"The company is trying out a new way to stop trolls from ruining your mentions."

"TORONTO - Jordan Peterson fills huge lecture halls and tells his audiences there's no shame in looking backward to a model of how the world should be arranged. Look back to the 1950s, he says - and back even further. He tells his audiences that they are smart. He is bringing them knowledge, yes, but it is knowledge that they already know and feel in their bones. He casts this as ancient wisdom, delivered through religious allegories and fairy tales which contain truth, he says, that modern society has forgotten. Most of his ideas stem from a gnawing anxiety around gender. "The masculine spirit is under assault," he told me. "It's obvious." In Mr. Peterson's world, order is masculine. Chaos is feminine. And if an overdose of femininity is our new poison, Mr. Peterson knows the cure. Hence his new book's subtitle: "An Antidote to Chaos.""

"Facebook is exquisitely designed to feed our addiction to hyper-partisan content. In this world, fringe players who are apt to be more strident end up at the top of our news feeds, burying the middle ground. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports on the ways junk news feeds into our own beliefs about politics, institutions and government."

"YouTube stars are being paid to sell academic cheating, a BBC investigation has found. More than 250 channels are promoting EduBirdie, based in Ukraine, which allows students to buy essays, rather than doing the work themselves. YouTube said it would help creators understand they cannot promote dishonest behaviour."

"A proliferation of free, entertaining online content often leads parents, kids, and tech companies to overlook-or worse, disregard-data-privacy laws."

""Initially, helicopter parenting appears to work," says Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of How to Raise an Adult. "As a kid, you're kept safe, you're given direction, and you might get a better grade because the parent is arguing with the teacher." But, ultimately, parents end up getting in the child's way. In the first episode of Home School, The Atlantic's new animated series on parenting, Lythcott-Haims explains how helicopter parenting strips children of agency and the ability to cultivate their own tools to navigate the world. "Our job as parents is-like it or not-to put ourselves out of a job," she says. This episode of Home School was produced by Elyse Kelly."

"NEWARK - The fifth-graders of Yolanda Bromfield's digital-privacy class had just finished their lesson on ­online-offline balance when she asked them a tough question: How would they act when they left school and reentered a world of prying websites, addictive phones and online scams? Susan, a 10-year-old in pink sneakers who likes YouTube and the mobile game "Piano Tiles 2," quietly raised her hand. "I will make sure that I don't tell nobody my personal stuff," she said, "and be offline for at least two hours every night." Between their math and literacy classes, these elementary school kids were studying up on perhaps one of the most important and least understood school subjects in America - how to protect their privacy, save their brains and survive the big, bad Web. Classes such as these, though surprisingly rare, are spreading across the country amid hopes of preparing kids and parents for some of the core tensions of modern childhood: what limits to set around technologies whose long-term effects are unknown - and for whom young users are a prime audience.

"How the new graphic iconography of memes, placards and posters is changing the way we communicate and protest"

"Gorgeous, popular, sought-after by brands... but these models on Instagram aren't real. They're digitally created. And to a lot of people, that doesn't matter at all."

"Cinematic VR allows viewers to live entirely inside a film. They put on goggles and look at the universe around them - behind, above, anywhere they turn their gaze - and still see the world of the movie. Some in the entertainment industry view it as perhaps the greatest advance in entertainment since the addition of sound to movies nearly a century ago, involving the senses in ways they're not involved when the real world is visible next to a screen. But while investors in Hollywood and elsewhere have poured in hundreds of millions of dollars, drawing top talent and yielding a creative explosion, cinematic VR has produced little in the way of commercial success or popular acceptance."

"Want to freak yourself out? I'm going to show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realizing it."

"In New York, I snapped a photo - and tweeted it - every time I spotted a kid with a meme-inspired sign. The unfaithful boyfriend meme recast with Trump staring at the NRA and ignoring "students lives." A Mocking Sponge with a "Make America Great Again" hat. Several Krusty Krab versus Chum Bucket riffs. "I don't get her sign," I overheard a woman in front of me saying to the man next to her, while we were waiting to march. "Hi, I can explain that," I said, breaking meme-rule No. 1: Never talk about a meme IRL. "It's a good versus bad comparison. The Krusty Krab is 'good,' and the Chum Bucket is 'bad.' So the NRA is bad here." "Oh, I guess I probably could have figured that out," the woman replied. "That makes sense." By the end of the day, I'd tweeted photos of a half-dozen meme signs I'd seen in New York City. Other protesters started sending me DMs and replying to my tweets with pictures of their signs from different cities. Twitter created an entire moment dedicated to SpongeBob signs alone. But for every like and fave - just look at the impressive shading on this Chum Bucket - Twitter, and my mentions, quickly filled with people barking about how stupid these kids were. About how cartoon-covered poster board is a terrible way to get people - voters, government representatives, "adults" - to pay attention."

"Facebook, Google and Twitter were supposed to save politics as good information drove out prejudice and falsehood. Something has gone very wrong"

"Young consumers have lots of distractions these days. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, giving brands less time than ever to make an impression. Perhaps that's why Snapchat-best known for fleeting photos and videos that catch a pop-culture moment, then disappear-has emerged as the social media mirror to a generation's soul."

"Cheering on your favorite sports team and snacking on junk food often go hand in hand in the United States, but a new study sheds light on just how intertwined sports and unhealthy foods really are. The study, published in the journal Pediatrics on Monday, reveals that 76% of food products shown in ads promoting a sports organization sponsorship are unhealthy and that 52.4% of beverages shown in sports sponsorship ads are sugar-sweetened."

"Technology helps us run our lives, do our jobs, get directions and keep track of our calendars. Right? Or, is technology taking control of our lives - stealing our time, and shattering our attention into a thousand pieces?"

"WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton left Facebook Inc. last year. Now he's saying others should do the same. In a tweet Tuesday, Action said: "It is time. #deletefacebook," referencing the online movement that is gaining steam in the wake of revelations that the personal data of 50 million Facebook FB, -3.34%   users was used without their permission by political data company Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 presidential campaign."

Perhaps at some point in the past few years you've told Facebook that you like, say, Kim Kardashian West. When you hit the thumbs-up button on her page, you probably did it because you wanted to see the reality TV star's posts in your news feed. Maybe you realized that marketers could target advertisements to you based on your interest in her. What you probably missed is that researchers had figured out how to tie your interest in Ms. Kardashian West to certain personality traits, such as how extroverted you are (very), how conscientious (more than most) and how open-minded (only somewhat). And when your fondness for Ms. Kardashian West is combined with other interests you've indicated on Facebook, researchers believe their algorithms can predict the nuances of your political views with better accuracy than your loved ones. As The New York Times reported on Saturday, that is what motivated the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to collect data from more than 50 million Facebook users, without their consent, to build its own behavioral models to target potential voters in various political campaigns. The company has worked for a political action committee started by John R. Bolton, who served in the George W. Bush administration, as well as for President Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. "We find your voters and move them to action," the firm boasts on its website."