Facebook and Instagram to start kicking Australian teenagers off platforms as social media ban looms

Australian Facebook and Instagram users under 16 will be notified starting Thursday that their accounts will be deactivated by 10 December, as Meta begins to comply with the Albanese government’s social media ban.Users affected by the ban will receive 14 days’ notice of their pending account deactivation through a combination of in-app messages, email and SMS before their access is cut off.The ban will affect users on Facebook and Instagram, as well as Threads, as an Instagram account is required to use that platform. Messenger is excluded from the ban – but Meta has had to develop a way for users to keep access to Messenger without a Facebook account as a result of the ban.Meta will begin stopping access to existing accounts and blocking under-16s from registering new accounts from 4 December, with access removed for all affected accounts by 10 December, the company said

TikTok to give users power to reduce amount of AI content on their feeds

TikTok is giving users the power to reduce the amount of artificial intelligence-made content on their feeds, as it revealed the platform hosts more than 1bn AI videos.The change, which is being tested over the next few weeks before a global rollout, comes as new video-generating tools such as OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3 have spurred a surge in AI content online.The Guardian revealed in August that nearly one in 10 of the fastest-growing YouTube channels globally only show AI-generated videos. Many qualify as “AI slop”, the term for low-quality, mass-produced content that is often nonsensical or surreal.Jade Nester, TikTok’s European director of public policy for safety and privacy, said: “We know from our community that many people enjoy content made with AI tools, from digital art to science explainers, and we want to give people the power to see more or less of that, based on their own preferences

Meta wins major US antitrust case and won’t have to break off WhatsApp or Instagram

Meta defeated a major challenge to its business on Tuesday when a US judge ruled that the company does not hold a monopoly in social networking.The case, brought by the US Federal Trade Commission, could have forced the tech giant to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, with the former FTC chair accusing the company of operating a “buy or bury” scheme against nascent competitors. The tech giant bought WhatsApp for $19bn in 2014. Losing either the image-based social network, which generates an estimated half of Meta’s revenue, or the world’s most popular messaging app could have done existential damage to Meta’s empire.The US district judge James Boasberg issued his ruling on Tuesday after the historic antitrust trial wrapped up in late May

What is Cloudflare – and why did its outage take down so many websites?

The internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare suffered an outage on Tuesday, making many websites inaccessible for about three hours.Cloudflare is a global cloud services and cybersecurity firm. It provides datacentres, website and email security, protection from data loss and defences against cyber threats, among other things. It describes itself as providing an “immune system for the internet”, with technology that sits between its clients and the wider world that blocks billions of cyber threats daily. It also uses its global infrastructure to speed up internet traffic

Cloudflare says ‘incident now resolved’ after outage causes error messages across the internet – as it happened

The firm has just issued an update saying it believes the incident over.A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.I’ve just quickly tested several key sites which are loading again.Key sites around the world went down, some for a few hours, after a widely relied-upon Internet infrastructure company suffered an unknown issueThe outages took place in the early hours of US morning and during UK business hoursIt affected users of everything from Spotify, ChatGPT, X, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Canva to retail websites of Visa, Vodafone and Vinted and UK grocery chains Asda and M&S

Cloudflare outage causes error messages across the internet

A key piece of the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure suffered a global outage on Tuesday, causing error messages to flash up across websites.Cloudflare, a US company whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks, experienced an unidentified problem that meant internet users could not access some of its customers’ websites.Some site owners could not access their performance dashboards. Sites including X and OpenAI suffered increased outages at the same time as Cloudflare’s problems, according to Downdetector.The outage was reported at 11