Freelance Writer | Journalist | Sian Boyle

Siân Boyle

Freelance writer and journalist

Revealed: Google facilitated Russia and China’s censorship requests

Google has cooperated with autocratic regimes around the world, including the Kremlin in Russia and the Chinese Communist party, to facilitate censorship requests, an Observer investigation can reveal. The technology company has engaged with the administrations of about 150 countries since 2011 that want information scrubbed from their public domains. As well as democratic governments, it has interacted with dictatorships, sanctioned regimes and governments accused of human rights abuses, including the police in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan...

AI ‘Wingmen’ Bots to Write Profiles and Flirt on Dating Apps

AI bots will soon be rolled out on dating apps to flirt with people, craft messages on users’ behalf and write their profiles for them. But depending on artificial intelligence to foster budding relationships risks eroding what little human authenticity is left on dating platforms, experts have warned. Match Group, the technology company with the world’s largest portfolio of dating platforms, including Tinder and Hinge, has announced it is increasing investment in AI, with …

Is Doom Scrolling Rotting Our Brains? The Evidence is Getting Harder to Ignore

If you want to witness the last vestiges of human intellect swirling down the drain, hold your nose and type the words “skibidi toilet” into YouTube. The 11-second video features an animated human head protruding from a toilet bowl while singing the nonsensical lyrics “skibidi dop dop dop yes yes”. The clip has been viewed more than 215m times, and spawned hundreds of millions of references on TikTok and other social media. Fitting, then, that the Oxford ...

Is This (Finally) the End for X? Delicate Musk-Trump Relationship and Growing Rivals Spell Trouble for Platform

Was that the week that marked the death of X? The platform formerly regarded as a utopian market square for exchanging information has suffered its largest exodus to date. Bluesky, emerging as X’s newest rival, has amassed 16 million users, including 1 million in the course of 24 hours last week. Hundreds of thousands of people have quit the former Twitter since Donald Trump’s election victory on 6 November. The catalyst is X’s owner, Elon Musk...

Are Dating Apps Actually Making us Lonelier?

The big tech companies that own dating apps are manipulating and overcharging their vulnerable users without delivering results, United Kingdom tech journalist Siân Boyle says. "The loneliness epidemic is affecting younger people disproportionately, who happen to be the largest users of dating apps. The fertility crisis is disproportionately affecting people in their 20s." Add to the mix post-Covid shyness, smartphone addiction and men's uncertainty about how to behave post #MeToo, and we have got a modern dating crisis on our hands, she…

Archive

Modern Dating is Broken – and That’s a Hidden Factor in England’s Fertility Crisis

Why are fertility rates at an all-time low? Since the figures for England and Wales were released last week, we’ve heard the same old theories. The cost of living means that couples can’t afford to start a family. Career-hungry women are eschewing children. Childcare and house prices mean that families are reluctant to expand. Yet these analyses ignore a key group: those who would like to have children with a partner but are single. In a...

Addicted to Love: How Dating Apps ‘Exploit’ Their Users

“Designed to be deleted” is the tagline of one of the UK’s most popular dating apps. Hinge promises that it is “the dating app for people who want to get off dating apps” – the place to find lasting love. But critics say modern dating is in crisis. They claim that dating apps, which have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times worldwide, are “exploitative” and are designed not to be deleted but to be addictive...

- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1839