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"Contrary to the images circulating on social media, Katy Perry was not one of them. "Couldn't make it to the MET, had to work," the singer posted on Instagram, alongside a video of herself singing in the studio - as well as two photos seemingly showing her at the gala. They were actually made with AI."

"The children's safety codes, introduced as part of the Online Safety Act, let Ofcom set new, tight rules for internet companies and how they can interact with children. It calls on services to make their platforms child-safe by default or implement robust age checks to identify children and give them safer versions of the experience. For those sites with age checks, Ofcom will require algorithmic curation to be tweaked to limit the risks to younger users. That would require sites such as Instagram and TikTok to ensure the suggested posts and "for you" pages explicitly take account of the age of children."

"A leading psychologist who advises Meta on suicide prevention and self-harm has quit her role, accusing the tech giant of "turning a blind eye" to harmful content on Instagram, repeatedly ignoring expert advice and prioritising profit over lives. Lotte Rubæk, who has been on Meta's global expert group for more than three years, told the Observer that the tech giant's ongoing failure to remove images of self-harm from its platforms is "triggering" vulnerable young women and girls to further harm themselves and contributing to rising suicide figures."

"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."

"Instagram has been used to promote sexual violence and exploitation by people advertising themselves as "pimps", a Guardian investigation has found. For the past year, the Guardian has been tracking Instagram accounts hosting content that advocates such activity as well as those that encourage violence against the women under the control of a pimp - someone who makes money from selling others for sex. The accounts identified often use hashtags as well as code phrases commonly associated with sex work to make it easier for buyers to locate them."

"Facebook and Instagram users will start seeing labels on AI-generated images that appear on their social media feeds, part of a broader tech industry initiative to sort between what's real and not. Meta said Tuesday it's working with industry partners on technical standards that will make it easier to identify images and eventually video and audio generated by artificial intelligence tools."

"Cory blames the gang who trafficked her daughter for destroying her life. She also blames Instagram, which she believes played a critical role in her daughter's sex trafficking. "If Instagram didn't exist, this wouldn't have happened to my daughter," she says. "Instagram is why it was so easy [for these people] to do this.""

"Meta estimates about 100,000 children using Facebook and Instagram receive online sexual harassment each day, including "pictures of adult genitalia", according to internal company documents made public late Wednesday."

"For Bejar, the controls in place on social networks like Instagram are not sufficient because they turn "inherently human interactions into an objective assessment". There are too few options for users to hide content or flag comments and DMs and explain why it made them uncomfortable even if it doesn't violate Meta's specific policies, he said. "There's a question of how clearly bad does the content need to be to warrant removal? And that means you set a line somewhere and have to define a criterion where either a computer system or a human can evaluate a piece of content," Bejar said."

"The complaint is a key part of a lawsuit filed against Meta by the attorneys general of 33 states in late October and was originally redacted. It alleges the social media company knew - but never disclosed - it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts. The large number of underage users was an "open secret" at the company, the suit alleges, citing internal company documents. In one example, the lawsuit cites an internal email thread in which employees discuss why a 12-year-old girl's four accounts were not deleted following complaints from the girl's mother stating her daughter was 12 years old and requesting the accounts to be taken down. The employees concluded that "the accounts were ignored" in part because representatives of Meta "couldn't tell for sure the user was underage"."

"A scammer paid Facebook's parent company $7,000 to reach up to 100,000 people in Australia with a deepfake A Current Affair video featuring altered versions of Jim Chalmers, Dick Smith, Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart, data reveals. Smith issued a warning to the public earlier this week after a video began circulating on Facebook and Instagram in recent weeks. The video was designed to appear like a segment on A Current Affair, featuring host Ally Langdon seemingly interviewing the treasurer and the rich listers about an investment opportunity."

"After I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in 2022, I started following Instagram accounts that could help me understand the condition. Reels and memes about being neurodivergent started to fill my feed, along with tips on how to manage ADHD in a relationship and other helpful advice. But within days, something else happened: my phone found out about my diagnosis. All of a sudden, I was being served with ads for apps that claimed they could help me to manage my symptoms. There were quizzes to determine what type of ADHD I had: was I predominantly inattentive or impulsive, one asked. Did I definitely have it? Find out by taking this diagnostic test, another promised."

"A Taiwanese American model says a well-known fashion designer uploaded a digitally altered runway photo that made her appear white. In a TikTok about the incident that has been viewed 1.8m times in the last week, Shereen Wu says Michael Costello, a designer who has worked with Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and Celine Dion, posted a photo to his Instagram from a recent Los Angeles fashion show. The photo depicts Wu in the slinky black ballgown that she walked the runway in - but her face has been changed, made to appear as if she is a white woman."

"Zuckerberg understands that well. As I wrote earlier this week, TikTok is growing at blinding speed, and that has Zuckerberg worried. And rightfully so. He knows more than anyone else that attention is fleeting; viewers are fickle. Same folks who like spending hours on Facebook and Instagram will jettison the platforms for TikTok in a jiffy. He needs to figure out a way to keep them corralled."

"Meta has apologised after inserting the word "terrorist" into the profile bios of some Palestinian Instagram users, in what the company says was a bug in auto-translation. The issue, which was first reported by 404media, affected users with the word "Palestinian" written in English on their profile, the Palestinian flag emoji and the word "alhamdulillah" written in Arabic. When auto-translated to English the phrase read: "Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom." TikTok user YtKingKhan posted earlier this week about the issue, noting that different combinations still translated to "terrorist"."

"Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is considering charging users in the EU €13 (£11) a month to access an ad-free version of Instagram or Facebook on their phones, as the company grapples with regulatory pressure on how it uses people's data. Meta is also weighing a €17 charge to use Instagram and Facebook without adverts on desktop, according to sources close to the discussions. Accessing both apps on smartphones would cost about €19 a month."

"In one case, a government campaign aimed at helping young people off benefits was targeted at Facebook users with interests including "afro-textured hair" and the "West Indies cricket team". Other campaigns have targeted LGBTQ+ content at people interested in "genderqueer" issues and the TV show RuPaul's Drag Race; council support services at people interested in "hijabs" and "Islamic dietary requirements"; and an appeal for witnesses to a murder in Manchester aimed at people interested in "hip-hop", "rapping", Kim Kardashian and Usain Bolt. The "microtargeting" is revealed in analysis of more than 12,000 ads which ran on Facebook and Instagram between late 2020 and 2023. Supplied to UK academics by Facebook's parent company Meta, and shared with the Observer, the data gives an insight into the use of targeted advertising by the state based on profiling by the world's biggest social media company. In 2021, Facebook announced a ban on targeting based on race, religion and sexual orientation amid concerns about discrimination, which led to the removal of several interest categories that had been used by advertisers to reach and exclude minority groups."

"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."

"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."

"In the 20 years since the birth of social media, child sexual exploitation has become one of the biggest challenges facing tech companies. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the internet is used by human traffickers as "digital hunting fields", allowing them access to both customers and potential victims, with children being targeted by traffickers on social media platforms. The biggest of these, Facebook, is owned by Meta, the tech giant whose platforms, which also include Instagram, are used by more than 3 billion people worldwide. In 2020, according to a report by US-based not-for-profit the Human Trafficking Institute, Facebook was the platform most used to groom and recruit children by sex traffickers (65%), based on an analysis of 105 federal child sex trafficking cases that year. The HTI analysis ranked Instagram second most prevalent, with Snapchat third."