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A Florida high-school student faces jail time for rigging her school’s Homecoming Queen election. A 17-year-old high school senior along with her mother, Laura Rose Carroll, were arrested this week, charged with accessing student…

The ‘young mastermind’ of the Twitter hack will serve three years in juvenile detention. Thanks to a new plea deal with the Florida State Attorney’s Office, the 18-year-old behind last summer’s breach of Twitter’s high-profile…

A US teenager has pleaded guilty to hacking several high-profile Twitter accounts in a large-scale Bitcoin scam. Graham Ivan Clark was 17 when he co-ordinated the scam - which hijacked the profiles of celebrities, including…

Dog training videos on YouTube promote "inhumane and ineffective" methods, an animal welfare charity has warned. Videos advocating the use of electric shock collars should come with a warning or be banned, the Blue…

We know. You wanted to spot someone across a crowded bar, get chatting, take their number, meet up for cocktails or coffees and eventually move in and get a dog together. You didn't think you'd be spending…

image copyrightKrystyna Paszko Disturbed by reports of rising domestic violence under coronavirus lockdown, a Polish high school student decided to launch a fake online shop to offer a lifeline to victims trapped…

Facebook will restore Australian news pages in the next few days after the government agreed to more amendments to the media bargaining code that makes the social network and Google pay for news. On Thursday Facebook blocked all news on…

After an abortive attempt to change its privacy policy led to millions of users signing up for competing services, WhatsApp has said it will try for a second time to roll out the update in mid-May. In an effort to smooth the transition,…

The UK government is “obviously concerned” at the repercussions of Facebook’s shutdown of large numbers of news and public information resources in Australia, Downing Street has said, confirming that the culture secretary will meet the US…

The site claims to be moderated and has exploded in global popularity during the pandemic with millions of visitors a day - particularly in the US, India, Mexico and the UK. It has become a TikTok trend, frequently visited by…

Today we made an incredibly difficult decision to restrict the availability of news on Facebook in Australia. For the last three years, Facebook has worked closely with the Australian government on regulation that would help better define…

More than a dozen teams in the US National Football League have had their social media accounts hacked. The teams included the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs, who will compete in the Super Bowl Championship on 2 February. The…

The news: Video platform TikTok has published a set of new, more detailed guidelines governing which videos will be deleted from the app. It says it will take down videos promoting terrorism, crime, violence, hate speech, or self-harm, for…

Facebook is tightening its policies on "manipulated media," including deepfakes, Monika Bickert, the company's vice president of global policy management, says in a blog post. Why it matters: Facebook has been criticized for the way it…

YouTube has premiered a Robert Downey Jr-fronted series that seeks to demystify artificial intelligence. The documentary - produced by the actor in partnership with his wife Susan - is one of the platform's highest profile and…

YouTube, one of the most popular social media platforms for video sharing, has aggressively started deleting cryptocurrency-related content from some of the biggest influencers in the industry. Based on Twitter and Reddit threads, YouTube…

Facebook says it will soon stop its practice of using phone numbers provided to the company as part of its two-factor authentication (2FA) security tool to power a friend suggestion feature, Reuters reported on Thursday. According to the…

Facebook is to stop using members' phone numbers in its friends recommendation system in 2020 following concern about privacy implications. Users can choose to have a code sent to their mobile phones when logging in to make access harder…

Trolls targeted people with epilepsy on Twitter with seizure-inducing videos, according to the Epilepsy Foundation. The US charity said the perpetrators had posted flashing and strobing Gifs and videos in November. The Epilepsy…

Self-professed “ethical hacker and reverse engineer” Vitali Kremez has discovered a new trojan, dubbed ‘Socelars’, which could be used to hack Facebook Ad Manager accounts, further endangering advertising on the platform. Security…

Artists have told the BBC how their artwork is being stolen from social media and sold for profit online. They claim malicious individuals are finding their art, often with the aid of an automated system known as a bot, and uploading it…

Thank god for Jim Sterling, a game critic whose recent YouTube antics forced YouTube’s copyright system to eat itself alive. Here’s how he did it. As you may already know, YouTube has something called “Content ID,” which is a system that…

Instagram is to warn users when their captions on a photo or video could be considered offensive. The Facebook-owned company says it has trained an AI system to detect offensive captions. The idea is to give users "a chance to pause and…

The Chinese authorities issued a directive in August last year requiring real name registration for live webcasts. Recently, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced a series of regulations including a ban on live web broadcasts and…

A look at recent usage trends, and how the company is trying to stay relevant for the next generation of consumers The writing is on the wall for Facebook — the platform is losing market share, fast, among young users. Edison Research’s…

If you search any popular Twitch streamer’s name on YouTube, you’ll find countless videos scraped from their streams. Of these, some will likely come from the streamer, but many are the product of users who upload content that is…

YouTube will no longer allow videos that "maliciously insult someone" based on "protected attributes" such as race, gender identity or sexuality. The video-sharing platform will also ban "implied threats of violence" as part of its new…

Twitter will begin deleting accounts that have been inactive for more than six months, unless they log in before an 11 December deadline. The cull will include users who stopped posting to the site because they died - unless someone with…

TikTok, a social network video app with more than 1 billion downloads globally, admitted Tuesday to a set of policies that had suppressed the reach of content created by users assumed to be “vulnerable to cyberbullying.” As examples of…

Facebook has launched a tool that will enable members to transfer photos and videos they have uploaded to the platform to Google Photos. The service would initially roll out in Ireland and then, in 2020, across the world, Facebook said.…