Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: This Meta outcome could be more efficient than a social media ban

Listen, if you somehow find yourself weirdly unconvinced that social media is bad for kids, just take a look at what Facebook and Instagram have done. It's huge.

Without actually admitting that kids get addicted to social media, they have effectively admitted it by promising to make changes to their platforms designed to break that addiction.

Angus Dowell: Politicians love comparing NZ’s economy to Singapore or Ireland – but it’s simplistic and misleading

Unveiling Amazon Web Services’ long-awaited NZ$7.5 billion “cloud region” – a cluster of local data centres – Prime Minister Christopher Luxon specifically referenced Ireland and Singapore as “two economies we often look to for inspiration on investment and technology”.

This kind of comparison has been a familiar refrain in New Zealand politics. More than a decade ago, then prime minister John Key imagined the country as the “Switzerland of the South Pacific”.

Brendan O'Neill: Mark Zuckerberg’s bonfire of the orthodoxies

Meta’s scrapping of the fact-checkers proves positive change is in the air.

Move over Elon Musk, another billionaire has hit the headlines. And he didn’t even have to demand the jailing of a prime minister to do so. It’s Mark Zuckerberg, boss of Meta. Yesterday he released the most extraordinary video. Sporting unruly curls, a black tee and dog-tag chain – the uniform of the millennial oligarch – he announced that Meta’s platforms would give their ‘fact-checkers’ the heave-ho and ‘dramatically reduce the amount of censorship’ they carry out. I doubt a more impactful mea culpa will be issued this year.

Chris Morrison: U.K. Met Office’s Junk and Fabricated Temperature Measurements.....

Inept ‘Fact Check’ by Science Feedback Shines Further Light on U.K. Met Office’s Junk and Fabricated Temperature Measurements

After a year of damaging revelations about the state of the Met Office’s temperature measuring network, the Green Blob-funded ‘fact-checker’ Science Feedback has sprung to the defence of the state-funded U.K. weather service. It has published a long ‘fact check’ seeking to exonerate practices that have recently come to light including the locating of stations with huge heat corrupted ‘uncertainties’ and the publication of invented data from 103 non-existent sites.

Merja Myllylahti: AI search tools and chatbots may make NZ news less visible and reliable – new study

Evidence is mounting that the new generative AI internet search tools provided by OpenAI, Google and Microsoft can increase the risk of returning false, misleading or partially correct information.

Despite the implications of this for the news industry and an informed democracy, the New Zealand government has decided to leave AI considerations out of its plans to revive the previous government’s Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill.

Lushington D. Brady: Meta Busted for Scamming and Spying

Late last year, this little snippet passed almost unnoticed in the NZ media: