Category: Technology

  • How YouTube perverts politics and spreads fear and rage

    This, the result of a months-long investigation by the New York Times, is terrifying: How YouTube radicalised Brazil. A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life. Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos…

  • Playing video games

    Writing in Metro, Owl Stefania writes about the importance of video games in her coming out process: “Growing up, video games were my escape, providing an avenue where I could explore who I was.” I’ve written about this too, and a version of the following article was originally published in 404 Ink magazine in late 2017.…

  • It’s not video games. It’s Nazis

    In the aftermath of the latest US gun massacres, there have been lots of attempts to pin the blame on things. Despite at least one shooter leaving yet another manifesto that says “I did it because I’m a huge Nazi”, US Republicans and right-wing types generally have been quick to apportion the blame for gun…

  • If only we’d known, say the people who knew

    Writing on Twitter, co-founder Ev Williams (@ev) talks about the problem of abuse and harassment on the platform. *And*, yes, we (Twitter) should have invested more heavily in abuse before. I think we did more in the early days than we often get credit for (and they are doing way more today). *And* I personally…

  • Fun with filters

    The chat app SnapChat is back in the headlines after its new gender-swapping filter went viral. The filter makes boys look like girls and vice-versa, and as you can see above the results are pretty funny – although I seem to have the dubious honour of being the only person who looks older when the…

  • Twitter: our rules don’t apply to white guys

    As Twitter continues to ignore calls to ban nazis from its platform, a leak provides one explanation: fear of collateral damage. Twitter fears that if it were to ban white supremacist hate speech, that might mean banning some US republican politicians. Politicians such as, er, the President of the United States. That fear only appears…

  • Sell your kids for clicks

    There’s a deeply worrying article in The Guardian about the rise of child labour on the internet. Making videos of your kids might not seem like work, but it is: as one interviewee puts it, “it’s not play if you’re making money”. Child performers are subject to laws designed to protect them from exploitation not…

  • Like tears in the rain

    MySpace, the leading social network from the pre-Facebook days, has accidentally (?) deleted more than a decade’s worth of music. Every piece of music uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2015, some 50 million songs from 14 million artists, is gone like tears in the rain. This is an important lesson: digital does not…

  • Unexpected item in the fast lane area

    I’m very cynical about driverless cars. To an extent I think they’re a solution to the wrong question: now that humans are largely a city-dwelling species (and one facing devastating climate change), the smart thing to do would be to make public transport better and more efficient. For example, I live in Glasgow: our buses…

  • Calling time on my Apple Watch

    I’ve had all three generations of Apple Watch, but it’s time to call time on it. It is an incredibly clever device and it felt very futuristic when it first came out. But it does absolutely nothing to make my life better. That’s not to say it can’t be useful. It can. But it’s not…