Rightwing media personalities on X transmuted a screed against NPR’s CEO into a fight over encryption via the Transitive Property of Bad People
For nearly two weeks, an esoteric debate has raged on X, formerly Twitter: could users concerned about privacy and security trust the messaging app Signal, or was the Telegram platform a better alternative? X’s chatbot, Grok AI, described the trending moment as “Telegram v Signal: a crypto clash”.
Signal is an app for sending end-to-end-encrypted messages to individuals and small groups. Telegram offers broadcast channels and messaging but is notend-to-end encrypted by default. Debates over their relative merits have popped up over the years, though largely within the confines of online spaces inhabited by cybersecurity, cryptography, privacy and policy geeks. This time, the conversation came to broader attention – Elon Musk’s following of 183 million – due to X’s most notorious capability: mutating isolated facts into viral conspiracy theories for the entertainment of rage-riddled crowds. As a bit player, I got a ringside seat to the manufactured controversy.
Firm asked to back up claims about Fiona Harvey after executive’s appearance before select committee
An MP has asked Netflix to provide evidence that the woman who inspired the character Martha Scott in Baby Reindeer is a “convicted stalker”, claiming that a record of her conviction has not yet been found.
Netflix’s director of public policy, Benjamin King, told the culture media and sport committee on 8 May that the show was “the true story of the horrific abuse that the writer and protagonist, Richard Gadd, suffered at the hands of a convicted stalker”.
Stuff posted on Reddit is getting incorporated into ChatGPT, Reddit and OpenAI announced on Thursday. The new partnership grants OpenAI access to Reddit’s Data API, giving the generative AI firm real-time access to Reddit posts.
Reddit content will be incorporated into ChatGPT "and new products," Reddit's blog post said. The social media firm claims the partnership will "enable OpenAI’s AI tools to better understand and showcase Reddit content, especially on recent topics." OpenAI will also start advertising on Reddit.
The deal is similar to one that Reddit struck with Google in February that allows the tech giant to make "new ways to display Reddit content" and provide "more efficient ways to train models," Reddit said at the time. Neither Reddit nor OpenAI disclosed the financial terms of their partnership, but Reddit's partnership with Google was reportedly worth $60 million.
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.
Adaptation of hit comedy quiz will begin airing on CNN on Saturday nights to coincide with presidential election
Arch, ironic and understated, Have I Got News for You is the quintessential British comedy quiz, but its creators are hoping a US version of the show can translate its particular brand of political humour across the Atlantic.
A US adaptation of the show will be broadcast by CNN in the autumn, to coincide with the presidential election. It will hit screens on Saturday nights – part of a double-bill with Bill Maher’s Real Time.
In the hours after Fico was shot on Wednesday, several senior politicians from the ruling coalition blamed independent media and the opposition for the incident.
In a press release today, the best music player of the 1990s announced that it'll open up its source code to developers worldwide. "Winamp will open up its code for the player used on Windows, enabling the entire community to participate in its development," said the company. "This is an invitation to global collaboration, where developers worldwide can contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve."
Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Winamp, explains: "This is a decision that will delight millions of users around the world. Our focus will be on new mobile players and other platforms. We will be releasing a new mobile player at the beginning of July. Still, we don't want to forget the tens of millions of users who use the software on Windows and will benefit from thousands of developers' experience and creativity. Winamp will remain the owner of the software and will decide on the innovations made in the official version."
Tenth-grader who participated in social media challenge ingested too much chile pepper extract and died of cardiopulmonary arrest
A Massachusetts teen who participated in a spicy tortilla chip challenge on social media died from eating a large quantity of chile pepper extract and also had a congenital heart defect, according to autopsy results obtained by the Associated Press.
Harris Wolobah, a 10th grader from the city of Worcester, died on 1 September 2023 after eating the Paqui chip as part of the manufacturer’s “One Chip Challenge”.
For the past decade, the dating app Bumble has claimed to be all about empowering women. But under a new CEO, Lidiane Jones, Bumble is now apologizing for a tone-deaf ad campaign that many users said seemed to channel incel ideology by telling women to stop denying sex.
"You know full well a vow of celibacy is not the answer,” one Bumble billboard seen in Los Angeles read. "Thou shalt not give up on dating and become a nun," read another.
Bumble HQ
“We don’t have enough women on the app.”
“They’d rather be alone than deal with men.”
“Should we teach men to be better?”
“No, we should shame women so they come back to the app.”
Force says no confirmed incidents in London as rumours spread on social media after nails found at Oxfordshire playground
The Metropolitan police have been forced to respond to rumours circulating online that nails have been stuck to children’s playground equipment, saying there have been no confirmed incidents in London.
In recent days parents’ WhatsApp groups have been inundated with reports that vandals have glued nails to children’s slides and other playground equipment.
The European Commission has opened an investigation into the owner of Facebook and Instagram over concerns that the platforms are creating addictive behaviour among children and damaging mental health.
The EU executive said Meta may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA), a landmark law passed by the bloc last summer that makes digital companies large and small liable for disinformation, shopping scams, child abuse and other online harms.
Broomgate Widely available, episodes weekly Never before has a broom been responsible for so much scandal – in 2015, the Canadian curling community was rocked by a team that used one instead of two. “To not have the other person out front cleaning in a frosty situation doesn’t make sense,” said one shocked commentator. The full story has never been told, so comedian and curling geek John Cullen investigates the switch to the “super broom” that caused a furore. Hannah Verdier
Presenter has added 1.6m listeners to Greatest Hits Radio mid-morning slot in last 12 months
Ken Bruce has added 1.6 million listeners since joining Greatest Hits Radio, as commercial radio stations continue to eat into the BBC’s audience.
Bruce left Radio 2 last year, saying the BBC had failed to offer him a new contract and he wanted a challenge. Aided by his regular PopMaster quiz, he has boosted the audience for his new mid-morning slot on Greatest Hits Radio by 73% in the last 12 months.
RedBird IMI deal effectively killed by new legislation blocking foreign states from owning UK newspapers
The former CNN executive who fronted a failed bid for the Telegraph newspaper by a UAE-backed consortium has suggested the government was not willing to listen to assurances about editorial neutrality.
Jeff Zucker said there were figures in the UK who were “scared” of the £600m deal, which would have seen the Abu Dhabi-backed consortium, RedBird IMI, take control of the Telegraph and Spectator.
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.
Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. [...] If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. [...] Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement's leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda.
The New Propaganda War: Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world. [SLAtlantic]
Our columnist spent the past month hanging out with 18 A.I. companions. They critiqued his clothes, chatted among themselves and hinted at a very different future.
The offering from Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery shows how rival companies are willing to work together to navigate an uncertain entertainment landscape.
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.”
Recent studies cast doubt on whether large-scale mental health interventions are making young people better. Some even suggest they can have a negative effect.
The Justice Department and state attorneys general say that Google has abused a monopoly over the search business, stifling competitors and limiting innovation, something the company denies.
Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, last June. In Manhattan Thursday, he said: “We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side and that we will ultimately prevail.”
A protester with a Palestinian flag on a Columbia University building on Monday. So far, there is little evidence that U.S. adversaries have provided material or organizational support to the protests.
The firm behind the lawsuit, Alden Global Capital, bought Tribune Publishing, which operated metropolitan dailies including The Chicago Tribune, in 2021.
Rib-eye steak “is viscerally and primitively satisfying to me,” said Dr. Shawn Baker, who was instrumental in the online rise of so-called “meatfluencers.”
The inquiry is intended to pressure the tech giant to more aggressively police Facebook and Instagram ahead of the European Union’s closely watched elections in June.
Quarterly results on Wednesday underscored Meta’s repositioning of itself as a company poised to capitalize on the industrywide fervor for artificial intelligence.
President Biden has signed the bill to force a sale of the video app or ban it. Now the law faces court challenges, a shortage of qualified buyers and Beijing’s hostility.
TikTok supporters on Capitol Hill last month. The proposed law would allow TikTok to continue to operate in the United States if its Chinese owner sold it within about nine months.
Supporters of TikTok gathered near the Capitol last month as the House of Representatives voted to pass a bill to force TikTok to cut ties with its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, or risk being banned in U.S. app stores.
A tiny group of lawmakers huddled in private about a year ago, aiming to keep the discussions away from TikTok lobbyists while bulletproofing a bill that could ban the app.
Congressional representatives joined TikTok creators at the Capitol last year ahead of a House vote to ban the app. The Senate passed a version of the bill this week.
President Biden has signed the bill to force a sale of the video app or ban it. Now the law faces court challenges, a shortage of qualified buyers and Beijing’s hostility.
TikTok supporters on Capitol Hill last month. The proposed law would allow TikTok to continue to operate in the United States if its Chinese owner sold it within about nine months.
The group intends to fight what its leader, Nina Jankowicz, and others have described as a coordinated campaign by conservatives and their allies to undermine researchers who study disinformation.
European officials threatened to fine TikTok and force it to remove some features, the latest regulatory challenge for the Chinese-owned social media app.
A report by Stanford researchers cautions that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children doesn’t have the resources to help fight the new epidemic.
Journalists outside a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation in January. A new report says A.I. is adding to the problem.
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