vivo is all set to launch the vivo V70 FE in the Indian market this week. It is believed to be the latest addition to the vivo V70 series. Before the actual launch, the pricing details of the upcoming smartphone have already gone live. Let’s take a quick look at the vivo V70 FE.

vivo V70 FE specifications

The vivo V70 FE is likely to bring a new design compared to other models in the V70 series. It may feature an oblong camera module with dual rings and a “200MP” label on the back. The phone is expected to have flat edges with side-mounted buttons.

In terms of colors, the device may be available in Northern Lights Purple and Monsoon Blue. The Purple variant is said to offer a unique glow effect, which makes it stand out in low light. As far as the display is concerned, the smartphone is expected to feature a large 6.83-inch 1.5K OLED display along with a 120Hz refresh rate. It may offer a peak brightness of up to 1,900 nits, which is great for media consumption and gaming.

The vivo V70 FE is expected to feature a MediaTek Dimensity 7360-Turbo chipset based on a 4nm process node. This should enable the device to handle daily tasks as well as gaming smoothly. It may support up to 12GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage.

Battery and Camera

Battery life is one of the major highlights of the vivo V70 FE. The smartphone is expected to come with a massive 7,000mAh battery. It is believed to support 90W fast charging as well. It is expected to support fast charging, which would be helpful for the users.

vivo V70 FE is expected to bring the best camera experience with its 200MP primary camera. It is believed to click high-resolution images. Along with the primary camera, the smartphone is expected to come with an 8MP ultra-wide-angle lens. It is believed to click ultra-wide images. For the front camera, the smartphone is expected to come with either a 32MP or 50MP front camera. The device is likely to focus on portraits and detailed photos, but it may miss out on ZEISS branding.

Expected Price and Launch Date

When it comes to pricing, vivo may launch the phone at Rs 37,999 for the 8GB + 128GB variant. In comparison, the 8GB + 256GB model could be priced at around Rs 40,999, while the 12GB + 256GB version may reach Rs 44,999. Moreover, buyers can also expect some launch offers and exchange deals. However, these prices are based on leaks and could change.

Furthermore, it is likely to launch the vivo V70 FE in India on April 2 at around 12 PM. The event will be streamed live on YouTube and vivo’s social channels. This will also be the first Fan Edition (FE) smartphone in the V-series.

I’ve been trying to become fluent in Spanish for the last decade. After spending most of my adult life surrounded by multilinguals, I often feel like I’m playing an impossible game of catch-up. Like everyone else, I’ve tried to become regimented with practicing on an in-phone app like Duolingo, which attempts to ‘game-ify’ language learning, but mostly ends up with a sad and sick-looking green bird icon guilting me to practice every time I open up my phone.

Babbel aims to help people actually learn the language through practical conversation and grammar, using proven pedagogical methods and speech recognition technology. Each lesson is short, with 10 to 15 minute lessons developed by a team of over 150 linguists. Instead of learning the same simple phrases in ad-ridden games on an endless loop, take charge of your language learning this year and make that commitment a reality. No more excuses—we’ve got a Babbel promo code and a Babbel coupon to help you hit your goals. Maybe you’ll be fluent by your next vacation (or at least able to order a chopped cheese with confidence at the bodega).

Unlock Your Babbel Promo Code and Save Big in April 2026

Not only is Babbel a helpful interactive app to simplify language learning, but it also has holistic services to help introduce the language to every part of your life. These are things like Babbel videos, which do a deep dive into what makes a language so fascinating, Babbel podcasts, which are led by Babbel experts who take an inside look at local culture and break down language secrets, and Babbel magazine, which highlights stories from around the world so you can better understand the history, culture, and people from the language you’re learning (and maybe will inspire you to take a trip to practice that language IRL!).

Make sure you check back often to find the latest Babbel promo code for sitewide savings. There are often discounts on the subscription tiers, which range from three month plans to annual memberships. Plus, springtime is usually when there are significant Babbel discounts for new users. And, if you sign up for the Babbel newsletter, you can receive a link for a Babbel coupon in your inbox.

Save 60% on 6-Month Plans With the Healthcare Workers Discount

As stated, knowing another language is an invaluable life skill, and a skill that is immeasurably valuable to healthcare workers, who may be able to more easily give lifesaving care. Healthcare professionals and nurses get a Babbel discount of 60% off a six-month Babbel subscription. To claim the Babbel discount, users just need to verify their medical credentials via ID.me.

Claim Your 60% Military Discount on 6-Month Subscriptions

This Babbel discount also applies to active duty military, veterans, and their families, who are also eligible for 60% off six-month Babbel subscriptions. This Babbel military coupon is valid for National Guard, reserve members, and immediate family members of service personnel, and all you need to do is verify your status at ID.me.

Snag a 60% Teacher Discount on Your Next 6 Months

Babbel is also extending the 60% discount to the real unsung heroes, teachers. Knowing more than one language is an invaluable tool for educators to be able to talk more effectively to parents or guardians, as well as to more deeply understand their students’ cultural identities. Educators and teachers, like K-12 teachers, university professors, and other educational staff members, are eligible for 60% off a six-month Babbel subscription. And like the others, you just need to verify credentials through ID.me.

Grab Top Lifetime Subscription Deals and Save in April 2026

Everyone knows that learning a language is a lifetime process, and Babbel wants to make it even easier for you to commit to it. If you pay once, you’ll get access to all available Babbel languages forever with Lifetime deals. You’ll just need to look for the “Lifetime Subscription” Babbel promos that could potentially save you hundreds of dollars over several years. Be sure to check back often, as these rotating deals often pop up during major holiday sales. While the upfront cost is higher, you’ll get access to all 14 available languages with this Babbel promo code lifetime subscription deal.

from the moral-panics-are-profitable dept

We’ve been saying for years now that Jonathan Haidt’s crusade against social media and kids is a moral panic dressed up in academic robes, and that the evidence simply does not support the sweeping claims he’s been making. A new piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff drives that point home with a framing that cuts straight to the absurdity of it all: this fear of new ideas “corrupting the youth” is literally as old as democracy itself.

In 399 BCE, Socrates was put on trial before a jury of some 500 of his fellow Athenians. The indictment accused him of impiety and added, “Socrates is…also guilty of corrupting the youth.” Despite the Athenian democracy’s commitment to free and equal speech, Socrates was found guilty and sentenced to death.

Two and a half millennia later, democracies are still deeply concerned about dangerous ideas corrupting the youth. This time, the target isn’t dangerous philosophy but an increase in teen mental-health issues blamed on social media.

Mchangama and Kosseff are particularly well-positioned to make this argument (and are both former Techdirt podcast guests). Mchangama’s prior book, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, traced the full arc of free speech battles across civilizations, and the two of them have a forthcoming co-authored book, The Future of Free Speech, on the global decline of free speech protections. Meanwhile Kosseff’s three previous books all cover related free speech territory: The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet, Liar in a Crowded Theater, and The United States of Anonymous. These are people who have spent their careers studying exactly these patterns — the recurring cycle of moral panic, political opportunism, and the quiet erosion of rights that tends to follow.

Their piece walks through the problems with both the evidence and the policy responses that have sprung from Haidt’s work. On the evidence:

In 2024, a review of the scientific literature by a committee at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine had found that despite some “potential harms,” the review “did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.” A 2026 longitudinal study in the Journal of Public Health reached a similar conclusion. 

We covered these studies at the time, noting that they were far from the only such studies to go hunting for the alleged evidence of inherent harms to children using social media — and coming up empty. It is amazing how little attention these studies get compared to Haidt’s book. So it’s good to see Mchangama and Kosseff call them out.

They also highlight what gets lost when you reduce this to a simple “social media = bad” story:

“Social media has the potential to connect friends and family. It may also be valuable to teens who otherwise feel excluded or lack offline support,” according to the National Academies of Science report. It also highlights the possible benefits of online access for “young people coping with serious illness, bereavement, and mental health problems” as well as opportunities for learning and developing interests. 

That point is especially important for vulnerable teenagers whose offline environments may be isolating or hostile. This is why comparing social media to tobacco is questionable: The scientific consensus on smoking’s harms is unanimous and no one claims smoking has benefits. Neither is true for social media.

This is consistent with what experts told TES Magazine last fall — actual researchers in the field described Haidt’s work as “fear” rather than science, said they couldn’t believe a fellow academic wrote it, and pointed out basic logical flaws in his causal claims. It’s also consistent with what I found in my own detailed review of the book when it came out two years ago, where the cherry-picked data, the ignored contrary evidence, and the policy proposals based on gut feelings rather than research were all on full display.

What makes this even worse than a standard “well-meaning but wrong” situation is a study we wrote about earlier this year showing that the social media “addiction” narrative itself may be more harmful than social media. Researchers found that very few people show signs consistent with actual addiction, but every time the media amplifies stories about social media addiction, more people claim they’re addicted. And that belief makes them feel helpless — convincing them they have a pathological condition rather than habits they could simply change.

In other words, the moral panic is doing the exact same thing it accuses social media of doing: making people anxious, helpless, and convinced they can’t control their own behavior.

The cost of being wrong here is that parents, politicians, and schools ignore the real causes of teen mental health struggles: poverty, the closure of youth services, reduced access to mental health care, and the erasure of community support systems. And the cost is that kids who genuinely rely on online communities — LGBTQ+ youth, kids with chronic illnesses, kids in hostile home environments — lose a lifeline. Mchangama and Kosseff make the same point, and now we can see the policy consequences playing out in real time.

And it goes even further. As Mchangama and Kosseff note, authoritarian governments are already using the “protect the children” framework as cover for broader censorship:

Authoritarian and illiberal states provide a grim window into how the protection of children can be weaponized to suppress dissent. In 2012, Russia enacted an internet blacklist law, with the stated intention of protecting children from harmful content. The law laid the groundwork for Russia’s heavily censored “Red Web” that now entirely prohibits many foreign social-media platforms.

The same goes in Indonesia which this month announced a ban on social media for those under 16. But Indonesia is also a country that has used the pretext of child protection to block and censor gay social networking apps and content.  

It’s a remarkable blind spot for those pushing Haidt’s arguments. They never seem to consider that these are the exact same tools authoritarian governments use to silence marginalized voices. You would think that politicians championing this book — particularly Democrats who claim to care about civil liberties and LGBTQ rights — might pause when they see Russia and Indonesia deploying identical justifications.

And yet politicians across the spectrum continue to treat Haidt’s book like scripture, despite an overwhelming expert consensus that his claims don’t hold up.

Mchangama and Kosseff close with what should be obvious, but apparently still needs to be said:

Democracies have always worried about dangerous ideas corrupting the young. Intellectuals and lawmakers should absolutely be concerned about how and when our children navigate social media. But they should also be concerned about whether, in our rush to protect our children, we are building an infrastructure of surveillance and censorship that will ultimately threaten the hard-won freedoms we want future generations to enjoy.

Speech is powerful. Ideas have consequences. But we protect such speech from legal liability for that very reason. The power of speech to change minds and influence people is exactly why those in power are so often afraid of it and looking to tamp it down. It’s also why Mchangama and Kosseff can tie the urge back all the way to Socrates.

Every generation gets its moral panic. Every time, someone insists “this time it’s different.” Every time, the evidence eventually catches up and the panic looks ridiculous in retrospect. The tragedy is how much damage gets done in the meantime — to kids who lose a real lifeline, to free expression, to privacy, and to the actual causes of teen suffering that never get addressed because everyone was too busy blaming the latest app.

The verdict from the people who actually study this stuff has been clear for a while now. Maybe it’s time for politicians to put down Haidt’s book and pick up the actual research.

Filed Under: free speech, jacob mchangama, jeff kosseff, jonathan haidt, moral panic

An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour.

In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis, people on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunction and stop operating. Photos and videos shared online show the Baidu cars halted on busy highways, often in the fast lane.

A college student in Wuhan tells WIRED that she was stuck in a Baidu robotaxi with two friends for about 90 minutes on Tuesday. (She asked to be only identified with her last name, He, to protect her privacy.) The student says the car malfunctioned and stopped four or five times during the trip before it eventually parked in front of an intersection in eastern Wuhan. Luckily, it was not a busy road, and the group was not in immediate danger. The screen display in the car asked the passengers to remain in the car with seatbelt on and wait for a company representative to come “in five minutes,” according to a photo He shared with WIRED.

He says it took about 30 minutes to reach a Baidu customer representative on the phone. “They kept saying it would be reported to their superior. But they didn’t explain what caused [the outage] or let us know how long we needed to wait for the staff to come,” He says. But no one ever came, and after another hour of waiting, the three passengers decided to just get out and go home by themselves (the doors weren’t locked).

On Chinese social media, other passengers also complained about being unable to reach Baidu’s customer support. “I tried every way I could think of to call for help using the options the app showed, but the phone line wouldn’t go through, and when I pressed the SOS button it told me it was unavailable. So then what exactly is the SOS for?” wrote one person in a post on RedNote alongside a video showing the button not working. She said she had to force the door to open and get out of the car as traffic halted to a complete stop behind her robotaxi. “Apollo Go, you really owe me an apology,” she wrote.

Baidu didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Local police in Wuhan issued a statement around midnight in China that said the situation was “likely caused by a system malfunction,” but the incident is still under investigation. No one was injured and all passengers have exited the vehicles, the police added. It’s unclear how many of Baidu’s robotaxis may have been impacted.

One dash cam recording posted to RedNote shows a car passing 16 Apollo Go vehicles parked on the road in the span of 90 minutes. On several occasions, the video shows the driver narrowly avoiding hitting the robotaxis by braking or changing lanes at the last minute.

Others were apparently not as fortunate. In another RedNote post, a man claimed he crashed into one of the malfunctioning Baidu vehicles. The man wrote in the caption that he was driving over 40 mph on a highway when the car in front of him suddenly changed lanes to avoid the stopped robotaxi. He couldn’t react fast enough and ended up running into the self-driving car. Photos of the man’s orange SUV being towed away show that the car’s front-right fender was completely torn off, and other parts appeared to have sustained major damage.