Month: January 2025

‘Each year you delay giving a phone is a big win’: child screen-time solutions from around the world

From stringent legislation to grassroots action, Australia and Spain lead the way in tackling children’s use of mobile phones and tablets If the advent of the affordable mobile phone has given parents a new way to stay in touch with their ­children, it has also prompted countless arguments about screen time, safety and social media. …

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Silicon Valley’s tycoons are bending the knee to Trump | Blake Montgomery

In 2017, Silicon Valley rebuked Trump’s travel ban. Today, it has reversed course and is bending over backwards with displays of deference to Trump On 28 January 2017, I rushed to the San Francisco international airport (SFO). Like elsewhere in the US that night, demonstrations were growing against a travel ban Donald Trump had issued …

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Meta terminates its DEI programs days before Trump inauguration

Meta, fresh off announcement to end factchecking, follows McDonald’s and Walmart in rolling back diversity initiatives Following a week in which Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was getting rid of factchecking, as of Friday the company is also terminating its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, effective immediately. An internal memo from Meta acknowledged that …

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Amazon dials back DEI programs ahead of Trump inauguration

Online giant is among several companies ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs before Trump takes office Amazon.com is winding down diversity programs ahead of Republican Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency, amid growing conservative opposition to such initiatives. Some of biggest businesses in the US have been scaling back their diversity initiatives, years after …

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Mark Zuckerberg’s end to Meta factchecking is a desperate play for engagement

As factchecking attempts end, Meta’s platforms will become a wasteland of fake news and misinformation Mark Zuckerberg craves one metric more than any other: engagement, the statistic that tracks how long social media users spend scrolling, clicking, commenting, and viewing ads. More engagement, more profit. The Meta CEO will do almost anything to keep users …

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Let’s teach teenagers how to use smartphones responsibly | Letters

Shawna Kay Williams-Pinnock calls for lessons about harmful content and social media literacy, plus letters from Stuart Harrington and Cyndy Etler In the article (As a child psychiatrist, I see what smartphones are doing to kids’ mental health – and it’s terrifying, 3 January), Dr Emily Sehmer, a UK-based psychiatrist, expressed concerns about the deleterious …

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Resident Evil 4 at 20: the horror game that revitalised a genre

With brutishly fast zombies, raw action and most importantly an over-the-shoulder viewpoint, the influence of Capcom’s horror game can still be felt It is an interesting quirk of video game history that one of the greatest ever horror titles debuted on the Nintendo GameCube, a toylike console better known for the cutest titles in the …

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TikTok ban: US supreme court hears oral arguments over fate of app – live updates

Justices hear arguments after app’s Chinese-based parent company ByteDance asked justices to review case Arguments have begun at the supreme court. First up is Noel Francisco, TikTok’s lawyer, who’s arguing that the US should halt the ban. He’s trying to convince the judges that the law passed by Congress last spring infringes on TikTok’s freedom …

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Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of ‘pirated’ books to train AI models, authors claim

Sarah Silverman and others file court case claiming CEO approved use of dataset despite warnings Business live – latest updates Mark Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of “pirated” versions of copyright-protected books to train the company’s artificial intelligence models, a group of authors has alleged in a US court filing. Citing internal Meta communications, the filing …

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