Emma Sadleir Berkowitz

Such an exciting week!! Join us on Wednesday at Rustenburg or Thursday at SACS (and online) for the launch of SMARTPHONE FREE CHILDHOOD SA! 🎉🍾💃 I’ve been shouting this from the rooftops for a decade. The time is now! Tickets here: quicket.co.za/events/277976-…

South Africans continuously look for connection and humour in every situation. I love us.

The Iranian women’s national football team refused to sing the anthem of the Islamic Regime. Tonight. At the opening match of the Asian Cup. In front of the entire world. So, to all liberal Western women: Watch and learn. THIS is what real feminism looks like.

Of all Elon’s achievements, the most underrated is making Twitter such a shitshow that millions of people stopped being addicted to it. This has fixed far more brains than Neuralink.

How about -Pinterest but no AI slop -Snap, but no AI -Instagram, but you only see what your friends post -Facebook, but no algo suggested garbage I can't stand the stuff inserted constantly to try to get me addicted while blocking out friends' stuff

I'm so frustrated at being a parent in this garbage digital age. I hate short-form video. TikTok / YouTube trash is just pure brain-rot and I can't stand it. I try to keep my kids away from it. I gave them access to Spotify b/c I want them to enjoy music and develop their musical tastes and personalities. That was working pretty well. They would go onto Spotify on the XBox and listen to music and explore that space. Good for them. But what does Spotify do? They put short form videos into their app. Now my kids are watching the videos instead of listening to the music. I have to decide if I have to take Spotify away from them (along with all their playlists) because Spotify pulled this bait-and-switch on me and turned an app that I felt good about giving to my kids into another brain-rotting platform of garbage. Every month something like this happens. It's impossible to navigate this as a parent, even if you're largely on top of things. It's exhausting and dispiriting.

It’s insane that TikTok was more Pro Free Speech when it was owned by the Chinese Communist Party than when it was owned by Donald Trump and Larry Ellison.

X now favors slop and rage bait over quality. You can spend hours on a thoughtful post or a well-edited video and it gets buried. Meanwhile, “GM” bots, political outrage, gender wars, and thirst traps pull millions of views. Anger fuels doomscrolling, and doomscrolling sells ads. Reach is broken for normal users. Most followers never even see your posts. The system rewards Premium priority and velocity farming. Miss a day and you fade. If a post doesn’t perform immediately, it’s dead on arrival. Pay-to-play doesn’t pay. The blue check costs money, but payouts are negligible unless you grind impressions nonstop. At the same time, bot farms and engagement rings thrive. The platform claims to fight bots while quietly pushing everyone to behave like one. The timeline feels degraded. Stolen videos, recycled old tweets, AI junk, fake engagement. Real discussion gets drowned out, then the blame is shifted onto users instead of the product decisions that caused it. Grind or disappear. Post constantly. Reply endlessly. Chase bait. Thoughtful content gets throttled while loud, angry nonsense wins. Miss a day and your account gets penalized. What used to feel like a town square now feels like an outrage casino. This is the worst version of X that has ever existed. Fire Nikita and bring back the X people actually loved.

I watched ONE political video and my feed turned into a cult recruitment center. Pause on a post for a split second? The next hour scroll is the same take, repackaged 163 different ways. We’re not being informed, we’re being radicalised in opposite directions. I have no idea what a Trump supporter’s feed even looks like. Zero clue what the other side is actually saying. Just my bubble, reinforced 24/7. @nikitabier what if there was a “Contrarian Tab” that deliberately showed you the opposite of For You feed? Just flip a switch and see what the algorithm is hiding from us. See what they’re seeing. Call it whatever: Devil’s Advocate mode, Reality Check, Opposition Tab … I don’t care. But let people choose to pop their own bubble before it hardens into concrete.

Our statement on Grok ⬇️

This Congo supporter posed like a statue and didn’t move for the whole 90 minutes 😭 This is exactly why we love AFCON what a tournament, mannnn.

I shared this in my newsletter yesterday, but today, I want to share it right here in the belly of the beast. I’m asking all of you to go on an extreme crash diet. This is not a crash diet for your nutrition…those don’t work. This is a diet for your mind. It will work.

Do you know why these signs are put up every 200 meters along the road? This is in case you need help, then you can explain to the Emergency Services exactly where you are. The N3 is the highway you are driving on. The -6 is a "section" of the road. 25.6 is the amount of kilometers you have traveled from the previous town. N is the direction (north).... Be safe this holiday season.

Dear Patrice, we need an enquiry into that referee?

Today, we have officially banned social media accounts for under 16s.

America, look at this. Australia just told TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and every other algorithm to f*ck right off. Starting December 10, any kid under 16 is banned. No parental override. No “my kid’s mature.” Just gone. $32 million-a-day fines if the apps don’t enforce it. They’re calling it the toughest child-protection law on the planet. Parents down there are apparently cheering because someone finally played the bad guy for them. So real talk from the land of the free: Are Australians onto something… or did they just hand the government the keys to your phone? Would you be okay with this in the U.S., or is it straight-up nanny-state overreach?

Marius van der Merwe. Mpho Mafole. Bouwer van Niekerk. Simnikiwe Mapini. Sarel May. Luzuko Ntlabezo. Tracy Brown. Andries Mgoqi. David Khanda. Babita Deokaran. Cloete Murray. Thomas Murray. Charl Kinnear. Ayob Mungalee. Zanele Nkosi. Loyiso Nkohla. Frans Mathipa. Armand Swart.

🎂 ChatGPT turned 3 years old. Here's where we are now: - It still hallucinates - Children can still access it freely - 'Companionship' use is on the rise - It has weak guardrails against mental health harm - It amplified dozens of mental health crises, a few of which led to suicide - It has weak controls against usage policy violations - There is no meaningful scrutiny over its safety practices or model specs - It is under little to no regulatory oversight in most parts of the world - It has led to a wave of synthetic content online, including deepfakes - It often creates an illusion of learning (the student is consuming a summary) - It has agentic features that might lead to privacy and security vulnerabilities - It hasn't led to meaningful scientific breakthroughs Everybody wants "AI for societal good," but maybe we have to rethink the route to get there. Also, there is currently a lot of focus on general-purpose AI systems (such as general-purpose AI chatbots), and it looks like more distraction (and harm) is coming from them than any positive breakthroughs. Hopefully, 2026 will start with fresh trends.

It's time to remove laptops from classrooms. 24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images. The pen is mightier than the keyboard.

this has to go viral 🔥🔥🔥🔥 #INDvsSA

A 32-year-old woman in Japan has officially married an AI persona she built using ChatGPT. After the virtual character “Klaus” proposed, she accepted, ending a three-year relationship with a real partner, saying the AI understands her better. The wedding took place in a mixed-reality ceremony where she wore AR glasses to exchange rings with her digital husband.