James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
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 …
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 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, …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
NPR hits back as Twitter hands it a ‘state-affiliated media’ label
The National Public Radio media service hit back at Twitter Inc. today after the social media platform made the surprise move of labeling it as state-affiliated media. NPR, which is headquartered in Washington D.C., has more than 1,000 public radio stations in …