Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, I and many others have been looking for alternatives. Who wants to share a platform with the likes of Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson? I considered leaving Twitter as soon as Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, just not wanting to be part of a community that could be bought, least of all by a man like him – the obnoxious “long hours at a high intensity” bullying of his staff began immediately. But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories: “Anyone got catastrophically lonely during Covid?”; “Anyone hooked up with their secondary school boy/girlfriend?” We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous. It got more unpleasant after the blue-tick fiasco: identity verification became something you could buy, which destroyed the trust quotient. So I joined the rival platform Mastodon, but fast realised that I would never get 70,000 followers on there like I had on Twitter. It wasn’t that I wanted the attention per se, just that my gang wasn’t varied or noisy enough. There’s something eerie and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often enough, like walking into a shopping mall where half the shops have closed down and the rest are all selling the same thing. Continue reading...

Journalists are using artificial intelligence avatars to combat Maduro’s media crackdown since disputed election The Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who spent some of his happiest years chronicling life in Caracas, once declared journalism “the best job in the world”. Not so if you are reporting on today’s Venezuela, where journalists are feeling the heat as the South American country lurches towards full-blown dictatorship under President Nicolás Maduro. Continue reading...

Deal ‘meets audience where they are’ by pairing publisher’s content within tech startup’s products, including ChatGPT Condé Nast and OpenAI announced a multi-year partnership on Tuesday to display content from the publisher’s brands such as the Vogue, Wired and the New Yorker within the AI startup’s products, including ChatGPT and its SearchGPT prototype. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Microsoft-backed, Sam Altman-led firm has signed similar deals with Time magazine, the Financial Times, Business Insider owner Axel Springer, France’s Le Monde and Spain’s Prisa Media over the past few months. The deals give OpenAI access to the large archives of text owned by the publishers, which are necessary both for training large language models like ChatGPT and for finding real-time information. Continue reading...

It cannot be right that Musk can sow discord without personal risk. He’s a jetsetter: perhaps fear of unexpected detention will concentrate his mind The way social media is making headlines currently is not without precedent: a fragile narcissist posting relentlessly on a social network he’s made his own. We know well how this has ended in the past; Donald Trump’s furious posts after his election defeat led to the assault on the Capitol on 6 January 2021. The aftermath of that episode saw the then president suspended from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even, to the dismay of those hoping to mood-board the Mar-a-Lago aesthetic, Pinterest. This time is likely to be different, not least because the person agitating the social media furore, Elon Musk, owns the platform he is using. Continue reading...

X owner deletes post sharing faked Telegraph article that claimed convicted rioters would be sent to detention camps Elon Musk shared a fake Telegraph article claiming Keir Starmer was considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands. Musk deleted his post after about 30 minutes but a screenshot captured by Politics.co.uk suggests it had garnered nearly two million views before it was deleted. Continue reading...

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