‘My Government Must Quit Twitter and Call Out Elon Musk’s Far-Right Hate’ Labour MP Noah Law explains why it’s time for Keir Starmer to start treating the billionaire X owner as the ‘foreign extremist’ he now is bylinetimes.com/2025/09/15/m...

“free speech” is just an empty signifier at this point and has been for at least 20 years (i am not a historian please don’t be mad if its way longer i am only a man)

“It’s alarming that the Environment Agency has been handing out licences for datacentres to extract hundreds of millions of litres of water from the environment – while failing to keep track of the total.” observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

finally some good fuckin news www.ft.com/content/8f8b...

farewell Peter Kyle, I will miss coming up with new and imaginative ways to say you’re getting your wallet inspected by big tech

Judge Mehta had a real opportunity to make significant change to the market here, and he’s basically blown it. I doubt we’ll see a similar chance to break up the monopolies for a long time.

We’ve come a long way since the reasonably strong response to the Southport race riots, huh

let the body keep the score let the body keep the score let the body keep the score let the body keep the SCOOOOOOOOOOOOORE

this isn’t even the correct version of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory for the uk!! “they’re importing voters” is the US version!!!! my man can’t even keep his white supremacist conspiracy bollocks straight

On the 30th August. Criminal.

This was entirely expected. The vast increase in energy demand that coming from data centres cannot be satisfied by renewables, or even existing grid infrastructure. So they are building new fossil fuel on-site generation. It's madness.

chatGPT will report you to the police but somehow OpenAI isn't capable of intervening when someone is an active suicide risk??

working on a thesis that the earnestness of AI chatbots is fundamentally antithetical to the bri'ish mind

"Future historians will surely debate at great length whether it was economics or media culture or simple incompetence that led the Starmer government’s moral compass to break. But they surely won’t debate who, out of the Taliban or the people who fled from their regime, were actually the baddies."

The question here, as with other cases of tech-enabled suicide, isn't so much 'did ChatGPT kill this boy?', it's 'why did he engage with ChatGPT to the exclusion of anyone/thing else?'. And the answer - in my view - is that ChatGPT, as w/ nearly all social media today, is designed to be addictive.

getting to the age now where seeing anyone posting a smiling photo with a parent on the gram prompts a quick caption read to make sure the parent hasn’t died

i think the problem with age verification discourse is mostly just americabrain: american journalists simply cannot understand that other countries' governments are not acting or legislating for the same reasons as theirs

TikTok now planning to lay off its UK-based moderators after doing so in Germany. They claim they're replacing w/ AI, but we all know AI can't moderate sufficiently well to do that. More than likely they'll offshore it to places w/ cheaper labour, like Meta before them. www.ft.com/content/d277...

The UK Government is forcing through a huge expansion of data centres without considering the serious cost in terms of water, energy and climate emissions. Foxglove and @globalactionplan.bsky.social are fighting back: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

if the mood sours on genAI, and the capital expenditure faucets are turned off, what happens to all the currently planned hyperscaler data centres? is the plan that we just let them sit as glorified shacks, totems to a time of untrammelled AI optimism?

we should absolutely co-opt the platforms that fascists have built for themselves to attempt to reach their audiences. but letting fascists have access to *your* audience, whoever that might be, is silly

Along with @globalactionplan.bsky.social we @foxglovelegal.bsky.social have launched a challenge to Rayner’s decision to overrule the local planning authority & push through a data centre at Woodlands Park without any need for an Environmental Impact Assessment. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

google has delightfully informed me that the Data (Use and Access) Bill appears in Season 8, Episode 254 of that long-running TV show, 'House of Lords'

don't worry everyone! data centre water use is a myth! it's all a big misunderstanding! so says a report from the lobby group TechUK, produced in partnership with the Environment Agency (!). the problem is, the research is, to use the technical term, bollocks. www.techuk.org/resource/tec...

It looks like the British govt is more bullish on AI than the AI companies -- even Sam Altman wouldn't tell you that "Agentic AI can reliably complete basic admin tasks" www.gov.uk/government/n...

Welp, suppose we might find out the answer to that question in the eyes of the state

So TikTok gets its moderators to train an AI, then fires them en masse to replace them with that AI. There has to be some action around companies forcing their employees to dig their own graves. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

realistically we have ~5 options for online safety. we can allow platforms to regulate themselves (laissez faire), force them to do it, or put the burden on parents, ISPs, or government. defaulting to the first option has been an unmitigated failure, even to those criticising legislative attempts.

“Promising young man” justice discourse but make it AI companies arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

hearing that clanker is a slur now

ah, monsieur, please take a seat

Keir Starmer's Government is still refusing to explore whether it should stop using X, or use alternative platforms like Bluesky, despite Musk's site amplifying unfiltered hate and misinformation, and despite its in-house AI bot referring to itself as "Mecha-Hitler" bylinetimes.com/2025/07/31/k...

really enjoyed Heretic (2024), a film whose horror can be summed up as “what if a british man watched zeitgeist (2007)?”

Interesting to see contrast between IS TONTY BLAIR BEHIND THIS on the right, and much lower salience of Thatcher (inarguably more influential on the country’s direction) on the left. Presumably a recency bias towards Brexit and subsequent changes amongst progressive respondents?

i might be in the minority on this platform when i say that i think it might be good, actually, to *try* to age-gate porn and gore. lgbtq+ and sw content is unacceptable collateral damage, yes. but i disagree that trying to stop kids seeing mature content is intrinsically creeping fascism.

As the UK government celebrates OpenAI’s plans to open more offices or data centers, it seems to ignore mounting warnings about ceding more power to tech giants, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Megan Kirkwood.

We have a story in the Times today about the planned uber hyperscale data centre in Elsham, Lincolnshire. Even the water company is objecting to this one. Among the litany of issues with the plan, there's the potential for it to cause shit in the drinking water. www.thetimes.com/uk/environme...

we used to have a proper internet

Most of the internet used to be like this. This is actually the default, it took companies enclosing the internet and adding weird, soul-killing incentives to make people behave the way they do now. In a way, there is truly nothing special about Wikipedia except that it survived longer.

at this point it’s well known in terrorism/extremism studies to the point of banality that a high proportion of those who engage in mass violence have a history of intimate partner abuse, but it bears repeating

in 20 years time there will be a serious student politics controversy over a “clankers v sloppers” party held during a freshers’ week, and i think that’s beautiful

Exposed: the neo-Nazis who are organising the Epping, Essex anti-immigrant protests

Google is killing news. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Sure seems like a good few members of our press have gone from 'worrying there might be riots this summer' to 'really hoping there will be riots this summer' in the last few days

inspired by @marcharris.bsky.social, tag yourself

Trump's AI Action Plan makes it crystal clear that they want to use AI as a tool of geostrategic dominance, locking in everyone else. Will Peter 'jangling keys admirer' Kyle continue to accept Google/OpenAI/whoever's offers of 'free AI support!!' with credulity? www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

'nightingale hospitals? why not nightingale prisons-' you catch a reflection in the mirror. it's michel foucault. he's holding a claw hammer

Ofcom news consumption report is out today. Lots to look at, but the thing that struck me is the increase in proportion of 12-15 y.o.s using X/Twitter, and just how much more politically engaged they seem than rest of their cohort. LOOK at the far right (heh) www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/r...

Around the time we filed our complaint about Google's avaricious AI Overviews with the CMA (and DG Comp in the EU), Cloudflare announced it would block AI scrapers by default. The catch? The only bots it won't work on are Google's, which will carry on regardless. www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-r...

This quote about water privatisation doing the rounds (including in a well-read post by @peterstefanovic.bsky.social) does not appear *anywhere* in the Independent Water Commission report. It's unclear where Robert Peston got it from. Could it be an AI summary gone wrong?