China hires western TikTokers to polish its image during 2022 Winter Olympics

Posted on January 22, 2022 by Admin

Influencers told to extol country’s virtues on social media despite diplomatic boycotts of Beijing Games over human rights record

An army of western social media influencers, each with hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok, Instagram or Twitch, is set to spread positive stories about China throughout next month’s Winter Olympics.

Concerned about the international backlash against the Beijing Games amid a wave of diplomatic boycotts, the government has hired western PR professionals to spread an alternative narrative through social media.

‘I have moments of shame I can’t control’: the lives ruined by explicit ‘collector culture’

Posted on January 6, 2022 by Admin

The swapping, collating and posting of nude images of women without their consent is on the rise. But unlike revenge porn, it is not a crime. Now survivors are demanding a change in the law

Ruby will never forget the first time she clicked on the database AnonIB. It is a so-called “revenge porn” site and in January 2020, a friend had texted her for help. Ruby is a secondary school teacher, used to supporting teenagers, and her friend turned to her for advice when she discovered her images were on the site.

“She didn’t send the thread that she was on,” says Ruby, 29. “She was embarrassed, so she sent a general link to the site itself.” When Ruby opened it, “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I couldn’t believe that such an infrastructure existed: something so well organised, so systematic, fed by the people who lived around us.”

Wordle: why the inventor of the fiendishly addictive online game doesn’t want your money

Posted on January 4, 2022 by Admin

The mobile phone game Josh Wardle launched in October now has 300,000 people playing it daily – but, he says, he is not cashing in

Name: Wordle.

Age: Nearly three months old.

‘I’d been set up’: the LGBTQ Kenyans ‘catfished’ for money via dating apps

Posted on January 4, 2022 by Admin

A colonial law that criminalises ‘unnatural’ sexual acts leaves LGBTQ+ people prey to social media extortion and blackmail

One day after work last month, Tom Otieno* went to a shopping centre in Nairobi to pick up groceries before heading home. He got a call from someone he had been chatting to for a week on Grindr, a social networking app for gay, bi, trans and queer people. The man had already tried ringing several times during the day while Otieno was with colleagues and was keen to meet.

Otieno, 29, mentioned where he was but said that he did not want to see the man. Then, as he was heading to his car, he got another call. As he answered it, someone approached him and said they were a police officer. Seconds later, two other officers joined him and surrounded Otieno.

Kirat Assi: ‘Bobby tried to destroy my hopes, my dreams, every part of my life’

Posted on January 2, 2022 by Admin

She had been ‘catfished’ for years, and now her hit podcast tells the story of tracing the scammer and her quest for justice

The voice of Kirat Assi, subject of the podcast Sweet Bobby, is so familiar I momentarily forget we had never spoken, let alone met. I am one of the million-plus listeners gripped by her story of being “catfished” – duped into a relationship by someone with a false identity.

Assi, who lives in London, fell victim to a complex fraud that lasted eight years and involved up to 60 characters who only existed in the scammer’s warped imagination. At the centre was Bobby, a handsome cardiologist with whom Assi formed a close friendship that turned into romance despite never meeting in real life. Bobby was a real person whose identity had been stolen by the scammer, eventually exposed as Assi’s cousin Simran Bhogal.

Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen

Posted on January 2, 2022 by Admin

Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can

When he was nine years old, my godson Adam developed a brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley. He took to singing Jailhouse Rock at the top of his voice with all the low crooning and pelvis-jiggling of the King himself. One day, as I tucked him in, he looked at me very earnestly and asked: “Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day?” Without really thinking, I agreed. I never gave it another thought, until everything had gone wrong.

Ten years later, Adam was lost. He had dropped out of school when he was 15, and he spent almost all his waking hours alternating blankly between screens – a blur of YouTube, WhatsApp and porn. (I’ve changed his name and some minor details to preserve his privacy.) He seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat, and nothing still or serious could gain any traction in his mind. During the decade in which Adam had become a man, this fracturing seemed to be happening to many of us. Our ability to pay attention was cracking and breaking. I had just turned 40, and wherever my generation gathered, we would lament our lost capacity for concentration. I still read a lot of books, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator. Then one evening, as we lay on my sofa, each staring at our own ceaselessly shrieking screens, I looked at him and felt a low dread. “Adam,” I said softly, “let’s go to Graceland.” I reminded him of the promise I had made. I could see that the idea of breaking this numbing routine ignited something in him, but I told him there was one condition he had to stick to if we went. He had to switch his phone off during the day. He swore he would.

Killed by a pill bought on Snapchat: the counterfeit drugs poisoning US teens

Posted on December 23, 2021 by Admin

Accidental deaths soar among young people amid a proliferation of fentanyl-filled pharmaceuticals

Fourteen-year-old Alondra Salinas had set out her new white sneakers and packed her backpack the night before the first day of in-person high school when police say she responded to an offer on Snapchat for blue pills, which turned out to be deadly fentanyl. Her mother couldn’t wake her the next morning.

Seventeen-year-old Zachary Didier was waiting to hear back on his college applications when a fake Percocet killed him. Sammy Berman Chapman, a 16-year-old straight-A student, died in his bedroom after taking what he thought was a single Xanax.

Ricky Gervais on offence, anger and infuriating Hollywood: ‘You have to provoke. It’s a good thing’

Posted on December 18, 2021 by Admin

He has made a career out of winding people up in everything from The Office to his Golden Globes speeches – but is the comedian’s bark worse than his bite?

Ricky Gervais’s assistant leads me past a huge, empty room to the top floor of an office above a shop on a swanky London high street. Gervais is sitting behind a desk at his computer in another huge, empty room, and looks as if he’s just squatted the place. There is nothing that suggests this is his office, except for the branded mugs sitting on his desk; one shows his face, the second says Tambury Gazette, the fictional newspaper where Gervais’s character, Tony, works in his hit Netflix series After Life.

As soon as he sees me, he swings his legs off the floor and on to the desk. I expect him to say, “Right, shoot”, as his fabulous fictional creation David Brent might have done, but he reins himself in. It’s 20 years since Gervais made his name with The Office, and it’s often been difficult to know where Brent ends and Gervais begins.

David Baddiel and his daughter on his social media addiction: ‘it can reward and punish you’

Posted on December 11, 2021 by Admin

Despite the abuse and anger, the comedian spent hours a day online. But then his daughter Dolly became dangerously drawn in. Was it time for a rethink?

Over the past 30 years, I have read and heard David Baddiel’s thoughts on many subjects, including sex, masturbation, religion, antisemitism, football fandom, football hooliganism, his mother’s sex life and his father’s dementia. “I am quite unfiltered,” he agrees, “mainly because I am almost psychotically comfortable in my own skin.” But today I have found the one subject that makes him squirm.

How much time does he spend on social media a day? “Oh, um, too much,” he says, his usual candour suddenly gone. What’s his daily screen time according to his phone? “It says four hours, which is a bit frightening.”

I feel despair at Sudan’s coup. But my children’s mini protest gives me hope | Khalid Albaih

Posted on December 7, 2021 by Admin

After 30 years in exile, it’s easy to doubt that it will ever be safe to live and work in Sudan. But the action being taken by young people shows democracy will rise again

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” John Steinbeck wrote to a friend in 1941, just before the US entered the second world war. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins – it never will – but that it doesn’t die.”

Growing up, I was always interested in politics, politics was the reason I had to leave Sudan at the age of 11. At school, we weren’t allowed to study or discuss it, and it was the same at home.For years, I lay in bed and listened to my father and his friends as they argued about politics and sang traditional songs during their weekend whisky rituals. They watched a new Arabic news channel, Al Jazeera, which aired from Qatar. All the journalism my father consumed about Sudan was from the London-based weekly opposition newspaper, Al Khartoum. The only time he turned on our dial-up internet was to visit Sudanese Online.