Lately: The biggest tech and online culture stories of 2025 – The Globe and Mail
Hello, welcome back to Lately, The Globe’s weekly tech newsletter. First off, a bit of housekeeping: I’m taking a couple weeks off for the holidays, so Lately will be back in your inboxes on Jan. 9.
Secondly, it’s time for Lately’s annual (slash second-ever) year-end round-up. So let’s dive into the biggest stories that shook the online world in 2025, from a new tech broligarchy to the rise of the sloposphere.
Megan Garcia is suing Character.AI in a wrongful death case related to her 14-year-old son’s suicide.GREGG NEWTON/AFP/Getty Images
In the past 12 months, families have been increasingly speaking out about the dangers of AI chatbots, especially for young people. Various lawsuits against Character.AI, OpenAI and Microsoft filed in the past year by families allege that the AI companies’ chatbots encouraged suicide and led to the deaths of their children. At the same time, as more people turn to chatbots as friends, therapists or confidantes, there has also been greater awareness of users forming unhealthy relationships with the technology. People have shared stories about developing “AI psychosis,” in which chatbots, known to be sycophantic to keep users locked into long conversations, support delusional and paranoid thoughts.
While these lawsuits make it through the courts, some AI companies have already made changes to address concerns: Character.AI announced in the fall that it would ban teenagers from using its chatbot. Online safety experts have welcomed the decision, but stress that the chatbots should never have been available to young people to begin with.
Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk with prime seats at the Trump inauguration.SHAWN THEW/Reuters
The first sign of a rising broligarchy was Donald Trump’s inauguration, when tech CEOs of the once proudly left-leaning Silicon Valley were seated side by side, front and centre. There was Elon Musk, of course, but also Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew and OpenAI’s Sam Altman were also in attendance.
Throughout 2025, tech leaders have cozied up with Trump, realizing the easiest way to get policies, government contracts and other perks would be through camaraderie with the President. Early on in 2025, Meta relaxed its content moderation policies around controversial issues such as gender identity and immigration, and TikTok sent out a push notification that thanked Trump for saving the app.
Maintaining a friendly relationship with the President has already reaped benefits for tech companies. Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order aimed at pre-empting any state-level regulation on artificial intelligence, something that all the tech companies – which have invested billions in AI – have been pushing for. This week Trump’s media empire, Truth Social, announced its merger with a Google-backed nuclear fusion company in a US$6-billion deal. Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have all touted fusion technology as a way of powering the energy-hungry data centres needed to build and run their AI products.
Then on Thursday night, the TikTok deal to keep the app operating in the U.S. was finally sealed, with parent company ByteDance selling just over 80 per cent of the company’s U.S. assets to American investors, including Oracle. Oracle, which was co-founded by Trump supporter Larry Ellison, is also a part of the President’s US$500-billion “Stargate” AI infrastructure project, along with OpenAI and SoftBank.
Of course, Trump’s feelings about someone can turn at any moment. It appears that the tech bosses are in his good books for now, but who knows what 2026 will bring.
This was the year that AI-generated content broke into the mainstream, and most troublingly, started to look very realistic. Google, OpenAI and Meta all released new generative AI tools, allowing users to turn a brief prompt – such as, say, a video of Steve Irwin rapping about crocodiles – into an astoundingly impressive video in just a few seconds, or minutes.
Meta and OpenAI created standalone apps, Vibes and Sora, respectively, for AI-generated content, but these videos have started to flood Instagram and TikTok. This type of AI content has been dubbed “slop” – at times entertaining, but also concerning as more people become distrustful of what they see online.
A protester in Kathmandu, Nepal.PRABIN RANABHAT/AFP/Getty Images
From Nepal to Peru, and Indonesia to Madagascar, a wave of Gen Z protests surged across continents in 2025. Although the catalysts vary – water and electricity shortages, high unemployment and wealth disparity – the overall message is largely the same rallying cry. They want a systemic overhaul.
Around the world, the movements shared a playbook that draws on the power of the social-media ecosystem – the native terrain of a deeply online generation. Discord and Reddit were hubs for organizing; TikTok and Instagram for breaking down complex issues and broadcasting protests; X for sharing on-the-ground, minute-by-minute intel. A shared language of memes, hashtags and irreverent references to pop culture has morphed into symbols of resistance.
Now that they’ve toppled governments, the question becomes how these movements will evolve in 2026.
Earlier this month Australia became the first country in the world to bar anyone under 16 from using social media, a drastic response to concerns over the potential harmful mental health effects on young people. The law has been divisive: parenting groups have praised the ban, while privacy experts, free speech advocates and, unsurprisingly, tech companies have criticized it. Following Australia’s lead, Denmark and Malaysia have announced plans to introduce age limits for social media.
Elsewhere, age-gating the internet is gaining steam. Britain’s Online Safety Act took effect this year, which puts age verification requirements on any content deemed “harmful” to minors on platforms such as YouTube, Reddit, X and pornography websites. The platforms have implemented age-gating measures, such as facial age estimation, checking a person’s age via their credit card provider and photo ID matching. However, British teens have already found workarounds for these barriers, including uploading AI-generated images of their own faces or photos of video game characters.
Here in Canada, the government is also mulling age verification. The proposed Bill S-209, which is making its way through the Senate, would restrict young peoples’ access to online pornography and require providers to implement age verification tools.
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