YouTube is to limit recommendations of certain health and fitness videos to teenagers, including those which “idealise” certain body types.
It says 13 to 17-year-old users will still be able to search for and view fitness-related content – but will not be encouraged into repeated viewing of similar videos.
YouTube says it is acting because of concerns that repeated exposure to such material can lead young people to develop “negative beliefs” about themselves.
Experts have welcome the measure but say it needs to be accompanied by a “broader discussion” about fitness and health for young people.
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YouTube’s algorithm will usually recommend similar content for users to watch once they have finished a particular video, as well as displaying related videos on a sidebar.
The platform says this will no longer be offered for teens when they view certain types of content, including:
videos that compare physical features and idealises some types over others
videos idealising specific fitness levels or body weights
videos displaying social aggression in the form of non-contact fights and intimidation
YouTube said the measures were being taken after its Youth and Familes Advisory Committee found that “teens are more likely than adults to form negative beliefs about themselves when seeing repeated messages about ideal standards in content they consume online.”
However, the restrictions on what videos are offered will only be possible if the user is logged in to a YouTube account – and if they have registered an accurate date of birth.
The platform does not automatically verify new users who join it.
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However new users must be at least 13 years old, and if YouTube suspects they provided an inaccurate age, they may be asked to verify it.
New users who fail that verification will be asked to add a parent or guardian to supervise the account – and failing to do this will result in the account being disabled.
Dr Petya Eckler, a senior lecturer at University of Strathclyde who studies the relationship between body image and social media, said she welcomed the announcement given “the link between use of social media by young people and perceptions of their bodies.”
But she told the BBC more needed to be done.
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“This should go hand in hand with a broader discussion of fitness and health within families and the idea that exercise is a great way to enhance our overall health and wellbeing and should not be done only for appearance reasons.”
YouTube has also announced new ways for parents to keep track of their children’s activities on the platform.
Parents will be able link their accounts with teenagers in their household in order to see their uploads, subscriptions and comments, and receive emails when they upload videos or start livestreams.
Affirm, the provider of buy now, pay later loans reported better-than-expected fiscal first-quarter results.
Here’s how the company did, compared to analysts’ consensus estimates from LSEG.
Loss per share: 31 cents adjusted vs. a loss of 35 cents expected
Revenue: $698 million vs. $664 million expected
Affirm reported gross merchandise volume (GMV) of $7.6 billion, topping the average estimate of $7.28 billion, according to StreetAccount. GMV, a key metric that helps gauge the total value of transactions, increased by 35% from a year earlier.
Revenue in the fiscal first quarter rose 41% from $496.5 million a year earlier.
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Revenue less transaction costs (RLTC) came in at $285 million, ahead of earlier guidance of $265 million to $280 million.
Affirm said it expects to achieve profitability on a GAAP basis in its fiscal fourth quarter of 2025. Last quarter, CEO Max Levchin said in a note to shareholders that the company had set a new goal of hitting operating profitability on a GAAP basis by the end of its fiscal year.
The company sees second-quarter revenue of between $770 million and $810 million, or $790 million in the middle of the range, versus the average estimate of $785 million, according to LSEG. Affirm is guiding to GMV in the range of $9.35 billion to $9.75 billion. Analysts polled by StreetAccount called for GMV of $9.48 billion.
Affirm shares were about flat for the year as Thursday’s close, but have been trending higher lately, up more than 70% since the end of August.
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The company’s new relationship with Apple plus other partnerships with Amazon and Shopify are helping results. In June, Affirm and Apple announced plans for U.S. Apple Pay users on iPhones and iPads to be able to apply for loans directly through Affirm.
“Affirm’s growth story has continued, particularly as they add new strategic distribution partners,” Kevin Kennedy, an analyst at global research firm Third Bridge, said in an email.
Kennedy added that the quality of Affirm’s underwriting, specifically for higher-priced orders and interest-bearing BNPL purchases, sets the company apart from the growing list of competitors.
“The payments space is constantly facing commoditization risk, and BNPL, while nascent, is facing the same challenge,” he wrote. “However, large ticket interest bearing purchases, which are becoming more accessible through Affirm, are better protected” compared with offerings from peers, he added.
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Square parent Block, which also reported earnings after the bell, acquired BNPL firm Afterpay for $29 billion in 2021.
Affirm’s quarterly earnings call starts at 5:00 P.M. eastern.
The November update for Google Pixel devices running Android 15 is rolling out now. This batch doesn’t include exciting new features, like the AI-powered theft protection in the October update, but it has bug fixes and the latest security patches to tighten things up.
The new software includes fixes for known intermittent issues with Bluetooth range, camera tilt when zooming between cameras and unexpected flashing or flickering of white dots or screen brightness. It also has fixes for adaptive brightness not activating, the keyboard dismiss button not working correctly and the performance and stability of some UI transitions and animations.
Android 15 arrived last month for Pixel devices, following the Pixel 9 lineup’s debut in August. The annual software jump focuses on security and privacy, like AI-powered theft detection lock and extra authentication requirements for removing SIMs and deactivating Find My Device.
Google says the November Pixel update is rolling out today and will continue in phases over the next week. You should see a notification when it’s ready for your device and carrier.
Block shares tumbled 11% in extended trading on Thursday after the company reported third-quarter revenue that trailed Wall Street expectations.
Here is how the company did, compared to analysts’ consensus estimates from LSEG.
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Earnings per share: 88 cents adjusted vs. 87 cents expected
Revenue: $5.98billion vs. $6.24 billion expected
Block, formerly known as Square, posted $2.25 billion in gross profit, up 19% from a year ago. Analysts tend to focus on gross profit as a more accurate measurement of the company’s core transactional businesses.
The company reported net incomeof $283.7 million, or 45 cents per share, after losing $88.7 million, or 15 cents a share, a year earlier.
The Cash App business, the company’s popular mobile payment platform and a significant contributor to overall profitability, reported $1.31 billion in gross profit, a 21% year-over-year jump. Block, run by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, said its Cash App Card monthly active users increased 11% year over year to more than 24 million.
The company said gross profit for the fourth quarter will increase 14% to $2.31 billion.
Block’s third-quarter earnings call starts at 5 P.M. Eastern time.
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French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI launched a new content moderation API on Thursday, marking its latest move to compete with OpenAI and other AI leaders while addressing growing concerns about AI safety and content filtering.
The new moderation service, powered by a fine-tuned version of Mistral’s Ministral 8B model, is designed to detect potentially harmful content across nine different categories, including sexual content, hate speech, violence, dangerous activities, and personally identifiable information. The API offers both raw text and conversational content analysis capabilities.
“Safety plays a key role in making AI useful,” Mistral’s team said in announcing the release. “At Mistral AI, we believe that system level guardrails are critical to protecting downstream deployments.”
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Multilingual moderation capabilities position Mistral to challenge OpenAI’s dominance
The launch comes at a crucial time for the AI industry, as companies face mounting pressure to implement stronger safeguards around their technology. Just last month, Mistral joined other major AI companies in signing the UK AI Safety Summit accord, pledging to develop AI responsibly.
The moderation API is already being used in Mistral’s own Le Chat platform and supports 11 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. This multilingual capability gives Mistral an edge over some competitors whose moderation tools primarily focus on English content.
“Over the past few months, we’ve seen growing enthusiasm across the industry and research community for new LLM-based moderation systems, which can help make moderation more scalable and robust across applications,” the company stated.
Enterprise partnerships show Mistral’s growing influence in corporate AI
The release follows Mistral’s recent string of high-profile partnerships, including deals with Microsoft Azure, Qualcomm, and SAP, positioning the young company as an increasingly important player in the enterprise AI market. Last month, SAP announced it would host Mistral’s models, including Mistral Large 2, on its infrastructure to provide customers with secure AI solutions that comply with European regulations.
What makes Mistral’s approach particularly noteworthy is its dual focus on edge computing and comprehensive safety features. While companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have focused primarily on cloud-based solutions, Mistral’s strategy of enabling both on-device AI and content moderation addresses growing concerns about data privacy, latency, and compliance. This could prove especially attractive to European companies subject to strict data protection regulations.
The company’s technical approach also shows sophistication beyond its years. By training its moderation model to understand conversational context rather than just analyzing isolated text, Mistral has created a system that can potentially catch subtle forms of harmful content that might slip through more basic filters.
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The moderation API is available immediately through Mistral’s cloud platform, with pricing based on usage. The company says it will continue to improve the system’s accuracy and expand its capabilities based on customer feedback and evolving safety requirements.
Mistral’s move shows how quickly the AI landscape is changing. Just a year ago, the Paris-based startup didn’t exist. Now it’s helping shape how enterprises think about AI safety. In a field dominated by American tech giants, Mistral’s European perspective on privacy and security might prove to be its greatest advantage.
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Sega is planning to delist a lot of its classic games from digital storefronts as of December 6th at 11:59PM PT.
Steam will be affected the most, losing 62 titles including Crazy Taxi, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, Jet Set Radio, NiGHTS into Dreams, and Sonic 3D Blast. Sega is pulling 12 titles from the Xbox store. The Nintendo eShop and the PlayStation Store will “just” lose SEGA Genesis Classics — but that title includes more than 50 old Genesis games, so it still means a lot will be unavailable. You can see the full lists of what’s getting pulled on a Sega support page.
Any games that you have purchased will still be available to download and play after they’re delisted from the storefronts, so if you’ve had your eye on any of them, you might want to buy them before they’re gone.
The delistings are happening ahead of Sega’s planned reboots for Jet Set Radio, Shinobi, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, and Crazy Taxi, but those revivals aren’t expected anytime soon. And it wouldn’t be the first time Sega has delisted games ahead of releasing them in a different form: the company pulled the vast majority of classic Sonic games from digital stores before it launched Sonic Origins.
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Hopefully, the games getting removed in December will be available to buy again at some point down the line — keeping video game classics alive is already hard enough.
Google TV will need 2GB of RAM in new TVs and related hardware
Android TV is unchanged with a 1GB minimum spec
It won’t affect your current streamer in the short term
One of the most common criticisms of Google TV is that it isn’t always very smooth on more modestly priced televisions. That’s largely because Google’s system requirements aren’t very demanding, so a TV can meet the minimum spec with some pretty unimpressive components. That’s about to change, though, which is good news for new buyers but a possible worry for existing owners.
As Android Authority reports, Google has submitted a change to the Android open-source project regarding Google TV minimum requirements. The change says that the minimum RAM must be 2GB, which is more than the RAM in the Chromecast with Google TV.
What does this change mean for your TV or streaming device?
Right now, it won’t have any effect at all. But going forward, it could be an issue because if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the decades we’ve been covering hardware, it’s that when you up the hardware spec, the software becomes more demanding very soon afterward.
That’s one reason why identical versions of iOS or Android can run so differently on different models of the same devices: the newer ones have more horsepower, and the operating system tends to be optimized for the newer spec rather than the oldest devices.
For most budget devices, Android TV may be the preferred OS since it only needs 1GB of RAM. Google’s approval process also seems more generous, and Android Authority points out that we’re only just seeing more projectors get approved for Google TV. Still, there are tons of Android TV ones available.
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It’s unclear whether the change is already in effect or if Google is phasing it in at a later date, but we should see TVs reflecting the change very soon.
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