Does Generation Z know how to email properly? An investigation

A professor caused an internet storm when she asked if young people were capable of writing a formal message

This week, Prof Brittney Cooper from Rutgers University caused a small internet storm when she asked a simple question: “Why don’t modern college kids know how to send a formal letter/email?” She added that her students frequently email her simply saying “Hello.”

Why don’t modern college kids know how to send a formal letter/email? I thought everyone knew to begin Dear Prof. X or Dear Dr. X. Instead these kids stay emailing me Hello There! Or Hello (no name): Why are they like this?

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Noxious internet drama makes me nostalgic for the good old days of passive aggressive notes | Brigid Delaney

TikTok artist Lubalin brilliantly captures the drama of low stakes online fights. But internet discord is increasingly spilling into everyday life

It was summer 2016 and I was looking after a friend’s flat in Kirribilli.

Out the back was a communal laundry and clothesline.

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South Korean AI chatbot pulled from Facebook after hate speech towards minorities

Lee Luda, built to emulate a 20-year-old Korean university student, engaged in homophobic slurs on social media

A popular South Korean chatbot has been suspended after complaints that it used hate speech towards sexual minorities in conversations with its users.

Lee Luda, the artificial intelligence [AI] persona of a 20-year-old female university student, was removed from Facebook messenger this week, after attracting more than 750,000 users in the 20 days since it was launched.

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Twitter chief says Trump ban was right decision but sets ‘dangerous precedent’

  • Jack Dorsey: ‘I do not celebrate having to ban Donald Trump’
  • ‘A ban is a failure of ours to promote healthy conversation’

Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, has said that banning Donald Trump from the platform was the “right decision” but that it sets a dangerous precedent.

Related: Donald Trump becomes the first US president to be impeached for a second time – live

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Huawei: bullets sent to Meng Wanzhou while under house arrest, court hears

Chief financial officer received multiple death threats during time in Vancouver, Canadian court told

Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, has received multiple death threats – including bullets in the mail – while under house arrest in Vancouver, a Canadian court heard on Wednesday.

The threats were revealed during testimony by Doug Maynard, chief operating officer of Lions Gate Risk Management, the company providing her security detail.

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TikTok to tackle grooming with safeguards for young users

NSPCC welcomes changes as it says abusers are taking advantage of pandemic to target children online

Children on TikTok will face “groundbreaking” new restrictions in an attempt to prevent grooming on the platform, the video-sharing company has announced, with particularly strict new rules for users under 16.

The platform, which has a lower age limit of 13, said users under 16 would no longer be able to receive comments from strangers, have their videos used for “duets” or mark their posts as available to be downloaded.

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Blocked: how the internet turned on Donald Trump

From Facebook and Twitter to Reddit and Amazon, tech firms are moving to silence the president, and his QAnon supporters

Twitter’s decision to suspend Donald Trump’s account on Wednesday evening has opened the floodgates for tech companies and platforms to remove the outgoing US president from their services.

Twitter’s suspension was followed by Facebook, which a day later announced the move would be “indefinite”. Twitter then announced a “permanent” suspension of Trump’s account.

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Twitter suspends 70,000 accounts sharing QAnon content

The network said it acted after ‘violent events in Washington’ when a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol

Twitter has said it has suspended more than 70,000 accounts since Friday that were primarily dedicated to sharing QAnon content as the social media site continued to crack down on content after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol.

“Given the violent events in Washington DC, and increased risk of harm, we began permanently suspending thousands of accounts that were primarily dedicated to sharing QAnon content on Friday afternoon,” Twitter said in a blog late on Monday.

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Opinion divided over Trump’s ban from social media

Actions spark debate on free speech and whether chief executives of tech firms are fit to act as judge and jury

As rioters were gathering around the US Capitol last Wednesday, a familiar question began to echo around the offices of the large social networks: what should they do about Donald Trump and his provocative posts?

The answer has been emphatic: ban him.

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Trump Twitter: Republicans and Democrats split over freedom of speech

Twitter’s decision to permanently suspend Donald Trump’s account in the wake of the storming of Capitol Hill on Wednesday continues to stoke fierce debate, supporters and critics split on partisan lines as they contest what the suspension means for a cherished American tradition: freedom of speech.

Related: Insurrection Day: when white supremacist terror came to the US Capitol

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Bill Gates joins Blackstone in bid to buy British private jet firm

Gates’ Cascade Investment fund teams up with US private equity firm on offer for Signature Aviation

Bill Gates has joined a £3bn bidding war to buy the world’s largest private jet operator just as he prepares to publish his new book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.

Cascade Investment, the fund that manages much of Gates’s $134bn personal fortune, announced on Friday it had teamed up with US private equity firm Blackstone in a bid for British private jet operator Signature Aviation.

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Trump has lost Twitter, his biggest political megaphone. Now what?

Trump’s banishment is likely to further enrage an already volatile president, but many hailed the move as a long overdue milestone

From his first executive tweet on the morning of inauguration day 2017 to his final tweet on Friday, announcing that he would not attend his successor’s inauguration, Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account has served as the president’s official platform.

For four years, the @realDonaldTrump Twitter feed was both public square and personal dialogue, a place where he made policy announcements and taunted political enemies; threatened military reprisal and boasted about his TV ratings. But it was also, perhaps most dangerously, a place where he sought to bend reality to his will, unleashing a combustible, near-daily stream of misinformation, lies and outrage to his more than 87 million followers.

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Theft of two computers during Capitol attack raises information security concerns

Nancy Pelosi’s office confirms laptop was stolen when Trump supporters, incited by the president, invaded the building

At least two computers were stolen from the Capitol when a violent mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the building on Wednesday – including one from the office of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi – raising grave information security concerns.

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Hyundai’s value surges by $9bn amid reports of Apple electric car deal

South Korean firm backtracks on statement confirming ‘early discussion’ with US company

Hyundai’s value surged by $9bn (£6.6bn) on Friday after reports that it could join with Apple in developing a driverless electric vehicle – despite confusion as it backtracked on a statement acknowledging “early discussion” with the iPhone manufacturer.

Investors sent the South Korean carmaker’s share price on the Seoul exchange up almost 20%, as local media reported a possible tie-up on electric cars and batteries with Apple, which has been developing its own vehicle technology.

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Elon Musk becomes world’s richest person

Tesla co-founder overtakes Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as car firm’s shares soar after ‘blue Senate’ victory

Elon Musk, the maverick boss of Tesla, has overtaken Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest person, after shares in the electric car company he co-founded soared on hopes that a Democrat-controlled US Senate would usher in a new green agenda.

A 4.8% rise in Tesla’s share price was enough to push Musk into the top spot according to the Bloomberg billionaires index, which tracks the daily changes in the fortunes of the world’s 500 wealthiest people.

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The nobody-nose job: how the pandemic led to a rise in plastic surgery

Wanting to emerge from lockdown ‘better’ versions of themselves, some people are turning to drastic measures

When Kaafiya Abdulle gave birth to her son in April 2017, she chose to breastfeed. A year later, she switched to baby formula, hyper-vigilant of the effects nursing had on her breasts. Unhappy with the sagging and shrinking that had occurred, she began to research breast lifts – a procedure she desperately wanted but never had the courage to pursue. Until the pandemic, that is.

Related: Why you should ignore the pressure to be productive during lockdown

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Misinformation ‘superspreaders’: Covid vaccine falsehoods still thriving on Facebook and Instagram

Researchers say big Facebook accounts still condemn vaccines while anti-vaxxers banned from Facebook have fled to Instagram

Conspiracy theories and misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine are still spreading on Facebook and Instagram, more than a month after Facebook pledged it would take them down.

Under pressure to contain an avalanche of falsehoods, Facebook announced on 3 December that it would ban debunked claims about the safety and efficacy of vaccines now being distributed worldwide. The company said it removed more than 12m pieces of content from Facebook and Instagram between March and October, and that it worked with factcheckers to place labels on 167 million more pieces of content over the same period.

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Russians are ‘likely’ perpetrators of US government hack, official report says

Multi-agency report is the Trump administration’s first statement of attribution for the breaching of at least 10 federal agencies

Russia was “likely” to have been behind a string of hacks of US federal agencies identified last month, according the office of the US director of national intelligence which said the hackers breached fewer than 10 federal agencies.

The office and the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency inside the Department of Homeland Security, in a joint statement, said the hackers’ goal appeared to be collecting intelligence, rather than any destructive acts.

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‘He’s a risk-taker’: Germans divided over Elon Musk’s new GigaFactory

The Tesla project will put Grünheide on the map, but some say it is doing ‘irreversible’ harm to the environment

For the past 10 months, Silas Heineken has been flying a drone over one of Germany’s biggest building sites and posting the images on YouTube.

The 14-year-old self-named “Tesla Kid” has built a significant following, as tens of thousands tune in each week to see the latest developments in Elon Musk’s GigaFactory as it emerges at speed from the sandy ground of Brandenburg, south-east of Berlin.

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