Meta said it was fully expecting many teenagers would try to evade the new measures.

“The more restrictive the experience is, the stronger the theoretical incentive for a teen to try and work around the restriction,” Mr Mosseri said.

In response, the company is launching and developing new tools to catch them out.

Instagram already asks for proof of age from teenage users trying to change their listed date of birth to an adult one, and has done since 2022.

Now, as a new measure, if an underage user tries to set up a new Instagram account with an adult date of birth on the same device, the platform will notice and force them to verify their age.

In a statement, the company said it was not sharing all the tools it was using, “because we don’t want to give teens an instruction manual”.

“So we are working on all these tools, some of them already exist … we need to improve [them] and figure out how to provide protections for those we think are lying about their age,” Mr Mosseri said.

The most stubborn category of “age-liars” are underage users who lied about their age at the outset.

But Meta said it was developing AI tools to proactively detect those people by analysing user behaviour, networks and the way they interact with content.

Source.

I’m 25 now, but I still always say I was born in the 80s out of habit…

…?

I’m surprised so many people think this is a good argument. TikTok is a social media platform. Temu is an online marketplace. The potential to cause disruption within US society is completely different.

The article did mention ad-blockers:

Some users take back control from online ads by installing ad-blocker software. These can be free versions in the form of a browser extension, or more advanced versions with a subscription fee.

I think you underestimate how technologically illiterate the average person is. Many people do not even understand the difference between a web browser and a search engine - they use Chrome because they think that’s the only way to perform a Google search.

I agree to an extent, but the problem is not so much the normies themselves as it is the massive commercial market they represent. You might point to mainstream social media as evidence of a problem with the people themselves, but you would be overlooking the fact that the surveillance and attention economies have meant these social media platforms are deliberately designed to position people against one another to drive engagement so these companies can charge more to advertisers. Discourse on the internet isn’t getting worse because there are more bad people online, it’s getting worse because companies have a financial incentive to turn us into bad people when we are online.

I haven’t heard of that one but I’ll definitely watch it, thanks for the recommendation! In my city the small Uyghur community has been quite vocal about the treatment of their friends and family back home, many of whom they haven’t been able to contact for years due to the crackdowns. In particular, there was a family who ran a restaurant I used to eat at semi-regularly whose story received worldwide media attention. I have felt quite strongly about this issue since then.

Only if we’re talking about total users.The number of monthly active users (MAU) shouldn’t be affected by this, unless Meta is counting an active Facebook/Instagram who has opened a Threads account as an active Threads user (regardless of their Threads usage).

They don’t clog the feed, the overwhelming majority of posts here are links to articles. Your lack of motor control is also not our problem.

This is a pretty good overview of the human rights problems associated with the Chinese technology industry. It’s why I decided to stop purchasing products designed by Chinese companies a few years ago, after watching a Frontline documentary about it. It just felt wrong to be putting money into a sector of their industry that I know is being used to oppress billions of people. That’s not to say non-Chinese technology companies don’t have their own significant problems but there is a very obvious and direct link between the Chinese state and the Chinese private sector that doesn’t exist elsewhere (at least not on this scale).

From my understanding, Bluesky (despite its recent growth) isn’t particularly big either. Threads claims to have a lot of users and I assume it would have the easiest time attracting normies, but I am still sceptical of its long-term viability. I feel like the people leaving X would have quite a bit of crossover with people who despise Meta.

So that leaves us with a fourth competitor, which is nothing at all. Anecdotally I think this is what I am seeing the most - people who leave X are just abandoning the entire concept of microblogging, since the point of it is to speak to a large audience and none of the competitors can really deliver that right now. The appeal of Twitter was that everyone (who was interested in microblogging) was on it; smaller, niche communities are fine for discussion boards and group chats but microbloggers don’t really want to be screaming into a void where most people will never hear them. Microblogging was never even particularly popular anyway (when compared with other forms of social media) and I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if the downfall of X eventually kills the concept for most people in society.

The first time I read that title I thought jt was implying conspiracy theorists aren’t human lol

I don’t know why you guys keep pretending X is Truth Social levels of dead. Is this just copium or are you really that far removed from reality? X is absolutely in a significant decline but it’s still the dominant microblogging platform by a mile. All politicians, all media organisations, all celebrities use X. And ultimately these are the accounts that will determine whether X remains relevant in mainstream society.

The point of the article isn’t that AI is outright useless as a coding tool but that it lulls programmers into a false sense of security regarding the quality and security of their code. They aren’t reviewing their work as frequently because of this new reliance on AI as a time saver, and as such are more likely to miss any mistakes that they or the AJ made.

I guess that’s just the reality of living in a world where money is equated with success and success is equated with talent.

Removed by mod

For sure, I’m not suggesting otherwise. Just giving some additional context as to why it may have been posted again.

I believe the reason it was posted is because Proton recently linked to the article again on Twitter, claiming that Proton Pass is appearing too far down in Google’s search results relative to its popularity. This is when searching for “password manager” (Google’s own password manager is the first result).

I think most people do understand this and the naysayers get too caught up on the words being used, like how you still get people frothing over the mouth over the use of the word “intelligence” years after this has entered mainstream conversation. Most people using that word don’t literally think ChatGPT is a new form of intelligent life.

Actual title and lead of the article (emphasis mine):

Debate Prep by Day, Google Defense by Night

Karen Dunn is helping Kamala Harris and defending Big Tech from a lawsuit brought by the Biden-Harris administration. The case has spotlighted a brawl between Dunn’s law firm and DOJ.

Interesting, thanks for sharing.