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...
This New Year's Eve we are going to see a blue moon. It has nothing to do with the shade or hue of the moon. It is simply a colloquial term for something that is very rare. There will be two full moon's this month the first having appeared on Dec 2. It's the first time this is happening from 1871 and only the fourth from 1900. On very rare occasions the moon can actually sport a bluish tint due to atmospheric conditions caused by forest fires or volcanic eruptions. It’s even happened fairly recently. The moon was a little blue across many sections of eastern North America in September 1950, because of smoke from widespread forest fires in western Canada. Also, after the massive eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in June 1991, there were many sightings of a physically blue moon all around the world. Fortunately these calamities don’t happen that often, and that lends itself to the creation of the phrase “once in a blue moon.” The astronomical definition of a bl...