Welcome to 2024, everyone! I hope you had a good slide into the new year — “Guten Rutsch!” as we say in Germany. One of the reasons you didn’t hear from me in a while is that I spent a wonderful week in the frozen wastes of the Dales, in Sweden, surrounded by paper books, paper notebooks and with my phone and laptop turned off.

After stopping by some friends in the north of Germany on the way back, I have now returned to my computer refreshed and with much energy and many new ideas for the coming year.

One of these ideas entails that I will, with renewed conviction, endeavour to spend less time on social media and more time writing on this blog. I’ve been trying, for quite a while, to have notes likes these replace the things I usually post on social media. So please, if you are interested in my projects and the things I write, follow this blog – for example by plugging its RSS feed into your feed reader instead of relying on my social profiles on other sites. And if you got any comments or ideas for improvements, please use the comment function under each post — for notes like this one and other smaller snippets, you will have to visit the post’s permalink to do so. You can also comment directly on the forum, of course.

Other plans for the coming year include finally finishing my novel and more regular streams, including a fixed day for the recording and live streaming of episodes of my podcast The Private Citizen. More on this in another post soon.

I wish all readers of my blog a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2024! I hope you have a relaxing time during the holidays and enjoy yourselves as much as you can.

After finishing my emotes, Pewy has now also finished the avatar I’ve commissioned. I love it very much! Thanks, Pewy!

Wow. That was fast. My Discourse hoster Communiteq has fixed my issue of Discourse comment embeds not working. It was indeed a bug in the most recent stable Discourse update. They’ve patched it on my forum instance.

I’m having some issues with the Discourse embeds that are supposed to include forum threads as a commenting feature. Currently, I am suspecting a recent Discourse update. But I really don’t know what has gone wrong. Please have patience with me while I try to fix this. And if you can help, please get in contact …on the forum?

The amazing Pewy has created three emotes for me and I absolutely love how they turned out! They will be deployed immediately on my Twitch channel and I’ll use them here on the blog as well, of course. I am so happy about this!

“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things."

— Rainer Maria Rilke

I wish all of my readers a Happy New Year! May you have a glorious party or a relaxing evening tonight; whaterver you prefer. See you in 2023!

Please be aware that I won’t be posting much on this blog in February. I’m taking the month off to try and finish my novel to do justice to the grant I have received from the German government for this goal. This is something I’m going to call Grim February.

You will find updates about how I am doing with this on the Grim Deep blog and my author account on Twitter.

Guys, just a quick update letting you know that there’ll be somewhat less content on this blog for a few weeks. I am quite busy at work and with other things at the moment. Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me in a while. It’s all good and I’ll be back soon.

Well, YouTube has restored the episode of The Private Citizen they’ve blocked yesterday. Apparently, I’m not a liar or incredibly bad at my job or whatever they were alleging with their unjustified claim of a TOS violation. They say in an email:

After taking another look, we can confirm that your content does not
violate our Community Guidelines.

Thanks for your patience while we reviewed this appeal. Our goal is to make
sure content doesn’t violate our Community Guidelines so that YouTube can
be a safe place for all – and sometimes we make mistakes trying to get it
right. We’re sorry for any frustration our mistake caused you, and we
appreciate you letting us know.

I guess that’s admitting that they fucked up. No explanation of how such an incredibly dumb mistake could have happened to such a supposedly very smart company, though.

I am still awaiting a response from their press office with a proper explanation. In my opinion, this automated email is a very sorry excuse for supressing important journalistic work. I will continue my research into what options journalists have to prevent overblocking like this.

You probably know that I record a weekly podcast on privacy, security, civil rights and other policy issues. You might also know that I record each episode live on Twitch and later upload it to my YouTube channel. Today, YouTube informed me that one of my videos had been blocked for a TOS violation for the first time.

They have removed the video for episode 74 of The Private Citizen because it allegedly contains “medical misinformation” with regards to COVID-19. This is a ludicrous claim and obviously bogus – that should be clear to anyone who listens to the episode (which is of course still available in podcast form). It was probably an automatic decision and YouTube is not providing any information on why they think I violated their TOS at all.

Now, it happens that I am not just some random YouTuber. I am a journalist and this video was made with my usual journalistic standards (see my previous work and the ethical guidelines for journalists in the German press codex , which I follow to the letter to the best of my abilities). As such I regard this kind of unsubstantiated claim as a grave insult to my work ethics. And I will fight this tooth and nail – my professional reputation is on the line here.

I have disputed the claim and contacted Google’s press office to provide me with information on why they think I violated their TOS, i.e. detailed justification as to where exactly my video contradicts expert guidance from the WHO and/or RKI. I will also take up this matter with my trade union, the DJV, as I consider this kind of behaviour by YouTube to be a threat to press freedom, especially of independent freelance journalists, here in Germany. I will keep you informed about Google’s response and my further steps in the matter.

Funnily enough, I pretty much predicted that something like this might happen on the podcast only last week when talking about YouTube, upload filters, journalism and free speech: The Private Citizen 73: A Great Time to Be a Podcaster.

When I went to my PO box between Christmas and New Year’s, I found a pleasant surprise waiting for me. I would like to thank Terile from my Discord community for gifting me a copy of How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence by David Omand. A very thoughtful gift! I am sure it will come in handy for my work, especially on The Private Citizen.

On a side note: That is one clever book cover!

I wish all of you a Happy New Year! May 2021 prove to be better than what we experienced in 2020. For everyone!

I’ve been hard at work all though the holidays and you’ll hopefully be able to see and read some of the things that I’ve been working on in the new year. Whatever else happens, I promise you there will be more stories here on the blog, in my newsletter and elsewhere for you to read. And there will be even more podcasts and probably more streams, too, than you’ve got in 2020. I promise I won’t slow down in 2021, so let’s go! Let’s make it an awesome year!

This photo was taken in Isernhagen, in November of 2016. The last time we had proper snow. I wish we had this kind of weather today. It’s my preferred mood for Christmas Eve, which is when the main Christmas celebration happens here in Germany.

Merry Christmas, everyone! Whatever you celebrate – or don’t – I hope you have a good time with your loved ones over the next few days.