The European Commission announced a sweeping set of updates to consumer law on Wednesday to protect European Union citizens from “harmful digital practices”—whether while online shopping, browsing social media, or doing their Duolingo lesson. Within the package, the Commission unveiled its Digital Fairness Act to address harmful practices online. Proposed rules include banning dark patterns—practices
The rules for Australia aren’t set in stone yet, but the government says following-only feeds must not be harder to use or less functional, that algorithm settings must be “obvious”, and that they must not change without an “explicit choice” by the user, even if they leave the app. Buoyed by her success in Australia,
Australians would be able to switch off social media algorithms under draft legislation to be proposed this week. Communications Minister Anika Wells, who last year helmed the government’s world-first social media ban for under-16s, said the digital duty of care laws would ensure “some basic safety protections on an industry that hasn’t had to observe
Before the internet learned to like, match, and swipe, it learned to ask one brutally simple question: hot or not? Launched in 2000, Hot or Not invited people to upload photographs of themselves and be rated by strangers on a scale from 1 to 10. It was crude, addictive, and, within weeks, one of the
As social media has evolved from a place to connect with friends to full-scale entertainment platforms, a startup called Yope is quietly building what it believes will be the future of online connection: social networks without algorithms, without ads, and without public content. Yope’s app, now backed by a $12.3 million round led by Northzone,
When Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical on artificial intelligence at the Vatican on Monday, he invited Christopher Olah, cofounder of Anthropic, to speak. The move signaled an unprecedented alliance between the Catholic church and Silicon Valley. But to understand how this partnership came about, we need to go back to Anthropic’s founding. Why
