Alexander Chalkidis

Tag: corruption

  • How many people have cheated their way to the vaccine?

    How many people have cheated their way to the vaccine?

    The answer to this question is much more complicated than it seems. In fact despite its dreadful toll in human lives and economies, the pandemic is a wonderful opportunity to see societies, governments and well, all organized systems in our world, tested.

    Capitalism or globalization or whatever you want to call it was already in trouble before all of this. Demonized and blamed for all sorts of problems. But if it was all about money, rich people all over the world would just buy a vaccine, wouldn’t they? We all have a sneaking suspicion many of them have, but then what about…

    … the rule of law? Because sure, you could get your hands on a couple of doses but then how would you do the paperwork? I am pretty sure that in Greece thousands of people have been vaccinated much earlier than they had the right to. They jumped the line by using political connections even though they are 40 or 50 years old. This should be impossible because of…

    …transparency and digital accountability. It is after all a most valuable item, every dose of vaccine should be on a computer system and accounted for. But it isn’t. Nobody wants the bad press that would accompany news that 1000 doses expired unused due to a mistake and in very few countries do governments allow their citizens access to such data.

    Social cohesion has been tested in these conditions. You can bad mouth Sweden all you like about the way they handled the pandemic, but you have to admire them in this respect. Depending where you live you have a very different approach to what you consider “normal” in terms of somebody jumping the line to get vaccinated before you. In Greece we consider it almost normal but…

    …group country behavior was spectacular. The European Union flexed its muscles to protect its members. It seemed a wonderful move which would protect smaller countries. It backfired. Other, small countries in the region did better. But like with masks and PPE, the gloves came off when it mattered, global cooperation went out the window when it mattered. So efforts like the…

    …green passport are in great danger of proving to be a joke. If I live in a country where I can get vaccinated just because I know a politician or a journalist, of course they can also produce any fake document or assurance with any dates they like afterwards. It will only work within countries, for their own use, like they did in Israel.

    So I don’t know exactly how many Greeks cheated their way into getting the COVID-19 vaccination before me. I am pretty sure it is several thousand. But I am even more sure we will never find out. If you live in a country which inspires more certainty you are lucky.

    Hopefully this pandemic will teach us all the value of institutions we can trust.

  • Facebook has a secret weapon: making money from politics

    In Greece, the media has always depended heavily on politics in order to survive.   Which is putting it very politely.  Private TV is the playground of rich business tycoons.  They pay money, to get eyeballs and influence and then use that influence in order to get big public sector projects.   We also have a public broadcaster with  thousands of journalists on its payroll, most of them doing nothing other than taking a fat salary.  They also dish out money for “external productions”…   Both of these ways of controlling the media agenda are still working, but are not as powerful as they used to be.  Not so many big projects, not so easy to give a job to your wife’s brother or whoever else you want to make happy as a politican without everybody noticing.

    But this corrupt model of media financing is so powerful that everyone still tries to emulate it.   So right now, as we are gearing up for the next elections, hundreds of small or medium media people think they have the masterplan.  They set up a website, get a lot of traffic and then get business people or politicians to pay them to write whatever they need written.  At first it looks like a genuine new news portal.  They invest in building it up.   Which means getting some content from somewhere, maybe even hiring a few journalists and…

    …facebook ads!  It is part of the package and at first they simply tick it off:  build website, get social media entities, email blast, google ads, facebook ads…  But then they notice that it’s the only thing that drives traffic.  Their content is rubbish, or – at best – the same as everyone else.  It takes time to build an audience like that and they don’t have time.   They try a few email blasts and then get blacklisted all over the place.  Even in Greece, it is getting harder to simply email a list you picked up from “a friend of a friend”…  So Facebook ads are easy.  They are relatively cheap.   And they bring clicks.

    Because all a Greek (new) media tycoon is interested in is his ranking on alexa.com.   This is all this market understands so I assume it will apply to probably 80% of the countries in the world too which are even less advanced in understanding media.  So find a Facebook ad that seems to work and just plaster it all over the place.   No need for fancy targetting, just blanket position to “anyone that has a pulse and lives in Greece“.  Does it bring clicks?  Sure it does!   Do they hang around much?  Of course not!

    Google has a different system.  They usually setup a mechanism whereby they have a fixed sum, something in chunks of 50 thousand Euros, and they go straight to the top of the food chain.  Much like a pimp, political parties will pay them directly for protection.  Under the auspices of a Google Ads campaign, the search giant turns the screws of the algorytm in your direction.  But a similar amount of money on Google Ads will not bring you the same number of clicks outside of the run up to elections.  People searching for information, looking for answers, don’t idly click on an advert of an article on some news portal they have never heard of.  

    I proved the extent of this problem in the past (details here http://alexanderchalkidis.com/blog/?p=18670 ) when a lazy advocate of the technique used a Goo.gl shortener so I could track the number of clicks.  More than 64 thousand paid clicks for an article which was bait.  What they wanted us to read were other, political, articles next to it.  It cost them maybe 7 or 8 thousand Euro to get a topic into the public limelight.  Seems cheap to me!  And – an important added advantage – it is the media equivelant of money laundering.  Nobody needs to know how much you spent.  Sure, they might see your advert plastered on the top of all ads in their personal Facebook profile, but that doesn’t prove anything.    I could have taken out an ad and paid with my personal credit card simply because I am a fanatic reader and wanted to share it with the world.  It is my favorite news portal…

    A news portal of course that they probably won’t hear much about after the elections…