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"TikTok's algorithm is famously effective, yet hard to study. As part of the Guardian's special series on the platform's explosive rise, we tested how the algorithm treats different users. We wondered what would happen if three people - with varying ages, backgrounds, and familiarity with the platform - created new accounts and recorded what they saw."

"Owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok's success - more than 1 billion users worldwide - is combining with well-established fears about social media's data collection practices and concerns over China's geo-political ambitions to generate a background hum of distrust about the app. "As the geopolitical situation changes I suspect we will see companies such as TikTok will continue to be treated with some caution in the west," says Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University."

"It comes as a Guardian investigation reveals the human stories behind scams that originate on Meta's platforms, with a nationwide estimate released this week predicting the tech firm's failure to stamp out fraud will cost UK households £250m during 2023. With someone in the UK said to fall victim to a purchase scam starting on either Facebook or Instagram every seven minutes, the Guardian asked people who had been defrauded on these sites as well as its WhatsApp platform to get in touch. One Facebook user told us she was defrauded of her life savings and got pulled into debt, losing a total of £70,000, after being duped by an investment scam. While some people lost large amounts of money, a stream of unsuspecting online shoppers reported being conned out of smaller amounts when they placed orders with bogus online shops advertised on Facebook and Instagram."

"In its complaint, the FTC said Amazon used "manipulative, coercive or deceptive user-interface designs known as 'dark patterns' to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions". It said the option to purchase items on Amazon without subscribing to Prime was more difficult in many cases. It also said that consumers were sometimes presented with a button to complete their transactions - which did not clearly state it would also enroll them into Prime."

"Next year's elections in Britain and the US could be marked by a wave of AI-powered disinformation, experts have warned, as generated images, text and deepfake videos go viral at the behest of swarms of AI-powered propaganda bots. Sam Altman, CEO of the ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, told a congressional hearing in Washington this week that the models behind the latest generation of AI technology could manipulate users."

"The constitutional right to safe, legal abortion has evaporated following the recent Supreme Court decision. Some states with so-called "trigger bans" have immediately criminalized abortion. Next, Congress may seek to criminalize abortion in all 50 states, putting the government in control of peoples' bodies. Google is fully complicit in the criminalization of people seeking abortion care. That's because Google stores historical location data about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies through "geofence" orders that unmask the identities of anyone who traveled to a specific place at a specific time-like an abortion clinic on a specific day. Google received 11,554 such geofence warrants in 2020."

"The government is introducing some amendments in time for the report stage on 12 July, with another batch to be announced shortly after. Under one confirmed change, tech firms will be required to shield internet users from state-sponsored disinformation that poses a threat to UK society and democracy. This is a tightening of existing proposals on disinformation in the bill, which already require tech firms to take action on state-sponsored disinformation that harms individuals - such as threats to kill. Another confirmed amendment is equally incremental. A clause in the bill aimed at end-to-end encrypted services already gives Ofcom the power to require those platforms to adopt "accredited technology" to detect child sexual abuse and exploitation [CSEA] content. If that doesn't work, then they must use their "best endeavours" to develop or deploy new technology to spot and remove CSEA. This move appears to be aimed at Mark Zuckerberg's plans to introduce end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger and Instagram."

"The Digital Services Act marks the end of the platforms' vast liability exemptions and their seeming impunity. It will impose more transparency on the platforms' content moderation and set rules on so-called dark patterns, design features that can trick users into doing things they didn't mean to."

"Internet shutdowns are not just used by governments facing civil unrest. Every year millions of internet users from Sudan to Syria, Jordan to India also lose internet access during exam season as governments pull the plug in a bid to avoid hi-tech cheating."

"What distinguishes Fog Reveal from other cellphone location technologies used by police is that it follows the devices through their advertising IDs, unique numbers assigned to each device. These numbers do not contain the name of the phone's user, but can be traced to homes and workplaces to help police establish pattern-of-life analyses."

"The folks at Signal are taking one of the four post-quantum cryptography algorithms that have been chosen by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology to withstand attacks by quantum computers, but instead of using it to replace their existing public-key encryption system, they are layering the new algorithm on top of what they already have. "We are augmenting our existing cryptosystems," they say, "such that an attacker must break both systems in order to compute the keys protecting people's communications." And they will be rolling out this augmented system to all users in the next few months."

"Racists on the notorious troll site 4chan are using a powerful new and free AI-powered image generator service offered by Microsoft to create antisemitic propaganda, according to posts reviewed by Bellingcat. Users of 4chan, which has frequently hosted hate speech and played home to posts by mass shooters, tasked Bing Image Creator to create photo-realistic antisemitic caricatures of Jews and, in recent days, shared images created by the platform depicting Orthodox men preparing to eat a baby, carrying migrants across the US border (the latter a nod to the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory), and committing the 9/11 attacks."

"Nepal has said it will ban TikTok, citing negative effects on the country's "social harmony". The popular video-sharing platform, which has around a billion monthly users, has faced restrictions in many countries for alleged breaches of data rules and for the potentially harmful impact on youth of some content. "The decision to ban was made today, and relevant authorities are currently addressing the technical issues," the minister for communications and information technology, Rekha Sharma, said on Monday."

"Word of the layoffs comes over a year after the company made a big hiring push, doubling its size to over 500 people. Stack Overflow did not elaborate on the reasons for the layoff, but its hiring push began near the start of a generative AI boom that has stuffed chatbots into every corner of the tech industry, including coding. That presents clear challenges for a personal coding help forum, as developers get comfortable with AI coding assistance and the very tools that do that are blended into products they use. AI-generated coding answers have also posed problems for the company over the past year. The company issued a temporary ban on users generating answers with the help of an AI chatbot in December last year, but its alleged under-enforcement led to a months-long strike among moderators that was resolved in August; the ban is still in place today. Stack Overflow also announced it would start charging AI companies to train on its site. "

"A boarding prep school in West Sussex, Cottesmore School, has made history by appointing an AI robot, Abigail Bailey, as its "principal headteacher". Created in collaboration with an artificial intelligence developer, the robot is designed to support the school's headmaster, Tom Rogerson, by providing advice on various issues such as supporting staff members and helping pupils with ADHD. Abigail Bailey functions similarly to the AI service ChatGPT, where users ask questions and receive answers from the chatbot's algorithms. The AI principal has been developed with extensive knowledge in machine learning and educational management, allowing it to analyze vast amounts of data. According to Mr. Rogerson, having the AI robot to assist him is calming and reassuring. He considers the role of a school leader to be lonely and believes that having an entity to rely on is invaluable. He also intends to make the publicly-available online robot accessible to state school headteachers."

"TikTok faces questions over safeguards for child users after a Guardian investigation found that moderators were being told to allow under-13s to stay on the platform if they claimed their parents were overseeing their accounts."

"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."

"My prediction failed. For a decade and a half, Facebook resisted the fate of all the social networks that preceded it. In hindsight, it's easy to see why: it cheated. The company used investor cash to buy and neutralize competitors ("Kids are leaving Facebook for Insta? Fine, we'll buy Insta. We know you value choice!"). It allegedly spied on users through the deceptive use of apps such as Onavo and exploited the intelligence to defeat rivals. More than anything, it ratcheted up "switching costs.""

"On Tuesday, security firm Cleafy reported that TeaBot was back. This time, the trojan spread through a malicious app called QR Code & Barcode Scanner, which as the name suggests, allowed users to interact with QR codes and barcodes. The app had more than 10,000 installations before Cleafy researchers notified Google of the fraudulent activity and Google removed it."

"Those whom the Gods wish to destroy," says the adage, "they first make mad." Actually, that's overkill: the Gods just need to make people forget. Amnesia turns out to be a powerful narcotic and it's been clouding our perceptions of what's been happening on the internet for at least 25 years, namely the inexorable degradation of the online environment and our passive, sullen acceptance of that."