Axios

Meta won't recommend political content on Threads

Meta will not "proactively recommend political content from accounts you don't follow" on Threads. The policies, which are the same it

News companies reverse course on hard subscriptions

News companies are reversing course on hard subscriptions—once seen as a safer alternative to the volatile ad market—in favor of flexible paywalls, membership programs and more ads. A strategy focused mainly on subscriptions requires upfront spending on premium content. That takes time to pay off—and many publishers don't have the cushion for that in the current ad slowdown. At the same time, many outlets have learned that simply throwing a paywall up over your previously free content doesn't work either. It throttles ad revenue without capturing enough new subscribers.

Child Safety Hearing: Senators Say Tech Platforms Hurt Children

CEO's from Meta, Snap, X, TikTok, and Discord testified in a contentious and emotional Senate hearing on child online safety. Lawmakers invoked the stories of online child abuse victims—many of whom sat directly behind the tech leaders—to issue a stunning rebuke to Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and other executives.

Tech rivals hound Apple over EU App Store plans

There's one thing uniting big and small tech companies operating in Europe: they can't stand Apple's approach to complying with the European Union's new Digital Markets Act (DMA). The DMA designates six big tech companies as online gatekeepers—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft—and obligates them to open their platforms to competition. Apple's DMA compliance plan allows developers to set up alternative app stores and avoid Apple's in-app payment system.

How AI could help curb global labor shortages

In conversations with a slew of business leaders about the economic implications of generative AI, a recurring theme cropped up: that AI-driven productivity gains are the world's best hope to limit the pain of a demographic squeeze. As computers get better at doing jobs humans have traditionally done, the risk of mass displacement of workers is created. But the flip side is an emerging shortage of working-age humans in most advanced economies and a murky future for globalization, which effectively expands the global pool of workers. The big macroeconomic question for the coming decade is wh

AI's next fight is over whose values it should hold

There's no such thing as an AI system without values — and that means this newest technology platform must navigate partisan rifts, culture-war chasms and international tensions from the very beginning. Every step in training, tuning and deploying AI models forces its creators to make choices about whose values the system will respect, whose point of view it will present and what limits it will observe. AI systems' points of view begins in the data with which they are trained — and the efforts their developers may take to mitigate the biases in the data. From there, most systems undergo an