‘Progressive except for Palestine’: how a tech charity imploded over a statement on Gaza

The board of the non-profit Code for Science & Society blocked a statement against genocide. The fallout tore the high-profile organization apartMiliaku Nwabueze, a senior program manager at Code for Science & Society, had been concerned for some time about the role of technology in state violence. Then, on 7 October of last year, Hamas entered Israel, killing and kidnapping about 1,400 people. Less than a week later, as Israel ordered 1.1 million Palestinians out of northern Gaza in the onset of its deadly retaliation, Nwabueze decided to write a message to her colleagues on the US-based non-profit organization’s Slack channel

Why Silicon Valley panicked over Australia’s under-16 social media ban

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. Happy belated Thanksgiving to my American readers, and I hope everyone enjoys a good holiday party this weekend. I’m excited to bake Grittibänz for the Feast of St Nicholas. This week in tech: Australia incites a panic, Bluesky poses the question of custom feeds, and the online things that brought me joy on holiday.On Thursday, Australia passed a law banning children under 16 from social networks

Meta says it has taken down about 20 covert influence operations in 2024

Meta has intervened to take down about 20 covert influence operations around the world this year, it has emerged – though the tech firm said fears of AI-fuelled fakery warping elections had not materialised in 2024.Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs at the company that runs Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said Russia was still the No 1 source of the adversarial online activity but said in a briefing it was “striking” how little AI was used to try to trick voters in the busiest ever year for elections around the world.The former British deputy prime minister revealed that Meta, which has more than 3 billion users, had to take down just over 500,000 requests to generate images on its own AI tools of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, JD Vance and Joe Biden in the month leading up to US election day.But the firm’s security experts had to tackle a new operation using fake accounts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal at the rate of more than one every three weeks. The “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” incidents included a Russian network using dozens of Facebook accounts and fictitious news websites to target people in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan

‘It feels like a startup energy’: Google’s UK boss on the advent of AI

While the tech giant wrestles with an US antitrust case, its managing director in London is pushing hard on the commercial possibilities of artificial intelligenceGoogle’s central London office cost as much as a tech unicorn and the company’s UK boss, Debbie Weinstein, says it pulses with a similar spirit.“It feels like a startup energy,” she says.However, we are meeting on a morning when Google has been threatened with a reckoning reserved for members of the corporate establishment, not tech ingenues: a breakup.Hours earlier, the US Department of Justice had asked a federal judge to order the sale of Google’s Chrome browser, along with a host of other actions including making its search index – a database of all the webpages it has crawled – available to competitors. It follows a ruling by the same judge in August that the $2tn company has built an illegal monopoly in the search market

The ChatGPT secret: is that text message from your friend, your lover – or a robot?

People are turning to chatbots to solve all their life problems, and they like its answers. But are they on a very slippery slope?When Tim first tried ChatGPT, he wasn’t very impressed. He had a play around, but ended up cancelling his subscription. Then he started having marriage troubles. Seeking to alleviate his soul-searching and sleepless nights, he took up journalling and found it beneficial

‘Russia can turn the lights off’: how the UK is preparing for cyberwar

The Swedish government checklist for surviving a war would not have looked out of place decades ago: bottled water; sleeping bags; extra batteries; enough cash for a week; and non-perishable food such as rice and cereal.Without being mentioned in name, Russia once more lurks in the background as it did during the cold war. But the nature of the threat it poses in the pamphlet, called “In case of crisis or war”, has changed.Alongside raising the possibility of “an armed attack against Sweden”, the guide also mentions “cyber-attacks” and “disinformation campaigns”.As well as coping with the threat of nuclear conflict or an armed border incursion, Europe must now contend with a very 21st-century foe: cyberwarfare