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"Some might scoff at this, and point out that news organisations make their own mistakes all the time - more consequential than my physicist/physician howler, if less humiliating. But cases of bad journalism are almost always warped representations of the real world, rather than missives from an imaginary one. Crucially, if an outlet gets big things wrong a lot, its reputation will suffer, and its audience are likely to vote with their feet, or other people will publish stories that air the mistake. And all of it will be out in the open. You may also note that journalists are increasingly likely to use AI in the production of stories - and there is no doubt that it is a phenomenally powerful tool, allowing investigative reporters to find patterns in vast financial datasets that reveal corruption, or analyse satellite imagery for evidence of bombing attacks in areas designated safe for civilians. There is a legitimate debate over the extent of disclosure required in such cases: on the one hand, if the inputs and outputs are being properly vetted, it might be a bit like flagging the use of Excel; on the other, AI is still new enough that readers may expect you to err on the side of caution. Still, the fundamental difference is not in what you're telling your audience, but what degree of supervision you're exercising over the machine."

"The missing internet history could hold vital clues about why the killer targeted young girls, but it was deleted by Rudakubana 10 minutes before he left home to carry out the "ferocious assault" on a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. Police fear it could be years before they see the evidence because they have had to apply for it using a specialist prosecutor in the US, where the technology companies are based. DCI Jason Pye, the detective leading the investigation for Merseyside police, said: "We're going through that process at the moment but we've been told it could be years.""

""All I kept coming back to was, what would Chris say?" Wales said. As AI spreads across society and enters the courtroom, the US judicial conference advisory committee has announced that it will begin seeking public comment as part of determining how to regulate the use of AI-generated evidence at trial."

"What we know about reducing misinformation Where the evidence stands for six strategies used to reduce the spread and impact of misinformation, according to the Prosocial Design Network"

"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.""

"But we're not entirely to blame if technology is making us less intelligent. After all, it was designed to captivate us totally. Silicon Valley's dirtiest design feature - which is everywhere once you spot it - is the infinite scroll, likened to the "bottomless soup bowl" experiment, in which participants will keep mindlessly eating from a soup bowl if it keeps refilling. An online feed that constantly "refills" manipulates the brain's dopaminergic reward system in a similar way. These powerful dopamine-driven loops of endless "seeking" can become addictive."