Good afternoon Sizzlers! Sorry about the late edition — had my hands full with a sick two-year-old and a bit of tech news happening! Great to be back in your inbox.

The News

The ban has begun with Meta first out of the blocks

Australians are now being told if their Facebook and Instagram accounts will be deactivated under the imminent teen social media ban (ABC News, Guardian). Meta is the first cab off the rank with info about what will happen:

Meta also reiterated that it thinks the ban will hurt more than help and that they expect hiccups with age check technology — presumably referring to the accuracy issues with facial scans — that they’re required to use because of government requirements.

(I also reported yesterday that Instagram already appears to be blocking people from making teen accounts, something that Meta is “investigating”).

The Sizzle: The ban begins! Despite most of you being very across this, I expect a lot of Australians will only essentially find out about this now. I think it’s interesting that Meta is the first tech company to move on the ban and they are completely doing what the government has asked. My guess is because it hopes that being first will help fix its reputation (which is probably the worst among all major platforms). Also, it doesn’t hurt that Meta still will have Messenger and WhatsApp, while a major competitor, Snapchat, is caught up in the ban.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Everyone is trying to slash regulations for AI

AI regulations are on the chopping block around the world. The European Commission is proposing to water down its flagship GDPR privacy rules to make it easier to train AI on personal information (Verge). It’s also suggesting to pause forthcoming requirements for “high-risk” use of AI for the time being. These changes, framed as “streamlining” existing rules, need to be voted through and are already facing opposition (Reuters). Meanwhile, the Trump Administration is getting ready to start blocking state-based AI laws which essentially would put an end to any real attempts to regulate AI in the US for the time being (Politico).

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Choose-your-own-rules is the future of content moderation

TikTok will soon let you choose to see less AI content (Engadget). Using Content Credentials metadata to identify what’s AI slop, TikTok will let users “dial things down” by choice. It’s a baby step towards the approach of Bluesky — which also announced some new moderation policies to allow more granular content reporting and account violations (Engadget) — which even allows users to sign up to additional voluntary moderation, like the Blacksky community (WIRED).

The Sizzle: Content moderation is one of the most complicated, fraught and least rewarding parts of running a social media platform. While I think there should be a clear baseline of what platforms will and won’t allow, I also think that handing more of the control for this to people is a good thing. This already happens in a de facto way via the recommendation engines, but I think making it more explicit and under a user’s conscious control can only be a good thing.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of the world:

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

Who down detects the down detector?

After yesterday’s outage that took down the DownDetector, Marner on the Sizzle forums thankfully shared how someone stepped up to create a service to let you know if the DownDetector is down: DownDetector’s Down Detector.

Which is all well and good, but what about if that goes down? Well, BernieTB also shared on the forum that there’s a Downdetector’s Downdetector’s Downdetector.

And yes, before you ask, here’s the Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector's Downdetector.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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