In the span of just 48 hours this week, two separate juries in two different US states delivered verdicts that could reshape the entire social media industry — not because of the dollar amounts involved, but because of what those verdicts legally establish for the first time. On Tuesday, March 24, a jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million for failing to protect children from sexual exploitation on Facebook and Instagram. Less than 24 hours later, on Wednesday, March 25, a jury in Los Angeles found both Meta and Google (YouTube) liable for engineering addiction in young users — finding them negligent in the design of their platforms and awarding a further $6 million in damages. Two days. Two states. Two juries. Both pointing at the same conclusion: that Big Tech can no longer hide behind the legal shields it has relied on for nearly three decades. This is the story of what happened, why it matters far beyond the headline numbers, and what comes next for the s...
The misco-blogging site Twitter has announced that they have bought Mixer Labs, the makers of GeoAPI. This translates into Geo-location on Twitter. Now when users post content they can more accurately give a geographical location to the tweet. This is very helpful for people who are reporting incidents as and when they are Happening. User who are following these tweets will better understand and make sense of these tweets because they are being tweeted at some times from Ground-Zero. Twitter had this to say . The Mixer Labs crew has been working on harnessing the power of local information for a couple years and just recently launched GeoAPI, a comprehensive service for helping developers build geolocation-aware applications. As of today, they're part of Twitter and will be working to combine the contextual relevance of location to tweets. We want to know What's happening? , and more precisely, Where is it happening? As a dramatic example, twittering "Earthquake!" ...