Tim Cook has long taken a strong stance against the infringement of Apple users' privacy – and the general erosion of privacy. That's been the case whether he's shown support for end-to-end encryption or if he's railed against the monetization of user data.

The rise of data protection

Almost a decade ago, the European Union (EU) introduced the most radical reformations to data protection laws in a generation with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Several months later, the (now outgoing) Apple CEO spoke at the 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners with a speech that targeted Apple's fellow technology rivals with both barrels.

He pointed out that billions of dollars were changing hands – and countless decisions were being made based on data points harvested from our interactions on digital platforms. These may include clicks of a Like button but also the information we have shared, often without understanding the full implications.

Your very own digital profile

Cook projected a dystopian future in which each person would be represented by a digital profile that's been devised based on analysis of the countless data points systems have gathered.

The purpose of this form of behavioral profiling, he suggested in his speech, could range from more effectively monetising your information to targeting you with more extremist content in one direction or another.

For example, we've since seen the way that social media platforms and similar sites have been highly effective in populist political movements, including the U.K. 'Brexit' decision to leave the EU. There are also fears this sort of power has been weaponized, to use Cook's phrase, by foreign adversaries.

Nearly 10 years on from the introduction of GDPR, there are fears that the rise of AI – which is turbocharging some of the fears the outgoing Apple boss raised – is undermining the laws and that newer, more modern regulations are needed.

The UK Government has finally announced its long-rumoured social media ban for under-16s. While the current proposal focuses on social media platforms, lawmakers are also considering restrictions on gaming platforms, streaming services, and, potentially, VPNs.

Previously, the Online Safety Act’s age verification requirements led swathes of people to use VPNs to avoid the measures. Now, the worry is that, without restrictions to VPN access, circumvention of the social media ban would leave children exposed to the materials the move aims to block.

The problem is that circumvention risks have blinded policymakers to a key factor — VPNs are crucial to securing children online.

Be it securing their data against leaks or the growing integration of features such as parental controls, there’d be greater harm from banning these tools than from leaving them be. What’s more, with the UK adopting an ‘Australia plus’ model, there’s little chance VPNs would help anyway.

How VPNs actually improve children’s online safety

Research by Childnet in late 2025 showed that while VPN providers saw searches increase over 300% when age verification arrived, there was no huge rise in VPN uptake by children when age verification landed that July. Uptake in the 3 months after was only 2% higher than a year earlier.

In the same study, 38% of children said that their primary reason for using a VPN was to stay safe online. By contrast, only 10% of children said they used a VPN to access content that they shouldn't.

Talking to TechRadar, Childnet International CEO Will Gardner elaborated, saying:

“Children that use VPNs do so for a variety of reasons, and, in fact, the primary reason they gave was to protect their privacy/online safety… any steps to restrict children from using this technology will be overriding these [reasons].”

Unsurprisingly, the VPN industry itself isn’t oblivious to the risks that children face online either.

Speaking to TechRadar, Chief Research Officer at ExpressVPN, Pete Membrey, underlined how VPNs can shield children from tracking and online profiling, and “provide private access to health information and safeguarding services”.

In other words, children can access the materials they need to remain healthy, even if they are in unsafe living situations.

ExpressVPN took this one step further earlier this year. Partnering with the International Watch Foundation (IWF), a foundation aiming to eliminate all child sexual abuse material online, ExpressVPN now blocks all sites listed by the IWF as hosting child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

This means any child using the internet while connected to ExpressVPN cannot see these materials. What’s more, parents can take this one step further thanks to adult content blocking settings in-app. If VPNs were restricted, neither of these capabilities would be accessible.

ExpressVPN has also made the technology for blocking CSAM material, OpenBoundary, open source, in a move to encourage other services to take similar measures.

Speaking on the importance of the partnership, Membrey explained:

“Our partnership with the Internet Watch Foundation takes [protecting children online] further…it shows that VPN providers can actively contribute to child protection while preserving the privacy that makes VPNs valuable in the first place."

“We empower parents to protect their children by applying these VPN benefits to their kids’ online activity.”

ExpressVPN is not the only VPN to have taken action to protect children. Countless of the best VPNs now offer measures such as parental controls and content blocking to protect children online — including NordVPN, Surfshark, Windscribe, and more.

The UK Government is also looking at gaming and streaming as part of the measures. In these instances, VPNs can not only secure the data you send online but also help prevent doxxing, meaning revealing someone's personally identifying details online, and other malicious practices that children can be exposed to.

Parental controls integrated into VPNs can also limit access to these services without the need to compromise VPNs entirely, unlike a total ban which risks leaving children totally exposed.

The VPN industry is also taking to other areas of parenting problems, disrupting those other markets by solving them in a more secure way.

HeyPolo is one example, a private location-tracking solution built by the team behind Surfshark.

Its tracking is entirely consent-based, so no one is tracked more than they want to. More importantly, no user data is sold to advertisers, protecting children from unwanted online profiling before they understand what it is.

Compare that to the current market-leading family tracking service, Life 360, which openly sells user data and bombards with advertising, rather than focusing on the online safety of the children using the platform.

The risks of imposing VPN restrictions

VPN restrictions are no guarantee of online child safety. App stores are constantly flooded with VPNs claiming to be safe that are entirely the opposite.

A TechRadar study recently found that over 75% of Android VPNs fail basic transparency tests, and it’s unlikely that restrictions would stop the emergence of such services appearing and being available to download before being restricted.

So any government-imposed restrictions on known VPNs would very likely push children to these untrustworthy and often malicious services. This could lead to children’s data being collected and monetized or put into databases at risk of breach from bad actors.

The same can be said for social media platforms. As YouTube spokesperson Jay Stoll,, explained while speaking to Wired: “Blanket bans push kids out of such curated, supervised, beneficial experiences and towards anonymous, less safe services.”

When age verification measures arrived on adult content in the UK, the number of people accessing this content via unregulated websites skyrocketed.

Data from the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a foundation named after its founder, suggested that up to 39% of adults had accessed content through unregulated sites.

Were the proposed restrictions to come in, there’s little to stop this from occurring again.

If, however, VPNs weren’t restricted, malicious content blocking tools included in these services would be a simple solution.

Keeping children protected and private

There’s little opposition to the need to protect children online. Where problems arise, though, is the UK government’s proposal to diminish online privacy to achieve this. Suggesting that one must be compromised so the other remains is a false dichotomy and undermines the broader benefits of a VPN to children and the wider population.

VPN restrictions are still under consideration for the coming months, and that means there’s still time for a solution that protects children online without compromising their access to protective, privacy-focused tools, but the signs aren’t good.

This is the second time in the past 12 months that VPNs have come under extreme scrutiny in the UK.

Many of the suggested actions are technically impossible. Adding age verification to the VPNs themselves, for example, would fundamentally contradict the no-logs policies these tools are built on, and the infrastructure VPNs use wouldn’t be capable of verifying a user's age without breaching this.

Regardless, it’s becoming difficult to see a future where access to these services isn’t restricted in some form to allow for greater protection of children and vulnerable adults online.

Australia’s model, which the UK Government’s proposal is built from, puts the onus on social media platforms to prevent VPN misuse, we’ll have to wait and see whether the UK will follow suit.

Following on from Australia banning social media access for under-16s, a ruling which came into force in December 2025, the UK government has announced its own restrictions for children — and they look set to be even stricter that those put in place by the authorities in Australia.

Announced by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the move will "give kids their childhood back" according to Downing Street. "The plans will set a new normal for future generations, kickstarting a cultural shift and driving forward the government’s fight to give every child the best start in life."

These are sweeping regulations and are likely to genuinely transform digital device use for young people — and quite possibly everyone else in the UK too — but there are some big questions remaining about how all of this is actually going to work.

Here's what you need to know based on what's been made official so far.

1. Which apps are affected?

The UK government says it's still evaluating this, but that it's going to target "user-to-user platforms, whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material, alongside algorithms". The qualifying apps that have been mentioned specifically so far are:

• Snapchat
• TikTok
• YouTube
• Instagram
• Facebook
• X

However, more apps will likely join that list. Liz Kendall (Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology) recently confirmed that Bluesky will be included, as it's on the list of apps affected by Australia's social media ban.

Australia's list of age-restricted apps also contains Reddit, Threads and Twitch. Messaging services, including WhatsApp and Signal, are excluded. There will also be a "narrowly defined list of exemptions" that's regularly reviewed. Livestreaming for under-16s is also going to be banned, across all platforms.

For gaming, the official line is that communications with "strangers" will be restricted, but children will still have access to multiplayer online games. AI chatbots are affected as well: bots built to offer companionship will be out of bounds for anyone under the age of 18 (not just 16), while more general-purpose bots have to set limits in terms of "intimate functionalities" for under-18s as well. Apps such as ChatGPT already have some robust parental controls in place.

2. When will the ban start?

Everything has now been set in motion after the official announcement, but there's still quite a way to go. The timetable put forward by Downing Street suggests that spring 2027 (so March, April, or May) is when the restrictions will actually come into place.

Before that, there's work to do. More detailed proposals will be put before Parliament by the end of 2026, although it's worth noting that both the Commons and the Lords have already decided that the government must take action on this issue — so this stage will be more of a formality than a debate.

It's worth bearing in mind that these measures come as a follow-up to the Online Safety Act, which came into force in 2025. That required apps and sites featuring adult content to put in some form of age verification — so really the social media ban for under-16s is an extension of these obligations, rather than something completely new.

3. How will the rules be enforced?

This is the biggest unknown right now, and the cause of most controversy. The government line is that regulator Ofcom will now conduct a "rapid study" into the best way to go about age verification, and that officials will be taking a close look at how Australia enforces its own ban.

In Australia, the duty falls on the platforms to make sure appropriate age checks are in place. The methods used for this vary, but include selfies and a lot of AI detection methods. Signals such as how long someone has had an account, and what they use it for, are also factored in to flag up the accounts of children under the age of 16.

Meta says it's booted hundreds of thousands of kids off Facebook and Instagram in Australia, though the company still argues that age verification should be handled at the device level so that platforms don't have to apply checks. We'll have to wait and see exactly how the UK government decides to implement this.

4. How will this affect adults?

Critics of the new legislation argue that it will mean the end to anonymity online — that anyone, of any age, will need to verify their identity to use websites and apps. The truth is that this is already happening, because of the Online Safety Act.

Earlier this year Apple rolled out age verification for iPhone owners in the UK, in order to comply with the Online Safety Act and preempt any further restrictions that are put in place. Registering a credit card or uploading a driving license are a couple of the ways this works for iOS, and we'll be seeing more of this over the next year.

Other verification methods we've seen include selfie age estimations, and registering email addresses that are verified as being run by an adult. If you're 16 or over and you've already worked through one of these processes, you shouldn't have to do it again.

5. What happens next?

The UK government says it will be publishing further details about its plans in July 2026, so we should get more clarity on some of these issues then. We'll also be hearing from Ofcom about how it plans to put in restrictions that kids will find it difficult to get around.

If you're a parent of someone under 16, or indeed you're under 16 yourself, you don't have to do anything else right now except wait. We don't yet know when the cut-off date will be, or what will happen to the existing accounts of kids kicked off these platforms.

What might also happen next is an increase in searches from tech-savvy children looking to get around the incoming regulations — but the signs are that age checks will be needed for privacy tools like VPNs as well.

• Experts say more evidence is needed on kids' phone use
• They were speaking in a House of Commons Select Committee
• Right now "almost everything is correlational"

The UK government has now put in motion a plan to ban under-16s from accessing social media content in apps such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok — but elsewhere in the corridors of Westminster, experts are advising politicians that there's not much in the way of solid evidence when it comes to phone use and the childhood brain.

Speaking at the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee this week in the House of Commons (via The Register), academics said that there just isn't enough data to show how social media and phone use might be shaping young minds as they develop.

"There is very little, if any, causal research in the early years," said Professor Denis Mareschal, who is the director of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck College. "Almost everything is correlational."

Those views were echoed by University of Cambridge Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, who said that the impact of "digital devices or social media" on adolescent brains amounted to "almost nothing". "There are a few small studies, but they haven't been replicated, and they're purely correlational," she said.

No precise age cut-off

However, while it's a case of more research needed, the experts certainly didn't dismiss concerns over child safety either. The panel acknowledged that reward and self-control systems in the brain are still forming during childhood and adolescence, and that even adults find phone use and social media addictive.

Dr Dusana Dorjee, from the University of York, made the point that time spent on a device is time not spent playing or interacting with others. A lack of that kind of multi-sensory input could be having an impact, she suggested.

As you would expect, there were questions about suitable age for letting children have phones and use social media, but according to Blakemore "what neuroscience can't do is pinpoint a precise age" — there's just too much variation between individuals.

AI chatbots were brought up too, but the answer was the same: we urgently need more evidence for their effects on kids and how they are relating to tools like ChatGPT. While there are a lot of worries and stories around these child safety issues, we're still waiting for the large-scale studies that can provide some definitive, data-led answers.

The UK has become the latest country to ban social media for under-16s, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer announcing today that "children will be given back their childhoods thanks to government action".

Following Australia's decision to lock teens out of popular social media apps in December 2025, the UK has promised "world-leading additional restrictions" on features like live streaming and strangers communicating with children.

The landmark legislation, which the UK government says is "backed by 9 in 10 parents", is expected to be brought before Parliament before Christmas, and could then come into force in Spring 2027.

So how exactly will the social media ban work, and what does it mean for children in the UK? You can follow all of the latest updates here live...

UK social media ban — a quick primer

Hello, and welcome to our liveblog on the UK's landmark social media ban for under-16s.

We'll be rounding up all of the latest news, reactions and more here today, but first a quick primer on what's happened.

The UK announced the social media ban for under-16s this morning. The statement says that social media is "designed to be addictive" and that the restrictions will give mean "less time for scrolling and more time for play".

The government says it will "use the same model for a social media ban as Australia" and that means the platforms will include Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. It won't include private messaging apps likes of WhatsApp and Signal.

If it's passed by Parliament later this year, the ban is expected to come into force from Spring 2027.

Which platforms are affected?

The UK government's statement lists some of the major platforms that will be affected by its proposed ban. These are

• Snapchat
• TikTok
• YouTube
• Instagram
• Facebook
• X

The UK government says that "we do not intend for messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to be included in the social media ban".

However, there are also planned restrictions for "so-called AI ‘romantic companion’ chatbots – designed to simulate sexual relationships or roleplay with users", which will "have to enforce a minimum age of 18".

The statement adds that "similar intimate functionalities will be restricted for under-18s on AI chatbots more widely".

This is an 'Australia plus' ban

As expected, the UK's proposed social media ban for under-16s is following a so-called 'Australia plus' model. That means it's following the thrust of Australia's legislation by restricting access to social media apps for children, but also adding extra restrictions for platforms that aren't banned.

The UK says this will include "world-leading blocks on harmful functions such as livestreaming and stranger communication with children for under-16s" and will affected "a wider range of online services, including on gaming sites".

And that's not it — the government says it will "also be looking in more detail at overnight curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for under-18-year-olds". Exactly how this might be implemented isn't clear, which is why Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said the UK will "set out more detail in July".

UK says it will "learn the lessons" of Australia ban

Reports have claimed that Australia's social media isn't proving very effective, with research from the Molly Rose Foundation claiming that over half of under-16 users were still on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

The UK government says it will "learn the lessons from Australia’s experience" by introducing "more highly effective age assurance (HEAA) measures to support compliance, making it far harder for children to bypass safeguards". Exactly what that entails, and how it will be balanced with privacy concerns, isn't yet clear.

Ban is "backed by 9 in 10 parents"

The UK government is pretty confident its social media ban for under-16s has public support and will be passed by Parliament "before Christmas".

It says the announcement follows "one of the biggest national conversations held by this government" with over "116,000 responses submitted by parents, children and experts across the country".

In those responses, "9 in 10 parents said they would support a social media ban for children under 16s", it said. Surprisingly, the government added that most "young people" also backed action" with "two-thirds agreeing that children younger than 16 should not be allowed to use at least some social media platforms".

That said, it didn't clarify exactly what it meant by "young people" and some inevitable controversy will arise more from its implementation than the broader idea.

How will the ban work?

The specifics of how the UK's social media ban will work is down to the country's communications regulator, Ofcom. The government says "Ofcom will conduct a rapid study on what is effective age assurance for verifying whether someone is over 16".

Ofcom has said it's been behind "some of the strongest changes" for online safety regulation, which includes porn sites being required to carry out age checks.

This means the UK social media ban will likely rely on technologies like digital ID and face scans — techniques that'll no doubt kickstart another privacy debate. VPNs will also likely in the spotlight, given their role in allowing people to get around similar blocks.

Not everyone backs the ban

The UK's proposed social media ban for under-16s isn't backed by all experts, despite the government's confidence that it has public support.

Professor David Ellis, Chair of Behavioral Science at the University of Bath and a member of the Institute for Digital Security and Behavior, said: "This ban is based on worry, not evidence. The evidence base as it stands suggests social media has a minuscule effect, if any, on teenagers — particularly once you account for the other factors we know shape childhood development".

"It's also unlikely to be straightforward to enforce, given what we've seen elsewhere, and it risks pushing teenagers towards less regulated parts of the internet," he added. "Worse, it lets social media companies off the hook: they can divert resources away from making platforms safer, despite the fact that many young people will simply remain on them".

Is there more to come?

While the ban is currently aimed at under-16s, Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel De Souza wants measures extended to 18-year-olds across several key areas.

“Any online service – not just social media, but gaming and other platforms – that uses harmful features should be banned from accessing under-18s unless and until it can prove it is safe.”

‘Harmful features’ is the term being used throughout this process, likely to allow further features to be added in the future should they be deemed applicable. That said, the Commissioner explicitly mentions addictive scrolling, explicit content, and unwanted strangers in her statement.

Measures surrounding under-18s are to be looked into in more detail in July. However, there’s currently nothing to suggest this will extend to a full ban like that enforced today.

Do you need to do anything?

Thankfully, for now, all you need to do is sit tight and wait for new information. The Government has said it will provide details to families and children ahead of the ban's enforcement.

If you're an adult, the ban will likely take a similar shape to the enforcement of the Online Safety Act age verification measures last year. This means that most likely, your account will automatically be deemed to comply if:

• It's been open for 16 years or longer
• it's linked to an email account that can prove you are over 16
• A bank card is associated to the account that can prove your age

Should you be required to verify your age, it will likely use methods including ID checks, facial scanning, or bank card verification.

If you've already verified your age for services as a result of the Online Safety Act, you shouldn't need to do them again either!

Will it work? Parents are split in polling

More responses to the UK government's plan are coming in.

YouGov has just released a poll that shows while 77% of UK parents with children under 18 support the ban (a point over all Britons in general at 76%), only 45% think it will be very or quite effective at curbing social media use.

59% of the population as a whole think the ban will be not very effective at stopping under-16s from using social media.

Greens say offline support is needed

How are the UK's other parties responding to the ban?

The UK's Green Party has said it "welcomes action to address the harms social media can cause to young people. The impact on mental health and online safety is well documented as is the huge concern among parents, teachers and many young people themselves. Stronger safeguards are clearly needed."

However it added, "organisations including the NSPCC and the Molly Rose Foundation have warned that a blanket ban could leave some young people, particularly disabled and LGBTQIA people, more isolated and cut off from support. We also need to see real investment in youth services and creative activities for young people to fill the void that will be created by this ban."

This echoes the words of Lisa Nandy, the UK's Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, who said "Keeping children safe online must go hand in hand with giving them more opportunities offline."

More UK party leaders weigh in

Sentiment among other parties and their leaders is spilt.

Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative party leader, has called the ban "fantastic news," saying it's "an important step in helping parents protect childhood for children."

Meanwhile Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey noted that while "families have been crying out for action to protect children from harmful social media" he and his party are "really worried that the government hasn't listened, and has instead come up with a half-baked policy that won't keep children safe."

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage doesn't think the ban will work "given the mass adoption of VPNs" adding that this move is "the introduction of Digital ID via the back door." He instead says that "handsets for children with limited features" are the best option — suggesting he's either yet another dumb phone fan, or isn't entirely aware of modern phone's parental controls like the ones Apple just added to iOS 27.

Meta and YouTube respond

Platforms are also sharing their thoughts on the UK's plans.

Speaking to the media a YouTube spokesperson has said "YouTube is a vital resource for young people, educators and parents, external. Blanket bans push kids out of such curated, supervised, beneficial experiences and towards anonymous, less safe services."

Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) has echoed YouTube's response, adding that any targeted age based restrictions should be done on device "so people aren't asked to hand over ID to dozens of individual services to prove their age.”

How will 16 and 17-year-olds prove their age?

When you're trying to prove you're over 18 there are a few methods like a driver's licence or a credit card check that can be used to verify your age. For people aged 16 or 17 there are fewer options, and we'll need to wait and see what Ofcom proposes they use as details of the UK government's plans are hashed out.

Options they could use include provisional driver's licences, bank account information, or passports if they have them.

Whatever verification method is proposed could go hand-in-hand with the UK's legislation to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 by the next general election.

We have our first viral reaction

The mood in UK classrooms today appears to be somber, as this BBC report captures brilliantly.

First, the reporter asks under-16 students to raise their hands if they support the ban — a request that's inevitably met by stunned silence.

Then, when asked what she will do instead of the nine hours per weekend she typically spends on social media, the student Isabella replies "stare at a wall". It's fair to say this isn't going down well with many — and if you've grown up with social media and use it as a communications tool, that's understandable.

Is the evidence really there?

Is there any scientific evidence that social media use harms the brains of children? Not really, as academics told a Science, Innovation and Technology Committee this week.

Professor Denis Mareschal, who is the director of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck College, said "There is very little, if any, causal research in the early years".

And those views were echoed by University of Cambridge Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, who said that the impact of "digital devices or social media" on adolescent brains amounted to "almost nothing".

That's not to say there's no impact, of course, just that the data doesn't yet support the theory that social media's impact on young brains is causational, not just correlational.

• Read more: Brain experts tell the UK government there's 'very little' scientific evidence that phones are harming kids — but a social media ban is going ahead anyway

Bluesky is also included in the ban

The dust is starting to settle on yesterday's bombshell announcement of a UK social media ban for under-16s — and more details are emerging.

For example, Liz Kendall (Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology) has just confirmed (below) that Bluesky will be included in the age restrictions, as it's on Australia's list of affected apps.

If you want to see the full list of affected apps, check out our guide on 5 things you need to know about the UK social media ban.

• Read more: How will the UK's social media ban actually work? Here's the full list of affected apps — and 5 things you need to know

It's safe to say that Meta had a rough Friday morning, with users unable to access Facebook and WhatsApp shortly before 10AM ET.

The initial issues appear to be concentrated on WhatsApp, where users were reporting that the app's main screen failed to load. However, Facebook ended up bearing the brunt of Meta's issues this morning – I encountered the "something went wrong" error, then the classic logo, and then an empty feed that wasn't loading for a while. Down Detector reports quickly spiked to over 100,000 for Facebook issues and then fell to under 5,000 in the hours after

We tracked the disruptions affecting Facebook, WhatsApp, and other Meta platforms in the live blog below, but the issue has since been resolved, with Meta's status page indicating a resolution has been implemented.

A look at Down Detector

It's clear that many of Meta's platforms are having some issues currently, as you can see at the top of Down Detector in the United States.

Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram are at the top of the list, with the first currently leading with over 120,000 reports.

Right now, I still can't get Facebook on the desktop to load; parts of the interface appear, like the main sidebars, but the actual content is missing. Now, I'm in New Jersey experiencing this, but my TechRadar colleagues in the UK are seeing a similar situation, with some posts appearing and then the feed appearing blank.

Let me know what you're seeing in the comments down below.

It does appear that Meta's engineers and other teams might have figured out the issue pretty quickly, though, as Facebook is again loading for a few of my colleagues, and reports on Down Detector are starting to drop for issues with Facebook and Messenger.

Facebook does appear to be recovering a bit. I was able to load the homepage and saw a few posts in the feed, but when I tried to click into one, I just saw the logo centered and Meta at the bottom, so it appears there might still be some issues with parts of the platform.

Let me know what you're seeing in the comments below.

On iOS, the Facebook app is still experiencing issues, mainly with the top story bar appearing empty and the feed serving older stories. For my colleague Josephine Watson in the UK, she's getting a 'Try Again' error at the top of her feed.

Meta confirms four issues with 'business products'

While Facebook is recovering and loading in a much closer to normal form than what we're seeing closer to the top of the hour, Meta's business products status page is showing an active disruption for 'Facebook Ads Manager,' 'Messenger API for Instagram,' 'Messenger Platform,' and 'WhatsApp Business Platform.'

Suffice it to say, it's clear that the issues affecting Meta span platforms – Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp included.

Down Detector reports are dropping

While reported issues with Facebook on Down Detector were over 120,000 nearly an hour ago, that number has fallen pretty sharply as the service has begun to recover. In the last update at 10:47 AM ET on Down Detector, Facebook reports were at 12,286. It's worth noting that it slightly spiked back up, but it's still a massive drop from the height of this issue.

Even so, 12,000 reports are certainly higher than what we normally see on a normal day with Facebook, with no issues.

• First trailer for The Social Network sequel, The Social Reckoning, has been released
• Stars Jeremy Strong, Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison in leading roles
• Movie explores the 2021 whistleblowing scandal, but release coincides with another whistleblower being 'silenced'

The first trailer for The Social Network sequel, The Social Reckoning, has been released (which you can catch up with below).

Starring Jeremy Strong, Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison, the new movie is set to follow the 2021 Facebook internal document leak to the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal by whistleblower, engineer Frances Haugen.

Described by Sony as a "spiritual successor" to The Social Network rather than a traditional sequel, The Social Reckoning will pick up 17 years after the first film ends with an entirely new cast and swaps director David Fincher for Aaron Sorkin (though Sorkin wrote the original screenplay for both).

The trailer has split fan opinion online, with some praising Strong for his "scarily accurate" portrayal of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, while others have dubbed it "unnecessary" and a "SNL sketch."

If you're somebody who has kept up with Facebook-related news over the first few years, you might have noticed that the timing of the trailer release is particularly interesting.

While it doesn't involve Haugen or anything we'll see in the new movie, another Facebook whistleblower, Sarah Wynn-Williams, has been "silenced" by the company mere days before The Social Reckoning debuted its first look.

The Social Reckoning trailer released days after Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams 'banned' from promoting Meta expose

Around the same time as The Social Reckoning is beginning to be promoted, Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former Director of Public Policy at Facebook, was 'banned' from promoting her Meta expose book, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work, at the Hay-on-Wye literature and arts Festival on May 31.

Why? With Meta strongly disputing the book’s claims, the company obtained an arbitration ruling in the US ahead of the book’s publication based on an agreement Wynn-Williams signed upon leaving the company.

This means that the author is banned from promoting or publicly discussing the book, with failure to comply with the rules potentially resulting in penalties of up to $50,000 per breach. As a result, Wynn-Williams sat in silence during her entire panel discussion at the festival.

The situation was described by panel host Carole Cadwalladr as “an author in a hostage situation." Copies of the book were removed from sale during the festival over concerns its sale could be tied to Wynn-Williams’ promotion.

For those who cannot wait for The Social Reckoning's release date of October 9, Careless People is a fantastic starting point to begin to get insight into Facebook's whistleblowing scandals (and I'd recommend this as an audiobook on Spotify, Audible and more).

Sales have reportedly increased by 300% since the 'silencing.'

Featured whistleblower Haugen also has a memoir to tide us over while we wait, with The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook being released in 2023.

• Canada tables the The Safe Social Media Act in Bill C-34
• It needs to be approved by both the House of Commons and the Senate
• Under-16s would be banned from social media platforms

There's an increasing realization that social media isn't particularly healthy for younger children, and a growing number of governments are now taking legislative action in response, with Canada the latest country to move to ban access to social media platforms for under-16s.

This is being done via the The Safe Social Media Act (via Engadget), put forward by the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture Marc Miller. The Act describes "growing risks" for young people that are "real, measurable, and increasing" — including negative effects on mental health, cyberbullying, and sexual abuse.

The Act also flags up AI as driving changes in "how harmful content is created, amplified, and experienced online". The Canadian government posits that the algorithms and engagement-baiting of social media platforms, together with features like endless scroll and autoplaying videos, have exacerbated these problems.

Introduced under Bill C-34, the Act is now officially tabled in the Canadian Parliament, though there's a way to go yet before it's made law. It will need to be voted in by both the House of Commons and the Senate, before being approved by the Governor General, but the process is now well underway.

"We're failing our children," Miller told reporters including CBC. "Enough is enough. We need basic protection in place so every child in this country can be safe on platforms they use every day." The plan is to set up a watchdog commission to make sure the ban on access for under-16s is upheld.

AI not included

The ban would apply to social media platforms, livestreaming services, and adult content services. Social media platforms and livestreaming services (but not adult content services) will be able to apply for exemptions, if they can prove "adequate safeguards" have been put in place for young people.

AI chatbots won't be included in the ban, though the bill does require that they take steps to reduce the risk of harmful content being generated in response to user prompts. Miller said that AI apps represented "an evolving playing field", and that authorities would "keep a close eye" on these services.

Exactly how this ban will be enforced hasn't been specified — Miller said there would be "a back and forth" with the social platforms on this — and CBC quotes concerns from Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa's Canada Research Chair, that any kind of age verification process would impinge on the privacy rights of all users, not just children.

A similar ban on social media for under-16s was put in place in Australia last year, though there's some debate over how effective it's being. Other countries, including the UK, are weighing up restrictions of their own, though difficulties with enforcement and verification are problems no matter what the location.

It's a little over 20 years since Facebook arrived, and social platforms are now facing a real reckoning: Meta and YouTube were ruled "negligent" by a Los Angeles court back in March, while just this week Apple devoted a large part of its WWDC 2026 presentation to improved protections for children on its devices.

The Hunterian Museum of Surgical History in London has a plaque near the entrance which reads, “The museum contains thousands of specimens of human remains, gathered before modern standards of consent were established. We recognize the debt owed to those people - named and unnamed - who in life and death have helped to advance medical knowledge.”

In future years, will people working in the digital industries look back at the ethical deficit of their forebears with the same discomfort? Our naive understanding of privacy, our ambivalence about the safety of vulnerable users, our contempt for those excluded from society by their own lack of technical savvy?

The rush for progress, it seems, will tend to create awkward compromises.

In barely two decades we’ve seen the elimination of in-person banking, ubiquitous adolescent social media usage, the explosion of mobile sports betting, and the prevalence of insecure “gig economy” jobs. This is just a tiny sample of the myriad impacts that digital products have had on society, with positive and negative consequences that are impossible to balance objectively. Who decides where the scales should fall? Regrettably, mostly it’s us.

Those working in technology have been granted an incredible privilege to mold the 21st century. The systems we design and the patterns we adopt have wrought profound change on the world.

From AI screening of job applicants to pay-by-app parking, our decisions are felt by millions yet are often invisible. As the pace of technological change increases, the potency of these decisions becomes greater still. This matters because the track record of the tech industry in behaving responsibly is, to put it mildly, not brilliant.

The accessibility of essential tools

The abysmal accessibility of essential tools, the pernicious opt-in/opt-out behaviors that permeate virtually every online transaction, the tantalizing auto-play of the next viral video. All of it speaks to a design mentality that prioritizes the developer over the user at every turn, with a vast asymmetry in the power those parties hold. Is it time, finally, to find some common foundational principles that guide the way we build the digital world? A digital Hippocratic Oath, if you will.

Tech workers are overwhelmingly optimists and idealists genuinely excited by the potential of our work to create amazing things. At the start of our careers we are taught how to elicit user requirements, or how to sort an array and normalize data, or how to present a business plan for investment. But we are not taught to think as far as our work travels, to hold the practical and the philosophical in equal grasp.

This is not true of other professions: architectural training frequently covers topics as varied as history, thermodynamics, interior design and public policy alongside a core skill of 3D drafting. Journalism has well-established principles of truthfulness and protection of sources (among other things), with solid sanctions against those who breach these standards.

Ethics in technology should not be seen as a bolt-on, standalone academic pursuit. They are an intrinsic and essential consideration in the way we create, and the way we create increasingly dictates how the world works.

Designers and engineers

How different things would be if the creators of digital products saw themselves not just as designers and engineers, but foremost as citizens. Cory Doctorow’s now-famous thesis on “enshittification” describes a process whereby internet platforms degrade their user value over time by prioritizing shareholder interests.

Whilst this is observably true, in many cases even the initial service prioritizing user needs is illusory. Digital products are extremely powerful tools to make us behave as their creators wish. The combination of ever-present connectivity, push notifications, personalization algorithms, and trillions of dollars of investment, has created tools of unimaginable influence.

Of course, much of the digital realm is already covered by legislation, with varying quality and effectiveness, applied in patchwork across different jurisdictions. A professional standard is something quite different - it is an overarching principle that provides guidance where there is ambiguity and an ethical north star that can be applied to a wide variety of situations. It also inculcates a standard of practice to which we are all held.

The original Hippocratic Oath

The original Hippocratic Oath stands up remarkably well to a modern reader, considering it’s roughly contemporary with the Old Testament. This is a measure of success by the above definition. There is a commitment to sharing knowledge, the duty of confidentiality, acknowledging the limits of one's own competence, and of course the famous bit: first, do no harm. All good stuff, and no less relevant today than when it was written. So what would a digital Hippocratic Oath look like?

“Do no harm” is a good starting point. Even this needs some qualification - there are caveats in biomedical ethics to clarify exactly what it means in practice. In the tech world, early Google had a company motto of “Don’t be evil” which got it into all kinds of reputational and legal trouble once the realities of global corporation-ship caught up.

It was quietly dropped in favor of “Do the right thing”, a helpfully subjective and ethically ambiguous alternative. Google’s struggles here are instructive: it turns out it’s hard to be good all the time. Nonetheless, it’s a noble and timeless aspiration. Technology should not be objectively bad.

Which brings us back to the fundamental principle set out above. We technologists have been gifted a phenomenal power to shape the future, and as with all power, we must accept the responsibility that goes along with it.

Perhaps the only guidance we must follow is this: Build the future that you yourself would want to live in. Because one day, you will.

We feature the best cloud storage: tested, reviewed and rated by experts.

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

Mark Zuckerberg has been a pivotal figure in the technology industry, stretching back to his work during the early days of building the Facebook social media network, to his latest AI and metaverse ventures heading up Meta. Chief to Zuckerberg's rise, however, has been a highly contentious philosophy.

Move fast and break things

Although Zuckerberg recited this philosophy at SXSW 2022, it's something he has long voiced, written down, and adhered to over the last couple of decades in different guises – stretching back to the early 2010s. The quote promotes the idea that rapid product development and disruption are more valuable than caution.

Where did it come from? "Move fast" was one of Facebook's core tenets, according to a 2012 letter to possible investors. Some years later, a 2018 documentary The Facebook Dilemma, by Frontline, showed footage of a younger Zuckerberg outlining similar thoughts to college students. It's something that's stayed with the CEO throughout his career, and continues to be at the heart of Meta's decision-making today.

Although Mark Zuckerberg has undergone something of a transformation in recent years, it's a philosophy that's remained remarkably consistent.

Picking up the pieces

The notion of moving fast and breaking things felt appealing in the early part of the 21st century when the product in question, Facebook, was extremely popular, growing fast, and continued to bring benefits to millions around the world.

Around the time that Zuckerberg was immortalized in film, the sheen began wearing off, and issues with this philosophy began materializing. This is especially true when you consider the way that social media, and related systems, began to reshape the world. Scandals and controversies, including Cambridge Analytica, Myanmar, and the widely debated impact on youth mental health, have dominated the discourse around Facebook.

It's little wonder that Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network, is framing a sequel in a way that exposes Facebook and Zuckerberg's role in overseeing and failing to fix "flaws that cause harm".

This February, Spain announced plans for a comprehensive social media ban for children under 16. It was no longer acceptable, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told an audience at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, to leave children unattended in the “digital Wild West,” which he described as rife with “addiction, abuse, pornography, manipulation [and] violence.”

Sánchez was clear on another point. The proposed ban, which is still pending parliamentary approval, would require social media platforms to implement “not just check boxes, but real barriers that work” for age verification. The BBC suggested his comment may have been in reference to Australia’s ban, with its laxer checks already proving somewhat susceptible to loopholes.

Spain and Australia are not anomalies here. A range of legislation—some passed, some still being debated—in countries like Portugal, France, Denmark, Greece, and Ireland cover everything from raising age limits as high as 16 and tying access to verified parental consent. In the US, the Trump administration is reportedly considering a nationwide social media ban modeled after Australia following the failure of the Kids Off Social Media Act to advance in Congress.

The various proposals and fact-finding committees far outnumber the pieces of actual legislation, but the appetite for action on the issue is undeniable. This is a global movement driven by rightfully concerned parents, educators, and policymakers. The risk of psychological harm through exposure to explicit and hateful content has grown too enormous to ignore.

This risk, however, doesn’t justify policies that would undermine fundamental digital privacy and autonomy rights, and therein lies one of the most pressing (and under-discussed) issues lurking behind these bans.

Privacy trade-offs in the name of safety

Identity verification will be crucial to any properly functioning ban. If you ban people under 16 from social media, you need to give people over 16 a way to legally access the same platforms.

The simplest mechanism to verify someone’s identity is to require a photo of a government ID like a driver’s license or a passport. This method is also completely unacceptable, as it creates a centralized trove of sensitive information that can be compromised by a bad actor. Even when digital wallets or national ID apps are used, the risk remains that platforms, third parties, or governments will gain access to more personal data than necessary.

This isn’t an imagined hypothetical. China’s Internet real-name system requires users to register services with their real identity, making it a target of warranted criticism over privacy breaches and surveillance overreach. The UK’s Online Safety Act has been similarly criticized for its dependence on face and ID scanning as a means of age verification.

The EU has tried to avoid similar issues by insisting that its own systems of age-verification ought to be anonymous and device-based. A number of proposals put forward by EU countries, however, still gravitate toward outdated solutions that collect a surplus of data.

Policymakers tend to default to invasive checks that equate verification with disclosure, and the resulting tension is one digital rights advocates will recognize. What is the price of privacy? And how do we protect kids from harm without compromising everyone’s privacy and autonomy?

Digital identification and age assurance

Rather than keep minors off social media altogether, some policymakers have floated the idea of implementing minor-specific restrictions within the platforms themselves. The European Parliament is currently debating limiting minors from accessing in-platform features like infinite scrolling, auto play, pull-to-refresh, reward loops, and gamification.

Although more nuanced than a straight ban, these proposed restrictions complicate the larger age verification issue by requiring minors to submit age proofs instead of adults. When we wave off these challenges as naturally solved by ‘digital identity,’ we inadvertently frame digital identity as a single, one-size-fits-all tool—which it isn’t.

Some digital identity solutions require users to submit highly sensitive data, such as photos of government-issued IDs and their own face, extending well beyond what’s actually needed to prove legal age. Newer approaches designed to limit how much information is shared allow people to prove specific attributes without exposing their full identity. This is going to be a critical distinction as we edge closer to the burden of proof falling on people under 18.

The future of social media bans is the future of digital privacy

Policymakers need to prioritize privacy-centric digital ID technologies to protect adults and kids. New technologies are making this possible.

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are one of them. ZKPs are cryptographic techniques that allow a user to prove the truth of a claim—“I am at least 16 years old”—to a platform without revealing any specific identifying information, such as their birthdate. This minimal data exchange transmits the truth of the over-16 claim and nothing else. There’s no centralized database that can be hacked, leaked, or misused. This is an essential protection for platforms requiring verification from minors.

A number of digital wallets are already adopting ZKPs for identity assertions, but implementation is far behind the intensifying progress of social media bans. It has to catch up. Eroding the digital privacy of adults was never the solution, and ZKPs reconcile this desire to protect individual freedoms with the goal to safeguard minors online.

Underscoring this debate is the broader principle that safety and liberty shouldn’t be treated as zero-sum, and can be complementary when systems are designed with both in mind. Protecting kids online is long overdue and a noble goal, but it risks funneling everyone toward a model of centralized and privacy-violating digital governance.

This is to be avoided. The next decade of digital regulation will involve a flood of social media bans, but it must be accompanied by better identification mechanisms that protect without exposing. Nothing less than a truly safe and open internet is at stake.

We list the best identity theft protection for families.

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

• Instagram Plus is now rolling out globally
• It costs $3.99 (roughly £3 / AU$5.60) per month
• It includes new and improved features, with everything that was previously free remaining so — at least for now

Following an announcement last month, Instagram Plus is now rolling out globally, giving you the opportunity to pay a monthly subscription to use a platform you previously accessed for free.

Of course, the free tier is still available and — for now at least — includes everything it always did, with the ‘Plus’ version adding things on top.

For $3.99 (roughly £3 / AU$5.60) per month, Instagram Plus gives you ‘Story Spotlight’, which lets you give your story priority for your friends, ‘Super Hearts’, which are animated hearts you can send, the ability to create as many story audience lists as you want, and the ability to make a story last for 48 hours, rather than the standard 24.

You can also preview stories, see how many times your stories were rewatched, quickly check if a specific person has viewed your story, and post to your profile or highlights without it appearing in friends' feeds.

On the customization side, you can choose from a selection of app icons, customize the font of your profile bio, and pin up to six posts to your profile (up from three previously).

A troubling future

All of this is new, so you don’t lose anything by not paying, and you still have to deal with adverts even if you do pay.

But of course, things could change — it’s possible that, in the future, Meta will let you pay to remove ads (as users can already separately do in the UK and EU), but it’s also possible that features that are currently free will one day be added to Instagram Plus.

And if nothing else, it's likely that most upcoming Instagram features will be placed behind the Instagram Plus paywall.

Those possibilities — along with a concept of paying for an app that has always been free, even if that’s fully optional for now — have been met with an understandably unhappy response from users.

Under a previous TechRadar article covering Instagram Plus and a possible pay-to-engage future, responses included “talk about pricing yourself out of business”, “let it be their undoing”, and “I won’t be paying”, among other, mostly negative comments.

So, it will be interesting to see whether Instagram Plus will actually prove successful for Meta, and whether the company will leave the free features alone indefinitely and continue improving the free tier, or whether Instagram will increasingly become an app you need to pay to use properly.

A couple of years ago, someone searching for our company found a website that looked like ours, used a version of our name, and sold proxies we had nothing to do with.

The impersonators were already operating before we rebranded from Smartproxy to Decodo in April 2025.

They registered smartproxy.org and smartproxy.cn to catch the traffic searching for the original domain name, and the rebrand gave them an even larger pool of people who had not heard about the change.

In 2025, the World Intellectual Property Organization handled 6,282 domain name disputes, a record for the organization. Cybersquatting cases have risen 68% since 2020.

Digital squatting now moves money, steals login credentials, and pulls customers toward infrastructure tied to cybercrime. Here are five things we did, and five things any business can do, when someone copies your brand.

What digital squatting is, and why cases keep climbing

Digital squatting means registering or using a domain name in bad faith to profit from someone else's trademark. A bad actor registers a domain close to an established brand, then uses it to intercept traffic, collect payments for services they never deliver, harvest login credentials, or push malware. Most victims find out only after their money disappears.

Squatting comes in a few common forms:

1. Typosquatting registers misspellings of popular domains, such as gooogle.com instead of google.com;

2. Combosquatting adds a keyword to a real brand name, producing domains like brand-login.com or brand-deals.com;

3. TLD squatting takes the same brand name across .org, .net, .io, and .ai;

4. Homograph attacks swap in visually identical characters from other alphabets, like a Cyrillic "а" for a Latin "a".

When it happened to us

We met digital squatting as the target, not the observer. We operated as Smartproxy for seven years, and over that time, the name picked up enough recognition for impersonators to want it. They registered .org and .cn, domains with no connection to our company, our infrastructure, or our team. The site copies a version of our former name and sells proxies we have nothing to do with, catching traffic from people who searched for Smartproxy.

The squatting also shaped how we could operate in China. The obvious domains were already taken, so before the rebrand, we had to run our China presence under a separate name, smartdaili.cn. A customer in that market searching for the brand could land on an impostor site first.

The rebrand to Decodo did not end the problem. It added a fresh group of people who knew the old name and never heard about the change, which is exactly who the lookalike domains target. The harm reached real customers, and we saw it in their complaints to us.

Trustpilot reviews describe people who paid the lookalike sites, sent irreversible cryptocurrency payments, received poor support, and got low-quality service under a name they trusted.

What the Proxyway research found

The case changed shape when researchers tested the impersonator's product directly. The independent researchers have purchased a standard weekly unlimited residential plan on smartproxy.org, the same product any retail buyer can get, and measured where its traffic actually exited. The method is one any paying customer could repeat, which is part of why the result carries weight.

Proxyway sent roughly 6.96 million HTTP requests through the plan across one week, with each request landing on an endpoint that logged the exit IP address. After removing duplicates, the pool showed 2,023,029 unique IPs, of which 2,019,488 were IPv4, and 3,541 were IPv6. The success rate sat at 90.25%, in line with what the service advertised.

To find where those IPs came from, Proxyway compared the pool against a reference dataset of 16,192,293 verified IPIDEA exit nodes, observed over the 30 days ending January 29, 2026. Antoine Vastel, VP of Research at DataDome, built that dataset by routing traffic through IPIDEA endpoints himself and confirming each address as a working exit node, rather than relying on marketing claims. IPIDEA is the residential proxy network that Google's Threat Intelligence Group disrupted back in January.

The comparison surfaced 773,087 IPs present in both pools. That figure equals 38.21% of the smartproxy.org pool and 4.77% of the IPIDEA dataset. The numbers sit in the table below:

Why a 38% overlap points to shared sourcing

Residential pools rotate, so some overlap between any two services is normal. IPinfo estimates monthly IPv4 retention in residential pools at around 40%, meaning roughly four in ten addresses visible this month remain next month, while the rest cycle out. Two pools drawing from genuinely separate apps, SDKs, and device populations should not share anything close to 38% of their IPs across a few-week window.

The IPv4 address space spans more than 4 billion addresses, so an overlap at this scale would be a statistical anomaly if the sources were independent. The pool sizes point the same way. The smartproxy.org pool of about 2 million IPs is roughly an eighth of the 16.2 million IPIDEA dataset, the proportion you would expect when one provider draws from part of a larger upstream pool. Shared sourcing explains the data cleanly.

5 things you can do to combat digital squatting

Each step below works on its own. Together, they cover monitoring, prevention, legal action, search, and customer communication.

1. Monitor for lookalike domains before they reach your customers

Catching a fake domain after a customer reports it means the damage has already happened. Monitoring closes that gap.

Set up these alerts:

i) Domain registration alerts for your brand name across common TLDs and misspellings;

ii) Brand-mention monitoring across search results and social platforms;

iii) Certificate transparency logs, which flag new SSL certificates issued for domains containing your brand name.

We learned the full extent of our case through third-party research and customer complaints, later than we wanted. Monitoring would have surfaced the registrations sooner. A weekly check across the main extensions and the three or four most likely misspellings of your name catches most attempts while they’re still new.

2. Register your own domain variations first

A squatter can’t register a domain you own. Defensive registration removes the easiest targets before anyone reaches for them.

Claim the obvious variations:

i) Major TLDs such as .org, .net, .io, and .ai

ii) Common misspellings of your brand name country-code domains for markets you operate in, such as .co.uk, .de, and .cn.

Turn on registrar lock, use a reputable domain registrar, and keep your registration details current. We hit this wall directly when the obvious domains in China were already taken. Claim your namespace early, because the cost of registering domains is far lower than reclaiming them later.

3. Use your legal routes, and know their limits

Trademark law gives you specific tools against squatters. The tools work, though they move slowly, so start them early. The following is general information, not legal advice.

Your main options:

i) Register your trademark, which is the foundation for every other action;

ii) Send a cease-and-desist letter to the registrant

iii) Report abuse directly to the registrar hosting the domain.

4. Own your brand in search results

When someone searches your brand, the page they click decides whether they reach you or a copy. Ranking above the impersonator removes most of their traffic.

Make the real you easy to find:

i) Publish content that states your official domains in plain language;

ii) Keep rebranding and company information current across your site and profiles;

iii) Use structured data and verified social media profiles so search engines confirm your identity.

We published direct, on-record clarifications so anyone searching the old brand finds the truth quickly. We say it plainly: we operate at decodo.com globally and decodo.cn in China. Everything else using the old name isn’t us

5. Tell your customers, and keep telling them

Customers can’t avoid a fake site that they don’t know exists. Telling them turns your audience into a filter against the impersonator.

Reach them through every channel you have:

i) Email warnings to your existing customer list;

ii) A banner or notice on your website;

iii) A help-center article that customers find when they search for the problem;

iv) Posts on the social accounts your customers already follow.

Treat impersonation as a security problem

Brand impersonation now sits next to the infrastructure-trust problem the IPIDEA takedown exposed. A fake domain can route customers into compromised device pools, which makes this a question for security and legal teams, not just marketing. Give it a cross-functional owner who watches domains, files complaints, and updates customers on a schedule.

Google's action against IPIDEA reduced the available device pool for proxy operators by millions and, in Google's words, may carry downstream impact across affiliated resellers. Squatting that depends on that kind of infrastructure carries the same exposure. Demand transparency from any provider you buy from, and apply the same standard to your own supply chain.

We feature the best proxy sites.

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

• Japan’s communications ministry has proposed tighter age limits on social media
• Unlike Australia’s under-16s ban, the draft measures do not propose a single age limit or total ban for those under a certain age
• The report is expected to be finalized in summer 2026, with the potential for amendments later on

Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication has proposed that the country adopt stricter age restrictions for social media users.

The proposal is part of a new draft set of measures designed to combat social media addiction in children and young people.

The measures were announced on June 2 by a panel of experts convened by the Ministry, and notably do not suggest a blanket ban on social media usage, or even a single age limit for all social media platforms.

Instead, the committee’s draft measures suggest that the Japanese government work with stakeholders such as social media platforms and mobile carriers to find age verification solutions. The Japan Times reports that the measures suggest collaborating on “methods of age verification based on feasible technologies and systems.”

This makes Japan something of an outlier in the growing group of countries considering social media restrictions. The trend follows Australia’s ban on social media for under 16s, which, as TechRadar reported at the time, came into effect in December 2025.

Japan’s communications ministry has said that adopting a blanket age restriction would be difficult due to the differences between each social media platform, and the widespread use of social media as a form of communication.

If the draft suggestions are adopted, we could see Japan implement one age limit for TikTok and another for Instagram, for example.

The proposed measures also ask social media service providers to take on more responsibility when it comes to age verification.

As The Asahi Shimbun reports, social media companies would, under the new proposals, be mandated by law to assess their own services and platforms for risks, and implement more stringent identity checks.

Currently, social media age verification in Japan generally relies on self-reported information, which is easier to get around for those willing to lie about their age.

The committee’s proposal suggests that age data already held by mobile networks could be used to provide stronger age verification for social media.

The proposal has some way to go before being adopted into law – it will first enter a public comment period before being finalized in summer 2026, after which point other ministries will be able to offer counterpoints, amendments, and additions.

As Kyodo News reports, Japan’s existing social media controls are mostly limited to mobile carriers filtering harmful websites, as well as parental monitoring.

Social media age limits - a growing trend

As mentioned, Japan is far from the first country to see government officials or elected lawmakers propose stricter controls on social media.

Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia have implemented social media bans for under-16s, while France, Greece, and Denmark have all announced blanket age limits with varying timeframes for compliance.

And at the end of May, digital ministers from G7 countries met to agree on a set of common principles for online child safety (via UNICEF).

There’s been comparatively little from the US when it comes to the prospect of limiting social media, though a Los Angeles court found in March 2026 that Google and Meta had intentionally built addictive platforms in what many viewed as a landmark case (via BBC News).

In the UK, however, the concept of a social media ban for under-16s has taken hold at the national level. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in May 2026 that he would take “decisive” action against social media’s impact on children, though he did not comment on what this would look like.

However, getting bans or age restrictions in place is only the first step – the real challenge is likely to be enforcement.

VPNs can be used to change the perceived location of a device, and therefore could be used to attempt circumventing a local social media ban.

Australia tackled this issue head-on by requiring social media platforms to block underaged VPN users. Japan appears to be taking a milder approach, perhaps in response to concerns that banning young people from social platforms outright could have negative consequences.

Do people in Japan support a social media ban?

Calls for social media bans and age limits have been met with mixed reactions across the globe.

A report by Family First (via Global Teacher Prize) published before the announcement of the new draft measures found that 38% of parents and 28% of Gen Z in Japan support banning social media for under-16s.

That’s low compared to other countries – the same report found that 77% of parents in Malaysia and 73% of Gen Z in India supported an under-16s ban, while other ‘Western’ countries saw lower levels of support.

It’s not yet clear whether social media restrictions are effective in improving young peoples’ wellbeing. In 2024, Amnesty International called on Australian lawmakers to regulate, rather than restrict, social media for young people, suggesting that outright bans wouldn’t keep children as safe as good regulation. And April 2026 research from the Molly Rose foundation suggests that 60% of Australian children are still managing to access social media post-ban.

With support in Japan relatively low, the milder proposed measures could either be an effort to avoid backlash or a response to the successes and limitations of other countries’ initiatives.

This is how it starts. Someone adds the word "Plus" to a familiar service. Plus sounds like more, but somehow it's almost always a harbinger of less: less access, fewer features unless you pay. The collection of Plus-sized social media platforms — Facebook Plus, Instagram Plus, WhatsApp Plus — all cheerfully introduced this week by Meta's Head of Product Naomi Gleit, is, despite what Meta might claim, likely the first step in a short path to reduced access to the core features of these popular social media platforms.

Gleit positions the change in her Instagram video as "building value" and delivering "enhanced features that our community already loves."

The Plus-sized services are, Gleit says on Facebook, rolling out today and should offer "premium features that unlock more from our apps and our AI glasses." The only tangible change, though, may be Meta AI falling in step with many of its generative AI competitors, and adding more capacity, the ability to handle more complex requests, and "more room to create." Sure, this is fuzzy, at best, lacking details like how many daily/monthly processing tokens or even how many prompts.

In fact, there are precious few details about what any of these Plus tiers (according to Techcrunch, will cost between $2.99 and $3.99 a month in the US) might offer. This means we can only look to how other digital platforms have introduced Plus-like tiers and what it's meant for consumer access.

If we were to look at streamers, the answer is clear and not encouraging.

Virtually every streaming platform sliced up its offerings to add a more affordable but ad-stuffed tier. In the case of Amazon, it took the more draconian measure and simply converted existing Amazon Prime Video customers to the ad tier. If you wanted to return to your original ad-free experience, you pay more.

Or look at Garmin and its Connect+ service, where it seems all the best analytical features are behind the subscription curtain.

As I've written before, we're now knee deep in tech subscription service culture, where companies unveil new products where key features are only available if you're willing to pay a never-ending monthly service fee.

The concern for Meta's Plus plan is that there are countless social media and communication features we depend on that could, without notice, suddenly fall under Plus.

WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption is a good example. It's a core, longtime, and laudable feature that is possibly the reason millions use it. What if encryption eventually ends up falling under WhatsApp Plus? I bet it would happen quietly, with a notice hidden in your email, or an unread WhatsApp message.

On Facebook, you could lose the ability to post more than three photos in a post, or maybe only Facebook Plus subscribers can post more than three public posts in a day.

Similarly, Instagram is ripe to shift key features like longer Reels, saving Stories, or Direct Messages under a Plus banner.

If you miss some of these features, there will be Meta One, a buy-one-get-all Plus bundle. The social media giant is only testing this idea, but it will surely be the answer to those frustrated by all they lost and looking for a more affordable way to claw it all back. So for one slightly lower price, you get it all (and probably a little more).

An upside

,Meta's Plus plan might not be all bad. I think many of us still grudgingly use Facebook because old friends are still on there, and it's the only place we get and share birthday messages. No one is thrilled with the ads or constant prompts to follow people we don't know or to join groups where we have at best a passing interest. Then there's the content itself, which is filled with AI garbage, hot takes, and misinformation.

What if Facebook Plus could be an ad-free and more curated experience? Could the premium tier ban, at your request, all AI?

If Instagram Plus were a custom-built service where you choose the feed, creating the perfect algorithm (or no algorithm at all) and pick and choose which features you want, that might be a social media platform worth paying for.

Let's get real

Unfortunately, I don't think Meta's subscription plan will ultimately work this way. As a signal, I look to Gleit's comments about Creators. For the promise of Plus or premium, they get:

• More tools
• Enhanced presence
• Automated tasks
• The ability to protect their brand.

I'm confused. Aren't all these things part of the base, free versions of Instagram and Facebook? Why would a creator suddenly have to pay to "protect their brand?"

Even if free protections remain strong, I'm sure Meta will pitch "enhanced protections" that many creators will want.

As it is, Instagram and Facebook's free versions don't do a great job of protecting identity. There are always fake versions of celebrities, and I've heard of people losing their valuable accounts and getting virtually no support from Meta when they try to reclaim them.

What's next

While we wait for details of Meta's Plus plan to emerge, I think we have to prepare for the worst. Services are an undeniably attractive business. People pay for access to their favorite platform or features, and they pay every single month. Once they're subscribed, they rarely peel off, even when you slightly raise the prices.

Just look at Apple, which long had a services business, but has grown it into a substantial multi-billion dollar piece of its revenue pie.

With billions of users around the globe, Meta's subscription business opportunity is enormous, and I'm guessing it felt it had to do this to ensure revenue growth, especially as people begin to wonder if they need to spend less time online and more time touching grass.

• The UK government's online safety consultation just ended
• This, and comments from officials, suggest we'll see new rules soon for under-16s
• A ban might not be coming, but some features could be restricted

The UK government is expected to announce some kind of social media crackdown for young people in the next few weeks — after Prime Minister Kier Starmer said on Tuesday he would act “very, very quickly” following a consultation with the public and with families; however, it’s being reported that it might not be a full ban for under-16s.

According to a report from The Times (behind a paywall), various experts and social media companies themselves are expecting a ban on addictive features, such as infinite scroll or video autoplay.

The logic here seems to be that in places where full-on social media bans are in effect (such as Australia), many under 16s have found ways to circumvent restrictions — or they’ve been pushed to less regulated online spaces that are either ignoring or haven’t been included in the ban. So instead of stopping access, you’d make the sites less addictive and safer by banning specific features.

Below, I’ve outlined the 8 measures and bans we might see implemented by the UK government. Other options are possible, though there are several that have been floated by online safety advocates, social media companies themselves, and those involved in UK politics — so I expect we’ll see some combination of these introduced when the UK’s social media crackdown commences.

Infinite scroll and auto play

These two features are often used by social media companies and other platforms to encourage more engagement with content, so I’ve grouped them together.

Infinite scroll allows you to scroll infinitely — that is, no matter how many TikTok videos you swipe through or how far down the Instagram page you go, there is always more to see and consume. Autoplay is also self-explanatory; videos in your feed will automatically start playing as you scroll by — either with audio or silently with subtitles. This feature hopes to hook you on content that you might have moved past, as once it starts, you get a little bit invested in what you’re watching.

Infinite scroll was a key complaint of a Californian ruling, which declared some social media platforms addictive, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s one of the first to go under any UK government rulings.

Alerts and push notifications

Another pair of tools that encourage social media usage, alerts and push notifications are the dings and pop-ups you see telling you you just got a DM, that your post got a comment, or that a content creator you have favorited just posted something.

They aim to take you away from whatever else you’re doing and pull you back to the social media platform.

This could be tackled at an app-level, or it could also be handled at a device level — forcing iPhones and Android devices to block app notifications for accounts linked to minors. We’ll have to see which method, if any, the UK Government chooses.

Likes and comments

These interactive engagement tools are another one that could be taken away for accounts belonging to users under 16, possibly taking away these options from posts made by young people, and/or removing their ability to like and comment.

While likes and comments are a mainstay of social media platforms, they can have consequences. Bad actors can use these features to harass the poster or to build up a rapport with the poster that could later be exploited.

Banning this aspect would allow younger users to still engage with social media by posting, but in a more bubbled and hopefully safer environment.

Personalised content recommendations

A.k.a. the algorithm: the platform’s software that analyses your watch time, likes, comments, scrolling habits, everything it can to find out what you want to see and feed it to you.

This feature being banned would make social media platforms much less appealing, as your feed won’t be tailored to your interests. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing if the goal is to reduce time spent online, and it could help prevent the wave of young users spiralling into shadier online sects as the algorithm simply feeds you content it thinks you’ll engage with, not necessarily content you should be seeing.

Device-level age verification

So far, the measures we might see aren’t ones most platforms are pushing for; instead, they’ve argued for age restrictions to be brought at a device-level, which would see Apple and Google on the hook for checking the age of phone users and then tailoring their app access accordingly.

While it passes the buck to some extent, the advantages it offers are that it should help limit cases where there’s a disparity between what limits are imposed on social media platforms, and for users, it’s less likely that their private data could leak, as they’re only sharing it with one or two companies rather than every platform where they create an account.

A VPN ban

This idea has been floated a few times, including by the UK’s House of Lords back in December 2025.

It’s certainly still a possibility we’ll see a ban for under-16s, though a wider ban seems a lot less likely. One of our VPN experts, Chiara Castro, has gone through all of the arguments against a VPN in another in-depth story, so check those out, but one of the reasons for limiting VPN access is that they allow users to avoid geo-locked restrictions, as they can spoof their location. Until restrictions are applied more globally, governments may feel VPNs are a loophole they need to close.

Businesses today are generating more customer data than at any point in history. Every support call, social media post, live chat transcript and community forum thread is a window into what a customer really thinks, feels, and needs.

Yet, for most organizations, most of these insights are never acted on.

Unstructured data, encompassing the conversations, complaints, and unscripted moments that make up the authentic voice of the customer, accounts for an estimated 80% of all available business information.

Further, it has historically been too messy, too varied, too human, and therefore technology constrained to process at any meaningful scale.

The result is a paradox that is quietly costing enterprises: they are data-rich, but context-poor.

This is not a data collection problem. We know enterprises are not short of information. Instead, they are short of the connective intelligence needed to transform that information into decisions that help scale the business to levels unimaginable before.

In an era where customer expectations are rising and competitive margins are tightening, this gap is no longer sustainable.

The insight gap is wider than most leaders realise

The root cause most organizations overlook is that enterprise IT infrastructure was largely built around structured inputs: System of Records (SORs), CRM & CDP data, survey scores, ticket volumes, or workflow configurations and metrics such as resolution times, first response etc.

While these metrics capture what happened in a transaction, they do not record why it happened, who were the decision-making actors and their roles, or what it means for the customer relationship going forward.

What most enterprise infrastructure does not effectively utilize is their unstructured data: the conversations happening across contact centers, social channels, support queues, and community platforms with the customers and internal ones across emails, slack channels, phone messaging carry far richer intelligence.

From a recurring complaint phrase appearing across thousands of calls, to a sentiment shift on a specific product feature, to early warning signs of dissatisfaction appearing in customer interactions weeks before a renewal is flagged as being at risk.

This is the business intelligence that determines whether a brand retains and grows its best customers or loses them to a competitor, and for most organizations, this data is sitting unread in variety of data storages, both structured and unstructured.

The gap between possessing that data and acting on it is where competitive advantage will be won or lost.

Agentic AI has changed the equation

Until recently, bridging this gap required significant manual investment: dedicated analyst teams, bespoke data science tooling, and lengthy lag times between insight generation and operational action. Agentic AI is fundamentally reshaping this process.

According to IDC research, 67% of contact center executives now identify contextualized customer engagement as the single most impactful business outcome from generative AI. That figure is significant, not only in its size, but for what it reveals about market understanding. The question has shifted from "what can AI do?" to "what does AI need to do it well?”, and the answer to this, is context.

The most powerful AI deployments in customer experience are not just those that automate routine tasks, but those that actively reason across the full arc of the customer journey. By connecting a social interaction from three weeks ago with a support call from last Tuesday and a survey response received yesterday, they surface the next best action with accuracy and speed that no human analyst team could match. AI, in this context, is not a replacement for human judgment. Instead, it is the amplifier that makes human judgment more informed, more timely, and more consequential.

AI is only as effective as the context it operates on. Models applied to fragmented or incomplete customer data will generate outputs that are confident in tone but limited in value. Models applied to only structured data, and not unstructured data will not be effective for the long tail of customer conversation types each of which are unique in one way or another. Remember: context is not a feature of enterprise AI, it is the precondition for it functioning well at all.

What unified context actually looks like in practice

Consider a scenario that plays out regularly in large consumer-facing organizations. A product issue begins quietly: a handful of mentions on social media, a slight uptick in a specific complaint phrase across contact center calls, a cluster of negative reviews appearing on a third-party platform. In a siloed environment, each signal sits with a different team, processed at a different cadence, and often never connected.

In a unified intelligence environment, the picture looks entirely different. The emerging pattern is detected early, the care team is alerted before inbound volumes rise, and proactive outreach reaches affected customers before they feel the need to complain. What might otherwise have become a reputational crisis becomes a loyalty moment instead. Finally, the models learn and improve from this experience and become better prepared to handle a similar situation in the future.

Organizations operating at this level consistently report meaningful improvements across key customer experience metrics: from faster resolution times and higher first-contact resolution rates to measurable gains in customer retention, all while freeing human agents to focus on the interactions where empathy and judgement genuinely matter.

The window for differentiation is open, but not indefinitely

The brands that will lead in an AI-defined customer economy are not necessarily those with the largest AI budgets. They are those that move now to build the contextual intelligence layer that gives AI something real to work with, and that treat unstructured conversational data not as an operational byproduct, but as a primary strategic asset.

The tools to do this exist. The business case is clear. The question for technology and business leaders today is not whether to act, but with what level of ambition and urgency. The organizations building this foundation today are pulling ahead in ways that become increasingly difficult for competitors to match.

The conversation is the data. The data is the opportunity. The only thing standing between the two is context.

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• A medical report compares the threats of social media to smoking
• Medical professionals are being encouraged to ask young patients about their screen time
• The UK government is weighing a blanket ban on social media use for under-16s, but some are calling for a different approach

Health experts have likened the health risks of social media use by young people to the dangers of smoking, as the UK government moves closer to introducing a social media ban for under-16s.

The UK’s Academy of Medical Royal Colleges says in a report that social media use poses significant damage to children who are “continuously exposed to hateful, addictive and grossly distressing content”. The report, submitted as part of the government’s consultation process, also says social media use by young people now sits alongside smoking and wearing seatbelts “as a unifying force for the medical profession”.

The report also highlights the responsibility of medical professionals in protecting children, saying doctors should now be asking children about their screen time and social media use when they first assess them. Half of the 454 medical professionals surveyed by the academy said they treated a child with social media-linked mental ill health at least once a week.

The guidance would make it easier for doctors to quickly assess if a child’s social media use is excessive and unhealthy, encouraging medical professionals to record any long-term health issues that could arise in their younger patients. “The difference now is that the harm being done to children online is not hypothetical … It is immediate, it is documented, and it is happening at scale,” the report adds.

One of the leading supporters of government action, former Health Secretary Wes Streeting, also said social media should be treated in a similar way to tobacco. “It’s extremely addictive, bad for our health, and big tech is borrowing the big tobacco playbook to avoid regulation”, he added.

The government’s consultation period, which received contributions from more than 70,000 individuals and groups, ends today (May 26), with Technology Secretary Liz Kendall telling the BBC: “The question isn't whether we're going to act — we will.”

She said the government would respond to the consultation over the summer, with measures being introduced before the end of the year.

As part of the consultation process, a number of bereaved parents who believe social media contributed to the loss of their children will meet with Prime Minister Keir Starmer to share their experiences. Starmer was initially opposed to an outright ban for under-16s, but has since said he is “open-minded” about enacting stronger measures.

Weighing the pros and the cons

While many parents, family groups, and health professionals favor some form of government action, opinion is divided on what form it should take.

Some argue that imposing a blanket ban for under-16s could backfire and actually cause greater harm, as it could cause young people to seek out banned content on the dark web, or even leave them unequipped to navigate online content when they turn 16.

The chair of the Molly Rose Foundation, Ian Russell, said that instead of an outright ban, existing laws should be enforced for a more holistic approach. The organization was founded and named after Molly Rose, a teenager who lost her life in 2017 after being exposed to harmful content through social media.

Critics of a blanket ban have pointed to Australia, which introduced a wide-ranging crackdown on social media use by young people in December 2025, banning children under 16 from holding accounts on major social media platforms.

A recent study conducted by the Molly Rose Foundation revealed that 60% of under-16s were still using platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, even though these services were required to shut down the accounts of under-age users.

Since that study was published, the UK has been experimenting with restrictive features before it considers a wider ban. In March, the UK government kick-started a pilot scheme, where it tested screentime limits and curfews in 300 teenage homes to trial different kinds of bans.

To add to this, further restrictive measures are also being considered including auto-play functions and infinite scrolling being disabled to stop young users from being caught in endless webs of potentially harmful content.

Quality education and access to reliable information are fundamental pillars of open, resilient, and forward-looking societies. In an increasingly complex digital environment, where disinformation challenges democratic processes and social cohesion, technology has a critical role to play.

Today’s digital landscape presents a clear paradox: access to information has never been greater, yet exposure to misleading or false content has reached unprecedented levels. Information that once required deliberate search now circulates continuously through digital platforms, driven by algorithms and real-time engagement models.

In this context, AI has become a central enabling technology. Its capacity to process large-scale data, identify patterns, and support content analysis creates significant opportunities to strengthen information integrity and transparency across digital ecosystems.

However, technology alone is not a guarantee of positive outcomes. The effectiveness of AI in addressing disinformation depends on how it is designed, governed, and deployed. A critical question therefore emerges: how can digital technologies be aligned with the shared objective of supporting truth, trust, and freedom of thought?

Information: Strategic asset or public weapon

Information is more than data or content; it is a strategic asset that underpins informed decision-making, civic participation, and institutional credibility. When information flows are intentionally distorted, the impact extends beyond individual misperception to broader societal and democratic consequences.

Disinformation should be understood not only as an error or anomaly, but as a systemic challenge with social, economic, and political implications.

There are some recent examples like a) the 2024 UK riots, which were initiated directly by a false story on social media; and b) the widely spread claims around the effects of COVID-19 vaccinations, which led to many people refusing to get vaccinated.

Ensuring access to diverse, reliable, and contextualized information is essential to maintaining public trust and democratic resilience.

From this perspective, the role of AI is more than a technical solution, it is part of the broader digital infrastructure that shapes the public sphere. The quality of information environments is as critical as the freedom to express opinions within them.

With opportunity, comes responsibility

AI technologies offer powerful capabilities to address disinformation, including automated content analysis, fact-checking support, detection of manipulated media, and early identification of coordinated influence campaigns. These tools can enhance the work of journalists, researchers, public institutions, and digital platforms.

At the same time, the same technologies can be misused to generate and scale misleading content, including synthetic text, images, audio, and video that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from authentic sources. This dual-use nature of AI places a clear responsibility on technology providers, policymakers, and users alike.

AI is not inherently neutral in its outcomes. Its societal impact is shaped by governance frameworks, ethical standards, and organizational choices. Responsible innovation therefore requires – alongside technical excellence – a clear commitment to transparency, accountability, and human oversight.

Education must always remain the foundation

While technology can mitigate risks, education remains the most sustainable defense against disinformation. Developing critical thinking skills, media literacy, and digital awareness is essential for enabling individuals to navigate complex information environments responsibly.

AI increasingly mediates learning through search, recommendation, and personalized instruction, offering significant benefits while also carrying risks of bias, narrowing perspectives, or over-reliance on automation. Digital literacy today extends beyond basic access or technical skills.

It includes the ability to assess sources, understand context, recognize bias, and engage thoughtfully with algorithm-driven systems. AI tools can support educational objectives by enabling personalized learning, adaptive content, and greater transparency around how digital tools operate.

Therefore, education remains fundamentally human-centered. Its purpose serves both to convey knowledge, and also to foster discernment, responsibility, and informed judgement in a rapidly evolving digital society.

The long-term resilience of information ecosystems depends not only on responsible AI design and regulation, but on education that equips citizens to understand how algorithmic systems operate, critically assess information, and exercise informed judgement in environments shaped by AI.

Accurate information is a shared responsibility

Addressing disinformation cannot be achieved through technology or regulation alone. It requires coordinated action across sectors, including education, media, public institutions, civil society, and the technology industry.

ICT companies have a particular responsibility to embed ethical principles into system design, data governance, and content moderation practices.

At the same time, public institutions ought to promote transparent information policies, and educational systems to integrate digital and media literacy as core competencies.

In democratic contexts such as election cycles, AI already plays a decisive yet largely invisible role in shaping how information is accessed, prioritized, and understood.

During elections, algorithmic systems influence the visibility of political content, assist in detecting coordinated disinformation, and support fact-checking at scale, making governance, transparency, and human oversight essential to safeguard trust and freedom of thought.

An informed democracy is the result of sustained collaboration. Information integrity is not a static objective; it can be seen more as an ongoing process that evolves alongside technology and society.

There’s no substitute for human judgement

Ultimately, the challenge of disinformation is not a contest between humans and machines, it is a question of values, governance, and collective intent. AI can support scale and efficiency, while human judgement remains essential in defining what is credible, fair, and socially responsible.

Technology amplifies capabilities, but it does not replace ethical decision-making. Freedom of thought, democratic participation, and public trust depend on the ability to question, verify, and demand transparency.

When guided by strong educational foundations and responsible governance, AI can become a constructive force in strengthening information ecosystems. In that alignment, technology serves as an enabler of informed choice, open dialogue, and human dignity instead of a tool of manipulation.

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A new experiment from cybersecurity company Surfshark suggests that even people who consider themselves savvy online users are struggling to tell AI bots apart from real humans on social media.

Of the 710 participants who took part in the study carried out with master's students from Malmö University, only 53% correctly identified more bots than they misidentified humans. This means that nearly half (47%) failed the task altogether.

Recent industry estimates suggest bot-driven amplification now accounts for around 23% of political discourse on X during election seasons.

Surfshark's own earlier research found that major platforms remove more than 6.3 billion fake accounts each year, roughly 47 times the number of babies born worldwide annually.

Even the best VPN cannot make you better at recognising an AI-written comment, and that is exactly the gap this experiment is trying to highlight.

The "Bot or Not" simulation puts you in the seat of a content moderator and asks one simple question: Can you really still trust your own instincts when you scroll?

Inside Surfshark's "Bot or Not" experiment

The "Bot or Not" game is a timed, interactive simulation built by Interaction Design master's students at Malmö University for the UNFOLD exhibition during Milan Design Week.

Players are dropped into a simulated social media comment section and given 120 seconds to spot 10 bot-written comments across four discussion topics.

Two of those topics were deliberately "cold," meaning low in emotional charge: data centres and the perennial pineapple-on-pizza debate. The other two were "hot" and politically loaded: immigration and women's rights. The contrast between the four was where the most revealing data appeared.

When participants discussed data centres, they identified 71% of the bots with a 76% accuracy rate, the strongest result in the study. Pineapple on pizza was almost as good, at 64% detection and 69% accuracy.

The moment the simulation moved into emotional territory, however, performance collapsed.

On immigration, detection fell to 54% and accuracy to 63%. On women's rights, detection crashed to just 49%, with accuracy slipping to 61%, meaning users were both missing more bots and wrongly accusing more real humans of being machines.

Who struggles most, and how to take the test

The study also points to a clear "generational cliff" at around the age of 40. Players up to age 20 were the strongest bot-hunters in the dataset, finding nearly 65% of bots with an accuracy of more than 71%. Performance held steady through the 20s and 30s, then dropped sharply for the 41 to 50 bracket, where detection fell to 42% and accuracy to 59%. Users over 50 fared only marginally better.

According to Surfshark's Research Lead Luís Costa, the takeaway is not really about reading skills or media literacy in the traditional sense. The biggest blind spot the experiment exposed was emotion: when a debate gets heated, it effectively hijacks the mental "radar" people rely on to flag suspicious content.

To push back against automated deception, he argues, what users actually need is a cooler head and a better awareness of their own vulnerabilities, not sharper textual analysis.

The "Bot or Not" game is now publicly available at botornot.one, and anyone can play it in their browser to see how they score against the original 710 participants.

The wider point of the study is harder to shake off than the score on any individual playthrough. Bots are being produced by the billions, the technology that powers them is getting better at blending in, and our own emotional reactions are the lever they are increasingly built to pull.

A few minutes with "Bot or Not" is a quick way to find out just how often that lever is already working on you.

• Discord has implemented end-to-end (E2EE) encryption for voice and video calls by default
• This is possible via its E2EE protocol, DAVE (Discord's Audio & Video End-to-End Encryption)
• Discord doesn't plan to use E2EE for text messages

Discord is hard at work to regain the trust of its users, with recent moves including adding Xbox Game Pass to Nitro and improving streaming on Linux, but it's not slowing down, judging by its latest move — even if it still may not be enough to appease everyone.

In its latest blog post, Discord announced that every voice and video call will now include end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default on its platforms. This means calls are now completely private and secure, and only those within a call can hear conversations.

Discord highlights that calls can consist of users on PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles, or via a web browser on a laptop or phone, which requires an E2EE protocol that works "seamlessly across all of those surfaces simultaneously", which isn't exactly an easy feat.

Fortunately, the rollout of E2EE using DAVE (Discord's Audio & Video End-to-End Encryption) began earlier in March 2026, which requires all clients to support DAVE before joining a call. Now, Discord is in the process of "removing the client code that supports unencrypted fallback", and once complete, unencrypted connections will be a thing of the past.

It's certainly a move that will have users feel more secure with private conversations on calls, especially with Discord's recent privacy concerns regarding global age verification. However, those controversial age verification plans are still slated for implementation in late 2026, and Discord currently has no plans to use E2EE for text messages.

It's worth noting that Discord has faced multiple cases of security breaches recently, revealing over 70,000 government ID photos, and that's exactly what the age verification checks require users (who aren't automatically verified) to submit.

Discord is moving in the right direction by doubling down on features like E2EE, but it's also not helping itself by doubling down on age verification, which is only mandatory for users in regions where new online child safety laws have been passed. Hopefully, those plans are revised, but it doesn't look like that's set to happen.

When Twitter introduced the blue check, it altered the power dynamics of social media. Visibility was no longer simply about who spoke the loudest; it became about who was authenticated.

A similar shift is now emerging in search.

For two decades, brands competed primarily on SEO. If you understood Google’s ranking signals, you could capture attention. But AI-generated answers are changing how people interact with information.

Increasingly, users are not just scrolling through links, they are receiving synthesized responses presented as authoritative.

That evolution is reshaping the rules of visibility.

In an AI-mediated environment, the first answer often becomes the only answer. There may be no second click, no chance to correct. If the information is outdated, incomplete or drawn from a third-party aggregator rather than an official source, the perception of the brand may already be shaped before the user ever reaches its website.

For businesses, this introduces a new reality: optimization alone is no longer sufficient. Verification is becoming just as critical.

When algorithms become editors

Generative AI systems do not simply rank pages. They draw from multiple sources, and prioritize signals of consistency and authority. If product specifications differ across platforms, with inconsistent or conflicting information across databases, the system does not pause to reconcile them. It generates an answer based on what it sees.

And increasingly, that answer defines the brand -- whether it’s fact or not.

This is where certified brand data takes on new importance. It is not an industry standard today, but that is almost beside the point. What matters is the direction of travel: toward a search ecosystem built on verifiable, machine-readable truth.

The comparison with Twitter’s blue check is more than a metaphor. The blue check functioned as a trust shortcut, telling users: this identity is authentic. In the AI era, certification is beginning to play a similar role, not for profiles, but for information itself.

As AI systems increasingly rely on structured, machine-readable signals to assess credibility, verified data becomes a powerful indicator of trust. Certification acts as the modern equivalent of that blue badge: a signal that the information originates from the brand itself, guiding platforms in deciding which facts to surface and cite.

Machines already care about provenance

Early evidence already points in that direction.

In controlled testing environments, data shows that certified brand data generates significant increases in visibility and engagement across multiple search environments. The most pronounced effects were observed on Bing and Yahoo, where certified data led to click increases of 35.4% and 37.2% respectively.

Even within emerging AI interfaces, the signal is measurable. In tests analysing AI citations, Google Gemini displayed a 9.2% increase in results citing pages that contained certified brand data, while overall visibility within Gemini responses rose by up to 9%.

These results point to a broader trend: AI systems are already integrating signals of provenance into how they source and cite information.

The underlying logic is straightforward. Just as humans tend to trust information that can be traced to a credible source, AI systems increasingly evaluate not only what data says, but where it originates.

Provenance is becoming a critical trust signal for automated systems.

SEO rules are evolving

This does not mean traditional search disappears. Websites, SEO and content strategies remain fundamental pillars of brand visibility. But the mechanics of visibility are expanding. Alongside ranking signals, consistency, provenance and verifiability are becoming decisive factors in how AI systems interpret a brand.

Under the classic SEO model, authority could often be engineered through backlinks or keyword strategies. In AI-driven answers, inconsistency is penalized far more severely than invisibility. If a system cannot confidently validate a dataset, it may default to a competitor or a secondary source that appears more coherent.

The implication is significant. Brands that invest heavily in marketing may find themselves outmaneuvered by organizations that simply govern their data more rigorously.

The next competitive advantage: trustworthy data

For boards and executive teams, this represents a strategic reframing. AI visibility is no longer purely a marketing issue, it is also a matter of data governance and corporate reputation. Reliable, structured information becomes a form of infrastructure, as critical to a company’s digital resilience as cybersecurity or financial controls.

The organizations that recognize this shift earliest will treat their data not merely as content to optimize, but as assets to certify.

Twitter’s blue check once helped determine who was perceived as legitimate in the social media economy. In the emerging AI search economy, certified data is beginning to shape which voices are treated as credible.

The question leaders should now be asking is no longer simply, “How do we rank?”

It is far more fundamental: when AI speaks on your behalf, can you prove your facts, or will someone else’s version of your business become the truth?

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Video has become the primary interface between businesses and their audiences. It shapes how products are understood, how brands are perceived, and how performance is measured across digital channels.

As demand accelerates, the constraint is no longer whether companies should invest in video, but how they can sustain the volume, speed, and quality required to break through the clutter and stay competitive.

AI video has moved beyond experimentation and into execution. It is reshaping workflows, introducing a more adaptive and scalable approach to content creation that aligns with the pace of modern marketing and storytelling.

The Data Signals a Structural Shift

According to recent data, demand for AI video creation services increased 66% in the second half of 2025, alongside a 136% rise in AI automation services.

These figures point to a reconfiguration of how businesses approach content production. AI is becoming embedded in operational workflows, enabling teams to produce more assets, iterate more frequently, and respond to performance data in shorter cycles.

Traditional video production, with its long timelines and complex coordination, was never built for the pace or volume modern marketing demands. AI removes much of that friction, enabling faster, more cost-efficient production and a shift from static campaign planning to always-on content generation.

But speed and scale come with a new challenge: when everyone can produce more, the baseline rises, and so does the noise. The real bottleneck is no longer production capacity, but the ability to break through the clutter with work that’s actually worth paying attention to.

In this landscape, taste, creative judgment, and high standards become the differentiators. AI can accelerate output, but it can’t replace the discernment required to craft ideas that stand out and truly connect.

The Emergence of AI Directors

As technology evolves, so does the role of the creator. AI video professionals are increasingly operating as directors, responsible for shaping narrative, visual identity, and performance across the entire production process.

Many of these AI filmmakers come from established creative backgrounds, having spent years in agencies, production environments, or in-house brand teams. They bring a deep understanding of storytelling, campaign development, and audience engagement, and have spent the past several years integrating AI into those workflows.

This convergence of creative expertise and technical fluency allows them to oversee end-to-end production, often independently or in small teams. The result is cohesive, brand-ready content delivered with a level of speed that traditional models struggle to match.

These AI directors are also typically operating as independent specialists. They are brought in to translate business objectives and creative briefs into effective content using tools that are still evolving. As generative technology becomes more accessible, the distinction between access and ability becomes more pronounced. The advantage no longer lies in having the tools, but in knowing how to direct them.

Expanding What Brands Can Produce

The impact of AI video is most visible in the breadth and frequency of content that businesses can now produce. High-quality commercials, social media campaigns, and product demos are no longer constrained by traditional production limits.

Businesses are starting to rethink how video can be used across the organization, from external marketing to internal storytelling and engagement. In some cases, companies are creating cinematic, narrative-driven videos for internal moments, placing employees into immersive, story-led environments that transform them from passive viewers into active participants. What once required a full studio production can now be achieved through a far more flexible and iterative process.

This shows that AI video is not limited to experimental use cases or one-off campaigns. It is reshaping both internal and external storytelling, enabling brands to produce more content, move faster, and deliver a level of polish that was previously out of reach.

That level of execution requires more than access to AI tools. It depends on creative and technical direction that most internal teams are still developing, particularly as output demands continue to increase.

Why This Matters for SMBs

For small and mid-sized businesses, this shift is especially significant. High-quality video production has historically required substantial investment in both budget time and talent. AI lowers those barriers, enabling smaller teams to produce content at greater scale.

What it does not remove is the need for expertise. As AI tools become more widely available, the differentiator shifts to how they are used.

This creates a practical challenge. Building AI video capabilities in-house can be slow and resource-intensive, particularly in a space that is evolving rapidly. Many internal teams are still early in the learning curve, which can limit both speed and output quality.

Specialized freelance creators offer a different path. Many are already operating at the forefront of AI video direction, combining creative backgrounds with hands-on experience using these tools in real production environments.

They bring the ability to execute quickly, maintain quality, and align content with performance goals without the overhead of building internal teams from scratch or working with big agencies.

For SMBs, this provides a more flexible way to access high-level expertise as needed.

A New Production Model Is Taking Shape

What is emerging is a more distributed model of video production, where creative direction and execution are increasingly handled by specialized, on-demand talent. This reduces the distance between idea and output while allowing businesses to scale content without scaling headcount.

For business leaders, the implications are clear. Demand for video will continue to grow, and expectations around speed and adaptability will increase alongside it. Meeting those expectations requires rethinking not just tools, but how creative work is sourced.

AI video is becoming part of the infrastructure of content production. Organizations that recognize where expertise already exists, and tap into it effectively, will be better positioned to scale output, maintain quality, and stay competitive.

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• Discord has released a major update for Linux users
• Game and screen sharing has been improved with hardware-accelerated video encoding now supported via Nvidia, AMD, and Intel GPUs
• It comes as users remain frustrated about global age verification plans

Discord on Linux, particularly on the Steam Deck or SteamOS handhelds, has been plagued by functionality issues, and a new update has finally addressed them — but users aren't buying it.

As reported by TweakTown, Discord announced a new major update for Linux in a video titled the 'year of the Linux desktop', providing significant improvements to game (or screen) capturing capabilities, including smaller updates to notifications and game detection.

Notably, hardware-accelerated video encoding is now supported on Nvidia, AMD, and Intel GPUs for Discord, for better video quality without a drawback on game performance.

Discord will also capture games using Vulkan or Valve's Gamescope, and that's great news for devices like the Steam Deck or the Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS, as more system resources can be used on games, ultimately improving performance and battery life while streaming to friends.

That's all good and well in the eyes of Discord users on Linux, and it has even joined in on the year of the Linux desktop meme (essentially the hope that Linux will surpass Windows) — and sure, this update has definitely taken it a step closer to that, but it's not enough to win fans over.

Instead, the comments on the video are consistent with users stating it's the 'year of age verification', criticizing Discord for its global age verification plans, which are still slated for late 2026.

This major Linux update comes around the same time as the Discord and Xbox collaboration, which gives Nitro users access to a starter edition of Xbox Game Pass. It seems as though Discord is trying its best to soften the blow from its controversial move, but it's quite clear that users aren't willing to let the age verification issues go.

We hear it a lot: there’s a trust crisis because we no longer know whether what we see or hear online is real.

A crisis is a sudden rupture in the ordinary workings of life, during which the mechanisms that keep society coherent are exposed as inadequate or deliberately corrupted.

Crises force individuals and institutions to confront the gap between appearance and reality. They reveal who truly controls the narrative.

But the thing about crises is that you must know you’re in one to call it that. There’s no such thing as an unknowing crisis, unless you count midlife, and then only with the benefit of hindsight.

Right now, most of us are too wrapped up in the demands of our daily lives to second-guess our news feeds, social media timelines, or that voice note from a “work colleague.” Unless we’ve been directly targeted by deepfake technology, we aren’t aware of danger, nor of how quickly that danger is cannibalizing the social contexts we rely on. That unawareness is the point.

The Ship Was Unsinkable, After All

Humans don’t traditionally react until we are gripped by consequence. Consider the Titanic after the iceberg struck: it was business as usual for many on board until the water started pouring in. The Titanic took two hours and forty minutes to sink, and even when the danger had become undeniable, numerous passengers reportedly carried on as normal. They had been told the ship was unsinkable, so it had to be true.

The deepfake threat follows a similar pattern. The technology generating synthetic video, audio, and imagery has evolved far beyond what the public imagines. The deepfakes being produced today are qualitatively different from what existed six months ago, and the pace of that change is accelerating.

Detection capabilities, whether human or technical, are struggling to keep up. Most people are not trained media forensics experts and cannot reasonably be expected to become them. That gap leaves individuals, businesses, and institutions genuinely exposed, whether or not they’ve noticed the water rising yet.

One of the more unsettling features of sophisticated synthetic media is that false content can be more convincing than the truth. A well-constructed deepfake carries none of the visual noise or contextual gaps that might make authentic footage look uncertain.

In early 2024, a finance worker in Hong Kong transferred $25 million to fraudsters after attending what appeared to be a video conferencing call with his company’s CFO and several colleagues. Every face on that call was fake. No one questioned what they were seeing. The ship, after all, was unsinkable.

Doublethink in the Age of Synthetic Media

In George Orwell’s 1984, the Party engineers a crisis by forcing citizens to hold two contradictory ideas at once. Today, anyone paying attention to the growth of AI deepfake attacks is doing a version of the same thing: wanting and needing, as humans, to trust that what they see and hear is real, while simultaneously suspecting it probably isn’t. That cognitive dissonance has a cost. It erodes the basic social contract that allows us to function, to transact, to believe one another.

Governments are not oblivious to this. They talk quietly among themselves about a crisis but rarely use that language publicly. If you call a crisis, you risk a panic. So instead, the conversation happens in policy rooms and industry forums, while ordinary people navigate an information environment that is shifting beneath their feet without anyone telling them so.

What makes the deepfake threat genuinely unprecedented is this: even the worst dictatorships of the twentieth century, those that gaslit entire populations into observing different realities, could not remove the human prerogative of personal perception. Yet AI deepfake technology has managed something those regimes could not. It has instilled doubt into belief itself.

Detection as a Foundation, Not a Fix

Detection technology is no longer optional. In the current digital media ecosystem, it functions as a baseline requirement for any organization operating at scale. As synthetic media grows more sophisticated, human judgement alone cannot be relied upon as a defense.

The important distinction is that detection software is an enabler of trust, not a substitute for human judgement. The goal is not to remove people from the process of verification but to give them something solid to stand on. Trust begins with reliable identification of synthetic content, but genuine confidence grows when people can understand and act on what the technology reveals. A result returned without explanation, a confidence score without context, asks users to place blind faith in a system rather than develop their own informed understanding. That is a fragile foundation.

Transparent, explainable detection encourages healthy skepticism rather than blanket distrust, and the distinction matters. Blanket distrust of all media is paralyzing. Healthy skepticism is empowering. Well-designed tools turn verification into a learning experience, gradually building the kind of pattern recognition that makes future judgments sharper and less dependent on any single piece of software.

Verification as an Everyday Habit

Media literacy has always evolved in response to new formats and new threats. The arrival of synthetic media is the latest chapter in that evolution, and it demands a meaningful update to what digital literacy actually means. The ability to question and verify the authenticity of content is now foundational, not specialist—and it applies even when content seems trustworthy.

The shift that matters is turning verification from an occasional task into an everyday habit. When detection tools are accessible, intuitive and widely available, they empower ordinary users to fact check, rather than outsourcing their judgement to platforms or institutions whose interests may not align with theirs. Widespread access to verification technology strengthens critical thinking at scale and supports well-informed public discourse. Confidence replaces uncertainty, and that confidence is grounded in something real.

From Dialogue to Action

The imperative now is to move from commentary to consequence.

This means immediate legislation that proactively protects people in the age of AI tools. It means a willingness to put humans before profit, to penalize and shut down the companies enabling the exponential growth of the deepfake threat. It means shared responsibility across platforms, organizations and individuals, because no single actor can address this alone.

Trust can be rebuilt, but only intentionally. It will not recover passively as attention moves elsewhere. It requires deliberate investment in the tools and skills that help people to safely navigate the consequences of their own beliefs.

Trust is a skill to be supported, not assumed. The expectation that people will simply know what is real is no longer reasonable. What is reasonable is giving people the means to find out and then making sure those means are genuinely within reach.

Let’s stop commenting on the trust crisis and start helping people survive it.

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Global influence is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of technology platforms, a pattern that is now difficult to ignore.

The organizations shaping public culture and directing the global flow of information are no longer traditional broadcasters, governments, or financial institutions, but technology companies.

Platforms such as YouTube, Google, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, ChatGPT, and TikTok not only provide the IT infrastructure for global conversation, but increasingly are the subject of that conversation themselves, across both mainstream media and social channels and thereby dominating global discourse.

This concentration is not simply a reflection of scale, but of how influence now operates.

The architecture of concentration

These platforms aren't just large, they've become the infrastructure through which people encounter and engage with the world. They determine what content is surfaced, how it's ranked, and what gains momentum at a scale no previous generation of media companies could match.

This creates a self-reinforcing dynamic. Influence is no longer determined by who produces the most content, but by who controls how it is discovered and interpreted. The practical implication is that distribution and discovery have effectively merged, to be absent from these platforms is increasingly to be absent from the conversation entirely.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating this considerably. The rise of AI-driven search and discovery means the interpretation of information, not just its distribution, is increasingly concentrated among the same small group of companies.

The sentiment ceiling and what it reveals

There is, however, an important nuance: influence does not equal popularity. Several of the most influential platforms operate under sustained regulatory and public scrutiny, driven by concerns around competition, governance, and content moderation. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act, for example, has already resulted in significant fines for Apple and Meta, with the EU signaling tougher enforcement ahead.

Yet this scrutiny has not altered the underlying dynamics. Users may express concerns about these platforms while continuing to rely on them for search, communication, and access to information. Audiences may have reservations about Facebook and still have no comparable alternative for staying connected with family abroad, for example. The divergence highlights a central tension: influence at this scale can persist even in the face of sustained criticism.

The gap that closes the argument

The scale of this dominance becomes even clearer when you look at the platforms most often described as alternatives or emerging challengers. When you track influence across both mainstream and social media, the structural gap is striking.

Analysis of both mainstream and social media channels shows the companies shaping global influence today include YouTube, Google, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, TikTok, and ChatGPT. They operate at a level of reach and integration that few others can approach. Even the most cited challengers, including Reddit, Perplexity AI, Bluesky, Snapchat, and Quora, exist at a materially different level of influence.

This is not simply a competitive gap, but a structural one. Scale, data, and deeply embedded user behavior create advantages that are difficult to replicate, meaning even fast-growing platforms struggle to convert attention into sustained influence.

The comparison with platforms that have already reached their tipping point, particularly ChatGPT which has become synonymous with generative AI for many users, illustrates what that threshold looks like in practice. It also shows how far most challengers remain from reaching it.

The structural reality

What this ultimately describes is not simply market leadership, but structural concentration. A small number of platforms now sit at the center of how the world communicates, shaping both what information is distributed and how it’s interpreted.

The advantages these platforms hold in reach, in data, and increasingly in the AI systems built on top of that data are not static. They compound. Each year that challengers fall short of critical mass makes the existing landscape a little more entrenched. Regulatory responses, however significant, have produced scrutiny and consequence but not the kind of redistribution of influence that would register at the level the data now measures.

The question now is not whether that concentration exists, but what it means for those operating in an environment where influence is increasingly concentrated at the top, and whether the frameworks being built today are genuinely equipped to govern it. The data suggests the window for that conversation is narrowing.

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• Discord has announced its Nitro subscription service will now include Xbox Game Pass
• The new starter edition will include access to 50+ games and 10 hours of cloud gaming
• All of Nitro's benefits will also be available alongside Game Pass at no extra cost

Discord has been at the center of controversy in 2026, due to its push for global age verification on the social platform, but its latest move may win some users over.

In a new blog post, Discord announced that its Nitro subscription will now include the new Xbox Game Pass starter edition membership, at no extra cost, allowing users to enjoy the benefits of Nitro's high-quality streaming capabilities and customization, alongside access to 50+ games via Game Pass.

This comes after it was effectively leaked earlier in April, serving as one of the big moves from Xbox under the helm of new CEO, Asha Sharma. It's a big move for both Xbox and Discord, but more so for the latter, considering the large number of its users who were threatening (or proceeded) to cancel Nitro subscriptions to stop the age verification plans.

Those plans haven't gone anywhere, as they're still slated for the latter stage of 2026, but adding Game Pass to Nitro benefits may help shift the attention elsewhere — and while the library is significantly smaller compared to PC Game Pass (which has 300+ games), it's two birds with one stone for consumers, for only $9.99 / £9.49 / AU$14.99 (which may vary due to localized pricing).

Some of those games included are Fallout 4, Stardew Valley, Deep Rock Galactic, and Overcooked 2, including access to 10 hours of cloud gaming each month. There's no clarity on how upgrades to higher tiers will work via Discord's Nitro subscription, and whether the cost to upgrade is cut, but it's a great start.

The new addition to Nitro is currently within its rollout phase, which will span over the next few weeks, and Discord emphasizes that this collaboration is essentially its way of encouraging users to join Nitro specifically, "if you've been on the fence" about the service.

• TikTok has been testing AI summaries for its videos
• The feature is throwing up wildly inaccurate text captions
• TikTok says it will now pull back on the technology

In the age of AI deepfakes, it's a good idea to treat everything you see on social media with a certain degree of skepticism, but the misinformation problem on TikTok has been made worse with some wildly inaccurate AI captions — and it's bad enough that the video platform is now scaling back this captioning technology.

As reported by Business Insider, TikTok had been testing AI-powered text summaries for videos with a limited number of users. However, after numerous mistakes and hallucinations, the technology is going to be limited to identifying products in videos, rather than fully describing the video's contents.

Those mistakes and hallucinations included describing a video of celebrity Charli D'Amelio talking to the camera as showing a "collection of various blueberries with different toppings", and labeling a dog-training video as "a captivating display of intricate origami art, meticulously folded from a single sheet".

You don't have to look far on social media to find further examples: there's what seems to be an image of two cats with the caption "a person demonstrating an impressive new robot arm with multiple dexterous fingers", for example.

'Garbage that has nothing to do with the video'

It's not clear exactly what's been going wrong that's causing TikTok's AI summaries to get the wrong idea so regularly (though presumably the feature did work at least some of the time). Recognizing the contents of images and videos is usually something AI can do pretty reliably.

That clearly hasn't been the experience of many TikTok users, however. One Redditor described the captions as "completely off the rails", while another said they were seeing "garbage that has nothing to do with the video" — with the AI summary also serving to distract from the actual caption on the video.

Other examples online show a Kentucky Derby horse race video described as "showcasing an intricate piece of calligraphy", and a cookery video with an overhead shot of a gray pan getting the label "a single ball bouncing and rolling on a green surface" — although these screenshots could also be faked, of course.

Even as AI is pushed into more and more of our apps and devices, hallucinations and errors remain a significant problem, which AI companies don't like admitting to. Whether it's a TikTok video or a legal document, if you're getting AI to summarize something, you'd be wise to run additional checks.

• New AI tools for verifying ages are being rolled out by Meta
• Instagram and Facebook is for users aged 13+
• A "visual analysis" will weigh up height and bone structure

Age verification for sites, apps, and devices is fast becoming the norm as regulators look to protect children from potentially harmful content — including content on social media. Now Meta has announced new "age assurance measures" for teen users and predictably, they are powered by AI.

Specifically, the system will use contextual clues associated with a profile (such as mentions of birthdays or school grades) together with a "visual analysis" to help figure out how old a user is.

"We want to be clear: this is not facial recognition," says Meta. "Our AI looks at general themes and visual cues, for example height or bone structure, to estimate someone's general age; it does not identify the specific person in the image."

Users suspected of being too young for Facebook and Instagram (so under 13) will have their accounts deactivated. They'll then need to provide some form of proof of age through a specific age verification process to get their account back.

'Safe, positive experiences online'

Other Facebook and Instagram users can report accounts that they think are being used by kids under the age of 13, and Meta says it hopes to "significantly increase the number of underage accounts we identify and remove" through these methods.

"We want young people to have safe, positive experiences online," says Meta (though some would disagree). "For over a decade, we've built tools, features, and resources to help teens have safe, age-appropriate experiences on our apps."

Similar AI techniques are already being used to spot teenagers on Meta's platforms, and shepherd them into teen-appropriate spaces on these platforms. This tech is now expanding into more regions (including Facebook in the US and the UK).

Meta's announcement ends with a familiar call that we've heard before from the developers of apps and websites: to force age verification at the device level, so it's a problem for Apple, Google, and Microsoft rather than Meta.

Trash on the street, noise, pollution, graffiti, and belligerent dogs: these all might be considered public nuisances. New Mexico, however, hopes to convince a jury that Meta's Facebook and Instagram fall under that designation and should be penalized accordingly.

I won't argue that Meta's products have proven in their 20-year history to be something of a challenge for humans. What started as a fun, casual way to connect has, in some instances, become the very foundation of how people view themselves and others. They are the pipeline for information (real and fake) and, in the case of Facebook, the single place where we wish someone a happy birthday.

No one envisioned, though, that they would have, for some, a powerful effect on our psyche, and especially for the youngest among us. What we see, hear, and read shapes us and our worldview.

How did we get here

Certainly, Mark Zuckerberg never envisaged that his college "The Facebook" would someday influence Presidential Elections.

However, when Zuckerberg and other tech leaders realized the magnetic power of these systems and how they could suck in eyeballs and drive advertising dollars, they woke up to both the potential for growth and the ever-present risk of losing visitors.

Things like infinite scroll, autoplay, and especially algorithms were designed not just to tailor experiences to your individual tastes, but to hook you and hold your attention for as long as possible (and to serve you as many ads as possible).

Again, by my estimation, there was no understanding that those same tools would prove so toxic to one of Meta's key audiences.

Meta was not necessarily targeting children or tweens, but that cohort was certainly on the platforms (and it never hurt Meta that teens would grow into adults with buying power) and lacked the maturity and skills to know when to turn them off or to take what was being presented as real with a grain of salt.

In truth, many adults still lack these abilities. They're fed a steady mix of fact and fiction, truth and hyperbole. Recently, a relative I consider intelligent told me with certainty that the recent White House Correspondents' Dinner attempted assassination was staged. There's no evidence it was, but the chatter on Facebook and fake media outlets that live there told her it was so.

Has Meta done enough?

It's in this light that we view Metas' impact on those adults, but especially these minors.

Meta has done what it thinks it can to prevent kids and teens from having the wrong kinds of experiences on the platform.

It's using AI to ferret out kids and teens posing as adults and shunting the minors to a limited experience — and in that experience, parental oversight that puts the control in adult hands.

All that, though, may not be enough

After losing the first part of a big case last month, which focused less on the content on these platforms and more on how Meta willfully built them to capture and hold attention, Meta is now facing that Public Nuisance charge, which New Mexico wants to use to force Meta to make these changes:

• Age verification
• Redesign recommendation algorithm
• End autoplay (for those under 18)
• End infinite scroll (for those under 18)
• $3.7B to support future teen mental health services in New Mexico

Meta has naturally argued that these changes are technically infeasible. I kind of doubt that, but they could be, at scale, at least, financially infeasible.

Look at that last bit where New Mexico is trying to get tens of billions of dollars from Meta to cover future teen mental health costs. I have no doubt the true costs could be that expensive, but what if New Mexico wins? The 40-or-so other Attorney Generals-sponsored cases against Meta would try to follow suit, and suddenly, Meta has a bill in the hundreds of billions.

You can see why Meta is going to fight. But the momentum appears to have swung away from the social media company, and it could very well lose this case.

Meta's answer, by the way, would be to pull out of New Mexico, something that I'm sure will upset many in New Mexico, especially some Instagram-addicted teens.

If New Mexico wins, it will also affix the label of public nuisance to Facebook and Instagram. I can't say I agree with that. I'm sometimes annoyed by the platforms, but there are other times, like my birthday, when I appreciate it. It's also worth noting that whatever happens with Meta will impact all other social media that operates in New Mexico and, likely before long, the rest of the US.

I agree, Facebook is frustrating, sometimes upsetting, but also part of our culture and, for better or worse, who we are as a society. It has connected people across oceans and could still do that in the future. I expect change to come, and I don't know if they should all be on Meta's terms, but I would be cautious about stamping it all with a label we'll struggle to remove.

As a tech journalist, I'm pretty much always online. With that sometimes comes certain habits that are not necessarily conducive to either productivity or mental health. I'm pretty sure most people would relate to that statement, regardless of profession, to say the least.

My current bugbear? It's definitely my social media usage. Like many others, I've been scrutinizing my own habits in the wake of the increasing public backlash around social media. Ethics and morality aside, my conclusion was pretty simple - I'm just wasting too much time on these apps.

In short, I'm sick of the distractions, and, as a Millennial, I'm old enough to remember when I wasn't just mindlessly scrolling on a screen. I'm old enough to remember when Facebook was just a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg's eye, in fact.

Subsequently, this past month or so, I've been on a real drive to get my online habits in shape. The results, after a strong start, have been... mixed.

Diagnosing the issue

To be honest, I've never really cared for Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. I've always thought LinkedIn was quite lame, and X/Twitter is obviously a cesspit to be avoided at all costs. I've always steered pretty clear of all the usual suspects with a kind of haughty pride, all the while ignoring my own ballooning Reddit and YouTube usage.

I've noticed (ironically, while scrolling through these apps) that people tend to give these platforms a kind of 'soft pass' when it comes to categorizing what's harmful and what isn't. Self-help sub-Reddits and YouTube vids are full of stories about 'digital detoxes' without a hint of irony. Perhaps I'm too critical here, but in my experience, these apps are just as addictive as the others.

And when you work on your home PC, as I do most of the time, it's exceptionally easy to get distracted, regardless of the app. A five-minute check for updates or news can turn into half an hour of scrolling through completely irrelevant content. Before you know it, you've wasted significant time with nothing to show for it.

Of course, we all have slow days, but I can't ignore that over the past few years, I've found it increasingly difficult to focus on all sorts of tasks. Even things that have usually held my interest, like say, reading a book, have been increasingly difficult. It's usually not long before I find myself scrolling Reddit or Google Discover.

If it were just eating into my productivity or my free time, then I could live with a little scrolling. The issue, for me, is that it distracts me from things I love to do, like reading or playing guitar. Even when I specifically schedule time out to do these things, I usually find myself distracted.

The first few weeks

From my previous attempts at quitting various things (namely caffeine), I knew that cold turkey was going to be the best approach. For some people, gradually reducing usage is effective, but it's never worked for me at all. I usually opt for the 'walk away and sweat it out' approach (admittedly, with varied results).

So, I resolved on a pretty simple path. Close all Reddit and YouTube tabs on my browser, delete the apps on my phone, and then just 'do other things'. The things in this case are my job, my hobbies, reading physical books, and so on. It's a crude approach, admittedly, but I was hoping that a bit of discipline would do most of the work while the dopamine slowly drained from my brain.

For the first few days, the approach did actually seem to be working, too. Aside from the expected boredom and restlessness, the difference was stark immediately. With no 'easy' options to fill space, suddenly I felt as if I had a lot more free time.

More work was getting done, I was enjoying my hobbies more, and even my apartment was looking a lot tidier. So far, so good - it felt like significant progress was being made here. Even better still, I wasn't even missing Reddit.

Where I went wrong

So why am I writing this? Well, obviously, I fell off the wagon. Just a month later, I'm almost back at square one, albeit with a resolve to curb my usage again.

Where things started going pear-shaped was about week two or three. I was enjoying recording music in my free time so much that I decided to pick up a new bass. This seemingly innocent decision is where I made a critical error.

In researching what to buy, I did what anyone would do - start with a simple Google search.

Cue a host of results with Reddit threads and YouTube videos detailing a whole list of products. Anyway, you can imagine how things went from here. Reading threads and watching videos 'strictly for research' turned into checking out the front pages for relevant content. Almost subconsciously, I found myself falling into the old routine of mindlessly scrolling through Reddit without much thought.

Editorial sites like TechRadar are increasingly being squeezed out of search results in favor of social media, which might be good or bad, depending on your viewpoint. Regardless, it makes it increasingly tricky to find information without being pulled into the swirling pool of social media. These sites permeate so many platforms now.

Although I'm more or less back at square one now, I do have a much clearer perspective of where to go from here. For one, I'll make sure I don't violate my self-imposed ban for any reason whatsoever (even when 'researching' products). Secondly, I think I'll book some time off work in the not-too-distant future to get some quality time away from my screen.

I'm wary of the term 'digital detox' because it reminds me of some kind of self-help fad, but in this case, I'm sure some time away from screens would massively help set habits straight. Fewer distractions, less nonsense content, and hopefully, more time to focus on the things that actually matter.

• Research shows that Australia's social media ban isn't the most effective
• Some under-16s say platforms haven't taken action to deactivate their accounts
• Despite the failure, the UK government is still considering a similar ban

The UK government is still mulling over a proposed social media ban following Australia becoming the first country to implement the ban — but it turns out, this ruling is failing for the people down under.

In a recent story from Sky News, the outlet revealed that research shows over 60% of underage users in Australia still have access to a range of their social media accounts on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The research was carried out online by the Molly Rose Foundation between March 12 - 31.

Australia’s social media ban for under-16s has been in effect since December 2025, targeting 10 of the biggest platforms. But even though platforms are now required to close existing underage accounts and prevent the creation of new ones by law, 53% of users were still on TikTok, while 53% used YouTube, and 52% of Instagram users still had access, the research reveals.

Beyond this, the study showed something deeper about these platforms’ efforts to enforce restrictions. According to the research, “two-thirds of YouTube users, 61% of Snapchat users, and 60% of both Instagram and TikTok users” claimed that these platforms didn’t take action to deactivate their accounts, which were created before the ban was issued, leaving users feeling more unsafe post-ban compared to before.

Each of the platforms mentioned above have yet to comment on why restrictive measures haven’t succeeded, but for those who have been signed out of their accounts, parents have apparently noticed positive behavioral changes according to a YouGov poll from March. But while Australia still finds its footing with the ban (it could be targeting VPNs next), the UK is still deliberating a similar ruling, even though research suggests Australia's ban hasn't been that effective.

‘Addictive scrolling mechanisms are really problematic’

Since Australia introduced the ban, the UK government has been seriously considering a similar approach. While it rolled out a slew of age verification requirements last year, it has yet to take action on an official social media ban, but it’s not completely off the cards for Prime Minister Keir Starmer who shared to the BBC "But I think ​equally important, the addictive scrolling mechanisms are really problematic to ​my mind. They need to go."

As it stands, the government is currently experimenting with tools such as curfews and screen time limits for apps to examine their impact on things such as education and family life, as Reuters shares. However, aside from this, the government wants to hear directly from parents and teenagers alike.

This would allow the government to see things from both perspectives. On the one hand it gives parents the opportunity to express any concerns they have regarding their child’s screen time and the type of content they can be exposed to. Consulting teenagers on the other hand would offer an explicit insight to the reality of growing up in the age of social media, especially if teenagers provide account of their own personal experiences.

For many people, choosing the right mobile provider used to be simple, choosing whoever had the best price and coverage in a market dominated by the major network operators.

But now the landscape has drastically changed. We live in an always-on digital world where access to mobile connectivity is expected at all times.

Smartphones are now used every day for work, managing finances, education, entertainment and travelling, and, with this reliance, consumers are now looking at more than just price.

Speed and reliability, international connectivity capabilities, contract flexibility, and ease of switching are all major factors, and that has created a mobile market made up of a diverse range of providers offering different specialisms.

The ecosystem is largely built around two types of providers: Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs).

MVNOs, in particular, have become increasingly prominent in recent years, and with evolving technology and rising expectations, it has never been more important for consumers to understand what MVNOs offer and the options at their fingertips.

It’s never been more important for consumers to understand the market and the options at their fingertips.

What makes an MVNO?

MVNO providers lease network capacity from established MNO providers, for example, Lyca Mobile uses EE’s network.

With that, MVNOs develop their own pricing models for pay-as-you-go and pay monthly plans, offer their own services such as EU roaming deals, and deliver their own customer experience offerings such as loyalty programs.

In essence, they offer the same overall connectivity as an MNO under their own brand.

For consumers, it offers more competitive pricing, greater flexibility with plans, and digital-first onboarding and plan management, putting the power back in the hands of customers.

How are they different from an MNO?

In comparison, MNOs are the big four providers in the UK that the majority of people will have heard of and used throughout their mobile phone history.

They are the companies that build and maintain national network infrastructure, and the ones that all of the MVNOs rely on for mobile connectivity.

Another part of their focus is investing in tower networks, developing new technologies such as 5G standalone and preparing for the next generation of connectivity, such as 6G.

Importantly, MVNOs are not direct infrastructure competitors to MNOs, they simply expand the reach of the network to deliver it to additional customers.

The two must collaborate to ensure that network investment and service innovation evolve together, both at the infrastructure layer and the experience layer.

What differentiates the various MVNOs on the market?

The MVNO sector prides itself on specialization, generally across value-driven providers, international connectivity providers, data-focused providers and brand driven providers.

No MVNO is the same and while some aim to deliver across multiple categories, they leave the choice up to the consumer for what they want to prioritize within their mobile plan.

For value-driven providers, the focus is on affordability within simple pricing structures, offering flexible contracts or SIM-only deals that are particularly aimed at the more affordable end of the market.

International connectivity providers are designed more with global use cases in mind, such as those with family and friends overseas or those who travel a lot, offering competitive international calling and roaming.

There are also providers focused heavily on data, with higher allowances that tailor to streaming, social media and consumers who are reliant on mobiles as their main electronic device.

Particularly over recent years, there’s also been a trend of retailers, fintech’s and other digital platforms launching their own MVNO offerings, looking to take advantage of their existing customer bases and relying on their trusted brand recognition.

As the use of technology has continued to grow, so has the number of MVNOs in the market. The current global MVNO count today stands around 2,100, representing more than a 60 per cent increase over the last decade, with Europe and APAC accounting for around 70 per cent of that total.

Much of this growth comes from MVNOs’ ability to understand the diverse needs of various customer groups and tailor mobile plans more effectively than traditional operators.

MVNOs have made their mark by understanding the different mobile plan needs of consumers and tailoring their services more than traditional operators.

The future of MVNO

The way we communicate and connect continues to change every year. Mobile experiences are getting faster and much more flexible as eSIM adoption rises, digital-first services become the standard, and 5G continues to roll out.

These changes are increasing customer expectations and giving MVNOs new opportunities to rethink how people stay connected.

As the industry starts to prepare for future technologies like 6G, it is clear that the future of mobile will be shaped just as much by the customer experience as by the technology behind it.

eSIM adoption is a major shift for the market, removing the need for a physical SIM card and therefore reducing the barrier to entry, as users can activate or switch providers completely digitally.

For MVNOs, eSIM simplifies customer acquisition with fully digital service models, and becomes particularly appealing around holidays and travelling due to the ease of international connectivity across countries, EU roaming services offered by some providers, and travel-friendly plans.

Digital-first telecom services are another area where a broader shift is being seen, with mobile apps replacing retail stores.

Consumers are switching towards the convenience of instant activations, flexible bundles and the ability to manage their account in real-time. This is an environment well-suited to MVNOs due to their ability to scale these services faster than large network operators.

At present, the telecoms market is working to rollout 5G networks to improve the speed and reliability of mobile connectivity, while enabling new services such as cloud gaming, streaming and remote work. But the future of this within the broader technology roadmap is 6G, expected around 2030.

As MNOs lead the technical development of networks to support 6G, with trials expected later this decade, MVNOs will play a key role in translating those capabilities into accessible services for users through offerings such as flexible data models and cross-border connectivity.

Shaping the future of connection

Mobile connectivity is a staple in everyday life, powering how people communicate and how they access essential services such as banking, education, healthcare and entertainment.

This increased reliance on digital, compounded by rising consumer expectations has driven a market shift towards more providers, MVNOs, and the need for more flexible, tailored mobile plans to service customers.

As MVNOs provide the infrastructure that powers connectivity, it’s the MVNOs that bring the choice, competition and innovation to the market.

Particularly as technologies such as eSIM and 5G shape the telecom landscape of the future, MVNOs will play a crucial role in ensuring innovation reaches the end customer in an affordable and accessible way.

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Always-on AI agents like OpenClaw are a promising step towards a new generation of powerful digital assistants capable of handling users’ day-to-day “life admin".

But if you want an AI agent to book you a table in a restaurant, respond to your emails, do your shopping, or make a doctor’s appointment, you may be opening up your digital life to a frightening new level of risk.

OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot and Clawdbot) set the internet ablaze last month, racking up over 100,000 GitHub stars in a week (which is virtually unheard of).

Its overnight success (and subsequent absorption into Sam Altman’s OpenAI) speaks to the wider excitement around the potential for AI agents to usher in the next stage for AI applications.

But, as power users and SMBs rush to deploy persistent AI agents, handing them the power to browse the web, manage files, connect to inboxes and interact with other agents on their behalf, alarm bells are ringing in the cybersecurity space.

Why always-on agents create a fundamentally different risk profile to chatbots

Right now, the vast majority of AI users do so through chatbot sessions, where the user’s own systems are protected by the constrained nature of the interaction. You add your data to the model, get your answer, and close the window.

Always-on AI agents are a different matter entirely.

The selling point behind OpenClaw and other AI agents is that they can perform real-world tasks on behalf of users. Set up OpenClaw to run locally on your computer, and it's capable of reading and writing files, executing scripts and interacting with external services, including other AI agents.

This level of integration, bringing an AI agent into the operating system layer, with what amounts to root access, is what makes AI agents like OpenClaw work. It also imperils the security of the entire system.

Small teams and individual power users are often self-hosting agents, wiring them into Gmail, Slack, AWS, GitHub and Stripe, and deploying them with minimal friction. But this “minimal friction” comes at the cost of minimal guardrails.

This isn’t a critique of any one framework, but rather a sign that the ecosystem is moving faster than its security model. An over-permissioned agent could delete or modify critical files, leak sensitive data through logs or memory, post on social media without review, or trigger costly API calls or transactions.

A single vulnerability can expose the user’s entire digital life.

Agent-to-agent ecosystems represent a new kind of attack surface, exacerbating the threat of prompt injection. According to recent research from Gartner, over 50% of successful cybersecurity attacks against AI agents in the coming year are expected to exploit access control issues.

Prompt injection, a kind of social engineering attack that targets AI specifically, involves a third party misleading the AI model by injecting malicious instructions into the conversation context.

In the same way that a phishing email tries to trick people into giving away sensitive information, “prompt injections attempt to trick AIs into doing something you did not ask for,” according to an OpenAI blog post.

This approach, combined with the inflated power of an AI agent, can have a more profound effect than making a chatbot give the wrong answer to a question.

Practical guardrails

In a sector defined by small developer teams, a DIY approach, and an emphasis on speed over safety, the people experimenting with autonomous agents today should be taking practical steps to reduce the risks associated with these new technologies.

Create dedicated accounts: Don’t give agents access to your primary inbox or root cloud credentials. Use scoped service accounts.

Segment environments: Separate experimental agents from production systems.

Rotate keys frequently: Assume credentials will leak eventually.

Red-team your own setup: Attempt prompt injection and tool misuse scenarios to see how the agent behaves.

Disable auto-execution for high-risk tools: Require confirmation for financial, administrative or destructive actions.

Audit exposed instances: Ensure your self-hosted agent isn’t reachable from the public internet without authentication.

Above all, keep an eye on your AI agents. It may feel like lessening the effectiveness of a tool, the whole point of which is ostensibly to spend less time babysitting your digital life.

But, if you wouldn’t be 100% trusting of a new human hire with access to your bank accounts and social media presence, an always-on AI agent deserves a similar level of scrutiny.

Agentic AI is on track to shape the next decade in terms of how we think about productivity. The ability to delegate complex, multi-step workflows to virtual agents will be transformative. But autonomy without the necessary guardrails is exposure, not innovation.

Because, unlike the AI solutions that came before them, AI agents aren’t just answering your questions or drafting your emails for review. They’re acting on your behalf. Right now, they’re just one vulnerability away from acting on somebody else’s.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

Worker sentiment in tech is starting to present a shoemaker’s children effect.

Employees are developing world-class technologies and AI tools, while internal processes remain outdated and inefficient.

For some companies, this proves a retention risk.

Employee insights

Glassdoor reviews illustrate the irony. When you look at employee experience feedback from the ten biggest U.S. tech employers, staff are highly motivated to work on AI developments and feel positive about the opportunities to do so, but they’re losing patience with the processes they still have to use at their own desks.

One worker, a full-stack developer, claims, “Since the AI boom, everything has gone downhill”. Another employee at the same company told his employer to “eat your own medicine - the AI we sell vs. the AI we use internally - deep divide”.

Other reviews suggest that those who do not believe in AI or engage with it face negative consequences to their career, while there is also a general consensus that pace and work quality is changing with the introduction of AI processes.

One developer states that deliverables have felt rushed since AI was introduced, with quality of work decreasing, while another states that their leadership’s use of generative AI in emails and communications is deemed impersonal and unprofessional.

Another reviewer even claims, “If it was up to this company, they would sack everyone and use AI”.

Spilling to social media

This growing sentiment isn’t exclusive to Glassdoor. Across social media, we can see an increasing backlash to workplace AI mandates across multiple industries on platforms such as Reddit and X (formally Twitter). In fact, many of the conversations happening here also explicitly cite AI mandates as a reason for quitting their job altogether.

Looking at these posts, there’s a clear desire to be included in AI-related discussions with leadership, which if implemented, might help reduce the feeling among many workers that AI use is being “forced”.

There’s also a frustration that poor AI performance is blamed on “bad prompts” from the employee rather than on the tool or process itself. This is a common theme, with other people feeling that management has too high expectations of AI, requesting it be used to replace job responsibilities it is not yet capable of completing to a good standard.

Interestingly, in a thread about coping with mandatory AI at work, multiple people even admitted to exaggerating or fabricating their AI usage at work due to a lack of confidence in the technology. One commenter said that they feel unable to convince their managers that they’re better off without it. Instead, they pretend to use it and even invent time-saving figures to meet usage requirements.

The employer disconnect

There’s a massive gap between executive perception and the employee reality evidenced in this research. A recent study also found that only 4% of leaders cited AI resistance as an issue, but another survey discovered 22% of employees are actually frustrated enough by workplace AI use to consider quitting.

Search data also shows a 10% YoY increase in U.S. searches for “quitting my job” (7,000 monthly searches) alongside emerging queries such as “made to use AI at work” (1,000 monthly searches).

The disconnect is elevated by the fact that people have admitted to misrepresenting their use of AI to meet workplace expectations, even though they are completing the work themselves.

AI is “not just a switch to turn on”

Though AI adds complexity that employers must navigate carefully, this type of dissatisfaction and disengagement isn’t really exclusive to AI; it can actually arise from change management challenges. Just like AI must learn, so do the employees working with it. It is a process, not just a switch to turn on.

Difficulties implementing AI processes can create additional change management hurdles. In a recent survey, senior IT professionals claimed that AI projects are being dropped before production, a YoY jump from 17% to 42% reporting this. In the same survey, 46% of those investing in generative AI state that no single enterprise objective had seen a "strong positive impact" from the investment.

Transparency and collaboration are key parts of the change management process. AI adoption can be higher when employees get to test or play with AI tools to figure out the best ways they can work with AI to improve their own personal working experience.

A starting point is updating compliance-driven policies to include AI guidelines, sharing key AI process information early in onboarding and introducing regular feedback tools to proactively address concerns and keep employees informed and engaged.

Internal feedback mechanisms, especially anonymous ones, often provide a place for disengaged employees to communicate some of the frustration that can build up, especially when regular conversations are not happening with a direct leader.

By focusing on engagement, managers and HR teams can help employees feel empowered rather than sidelined, keeping talent intact as how they work continues to evolve. Before you can sell the AI revolution to the world, you have to make your own people want to be part of it.

Read our list of the best employee scheduling software.

• Reddit has announced that r/all is going away
• The feed was a place to find trending posts across the platform
• It can still be found by going to the old Reddit interface

If you're a Reddit user, you may have frequently loaded up the r/all page, a feed showing posts that are trending across the platform with fewer filters than the similar r/popular. Now the page is going away, though at the time of writing there is still one way to get to it.

Reddit published a changelog (via The Verge) explaining that "entry points and links to r/all" are being taken down starting from April 2. This affects both the desktop interface and the mobile apps for Android and iOS.

"As part of ongoing efforts to simplify Reddit and improve Home feed personalization, the final steps to deprecate r/all are being implemented," Reddit says. "Trending content remains available via r/popular."

The r/popular feed is similar to r/all, but blocks out adult content labeled NSFW (Not Suitable For Work). Before it got deprecated, r/all didn't filter anything out, apart from sexually explicit content.

You can still find r/all

If you try and access r/all through the standard methods — by following this link, for example — you'll simply be directed to the front page of Reddit. This also presents a selection of popular content taken from across the Reddit boards.

There is still a way of finding r/all though: If you visit the old Reddit interface, which remains online, there's still a link to the r/all page at the top. Reddit has itself said that this option is going to remain available for those who want it.

This hasn't come completely out of nowhere: Reddit has previously been testing redirects away from r/all, though up until now it's been labeled as an experiment. Now the move is permanent, at least as far as the default interface goes.

The r/popular feed might not last much longer either. A spokesperson told The Verge that Reddit was "rethinking parts of the global feed experience, especially for new users" and that future changes may indeed involve r/popular.

From boardroom meetings to LinkedIn posts, it’s hard to escape people shouting about their latest achievements with AI. And it’s true that AI tools are unlocking remarkable new frontiers for enterprise organizations.

But for all the noise, many of the claims shared proudly on social media ultimately amount to hot air; celebrating results that don’t mean much to the company or its audience.

These so-called “vanity metrics” cloak AI projects in positive affirmations, but fail to deliver true insight – and as a result, they hold back AI adoption and prevent enterprises from accessing its true value.

Vanity metrics might look impressive in a slide deck, but they fail to measure real business outcomes. This is a familiar trap. Many will remember the early days of social media, when companies boasted about follower counts rather than tracking if the right audiences are engaging and influencing sales revenue.

These surface-level metrics miss the ‘so what’ and highlight that organizations are struggling to measure and communicate the true value of AI.

Without a clear view of value, many organizations are embarking on AI projects without a defined path to ROI. In 2024, we commissioned a report that found only 32% of companies understood how to measure ROI on AI projects.

Since then, a recent report has found that nearly half of businesses still lack structured ROI frameworks. Clearly, organizations are unsure about the route to value and afraid to share that they’re flying blind.

Under pressure to appear on the front foot, enterprises adopt metrics that look good on paper, but are really more hype than help. And when we’re vague about value, we risk sacrificing AI projects on the altar of false confidence.

More work, no pay-off

Measuring the wrong things as proof of success can lead to a false sense of confidence in AI projects. A reliance on vanity metrics gives organizations a skewed perspective on project success, while obscuring how an AI project is performing in a wider context. Surface-level results untethered to business objectives give no true indication of value.

Say you’re onboarding a new AI agent to take over customer service processes, like Klarna did last year. A bot might emulate the work of more than 853 full-time human agents, handle queries at an unprecedented pace, and reportedly save the firm $60m in costs. These metrics sound impressive on the surface.

But they may only capture half the picture. Klarna was just months into this new initiative before it made a swift U-turn towards rehiring human agents, having cut too many humans out of the loop far too quickly. Despite the impressive results shared in public, things clearly weren’t going to plan behind closed doors.

This cautionary tale is a reminder that, however tempting it is to tout shiny metrics, the wider context across the business may tell a different story. The reality on the ground could be more work for remaining staff, hidden costs, and an increase in disgruntled customers.

This kind of unconditional affirmation can provide false assurances to the boardroom that a pilot or roll-out is a success, when in reality it could benefit from a strategic reset or course correction.

Measuring what matters to you

In the face of hype-fueled AI declarations, I’m a firm believer that success can’t be boiled down to a single metric.

Tracking the granular detail of how AI speeds up the process of monitoring, reviewing, replying, and filing data subject access requests, for example, might not trend on LinkedIn or get you featured in the broadsheets, but it will tell you precisely whether AI is addressing the problem it was deployed to solve.

These insights are layered, accrue over time, and can’t be boiled down to a topline figure.

Like any other enterprise tech solution, AI projects need clear, developed objectives and solid KPIs tied to business outcomes as part of their foundations. Measures of impact will be specific to an organization and its goals, and should track how projects perform in the context of the wider business.

Getting this right from the start ensures that organizations can see the return on investment in real time. Being able to observe, measure, and tweak projects once launched not only ensures sustained value, but also gives a solid justification for further investment into new AI solutions elsewhere in the business.

Following the golden thread of value

Understanding what to measure and tracking the success of AI projects doesn’t have to be complicated. But it does require an understanding of the golden thread of value that should run through every initiative.

The first step for tracking an AI project should always be to define an AI use case as a solution to a specific business problem, rather than thinking of AI as a generic solution to any problem. The best use cases address well-documented pain points, often repeatable tasks that can be most readily automated.

KPIs should be identified upfront and aligned to business objectives. If we take a customer service chatbot as an example, KPIs could consider how fast queries are responded to, but should also track customer satisfaction scores, repeat contacts, and escalation rates to human agents.

Anchoring these to bigger business objectives, like customer retention and regulatory compliance, is what reveals the full picture of the solution’s success. KPIs should be quantified upfront and tracked early, with reporting continuing over the course of months, not just days or weeks.

The impact of AI solutions will evolve over time, so ongoing reporting is vital for keeping projects on track.

Assigning ownership is one of the most overlooked aspects of tracking success. When AI projects sit entirely within AI and data teams, they may be optimized for technical performance rather than business outcomes. Who ‘owns’ the solution should be clearly identified, accountable for the results, and have a seat at the decision-making table.

This helps ensure the project aligns with broader business value and, critically, helps move AI projects away from isolated tech solutions to an integral part of business strategy.

AI is increasingly embedded into everyday business operations, but widening adoption does not necessarily reflect widespread understanding of how this technology can generate value.

The organizations that will get lasting ROI from AI initiatives won’t always be the ones sharing the most eye-catching stats on LinkedIn. Instead, they’ll be the ones celebrating real impact on their business objectives and resisting the temptation to mistake noise for progress.

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We have all been there. You find a piece of business software that looks like it will solve everything. The demo is polished. The landing page promises the world.

You sign up, pay, get inside - and discover that the feature you actually wanted is locked behind a "Premium" tier. Or an "Enterprise" plan. Or, my personal favorite, a "Contact Sales for Pricing" button that leads to a 45-minute discovery call where someone tries to upsell you on a package you never needed.

It is the universal SaaS trap. And in 2026, the market is finally calling it out.

Wall Street has wiped over $1 trillion in market capitalization from the software-as-a-service sector this year alone. Salesforce, once the undisputed king of enterprise software, has seen its stock plunge 26% after earnings.

Atlassian has cut 10% of its workforce - 1,600 people - while its stock has dropped 84% from its 2021 peak. Forrester calls it the "SaaS-pocalypse." TechCrunch is writing its obituary.

The reason is simple. If an AI agent can do the work of ten people, why would you pay for ten software seats?

A $350,000 Salesforce contract was reportedly terminated for a custom-built alternative. Retool's 2026 Build vs. Buy Report found that 35% of enterprise teams have already replaced at least one SaaS tool with custom software, and 78% plan to build more this year.

I run a media company, not a software company. But when I looked at what we were paying for - and what we were actually getting - I decided to stop buying and start building.

The problem we were solving

Man of Many is Australia's largest independently owned men's lifestyle publisher. But we are a small team operating in an industry under existential pressure.

Meanwhile, every SaaS vendor was knocking on the door with point solutions. One tool for SEO. Another for social media scheduling. Another for analytics. Another for CRM. The average large enterprise now runs over 2,000 applications, with more than 60% not formally approved by IT. That is not a tech stack. That is tool sprawl.

So instead of subscribing to more software, I built an AI operating system.

What we built

Otto OS is an AI Chief Operating Officer that runs our back-office operations through a network of specialized AI agents. It handles editorial workflows, sales intelligence, competitive analysis, financial reporting, content strategy, and business monitoring.

The architecture follows what is called the WAT Framework - Workflows, Agents, and Tools (hat tip to Nate Herk) - which separates AI reasoning from deterministic execution. This separation matters because when AI tries to handle every step directly, accuracy compounds downward. Five steps at 90% accuracy each give you 59% overall success.

I built it using Claude Code as both the builder and the brain. No traditional developers were involved. The initial build took roughly a week of active development.

What it actually does

Every morning, Otto generates a briefing that pulls live revenue data from Google Ad Manager, checks traffic trends from GA4, scans for SEO anomalies, reviews outstanding invoices in Xero, and flags anything that needs human attention. That used to require someone logging into five different platforms and manually compiling the information.

The security architecture uses a traffic-light system. Green zone: read-only access. Amber zone: draft-only access requiring human review. Red zone: any action involving money, public posting, or data deletion requires explicit human approval every time.

What I learned (and what is transferable)

1. Map your tool sprawl. List every SaaS product you pay for. Next to each one, write down which 20% of its features you actually use.

2. Start with the boring stuff. Reporting. Data consolidation. Status updates. Invoice chasing. These are the tasks where automation delivers immediate, measurable ROI.

3. Separate thinking from doing. Let AI handle reasoning and orchestration. Let deterministic scripts handle execution.

4. Use plain text as your database. Simple markdown files are the most effective memory system for AI.

5. Security is non-negotiable from day one. Build the guardrails before you build the features.

6. Document everything as you go. The system should write its own SOPs.

The bigger picture

We are not the only publisher thinking this way. Dow Jones, Business Insider, and Forbes are all investing heavily in internal AI systems. Reuters Institute's 2026 predictions report found that 97% of publishers now consider back-end AI automation "important."

Bain and Company frames this as a fundamental restructuring of the software industry. Dean Shahar, who manages a three billion euro fund at DTCP, put it bluntly: "The SaaS world is dying. Not software itself, but SaaS as a business category."

For us at Man of Many, Otto OS is how a small independent team competes against publishers with hundreds of staff. It cost a fraction of what we were spending on SaaS subscriptions that underdelivered.

The tools to do this are available to anyone, right now. The question is not whether your industry will be disrupted by AI. It is whether you will be the one building the system, or the one still waiting on a vendor to ship the feature you needed six months ago.

Check out our list of best Large Language Models (LLMs) for coding.

On Wednesday, a Los Angeles jury found that Meta and Google are liable for designing products that are deliberately addictive and failing to warn users about the nature of their products.

This is huge news, a landmark verdict that will inform hundreds of cases to come. While the plaintiff, a 20-year-old identified only as KGM, has been awarded $6m in damages, it's the verdict itself that's most damaging, as it opens the door to many more lawsuits against tech companies.

According to a report in The Guardian, KGM testified that "she became addicted to YouTube at age six and Instagram at nine, which she said had deleterious effects on her wellbeing". She began self-harming at age 10 and was diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia in her early teens.

KGM's lawyers, in their closing remarks, said: “How do you make a child never put down the phone? That’s called the engineering of addiction. They engineered it, they put these features on the phones. These are Trojan horses: they look wonderful and great … but you invite them in and they take over.”

Outside the courtroom, families who had lost young people to suicide celebrated the verdict as the beginning of justice. Meta and Google both plan to appeal, stating they "respectfully disagree" with the verdict.

Why is it so hard to put down our phones? Is social media and scrolling really as addictive as substances like nicotine and tobacco? Should we be safeguarding our kids from technology, or is it a content issue to be monitored by parents, rather than an app design problem? I'll break down the scientific research behind the verdict below.

Children and social media addiction: the effects

While I think it's pretty obvious to any phone user that social media apps have addictive qualities, there are extra concerns about the effects of heavy digital device use on children's developing brains.

One literature review by Italian pediatrists linked digital addiction in children with depression, diet, and psychological issues, as well as 'sleep, addiction, anxiety, sex related issues, behavioral problems, body image, physical activity, online grooming, sight, headache, and dental care'. KGM was six years old when she first got addicted to social media, according to her testimony.

Researchers in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands have also linked 'high social media usage' among adolescents to 'a statistically significant change in the developmental trajectory of cerebellum volumes', a part of the brain associated with emotional control. It could literally influence the brain's physical development.

Another report says: "frequent social media use may be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain in the amygdala (important for emotional learning and behavior) and the prefrontal cortex (important for impulse control, emotional regulation, and moderating social behavior), and could increase sensitivity to social rewards and punishments".

However, it's worth noting that none of these findings are yet conclusive.

How social media apps are designed to foster engagement

Below are three ways Meta and Google could have designed their platforms to encourage addictive behaviors, supported by science and quotes from the trial.

1. The dopamine cycle

In a report by The Guardian, Meta employees in 2020 are quoted as saying “oh my gosh y'all, IG is a drug” in an email exchange, while a colleague responds, “Lol, I mean, all social media. We’re basically pushers.”

They're not entirely wrong. The basis of addiction is all about hijacking the 'mesolimbic system', the part of the brain responsible for associating certain behaviors with rewards, both natural (food, sex, play) and artificial (drugs such as alcohol and nicotine, and notifications). Once a reward is achieved, dopamine is released.

One study on teen addiction linked activation of the mesolimbic pathway to social media use, stating children are "often victims of an unrelenting 'dopamine cycle' created in a loop of 'desire' induced by endless social media feeds, 'seeking and anticipating rewards' in the way of photo tagging, likes, and comments," the latter being the triggers that continue to reinstate the 'desire' behavior.

"The overactivation of the dopamine system in such individuals can further increase the risk of addictive behaviors or pathological changes that lead to a decline in pleasure from natural rewards." Essentially, all you want to do is keep scrolling, just like an addict looking for an endless fix because natural rewards no longer provide the same pleasure as scrolling.

According to CNN, KGM's lawyer Mark Lanier said in his opening statement: “This case is about two of the richest corporations who have engineered addiction in children’s brains,” Lanier said in his opening statement. “The swipe, for a child, like Kaley, this motion is a handle of a slot machine. But every time she swipes, it’s not for money, but for mental stimulation.”

2. The infinite scroll

Now that a swipe is a pleasure creation tool, the next crucial tool in social media's arsenal of addiction creation is the infinite scroll: the ability to swipe forever, to continue to activate and hijack the mesolimbic pathway for as long as the user desires. Likewise, video autoplay on platforms such as YouTube and Netflix helps remove barriers and pauses, encouraging viewers to continue watching.

KGM's lawyers mention the infinitely scrollable feeds and video autoplay as features designed to keep people on the apps, maintain attention, and encourage addictive behaviors. But it's ok, because the inventor of the scrollable feed, Aza Raskin, apologized when he unleashed this horror upon the world.

3. Algorithmically encouraged negative content

Ever heard of 'happy scrolling'? Of course not. 'Doomscrolling,' on the other hand, is named so for a reason. Negativity is more addictive than positive content: one 2024 report by Cambridge University said that "it’s long been recognized that news-related social media posts that use negative language are re-posted more, so that in turn rewards users who create negative content through greater exposure".

Combine this with the infinitely scrollable feed and addictive, casino-esque nature of social media platforms, and you get doomscrolling, a constant stream of bad news, enraging user-created content, and messaging that you're never going to be enough unless you do this, or buy that, or look like this.

KGM used Instagram filters on 'almost all' her pictures and 'had not experienced the negative feelings associated with her body dysmorphia diagnosis before she began using social media and filters,' according to court reporting by Al Jazeera.

The same scientific report quoted above on brain development also said that "in early adolescence, when identities and sense of self-worth are forming, brain development is especially susceptible to social pressures, peer opinions, and peer comparison".

The bottom line? Children are easily impressionable, and if online negativity is more rewarding than positivity, unfettered access to an endless stream of content designed to make users feel worse to increase engagement is going to warp their worldview. According to the jury, in this case, the buck stops at the algorithm's designers.

• iOS and iPadOS users in the UK now have to verify their age
• Otherwise certain features may be disabled for under-18s
• Meta and Google have been fined over their child safety policies

It seems we're hitting a point of reckoning when it comes to phone usage for under-18s: Apple is rolling out mandatory age verification for iPhone and iPad users in the UK, just a day after Meta and Google were hit by a massive fine in a landmark social media trial.

Starting with the Apple verification rollout, this is part of the new iOS 26.4 and iPadOS 26.4 update for users in the United Kingdom. If you're a UK user, you'll be asked to register a credit card or scan an ID in order to prove you're aged 18 or over — unless Apple has previously confirmed your age. This process is already causing some iPhone owners issues.

Apple has full details here, and says the verification process is "required by law in some countries and regions" in regards to "downloading apps, changing certain settings, or taking other actions with your Apple Account". If you need to verify your account, you'll see a message appear on the Settings menu.

While this specific step of age verification at a device level isn't required by UK law as it currently stands, recent legislation does mean it is required for adult websites (including pornography sites). The onus has been on the sites themselves to do the verifying, but there have been calls for checks to be made at the device level too.

With the UK government trialling a curb on social media for under-16s, a law similar to the one implemented in Australia now looks likely. Apple's intentions may be to get ahead of any such decision, and according to the BBC it has been working closely with regulator Ofcom on the new feature.

It's not clear exactly what will happen if you're under 18 and are unable to confirm an adult identity. As per Apple's support document, you may see certain features restricted or be asked to join a Family Sharing group operated by a parent, but the wording suggests it will vary on a case-by-case basis.

Social media addiction

Another reason Apple might have taken this move is the landmark social media lawsuit that just reached a conclusion in Los Angeles: Meta and Google have been ordered to pay out $6m (about £4.5m / AU$8.65m) to a young woman who claimed that Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube severely impacted her mental health.

The woman's lawyers had described the apps developed by Meta and Google as "addiction machines", arguing that the tech companies hadn't done enough to stop younger children accessing these platforms, or to protect them from the harms associated with too much screen time.

In a separate trial in New Mexico that reached a verdict earlier this week, Meta was separately told to pay a $375m (about £281m / AU$541m) fine for misleading users over child safety protections in its apps. Meta had been aware of child predators on its platforms, and hadn't done enough to block them, the jury decided.

Meta and Google both intend to appeal: "Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app," a Meta spokesperson said. "We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously as every case is different, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online."

And while Apple's age restrictions have been welcomed by Ofcom and child protection groups, not everyone is happy about it: some see it as another step towards "mass surveillance" and even more user data tracking and logging, while others argue protection responsibilities should lie with parents rather than device makers.

The momentum definitely seems to be in one direction right now, however — and with AI bots another problem that the internet is grappling with, it's likely that more verification checks are going to start appearing in the future.

It's hard to find anyone who doesn't believe that too much social media is a bad thing. Social media companies now urge you to take breaks, and even Apple's Tim Cook, whose ultra-popular iPhone hosts all these platforms' apps, wants people to look less at their phones and more at other human beings. Now, though, the courts have weighed in, and Meta and YouTube just lost a landmark case that could take casual concern and make it tangible in the form of fundamental changes to how we view and use social media.

On Wednesday, an LA Superior Court Jury ruled in favor of a 20-year-old plaintiff who claimed that Meta and YouTube were negligent and that their platforms caused her mental health issues. It's one of many such cases popping up around the US, and less than 24 hours earlier, Meta lost a case in New Mexico, which claimed that Meta's apps failed to protect users from online predators. Even though these cases are not connected in the courts, the pair of them may point to some rapidly changing attitudes toward social media and its use.

This LA case, which originally also included TikTok and Snap (they settled out of court) is more notable since, by not focusing on the content that might have led to harm but on how the systems are built (algorithms that keep you engaged, endless scrolls, notificatons to return), the case skirted around the US's long-standing Section 230 (part of the US 1996 Communications Decency Act) that essentially protects these platforms from the content that third-party individuals' post on them. So, unlike a publisher that might be liable for a story in their newspaper, YouTube is not directly liable for false and inflammatory remarks made in a YouTube video.

In this case, the content that might have influenced the plaintiff's body dysmorphia is immaterial. What matters is that Instagram and YouTube felt inescapable because of how they work.

Let's not be naive

Whether or not that's true (yes, the jury believes it is), what we should be able to agree on is that the algorithms in Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are powerful, and personalized to even your most fleeting interests. They're not just measuring if you actively click on a like button. They can see time spent, where you paused, commented, and other metrics that tell them how you feel about that content. More positive signals will lead to you seeing more of that content, even if it's not good for you. Just last year, Instagram added a tool to let you curate your own algorithm.

If you have notifications on, these platforms will reach out and try to pull you back in. There's also the social construct around them. Our cultural language is now intertwined with social media; to be off of it is to be wildly out of touch. That's not something a teen feels they can afford to do.

One of the questions here, and I don't know that this case makes it clear, is if Meta and YouTube are being held negligent for not knowing what their systems were doing or if they willfully designed systems, as some reports have alleged, and algorithms that would keep us coming back and on platform as long as possible, serving you whatever content engaged you most and not discerning between healthy and unhealthy content.

Cases like this make me feel for the affected teens, and how they must've felt trapped by the content and their response to it. I know that Meta and YouTube argued that the harm this young woman felt was tied to her home life and not their platforms. I would guess that played a part.

The role parents play

Which leads me to think about parents and guardians. Before any of us understood the impact of these platforms, most of us threw up our hands and "let teens be teens." Social media wasn't for us, although now many adults are just as addicted to it as teens.

I've often counseled parents on how they can't leave their kids alone with phones, tablets, and social media. These tiny screens are doorways to a vast and unknowable world, often featuring content, ideas, and people they are not ready to handle.

Post-millennial teens (let's just call them 'digital natives') are often smarter than their parents about technology, running rings around their rules and creating fake Instagrams (Finstagrams) to hide what they were really doing on the platform: parents saw the main Instagram account, their friends saw their real lives in Finstagram.

It took more than a decade for Meta, YouTube, and others to admit that these platforms needed to offer parents some modicum of control.

They moved slowly at first, but in the last few years, Meta has become particularly aggressive, even applying AI to identify potential teens on the Instagram and then automatically shifting them into more limited access (yes, I've heard of adults who've been swept up in this automation, but then I have to ask, why does an AI think you're a teen? What are you doing on there?).

What's next

Meta is appealing in New Mexico and will surely appeal this case, as well. But a loss like this could be the beginning of a landslide where Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and others suffer more losses and have no choice but to rewrite algorithms (what if they have to insert content they know you'll dislike after every fifth post?), pause or limit auto scrolling for everyone, and remove everyone under 18 from these platforms.

That's also all unlikely but not impossible. It's hard to imagine these platforms emerging unscathed. The sentiment has changed. Action will be warranted.

At the same time, they cannot afford to lose their teen user bases. Meta and YouTube need these younger users because they will eventually become their adult customers with buying power. Most of Meta's revenue still comes from advertising, which is somewhat effective on kids and teens, but far more impactful for adults with money in their pockets.

Change is coming, but I can't conceive yet how it will manifest; I just know it's coming.

For many organizations, compromised usernames and passwords feel like yesterday’s problem. Multifactor authentication is standard, security training is routine, and credential theft is often seen as a low-priority risk. Yet this confidence is increasingly out of step with how attackers operate today.

A large portion of today’s credential abuse begins with infostealer malware. These programs silently gather much more than just login credentials from infected computers.

Data from browsing histories, autofill details, saved session elements, financial information, and system identifiers are combined into what are normally termed ‘stealer logs’. To attackers, these logs provide a full picture of a user’s digital existence, put into a format which is simple to trade, market and put into operation.

The scope of this data is what makes stealer logs so effective. Rather than guessing at how a user might authenticate or act, attackers can copy it. Session cookies, specifically, enable malicious actors to pose as users who have already completed authentication, occasionally avoiding further security measures completely.

The outcome is access which seems valid, acts normally, and is hard to tell apart from routine activity.

This is not something to be disregarded.

Recent research from Flare and Socura indicates that the exposure of credentials is common, even in the case of the biggest companies in the UK. In excess of 460,000 credential leaks have been traced to company email addresses belonging to businesses on the FTSE 100, and some of those businesses have had as many as ten thousand exposures circulating without their knowledge.

Critically, a large amount of this information came from logs made by infostealer malware, not from direct attacks on company systems.

Campaigns like the Snow infostealer operation show this in reality. Spread through a pirated copy of Microsoft Office 2022, the malware took passwords, details from browsers and session cookies from many countries and in several languages.

This was then collated and offered for sale to third parties, giving criminals access which they could either use immediately, or sell on to others in large quantities.

Dangers of conflating professional and personal

The risks to an organization are increased by the way corporate identities are used outside of the workplace.

When employees register work email addresses on personal services such as social media, consumer applications, or unvetted sites, they increase the likelihood of that email being exposed in a third-party data breach for those registered services.

A breach on a personal forum or third-party service can reveal a corporate identity, and if passwords are reused, it leads to attackers gaining a simple point of entry back into corporate systems.

Device usage further complicates matters. Personal computers frequently contain consumer software, pirated applications, or downloads from dubious origins.

These are common delivery methods for infostealer malware. If a user has ever logged into a work account from such a device, those credentials and session details could already be captured, awaiting exploitation.

Although these risks affect employees at all levels, executive and C-suite accounts are particularly valuable. Top-level managers generally have broad access and organizational power.

Compromising one of these accounts enables business email scams, fraudulent payment requests, or access to confidential, proprietary information; none of these attacks require complex technical intrusion. In this scenario, trust is the most potent exploit.

Simplicity does not equate to security

Although still a vital protection, multi-factor authentication isn’t foolproof. When a user successfully logs in and completes an MFA challenge, the website assigns that user a cookie to keep them authenticated. By importing a stolen cookie, an attacker can effectively trick a website into thinking they have already authenticated and bypass MFA entirely.

A further difficulty is that many present-day security measures are created to make things simpler for users, and fail to examine what users do after they’ve logged in. After a user’s identity is confirmed, their subsequent activity is very often assumed to be legitimate.

Criminals exploit this by working steadily and carefully, fitting in with what is usual, instead of setting off clear warnings. Information on access taken from stolen credentials enables them to sign in when it would be expected, from places the user normally would, and by means of devices or browser settings which are recognized.

This obfuscation means that even systems which record everything thoroughly may not identify harmful actions until the real harm has occurred.

This shows a larger flaw in the standard ways that cybersecurity works, which relies on the premise that if somebody has legitimately accessed a network once, they will continue to do so, legitimately in the future.

Their reliability is not checked every time. In reality, identity management should be assessed dynamically, taking into account behavior, context, and risk throughout a session. Without this shift, organizations remain vulnerable to attackers who simply inherit a trusted identity and use it as intended, just with malicious intent.

Reducing the risk of account takeover relies on stringent offboarding practices, ensuring access is terminated the moment an employee leaves. Single Sign-On should be used everywhere to allow for immediate, centralized account revocation.

Employees should also be required to use strong, unique passwords for any accounts. Additionally, utilizing a threat exposure vendor helps organizations identify and remediate leaked credentials and sessions impacting their employees before attackers can use them.

Stolen login details remain an issue, not from a lack of defense, but because the kind of access we allow has changed. As work happens in more places and identities are used on more and more devices and systems, security rules must change with it.

It’s important to work out how criminals really use data they’ve stolen, instead of just how they steal it, if we are to close that gap.

We've featured the best identity theft protection.

This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

• The CEO of Reddit has been talking about verification
• Face ID or Touch ID could be used to prove you're human
• Nothing has been decided or implemented on Reddit yet

Reddit has a serious bot problem, and CEO Steve Huffman has been talking about ways that it could prove that posts are crafted by humans – including the possibility that Face ID and Touch ID verification could be required.

Huffman made the comments in an interview with TBPN (via Engadget), while discussing the idea of making Reddit more valuable for its users, and opening out the platform to people who haven't used it before.

"The most lightweight way [to verify a user is human] is with something like Face ID," Huffman said, before going on to mention more "heavy" options such as ID checking services, and other alternatives in between.

Reddit is looking at passkey technology in general, Huffman said: "They actually require a human presence. A human has to touch, or do, or look at something. That actually just proves that there's a person there, or gets you pretty far."

'We do want to know you're a person'

Huffman also said the internet as a whole needs better third-party tools for verifying that someone is a human being, without having to require any kind of ID and without impinging on the privacy and security of users.

Reddit isn't the only online platform struggling with an influx of automated bots, especially with the rise of generative AI to power them. We're getting to the stage where bot traffic is overtaking human traffic on the web.

While platforms such as X and Facebook seem okay with AI-generated content being posted for the masses, it's something Reddit is keen to crack down on – while also respecting the anonymity of its users.

"Part of our promise for our users is we don't know your name but we do want to know you're a person," Huffman said. "It'll be an evolution for us for a while, and probably every platform to find the right middle ground here."

X was down for thousands of users on March 18 for around an hour, but Elon Musk's social network quickly recovered and is back to full health.

According to Downdetector, the issues started at around at 10.47am ET / 2.47pm GMT, when a large spike in reports appeared in both the US and UK. The reports peaked at around 26,000 in the US and just under 5,000 in the UK, but quickly plummeted to a baseline level at about 11.44am ET / 3.44pm GMT.

No official cause was given for the issues, but here's how the latest X outage played out...

This looks like another big one

We haven't seen a spike in reports about X issues this big for, well, a month since the last outage on February 16.

Right now, there are over 36,000 reports on Downdetector in the US and over 8,000 in the UK. In short, that's big and more serious than the early stages of the February outage.

However, X is already working again for me after a brief period of error messages, so perhaps this one will be more short-lived.

X is recovering

Good news for fans of memes and doomscrolling — X seems to already be recovering from its earlier issues.

The site is now working for me and the reports have dropped sharply on Downdetector, falling to just over 14,000 in the US and around 3,700 in the UK.

I'll be keeping an eye on this one to see if there are any aftershocks, but fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately for work productivity) Elon Musk's social network seems to be back up and running.

In case you've missed it, Discord recently made it clear that it will stick with plans to enforce global age verification on its users, but the rollout has been delayed until the second half of 2026.

Unsurprisingly, it has left users on the social platform frustrated, as the threat of losing some privileges on the app looms, and most importantly, privacy remains a major concern for both those who participate in verification or not. It's exactly why we've seen a sudden spike in users fleeing to Discord alternatives such as Stoat or Valour Software.

Frankly, I doubt most users truly want to leave the platform, considering how popular it is and how accustomed many are to using it. However, the global age verification delay may not work in Discord's favor, as I believe its executives think it does; it only provides more time for users to look for alternatives, and I predict many will have moved on by the time those changes are implemented.

I'm not quite ready to jump ship just yet, as there's no guarantee the same contacts and servers already available on Discord will also be on alternatives. Regardless, if you're ready to leave the platform behind and keep your data safe, there's a crucial step you'll need to take before deleting your Discord account.

Use Discrub to delete your Discord messages

Google Chrome's extensions are lifesavers, and with Discrub, users can easily delete attachments and messages in bulk without manually deleting each message (tutorial above).

It's possible by logging onto Discord on Chrome and simply using Discrub for multiple options, such as exporting messages or attachments if needed, or in this case, deleting them.

This is a vital step when deleting your account, as your activity and most importantly, your messages, are still visible to the other recipient – and if that includes personal information, there'll be no way to remove that once your account is gone.

Discord is under fire for its data breaches and push for age verification, which requires some form of identification. Both Discord itself and its verification software partner, Persona, have seen major data breaches (the latter was the most recent), and leaving personal information in chats isn't exactly safe either.

It's a sad state of affairs to see Discord effectively manufacture its own possible downfall, and while the age verification measures are mandatory by government law in some countries, it has still chosen to enforce them globally.

Perhaps the number of users leaving the platform will encourage its executives to restrategize, but I highly doubt it will budge.

• YouTube fixed a recent bug that meant non-English comments in live chats wouldn't be delivered
• Multiple users took to voicing complaints on the YouTube Help platform
• It remains unclear what caused the bug, but it may have been a caching or AI moderation error

YouTube has undergone numerous changes over the years, with content creators frequently voicing frustrations regarding moderation and monetization — and the platform's latest issue sums up these concerns.

Several users noticed a strange bug on YouTube's live chats, which only allowed emojis or non-English text to be sent and delivered, and was subsequently fixed, as noted by YouTube on its support page. This applied to both standard and super chat messages, temporarily spoiling live chat functionality.

I spotted this while chatting in a live stream, and found that only incoherent text (or text in different languages) would be delivered, making it one of the most bizarre bugs on the platform. It's not exactly clear what caused the issue, as YouTube gave little to no explanation to users.

On paper, however, it appears that the issue may have originated from a caching error on YouTube's backend. The worst-case scenario is an error that may have occurred on the side of chat moderation, and YouTube has openly admitted that it uses AI for content moderation.

The potential cause behind the bug is open to speculation unless YouTube provides any further details, which I would say is unlikely at this stage, now that the bug is resolved. However, the live chat bug sheds light on a bigger issue that YouTube needs to address as soon as possible.

YouTube's AI chat moderation is too aggressive

Having used YouTube's live chat during streams, many other users and I have noticed how aggressive the chat moderation can be, even when content creators aren't actively blocking keywords.

While not safe-for-work text is unsurprisingly blocked a majority of the time, there are multiple scenarios where safe-for-work content is also blocked, and that's where YouTube's AI chat moderation is to blame.

AI is far from perfect, and that statement particularly applies to discerning whether comments in live chats are appropriate or not. Without humans reviewing content, false flags are likely, and the controversy grows when noting that AI moderation supposedly extends to scans of channels that may be violating community guidelines.

Unfortunately, platforms and companies beyond YouTube are also relying on AI to complete human tasks, and it's proving problematic for job security, hardware availability in tech, and the normal functionality of multiple systems. It seems like AI is here to stay, and that's very worrying.

• Discord's age verification plans have been delayed to the 'second half' of 2026
• The delay is a response to the backlash from users who have voiced privacy concerns
• Discord still intends to roll out age verification for users with minor changes

Discord has been under fire from its users due to plans for global age verification on the social app, and the fierce backlash against the decision has finally prompted Discord to act — but it's still not enough to win users over.

In a new press release, Discord announced that it will delay its global age verification plans, after admitting "we've made mistakes" and plans to rectify the matter by regaining the trust of its users. Instead of the rollout beginning in March, it will now happen at an unannounced date in the latter stage of 2026.

Discord has also tried to clarify its plans yet again, stating: "Many of you walked away thinking we're requiring face scans and ID uploads from everyone just to use Discord. That's not what's happening, but the fact that so many people believe it tells us we failed at our most basic job: clearly explaining what we're doing and why. That's on us."

However, what Discord seemingly fails to realize is that users don't want age verification measures on the platform whatsoever, and more specifically, because of the security risks it poses due to data breaches on the platform.

A Discord alternative open-source app, Valour Software, took to criticizing Discord over the delay, stating: "You got everything wrong. The fact that you are still moving forward with any of it and are not using your billions in VC funding to legally fight for the privacy of your users is evidence that all you care about is getting that sweet, valuable facial recognition data."

While it's clear that not all users will be required to verify age via facial recognition (or use a form of government ID), Discord states it's able to note who is an adult via an "internal system that works to accurately determine your age", which doesn't help calm those who already have privacy fears.

Discord is attempting damage control

It's the second time Discord has addressed the controversial decision, but it's a response to the backlash that won't sit well with users. Since Discord is still going forward with its age verification plans, but just at a later date, it seems as though Discord is effectively saying, "We'll wait until you all stop complaining, and we'll implement the changes later on anyway."

Fortunately, it has cut ties with Persona for its verification system, as the widely used verification platform suffered a major data breach recently, which was reported by Malwarebytes. Still, it feels like it's too little too late for Discord, as the damage has already been done from the moment it announced verification plans for users globally.

While there are regions where the new measures are mandatory due to new government laws, there are still many others that don't have to comply, and that has left many feeling that Discord has ulterior motives to essentially further monitor its users.

The backlash won't stop here, especially with users flocking to Discord alternatives such as Stoat, so Discord may eventually be forced to completely fall back on its age verification rollout, but those plans probably won't at this stage.

• Gen Digital found nearly a third of Meta ads in EU/UK linked to scams
• Malvertising now drives 41% of cyberattacks against individuals
• Top 10 scam advertisers responsible for over half of fraudulent ads, tied to China/Hong Kong infrastructure

Ads on social networks are being abused to deliver malware and scam people on a scale that rivals legitimate advertising itself., new research has claimed.

Gen Digital analyzed 14.57 million Meta ads over a 23-day period in the EU and UK representing 10.76 billion impressions, and discovered almost a third (30.99%) - 4.51 million ads - were related to a scam campaign that can be either phishing, malware, or other malicious infrastructure.

Those fraudulent ads generated 143.8 million impressions in the EU alone, and 304.11 million across the EU and UK in less than a month.

Highly concentrated scam activity

Gen Digital says the success is partly due to the fact that the ads don’t look like a scam: “Today, dangerous ads don’t look suspicious; they look professional, familiar and seem to target your exact needs. On social networks, the same optimization engines designed to maximize engagement and conversion are being repurposed to maximize victimization,” the research reads.

Another important factor is that malvertising now accounts for 41% of all cyberattacks against individuals. It is the single largest threat to consumers, according to Gen telemetry.

The (relatively) good news is that the scam activity was highly concentrated. The top 10 scam advertisers were responsible for more than half (56.1%) of all scam ads, accounting for 2.53 million unique ads and 57.92 million impressions. Researchers traced repeated campaign clusters to shared payment systems and infrastructure linked to China and Hong Kong, saying these are an organized, industrial-scale operation.

Scammers frequently reused the same domains, have near-identical ad text, and use identical infrastructure across multiple campaigns.

It seems that dopamine addiction is not the only way social media risks our wellbeing.

• Mark Zuckerberg spoke at the LA social media addiction trial
• He defended Meta's approach to protecting teen users
• The plantiff's lawyer argued Meta was targeting teens for platform growth

Meta's focus might look to be more on AI and smart glasses than the social media platforms which saw it rise to prominence, but errors its accused of making with regards to keeping teens safe online could affect the whole company, and the whole tech industry.

To catch you up to speed, Meta and YouTube are currently involved in a social media addiction trial being held in Los Angeles, which pits the duo against a plaintiff accusing the companies of intentionally creating damagingly addictive platforms.

It’s one of thousands of similar lawsuits that have been filed against social media giants, which are attempting to argue that platform features rather than platform content have created negative addictive tendencies in younger users. Social media content is protected by the infamous Section 230 federal rule, which shields platforms from liability for the user-generated content on their sites, but lawyers for the plaintiff argue the law doesn’t protect features like infinite scroll.

The trial started a little over a week ago, and after opening arguments from lawyers for each side, key figures are taking the stand, including, recently, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg defended the actions of his company, saying that, while he regrets Meta not making faster progress in its efforts to identify users under 13, the teams working on platforms like Facebook and Instagram have spent years addressing “problematic use” because “it’s the right thing to do” (via the BBC).

This includes adding features such as daily use limits, usage alerts, and the ability to switch notifications off in the evening and overnight.

He was, however, questioned about various internal messages, such as one in 2017 which sees an executive saying “Mark has decided the top priority for the company is teens," and another from 2015 in which Zuckerberg and others discuss strategies to increase "teen usage."

Zuckerberg was also asked about a 2019 research report from an independent company done on behalf of Instagram, which said teen users had "an addicts' narrative about their Instagram use."

More than a social media trial?

As we've discussed in previous articles about this ongoing story, the verdict made in this trial could have major ramifications for social media companies. There are thousands of similar lawsuits making their way through the US courts that would take precedent from the decisions made here, and a negative result for Meta and YouTube could embolden more governments to introduce or tighten social media restrictions for younger users, following the lead of Australia.

But for both of these companies, a negative result – or even simply a negative result in the court of public opinion – could impact not only their past mistakes but their future projects too.

Both Meta and Google, the parent of YouTube, are currently pushing hard into AI and wearables with Ray-Ban Meta glasses and Android XR. Smart glasses are the big new thing in tech, and there are rumors that Meta might finally launch a smart watch to compete with Android and Apple bands, but these gadgets can give these companies a lot of insight into our lives and our physical health.

A recent New York Times report has suggested Meta wants to add facial recognition to its specs, and numerous wearables brands have dreamed up visions of glasses that can remind you where you left your keys before you leave home. But these features only work effectively if your tech is always watching your every move, listening to all your conversations, and deeply involved in your life.

If the perception (even if the trial’s verdict disputes it) is that Meta and YouTube – and by extension Google – misuse social media data to get people hooked on their tech, I imagine folks wouldn’t be keen to hand over even more data to these companies through wearables.

Equally, if Meta and YouTube can prove they have done everything they can to keep users safe, then that could help convince people that their wearables are the safest option in this new AI/AR wild west.

This is a case we’ll be following closely, though with the trial still underway, and appeals likely to follow, don't expect a final decision to be made any time soon.

Last year marked 20 years since YouTube was revealed to the world, as well as the anniversary of the first-ever YouTube video. To celebrate this milestone, it’s heading to one of the most famous art museums in the world, the V&A museum in London, and it’s wild to think that it's now considered museum-worthy.

As part of the museum’s latest collection 'Design 1900 - Now,' which opens today (February 18), its curators have acquired a reconstruction of the original YouTube watch page from 2006, as well as a projection of the original video file for the first uploaded video titled ‘Me at the zoo’ — taken by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim.

While this part of the exhibit is designed to spotlight early web design aesthetics, there’s more to it than meets the eye. Its purpose is to showcase how YouTube’s early contributions to internet culture have shaped the evolution of content platforms and the formation of online communities.

"By reconstructing the original 2005 watchpage, we aren't just showing a video; we are inviting the public to step back in time to the beginning of a global, cultural phenomenon”, YouTube's chief executive, Neal Mohan, summarizes for the BBC.

YouTube goes into further detail in its blog post, saying “The 19-second clip of YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, filmed on a low-res camera in 2005 is widely considered a foundational moment in the rise of user-generated content, enabling new modes of public self-expression, changing how media is created and consumed”. In this lies the birth of the popular social media functions we use daily.

It was unknown back then, but much of YouTube’s early design elements feature infant examples of key social media tools such as badges, rating buttons, as well as sharing and recommendation features — all of which I, frankly, couldn't live without. That said, I still can’t get over the fact that early YouTube is now considered old enough to be exhibited in this way.

My favorite corner of the internet is almost old enough to buy a beer, and I’m still using it

I remember stumbling upon YouTube around the 2007-2008 mark, and it felt like I had discovered something otherworldly. The first batch of videos that defined my early YouTube days ranged from clips of The Sims to viral hits such as Potter Puppet Pals — but then music videos happened.

Being a frequent scourer of pre-YouTube music websites such as Slack-Time (that’s where I first watched the video for Poker Face), and a keen watcher of music TV channels, you can imagine how thrilled 9-year-old me was when Vevo started providing YouTube with music videos galore in 2009. But even then, I look back on that time and nothing feels too dissimilar to how I’m consuming content in my 20s even though the game has exponentially changed.

I still can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that we’re now approaching a time where we’re beginning to view platforms like YouTube in this light — even though its layout today has a lot of the same features it did back then, it is much more refined. Before you know it, it’ll only be a matter of time before an early TikTok feed gets suspended in the Louvre.