Molly Russell, at just 14, took her own life. Her parents blame the apps on her phone for exposing her to graphic and disturbing content that took control of her mindset.

These stories are not unique. Data from thousands of people shows that social media increases loneliness, depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. Last week, a jury in California found that Meta and YouTube were liable for causing a teenager’s addiction to social media. The idea that social media causes harm is no longer in dispute.

The proposed response – in Australia, now proposed in the UK and elsewhere – is to ban social media for under-16s. It is an understandable impulse. But there are good reasons to think it won’t work – despite politicians claiming a successful start to the ban.

Teenagers have always found ways around rules. Getting an older sibling to buy alcohol is a time-honoured tradition. When it comes to social media, teenagers are more tech-savvy than the adults trying to restrict them, and evidence is emerging that many are working around the age verification systems put in place to enforce bans, such as by using VPNs (virtual private networks).

Rules will exist, but compliance will be patchy and hard to enforce. Those most determined to access social media may also be the most resourceful in getting around restrictions. This means that the teenagers most at risk may also be the least affected by a ban. Evidence from other areas shows that when certain activities are driven underground, they often become more harmful.

Not neutral tools

Even if the bans worked perfectly, they would address only part of the problem. It is difficult to disentangle the harms of social media from the devices that deliver it.

Smartphones are not neutral tools: they are engineered to hold attention through constant notifications, “frictionless” access to content, and rewards for regular interactions. Research links smartphone use – not just social media – to disrupted sleep, impaired attention and cognition, mental health problems, physical ailments such as chronic back pain and addiction.

Social media is one component of a broader “smartphone ecosystem”, and targeting one app while leaving the ecosystem intact is unlikely to solve much.

If social media is blocked, teenagers are not going to put their phones down. They will migrate to mobile games, group chats and endless web browsing – activities that rely on the same design features driving their social media use: notifications, streaks (features that track consecutive days of use and reward consistency), infinite scroll. The problem is not any single app but a pattern of behaviour that will find new outlets.

Nor is this only a problem for teenagers. Adults struggle with excessive smartphone use, too. Heavy use is associated with poorer sleep, reduced attention and higher stress – and in some respects, the adult consequences are more severe. Distracted driving, often fuelled by phone use, kills thousands of people every year.

This matters for teenagers because behaviour is learned by watching others. Children who see parents, teachers and other adults checking their phones absorb that as the norm. A policy that targets only young people does nothing to change the culture they are growing up inside.

And opting out is becoming harder for everyone. Primary school children are expected to use smartphones for homework – on apps that share more than a passing resemblance to addictive games. Online banking has become more difficult without one. Workplaces assume employees are reachable via multiple WhatsApp groups at all hours.

When opting out means opting out of modern life, restricting access to one category of app starts to look less like a solution and more like a gesture.

If the goal is to reduce harm, the focus needs to widen. The deeper issue is the central role smartphones now play in everyday life – for all of us, not just teenagers. That points towards different kinds of intervention: delaying smartphone adoption among younger children, encouraging simpler devices, redesigning compulsive features across all apps, and ensuring that essential services such as banking, education and travel stop assuming everyone is glued to a screen.

Banning social media for teenagers may feel like decisive action. But until the broader dependency is addressed, it will not deliver the change its advocates are hoping for.

• Jeremy Howick is a Professor and Director of the Stoneygate Centre for Excellence in Empathic Healthcare, University of Leicester
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

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Pi, which covers both mobile data and home internet 5G solutions, does away with the typical business structure. There are no contracts, call centres, or credit checks to worry about. The only worries are customers trying to snag 20GB of data for R1 or getting faster 5G internet speeds during the first three months of launch.

Want a slice of that Pi.za pie?

This is what Pi is offering customers willing to take a bet on it during its initial launch. Even if you aren’t convinced by flashy deals, its core offerings appear to be good value. For instance, 5GB of Anytime Data will cost customers R99, while 80GB is R400. 5G home internet is another story.

“With Pi, customers can build a plan that works for them. They can choose how much data they need and add minutes and SMS whenever required… Customers can easily keep their existing number or choose a new one and be connected instantly via eSIM or by ordering a physical SIM – with every step in the customer’s hands,” it said.

Read More: Vodacom removes mobile data costs for SABC+ news and education channels

Customers only need the app (Android, iOS, AppGallery) to manage and customise their plans. The network operator uses eSIMs for mobile data plans, while home internet requires a physical SIM. The account creator can have up to ten users under their name, each addition unlocking “incremental savings.” The first added unlocks 5% savings, the second 10%, and so on, to a maximum of 20%.

Whether you’re keeping your old number or starting fresh, Pi won’t punish you for any unspent mobile data. Not right away, at least. Mobile data remains active for up to twelve months after purchase, allowing you to better budget your data escapades. Many of the larger operators typically set a month-long limit on data.

Pi Mobile Plans:

Minutes and SMS:

Pi Home Plans:

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For example, DNS, the Domain Name System, has quietly become a single point of failure. DNS is the Internet’s phone book. When it fails, large parts of the internet effectively disappear, even if servers are still running.

DNS is not alone. Over the past decade, four core internet services – DNS, authentication, email and security infrastructure – have consolidated into a small number of global platforms. As a cybersecurity researcher, I see that this concentration has fundamentally changed how outages unfold. What would once have been a local failure is now often a systemic event, affecting thousands of organisations simultaneously.

The internet was designed to assume failure. Mail servers, DNS resolvers, authentication systems and security monitors were meant to be distributed and locally controlled. Today, for reasons that make economic sense, many companies and organisations outsource all four to the same handful of providers. One cloud service monitoring organisation referred to 2025 as the year of the global cloud outage.

DNS, authentication, email and security

Outages are no longer rare exceptions, but a predictable byproduct of efficiency at a global scale. That pattern becomes apparent when you look at a few major outages that have affected each of the four services.

DNS outages are a prime example of systemic risk. If DNS cannot resolve a name, a website may as well not exist. A growing share of global DNS resolution now depends on a small number of providers. That concentration means that a single configuration error, routing issue or attack can ripple across much of the web.

Authentication outages are less visible to the public but often more disruptive inside organisations.

For example, on Oct. 29, 2025, Microsoft Azure experienced a major outage that disrupted authentication and access for millions of users worldwide for over five hours. Another authentication provider, Okta, suffered an outage on Oct. 3.

Authentication has become a universal gatekeeper. When identity services fail, modern organizations don’t degrade gracefully; they come to a halt.

Despite decades of predictions about its decline, email remains a central component of how employers function. Password resets, invoices, legal notices, emergency notifications and incident response coordination all depend on it. When large cloud email providers experience outages, companies and organisations not only lose communication but also struggle to recover accounts and coordinate recovery efforts effectively. In 2025, both Yahoo and Microsoft email services suffered outages.

Since many companies and organisations no longer operate independent mail systems, email outages are increasingly affecting entire industries simultaneously. In an emergency, the system that people rely on to respond may be unavailable.

Security as a service is a rapidly growing market. Cybersecurity infrastructure, including distributed denial-of-service mitigation, firewalls and bot protection, is designed to keep services online. When this infrastructure fails, it can have the opposite effect.

Misconfigured security rules and routing errors at global security providers have repeatedly blocked legitimate traffic on a massive scale. In one well-documented incident in 2024, a routine configuration change by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused widespread outages across thousands of unrelated websites.

Why outages are getting more expensive

Industry data suggests that while outages may be becoming less frequent, they are becoming far more costly.

The professional services organisation Uptime Institute reports that more than half of major outages now cost over US$100,000, and roughly 1 in 5 exceeds $1 million. These estimated costs reflect lost revenue, stalled operations, reputational damage and, in some cases, risks to health and public safety.

Centralisation magnifies these costs. A single failure now affects a greater number of users, employers and critical services simultaneously. What was once an IT problem has evolved into a multifaceted economic and societal issue.

Concentration is the real risk.

Regulators are beginning to recognise this pattern. In the United States, federal guidance now emphasises the importance of inventorying cloud dependencies and reducing reliance on a single provider. These efforts reflect a growing realisation: The greatest risk is not any one outage, but the structure of dependency that makes those outages unavoidable and wide-reaching.

Accounting for inevitable failures

The internet was designed to route around damage. In the pursuit of convenience and scale, the tech industry has rebuilt key parts of it around a small number of global trust brokers for names, identity, messaging and security. The result is a byproduct of the cloud services business model, where routine failures become systemic events.

Companies and organisations don’t need to abandon the cloud to address this issue. But I believe that it’s important to measure concentration, design for diversity, and rehearse what happens when shared services fail. Resilience does not come from perfection. It stems from choice, redundancy and the ability to fail locally rather than everywhere at once.

• Doug Jacobson is a University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

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But this formula is changing. Rather than being passively served content that search engines decide is most relevant (or businesses have paid to have promoted), some big tech platforms have started providing users more control over what they see online.

Earlier this year, Google launched the Preferred Sources feature in Australia and New Zealand. Through it, users can select organisations that are “preferred” and whose content they’d like to see more of in relevant search results.

In response, a raft of organisations, from news outlets to big banks, have started inviting their audiences and customers to choose them, with instructions on how to use this feature. News outlets such as the ABC, News.com.au, RNZ and The Conversation have all done so, among many others.

If you decide to use this new feature, there are potential benefits – but there can be unintended outcomes as well.

Where do you get your news?

In Australia, more adults say they get news from social media (26%) than from online news websites (23%). This means that a feature like “preferred sources” might influence readers who get their news from search engines. But it won’t affect users who primarily get their news from social media apps.

Trading phones with someone and looking at their browsing history or recommended YouTube videos reveals just how much personalisation influences what we see online.

Big tech companies are known to harvest large amounts of data, making money in an attention economy from audience engagement. They also make money from knowing more about their users so they can sell this information to advertisers.

Much of the internet is governed by invisible algorithms – hidden rules dictating who sees what, for which reasons. Algorithms often prioritise content that is engaging and sensational, which is one reason why misinformation can flourish online.

As helpful as it can be to get recommendations of products to buy or Netflix shows to watch, based on your history, when it comes to voting and politics, recommendations become much more fraught.

Our own research has shown people’s online news and information environments are fragmented, complex, opaque, chaotic and polluted, and that users desire more control over what they see. But what are the potential impacts of this?

More control is good

At face value, more control over what we see online is a positive and empowering thing.

This rebalances the equation from the loudest, most popular, or wealthiest voices – or ones that manipulate algorithms the most – to the ones users are actually interested in hearing from.

It potentially also helps with cognitive overload. Rather than having to spend the time and mental energy to decide on a case-by-case basis whether each source you encounter is trustworthy, making this decision once for particular news brands or organisations can make engaging with search results more relevant and efficient.

But a lack of balance is risky

However, the voices people want to hear from aren’t necessarily the ones that are best for them. As with any choice, you need a level of maturity and critical thinking to act responsibly.

As data companies, search engines benefit from knowing ever more information about user behaviour and preferences. Knowing which media outlet you prefer may in some cases indicate your political party preferences. Knowing that you prefer sports news over celebrity news can help companies target you with advertising more effectively.

In addition, more choice could potentially affect the diversity of people’s media diets. Just like with food diets, if people rely too much on low-quality media, over time that may affect their opinions, attitudes and behaviours. This has important implications for democracies that rely on well-informed and engaged citizens to cast votes.

There’s also a risk in conflating news sources with other types of sources. Journalists at news organisations are often held accountable to professional codes of conduct that, for example, aim to prevent reporters from personally benefiting from their reporting.

In theory, this allows audiences to receive independent analysis on important topics with confidence that the source has fact-checked claims and doesn’t have a vested interest in the reporting.

But if you select a business – such as the blog of a hardware store or a bank – as a source, you don’t have those same guarantees around editorial codes of conduct and professional ethics.

Should you use this feature?

Overall, allowing users more control over what they see is a good thing. But appropriate governance and regulation – possibly championed by Australia’s Digital Platform Regulators Forum – is needed to ensure people’s privacy and that their source preferences aren’t unfairly monetised.

Being more involved in your media diet is a positive step, as is thinking about its balance and diversity.

Ensuring a mix of sources across types (think local, regional, national, and international) and varieties (political, social, sports, entertainment news, and so on) can lead to a better balance.

Also think about whether the sources you are relying on are based on opinions or on facts. Doing this and actively creating a high-quality media diet is better for you and for others in your community.

• T.J. Thomson is an Associate Professor of Visual Communication & Digital Media, RMIT University
• Aimee Hourigan is a Research Fellow, Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, Queensland University of Technology
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

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These harms are not abstract. Research shows that young people are exposed to violent misogynistic cultures and toxic manospheres online.

But despite being consistently critical of the viral and experiential platform business models driving much of today’s social media harm, as an expert in digital communication, I do not support the ban. This is not because I defend the kind of libertarian politics adopted by Silicon Valley.

It isn’t because I consider social media harmless either. The situation is more nuanced. I oppose the ban because it is based on questionable assumptions about under-16s’ vulnerability to social media and overlooks the broader harms platform business models present to all users.

What’s needed is a hardline regime of regulation and education across all age ranges.

I challenge the pro-ban debate because it too often rests on a crude and narrow adult perception of young online experiences. This often overstates media effects on attention and other brain functions. It also crucially underestimates the significance of learning about wider digital cultures in the everyday social, political, creative and emotional experiences of young people.

More profound issues persist in the business models that structure digital experiences. There is little doubt that doomscrolling has negative psychological effects, as many users discovered during the COVID pandemic.

As an invention of the attention economy, endless feeds are not accidental: they are shaped by design choices that keep users scrolling long past the point of diminishing returns. These systems are purposefully optimised for engagement metrics, not well-being. Platforms do not sell content; they sell scarcity of attention, optimising and farming user experiences for advertisers and data companies.

Where I am more sceptical is in claims that social media rewires young people’s brains or directly destroys attention spans. Such arguments often imply a simple cause-and-effect relationship between screens and declining cognition. Historically, anxieties about distraction long predate social media. Technology scholars point out that forms of shorter, more fragmented attention most probably preceded the deep attention required to read books.

The problem is not that under-16s are uniquely vulnerable to encounters with screens. It is that all users are navigating systems engineered to optimise distraction at scale. Attention is not disappearing. It is being captured and redirected.

Regulation, not prohibition

There is no question that under-16s face particular risks online. But banning social media will not eliminate those risks. Young people are adept at working around restrictions, whether through VPNs, shared logins or burner accounts. When a cultural practice is pushed underground, it does not disappear. It becomes more secretive, less supervised and often more socially risky.

Prohibition also tends to increase desirability. Social media does not become less tempting because it is forbidden. It becomes rebellious, status-laden and harder for parents, educators and researchers to engage with openly. Historically, prohibitionist approaches to alcohol and gambling have driven cultures of harm underground rather than eliminating them.

In the UK context, this matters. While policymakers debate bans, the same global platforms continue to operate with limited accountability, despite legislation such as the Online Safety Act. Silicon Valley companies have become too powerful to self-regulate and increasingly unwilling to act in the public interest. Decades of government-backed deregulation (or re-regulation) driven by digitisation have left platforms with unprecedented reach and minimal responsibility.

This situation is not sustainable.

Social media is a media industry, no different in principle from film, television, radio or newspapers. Yet it has grown with almost no editorial responsibility or enforceable public standards. Leaning on automated filters or AI moderation does not remove harmful content at the source.

The answer is not prohibition, but stringent regulation: clearer rules, enforced transparency, content governance and meaningful oversight of how algorithms function. A ban avoids the hard questions. Regulation forces us to confront them, including how recommendation systems shape experience, and whose interests those systems ultimately serve.

Why media literacy matters

Media studies is often derided as a shallow subject lacking rigour, but digital media literacy is now essential. Understanding how algorithms work is crucial for grasping how attention is farmed, manipulated and sold.

Social media is not only informational but also emotional. Platforms trade heavily in outrage, affirmation, anxiety and belonging. Media literacy must therefore go beyond recognising misinformation, fact-checking or managing screen time. It must involve an “education of the senses”. In this case, learning how to discern between commodified emotional experiences and what constitutes a genuinely flourishing online life.

This is not about teaching young people to simply resist platforms. It is about equipping them with conceptual tools to recognise how digital experiences are designed, how their feelings are being engaged, and how their attention is being steered.

If the UK government is serious about protecting young people online, it needs to regulate social media as the powerful media industry it is. It needs to educate users about how their emotional experiences are extracted and commodified. That approach is slower and more politically demanding. But it addresses the problem at its source.

• Tony D Sampson is a Reader in Digital Communication, University of Essex
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

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But the social media sands may slowly be shifting. A test-case jury trial in Los Angeles is accusing big tech companies of creating “addiction machines”. While TikTok and Snapchat have already settled with the 20-year-old plaintiff, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is due to give evidence in the courtroom this week.

The European Commission recently issued a preliminary ruling against TikTok, stating that the app’s design – with features such as infinite scroll and autoplay – breaches the EU Digital Services Act. One industry expert told the BBC that the problem is “no longer just about toxic content, it’s about toxic design”.

Meta and other defendants have historically argued that their platforms are communication tools, not traps, and that “addiction” is a mischaracterisation of high engagement.

“I think it’s important to differentiate between clinical addiction and problematic use,” Instagram chief Adam Mosseri testified in the LA court. He noted that the field of psychology does not classify social media addiction as an official diagnosis.

Tech giants maintain that users and parents have the agency and tools to manage screen time. However, a growing body of academic research suggests features like infinite scrolling, autoplay and push notifications are engineered to override human self-control.

A state of ‘automated attachment’

My research with colleagues on digital consumption behaviour also challenges the idea that excessive social media use is a failure of personal willpower. Through interviews with 32 self-identified excessive users and an analysis of online discussions dedicated to heavy digital use, we found that consumers frequently enter a state of “automated attachment”.

This is when connection to the device becomes purely reflexive, as conscious decision-making is effectively suspended by the platform’s design.

We found that the impulse to use these platforms sometimes occurs before the user is even fully conscious. One participant admitted: “I’m waking up, I’m not even totally conscious, and I’m already doing things on the device.”

Another described this loss of agency vividly: “I found myself mindlessly opening the [TikTok] app every time I felt even the tiniest bit bored … My thumb was reaching to its old spot on reflex, without a conscious thought.”

Social media proponents argue that “screen addiction” isn’t the same as substance abuse. However, new neurophysiological evidence suggests that frequent engagement with these algorithms alters dopamine pathways, fostering a dependency that is “analogous to substance addiction”.

Strategies that keep users engaged

The argument that users should simply exercise willpower also needs to be understood in the context of the sophisticated strategies platforms employ to keep users engaged. These include:

1. Removing stopping cues

Features like infinite scroll, autoplay and push notifications create a continuous flow of content. By eliminating natural end-points, the design effectively shifts users into autopilot mode, making stopping a viewing session more difficult.

2. Variable rewards

Similar to a slot machine, algorithms deliver intermittent, unpredictable rewards such as likes and personalised videos. This unpredictability triggers the dopamine system, creating a compulsive cycle of seeking and anticipation.

3. Social pressure

Features such as notifications and time-limited story posts have been found to exploit psychological vulnerabilities, inducing anxiety that for many users can only be relieved by checking the app. Strategies employing “emotional steering” can take advantage of psychological vulnerabilities, such as people’s fear of missing out, to instil a sense of social obligation and guilt if they attempt to disconnect.

Vulnerability in children

The issue of social media addiction is of particular concern when it comes to children, whose impulse control mechanisms are still developing. The US trial’s plaintiff says she began using social media at the age of six, and that her early exposure to these platforms led to a spiral into addiction.

A growing body of research suggests that “variable reward schedules” are especially potent for developing minds, which exhibit a heightened sensitivity to rewards. Children lack the cognitive brakes to resist these dopamine loops because their emotional regulation and impulsivity controls are still developing.

Lawyers in the US trial have pointed to internal documents, known as “Project Myst”, which allegedly show that Meta knew parental controls were ineffective against these engagement loops. Meta’s attorney, Paul Schmidt, countered that the plaintiff’s struggles stemmed from pre-existing childhood trauma rather than platform design.

The company has long argued that it provides parents with “robust tools at their fingertips”, and that the primary issue is “behavioural” – because many parents fail to use them.

Our study heard from many adults (mainly in their 20s) who described the near-impossibility of controlling levels of use, despite their best efforts. If these adults cannot stop opening apps on reflex, expecting a child to exercise restraint with apps that affect human neurophysiology seems even more unrealistic.

Potential harms of overuse

The consequences of social media overuse can be significant. Our research and recent studies have identified a wide range of potential harms.

These include “psychological entrapment”. Participants in our study described a “feedback loop of doom and despair”. Users can turn to platforms to escape anxiety, only to find that the scrolling deepens their feelings of emptiness and isolation.

Excessive exposure to rapidly changing, highly stimulating content can fracture the user’s attention span, making it harder to focus on complex real-world tasks.

And many users describe feeling “defeated” by the technology. Social media’s erosion of autonomy can leave people unable to align their online actions – such as overlong sessions – with their intentions.

A ruling against social media companies in the LA court case, or enforced redesign of their apps in the EU, could have profound implications for the way these platforms are operated in future.

But while big tech companies have grown at dizzying rates over the past two decades, attempts to rein in their products on both sides of the Atlantic remain slow and painstaking. In this era of “use first, legislate later”, people all over the world, of all ages, are the laboratory mice.

• Quynh Hoang is a Lecturer in Marketing and Consumption, Department of Marketing and Strategy, University of Leicester
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

The post Is social media addictive? How it keeps you clicking and the harms it can cause appeared first on Stuff South Africa.

The patent, filed by Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, notes how a large language model (LLM) may step in if it detects a user’s Facebook or Instagram account has been inactive for longer than usual. It’s an eerie thought, and one we’re sure people won’t be keen on if it becomes reality.

Meta goes meta

“The language model may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased,” the patent reads.

The LLM would, of course, be trained on “user-specific” data to help it fully embody the deceased user in question. It’d obviously never be able to capture the user’s voice accurately when posting, replying to comments, or responding to DMs. Not that the folks still wandering around Facebook care too much. The patent also refers to tech that would allow the LLM to simulate voice or video calls with friends.

Read More: Meta’s Reality Labs begins shedding staff, three VR studios to close

As Business Insider points out, the feature could potentially be handy for influencers who make a living off social media. Personally, the thought of an ‘influencer’ raking in unearned cash doesn’t sit right with us. It’s infinitely more off-putting for family members of a deceased user who won’t stop shitposting from beyond the grave.

Fortunately, a Meta spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that it currently has no plans to implement the tech into its platforms, despite the clear indication that it has thought about it. Yet, anyway. Perhaps the political climate is just a little too stable for Facebook to unleash such a controversial feature upon users. Never say never, right?

Source

*It is, in fact, entirely possible.

The post Meta’s latest AI scheme wants to keep your accounts alive (even if you aren’t) appeared first on Stuff South Africa.

The Internet Archive has been recording the history of the internet and making it available to the public through its Wayback Machine since 1996. Now, some of the world’s biggest news outlets are blocking the archive’s access to their pages.

Major publishers – including The Guardian, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and USA Today – have confirmed they’re ending the Internet Archive’s access to their content.

While publishers say they support the archive’s preservation mission, they argue unrestricted access creates unintended consequences, exposing journalism to AI crawlers and members of the public trying to skirt their paywalls.

Yet, publishers don’t simply want to lock out AI crawlers. Rather, they want to sell their content to data-hungry tech companies. Their back catalogues of news, books and other media have become a hot commodity as data to train AI systems.

Robot readers

Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini require access to large archives of content (such as media content, books, art and academic research) for training and to answer user prompts.

Publishers claim technology companies have accessed a lot of this content for free and without the consent of copyright owners. Some began taking tech companies to court, claiming they had stolen their intellectual property. High-profile examples include The New York Times’ case against ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI and News Corp’s lawsuit against Perplexity AI.

Old news, new money

In response, some tech companies have struck deals to pay for access to publishers’ content. NewsCorp’s contract with OpenAI is reportedly worth more than US$250 million over five years.

Similar deals have been struck between academic publishers and tech companies. Publishing houses such as Taylor & Francis and Elsevier have come under scrutiny in the past for locking publicly funded research behind commercial paywalls.

Now, Taylor & Francis has signed a US$10 million nonexclusive deal with Microsoft granting the company access to over 3,000 journals.

Publishers are also using technology to stop unwanted AI bots from accessing their content, including the crawlers used by the Internet Archive to record internet history. News publishers have referred to the Internet Archive as a “back door” to their catalogues, allowing unscrupulous tech companies to continue scraping their content.

The cost of making news free

The Wayback Machine has also been used by members of the public to avoid newspaper paywalls. Understandably, media outlets want readers to pay for news.

News is a business, and its advertising revenue model has come under increasing pressure from the same tech companies using news content for AI training and retrieval. But this comes at the expense of public access to credible information.

When newspapers first started moving their content online and making it free to the public in the late 1990s, they contributed to the ethos of sharing and collaboration on the early web.

In hindsight, however, one commentator called free access the “original sin” of online news. The public became accustomed to getting their digital editions for free, and as online business models shifted, many mid- and small-sized news companies struggled to fund their operations.

The opposite approach – placing all commercial news behind paywalls – has its own problems. As news publishers move to subscription-only models, people have to juggle multiple expensive subscriptions or limit their news appetite. Otherwise, they’re left with whatever news remains online for free or is served up by social media algorithms. The result is a more closed, commercial internet.

This isn’t the first time that the Internet Archive has been in the crosshairs of publishers, as the organisation was previously sued and found to be in breach of copyright through its Open Library project.

The past and future of the internet

The Wayback Machine has served as a public record of the web for more than three decades, used by researchers, educators, journalists and amateur internet historians.

Blocking its access to international newspapers of note will leave significant holes in the public record of the internet.

Today, you can use the Wayback Machine to see The New York Times’ front page from June 1997: the first time the Internet Archive crawled the newspaper’s website. In another 30 years, internet researchers and curious members of the public won’t have access to today’s front page, even if the Internet Archive is still around.

Today’s websites become tomorrow’s historical records. Without the preservation efforts of not-for-profit organisations like The Internet Archive, we risk losing vital records.

Despite the actions of commercial publishers and emerging challenges of AI, not-for-profit organisations such as the Internet Archive and Wikipedia aim to keep the dream of an open, collaborative and transparent internet alive.

• Tai Neilson is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Macquarie University
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

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Xikipedia replicates the sort of thing you’d find on X, Threads, or even (if you have the correct tastes) BlueSky… but without any of the trolling, memes, and general negativity you’ll find on those platforms. Our first look at the reworking gave us immediate access to Joe Pesci, and the world could always use more Joe Pesci.

Sick of social media? Try Xikipedia

It’s not a complete project, of course. You can’t download an app that’ll serve up random facts from Wikipedia and expect it to remain static. The project’s description states that “Xikipedia is a pseudo social media feed that algorithmically shows you content from Simple Wikipedia. It is made as a demonstration of how even a basic non-ML algorithm with no data from other users can quickly learn what you engage with to suggest you more similar content. No data is collected or shared here, the algorithm runs locally and the data disappears once you refresh or close the tab.”

Which is… about what we experienced when we took a look. Tag a few of the hearts in the bottom right of each ‘post’, and the page will begin showing you connected events. In our case, tagging the WWE’s 2005 Backlash event led to the TCL: Tables, Ladders, Chairs event from 2013, followed by Vengeance, No Way Out, the Royal Rumble… you get the idea.

It’s an interesting thing to play around with and, provided you don’t just like the sort of items giving you seasonal affective depression (making you SAD, in other words), it’s a welcome diversion from scrolling through the other sort of algorithm. Xikipedia… might even have potential as a complete all. We expect someone is already vibe-coding the app as we type this.

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And yet, here we are. Yahoo has announced a new proprietary “answer engine” that will run inside all of the company’s products, including the Search option that definitely still exists. Called Yahoo Scout, the service is powered by Claude AI as well as the purple company’s “unique data and user insights, as well as over 30 years of history in search.”

Yahoo!, really?

We’d have thought the company had learned its lesson about putting the word ‘answer’ in its product descriptions after what happened last time, but Scout will (hopefully) sidestep trolls and bad actors by having Anthropic’s Claude answering questions — however silly they may be. Claude is known to have used Reddit data for training, so perhaps expect some silly answers in return.

The American search company’s Scout platform is rolling out in beta to its “nearly 250 million users in the United States on desktop and mobile” across all of Yahoo’s services. It’ll offer “the best of traditional web search and generative AI search to deliver the right information and assistance at the right time for [the company’s] vast user base.”

Scout will provide summaries, shopping assistance, financial analysis (as well as “deeper insights through AI-powered questions”, and additional functions across the company’s Mail and sports offerings. How well it does at all of these will depend on the Claude integration and the efficacy of Yahoo’s database of data that’s supposed to inform this thing. The end goal, or at least one of them, is enhanced advertising. Because of course it is.

The company said that, over time, the “new answer engine will become more personalized, will add new capabilities focused on deeper experiences within key verticals, and will introduce new, improved opportunities for search advertisers to effectively cross the chasm to generative AI search advertising.”

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