Author: Jaxon Bennett

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Telegram has told investors that the detainment of chief executive Pavel Durov by French police has had no “material impact” on the messaging app’s operations, as financial disclosures showed that the surging value of its crypto holdings is increasingly underpinning its business.According to unaudited financial statements seen by the Financial Times, which have not been previously reported, Telegram reported huge gains in the value of its digital assets in the first half of 2024, which rose to $1.3bn compared with nearly $400mn…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Parents the world over know the dilemma. Social media networks are a pivot around which their teenage children’s lives revolve — where they hang out with friends, nurture relationships, share what they are doing and find out much about current events. Yet research has suggested a link between social media apps and anxiety, depression, and sleeping and eating disorders among young people. They can be a source of harmful material on body image, or of misogynistic content, or forums for bullying. Is…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Bluesky, the social media site that has grown rapidly following an exodus of users from Elon Musk’s X, is in breach of EU regulations for not disclosing key details about the group, the European Commission said on Monday.“All platforms in the EU . . . have to have a dedicated page on their website where it says how many users they have in the EU and where they are legally established,” said commission spokesman Thomas Regnier. “This is not the case for Bluesky as of today.…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.China’s national technology champion Huawei is poised to launch its first flagship phone that can run its own apps on a fully homegrown operating system, in the latest sign of how technology is splintering into competing US and Chinese ecosystems. The Mate 70 smartphone set to be released on Tuesday will feature HarmonyOS Next, which Huawei hopes to establish as a third major mobile operating system alongside Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.It is the latest demonstration that US sanctions designed to enfeeble the…

The incoming Trump administration’s vow to dismantle the leftwing “censorship cartel” has thrown a shadow over the cottage industry of academics, non-profits and researchers that sprang up to combat a tide of digital misinformation — and threatens to disrupt the Big Tech companies behind the world’s most popular platforms. Researchers fear Donald Trump will make good on his past promises to crack down further on the misinformation field in the US for alleged “election interference”. Among those threats, he has said he would seek to curb funds to any universities found to have engaged in censorship activities “such as flagging social media…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Meta’s Threads is losing ground to social media start-up Bluesky in capitalising on the exodus of users from Elon Musk’s X following Donald Trump’s election. Since election day, app usage of Bluesky in the US and UK skyrocketed by almost 300 per cent to 3.5mn daily users, according to data from research group Similarweb. The site was boosted as academics, journalists and left-leaning politicians abandoned X, whose billionaire owner is a prominent supporter of the president-elect.Some content could not load. Check your…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.At the start of the 1960s, when most computers occupied an entire room, the world’s programmers could barely fill a baseball stadium. Only a few thousand specialists could wrangle arcane coding languages such as Fortran and Cobol, and the unwieldy mainframes they ran on. By the mid-1970s, there were millions of programmers. Computing’s first step into the mainstream was driven by the work of Thomas Kurtz, who died this month at the age of 96, and his fellow Dartmouth College professor John…

A decade after Lee Jae-yong took the helm at Samsung, the tech giant’s third-generation corporate heir is undergoing the most severe test yet of his business mettle.The South Korean billionaire heads a conglomerate grappling with problems in its vast semiconductor business, where it has fallen behind in the AI chip race and is poised to launch a management shake-up.Meanwhile it is dealing with discontent from employees — with Samsung Electronics’ labour union in July going on its first ever strike in a dispute over pay and conditions — and investors, with its shares down more than 30 per cent this year…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Amazon has invested another $4bn in artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the company to $8bn, as Big Tech’s race to dominate the generative AI sector intensifies. Amazon invested an initial $1.25bn in September last year, and increased that to $4bn at the end of March.Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic, said its AI software Claude had had “a year of breakout growth”. “Our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude’s capabilities to millions of…

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the worldThe writer is co-founder of LinkedIn, co-founder at Inflection AI and a partner at Greylock As the US prepares for a shift in leadership that will massively impact how America does business, there are many reasons for optimism. Once again, Donald Trump will be inheriting a strong Democrat-engineered economy. During Joe Biden’s presidency, full-time employment has surged. GDP growth has been robust. Average hourly earnings are on an upward trajectory. The Chips Act is also set to have a sweeping impact.…