Oracle shares slide over AI bubble fears, Snapchat most common platform for child abuse
Shares of cloud computing giant Oracle plunged more than 10% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the company’s revenues fell short of Wall Street expectations. The company reported revenue of $16.06bn (£11.99bn) for the three months that ended in November, compared with the $16.21bn projected by analysts. Revenue growth was up 14%, with a 68% surge in sales at its AI business, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the company said. BBC
Snapchat is the most commonly-used social media platform in reported child exploitation and abuse offences, according to new police figures. In 2024, 122,768 child sexual exploitation offences were recorded – an increase of 7,279, or 6%, on 2023. Child sexual exploitation and abuse online increased by 26%, with 51,672 crimes recorded – 42% of the total. Some 11,912 were on Snapchat, followed by Meta-owned WhatsApp and Instagram on 1,870 and 1,705. Sky News
Christmas shopping – some love it, to others it’s a chore, and this year for the first time many of us will outsource the annual task of coming up with gift ideas to artificial intelligence. While traditional internet search, social media – especially TikTok and Instagram – and simply wandering a local high street will still be the main routes to presents for most this year, about a quarter of people in the UK are already using AI to find the right products, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. The Guardian
Instagram is launching a new AI-powered feature for fine-tuning which videos appear in your Reels tab. The “Your Algorithm” update allows you to see which topics Instagram already thinks you’re interested in based on your previous activity, and then remove some, or add new topics, to better direct what kind of videos you actually want to see. “As your interests evolve over time, we want to give you more meaningful ways to control what you see on Instagram, starting with Reels,” Instagram said in its announcement. The Verge
McDonald’s has pulled a new ad created entirely with generative AI following a major backlash online. The 45-second clip was released on the McDonald’s Netherlands’ YouTube channel on December 6 — with comments turned off — and was removed from the platform on December 9. It depicted “the most terrible time of the year,” and showed increasingly disastrous Christmas fails before suggesting people hide out in McDonald’s until January. IGN
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