Meta’s global affairs chief points to ‘behavioural issue’ around child safety tools on the social media platforms Parents do not use parental controls on Facebook and Instagram, according to Meta’s Nick Clegg, with adults failing to embrace the 50 child safety tools the company has introduced in recent years. Meta’s global affairs chief said there was a “behavioural issue” around using the tools, after admitting they were being ignored by parents. Regulatory pressure is building on tech companies to protect children from harmful content, with the Australian government announcing plans this week to ban younger teenagers from accessing social media. Continue reading...

Each government has been a challenge, each leader sillier and more ruinous than the last. But even cartoonists crave a bit of boring earnestness sometimes For the past five weeks people have repeatedly said to me, “You must be really busy!” I’ve had to explain that elections aren’t like that; in fact, from the point of view of cartoonists, they’re boring. The only real fun comes when the wheels fall off the party machines and their careful choreography collapses into farce. But in this election even the Tories’ serial weapons-grade balls-ups are becoming a bore, serving merely to remind me of the universal truth that reality will always, always be weirder than anything satire could think up in a million years. That said, in the empty hours of this interminable death watch while we’ve waited for the Tory tumbril finally to trundle to the guillotine, I’ve been reflecting on the past 14 years, and how the worst government of my lifetime has been succeeded five times by one that was even worse. Continue reading...