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"Smartphones should be banned from schools to tackle classroom disruption, improve learning and help protect children from cyberbullying, a UN report has recommended. Unesco, the UN's education, science and culture agency, said there was evidence that excessive mobile phone use was linked to reduced educational performance and that high levels of screen time had a negative effect on children's emotional stability."

"The Italian supreme court ordered prosecutors last month to disclose how the Sky ECC data had been retrieved, arguing that it was impossible to have a fair trial if the accused is unable to access the evidence or assess its reliability and legality, a position supposed by the NGO Fair Trials. Whether prosecutors choose to do so could determine whether the arrests made this week lead to convictions or not. Prosecutors in the UK face a similar dilemma in relation to the hacking of EncroChat, another secret messaging platform that had the added facility of a "panic" button that when pressed would immediately erase the phone's contents."

"If AI causes mass unemployment among the general populace, it will be the first time in history that any technology has ever done that. Industrial machinery, computer-controlled machine tools, software applications, and industrial robots all caused panics about human obsolescence, and nothing of the kind ever came to pass; pretty much everyone who wants a job still has a job. As Noah has written, a wave of recent evidence shows that adoption of industrial robots and automation technology in general is associated with an increase in employment at the company and industry level."

"Since the 2016 presidential election, the notion that the Russian government somehow "weaponized" social media to push voters to Donald Trump has been widely taken as a gospel in liberal circles. A groundbreaking recent New York University study, however, says there's no evidence Russian tweets had any meaningful effect at all."

"These are the early days of the data revolution in personal decision-making. I am not claiming that we can completely outsource our lifestyle choices to algorithms, though we might get to that point in the future. I am claiming instead that we can all dramatically improve our decision-making by consulting evidence mined from thousands or millions of people who faced dilemmas similar to ours. And we can do that now."

"Getty points to images produced by Stable Diffusion which contain its copyright watermark, suggesting that Stable Diffusion has ingested and is reproducing copyrighted material without permission (Stability AI has not yet commented publicly on the lawsuit). The same level of evidence is harder to come by when examining ChatGPT's text output, but there is no doubt that it has been trained on copyrighted material. OpenAI will be hoping that its text generation is covered by "fair use", a provision in copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material for "transformative" purposes. That idea will probably one day be tested in court."

"Stress is the common factor in many behaviours widely understood to be bad for our health - drinking too much booze, smoking cigarettes, even eating unhealthy food. (There is some evidence to suggest that cortisol - the hormone released when we feel stress - makes us crave high fat and sugary foods.) And, these days, many of life's stressors are communicated via the mobile phone. I cannot stop these stressors, but by turning off notifications, I can at least stop them ambushing me. It's an action that helps me regain some sense of control. For example, when I open up a news app, I am ready to find out what is happening in the world. It is different from being in the supermarket cheese aisle and getting an alert, where - as part of a whole barrage of communications - I may feel blindsided."

"The campaign is spearheaded by the privacy advocate Big Brother Watch and is also backed by 31 groups including Liberty, Amnesty International and the Race Equality Foundation. Police have deployed live facial recognition at large-scale public events, including King Charles's coronation. The statement said: "We hold differing views about live facial recognition surveillance, ranging from serious concerns about its incompatibility with human rights, to the potential for discriminatory impact, the lack of safeguards, the lack of an evidence base, an unproven case of necessity or proportionality, the lack of a sufficient legal basis, the lack of parliamentary consideration, and the lack of a democratic mandate. "We call on UK police and private companies to immediately stop using live facial recognition for public surveillance.""

""As expected, we found evidence of a performance improvement over generations due to social learning," the researchers wrote. "Adding an algorithm with a different problem-solving bias than humans temporarily improved human performance but improvements were not sustained in following generations. While humans did copy solutions from the algorithm, they appeared to do so at a lower rate than they copied other humans' solutions with comparable performance." Brinkmann told Motherboard that while they were surprised superior solutions weren't more commonly adopted, this was in line with other research suggesting human biases in decision-making persist despite social learning. Still, the team is optimistic that future research can yield insight into how to amend this."

"A collaboration between Oxford University, The Education University of Hong Kong, Reading University and Durham University has found "no evidence to suggest abstaining from social media has a positive effect on an individual's well-being." The researchers noted that this contrasts popular beliefs about the benefits of digital detoxes. Moreover, this international study found that those who took a break from social media didn't replace online socializing with face-to-face, voice, or email interactions, as the researchers had expected. Taking a break from social media therefore led to reduced overall interaction and loneliness as social media was not replaced with forms of socializing."

"Countries around the world are deploying technologies-like digital IDs, facial recognition systems, GPS devices, and spyware-that are meant to improve governance and reduce crime. But there has been little evidence to back these claims, all while introducing a high risk of exclusion, bias, misidentification, and privacy violations. It's important to note that these impacts are not equal. They fall disproportionately on religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities, migrants and refugees, as well as human rights activists and political dissidents."

"Disappearing messages is a feature offered by apps like Signal and WhatsApp, giving users the option to have conversations that self-destruct. They're not the only platforms that have tapped into the allure of digital ephemerality. The very premise of Snapchat is that content is only viewable for a short window; Instagram stories similarly vanish after 24 hours. Those who are chronically online may remember the last day of X's own foray into expiring content called "fleets", when countless users threw whatever remaining posting-caution they had to the wind to share revealing, horny or outright unhinged posts for one final hurrah before the feature itself vanished. I can't tell you what people posted or link you to evidence of this because, well, it's gone."

"Police officers are watching TikTok in an attempt to catch far-right demonstrators livestreaming self-incriminating footage of their illegal behaviour. TikTok's Live function has become one of the defining outlets for coverage of this summer's riots, with hundreds of thousands of viewers watching live streams of rioting over the last week in cities such as Stoke, Leeds, Hull and Nottingham."

"Exposure to false and inflammatory content is remarkably low, with just 1% of Twitter users accounting for 80% of exposure to dubious websites during the 2016 U.S. election. This is heavily concentrated among a small fringe of users actively seeking it out. Examples: 6.3% of YouTube users were responsible for 79.8% of exposure to extremist channels from July to December 2020, 85% of vaccine-sceptical content was consumed by less than 1% of US citizens in the 2016-2019 period. Conventional wisdom blames platform algorithms for spreading misinformation. However, evidence suggests user preferences play an outsized role. For instance, a mere 0.04% of YouTube's algorithmic recommendations directed users to extremist content. It's tempting to draw a straight line between social media usage and societal ills. But studies rigorously designed to untangle cause and effect often come up short. "

"A core selling point of machine learning is discovery without understanding, which is why errors are particularly common in machine-learning-based science. Three years ago, we compiled evidence revealing that an error called leakage - the machine learning version of teaching to the test - was pervasive, affecting hundreds of papers from 17 disciplines. Since then, we have been trying to understand the problem better and devise solutions.  This post presents an update. In short, we think things will get worse before they get better, although there are glimmers of hope on the horizon."

"Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments, with people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. Data from a large real-world social network, collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks [Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2008) BMJ 337:a2338], although the results are controversial. "

"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.""

"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."

"It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. "But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it-a broader impact on trust," he said. "Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can't trust anything, and other people are being misled about it-well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself." Nyhan had a similar reaction. "There are genuine questions that are really important, but there's a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. 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.""