I blogged earlier today about Steffan Browning signing a Change.org petition to get the WHO to use homeopathy to combat Ebola. Needless to say this story has been picked up by the mainstream media. The Herald, and Stuff are both carrying the story. This morning Russel Brown said:
Which I suspect is a reference to this post:
SOURCE: Stuff
However what is interesting is that Russel Norman, as quoted in The Herald said:
As well Felix Markwick has just tweeted:
I was pretty sure that the posting to Facebook was automated but not automatic. So I went and found a petition on Change.org that I was happy to sign and went through the process. Firstly you have to provide certain details:
When you hit sign, it then adds you to the petition and you then get the following screen:
Which allows you to choose to post it to Facebook. I double checked this by signing another petition while logged in using my Facebook account:
Which once again results in the option to post to Facebook. Here is a screen grab of my Facebook profile afterwards:
There is more than one quote, from more than one member of the Green party claiming that it was accidental that Steffan shared the petition to his Facebook page. But as the screen grabs above show, both signing manually and signing it while signed in with your Facebook account results in you being asked if you want to share the petition to Facebook. There may be a way to sign it that automatically posts to Facebook, but I haven’t found it. So it looks like all of the comments from Steffan and Russel fall into the category of trying to shift/remove blame. That is pretty much summed up by Steffan’s quote that Laura McQuillan has tweeted:
It is pretty obvious that Steffan took active steps to promote this petition, it is not something that happened automatically. Trying to use that excuse to backpedal it just makes him, and Russel, look like they don’t understand how social media works.
