He blocked Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. He signed a censorship law that led TikTok to disable its functions. President Vladimir V. Putin has clamped down on free expression in Russia to a degree unseen since the Soviet era. Now he is taking aim at the last Western tech platform barely standing in wartime Russia: YouTube. … Read more
On Oct. 4, 2019, a 13-year-old British boy called a child welfare hotline from his home in Banks, a village in northwest England, and asked: “What should I do if I want to kill somebody?” The teenager, Axel Rudakubana, said that he had started taking a knife to school because he was being bullied. After … Read more
As the world scrambles to understand DeepSeek — its sophistication, its implications for the global A.I. arms race — one natural question has arisen: Given that it is made by a Chinese company, how is it dealing with Chinese censorship? I decided to test it out. I’m based in China, and I registered for DeepSeek’s … Read more
Inside China, it was called the tipping point for the global technological rivalry with the United States and the “darkest hour” in Silicon Valley, evoking Winston Churchill. It was possibly a breakthrough that could change the country’s destiny. The news that the Chinese start-up DeepSeek can build artificial intelligence models that are as good as … Read more
Like soccer players taking the field in a giant stadium, the 12 finalists ran through a glowing “hype tunnel,” some wearing jerseys with sponsorship logos. As an announcer bellowed introductions and cameras captured their every move, they approached a neon-lit stage to raucous cheers. Then the men sat down at desktop computers, opened their Microsoft … Read more
The Chinese social media app RedNote is full of cute, heartwarming moments after about 500,000 American users fled to it last week to protest the looming U.S. government ban on TikTok. Calling themselves “TikTok refugees,” these users paid the “cat tax” to join RedNote by posting cat photos and videos. They answered so many questions … Read more
A man was arrested in connection with a fire set early on Sunday in response to “recent talks” of banning the popular video app TikTok, the authorities said. The fire was at a strip mall that includes a district office of a Wisconsin congressman who has been critical of the app. The man, 19, who … Read more