The Australian government has issued guidelines regarding proposed age verification regulations that come into effect this December. While social networks will be required to “detect and deactivate or remove” the accounts of members under the age of sixteen, they will not need to verify the age of every last user....

James O’Sullivan, writing for Noema: While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren’t...

Like many online-publishers/bloggers, I’ve experienced significant surges of traffic caused by AI bots indexing — or whatever they do — thousands of pages at a time on my website. I’m in two minds as to whether or not to block this activity, but it seems pointless as many crawlers disregard disallow requests....

Tom Saunders, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Thanks to climate change and a rapid warming trend in our oceans, the historical record and current analysis of the two Pacific phases has become contaminated. El Niño, the warm episode, is being falsely observed, while the cool state, La Niña, is at...

The fellowship was created in 2011 to honour the memory of late Australian writer and biographer Hazel Rowley, who died in the same year. Past recipients of the fellowship, which supports the work of Australian biography writers, include Mary Hoban, the inaugural winner, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Matthew Lamb, and Mandy...