Digit_al Society

"Peer pressure aside, the 32-year-old is not alone. Britain's communications watchdog reported last week that UK adults were becoming less active on social media platforms. Ofcom said just under half of adult social media users (49%) now post, share or comment, compared with 61% in 2024. So is the UK turning off social media?"

"The antisocial behaviour took place after link-ups arranged on social media sites including TikTok and Snapchat. In a statement, the Met urged social media companies to "play their part by taking responsibility for content on their platforms that promotes or incites disorder"."

"The findings have the potential to upend pseudonymity, an imperfect but often sufficient privacy measure used by many people to post queries and participate in sometimes sensitive public discussions while making it hard for others to positively identify the speakers. The ability to cheaply and quickly identify the people behind such obscured accounts opens them up to doxxing, stalking, and the assembly of detailed marketing profiles that track where speakers live, what they do for a living, and other personal information. This pseudonymity measure no longer holds. "Our findings have significant implications for online privacy," the researchers wrote. "The average online user has long operated under an implicit threat model where they have assumed pseudonymity provides adequate protection because targeted deanonymization would require extensive effort. LLMs invalidate this assumption.""

"This perceptual shift has consequences for how AI shapes beliefs. Our data shows that AI is a more potent driver of belief certainty than traditional social media platforms. While 44.5 percent of users report that AI makes them more certain about their important beliefs, only 38.5 percent say the same of social media. More striking still, AI interactions are nearly three times less likely to cause users to doubt their beliefs (4.8 percent) compared to social media interactions (13.9 percent)."

"AI has made it vastly easier for malicious hackers to identify anonymous social media accounts, a new study has warned. In most test scenarios, large language models (LLMs) - the technology behind platforms such as ChatGPT - successfully matched anonymous online users with their actual identities on other platforms, based on the information they posted."

"Grandmother jailed 108 days after facial recognition got it wrong"

"AI autocomplete doesn't just change how you write. It changes how you think AI-powered writing tools are increasingly integrated into our e-mails and phones. Now a new study finds biased AI suggestions can sway users' beliefs"

"Confidential health records from UK BioBank project exposed online Exclusive: Guardian investigation finds data from flagship medical research leaked dozens of times"

"'Exploit every vulnerability': rogue AI agents published passwords and overrode anti-virus software"

"Perhaps the clearest examples of eroding privacy norms come from romantic partnerships, where tracking and monitoring have become widely accepted substitutes for direct communication. In a 2021 study published in Children and Youth Services Review, researchers found that almost 60% of young adults surveyed had experienced "digital monitoring or control" while dating, which the study defined as "using social media/technology to keep track of, intrude on the privacy of, and control the activities of a dating partner". It's now normal to scan a partner's social media profiles for small signs of disloyalty, such as an Instagram "like" on another person's photo or a tagged photo at an unexpected place. Some people go so far as to pay amateur online sleuths for a full audit of their partner's digital footprint."

"While social media bans may seem like a prudent measure to protect children, they are not only ineffective, they endanger both children and adults. There is little evidence that social media is driving any type of widespread mental health crisis in children. Studies have repeatedly shown the opposite. Removing anonymity from the web, which will inevitably happen when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for easier government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, who rely on online anonymity. And while some claim the laws would curb big tech's power, only the largest tech companies have the resources to shoulder the extensive costs of age verification systems. Non-profit and indie platforms could be forced to close, consolidating big tech's power further. Mass surveillance systems, once constructed, could also be easily leveraged by governments and bad actors."

"Microsoft just gave the internet a masterclass in the Streisand effect. The company added "Microslop" - a derisive nickname for Microsoft that took off after Merriam-Webster named "slop" its 2025 word of the year - to the auto-moderation block list on its official Copilot Discord server. Any message containing the word was silently swallowed by bots before it could appear in chat, reports Windows Latest."

"We've spent today working to separate the real from the fictitious as pictures and video flood social media following three days of strikes across Iran, Israel and several Gulf nations. Here's some of the fakery spreading on social media that we've debunked: An image claiming to be of a huge explosion at an Iraqi airport was made using AI Google Earth satellite images that were manipulated to claim damage to a US Navy base Fake social media accounts claiming to belong to senior Iranian cleric"

"Ceccanti had been communicating with OpenAI's chatbot for a few years. He used it initially as a tool to brainstorm ways to build a path to low-cost housing for his community in Clatskanie, Oregon, but eventually turned to it as a confidante. He would spend 12 hours a day typing to the bot, according to his wife. He had cut himself off from it after she, along with his friends, realized he was spiraling into beliefs that were detached from reality. "He was not a depressed person," Fox said, as she sat on the couch in their living room with tears trickling down her face. Ceccanti never discussed suicide with the bot, according to his chat logs, viewed by the Guardian. Fox believes her husband suffered a crisis after quitting ChatGPT after prolonged use. "Which tells me that this thing is not just dangerous to people with depression, it's dangerous to anybody," she said. He returned to the bot in the months leading up to his death and quit again just days prior."

"Workers grappling with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence have said they feel "devalued" by the technology and warned of a downward trajectory in the quality of work. Recent analysis by the International Monetary Fund found AI would affect about 40% of jobs around the world. Its head, Kristalina Georgieva, has said: "This is like a tsunami hitting the labour market." Workers who have trained AI models to replace some or all of their roles tell the Guardian about their experiences."

" Spanish engineer reports flaw in 'smart' vacuums after gaining control of 7,000 devices Sammy Azdoufal alerted New York-based outlet the Verge after he took control of DJI Romo devices around the world Eric Berger Tue 24 Feb 2026 20.40 GMT Share Prefer the Guardian on Google A Spanish software engineer reportedly contacted a New York-based tech outlet recently to reveal he had remotely taken control of about 7,000 vacuums worldwide, in the process shedding light on a broad vulnerability with smart products, according to a cybersecurity expert. The Verge reported that the situation came to light when Sammy Azdoufal was trying to reverse-engineer his new DJI Romo vacuum so that he could control it with his Playstation 5 gamepad."

"'In the end, you feel blank': India's female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI Women in rural communities describe trauma of moderating violent and pornographic content for global tech companies"

"Google DeepMind is calling for the moral behavior of large language models-such as what they do when called on to act as companions, therapists, medical advisors, and so on-to be scrutinized with the same kind of rigor as their ability to code or do math. As LLMs improve, people are asking them to play more and more sensitive roles in their lives. Agents are starting to take actions on people's behalf. LLMs may be able to influence human decision-making. And yet nobody knows how trustworthy this technology really is at such tasks. With coding and math, you have clear-cut, correct answers that you can check, William Isaac, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, told me when I met him and Julia Haas, a fellow research scientist at the firm, for an exclusive preview of their work, which is published in Nature today. That's not the case for moral questions, which typically have a range of acceptable answers: "Morality is an important capability but hard to evaluate," says Isaac. "In the moral domain, there's no right and wrong," adds Haas. "But it's not by any means a free-for-all. There are better answers and there are worse answers.""