29/10/2025

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Meta, TikTok comply with social media ban

KINGSTON: Jamaican officials urged the public to get to higher ground and shelters ahead of Hurricane Melissa’s expected landfall, with the prime minister warning it could bring massive devastation. The Category 5 storm, which could be the island’s most violent on record, is charting a painstakingly slow path through the Caribbean, and has already been blamed for three deaths in Jamaica, three deaths in Haiti and one in the Dominican Republic. The US National Hurricane Center reported that Melissa was still 240km from Kingston late on Monday, and reaching maximum wind speeds of 282 kph. Its heavy rains combined with intense winds could wreak devastation on par with historic hurricanes, including 2017’s Maria or 2005’s Katrina , which left indelible impacts on Puerto Rico and the US city of New Orleans. Local Government Minister Desmond McKenzie said on Monday evening that of the island’s 880-odd shelters standing by, only 133 were hosting locals. They “should be seeing people now”, McKenzie said, adding: “I want to urge persons in these parishes to get to high ground as quickly as possible.” Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness said the island’s western end faced the worst destruction. “I don’t believe there is any infrastructure within this region that could withstand a Category 5 storm, so there could be significant dislocation,” he told CNN. – AFP NAIROBI: A small plane travelling from Kenya’s coast crashed yesterday, according to the country’s aviation authority, with the 12 people on board feared dead. The small plane was en route to Kichwa Tembo, a private airstrip in the Maasai Mara National Park, from the tourist hotspot of Diani when it came down at around 5.30am local time (10.30am in Malaysia). “The aircraft had 12 persons on board,” a statement from the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority said. It gave no further details, but said that government agencies were already on site to establish the cause of the accident. In August, a light aircraft belonging to the medical NGO Amref crashed on the outskirts of capital Nairobi, killing six and injuring two more. – AFP Jamaica braces for Hurricane Melissa AUSTRALIA FERRIES IMMIGRANTS TO ATOLL SYDNEY: Australia has started ferrying immigrants to the barren Pacific nation of Nauru under a contentious deal signed this year, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said yesterday. A cohort of around 350 immigrants – many of them convicted of serious crimes including assault, drug smuggling and even murder – could eventually be sent to the low-lying atoll after Australia failed to resettle them elsewhere. “Nauru confirmed last Friday that the first transfer had occurred,” Burke said in a statement. Burke did not detail how many immigrants had been sent to Nauru. For years the group languished inside Australia’s immigration detention system after their visas were cancelled for violent crimes or because officials held other concerns. – AFP 12 FEARED DEAD IN KENYA LIGHT AIRCRAFT CRASH

BR I E F S

o Law takes effect Dec 10

Australia and New Zealand, said the company would soon approach holders of accounts confirmed to be under 16 – about 450,000 across Instagram and Facebook – to give them a choice between deleting their photos and other data or offering to store it until they turned 16. TikTok, which says it has 200,000 under-16 accounts in Australia, and Snap, which says it has 440,000 under-16 accounts, said they would take similar steps. The companies said that they would use behaviour-tracking software to determine if an account holder claiming to be over 16 was underage. “Where we identify someone that is saying they’re 25 but the behaviours would indicate that they’re below 16, from Dec 10 we will have those accounts deactivated,” Woods-Joyce said. For users incorrectly deemed to be under 16, Meta and TikTok said they would refer them to a third-party age-estimation tool. Snap said it was still working on a solution for users who believed they were incorrectly blocked. – Reuters

16 or face a fine of up to A$49.5 million (RM136 million). The platforms previously argued that the ban would drive young people to more dangerous corners of the internet that are poorly monitored, as well as deprive young people of social contact. They also said that implementation would be unnecessarily complex. Snap and Google owned YouTube have also argued they aren’t social media companies. “We don’t agree, but we accept and we will abide by the law,” said Jennifer Stout, Snap’s senior vice-president of global policy and platform operations, via a video link. Ella Woods-Joyce, TikTok’s public policy lead for Australia, reiterated the Chinese-owned platform’s opposition to the ban but said “TikTok will comply with the law and meet its obligations.” “We are on track to meet our compliance,” she said. Mia Garlick, Meta’s policy director for

SYDNEY: Instagram owner Meta and other social media firms said yesterday they will comply with a ban on users under the age of 16, adding that they will start deactivating accounts once the law takes effect on Dec 10. In parliament, Meta, TikTok owner ByteDance and Snapchat owner Snap said they continued to believe the ban would not protect young people, but they would soon reach out to owners of more than a million underage accounts to prepare them for the change. Their comments represented a shift in the social media industry’s response to the law, which is being watched by lawmakers around the world as concern grows about youth mental health. Under the Australian law, platforms must take “reasonable steps” to block users aged less than

(From left) Odicio, Maipatxi Apurina, head of Land Monitoring at The Coordination of Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon, Gere and Lucas Manchineri, president of the Manchineru people’s organisation at the launch of the report in London. – REUTERSPIC

‘Half of isolated indigenous peoples face extinction’ LONDON: Almost half of indigenous

protected under international law, and although national legislation exists, “implementation is often weak”, the NGO said. In Indonesia, the growing exploitation of nickel to meet surging demand for electric vehicle batteries is endangering the nomadic hunter gatherer people of the Hongana Manyawa community, the report said. “We in the industrialised world ... view (indigenous peoples) as unfortunate collateral damage while we plunder their allowance for cars and houses and energy, jewellery, entertainment,” said actor Gere, recalling his childhood next to a native American reservation in New York State. In April, Indian authorities arrested a US tourist attempting to approach the Sentinelese community, who live on an island where no one is allowed to go. – AFP

rainforest, mainly in Brazil, but groups have also been recorded in Indonesia and India. “The threats to almost half are so severe that they could be wiped out in the next 10 years,” the report warned. The Kakataibo community of Peru’s Ucayali region faces one of the most uncertain futures. Kakataibo community member Herlin Odicio does not live in isolation and instead campaigns on his people’s behalf, notably against the illegal logging and cocoa cultivation that threaten them. “In Peru, the government is erasing the laws that protect indigenous rights,” he told the press conference, warning the community could be facing “extermination”. “We are not asking the government for a favour. This is an ancestral right,” he said. Indigenous rights, particularly land rights, are

communities living cut off from the world face extinction within the decade due to logging, mining and tourism, the NGO Survival International warned on Monday. “We really want the world and particularly governments and industries to recognise and address this as a global emergency,” Survival International’s executive director Caroline Pearce told a press conference in London, attended by US actor and long-time supporter of indigenous peoples Richard Gere. Some 196 peoples and groups, referred to as “uncontacted” due to their desire to live voluntarily isolated from other human societies, have been identified in 10 countries, according to the NGO’s report. More than 90% of them live in the Amazon