medical professionals arguing for inaction.
I mean, look at the graph.
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I want to tell you a personal story. What Naomi Osaka explains here is 'me' ...
This is how I feel every time I have to do a conference, an interview, a presentation, or a lecture. And it's why you don't see me in public.
Let me explain (thread)
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This has led to the completely insane situation that:
1: Very often when I talk with someone, they are completely misinformed about the pandemic because of what they read in the news.
2: Newspapers (in Denmark) are not the place to get informed about COVID.
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So many newspapers and magazines sell subscriptions like this: (hint, this is a terrible way to sell anything)
You don't sell something by just telling people to buy it. You sell the value that it provides, and you need to explain and demonstrate that value.
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The other group of health experts is everyone else, who looks at the data, analyzes it, understand the numbers, the trends, the patterns, etc ... and who has been very consistent throughout this pandemic.
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As a media analyst, this is painful to write. I love journalism. This is my industry we are talking about. But, we are at a point right now where, if I want to get informed, I turn to more accurate sources than the news.
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As a media analyst, I cannot express how concerned I am about this.
What we seem to be doing in the press is not to inform the public, and help create solutions. But instead, just tell people "what they want to hear".
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If you show people this graph of the rapidly increasing rate of hospitalized people, people will respond with whatever opinion they have, discarding the data completely.
This is where we are today. There are no facts anymore, just the opinion that each person has.
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Take something simple as masks. Last year, after researchers looked through all the evidence and found masks to work, the newspapers went out to find people like this who could contradict the findings.
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Calvin was ahead of his time... this strip is from 1995. today you can get paid $100 million for this ;)
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Every single month we see yet another person claiming that micro-payments will 'solve' things for the media. And the argument we often hear is this:
Only 4-5% are willing to buy a subscription, whereas (in studies) 30-45% say they are willing to use micro-payments.
[thread]
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Not only that, predictions of this second group have proven to be very accurate (the data matches what they say, even months afterward) whereas the experts in the media are often completely wrong.
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Newspapers: YouTube and Facebook need to get their act together in moderating their content to prevent would-be terrorist to get inspired.
Also newspapers: Here is the terrorist's manifesto. Here is who he was inspired by. Here is a profile of him. Here is a bunch of pictures.
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I wish the newspapers would focus less on Russian gas, and so much more on speeding up ways to not need it. This is what we need right now. A European push to dramatically shift the way we heat our houses. We have the tech, but we need to scale up the infrastructure.
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The Daily Mail publishes an article about how Google and Facebook is tracking you, and how scary that is.
But, as I pointed out in my newsletter a while back, news sites like the Mail Online is far, far, far worse when it comes to tracking:
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So you are still far more likely to get COVID today than during the 1st or 2nd wave, and if you are in any way immune compromised, or have some other problems that puts you at risk, 'living with COVID' has turned your social life into a 'no-go'.
It's insanity!
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Today was a dark day in Denmark. The people who say that other people don't matter won, and they have now been given their 'freedom' to continue to spread the virus and just let others die.
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Traditional media: Young people have no attention span, so we shouldn’t make any content longer than a few minutes long.
Twitch streamers: Uh... we regularly do 4-6 hour streams, and our audiences love it.
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Twitter is the only social platform that I still use, and there is so much good in it. Every day I have many wonderful interactions with people here. But a Twitter owned by Musk is so abhorrent to me that I don't feel like I can be a part of it.
This makes me absolutely furious!
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One of the heroes of the world,
@_HannahRitchie
is manually converting the COVID-19 WHO data into actual CSV data files that you can download:
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But despite this, we are constantly being told that the pandemic 'is over'. No, it's not fucking over ... the only thing that has really changed is that people have stopped getting tested. If we look at the sewer data (the red line), it has barely dropped yet).
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Let's talk about excess deaths...
Recently I wrote a thread about COVID which got a fair bit of attention (link at the end of the thread), and it has been 'interesting' to see how some have tried to defend what we are doing in Denmark.
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But worse of all, we turned COVID into an opinion. Every day, we asked, "what do you think?" ... and then we reported that one person think this and another person think that.
Every single day.
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@dangillmor
@mathewi
Every time I see things like this, I'm reminded by this study from 2020
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This 'behavior' is the single biggest reason why the media industry is struggling. You are all stealing from each other so that every newspaper ends up writing the same stories.
But sure, Google should pay, but you are okay with publishers doing this? Come on!
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Read this thread. I discovered the same thing when I decided to using blocking as a filter. It made it a lot easier to get a wider perspective.
1/One of the most wrongheaded and persistent ideas floating around on social media is the idea of an "intellectual bubble".
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So, I ask you again, newspapers. What impact did your headline have? You very strongly indicated that this death was linked to the vaccine. But in your story, you tell people that no such link exist.
But you also know that most people will only see the headline.
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The collective feeling from Europe about Brexit is this. You might notice, for instance, that European newspapers don’t actually cover it that much. It’s not that we don’t care, but that we all know what the outcome will be. So...we are just waiting and trying to do other things.
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I refuse to accept this reality. I became a media analyst because I believe in the concept and importance of journalism. When we uncover wrongdoings and hold those in power to account, I believe we do all of that because we care.
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Note to people on Twitter: Nuclear power plants are many, many, many, many, many, many times safer than they were during the Chernobyl era. A fire in a building is not likely to blow anything up.
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