Reddit "has overtaken TikTok as Britain's fourth most-visited social media service," reports the Guardian: The platform has undergone huge growth over the last two years, with an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches. Three in five Brits online now encounter the site, up from a third in 2023, according to Ofcom. Its popularity is rising fastest with younger internet users. It is now the sixth most visited organisation of any kind by UK users aged between 18 and 24, up from 10th a year earlier. More than three-quarters of that cohort now visit it....

The UK is a boom market for the platform, with the second largest user base behind the US, according to company records. A series of factors are behind its rise. However, a change in Google's search algorithms last year to prioritise helpful content from discussion forums appears to have been a significant driver. A recent deal with Google that allows the company to train its AI model on Reddit's content also appears to have provided a boost. Reddit is the most-cited source for Google AI overviews, which is likely to see more people directed to its forums. It has a similar deal with OpenAI, which owns the most popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
According to the article, Reddit "believes it is also benefiting from shifting internet habits, as younger users seek out human-generated reviews and opinions."

"While a growing number of U.S. employers are mandating workers return to the office five days a week," reports the Washington Post, "some companies say AI is saving them enough time to launch or sustain a four-day workweek.

"More companies may move toward a shortened workweek, several executives and researchers predict, as workers, especially those in younger generations, continue to push for better work-life balance." And "several companies — especially those with a largely remote workforce — have adjusted their work rhythm after delegating many tasks to AI..." AI "has such a potential to have so much labor savings, you'll see firms shift to a four-day week in an evolutionary way," said Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College who has studied the subject. "There's enough social consensus that people are exhausted and stressed...." Small and medium businesses often adopt shortened workweeks to compete with big salaries for new hires and retention, Schor said. That's how Peak PEO, a London-based service that helps companies expand globally with teams in different locations, thought about its strategy... CEO Alex Voakes said that job openings that used to get two applications jumped to 350 after the change.
"Some of the world's most influential business leaders have publicly suggested the shift may be inevitable," adds Fortune: Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has said advancing technology could eventually push the workweek down to just three-and-a-half days. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has gone further, openly questioning whether a two-day workweek could be the future. Elon Musk has taken the idea to its logical extreme, positing that the need to work altogether could cease... Tech innovation could "probably" lead to a transition toward four-day workweeks, [Nvidia CEO Jensen] Huang said on Fox Business in August...

Ghana has decided to deal with the viral spread of prophetic content on social media by setting up an official reporting mechanism for sensitive predictions, a move triggered by the August 2025 helicopter crash that killed the country's defence and environment ministers along with six others.

After the accident, TikTok clips circulated showing pastors who claimed to have foreseen the disaster before it happened. Elvis Ankrah, the presidential envoy for inter-faith and ecumenical relations, now asks prophets to submit their predictions for review.

Charismatic preacher-prophets have been a fixture of Ghanaian public life since Pentecostalism arrived in the 1980s, but social media has amplified their reach and made their claims increasingly outlandish. Police have threatened to arrest prophets who cannot prove their predictions eventually came true. Some two-thirds of Ghanaians favor giving divine intervention a role in politics. Ankrah recently declared that most prophecies submitted to him are "total bunk."

Instagram head Adam Mosseri closed out 2025 by acknowledging what many have long suspected: the era of trusting photographs as accurate records of reality is over, and the platform he runs will need to fundamentally adapt to an age of "infinite synthetic content."

In a slideshow posted to Instagram, Mosseri wrote that for most of his life he could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened, adding that this is clearly no longer the case. He predicted a shift from assuming what we see is real by default to starting with skepticism and paying attention to who is sharing something and why.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a growing number of tech startups are stocking offices with free nicotine pouches as founders and employees chase sharper focus and stamina in hyper-competitive AI-era work environments. The Wall Street Journal reports: Earlier this year, two nicotine startups -- Lucy Nicotine and Sesh -- made branded vending machines filled with flavored products for analytics company Palantir Technologies. Both machines are in the company's Washington, D.C., offices. The pouches are free for employees and guests over the age of 21, a spokeswoman for Palantir said. Palantir pays to stock the nicotine products.

Alex Cohen, a startup founder based in Austin, Texas, said he was first exposed to nicotine pouches in the workplace after seeing tins of Zyns on the desks of his software engineers. His company, Hello Patient, makes AI-powered healthcare-communication software. "They were very productive, so I thought maybe there's something here," he said. Those engineers soon asked him if he could buy it for the office.

Cohen said he initially bought the nicotine pouches as a joke for social media. He posted a picture of a drawer in his startup's office filled with nicotine pouches made by different brands with the caption, "We're hiring." "Then, I accidentally got addicted," said Cohen. He said he uses around two to three pouches a day. His go-to flavors are mango or minty. Cohen said he has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and he has found that the pouches can provide a quick productivity boost. "It helps with reining in my focus because it is a stimulant," he said. Today, Hello Patient has a nicotine-pouch fridge in its office kitchen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: France intends to follow Australia and ban social media platforms for children from the start of the 2026 academic year. A draft bill preventing under-15s from using social media will be submitted for legal checks and is expected to be debated in parliament early in the new year. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has made it clear in recent weeks that he wants France to swiftly follow Australia's world-first ban on social media platforms for under-16s, which came into force in December. It includes Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.

Le Monde and France Info reported on Wednesday that a draft bill was now complete and contained two measures: a ban on social media for under-15s and a ban on mobile phones in high schools, where 15- to 18-year-olds study. Phones have already been banned in primary and middle schools. The bill will be submitted to France's Conseil d'Etat for legal review in the coming days. Education unions will also look at the proposed high-school ban on phones. The government wants the social media ban to come into force from September 2026.

Le Monde reported the text of the draft bill cited "the risks of excessive screen use by teenagers," including the dangers of being exposed to inappropriate social media content, online bullying, and altered sleep patterns. The bill states the need to "protect future generations" from dangers that threaten their ability to thrive and live together in a society with shared values. Earlier this month, Macron confirmed at a public debate in Saint Malo that he wanted a social media ban for young teenagers. He said there was "consensus being shaped" on the issue after Australia introduced its ban.

"The more screen time there is, the more school achievement drops the more screen time there is, the more mental health problems go up," he said. He used the analogy of a teenager getting into a Formula One racing car before they had learned to drive. "If a child is in a Formula One car and they turn on the engine, I don't want them to win the race, I just want them to get out of the car. I want them to learn the highway code first, and to ensure the car works, and to teach them to drive in a different car."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: South Africans ... have found a remedy for power cuts that have plagued people in the developing world for years. Thanks to swiftly falling prices of Chinese made solar panels and batteries, they now draw their power from the sun. These aren't the tiny, old-school solar lanterns that once powered a lightbulb or TV in rural communities. Today, solar and battery systems are deployed across a variety of businesses -- auto factories and wineries, gold mines and shopping malls. And they are changing everyday life, trade and industry in Africa's biggest economy. This has happened at startling speed. Solar has risen from almost nothing in 2019 to roughly 10 percent of South Africa's electricity-generating capacity.

No longer do South Africans depend entirely on giant coal-burning plants that have defined how people worldwide got their electricity for more than a century. That's forcing the nation's already beleaguered electric utility to rethink its business as revenues evaporate. Joel Nana, a project manager with Sustainable Energy Africa, a Cape Town-based organization, called it "a bottom-up movement" to sidestep a generations-old problem. "The broken system is unreliable electricity, expensive electricity or no electricity at all," he said. "We've been living in this situation forever." What's happening in South Africa is repeating across the continent. Key to this shift: China's ambition to lead the world in clean energy. The report says that more than 7 gigawatts of solar capacity have been installed in South Africa over the past five years -- about 1/10 of the country's total installed capacity (55 GW). And most of this new solar capacity is privately owned and installed by households and businesses rather than utilities.

Across the continent, Chinese solar imports rose 50% in the first 10 months of 2025. Cheap Chinese solar is rapidly reshaping Africa's energy landscape from the bottom up but it's also shifting geopolitical influence, hollowing out local manufacturing opportunities, and deepening divides between those who can afford energy independence and those who can't. "The solar surge does little to address the most pressing social and economic problems of developing countries like South Africa, the need to generate new jobs for millions of young citizens," reports the NYT. "Installation labor is local, but the panels and batteries are almost all made in China."

Further reading: Why Solarpunk Is Already Happening In Africa

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Mac Bauer is fast, but the city's trams, weighing more than 100,000lbs and traveling at a maximum speed of nearly 45mph, should be far faster than him. And yet as of late December, in head-to-head races against streetcars, the 32-year-old remains undefeated in his quest to highlight how sluggish the trams, used by 230,000 people daily, truly are.

Some races have pushed him closer to his limits as a runner. On other occasions, the car has been so slow he's had time to nip into a McDonald's before it reaches the last station. "I don't like winning. I really don't. I really, really wish these streetcars were faster than me," he said. "But they're not. And this is the problem." Bauer's rise as a running celebrity and transit critic embodies the mounting frustration of a city beset by chronic delays, congested streets and decades of under-built transit.

"Streetcars just shouldn't be stuck in traffic," he said, adding the system also needed more "signal priority" which gives the streetcars lengthened green lights and shortened red lights. Bauer started racing transit vehicles roughly a year ago after he and his wife realized how long it took them to traverse the city. He posted videos of those races to Instagram and quickly transformed into a minor celebrity. Bauer describes his runs as a form of social activism, and his ability to lay bare the absurdities of Toronto's beleaguered public transit system -- a person can outrun a streetcar! -- has struck a nerve with the tens of thousands of commuters who share his Instagram posts.

Japan's demographic transformation is no longer a distant forecast but an accelerating reality, and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research now estimates the country's population will fall to roughly 100 million by 2050 -- more than 20 million fewer people than today.

The share of residents aged 65 and over stood at 29.4% as of September and is expected to reach 37.1% by midcentury. The dependency ratio -- children and older adults supported by every 100 working-age people -- is projected to rise from 68.0 to 89.0, meaning each working-age person will effectively support one dependent.

Akita Prefecture is currently offering a preview of this future. Its population fell 1.93% year over year as of November 1, the steepest decline of any prefecture, and more than 40% of its residents are already 65 or older. By 2050, Akita's population is projected to drop to around 560,000, roughly 60% of its current size. Japan's total fertility rate fell for the ninth consecutive year in 2024, declining to 1.15 from 1.2. A health ministry survey found around 319,000 babies were born in the first half of 2025, more than 10,000 fewer than the same period last year -- a pace that could put the full-year total at a record low.

The six-decade flow of highly skilled Indian immigrants to the United States -- a migration pattern that produced some of the country's highest-earning households, several Nobel laureates, and the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and Pepsi -- appears to be grinding to a halt amid rising anti-Indian rhetoric from Republican officials and chaos in the visa system, according to New York Times.

Indian student arrivals at American universities fell 44% this year, even as Indians had just become the largest contingent of foreign students the previous year. The decline comes as top Trump administration officials have publicly accused Indian immigrants of gaming the system. Stephen Miller, the architect of the president's immigration crackdown, declared on Fox News that Indians "engage in a lot of cheating on immigration policies that is very harmful to American workers." Governor Ron DeSantis called the H-1B visa program "chain migration run amok."

The hostility extends beyond policy circles. At a Hindu temple in Sugar Land, Texas, conservative Christian protesters gathered during the dedication of a 90-foot Hanuman statue, calling the deity "a demon god." A U.S. Senate candidate wrote on social media: "Why are we allowing a false statue of a false Hindu God to be here in Texas? We are a CHRISTIAN nation." Indian Americans' median household income significantly outstrips that of white Americans, and about three-quarters hold at least a college degree. Foreign students have earned more engineering and computer science doctorates than American citizens and permanent residents for over two decades, according to the National Science Foundation. American tech giants have announced $67.5 billion in new investments in India in just the past few months.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Insurance giant Aflac is notifying roughly 22.65 million people that their personal information was stolen from its systems in June 2025. The company disclosed the intrusion on June 20, saying it had identified suspicious activity on its network in the US on June 12 and blaming it on a sophisticated cybercrime group. The company said it immediately contained the attack and engaged with third-party cybersecurity experts to help with incident response. Aflac's operations were not affected, as file-encrypting ransomware was not deployed.

[...] The compromised information, the insurance giant says, includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, driver's license numbers, government ID numbers, medical and health insurance information, and other data. "The review of the potentially impacted files determined personal information associated with customers, beneficiaries, employees, agents, and other individuals related to Aflac was involved," Aflac said in a notification (PDF) on its website. The company is providing the affected individuals with 24 months of free credit monitoring, identity theft protection, and medical fraud protection services.

AI-generated video tools like OpenAI's Sora will make individual content creators "far, far, far less valuable" as social media platforms shift toward algorithmically generated content tailored to each viewer, according to Michael Mignano, a partner at venture capital firm Lightspeed and who cofounded the podcasting platform Anchor before Spotify acquired it.

Speaking on a podcast, Mignano described a future where content is generated instantaneously and artificially to suit the viewer. The TikTok algorithm is powerful, he said, but it still requires human beings to make content -- and there's a cost to that. AI could drive those costs down significantly. Mignano called this shift the "death of the creator" in a post, acknowledging it was "devastating" but arguing it marked a "whole new chapter for the internet."

In an email to Business Insider, Mignano wrote that quality will win out. "Platforms will no longer reward humans posting the same old, tried and true formats and memes," he wrote. "True uniqueness of image, likeness, and creativity will be the only viable path for human-created content."

On Wednesday (Christmas Eve), the Free Software Foundation announced it had received two major contributions totaling around $900,000 USD — in the cryptocurrency Monero.

The two donations "are among some of the largest private gifts ever made to the organization," the FSF said in a statement.

"The donors wish to remain anonymous," according to the FSF's statement: The organization is in its annual winter fundraising drive, currently at three-quarters of its $400,000 USD winter goal, and will now switch its focus to a member drive thanks in part to these donations... The donation will support the organization's technical team and infrastructure capacity, as well as strengthen its campaigns, education, licensing, and advocacy initiatives, and future opportunities. The FSF is seeking donations until year-end after which they aim to gain 100 associate members through its year-end fundraising ending January 16.
The FSF's executive director said the donations prove "that software freedom is recognized more and more as a principal issue today, at the core of several other social movements people care about like privacy, ownership, and the right to repair...

"We are proudly supported by a large variety of contributors who care about digital rights. All donations matter, whether $5 or $500,000."

Social media platforms with infinite scrolling, auto-play and algorithmic feeds will be required to display warning labels about their potential harm to young users' mental health under a new law, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Friday. From a report: "Keeping New Yorkers safe has been my top priority since taking office, and that includes protecting our kids from the potential harms of social media features that encourage excessive use," Hochul said in a statement.

This month Australia imposed a social media ban for children under 16. New York joins states like California and Minnesota that have similar social media laws. The New York law includes platforms that offer "addictive feeds," auto play or infinite scroll, according to the legislation. The law applies to conduct occurring partly or wholly in New York but not when the platform is accessed by users physically outside the state.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese social media users criticized two key government policies, rare signs of public dissent in the country where the internet is heavily censored. The death of the former head of China's one-child policy agency -- which for decades forced women to carry out abortions and sterilizations -- sparked criticism of the demographic effort, with one netizen lamenting the "children who were lost."

Others, meanwhile, criticized Beijing's leadership over its ongoing row with Tokyo, sparked by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi saying her country could intervene to defend Taiwan in a potential Chinese attack on the self-ruled island, which Beijing claims as its own.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Concerned that artificial intelligence could threaten Communist Party rule, Beijing is taking extraordinary steps to keep it under control. Although China's government sees AI as crucial to the country's economic and military future, regulations and recent purges of online content show it also fears AI could destabilize society. Chatbots pose a particular problem: Their ability to think for themselves could generate responses that spur people to question party rule.

In November, Beijing formalized rules it has been working on with AI companies to ensure their chatbots are trained on data filtered for politically sensitive content, and that they can pass an ideological test before going public. All AI-generated texts, videos and images must be explicitly labeled and traceable, making it easier to track and punish anyone spreading undesirable content. Authorities recently said they removed 960,000 pieces of what they regarded as illegal or harmful AI-generated content during three months of an enforcement campaign. Authorities have officially classified AI as a major potential threat, adding it alongside earthquakes and epidemics to its National Emergency Response Plan.

Chinese authorities don't want to regulate too much, people familiar with the government's thinking said. Doing so could extinguish innovation and condemn China to second-tier status in the global AI race behind the U.S., which is taking a more hands-off approach toward policing AI. But Beijing also can't afford to let AI run amok. Chinese leader Xi Jinping said earlier this year that AI brought "unprecedented risks," according to state media. A lieutenant called AI without safety like driving on a highway without brakes. There are signs that China is, for now, finding a way to thread the needle.

Chinese models are scoring well in international rankings, both overall and in specific areas such as computer coding, even as they censor responses about the Tiananmen Square massacre, human-rights concerns and other sensitive topics. Major American AI models are for the most part unavailable in China. It could become harder for DeepSeek and other Chinese models to keep up with U.S. models as AI systems become more sophisticated. Researchers outside of China who have reviewed both Chinese and American models also say that China's regulatory approach has some benefits: Its chatbots are often safer by some metrics, with less violence and pornography, and are less likely to steer people toward self-harm. "The Communist Party's top priority has always been regulating political content, but there are people in the system who deeply care about the other social impacts of AI, especially on children," said Matt Sheehan, who studies Chinese AI at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank. "That may lead models to produce less dangerous content on certain dimensions."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The State Department announced Tuesday it was barring five Europeans it accused of leading efforts to pressure U.S. tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints. The Europeans, characterized by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as "radical" activists and "weaponized" nongovernmental organizations, fell afoul of a new visa policy announced in May to restrict the entry of foreigners deemed responsible for censorship of protected speech in the United States. "For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose," Rubio posted on X. "The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship."

The five Europeans were identified by Sarah Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, in a series of posts on social media. [...] The five Europeans named by Rogers are: Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate; Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, leaders of HateAid, a German organization; Clare Melford, who runs the Global Disinformation Index; and former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, who was responsible for digital affairs. Rogers in her post on X called Breton, a French business executive and former finance minister, the "mastermind" behind the EU's Digital Services Act, which imposes a set of strict requirements designed to keep internet users safe online. This includes flagging harmful or illegal content like hate speech. She referred to Breton warning Musk of a possible "amplification of harmful content" by broadcasting his livestream interview with Trump in August 2024 when he was running for president.

theodp writes: We all mix pictures, emojis, and text freely in our communications. So why not in our code? That's the premise of "Fun With Python and Emoji: What Might Adding Pictures to Text Programming Languages Look Like?" (two-image Bluesky explainer; full slides), which takes a look at what mixing emoji with Python and SQL might look like. A GitHub repo includes a Google Colab-ready Python notebook proof of concept that does rudimentary emoji-to-text translation via an IPython input transformer.

So, in the Golden Age of AI -- some 60+ years after Kenneth Iverson introduced the chock-full-of-symbols APL -- are valid technical reasons still keeping symbols and pictures out of code, or is their absence more of a programming dogma thing?

Tech giants Google and Apple are asking some employees with H-1B visas to reconsider international travel, as their legal teams warned that visa processing delays could keep employees abroad for months, according to Business Insider. From a report: Law firms representing the tech giants sent memos advising staff who require visa stamps for reentry to stay in the U.S., warning that international travel could entangle them in visa screening delays following the introduction of a new social media screening requirement, according to the news agency. The policy subjects H-1B workers and their dependents to reviews of their social media histories.

"Please be aware that some US Embassies and Consulates are experiencing significant visa stamping appointment delays, currently reported as up to 12 months," BAL Immigration Law, which represents Google, said in a memo obtained by Business Insider. The law firm said the delays were affecting H-1B, H-4, F, J and M visas.

Uber and Lyft plan to trial robotaxis in London starting in 2026 using autonomous vehicles from Baidu, as the UK fast-tracks approvals for self-driving cars on public roads. CNBC reports: Lyft's testing of Baidu's initial fleet of dozens of vehicles will begin in 2026, pending regulatory approval, "with plans to scale to hundreds from there," Lyft CEO David Risher said in a post on social media platform X on Monday. Meanwhile, Uber said that its first pilot is expected to start in the first half of 2026. "We're excited to accelerate Britain's leadership in the future of mobility, bringing another safe and reliable travel option to Londoners next year," the company added.

The moves add to Baidu's growing global footprint, which it says includes 22 cities and more than 250,000 weekly trips, as it races against other Chinese players like WeRide and Western giants like Alphabet's Waymo. The UK, in particular, has seen a wave of interest from driverless taxi companies, following the government's announcement in June that it would accelerate its plans to allow autonomous vehicle tech on public roads. The government now aims to begin permitting robotaxis to operate in small-scale pilots starting in spring 2026, with Baidu likely aiming to be among the first. The city of London has also established a "Vision Zero" goal to eliminate all serious injuries and deaths in its transportation systems by 2041, with autonomous driving technology expected to play a large role.