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rage against the machine!
Silicon Valley is reeling and the future suddenly looks marginally less dystopian. Kudos to the jury who just delivered the huge verdict at an LA court.
We’ve seen Zuckerberg coast through court cases too numerous to recite, but the latest proceedings will have drudged up that pit in the stomach created after being dragged through the ringer in the Cambridge Analytica trial.
The Meta boss no doubt entered the courtroom believing that the unearthing of some grim internal emails would be the worst of his troubles, but a month later both Meta and Google were deemed liable for contributing to a woman’s mental health harms through the design of Instagram and YouTube.
Reparations in the sum of $6 million were paid, but the real cost is far more damaging for big tech’s key players. When it comes to the symbiosis between social media and mental health issues in young people, the industry has always pointed at users, parents, society, puberty, the Moon cycle – anything but the products themselves.
The broad legal protections that have previously gotten them off scot-free now clearly don’t hold the same weight, however. The catch-all excuse of Section 230, which says publishers are not responsible for user content, has dwindled in strength over recent years as platforms push the boat out with blatant algorithmic tricks to keep people glued to screens for as long as possible.
The prosecution’s tact was simple. If your product is designed to maximise compulsive use, and that design is hurting children, you don’t get to just shrug and call yourself a neutral host. The jury wholeheartedly agreed.
It wasn’t just one rotten afternoon in court for Meta, either. 24 hours prior, Meta was hit was a $375 million verdict in New Mexico over the alleged concealment of what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platform. Suffice to say, it’s now open season for lawsuits against these once invulnerable entities.
Of course, the disgraced Silicon Valley firms will send their armies of lawyers to argue that morality isn’t relevant in legal definitions, but either way the damage is done and the mood has shifted.
Critics have been saying for years that social media platforms aren’t merely hosting harm, they’re engineering the conditions for it, and the worst kept secret in tech is now finally rearing its ugly head in the public domain.
😬 crowd control
‘Harry Potter’ series has ‘serious security’ because of racist death threats against Paapa Essiedu – los angeles times
What is it about this wizard-child franchise that gets people so angry? The LA Times says that early screenshots of actor Paapa Essiedu playing Severus Snape ignited a barrage of racist death threats directed at the Ghanian-Brit. Essiedu revealed that he has been told to quit to HBO series or be killed. Even by modern fandom standards that’s fairly extreme, right? Having credible conversations about honouring source material is one thing, but the abuse is just grim and uncalled for. We’ve seen similar instances in recent years with Star Wars and House of the Dragon, and studios are almost resigned to treating bigoted harassment as an expected production cost whenever a beloved IP comes into play. You couldn’t move on the weekend for AI generated videos of Paapa Essiedu as Snape on the weekend – and literally all of it involved outdated, juvenile stereotypes. Is the natural progression from ‘go woke, go broke’ just straight racism then?
First look at Paapa Essiedu as Snape in the ‘Harry Potter’ series pic.twitter.com/kTwkFEJqz3
— Culture Crave 🍿 (@CultureCrave) March 25, 2026
Kanye West announces first UK gigs in a decade to headline all three nights of Wireless 2026 – nme
The only thing your parents fear more than AI is cancel culture, but here’s proof there’s nothing to worry about. NME reports that Kanye West, or Ye (happy now?), will headline all three nights of Wireless 2026 in his first UK show for a decade. Despite seemingly being hellbent on disgracing himself publicly during that hiatus, the buzz is still massive. It just goes to show that all the ideological ramblings, the anti-Semitic rants, the literal pissing on awards isn’t all that significant when a chance to hear Can’t Tell Me Nothing ring out around Finsbury Park presents itself. Festivals obviously know this, and fans know this. Nostalgia and spectacle can smooth over almost anything, and if evidence was presented to support that theory in court, Ye’s sudden return to adoration is probably the murder weapon – the humdinger that seals the case for good. His music is bloody good, to be fair.
YE LIVE AT WIRELESS. FINSBURY PARK. LONDON.
THREE NIGHTS…
10 JULY
11 JULY
12 JULY★ 48hr @PayPalUK presale: 12PM BST Tue 31 March*
★ Wireless presale: 12PM BST Tue 7 April – Sign up in our bio for access
★ General onsale: 12PM BST Wed 8 April@PepsiUK pic.twitter.com/p200lgktdL
— Wireless Festival (@WirelessFest) March 30, 2026
🤑 price of entry
Why Young People Can’t Find a Job in London Anymore – bloomberg
London is viewed among young people as the UK’s answer to the Big Apple, the place to go to become somebody, or more likely become underpaid in a bougier postcode. Bloomberg says that the feeling of promise is starting to erode, as Youth unemployment in the capital rises more dramatically than anywhere else in Britain. Graduate jobs that were once plentiful are hair thin, and sectors that traditionally took on ambitious young workers are being squeezed by higher taxes, intensely stringent hiring, and – you guessed it – generative AI ousting junior positions for the price of a monthly subscription. The article profiles a computer science graduate who has sent off 50 applications and landed just a single interview. No wonder Gen Z is intent on job hugging since the pandemic. It seems if you pursue pastures new in the Big Smoke, you might just end up twiddling your thumbs at home.
Vaping likely to cause lung and oral cancer, Australian researchers find in new review of evidence – the guardian
That AAA battery you’re sucking on is probably not great for your health, i’m sure you’re aware of that every time you ask bossman for a pineapple ice, but we’re beginning to glean just how detrimental a vaping habit may be. The Guardian has detailed a new Australian study in the journal Carcinogenesis and the headline is that vaping is likely to cause lung and oral cancer. The review drew on research from 2017 to 2025 which showed DNA damage, inflammation, and other pre-carcinogenic changes in the mouth and lungs. Because vapes were only invented in the early 2000s, the dataset isn’t large enough to make the same level of assertions we made about tobacco, but the review has isolated and assessed the biological changes that occur when vaping specifically. It sure looks like it causes cancer. Not just gum disease, then… said the newsletter author shamelessly, who had vapes on and off until around 28.
