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India's External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar will represent the nation at the funeral of former Bangladesh Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, who passed away at 80. Prime Minister Modi expressed deep sorrow, extending condolences to her family and the people of Bangladesh
2025 was quite a polarising year for Tamil cinema. Audience thronged to theatres, not to watch the best of what the biggest stars of the industry had to offer, but to listen to good stories from medium-budget and small-budget titles. The likes of Madras Matinee and Tourist Family entertained and
Not knowing a regional language in the South has often been a concern, with several language-related controversies making headlines over the years. But this time, a Bengaluru resident has praised the city's 112 emergency helpline for its swift response, even though he did not know Kannada
Fewer fact-checks, ascent of AI, social media scans for visas: Events that marked digital platforms in 2025
Fewer fact-checks, ascent of AI, social media scans for visas: Events that marked digital platforms in 2025
2025 will be a memorable year for Australian children, as the world watched their government successfully push for a social media ban on users under 16 years of age. The legislation came into force this month and as a result, children across Australia (though not all of them yet) lost access to platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and more.
If you are above 16 or reside outside Australia, you might naturally think that your access to everyday platforms was left untouched. In truth, however, your experience as a social media user changed drastically in 2025—whether you realised it or not.
Let's take a look at the top events that shaped digital platforms this year.
As U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House for the second time, tech billionaires moved quickly to curry favour with the temperamental, right-wing president. For his part, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated to Trump's inaugural fund and was present at the ceremony itself. That month, he also announced that Meta was replacing its third-party fact-checkers with ‘Community Notes'-style context notes, similar to Elon Musk's X.
Meta further stated that a “number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender” were being removed, citing free speech as the reason for this. Regulators and digital rights advocates reacted with alarm, raising concerns that marginalised or minority users such as people of colour or members of the LGBTQIA+ community would become more vulnerable to hate speech on Facebook and Instagram.
In March, OpenAI upgraded its GPT-4o model. What should have been a standard company development instead triggered an explosion of AI-generated images around the world as users revelled in the beefed up GPT-4o model's ability to generate AI portraits in an animated illustration style closely resembling Studio Ghibli's anime films. The Studio Ghibli AI photos popped up everywhere, from physical flyers and WhatsApp display pictures to dating apps and social media graphics.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman noted around this time that the ChatGPT-maker added one million users in one hour, even as artists and digital rights advocates pointed out the legal risks of allowing AI chatbots to create images in the style of living artists and art studios, potentially violating copyright law. What's more, the AI Ghibli trend was used to create images that violated Director Hayao Miyazaki's child-friendly, anti-war art. This included AI-generated promotion of the Israeli military, communal violence in India, pornography, and the arrest of migrants in the U.S.
In the days following the Pahalgam terrorist attack on April 22 that claimed over 20 lives and India's ensuing Operation Sindoor military action, social media was used to harass a number of figures who called for peace and restraint during a time when many feared a full war between the two nations.
Those targeted by trolls included Himanshi Narwal, the wife of Navy Lieutenant Vinay Narwal, who was murdered in Pahalgam. Ms. Narwal had called for peace and denounced actions targeting Muslims and Kashmiri people after the terrorist attack.
Much of the abuse took place on Elon Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter), where even India's Foreign Secretary, Vikram Misri, was not spared. He was hit with abusive comments after announcing that India and Pakistan had agreed to the cessation of military operations. In addition to this, his daughter was doxxed.
Other journalists, fact-checkers, anti-war activists, and those expressing their opinions against war and militarisation were also systematically attacked and doxxed by far-right social media users.
With the return of Trump to the White House, the U.S. government has doubled down on its anti-immigration rhetoric, along with tightening conditions for the issuance of visas to foreign students and skilled workers. From May, there were communications from U.S. officials to make people believe that social media vetting would be an active part of the visa application process.
From the summer, it was seen that the U.S. Department of State's ‘Online Nonimmigrant Visa Application' (DS-160) form included a sub-section listing various social media platforms that applicants were asked to select, in order to share their personal identifiers for scrutiny .
More recently, a new proposal suggested that international tourists from multiple countries such as the UK, France, and even Japan might have to provide five years of their social media history, even if they are allowed to visit the U.S. for 90 days without a visa.
On October 20, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) failure caused by a DNS error brought down thousands of platforms and services, including Canva, Perplexity, Amazon, Roblox, Snapchat, Signal, and ChatGPT.
On November 18, a Cloudflare outage caused by a change to database system permissions caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by Cloudflare's Bot Management system. A larger-than-usual feature file triggered software failures. This brought down services including X, OpenAI, LinkedIn, Zoom, and Spotify.
What is the takeaway from these two separate events? Your online life may be a rich experience made up of a diverse selection of social media platforms, entertainment channels, hobby blogs, and news websites. However, large sections of the web rely on service providers such as Cloudflare and AWS, in order to route internet traffic and help users access the services they need. When these platforms see outages, no matter how short, we are reminded as to how huge sections of the web depend on a small number of service providers in order to remain functional.
Published - December 30, 2025 11:43 am IST
technology (general)
Source: TheHindu
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