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"A third of social media users aged between eight and 17 have the online age of an adult because they sign up with a false date of birth, according to new research. The fake age issue means that young users in the UK are at greater risk of being exposed to harmful or adult content, as platforms presume they are older than they in fact are."

"There's so much focus on sweeping claims that aren't actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better." He added, "We're years into this, and we're still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It's totally wild.""

"At first glance, the Twitter user "Canaelan" looks ordinary enough. He has tweeted on everything from basketball to Taylor Swift, Tottenham Hotspur football club to the price of a KitKat. The profile shows a friendly-looking blond man with a stubbly beard and glasses who, it indicates, lives in Sheffield. The background: a winking owl. Canaelan is, in fact, a non-human bot linked to a vast army of fake social media profiles controlled by a software designed to spread "propaganda". Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims, which controls more than 30,000 fake social media profiles, can be used to spread disinformation at scale and at speed. It is sold by "Team Jorge", a unit of disinformation operatives based in Israel."

"Has the introduction of social media in the past 10-15 years caused the increase in prevalence of mental health problems in teens? At this point, most of what I'm reading and hearing is a resounding yes (especially for girls). I don't necessarily disagree with this. Just to level set: I think there is a very good chance (my current number is probably around 75%) that social media has contributed to the teen mental health crisis. At the same time, I think large-scale mental health crises are complex phenomena, that there are likely multiple causes, and that we need to make sure we're approaching the data with the scrutiny it deserves. It's this nuance that, I think, has been missing from the conversation."

"The governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has signed sweeping social media legislation requiring explicit parental permissions for anyone under 18 to use platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. He also signed a bill prohibiting social media companies from employing techniques that could cause minors to develop an "addiction" to the platforms."

"If you were doubting how important recommender systems are to social media companies, a lawsuit filed last week against Meta makes it crystal clear. At the heart of this legal battle is a fundamental question: Shouldn't users have the power to decide what they do and don't see online? The lawsuit filed by Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on behalf of Professor Ethan Zuckerman directly challenges how social media feeds are curated. Professor Zuckerman's proposed browser extension, 'Unfollow Everything 2.0,' would enable Facebook users to disengage from the algorithmically driven content that dominates their feeds, by allowing them to unfollow friends, pages and groups en masse, thus resetting their digital interactions on their terms."

"It's hardly a surprise that Meta, owner of Facebook, is refusing to renew its deals with Australia's media companies. It was always grudging in its negotiations and never really accepted the principle that it should pay for the benefit of using the work of journalists. Facebook and Google were forced to the bargaining table by the news media bargaining code. That law allowed the government to "designate" digital platforms, which would force them to negotiate with media companies. The big stick was that if the parties could not agree, the decision would be made by an independent arbiter. In other words, Google and Facebook would lose control."

"In attendance will be Matthew P Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center - a law firm dedicated exclusively to representing the families of children allegedly harmed by social media. The firm has filed cases against platforms including Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Discord."

"The internet, including social media, was not made with children and young people in mind. This is why online experiences are not always good for children and sometimes even exploitative, risky, and deeply problematic. No wonder parents are worried, educators are at a loss and the government feels compelled to act. But banning children from social media is not the answer."

"research consistently shows that social media is exploited to facilitate political intimidation and violence. What's more, certain features of social media platforms make them particularly susceptible to such exploitation, and some of those features can be changed to reduce the danger. "

"A woman whose 14-year-old son killed himself is calling for parents to be given the legal right to access their child's social media accounts to help understand why they died. Ellen Roome has gathered more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for social media companies to be required to hand over data to parents after a child has died. Under the current law, parents have no legal right to see whether their child was being bullied or threatened, was looking at self-harm images or other harmful content, or had expressed suicidal feelings online or searched for help with mental health problems."

"The initial project will pursue a new, open royalty-free video codec specification and open-source implementation based on the contributions of members, along with binding specifications for media format, content encryption and adaptive streaming, thereby creating opportunities for next-generation media experiences."

"Our social media platforms are powered by a surveillance-based business model designed to mine, manipulate, and extract our human experiences at any cost, causing a breakdown of our information ecosystem and shared sense of truth worldwide. This extractive business model is not built for us but built to exploit us."

"There has been a great amount of research and resources dedicated to mapping social media "pipelines" into far-right and reactionary politics. Less thought, however, has been dedicated to a leftwing alternative. This is a huge gap in how the left, broadly, thinks about online politics. While the problems of online rightwing radicalization are very real, I believe that the mechanisms of social media also offer a path for progressive and leftwing politicization."

"I do want us all to be non-binary in how we think about the big issues, however. It was deeply saddening to see the abuse Malala Yousafzai got on social media last week because she is mates with a Tory. On Facebook she had endorsed a young woman who is standing for president of the Oxford Student Conservative Association. She said her friend was talented and this was not a personal reflection of her own political views."

"Tech companies around the world appeared to listen. The very public and very swift removal of Russian channels on social media represented a sea change from years of prior content moderation decisions, when government requests for removals were often done with less fanfare and were frequently met with ire from human rights groups."

"Shoppers are being deceived because social media platforms and messaging apps are not doing enough to prevent a "cottage industry of fraudsters" soliciting fake reviews, according to Amazon. Fake reviews have become one of the most persistent scourges of online retailers, and some analysts think that about one in seven reviews in the UK are not the real deal, with blame often directed at groups that proliferate on Facebook. Last year Amazon alone blocked 200m fake reviews. Dharmesh Mehta, head of the company's customer trust team, said this avalanche of misinformation was harming consumers, who were being "deceived about what products they should or shouldn't be buying"."

"It shows rapid technological advances are allowing governments and political actors to distort reality, and fake content is easier to publish than ever before. "The difference is being blurred between true and false, real and artificial, facts and artifices, jeopardising the right to information," the report said. "The unprecedented ability to tamper with content is being used to undermine those who embody quality journalism and weaken journalism itself." Artificial intelligence was "wreaking further havoc on the media world", the report said, with AI tools "digesting content and regurgitating it in the form of syntheses that flout the principles of rigour and reliability". This is not just written AI content but visual, too. High-definition images that appear to show real people can be generated in seconds."

"But it's not hard to see how social media and a rise in misogyny are, in fact, related. Social media sites trap girls in spirals questioning their attractiveness and self-worth. They're encouraged to compare themselves to others and seek approval for the way they look, while reinforcing beauty standards that favor thinness and whiteness. They feel pressured to promote themselves as objects. There have been many studies establishing all this over about the last 10 years, including Facebook's own research into girls and Instagram - research that the company suppressed until exposed by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. "Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression," Facebook's study noted. "This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.""

"'You could single-handedly push it to extinction': how social media is putting our rarest wildlife at risk"