The Guardian

Royal Court, London Teenage girls discuss the horrors they have seen via their phones as Georgie Dettmer’s reckoning with internet culture is brutally realised by director Jess Edwards Georgie Dettmer’s gaze is unflinching. Nothing is held back in Are You Watching?, her fury-filled interrogation of our twisted relationship with sex and violence, and the emotional distance we hide behind when we w…

Jess Asato was portrayed by AI tool as wearing a bikini after she criticised the creation of such non-consensual pictures A Labour MP has taken legal action against Elon Musk’s AI company after saying its Grok tool helped a user produce fake sexualised pictures of her, part of a wave of such images that flooded X earlier this year. Jess Asato, the MP for Lowestoft, said in January that seeing her…

European Commission aims to reduce ‘risky dependencies’ on foreign suppliers in cloud computing, AI and semiconductor production The EU executive wants to ensure no foreign government or company has access to a “kill switch” to turn off or disrupt vital tech services across the continent, as part of an effort to cut dependencies on the US and China. Publishing “technological sovereignty” proposal…

Mat Watkinson and Keith Flett respond to Jonathan Liew’s article asking why many self-professed progressives still use Elon Musk’s social media platform Jonathan Liew wonders why people are still on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X ( If you’re still on Elon Musk’s X, ask yourself this: why?, 28 May ). There is an obvious answer: all major companies refuse to leave it. Sadly, it’s the quickest…

Bank apologises after IT update caused problems with Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland apps Lloyds Banking Group has apologised after thousands of its customers were unable to make payments or send money due to another IT glitch. According to Downdetector, a website that lets people track real-time service issues and outages, customers started noticing problems shortly after 11am on Wednesday,…

At Pixelate, the music is as garish as the meme-referencing costumes. Is it internet ‘brainrot’ come to life – or a much-needed offline community? ‘It’s time to get … crazy!” DJ Compulsive Leia is yelling at us from the stage. Around me, clubbers in cat ears wave LED glow sticks and squeal in anticipation. Suddenly, an all too familiar sound: Crazy Frog’s much maligned version of Axel F, albeit r…

Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker say UK has stopped them travelling to speak at SXSW London Two prominent US political commentators who were due to speak at events in the UK this week have said they have been banned from entering the country. Cenk Uygur, the host of the Young Turks online political talkshow, and Hasan Piker, who runs his own hours-long stream each day, said they had been stopped from a…

Authoritarian states are increasingly shutting off or throttling access to the internet, creating separate spheres in a realm built on connection China boasts of having the world’s largest population of internet users: 1.125 billion by the end of 2025, according to official figures . But as one joke has it, the Great Firewall – blocking not only politically sensitive material but also global tech…

Richard Thackeray and Phil Snell respond to an article by Wendy Liu on using artificial intelligence Wendy Liu’s thoughtful piece on AI and cognitive sovereignty raises real concerns about labour redundancies, the hype and the environmental cost ( I avoid AI tools because thinking is supposed to be hard. It’s what makes us human, 24 May ). But I think she allows those legitimate grievances to col…

European Commission finds shoppers on Chinese website very likely to find unsafe items and imposes €200m penalty EU regulators have fined the Chinese shopping website Temu €200m (£173m) for failing to stop the sale of illegal and dangerous products. The European Commission imposed the penalty after a 19-month investigation that found consumers were very likely to encounter illegal or unsafe produ…

Some argue that quitting the platform formerly known as Twitter cedes the space to malign actors. But it’s an open sewer, beyond redemeption You can read the Tottenham striker Richarlison launching a defiant broadside at the newly crowned champions. “Next season, we will compete for the title,” he says. “Arsenal won’t be winning it again for the next 22 years.” You can read the outgoing Mancheste…

After 88 days of near-total blackout, first reactions to the return of partial connectivity were not celebratory After 88 days of near-total internet blackout in Iran, long-delayed messages, images and poems flooded phones and social media feeds at about 5pm on Tuesday, when still-limited connectivity flickered back to life . The first reactions, however, were not celebratory. Many new posts were…

She made millions as a tween and teenager by posting clips of herself and her friends on YouTube. Then the business collapsed amid acrimony. What does her success in the adult industry, at 18, say about surveillance, social media and sexualisation? ‘Honestly, the answer is kind of gross,” says Piper Rockelle, in a recent TikTok video, reflecting on why she is so popular on OnlyFans. In the clip, …

As government begins restoring connection, population voices dismay over food price increases and shortages The partial lifting of internet restrictions in Iran has revealed a rising tide of anger about food price inflation as ordinary Iranians decry annual price increases of 308% for vegetable oil, 190% for chicken, and 170% for rice. Iranian authorities on Tuesday began restoring the connection…

The company’s data editor trawls through billions of queries to deliver a portrait of the world’s preoccupations As anyone who has procreated this century knows, childrearing involves daily rounds of online searching. The most common parenting-related queries feature in What We Ask Google, a valiant attempt by the search giant’s data editor Simon Rogers to create a “surprisingly hopeful picture o…