James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Bipartisan bill aims to ban kids under 13 from using social media
A bipartisan bill introduced today would stop anyone in the U.S. under 13 years of age from using social media as well as put limits on all young people from getting onto such platforms. The “Protecting Kids on Social Media Act,” is the brainchild of Senators Tom Cotton (R-Arizona), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), ...
UK bill aims to tackle big tech’s dominance in digital markets
The U.K. announced today that its Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill will crack down on the dominance of some of the world’s leading tech companies. Despite mammoth efforts by big tech to stop the bill from going through, their lobbying has not produced any significant changes. The U.K.’s watchdogs, including the all-new Digital Markets Unit, ...
Supreme Court to hear cases involving disputes over public officials blocking people on social media
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear two First Amendment rights cases in which public officials blocked people on their social media accounts. The cases both related to a case involving former president Donald Trump, in which he argued that he should have the right to block people on his Twitter account. Trump argued that since ...
The purge of Twitter’s blue checkmarks has begun
Today was the end of an era for many people when they discovered that Twitter Inc. owner Elon Musk had finally made good on his promise to remove the platform’s blue checkmarks. It has been known for a while this was coming, although Musk’s plan to take away people’s precious verification badges of honor has ...
Google employees say Bard AI was pushed out despite ethical flaws
A group of Google LLC employees working on Bard says the company rushed to release the chatbot in spite of obvious ethical issues, according to a report today by Bloomberg. Google may have been slow out of the blocks in terms of what has been an explosion of generative artificial intelligence trained on large language ...
Reddit to charge for access to its API to counter free data scraping by AI companies
As big tech races to develop the most advanced generative artificial intelligence chatbots, Reddit Inc. today announced its treasure trove of data will no longer come free. The company said it will now start charging for access to its application programming interface, an API that has been used by AI companies such as Microsoft Corp.’s ...
Twitter will start labeling tweets that have been restricted for hateful speech
Twitter Inc. announced today that it will now effectively let people know their tweet has been “shadowbanned” when it has violated the company’s Hateful Conduct policy. In a blog post, Twitter said that under Twitter 2.0, it wants the platform to remain safe but not to be a hive of censorship. The company said it ...
In surprise interview with BBC, Elon Musk says owning Twitter at times has been ‘painful’
Twitter Inc. owner Elon Musk sat with the BBC on Tuesday night at the company’s offices in San Francisco in what turned out to be a fairly candid interview. In the 90 minutes that the BBC spoke to Musk, just about all of the hot topics were covered. He talked about the massive layoffs at ...
Substack releases a platform that looks a whole lot like Twitter
Substack Inc. today launched Notes, a platform where Substack creators can interact with subscribers and where the entire experience looks very much like Twitter. The differences are only in the language. Users don’t post tweets; they post notes. There’s no such thing as a retweet, but there is a restack. Everything else looks like a ...
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says chat AI is coming to search… at some point
Conversational artificial intelligence is coming to the world’s largest search engine, according to the Google LLC boss, but when that happens, he’s not prepared to say. In an interview published by the Wall Street Journal today, Pichai allayed fears that large language model AI, known as LLMs, such as the very popular ChatGPT, will put much ...