An eye-opening insider account of Facebook alleges a bizarre office culture and worrying political overreach

If Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel about young tech workers, Microserfs, were a dystopian tragedy, it might read something like Careless People. The author narrates, in a fizzy historic present, her youthful idealism when she arrives at Facebook (now Meta) to work on global affairs in 2011, after a stint as an ambassador for New Zealand. Some years later she finds a female agency worker having a seizure on the office floor, surrounded by bosses who are ignoring her. The scales falling from her eyes become a blizzard. These people, she decides, just “didn’t give a fuck”.

Mark Zuckerberg’s first meeting with a head of state was with the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, in 2012. He was sweaty and nervous, but slowly he acquires a taste for the limelight. He asks (unsuccessfully) to be sat next to Fidel Castro at a dinner. In 2015 he asks Xi Jinping if he’ll “do him the honor of naming his unborn child”. (Xi refuses.) He’s friendly with Barack Obama, until the latter gives him a dressing-down about fake news.

In Sudan, fighters from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group, appear to have filmed and posted online videos of themselves glorifying the burning of homes and the torture of prisoners. These videos could be used by international courts to pursue war crime prosecutions.

Kaamil Ahmed explains how the international legal system is adapting to social media, finding a way to use the digital material shared online to corroborate accounts of war crimes being committed in countries ranging from Ukraine to Sudan

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Video footage, described as ‘callous’ and ‘pretty dreadful’, showed Sam Jones grabbing the joey from its mother at night

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A US hunting influencer who shared video of herself snatching a baby wombat away from its mother is being investigated for a potential breach of her Australian visa.

The footage, with scenes described as “callous” by the RSPCA and “pretty dreadful” by the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, showed the Montana-based influencer Sam Jones grabbing the wombat joey at night as it was walking with its mother.

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Surrey was region of UK with most sign-ups for Smartphone Free Childhood’s parent pact, launched last year

An online campaign committing parents to bar their children from owning a smartphone until they are at least 14 has garnered 100,000 signatures in the six months since its launch.

The Smartphone Free Childhood campaign launched a “parent pact” in September in which signatories committed to withhold handsets from their children until at least the end of year 9, and to keep them off social media until they are 16.

Dr Aodhan Breathnach says the general overreach of the state during the pandemic led to mistrust, Desmond Hewitt considers evidence and irrationality, and Richard Bunning is concerned by the poison on social media

The very title of Laura Spinney’s piece is a sad reflection of how pandemic control preferences quickly aligned along traditional political lines, to everybody’s detriment ( Five years on from the pandemic, the right’s fake Covid narrative has been turbocharged into the mainstream, 9 March ). If the right has been guilty of undermining science and scientists, I also observed through the pandemic how the left displayed a disturbing enthusiasm to restrict liberty, using fear and guilt to encourage compliance with control measures, and many arguing to prolong the restrictions beyond the point where they were doing any good.

I have experience of how the Covid control measures in the NHS, while well-intentioned, were only dismantled at a snail’s pace after the greatest danger had passed, prolonging the disruptive effect of the pandemic on the nation’s health.

Media Matters for America (MMFA) has a plan to potentially defuse Elon Musk's "thermonuclear" lawsuits filed so far in three cities around the world, which accuse the nonprofit media watchdog organization of orchestrating a very costly X ad boycott .

On Monday, MMFA filed a complaint in a US district court in San Francisco, alleging that X violated its own terms of service by suing MMFA in Texas, Dublin, and Singapore. According to the TOS, MMFA alleged, X requires any litigation over use of its services to be "brought solely in the federal or state courts located in San Francisco County, California, United States."

"X Corp.’s decision to file in multiple jurisdictions across the globe is intended to chill Media Matters’ reporting and drive up costs—both of which it has achieved—and it is directly foreclosed by X’s own Terms of Service," MMFA's complaint said.

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Whatever deal the US president is eyeing over the app, it is further proof some digital giants wield disproportionate clout

Late on Saturday 18 January, TikTok, the short-video app beloved of millions of users mostly aged between 18 and 24, went dark in the US . This was not because of a power outage, but because its owner switched it off. For an explanation of why it did so, though, we have to spool back a bit. For years, TikTok has been a thorn in the sides of US legislators and national security officials for two reasons. First, it’s owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which doubtless does whatever Xi Jinping tells it to do. Second, TikTok hoovers up phenomenally detailed data about its young users. The average session lasts 11 minutes and the video length is about 25 seconds. “That’s 26 ‘episodes’ per session,” says blogger Prof Scott Galloway , “with each episode generating multiple microsignals: whether you scrolled past a video, paused it, rewatched it, liked it, commented on it, shared it, and followed the creator, plus how long you watched before moving on. That’s hundreds of signals. Sweet crude like the world has never seen, ready to be algorithmically refined into rocket fuel.” The thought of personal data with this granularity falling into Chinese hands seemingly drove the American deep state, not to mention Meta, Google and co wild. And Congress got the message.

In April last year, Joe Biden signed into law the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act , a statute that had attracted unprecedented bipartisan support on its path through a divided Congress. The act basically mandated that TikTok’s owner would have to sell it to an American company or be banned in the US. It was scheduled to come into force on Sunday 19 January 2025.

This docuseries doesn’t just show the tale of the YouTubers who created content out of adopting a child – until they gave him up. It’s also a valuable indictment of our obsession with living online

Everywhere you look on the internet, people are doing things for attention that most of us might reasonably term “buck wild”. There are people eating the entire McDonald’s menu in one sitting, people willingly uploading slickly edited videos of childbirth (“My Labour Journey PART ONE OF SEVEN”), people making TikToks at funerals. All of life is in your phone – even, and in fact especially, the bits we used to keep to ourselves.

This online attention economy sets the scene for An Update on Our Family , director Rachel Mason ’s HBO documentary (Thursday 30 January, 9pm, Sky Documentaries), which centres on former YouTubers James and Myka Stauffer. The Stauffers were “family vloggers” – that is, they filmed and posted the minutiae of their lives with their children, from cleaning the car to newborn reveals. In May 2020, the couple shared a video reporting that they had “rehomed” Huxley, the son they had adopted from China three years previously, and who is autistic. Outrage, of course, ensued, as other creators on the platform mobilised to rage against the decision, which became the subject of wider online discourse for weeks.

Exclusive: Her social media presence resonates with younger voters but it comes with a ‘horrific’ dark side that has made her consider quitting

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There were several points in 2024 when Victorian upper house MP Georgie Purcell thought about quitting politics.

There was the moment when the state Labor government, despite launching its own inquiry that recommended outlawing duck hunting , chose to let it continue – undermining the very goal that motivated Purcell to enter parliament.