My decade of social media and why I’m sick of it

In a previous article I have looked at what the banning of Trump (the then President of the United States) could have on the future of the most popular social media platforms globally. In this article, I am suggesting that we’re standing on the cusp of profound change, as far as social media is concerned and below is my experience and why I’m using Facebook less and less – and if I’m disillusioned with the medium, I’m sure I’m not alone – others will have had similar problems to me – ask Trump.

My experience

I joined Facebook about a decade ago and it was because I wanted to see an old friend’s new photos that had been posted there – it was the sole reason.

Up until then, I had been writing articles for ABCs online platform Unleashed (now called The Drum). It turns out it was a good education for what was to come in what turned out to be a steep learning curve for me.

My very first article for Unleashed about an Australian Republic unleashed (pun intended) the most horrible, venomous comments I had ever read – all 650 of them. They were so bad that I couldn’t bear to read them (and these were the comments had been vetted before they were published. Goodness knows what the unpublished ones were like.)

“Are there any more comments?” I’d ask my sons dreading their positive response… and the comments went on (and on and on) for days.

That was in my thin-skinned days. I now have the hide of a rhinoceros and in the main, I don’t care what you write.

Funny: I didn’t think anything I’d written in that article was particularly controversial – seems I was wrong. Not everybody is like me…and not being more aware of this fact has been a large part of my social-media disappointments with new-found ‘friends.’

After joining Facebook (without the intent of ever using it again) I found myself besieged by ‘friend’ requests and I curiously accepted most. In its infancy, it was a good experience and I connected with long-lost family and interesting people that I’d have never encountered except there and I’m sure that this was the intended use envisaged by its creators.

However, what it also meant was that I was connecting with some people that I would have otherwise steered clear of. The things that one picks up subliminally, in a face-to-face meeting, has an impact on how you feel about the person – senses and intuition come into play that can’t on paper or on a screen. And so, believing that all the people I was speaking with were ‘like me’ – especially when it came to their moral compass, I proceeded accordingly.

Disappointments

The second Facebook ‘friend’ I ever had, called himself Paul Reinbara. He had a blogsite (still running, I believe) called PNG Blogs. By then, having had my interest piqued in Papua New Guinea (PNG) by the Moti case, I started writing some articles for his blogsite and commenting on some PNG Facebook discussion groups like Sharp Talk and PNG News Page where I quickly started to become known and where the reaction to my comments never ceased to amaze me. I’d not expected such strong reactions, as I hadn’t on Unleashed.

Paul Reinbara seemed like a nice person and we got along quite well when we conversed. However, what I didn’t know was that there is no such person by that name and that it was just a name that many people wrote under in order to stay anonymous and out of the reach of the government they were often criticising.

In later years, the initial people using that name changed and, with the change, Paul Reinbara became my bitter enemy. Paul Reinbara has more recently morphed into Michael Passingan – who’d have thought? I didn’t. I was so naïve.

Then there were the real people whom I’d so admired at first who, in the final analysis, proved utter disappointments.

The two most notable are current leader of the opposition and former Deputy Prime Minister of PNG, Belden Namah and also the former head of the anti-corruption agency Task Force Sweep and current Commissioner General of the Internal Revenue Commission in PNG, Sam Koim.

Belden Namah

I was impressed with what I’d read about Namah, he was certainly a charming man to communicate with. I was 100% with him in his political quest – which was right around the time of the 2010/2011 political coup that he’d helped orchestrate to oust a sick Sir Michael Somare and wrest power. I thought he may be just what PNG needed politically – this self-proclaimed saviour of Bougainville. Ha!

What I found out when I met him was that he was highly manipulative and prone to making rash promises that he never intended to keep – and these were promises on behalf of PNG that he used to effect his personal desires.

 It took no time at all for him to dispossess me of all my illusions.

With these methods, instead of making an ally of me (which would be preferable considering I was a journalist) he created a dangerous enemy because when suitably motivated, my research skills are excellent and since looking more deeply into his dealings, I’ve uncovered a plethora of dirty dealings. It was my research that revealed he was the unnamed “Foreign Minister” that was mentioned in the Sydney Star Casino licence inquiry and the revelation made headlines in the Sydney Morning Herald.

And there’s much more, nevertheless he still thrives in the environment he occupies – no matter how much dirt I’ve dug up on him. Sometimes what I do is a thankless task. But that’s PNG for you. The more corrupt politicians steal from their people, the more they’re revered. It’s bizarre.

Subsequently, I have wondered how I had come to a point in my life when this sort of disgusting person had touched it – for however short a time and however tenuously.

“How do you know these sorts people?” asked an astonished friend, “…and why?”

Yes, “why” indeed?

Sam Koim

As for Sam Koim: I could not help but be impressed with him. He seemed to be doing all the right things – and although there was a strong anti-Prime-Minister-Peter O’Neill contingent on social media, he resisted playing to them. They wanted him to arrest the PM for corruption when the evidence just wasn’t there. And he wouldn’t – for a time. That decision wasn’t popular.

Koim and I collaborated on a couple of projects: it was during this time that I came to realise how ill-equipped he was for the job at hand.

Before he gave the famous talk to AUSTRAC, he asked me to edit it for him – which I did. There were some astonishing claims he made in that talk – no one queried him on the veracity of that information assuming that it was gospel as it was assumed to have come from the PNG government official figures (so they thought. Ha!) No, the claims he made had come from a journalist when the journalist was writing for a newspaper for which he no longer worked. Koim didn’t know how the journalist had come by them. Say what???!!!

I contacted a friend and colleague at the said newspaper, and she looked for the files that contained the information – she said she couldn’t find any. So, for all intents and purposes, Koim had as good as plucked these figures out of thin air.

As a journalist, I would have never gone to press with such flimsy proof – yet Koim gave out this uncorroborated information to PNGs leading aid donor from someone they assumed would know.

Then in another project – that will remain nameless – I, believing he had access to government records, relied on him to produce them as they were vital to our plan. He arrived for our meeting in Australia – both of us having to fly to the destination – armed with less information than I had managed to glean off the internet – it was a waste of a trip.

I did manage to eventually save the project – which came out better than anticipated, but found myself having to explain time and time again why it was costing money to get the information we needed. It was a legitimate expense that is applicable to all requests such as we were making of this particular agency. Did he understand? Did he heck? He was convinced someone (I?) was trying to diddle him. He was hard work.

Then there was another occasion when Koim seemed not to understand the term ‘taxing’ of lawyers’ bills. So, by then, I knew that Koim was flying by the seat of his pants… but I never thought he’d do what he did.

Imagine my surprise when I found him on television in Australia where he’d come to entreat the Australian government to do something about the PNG one – you know, the one he worked for. What did he expect – that the Australian government would march into PNG with an invasion force and fix his problem? This was a diplomatic incident par excellence. What was he thinking?

He was probably in the same frame of mind as when he took out an arrest warrant for the then Prime Minister, Peter O’Neill – sworn out by a magistrate who was widely rumoured to be involved romantically with an opposition MP who was suspected of being behind the warrant. The arrest warrant was easily found to be faulty by O’Neill’s lawyers.

O’Neill’s crime was as an accessory (and enabler) of the crime that lawyer Paul Paraka was alleged to have committed – except – no conviction or arrest had been made for Paraka and there was no real evidence that a crime had ever been committed – so how can you be an accessory to that? He was putting the cart before the horse. Under the circumstances the warrant had to be politically motivated.

However, with this one act, Koim went from being a feather duster to a rooster in the eyes of a loud contingent of social media commentators. The mainstream media also refused to publish anything that set Koim in a bad light – he also had the backing of some powerful senior police and politicians. Koim revelled in his popularity.

It seems, he’d sold his integrity – I don’t know what he got in return but during his time in the wilderness (a few years) neither he nor his family starved. Koim offered to tell me who his backers were – but ‘off the record’. I declined, as I’m a journalist not a keeper of people’s secrets and I never reveal things that I have agreed to be ‘off the record’ – so I thought there was no point in him telling me.

However, I do have, in my possession, evidence that Kerenga Kua, a powerful MP and the former lawyer of Sir Michael Somare paid the hotel bills of Koim’s Australian lawyers in Port Moresby (or more accurately, Kua’s law practice) when they were in country appearing for Koim in some litigation relating to the disbanding of Task Force Sweep.  

The manipulators

No one ever warned me about the unscrupulous people on social media who blatantly use others to gain popularity and I wasn’t watching out for them, but they came to me.

I’ve had several who’ve called out my name so that people take notice of them – but three of them are stand outs: Sonja Barry Ramoi, Bryan Kramer and Okuk Mori Rogerson.

Both Ramoi and Rogerson sought out my friendship. Online, they seemed like lovely people and I agreed to meet them both – was even looking forward to it.

It didn’t go well. I was uneasy with Ramoi from the start. She was not the type of person with whom I’d ever associate for all sorts of personal reasons that I won’t go into. I was so unnerved by her demeanour and everything else that when she started getting a bit tipsy and I saw my bus arrive, I left her without telling her I was going – not something I have a habit of doing – I was that rattled by her.

Okuk was different, we met in Sydney (where he lives) and he seemed urbane and interesting, but he had assumed that I would agree to help him become Prime Minister – and I did write something for him to publish – but when his requests came for favours I was not comfortable doing and I refused to do them – he became nasty, really nasty, concocting all sorts of lies which he’d mischievously publish to ignobly enhance his popularity – the good little Christian that he is. It seems that hell hath no fury …

Ramoi also turned. 

In her case, I think it was more strategic than emotional – she had decided her fortunes would improve if she opposed me stridently in social media – and she awaited her opportunity. It was a case of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ sort of thing because there’s no doubt that, by then, the things I’d been writing were polarising and prominent.

On social media in PNG they either hated or loved Susan Merrell – there seemed no in between and there were a lot more of the strident commenters who came down on the side of dislike – so it was good strategy on her part to lift her from the nobody she’d been up until then.

In fact, lots of people, in those days, wrote what I call the “I hate Susan Merrell Chronicles” with a view to lifting themselves from obscurity but none so successfully as Bryan Kramer. He managed to lift himself from a life of abject failure in most things he’d attempted to become the legally unqualified Justice Minister of Papua New Guinea.

A Twitter account lamented nostalgically –
“Remember gentler times when Bryan Kramer would just write endless articles about Susan Merrell?”

Oh yes, we all enjoyed those.

The good thing is, on achieving his goal, he has left me alone. You’re welcome, Bryan.

Ramoi has left me alone lately too (which is nice) – but with her, I suspect it was a directive from a higher place. Whereas Okuk is still at it (along with others who think they’ll try their luck the latest being just this week: more lies, more accusations of sedition, more calls for my deportation – I don’t know from where.)

Facebook’s restraints.

Navigating these people has been difficult enough as well as dealing with the many death threats that have been published against me on Facebook and I reproduce one of them (right) penned by someone calling themself Cindy Ombaria just in order to illustrate the vicious nature of the threats. (The redactions are mine, the english expression and spelling hers or his). This is not the only one but it is the worse.

Most of the threats of violence against me have been very sexual in nature – a damning statement on the status of women in PNG.

Now Facebook has rules about what can and can’t be posted and I’m sure that particular gem (right) would go against their policy – but, Facebook does nothing, I’ve found, unless they get a complaint and, in many cases, when a person attacks me on Facebook, I do not complain, I fight my own battles. Either that or Facebook moves so slowly that the offending posting is gone before they have the time to get around to it – but by that time the damage is done.

Me, I never attack someone gratuitously, although I will defend myself vigorously and, given that English is my first language (that it often isn’t for my abusers) and it’s likely that my education level far exceeds those I’m verbally sparring with – chances are, I will emerge victorious in any battle of words. I’m in a position of considerable advantage and they persist on punching above their weight.

As a result, many suffer humiliation by my words and many will run off, tail between their legs, to complain to Facebook that I’m being mean to them – and I am – but in retaliation. When Facebook agrees with them and censors my comment and they ask me if I accept their penalties, what do they expect me to say?
“He started it,” which he surely did – however I am not a kindergarten child and I refuse to be tried in the Facebook tribunal. I just shrug and forget it.

It does mean, however, that I lose control of being the final arbiter of what, how and when I say something (within the laws of the land, of course), I’ve given up those rights to Facebook in exchange for using their media platform.  I’m not happy with that but it’s their forum, their rules and Facebook has a near monopoly – if you’re not on Facebook, you’re nowhere, as President Trump found out.

I learned the lesson early with Facebook discussion sites such as Sharp Talk and PNG News Page because, in this situation, Facebook expects that the site will regulate itself and provide its own censorship – and it usually does except, the site has no obligation to be fair or to justify its editing decisions or sanctions against members – it just pleases itself with Facebook being the final arbiter if there’s a complaint against the site administrators.

These people exclude and/or include comments according to whim or to flatter their own prejudices (and they always have them). Most will ban anyone whose opinion does not match theirs. That’s audience stacking if ever there was.

The risk is that, someone not realising the manipulative nature of the site can believe that everyone is of one accord – that it is a majority viewpoint. It never is.

I have been banned from many sites (ie I can’t see them or use them) and they are sites that often continue to defame me with gay abandon. How do I complain to Facebook when I can’t even see what’s being written? This way they have virtual carte blanche to write what they please

In conclusion

I’m no longer prepared to subject myself to the arbitrary vagaries of Facebook or site administrators of Facebook discussion groups and if I’m not, I’m sure I’m not Robinson Crusoe here. I’m looking for an alternative. But where to from here? Got any ideas?