Digit_al Society

"The Electoral Commission has called for new legal controls over misinformation from AI chatbots, after a thinktank found they had made serious mistakes during the recent Scottish election. The thinktank Demos said its investigation had found that AI services gave voters misinformation to 34% of the questions it posed, which it said raised worrying questions about the lack of regulation of AI platforms in the UK."

"It is a familiar story. Extravagant claims are made on behalf of novel computerised tools. The public are told that this or that digital application or system is going to change the world for the better. Efficiencies will be unlocked and problems solved as human limitations are overcome by networked devices plugged into vast stores of data. Anyone who questions the narrative is a pessimist or, perhaps, a criminal. This appears to be the logic behind arguments put forward on behalf of one such tool - live facial recognition technology. Law-abiding citizens have "nothing to fear" from the police's increased reliance on mounted cameras, said the Home Office minister, Sarah Jones, last month, after a high court challenge brought on human rights and privacy grounds failed. The use of AI-powered identification software, made by the Japanese company NEC, "only locates specifically wanted people", she added. Last year, Ms Jones described the technology as "the biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA"."

" 'Things were going dark left and right': the race to save US government datasets before they're deleted Group has banded together to rescue data as Trump administration has removed or altered data on climate change, reproductive health, LGBTQ+ people and more Building power is supported by About this content Amy Qin Thu 7 May 2026 12.00 BST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google André spent 2025 trying to stay one step ahead of the Trump administration. Every morning, he woke up and downloaded as many government datasets as he could before they were deleted. He continued throughout the afternoon, and sometimes through the night, if a notification from his group chat popped up on his phone saying that a new webpage had been taken down."

"It showed the AIs' advantage was particularly pronounced in triage circumstances requiring rapid decisions with minimal information. The diagnosis accuracy of the AI - OpenAI's o1 reasoning model - rose to 82% when more detail was available, compared with the 70-79% accuracy achieved by the expert humans, though this difference was not statistically significant."

"An element of exploitation': the world of TikTok child skincare influencers Experts say regulation of child influencers sits in a legal grey area as children promote products on social media"

"Peer pressure aside, the 32-year-old is not alone. Britain's communications watchdog reported last week that UK adults were becoming less active on social media platforms. Ofcom said just under half of adult social media users (49%) now post, share or comment, compared with 61% in 2024. So is the UK turning off social media?"

"The antisocial behaviour took place after link-ups arranged on social media sites including TikTok and Snapchat. In a statement, the Met urged social media companies to "play their part by taking responsibility for content on their platforms that promotes or incites disorder"."

"The findings have the potential to upend pseudonymity, an imperfect but often sufficient privacy measure used by many people to post queries and participate in sometimes sensitive public discussions while making it hard for others to positively identify the speakers. The ability to cheaply and quickly identify the people behind such obscured accounts opens them up to doxxing, stalking, and the assembly of detailed marketing profiles that track where speakers live, what they do for a living, and other personal information. This pseudonymity measure no longer holds. "Our findings have significant implications for online privacy," the researchers wrote. "The average online user has long operated under an implicit threat model where they have assumed pseudonymity provides adequate protection because targeted deanonymization would require extensive effort. LLMs invalidate this assumption.""

"This perceptual shift has consequences for how AI shapes beliefs. Our data shows that AI is a more potent driver of belief certainty than traditional social media platforms. While 44.5 percent of users report that AI makes them more certain about their important beliefs, only 38.5 percent say the same of social media. More striking still, AI interactions are nearly three times less likely to cause users to doubt their beliefs (4.8 percent) compared to social media interactions (13.9 percent)."

"AI has made it vastly easier for malicious hackers to identify anonymous social media accounts, a new study has warned. In most test scenarios, large language models (LLMs) - the technology behind platforms such as ChatGPT - successfully matched anonymous online users with their actual identities on other platforms, based on the information they posted."

"Grandmother jailed 108 days after facial recognition got it wrong"

"AI autocomplete doesn't just change how you write. It changes how you think AI-powered writing tools are increasingly integrated into our e-mails and phones. Now a new study finds biased AI suggestions can sway users' beliefs"

"Confidential health records from UK BioBank project exposed online Exclusive: Guardian investigation finds data from flagship medical research leaked dozens of times"

"'Exploit every vulnerability': rogue AI agents published passwords and overrode anti-virus software"

"Perhaps the clearest examples of eroding privacy norms come from romantic partnerships, where tracking and monitoring have become widely accepted substitutes for direct communication. In a 2021 study published in Children and Youth Services Review, researchers found that almost 60% of young adults surveyed had experienced "digital monitoring or control" while dating, which the study defined as "using social media/technology to keep track of, intrude on the privacy of, and control the activities of a dating partner". It's now normal to scan a partner's social media profiles for small signs of disloyalty, such as an Instagram "like" on another person's photo or a tagged photo at an unexpected place. Some people go so far as to pay amateur online sleuths for a full audit of their partner's digital footprint."

"While social media bans may seem like a prudent measure to protect children, they are not only ineffective, they endanger both children and adults. There is little evidence that social media is driving any type of widespread mental health crisis in children. Studies have repeatedly shown the opposite. Removing anonymity from the web, which will inevitably happen when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for easier government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, who rely on online anonymity. And while some claim the laws would curb big tech's power, only the largest tech companies have the resources to shoulder the extensive costs of age verification systems. Non-profit and indie platforms could be forced to close, consolidating big tech's power further. Mass surveillance systems, once constructed, could also be easily leveraged by governments and bad actors."

"Microsoft just gave the internet a masterclass in the Streisand effect. The company added "Microslop" - a derisive nickname for Microsoft that took off after Merriam-Webster named "slop" its 2025 word of the year - to the auto-moderation block list on its official Copilot Discord server. Any message containing the word was silently swallowed by bots before it could appear in chat, reports Windows Latest."

"We've spent today working to separate the real from the fictitious as pictures and video flood social media following three days of strikes across Iran, Israel and several Gulf nations. Here's some of the fakery spreading on social media that we've debunked: An image claiming to be of a huge explosion at an Iraqi airport was made using AI Google Earth satellite images that were manipulated to claim damage to a US Navy base Fake social media accounts claiming to belong to senior Iranian cleric"

"Ceccanti had been communicating with OpenAI's chatbot for a few years. He used it initially as a tool to brainstorm ways to build a path to low-cost housing for his community in Clatskanie, Oregon, but eventually turned to it as a confidante. He would spend 12 hours a day typing to the bot, according to his wife. He had cut himself off from it after she, along with his friends, realized he was spiraling into beliefs that were detached from reality. "He was not a depressed person," Fox said, as she sat on the couch in their living room with tears trickling down her face. Ceccanti never discussed suicide with the bot, according to his chat logs, viewed by the Guardian. Fox believes her husband suffered a crisis after quitting ChatGPT after prolonged use. "Which tells me that this thing is not just dangerous to people with depression, it's dangerous to anybody," she said. He returned to the bot in the months leading up to his death and quit again just days prior."