The Guardian

Has the ban started, and how will age verification work? Platforms will need to deactivate accounts for users under 16 and stop teens from making accounts until they are that age, or face fines of up to $50m. Here’s everything you need to know Millions of children and teens lose access to accounts as Australia’s world-first social media ban begins Read more about Australia’s social media ban Aust…

As midlife audiences turn to digital media, the 55 to 64 age bracket is an increasingly important demographic In 2022, Caroline Idiens was on holiday halfway up an Italian mountain when her brother called to tell her to check her Instagram account. “I said, ‘I haven’t got any wifi. And he said: ‘Every time you refresh, it’s adding 500 followers.’ So I had to try to get to the top of the hill with…

Easy-to-guess words and figures still dominate, alarming cysbersecurity experts and delighting hackers It is a hacker’s dream. Even in the face of repeated warnings to protect online accounts, a new study reveals that “admin” is the most commonly used password in the UK. The second most popular, “123456”, is also unlikely to keep hackers at bay. Continue reading...

Hundreds of videos on TikTok and elsewhere impersonate experts to sell supplements with unproven effects TikTok and other social media platforms are hosting AI-generated deepfake videos of doctors whose words have been manipulated to help sell supplements and spread health misinformation. The factchecking organisation Full Fact has uncovered hundreds of such videos featuring impersonated versions…

Web infrastructure provider says it has implemented a fix after users had seen ‘a large number of empty pages’ A host of websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector went offline on Friday morning after fresh problems at Cloudflare. Cloudflare said shortly after 9am UK time that it was “investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs”, referring to application programming in…

We know from recent hacks, and even the Snowden revelations, how vulnerable information gathered is to theft and misuse One thing to remember about the modern world is that nothing online is ever secure. M&S and Jaguar taught us that . Edward Snowden taught us that. Every week, it seems, some giant corporation sees its system collapse at the touch of a button in an attic. The government this week…

Zohran Mamdani, Ozzy Osbourne and Sinners also feature in encyclopedia’s top 20 most-read English-language pages Wikipedia’s article on Charlie Kirk was the most read on the online encyclopedia this year, as users sought out information on the conservative activist. People viewed the entry on Kirk nearly 45m times, many after he was shot at a university campus debate on 10 September. Charlie Kirk…

Independent reviewer says need to protect against online threats is now as important as need for robust armed forces The UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism laws has criticised the government’s latest national security strategy for failing to take online threats more seriously, despite Keir Starmer claiming it would result in “a hardening and sharpening of our approach” in the face of Russian …

Existence of phrase – to describe content intended to make you angry – shows people are aware of manipulation tactics used online, says Oxford Dictionary publisher Good news for those who find their blood pressure rising as they scroll through their online news feeds: the Oxford English Dictionary’s publisher has highlighted the term they might need to describe how they often feel, naming “rage b…

Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea says it is checking whether data taken contained residents’s details A London council has urged thousands of residents to be “extra vigilant” when receiving calls, emails or text messages after confirming that data had been taken in a cyber-attack. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), which has 147,500 residents, said some data had been copie…

Harms include threats to release intimate pictures as charity warns against parents sharing photos or details of children online Nearly one in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, with harms ranging from threatening to release intimate pictures to revealing details about someone’s personal life. The NSPCC child protection charity also found that one in five parents know a ch…

Study shows small changes to tone of posts in ‘for you’ feed increase unfavourable feelings towards political opponents Small changes to the tone of posts fed to users of X can increase feelings of political polarisation as much in a week as would have historically taken at least three years, research has found. A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk’s social platform to in…

Amazon Web Services owns the basic infrastructure for other businesses to operate online, turning even governments into its serfs. But now some people are fighting back For the past six years, every Black Friday – that made-up carnival of consumption – Amazon workers and their allies have mobilised across the world in coordinated strikes and protests . At first glance, these disputes look like th…

She has read 57 books this year, whereas I have watched all of Selling Sunset. But we listen to each other – and enjoy it There are some pretty big differences between me and my girlfriend. She is from Aotearoa, I’m from Queensland. She is 10 years younger than me. She loves Marmite and loathes Vegemite; I hold the reverse and correct opinion. But probably our biggest difference is in our attitud…

A new feature on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter allows users to see the location of other accounts. It has resulted in a firestorm of recriminations When X rolled out a new feature revealing the locations of popular accounts, the company was acting to boost transparency and clamp down on disinformation. The result, however, has been a circular firing squad of recriminations, …