"From the filmmaker behind "Miss Representation" and "The Mask You Live In" comes an exploration of inequality and our cultural values."

"Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook will notify the estimated 50 million people whose data was extracted from the social network and handed off to a tech firm working for the Trump campaign."

" As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem. The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work. So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network's history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump's campaign in 2016."

"The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump's election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant's biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica - a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump's key adviser Steve Bannon - used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: "We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people's profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on." The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use. However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers' Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook's "platform policy" allowed only collection of friends' data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising. The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook's role in targeting voters in the US presidential election. It comes only weeks after indictments of 13 Russians by the special counsel Robert

"Can your child identify a cardinal? A holly tree? Queen Anne's lace? If not, "nature-deficit disorder" might be the diagnosis. It's not life-threatening, by any means. But it can be quality-of-life threatening. Research showing the mental and physical health benefits of being out in nature is mounting. One of the gurus of an international movement to get children back outside - away from their couches and screens   - is Richard Louv.  In 2006, he co-founded the Children & Nature Network, a nonprofit aimed at reconnecting families and nature."

"The Representation Project is excited to partner with Harry's on "A Man Like You." This short film tells the story of an alien who discovers how to be a man with the help of a young boy. As a result of the alien's many questions, the boy learns that traditional ideals of masculinity are sometimes too narrow for today's world. In the end, a real man is simply a good human."

""After year in space, astronaut Scott Kelly no longer has same DNA as identical twin," the headline of a story on the Today Show's website, published Thursday, declared. Seven percent of his DNA, the story says, "has not returned to normal since he returned from space." Pretty amazing news, right? Too bad it's not true. This week, dozens of news organizations published stories with this or similar information. They cited a NASA study on the effects of space travel on the human body, with two subjects: astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly, identical twins. In 2015, Scott flew to the International Space Station and lived there for 340 days-a record for an American astronaut-while Mark stayed on Earth. Scientists examined the twins before, during, and after the mission. While the study certainly detected some interesting changes in Scott after his return, space did not alter 7 percent of Scott's DNA, the genetic code found in the cells in our bodies that makes us what we are. What the NASA study found was that some of Scott's genes changed their expression while he was in space, and 7 percent of those genes didn't return to their pre-flight states months after he came back. If 7 percent of Scott's genetic code changed, as some of the stories suggested, he'd come back an entirely different species."

"he same brain circuits that are activated by eating chocolate and winning money are activated when teenagers see large numbers of "likes" on their own photos or the photos of peers in a social network, according to a first-of-its-kind UCLA study that scanned teens' brains while using social media."

"Our brains on multitasking aren't nearly as good as we think they are. Let's say you're working on an activity over here, on the right side of the brain, and suddenly you're trying to multitask another activity, like talking on the phone. You're not actually doing both activities at the same time, in fact, you're now diverting your attention from one part of your brain to another part of your brain. That takes time, that takes resources, that takes brain cells."

"Many students feel there is nothing wrong with sending out a few quick texts or jumping on Facebook during class, and many are proud of their self-perceived ability to keep abreast of classroom discussion while their attention is divided. But a new study by researchers at the University of Connecticut shows multitasking is hurting college students more than they think. In a survey that probed the multitasking habits of more than 350 college students, UConn researchers found that students who multitasked while doing homework had to study longer, and those who frequently multitasked in class had lower grades on average than their peers who multitasked less often. While prior studies have reported that classroom multitasking can hurt students' grades, the UConn study is believed to be the first to take into account whether students' prowess at multitasking and additional time spent studying offset the tendency for poorer academic performance. It did not."

"Here's practical advice from a neuroscientist: Don't try to multitask. It ruins productivity, causes mistakes, and impedes creative thought. Many of you are probably thinking, "but I'm good at it!" Sadly, that's an illusion. As humans, we have a very limited capacity for simultaneous thought - we can only hold a little bit of information in the mind at any single moment. Our brains, however, delude us into thinking we can do more. "

"Today, companies reach consumers with targeted marketing - placing ads based on your web searches, the content of your Gmail messages, or your purchasing history. Every time you log into a site like Amazon, the recommendations you see are based not only on your purchase history and items you've viewed, but also an algorithm that factors in the preferences of people with similar buying histories. Companies also use retargeting: blanketing the ad space with images of products you've viewed as you move on to browse other sites. But as the volumes of data we add to the web keeps multiplying - one estimate projects it will grow 300 times by 2020 - it becomes more difficult for marketers to figure out who to target with which ads and when. So companies are turning to computer models that analyze these massive pools of information to make inferences about your health, personality traits, and even mood in real time, in order to help them predict, and ultimately influence, your next purchase."

"In the lead-up to tonight's film, Generation Like, we've been asking our Facebook and Twitter communities to tell us why you use social and how it's affecting your lives. Hundreds of you have told us about the choices you're making - and why you're making them. We've asked a few writers who've thought a lot about social media to read your comments and reflect on them in the context of tonight's film. We also want to hear from you! Share your reactions below in the comments. Does Social Media Empower or Exploit? Douglas Rushkoff, Generation Like correspondent Douglas Rushkoff: Does Social Media Empower or Exploit? Generation Like correspondent Douglas Rushkoff is the author, most recently, of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, as well a dozen other books on media, technology and culture. He was correspondent on three previous FRONTLINE films, The Merchants of Cool (2001), The Persuaders (2004), and Digital Nation (2010). Follow him on Twitter @Rushkoff. In the lead-up to Generation Like, FRONTLINE has been asking questions about social media on social media. As I wade through the many responses, I am reminded of my own questions about these platforms when I began making this documentary. Like me, many of you are thrilled by the opportunity for connection and self-expression that social media offer.   Calum James Facebook is the best communication tool ever created. February 12 at 7:02pm   But many of you also share a sense of skepticism about what it is that social media - and the companies behind them - ask from us in return.   We all know this has something to do with our data. We create consumer profiles for the unseen companies on the other side of the screen, and enter into a relationship with them that isn't entirely clear. "Who is doing what for whom, and to what end?" The need to understand this better - and what it means for the young people using this stuff - is what set us on our journey to explor

"danah boyd is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and a research assistant professor in media, culture and communication at New York University. She told FRONTLINE that kids today aren't much different than they were decades ago; it's the world around them that's changed. "Young people are participating in the attention economy just like adults are. They're part of it; they're growing up with it; it's what they see all around them," she said. "

"Fake news videos aren't new, but they are on the rise and more realistic than ever due to technological advances. What used to be a fairly big production and cost thousands of dollars can now be achieved with a selfie stick and a smartphone. That may not sound like a big deal, but when politics, propaganda and bad intentions enter the fray, the potential to cause harm is staggering and potentially irreparable.   ASU Now spoke to Dan Gillmor and Eric Newton , who launched News Co/Lab in October, a collaborative lab inside the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication that aims to help the public find new ways of understanding and engaging with news and information. They believe fake videos soon will be "trivially easy, inexpensive, and all too believable.""