Threat Matrix service monitors social media profiles and flags up death threats, racism and sexist comments

The All England Lawn Tennis Club is using artificial intelligence for the first time to protect players at Wimbledon from online abuse.

An AI-driven service monitors players’ public-facing social media profiles and automatically flags death threats, racism and sexist comments in 35 different languages.

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Platforms send targeted messages to customers, reducing cancellations and encouraging them to return

Booking a table at your favourite restaurant no longer involves simply contacting the establishment and giving your details. Now it often involves the restaurant contacting you too – sometimes several times over.

Online booking platforms used by hundreds of restaurants in the UK now send out reservation confirmations, reminders, requests for feedback, future deals and news. Some send certain customers a “personalised booking link” after their visit, to encourage them to come back. “I hope you had a great time on your last visit … and that you’ll come back to see us again soon,” reads one example, sent on behalf of Som Saa, a Thai restaurant in east London, via booking platform SevenRooms.

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The longtime Daily Show host takes his satirical style to podcasting with The Weekly Show. Plus: five of the best election podcasts

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There are some things that feel like they definitely won’t work as a podcast. Right up there is anything about adorable animals – after all, you can’t exactly hear the tiny button noses. When it comes to cute creatures, it seems obvious that there’s no better way to appreciate them than gazing at them.

But this week, I discovered Animal , a New York Times podcast that proves that the beauty of fauna works even when it’s coming at you via your earholes. From charming tales of rescued baby puffins (technically known by the super-cute term “pufflings”) to a borderline immersive piece of storytelling about the ethereal experience of being stared at by a manatee, it’s a captivating listen – and it has redefined my ideas of what podcasts might be good at.

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Wikiesfera is one of a handful of groups around world trying to ‘make women visible’ on user-edited site

Packed into the back room of a feminist bookshop in Madrid, 17 women hunched over their laptops, chatting and laughing as they passed around snacks. Every now and then a hearty burst of applause punctuated the sound of typing, each time marking a milestone as the group steadily chipped away at what is perhaps one of the world’s most pervasive gender gaps.

Just under a fifth of Wikipedia’s content, including biographies, is focused on women, while women account for just about 15% of the site’s volunteer editors. “The numbers are pretty terrifying,” said Patricia Horrillo, who for much of the past decade has spent her spare time working to tackle this gap, cultivating a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to publishing content focused on women.

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The royals are perennial clickbait, but the wild online bunkum over the Princess of Wales hints at new and darker forces

On TikTok, there is a short clip of what an AI voiceover claims is a supposed “ring glitch” in the video in which Princess of Wales reveals her cancer diagnosis. It has 1.3 million views. Others, in which users “break down” aspects of the video and analyse the saga with spurious evidence, also rack up millions of views and shares. I have then seen them surface on X, formerly known as Twitter, and even shared on WhatsApp by friends and family, who see in these videos, presented as factual and delivered in reporter-style, nothing that indicates that this is wild internet bunkum.

Something has changed about the way social media content is presented to us. It is both a huge and subtle shift. Until recently, types of content were segregated by platform. Instagram was for pictures and short reels, TikTok for longer videos, X for short written posts. Now Instagram reels post TikTok videos, which post Instagram reels, and all are posted on X. Often it feels like a closed loop, with the algorithm taking you further and further away from discretion and choice in who you follow. All social media apps now have the equivalent of a “For you” page, a feed of content from people you don’t follow, and which, if you don’t consciously adjust your settings, the homepage defaults to. The result is that increasingly, you have less control over what you see.

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Media companies to combine publishing and advertising platforms to target gen Z and millennials

The Independent will take control of BuzzFeed and HuffPost in the UK and Ireland with the intention to create “Britain’s biggest publisher network for Gen Z and millennial audiences”, the publishers have said.

The two media companies will combine their publishing, data and advertising platforms “to allow commercial partners to seamlessly buy across their sites”.

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Supposedly Google is starting a pilot program of disabling Internet connectivity from employee computers:

The company will disable internet access on the select desktops, with the exception of internal web-based tools and Google-owned websites like Google Drive and Gmail. Some workers who need the internet to do their job will get exceptions, the company stated in materials.

Google has not confirmed this story.

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