James Farrell

James Farrell is the former editor-in-chief of Chiang Mai CityNews, where he wrote and managed daily news, features, op-eds and blogs on a diverse range of topics. Prior to this, in the same city of Northern Thailand where he lives, he was the longstanding deputy editor of the monthly magazine Citylife. He has written on culture, politics, travel, tech, business, human rights, for local, national, and international news services and magazines. He has a keen interest in the role technology is playing in the transformation of society, culture and politics, especially in developing nations. This is reflected in his not-so-successful first novel.

Latest from James Farrell

Twitter admits to accidentally taking down posts showing Russia-Ukraine conflict

Twitter Inc. said today that this week it had mistakenly removed content from its platform and suspended users who had been tracking the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Such users had been accessing satellite images that showed Russian movement along the Ukraine border, sharing the important images on social media platforms. This type of open-source ...

Meta launches TikTok lookalike ‘Facebook Reels’ in 150 countries

Meta Platforms Inc. today announced that it’s launching Facebook Reels around the world with a raft of features to enable people to make money. For some years now, the company has been talking about creating a competitor to ByteDance Ltd.-owned TikTok, and now it’s finally here. Reels had previously been released for Instagram and to ...

Donald Trump’s social media app Truth Social debuts today in rocky start

Former President Donald Trump’s social media app was made available today in Apple Inc.’s App Store, but it got off to a rocky start. Truth Social has been in the pipeline for some time now, ever since Trump (pictured) was kicked off Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. for repeated violations of policy. His Twitter account alone ...

YouTube looking for new ways to fight the spread of misinformation

Google LLC-owned YouTube said today that it’s in process of adopting new measures to tackle how misinformation spreads on the platform. Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan said in a blog post that there were three main issues that need to be attended to: catching misinformation before it goes viral, addressing the problem of cross-platform sharing ...

Mark Zuckerberg elevates policy chief Nick Clegg to a bigger role at Meta

Meta Platforms Inc. today announced that the U.K.’s former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is getting a promotion, one that will put him on a level just under Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. Clegg (pictured), or Sir Clegg in the U.K., is currently Meta’s head of policy and communications and was the vice president of global ...

Elon Musk’s brain chip firm Neuralink denies abuse of monkeys in its experiments

After being accused of harming animals in its experiments, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup Neuralink today said experiments with its brain-computer interface have always been ethical. Neuralink hopes to connect human brains with computers. Sometimes the work means animals have to be used, although Neuralink says when that happens, the animals have been treated in ...

Texas is suing Meta over using facial recognition data without people’s consent

The state of Texas filed a lawsuit today against Meta Platforms Inc. for its use of its facial recognition system, a suit that could end up being very expensive for the tech giant. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton alleges that Meta, then Facebook Inc., collected biometric data on users without their consent, breaching the Texas ...

French watchdog says Google Analytics breaches GDPR rules and could be banned

Google LLC’s Analytics service, the largest of its kind in the world, could be handing French people’s data to U.S. intelligence services, France’s watchdog CNIL said today. CNIL said Google Analytics breaches article 44 of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, and the tech giant hasn’t done enough to ensure data protection. It added that ...

Sony’s AI can employ clever strategies to beat the best humans at ‘Gran Turismo’

Sony Corp. announced today that it has created an artificial intelligence that can get the better of humans when playing the simulation game “Gran Turismo,” which could have implications in the future for self-driving technology. AI has already mastered such games as “Go” and chess, and according to Sony, it took just two days of ...

UK government warns porn sites might be legally required to verify user ages

The U.K. today said that as part of the Online Safety Bill, it might make it a requirement that all pornography websites perform “robust checks” on the age of their users. If that sounds familiar, that’s because a similar bill was discussed back in 2017 as part of the Digital Economy Act. At the time, the ...