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...
Google is working on a new services that combines stories published in The New York Times and Washington post to make it easier for readers to follow evolving news stories. "The "Living Stories" project introduced Tuesday marks Google Inc.'s latest attempt to frame itself as an ally of the ailing newspaper industry " Google will now build stories based on importance and this may in some way help the ailing newspaper industry. The concept of grouping articles by topic isn't new . Yahoo came up with its version, called Yahoo News Topics , two years ago. Here's Yahoo's page on " Google ," for example. What's different is that Google sees publishers using Living Stories on their own websites, not just on Google. Here's an example from the Times of what a page about the war in Afghanistan looks like. So with this Living Stories will help categorize a list of ongoing stories on a single page. Which in turn will help users follow u...