(A win insofar as they don’t have to break big bits off the company)
Snr Lecturer digital media Swinburne Uni, chicken whisperer, researcher. Smells books. Maybe we can build a new thing here 🌱 The Upside Down: https://twitter.com/manjusrii
5,638 followers 2,320 following 701 posts
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(A win insofar as they don’t have to break big bits off the company)
Google had a (relative) win “Google will not have to sell its Chrome web browser but must share information with competitors, a US federal judge has ordered. www.bbc.com/news/article...
Across the nation, the March for Australia got underway stuffed full of Australians from all walks of (intolerant of other people) life — First Dog on the Moon www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Substack getting out the handcuffs for writers, cartoonists, boutique sellers ...
PS I’m ok. I’m a big person.
Some lovely replies I’ve got over the last few hours. And people wonder why I don’t think young kids should be exposed to social media platforms, and that age verification is a good idea. Not exposing kids to unmitigated toxicity is one reason.
Yes, unfortunately you’re right.
It just boggles my mind that people who are literally descended from immigrants are protesting immigration in Melbourne today. Unless you’re an indigenous Australian you came from somewhere else.
MEAA Deputy Chief Executive spoke to ABC Canberra this morning on the Israeli strike on Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza that killed another five media workers. Stop Killing Journalists.
Just saw Moritz von Oswald’s Silencio at Melbourne Recital Hall: the most beautiful, textural composition I’ve heard in decades 👌
The big tech era continues to feel like it’s built on the idea that enabling crimes at ungodly scale means they aren’t crimes anymore. Scams? Abuse? IP theft? Do it 10 times and you go to jail. Do it 10 billion times and it’s a business model.
🤣 She’s not scruffy enough
To be fair to the sub, it is a list. Just not a list that makes any sense at all
I wish we could just call a spade a spade. This is starvation.
Hope you feeling better x
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It is difficult to discuss a genocide with “balance and respect”. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...
Because they’re not as progressive as we thought they were
Targeting journalists is a war crime. As colleagues, we remember them. meaa.io/45A4vZ5
Heartened to see that the Australian Society of Authors are pushing back against a proposed text and data mining exception to the Copyright Act to allow the training of AI. Did you see this @manjusrii.bsky.social ? www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...
UTS is going to axe 400 jobs. This is not solely the government’s fault, but it is yet another sign that the “Job-ready Graduates” package needs to be abolished. It punishes humanities students
Netanyahu just said we’d do exactly the same if Melbourne was under attack. No, we wouldn’t.
Oooh!!
Has anyone worked out if the meteor in Melb sky last night actually made it to the ground? Excited. Would love to see a pic of it, even if it’s only the size of a marble
Yep there is
Just let him in. There's enough room in both our country and our hearts for the people the US hates.
They said Australia. It’s so random isn’t it?
As though people are like little UPS parcels you can just shuffle off to the opposite side of the round world. (This excerpt is from WaPo)
🤣
if anything it is undead bsky.app/profile/atar...
*Twitter is not dead strictly speaking, but it has become an ugly thing known by another name
It resisted throughout the life of Twitter. It resisted when Facebook took it over. It resisted when TikTok did it. Why now? So interesting It’ll fundamentally change the nature and experience of the platform, for sure. It’ll be easier to go viral quickly for example
Instagram has resisted any kind of “repost” feature for as long as it has existed. It’s so interesting that it has decided to finally do it now. It resisted through the early years, it even resisted when TikTok did it a few years ago.
Mark Zuckerberg's vision of 'personal superintelligence' just sounds like supersurveillance. Again. "Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices."
It’s hard to capture in a pic the size/energy of the crowd ready to march over the Syd Harbour Bridge but the station announcer at Wynyard:“don’t worry about tapping off, Transport NSW will work it out, gates are open, you’re heading for George St to the park, keep going, let’s free Palestine” 💕💕
If you're interested, you can watch many thousands and thousands of fellow Australians right now marching across the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge for peace in Palestine It's bucketing down rain, and still they keep coming, and still they keep marching #MarchForHumanity #FreeGaza webcamsydney.com
Exactly
Facebook must be held responsible for the content it publishes. Not just on an occasional case-by-case basis. I’ve been saying this for a decade and I’ll keep saying it until it happens www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
“The point of this messaging isn’t to meaningfully dispute the facts on the ground in Gaza. The point is to foment among Israel’s supporters the idea that no piece of media sympathetic to Palestinians can be trusted.”
What an incredible beastie! Look how chunky it is www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Remember when Twitter was the place people went to for breaking news? It’s useless now
4,000 NASA workers are leaving through deferred resignation. "The cuts amount to an estimated 20% of NASA's workforce" www.npr.org/2025/07/26/n...
(PS: using their logic you could also argue that X is not social media, it is a “text sharing platform”. Or that TikTok is not social media it is just a “video sharing platform”)
“Hey guys, remember to like, absolutely not share, and subscribe! And ding that bell!”
I hope the government does not back down.
Additionally it has metrics of engagement just like tiktok or instagram, eg number of subscribers, likes, comments etc. It serves up a feed of other people’s content that is curated algorithmically just like the others.
YouTube is being utterly disingenuous arguing that it is “not a social media platform”. It knows full well that users see the platform as a way to *share* content with other people, to view & interact with other people’s content, and to draw a (hopefully) large crowd to your own stuff
It’s deeply weird that Trump hasn’t taken to Truth Social and tapped out a furious rant in caps lock about the South Park episode. Its out of character
“Most of these people were declared dead on arrival at health facilities or died shortly after, their bodies showing clear signs of severe wasting,” the WHO said. www.theage.com.au/world/middle...
What Trump doesn’t seem to understand is that Rupert Murdoch is an actual Bond villain and Donald Trump is not James Bond.
Trump is deploying the high-vis and hardhat look. Australians invented this political power move (they can even bring their own fake tradies)
Good
Fascinating. Microsoft emailed me to say it was raising the price of Microsoft 365, but when i went to cancel it offered me me the old price — without all the AI bullshit. It’s forcing AI on everyone and making them pay more for it, then only telling them they don’t have to if they try to cancel.
Hate to agree with this sentiment but yes it’s true
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This wouldn’t have happened without Fox News. Without the enshittification of Twitter (doctorow’s term). Without the billionaires
I wonder if Murdoch (like Musk) is now regretting the destructive force he helped install in the White House
Let’s hope it stays that way
The gleeful doxing of someone cheating in public is bad even if they are a CEO and even if they are a Coldplay fan. It's bad because this kind of thing is happening to random people on TikTok for such crimes as "sitting silently on a plane" or "being attractive" www.404media.co/the-astronom...
The visit to Alcatraz is the most transparent attempt I’ve seen in recent years to hijack the news cycle.
This is not about “powering meaningful communication” for Facebook. It’s about precision advertising delivery in the era of AI. In many ways they do themselves a disservice by claiming that they care about “Australian concepts” and culture www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
Of *course* the new Grok companion would be a flirty goth anime girl aged 22 who is totally head over heels in love with you
PS Diana, tell him I’m still at it too and it’s a problem truth
Pokémon widow 🤣 love it
Yep
NB: two months after this headline a little app called TikTok was released, and these concerns about “engrossed” pedestrians took a new turn
Flash back to July 10, 2016 in The Age.
Exciting!
@manjusrii.bsky.social www.independent.co.uk/news/science...
Too young to die. Vale, Julian McMahon. www.theguardian.com/film/2025/ju...
NYT on why Trump bombed Iran.
This is a negotiating tactic, a last ditch attempt at lobbying, just like it was in 2020. My advice to creators: don’t believe what YouTube tells you about this. Last time none of what they claimed (ie your search will “break”, your product will be worse, etc) actually happened
Yep
Read more: www.afr.com/companies/me...
Remember when there were pop ups all over Google saying the Australian government was going to “break” search, “break” the web in 2020? That’s because Google didn’t want the government in there regulating. They’d tried lobbying themselves but it didn’t work, so they turned to users.
YouTube is going to leverage its own user base to pressure the government over legislation it doesn’t like. It is going to mobilise creators. Google (who own YouTube) tried to pit their users against the government once before in 2020.
Just a reminder that while her ex nonstop soils himself in public with tasteless displays of wealth and look-at-me, thirsty nonsense, Mackenzie Scott has given away close to $20 billion to 1,600 charities, no strings attached and without any need for recognition.
Ok this is fun (and I love that it’s represented by avatars). Do yours here skircle.me/skircle
🚨 Now out in Nature Human Behaviour 🚨 We show that following the news on WhatsApp or Instagram (N = 3,395 🇫🇷🇩🇪) increases current affairs knowledge, participants’ ability to discern true from false news stories, awareness of true news stories, as well as trust in the news. doi.org/10.1038/s415...
The whole world gets to read what Reviewer 2 said www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Of course. US strikes 3 Iranian nuclear sites.
Truth Social is down (I imagine because every journalist in the world is madly refreshing Trump’s feed)
My god he did it. He started a war.
Can you imagine returning to a world where serious decisions are made and communicated with reason not “instinct” or Pepe the frog memes
The days of opening twitter/X/truth social just to see if Trump has started a nuclear war by tweet have returned
When your pilot is “not really into reading the news”
@manjusrii.bsky.social lol arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/o...
He hasn’t managed to stop or even *de-escalate* war in the Middle East but at least you’ve got new flag poles, right?
Cancelled two trips this year. Pivoted a fellowship application from US to Europe. Used to live there. Been back 30+ times. Will never go back again.
I’m hoping they’ll fix it at the next election.
They’ve got previous www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
www.theage.com.au/world/north-...
This is Orwellian. I’ve already been warned to avoid travelling to the US if at all possible, but didn’t realise it was at the “scrub your phone” point
Massive #NoKings march in New York City!
This feels…massive? Disney and Universal are industry giants: this is not some artist or radio host suing ChatGPT. It has the potential to change things for artists everywhere.
Disney and Universal are going to take on generative AI. They’ve filed a case in an LA court against Midjourney—and it has a pretty solid argument backed up with tons of examples. www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/u...
Update on this: we have enough interest now thanks!! Xx
Malk 