Andy Burnham nears Labour leadership finish line
Labour should ditch the triple-lock pensions promise to help tackle the UK’s straitened public finances, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has urged. Heather Stewart has the story.
I’m afraid we are not going to be able to open comments today for staffing reasons. If you want to contact me directly, it is probably best to get me on on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social.
Continue reading...Julie Inman Grant singles out X when giving evidence to royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
Mainstream platforms are fighting to distribute and monetise “gore” and “fringe” content, the eSafety watchdog has told the antisemitism royal commission.
Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, on Thursday singled out X, telling the inquiry her office has to fight its billionaire owner, Elon Musk, to try to keep footage – including some posted of the Bondi terror attack – restricted or off the platform.
Continue reading...UK is latest country to set minimum age for social media access but big tech is fighting back globally against curbs
Arturo Béjar, a former employee turned whistleblower at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has talked to parents around the world. He says they share the same perspective: they dread the day their children are old enough to go online.
Governments appear to be listening too. This month the UK became the latest country to state that it would set a minimum age of 16 for accessing major social media platforms. Social media bans are becoming a legislative trend after the precedent set by Australia last year, when it imposed an age limit on platforms including Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, Google’s YouTube, Elon Musk’s X, TikTok and Snapchat.
Continue reading...Follow the day’s updates live
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
Big tech not cooperating ‘as much as we’d like them to’: Watt
Federal cabinet minister Murray Watt, says the government knows it’s needed to take more action to ensure social media giants are complying with a ban for under 16s that came into effect in December.
These laws were brand new, never developed anywhere in the world. And what we’ve learned is that the powers that the safety commissioner has do need to be beefed up, also to give her powers across things like age assurance tools. So things that sit outside the social media platforms themselves, but compelling them to provide information so that she can do her job even better.
The pace of change is accelerating, the global and generational pressures are intensifying, and people have got legitimate concerns about where they fit in that, and then we’ve got the anger industry, and parties of the populist right trying to make that worse rather than trying to make that better.
It is a difficult time around the world to be an incumbent government, from our point of view. We are using the power of incumbency to take real action, to deliver cost-of-living help, to deliver real change. The best antidote to anger is action … The Albanese Labour government has chosen to address those concerns rather than dismiss them.
Continue reading...Prime minister Anthony Albanese says too many children still on platforms but he is ‘heartened’ by world-leading law
Social media bans go global: big tech faces a reckoning after Australia’s crackdown
Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast
The federal government will double the penalty for breaches of Australia’s youth social media ban to $99m, arguing tech companies are “not doing enough” to keep children off harmful social media sites.
And the eSafety commissioner, now investigating potential breaches of the law by Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube, will have its information-gathering powers strengthened under proposed further reforms.
Continue reading...As a host of countries move to rein in social media use by children, could this be technology’s big tobacco moment?
Continue reading...Liz Kendall also wants Ofcom to report to parliament every year on how effectively social media firms are keeping under-16s off their platforms
Starmer acknowledges some teenagers will get round these restrictons. But that does not make the rules pointless, he says.
Will it mean that no child ever looks at social media again? No.
But look, this might shock you, but it doesn’t shock parents of teenagers; they get around other laws too.
Some technology companies want us to think that social media is unchangeable, part of an almost natural order.
But we have to resist that kind of learned helplessness. We have agency, we can change it, and we will.
Continue reading...In today’s newsletter: With Keir Starmer expected to announce Australia-style restrictions, further problems – including AI chatbots - are on the horizon
Good morning. Keir Starmer’s expected speech next week about young people’s access to social media will be analysed as much for how it benefits the outcome of a certain byelection, as its safeguarding of children’s synapses.
After issuing an ultimatum to tech firms yesterday to block children’s phones from sharing nude images, the government is expected to make another major announcement about social media within days. Briefings suggest it will stop short of a blanket ban on under-16s accessing social media. But it will still amount to radical regulation, with Downing Street insisting that Starmer is up for a fight with big tech.
UK politics | Volodymyr Zelenskyy has revealed that he plans to invite King Charles on a state visit to Ukraine as early as this year, which would make him the most senior royal to travel to Kyiv since Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Middle East | Fears of a return to a full-scale regional war in the Middle East eased on Monday as Israel and Iran said they had halted attacks on each other after an appeal from Donald Trump to “immediately stop shooting”.
UK news | A report has found “widespread and concerning evidence” of bias and victim-blaming in the family courts – primarily disadvantaging women.
US news | Donald Trump was loudly booed when he was shown on the video screens at Madison Square Garden on Monday night at the NBA finals.
Unemployment | A government-funded pilot of “hyperlocal” job support in 10 neighbourhoods across England has shown “promising early signs of effectiveness”, including for young people, and could be scalable nationwide, a new evaluation has shown.
Continue reading...Technology secretary Liz Kendall says she is ‘very concerned’ about role of social media but will not be ‘bullied off’ X
The government is considering fresh action to halt the spread of misinformation during public crises, Liz Kendall has said, insisting she will not be “bullied off” Elon Musk’s X.
The technology secretary was speaking after rioting broke out in Southampton over the police response to the fatal stabbing of Henry Nowak, a case about which Musk has repeatedly posted.
Continue reading...Major report on young people not in employment, education or training warns ‘we have neither a system or a plan to deal with it’
Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, is introducing Alan Milburn.
He says Milburn’s report is “really important and powerful”.
I could see in the first few weeks after being appointed as the secretary of state what was happening, both in human and in financial terms, [in terms of youth unemployment].
And I knew that we had to get properly under the bonnet of this problem, because there’s a lot more thing than one thing happening here …
Continue reading...‘Robert’s answer is not Reform policy’, Yusuf said about an answer that Jenrick gave to journalists days earlier
Keir Starmer has said that SNP leaders need to explain why they did not realise that Peter Murrell was stealing more than £400,000 from the party.
Asked about yesterday’s court proceedings in Edinburgh, where Murrell admitting embezzling money from the party to spend on luxury goods, Starmer said:
I think anybody looking at what’s happening up in Scotland will be baffled that those at the top of the SNP say they didn’t know anything about what was going on, so clearly there are questions that need to be answered.
Continue reading...The comments were part of a broader address in which he condemned Nato allies
Yesterday the Conservative party said that it wanted to ban political parties from distributing campaign literature in a foreign language. Announcing a plan to propose an amendement to the representation of the people bill to make this law, the shadow communities minister Paul Holmes said:
Campaigning in a foreign language as the Greens did in Gorton and Denton only fosters greater division. A coherent national culture relies on shared values, and an inclusive electoral process relies on a common tongue.
I think it’s for political parties to choose how they campaign and communicate with British voters. If they’re using British money that is funding their campaigns and they’re speaking to people who have the right to vote, then why would you not show those voters the respect of communication?
What fuels division is Nick Timothy standing up and singling out Muslim forms of worship for a ban when he’s not applying that to forms of worship that other religions are talking about.
It just doesn’t compute, does it? I worked in Number 10. Briefly, I had a Number 10 phone. There was a paranoia about devices like that falling into other people’s hands.
And so whether it was the Met Police, whether it was Morgan McSweeney, and what sounds like pretty evasive set of reporting, even when you look at that transcript, or whether it was the Number 10 security team following up something that at the time they could not have been sure had not been taken by a state actor, a phone with all sorts of government secrets potentially in it, that’s precisely why people in government have two separate phones.
I don’t believe McSwindle had his iPhone stolen
Honest believe, Matt. It’s smacks of the liar Johnson defence of ‘lost all my WhatsApp messages’. We mustn’t take the public for fools. And I am afraid this smacks of too convenient by far. I won’t do it. I will say what I actually think. And I don’t believe it. End of!
I believe the report was made. McSwindle didn’t mention that he was the chief of staff to the PM. A significant omission of he’d wanted the police to prioritise the offence.
Continue reading...Ban could still be introduced in future after Commons back government bid to give extra powers to secretary of state
A proposed ban on social media for under-16s has been rejected by MPs.
Parliamentarians voted 307 to 173, majority 134, against the proposed change to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill, which was brought forward by Conservative peer and former minister John Nash.
Continue reading...