There should be a high bar for politicians attacking the media, but maybe Ed Davey has half a point here? For example, the first three paragraphs of this BBC story repeat Reform's £243bn figure without saying that the thinktank behind the estimate now disowns it. (This is mentioned in paragraph 35)

What a terrible take. As someone who engaged at a policy level with the ePrivacy Directive (& its predecessor 97/66EC), the ePD didn’t ’plaster the online world with pop-ups’. Privacy invading & eroding business models are responsible for that - biz could have chosen a different path

Re the new Reform pledge, a sports writer has already got to the heart of the matter better than the politics commentators www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Will Oxford disclose how much it paid (or did not pay) for this? Surely a sweetheart deal (has research money thrown in!) so OpenAI can plaster Oxford over its marketing and raid other unis’ fees, library budgets to throw into the sector’s massive inference funding chasm.

Yet bbc and others will of course spend months to years talking about nothing else and asking those questions Consequences 1. No other real problems will be covered 2. All of us will be continually alienated and made feel not welcome

Google honestly advertising Gemini (on Facebook as it happens) with "summarise this contract, including an outline of agreements, termination and payment terms" as the example.

Going to take that a bit personally, I've paid tax and NI in UK for 30 years now, does Farage want to take away my state pension rights?

Wes Streeting very confusingly saying trans men are a problem because they clearly can't go into women's spaces, and then concluding that trans women need "third spaces". www.mumsnet.com/news/wes-str...

Also this week, in an interview with Mumsnet, Streeting advocated for trans segregation. www.mumsnet.com/news/wes-str...

Fucking incredible to lose to a sundowning racist gameshow host, one of the most humiliating political defeats in American history, and then put out a book like "no no no, you guys got it all wrong, I hate trans people too!"

In case you thought I was exaggerating, here is the "debate" on Kimmel from Newsnight. David Frum explaining the horrific first-amendment-breaching executive overreach. British right wing hacks: bUt HiS jOkE wAs iNaCCuRaTe!

Ooh, those Christians and their second commandment ...

This is it exactly - with the UK, we are dangerously close to getting Farage and Reform. Meanwhile they are implementing age verification surveillance, telling people not to use VPNs and welcoming deeper relationships with tech companies involved in Trump's immigration enforcement.

How something can be both shocking yet also not surprising in the least www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

young people today will never know what it was like when computers just… did what you told them to do. never randomly changed shit without permission. never locked you out of your game console for updates. fuckin sucks.

Pretty clear illustration of "you may as well stand up for what you believe in, they're coming for you anyway."

Trump’s allies now control X, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, & TikTok. They own Fox News, CBS, WaPo, WSJ & NY Post. They own Sinclair Broadcasting which has 200 tv stations and local news in 100 markets. “Freedom of speech” is now what Trump and his billionaire pals say it is.

weird that neither of these articles two main stories decrying censorship mention WaPo's firing of @karenattiah.bsky.social I guess democracy really does die in darkness

We’d be in a much stronger position right now if mainstream Democrats had taken a common sense stand for First Amendment principles instead of piling on undergraduate standing up for Palestine.

In light of @pallenberg having content about Jimmy Kimmel removed from LinkedIn, I've written about the topic of Europeans problematic use of US commercial social networks in the era of Trump […]

Oh. That doesn’t seem right

please ENJOY this clip of Mark Zuckerberg *just trying to answer a video call* with the new 'neural band' Meta is shilling and failing miserably during a live demo You get a prize if you can withstand all 1:42 of this youtu.be/D97ILdUbYww?...

Israeli Forces fired upon a clearly identified Médecins Sans Frontièreswater truck while it was distributing 10000L of drinking water in Gaza City. The vehicle’s route and schedule had been communicated in advance to the Israeli authorities, as MSF does on a daily basis. msf.org.au/article/proj...

The single best way to improve my Samsung Android experience would be to get rid of this screen (last time I cleaned up open apps, 5 instances of it), to get it detached from what I used to naively think of as the "Power" button, or to get Gemini completely removed (already disabled on purpose).

One of the reasons we shouldn't invite authoritarians to the UK - ABC barred from Trump’s UK press conference after his clash with Australian journalist John Lyons www.theguardian.com/media/2025/s...

Surely this (especially "irrevocable") is GDPR-nonsensical anyway. If the legal basis is contract, it can end. If the legal basis is consent, it can be withdrawn. Never mind the use of unspecified personal data for unspecified and unlimited purposes.

Shame on Downing Street for going along with this. So much for being committed to a free press

I’m old enough to remember when a lot of people on social media told me that Vance’s remarks in Munich about free speech were to be taken very seriously.

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

I want my country back … from those who profit as public transport is run into the ground , those who get rewards for putting shit in the sea, those financiers and bankers who will destabilise a country for a quick buck, basically everyone Farage will stand up for if he wins an election

Starmer's package of US investment apparently bringing jobs to the UK includes £1.5bn from the tech company Palantir - a company facilitating Trump's deportation machinery. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I was inclined to do as advised, but found the buttons saying "listen to podcast" actually lead to the podcast being generated then, and only published if you choose to. On top of that, all the ones I tried were 0:00 long instead of the promised length. So yes rubbish from Academia, harmless still?

Quite. Fixing potholes won't fix racist lies.

You can trust institutions to do the right thing as long as they’ve exhausted every possible alternative

AI is a lack of consent machine

In London, hate will never win.

coates is genuinely a generational writer

Absolutely. Moving our cars to electric meant 20 extra apps on my phone, and a few days' trial and error to get the car app, the charger app, the power company app, the car, and the charger set right so that the car is charged at the time we want it to be.

Being an adult means having twenty apps with names like “Together” or “Omni”, and one of them controls your heating and one is your bank and none of them work

“People have a right to peaceful protest. It is core to our country’s values” the prime minister said in a statement to the Guardian. theguardian.com/uk-news/2025... But not this sort of peaceful protest obv. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Any illusion that we had a competent chancellor is now gone. Calling a meeting because UK cryptocurrency companies fear they haven't got as much opportunity as their counterparts in the Wild West ... "and blockchain". Even @davidgerard.co.uk has moved on from that :)

Q: Do you think it would've been fitting to lower the flags to half staff when Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota House Speaker, was gunned down by an assassin? TRUMP: I'm not familiar. The who?

I only now know what the white man who killed Kirk looks like through The Onion. If this person was trans, Black, brown, or Muslim their face would be plastered on every screen, on every shooting range target, on bumper stickers. Osama redux.

Romania's communication's watchdog says Twitter has refused to cooperate and take down Russian propaganda all year stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actual...

Sincerely hate stunts like this with my entire being. Disappointed to see Massive Attack be the ones doing it.

Here’s a poem called ‘English Roundabouts’.

"You can be English with roots that stretch back a 1,000 years, but you can also be English and look like me". About time. Need much more of this, and need the PM to come out and say it and challenge the politicians and media who've brought us here - not just Musk www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The Guardian’s Jessica Elgot “whatever you think of these messages”?!!! and making Labour factional infighting the focus rather than gross misogynoir. Truly grim stuff. And as for Harry Cole, we know full well what his whatsapps say about Diane Abbott.

This idea that racism is something that a person "is", i.e. that they are consciously A Racist, and thus anyone who isn't consciously A Racist should be given the benefit of the doubt in all cases, is one of the most helpful developments for racist ideology since phrenology