Exclusive: almost half of billionaire Tory donor’s last 100 reposts were in support of rightwing party
A Tory peer and former party donor has shared dozens of social media posts supportive of Nigel Farage and Reform UK.
During the course of the election campaign Peter Cruddas, the billionaire Tory donor who was controversially ennobled by Boris Johnson, has reposted a string of material calling on voters to back Farage and his party.
A-listers queued up to add showbiz pizzaz before elections. Today, it’s seen as more effective for a member of the public speak out
David Tennant, Colin Firth, Jim Davidson and the late Kenny Everett all signed up to officially support a political party during past British general election campaigns, giving a touch of showbiz pizazz to the daily round of rainy hustings and churlish TV debates. After Tony Blair’s victory in 1997, the pavement in Downing Street was infamously lined with VIPs, from a Gallagher brother to a Mitchell brother (EastEnders’ Ross Kemp), all calling at his celebratory Cool Britannia event.
But the era of the high-profile celebrity political endorsement appears to be behind us as individual social media declarations, together with the complexities that surround divisive issues such as gender politics, climate change and the Middle East conflict, make these relationships more difficult to cement.
The term for England footballers’ wives and girlfriends first exploded in 2006 in Germany. The new generation watching the Euros are turning the old stereotypes on their heads
When England take to the pitch for their first game on Sunday night in Germany, eyes will be trained not just on the players but on the team sitting in the stands, cheering on the squad – the wives and girlfriends of the players, the so-called Wags.
The acronym Wags first appeared in the Sunday Telegraph in 2002 – apparently coined by the staff of a Dubai hotel where the players’ wives and girlfriends stayed. Still a relatively new phenomenon, it exploded like a glitterbomb on to the resort of Baden-Baden, where the England squad were based during the World Cup in Germany in 2006.
Platforms send targeted messages to customers, reducing cancellations and encouraging them to return
Booking a table at your favourite restaurant no longer involves simply contacting the establishment and giving your details. Now it often involves the restaurant contacting you too – sometimes several times over.
Online booking platforms used by hundreds of restaurants in the UK now send out reservation confirmations, reminders, requests for feedback, future deals and news. Some send certain customers a “personalised booking link” after their visit, to encourage them to come back. “I hope you had a great time on your last visit … and that you’ll come back to see us again soon,” reads one example, sent on behalf of Som Saa, a Thai restaurant in east London, via booking platform SevenRooms.
Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book blames social media for a decline in teenage mental health. But is he right?
When I was 13, two of my friends were arrested for shoplifting. Along with two boys in our year, they had decided to bunk off school – our suburban grammar school renowned for its academic excellence – and get the train to a shopping centre nearby. The day had been going well until they reached HMV, where a security guard asked them about the CDs they had hidden in their coats. Cue a call to the police, and some time in a cell at the local police station. By the end of the day, news had travelled to the rest of us via an SMS on our Nokia 3310s and we gathered at one of our houses to discuss the situation. Most of us were crying.
It was but one dramatic moment in a lawless year. In year 7 we had been a fairly risk-taking group, but in the spring of year 8, a new girl joined our school and her arrival set things on fire. Beside the shoplifting habit, there was a lot of alcohol, stolen from parents’ cupboards or bought for us by strangers on the high street or by older siblings. We drank where teenagers have always drunk: in parks at night or during unsupervised parties at home. Blacking out was not uncommon, and more than once someone ended up in A&E. There was a lot of smoking, too, cigarettes and weed, and a lot of arguing about boys and each other (more crying there, too).
Shamin Vogel sets out the stark reality for today’s young women who face ridiculous societal expectations and high living and childcare costs. Plus letters from Rachel Fowler and Claire Elizabeth Brown
I read Emma Beddington’s column with delight (Young women are telling each other to ‘date rich’. How terrifyingly retro, 9 June). I was raised to think that I can achieve whatever I want, always with the reminder that generations of women before me fought for equality. Moving to London for my studies, I became acquainted with the concept of women studying just to find a rich husband and to be a housewife and mother. This idea was utterly foreign, even incomprehensible, to the career‑oriented 19-year-old me.
A decade later, I am surrounded by female friends who now regret not having found a rich husband – who are faced with rising living expenses, a ticking body clock, ridiculous housing prices, seemingly out‑of‑reach childcare and fertility costs, and a never-ending parade of hopeful online dating matches. Yes, life is hard working as a man, but for women there are some more items on the list: you need to push for a good career, look fabulous, find a nice husband, have kids, be part of Forbes’ 30 under 30, be an executive but not forget to have a clean white kitchen and make kids’ birthday cakes.
Male body dysmorphia has rocketed – maybe because we’re desperate to assert a sense of control over our chaotic lives
Looking back, it was probably when I started checking how many grams of carbohydrates were in red onions and broccoli that my eating disorder began. I say “eating disorder” now, but, of course, as a man, I didn’t think of it as that at the time. It was just “cutting weight”.
I was 22 and had signed up for my first white-collar boxing match. Even though the weight classes were loose and barely enforced, I was determined to get into the best shape of my life – which I believed meant getting down from my natural weight of 90kg to 80kg. That’s like going from 36in to 32in jeans in the space of a month.
Tom Usher is a freelance writer
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The facial recognition start-up doesn’t have the funds to settle a class-action lawsuit, so lawyers are proposing equity for those whose faces were scraped from the internet.
From tracking your nemesis to chuckling at pets, there are myriad ways to waste time on the internet. We identify some of the worst and what you should do instead
In 2024, no one needs another reminder they’re spending too much time on their phone; that the internet, and specifically social media, is designed by thousands of Silicon Valley geniuses to keep us scrolling, helpless pawns in the attention economy, blah blah blah. But let’s get granular: what are the worst ways to be in thrall to your small shiny rectangle and its big brother, the larger electronic rectangle? I asked about people’s most irresistible, life-consuming, pointless and occasionally poisonous internet rabbit holes. Then I tried to work out what they (and I) could do instead.
Linda Yaccarino told X employees that 65 percent of advertisers had returned to the platform since January, while admitting that the business continues to face advertising headwinds.
Christopher Blair, a renowned “liberal troll” who posts falsehoods to Facebook, is having a banner year despite crackdowns by Facebook and growing competition from A.I.
Customers keep filming employees behind the counter, in a bid to ensure their burritos are big enough
When Atulya Dora-Laskey clocks in to her job making tacos, burritos and salad bowls on the line at a Chipotle in Lansing, Michigan, she knows there’s a chance a customer will whip out a camera to film her assembling their lunch. If it does happen, “it’s immediately anxiety-inducing for my co-workers and me,” she said. She finds it “very stressful and dehumanizing” to be filmed at work.
These incidents of filming began last month, after rumors circulated on TikTok and Reddit alleging that Chipotle lineworkers skimped customers on the chain’s infamously large portion sizes – unless customers filmed workers making their order.
I set expectations when she saved up and got the phone – little did I know it would undermine them, and her mental health
The byline on this essay is a pseudonym.
My daughter is one of those kids the US surgeon general warned us about. Our nation’s children are “unknowing participants” in a “decades-long experiment”. Social media usage poses mental health risks to youth, who use it “almost constantly”, causing sleep deprivation, depression and anxiety.
‘We are doing things differently,’ says Mark Bullingham
The Football Association has funded a special unit within the British police to help them prosecute anyone who abuses England’s players on social media. The governing body has long been committed to passing on the evidence of such instances to the authorities and there has sadly been too much of it.
But as England prepare for their opening Euro 2024 tie against Serbia on Sunday night, the FA’s chief executive, Mark Bullingham, revealed a new move.
Disquiet over social media addiction is leading to a growing enthusiasm for Polaroids, postcards and the physical and analogue world
For Bea, it was moments like finding herself scrolling though the news on the toilet that made her feel the need to reassess her relationship with her phone.
The 37-year-old from London had began to feel uncomfortable with the way pinging notifications and the urge to pick up her phone were encroaching on her life. So when her iPhone broke, over a year ago, she decided it was time to switch to a device that allowed her to stay in touch with others while minimising distractions.
Word puzzles on LinkedIn. Logic challenges in The Washington Post. For news publishers and tech sites looking to both entice and engage users, games are serious business.
The social media star on performing to silent audiences, turning spite into success and still having to prove herself as a ‘proper’ comedian
Can you recall a gig so bad, it’s now funny? I was once booked for an outdoor, family friendly village fete where none of the comedians had been warned that the jokes would have to be child-appropriate. In the early days of your comedy career, you only have five minutes of jokes so we didn’t have tamer ones we could swap in. The section of field directly in front of the stage had been roped off for the dog show later in the day (the main event), meaning anyone wanting to watch the comedy would have to watch from about 10 metres away with a whole load of nothing between us. Only five people stood behind the rope to watch, including an adult in a full Peppa Pig costume who heckled throughout. I performed five minutes to silence, before the next act got their microphone disconnected and the comedy cancelled after saying the C word.
What is your upcoming show, (Role) Model, about? It’s about 55 minutes long … 57 with a good audience. I want it to feel like an incredibly fun conversation with your toxic best friend. But I guess it’s also a show about what it’s like to go viral overnight, or even worse, going viral for dancing with your parents. I’m trying to work out who I want to be versus what other people want me to be, and asking why are both impossible.
Since he was elected as the town’s MP, the Workers party leader has grown his huge online audience, but now faces a tough election battle with Labour
George Galloway was in full flow as he addressed tens of thousands of viewers online one evening in late March.
In a five-minute monologue, the newly elected Rochdale MP dismissed what he described as the “official narrative” of the murders of the US president John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and senator Robert F Kennedy. They were, he said, “a pack of lies”.
Social media users voiced worries about a move by Meta to use information from public Instagram and Facebook posts to train its A.I. But the scraping has already begun. Here’s what to know.
Meta sent notifications to European users of Facebook and Instagram letting them know that their public posts could be used to train its A.I. — including its chatbot and other services it develops — starting on June 26. In the United States, public posts are already being used to train the services.
According to data released by the FTC in its annual Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book, nearly half of the fraud reported to the federal government in 2023 fell into the category of impersonation fraud — 330,000 scams impersonating businesses and 160,000 scams impersonating government institutions. Allure Security’s online brand impersonation detection data corroborates the FTC’s […]
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs ordered the operation, which used fake social media accounts urging U.S. lawmakers to fund Israel’s military, according to officials and documents about the effort.
The campaign focused on more than a dozen members of Congress, including Representative Ritchie Torres, left, and Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader.
Misinformation is not a new problem, but there are plenty of indications that the advent of social media has made things worse. Academic researchers have responded by trying to understand the scope of the problem, identifying the most misinformation-filled social media networks, organized government efforts to spread false information, and even prominent individuals who are the sources of misinformation.
All of that's potentially valuable data. But it skips over another major contribution: average individuals who, for one reason or another, seem inspired to spread misinformation. A study released today looks at a large panel of Twitter accounts that are associated with US-based voters (the work was done back when X was still Twitter). It identifies a small group of misinformation superspreaders, which represent just 0.3 percent of the accounts but are responsible for sharing 80 percent of the links to fake news sites.
While you might expect these to be young, Internet-savvy individuals who automate their sharing, it turns out this population tends to be older, female, and very, very prone to clicking the "retweet" button.
After some trying years during which Mr. Zuckerberg could do little right, many developers and technologists have embraced the Meta chief as their champion of “open-source” artificial intelligence.
The billionaire owner of X has increasingly been using his social media platform to criticize President Biden for his health and immigration policies, according to a New York Times analysis.
The platform will keep state-affiliated media accounts out of users’ feeds if they “attempt to reach communities outside their home country on current global events and affairs.”
Marc Andreessen, Chamath Palihapitiya and several other tech venture capitalists are increasingly criticizing President Biden and making their disaffection known in an election year.
Mr. Trump has treated Trump Media, which runs his social network Truth Social, as a low-cost sideshow. Now a big portion of his wealth hinges on its success.
The island democracy was early to ban TikTok on government phones, and the ruling party refuses to use it. But a U.S.-style ban is not under consideration.
Advertisers of merchandise for young girls find that adult men can become their unintended audience. In a test ad, convicted sex offenders inquired about a child model.
Mr. Musk has built a constellation of like-minded heads of state — including Argentina’s Javier Milei and India’s Narendra Modi — to push his own politics and expand his business empire.
Reddit’s first earnings report as a public company showed leaps in users and advertising revenue, along with expenses related to its initial public offering.
You’ve likely felt it: The dull pull downwards of a smartphone scroll. The “five more minutes” just before bed. The sleep still there after waking. The edges of your calm slowly fraying.
After more than a decade of our most recent technological experiment, in turns out that having the entirety of the internet in the palm of your hands could be … not so great. Obviously, the effects of this are compounded by the fact that the internet that was built after the invention of the smartphone is a very different internet than the one before—supercharged with algorithms that get you to click more, watch more, buy more, and rest so much less.
But for one group, in particular, across the world, the impact of smartphones and constant social media may be causing an unprecedented mental health crisis: Young people.
According to the American College Health Association, the percentage of undergraduates in the US—so, mainly young adults in college—who were diagnosed with anxiety increased 134% since 2010. In the same time period for the same group, there was in increase in diagnoses of depression by 106%, ADHD by 72%, bipolar by 57%, and anorexia by 100%.
That’s not all. According to a US National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the prevalence of anxiety in America increased for every age group except those over 50, again, since 2010. Those aged 35 – 49 experienced a 52% increase, those aged 26 – 34 experienced a 103% increase, and those aged 18 – 25 experienced a 139% increase.
This data, and much more, was cited by the social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, in debuting his latest book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” In the book, Haidt examines what he believes is a mental health crisis unique amongst today’s youth, and he proposes that much of the crisis has been brought about by a change in childhood—away from a “play-based” childhood and into a “phone-based” one.
This shift, Haidt argues, is largely to blame for the increased rates of anxiety, depression, suicidality, and more.
And rather than just naming the problem, Haidt also proposes five solutions to turn things around:
Give children far more time playing with other children.
Look for more ways to embed children in stable real-world communities.
Don’t give a smartphone as the first phone.
Don’t give a smartphone until high school.
Delay the opening of accounts on nearly all social media platforms until the beginning of high school (at least).
Writing for the outlet Platformer, reporter Zoe Schiffer spoke with multiple behavioral psychologists who alleged that Haidt’s book cherry-picks survey data, ignores mental health crises amongst adults, and over-simplifies a complex problem with a blunt solution.
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Dr. Jean Twenge to get more clarity on the situation: Is there a mental health crisis amongst today’s teens? Is it unique to their generation? And can it really be traced to the use of smartphones and social media?
According to Dr. Twenge, the answer to all those questions is, pretty much, “Yes.” But, she said, there’s still some hope to be found.
“This is where the argument around smartphones and social media being behind the adolescent mental health crisis actually has, kind of paradoxically, some optimism to it. Because if that’s the cause, that means we can do something about it.”
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