The Web

A new site that tracks the daily fluctuating costs behind building a bot army on over 500 social media and commercial platforms—from TikTok to Amazon and Spotify—in every nation on the planet is launched today by the University of Cambridge.... Read more

As Australia's ban on under-16-year-olds having certain social media accounts kicks in this week, debate on whether it's a good idea or even legal rages on—both at home and overseas.... Read more

As Australia began enforcing a world-first social media ban for children under 16 years old this week, Denmark is planning to follow its lead and severely restrict social media access for young people.... Read more

Instagram on Wednesday unveiled a new AI-powered feature that lets users view and adjust the algorithm shaping their Reels feed, calling it a pioneering move toward greater user control.... Read more

The tech industry's unofficial motto for two decades was "move fast and break things." It was a philosophy that broke more than just taxi monopolies or hotel chains. It also constructed a digital world filled with risks for our most vulnerable.... Read more

Australia banned under-16s from social media in a world-first crackdown on Wednesday, declaring it was time to "take back control" from formidable tech giants.... Read more

Elon Musk's X erupted in uproar after the rollout of a feature revealing an account's location, exposing what users describe as global troll farms and influence operations on the platform—including in support of Donald Trump.... Read more

Snapchat has begun asking teenage Australians to verify their ages, a company spokesperson said Monday, just weeks before Canberra enforces sweeping laws banning under-16s from social media.... Read more

Technology giant Meta on Thursday began sending thousands of young Australians a two-week warning to downland their digital histories and delete their accounts from Facebook, Instagram and Threads before a world-first social media ban on accounts of children younger than 16 takes effect.... Read more

The EU executive proposed rolling back key AI and data privacy rules on Wednesday as part of a push to slash red tape and help Europe's high-tech sector catch up with global rivals.... Read more

The EU will unveil plans on Wednesday to overhaul its AI and data privacy rules after coming under pressure from European and US companies.... Read more

A widely used Internet infrastructure company said that it has resolved an issue that led to outages impacting users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game, "League of Legends," to the New Jersey Transit system early Tuesday.... Read more

A widely used Internet infrastructure company said that it has resolved an issue that led to outages impacting users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game, "League of Legends," to the New Jersey Transit system early Tuesday.... Read more

Big tech platforms, including TikTok and Netflix, are all looking to add video podcasts to their content, a rapidly growing format that attracts a young audience prized by advertisers and where YouTube dominates.... Read more

Google on Friday announced changes to its advertising services to avert the risk of a breakup, two months after Brussels hit the US giant with a massive fine.... Read more

A swarm of AI "crawlers" is running rampant on the internet, scouring billions of websites for data to feed algorithms at leading tech companies—all without permission or payment, upending the online economy.... Read more

The risk of the internet fragmenting into national "splinternets" will likely be averted in a UN vote next month, the head of the authority that manages web addresses told AFP on Tuesday.... Read more

When most people think about immigration enforcement, they picture border crossings and airport checkpoints. But the new front line may be your social media feed.... Read more

Denmark's government on Friday announced an agreement to ban access to social media for anyone under 15, ratcheting up pressure on Big Tech platforms as concerns grow that kids are getting too swept up in a digitized world of harmful content and commercial interests.... Read more

Australia has added message board Reddit and livestreaming service Kick to its list of social media platforms that must ban children younger than 16 from holding accounts.... Read more

When millions of people suddenly couldn't load familiar websites and apps during the Amazon Web Services, or AWS, outage on Oct. 20, 2025, the affected servers weren't actually down. The problem was more fundamental – their names couldn't be found.... Read more

As anyone who uses the internet will know, the way we find information has fundamentally changed. For the last three decades, search engines have delivered ranked lists of links in response to our queries, and it was our job to search through them to find what we wanted. Now, major... Read more

Data from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI suggest that more than a million of the people using its generative AI chatbot have shown interest in suicide.... Read more

Tech giants Meta and TikTok said Tuesday they will obey Australia's under-16 social media ban but warned the landmark laws could prove difficult to enforce.... Read more

Zhao Yitang had always dreamed of playing football for China and this summer he finally did—not in boots on a pitch, but on a smartphone.... Read more

Elon Musk has launched Grokipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia that the billionaire seeks to position as a rival to Wikipedia.... Read more

Learning about a topic by interacting with AI chatbots like ChatGPT rather than following links provided by web search can produce shallower knowledge. Advice given on the basis of this shallow knowledge tends to be sparser, less original, and less likely to be adopted by others.... Read more

On Monday, October 20, millions of internet users got a painful answer to a question few even knew existed. The question was: What do Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Signal, United and Delta airlines and countless other web-based sites and services have in common?... Read more

A recent study shows that AI-powered social media bots can increase user engagement on posts, but they fall short of encouraging users to post more overall.... Read more

The race to build the metaverse—a vast digital realm where virtual and physical worlds merge—is already becoming a global power struggle.... Read more

From Reddit and Snapchat to Delta and Zoom, more than a thousand websites around the globe were knocked offline early Monday—and continued to have problems into the afternoon—after a major outage at Amazon Web Services, the single largest cloud service provider in the world.... Read more

A major Amazon Web Services outage disrupted scores of online platforms on Monday—leaving people around the world unable to access some banks, chatting apps, online food ordering and more.... Read more

ChatGPT will be able to have kinkier conversations after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the artificial intelligence company will soon allow its chatbot to engage in "erotica for verified adults."... Read more

The Australian government has begun a public education campaign with tips on how to wean children off social media ahead of a world-first national 16-year age limit taking effect in December.... Read more

European lawmakers on Thursday called for stricter rules to protect minors online, including a bloc-wide minimum age of 16 to access social media and AI companions without parental consent.... Read more

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, is about to launch the early beta version of Grokipedia, a new project to rival Wikipedia.... Read more

Ursula Smartt not only writes about media law but she acts like a journalist when she does it.... Read more

OpenAI announced plans on Tuesday to relax restrictions on its ChatGPT chatbot, including allowing erotic content for verified adult users as part of what the company calls a "treat adult users like adults" principle.... Read more

Teenagers on Instagram will be restricted to seeing PG-13 content by default and won't be able to change their settings without a parent's permission, Meta announced on Tuesday.... Read more

Alphabet Inc.'s Google wants to retain the right to bundle its popular mapping and video apps with its Gemini AI service, a lawyer for the company told a federal judge Wednesday, pushing back on a Justice Department proposal that would bar the practice.... Read more

Does protecting children justify snooping on private messages? That is the sensitive question facing EU countries Wednesday as they wrangle over a push to combat child sexual abuse material online.... Read more

There's been a striking decline in public confidence in social media platforms, according to the 2025 Ethics Index published by the Governance Institute of Australia. One in four Australians now rate social media as "very unethical."... Read more

Alphabet Inc.'s Google has spent the past week in Virginia federal court seeking to persuade a judge that selling off its advertising exchange is too risky, technologically difficult and would disrupt the market.... Read more

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law groundbreaking legislation requiring the world's largest artificial intelligence companies to publicly disclose their safety protocols and report critical incidents, state lawmakers announced Monday.... Read more

Despite years of congressional hearings, lawsuits, academic research, whistleblowers and testimony from parents and teenagers about the dangers of Instagram, Meta's wildly popular app has failed to protect children from harm, with "woefully ineffective" safety measures, according to a new report from former employee and whistleblower Arturo Bejar and four... Read more

EU chief Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday threw her support behind growing calls to ban social media use for children, promising to weigh action at the European level in coming months.... Read more

China's top internet regulator said Tuesday it would take action against ByteDance-owned news app Jinri Toutiao and Alibaba's internet browser company UCWeb for allegedly displaying harmful content, a day after announcing a two-month social media crackdown.... Read more

As cyber threats grow more sophisticated by the day, UC Riverside researchers are making computing safer thanks to research that targets some of the internet's most pressing security challenges.... Read more

The parents of teenagers who killed themselves after interactions with artificial intelligence chatbots are planning to testify to Congress on Tuesday about the dangers of the technology.... Read more

Australia will not require social media giants to verify the ages of all users under its ban on under-16s using the platforms, Canberra said Tuesday.... Read more