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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

Adults who work with Young People News

16 November 2023

Meta wants to shift the burden of monitoring social media usage among teens back to the app stores — and to parents.

Meta’s global head of Safety, Antigone Davis, argues that parents should be responsible for approving their teens’ app downloads and staked Meta’s position in supporting federal legislation that would require parental approval for app downloads for users under the age of 16.

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13 November 2023

Popular live video chat website Omegle is shutting down after 14 years following user claims of abuse.

The service, which randomly placed users in online chats with strangers, grew in popularity with children and young people during the Covid pandemic.

But the site has been mentioned in more than 50 cases against paedophiles in the last couple of years.

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08 November 2023

Shayan Sardarizadeh is a senior journalist covering disinformation, extremism and conspiracy theories for BBC Monitoring’s disinformation team as part of BBC Verify. Since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, he’s debunked dozens of misleading visuals on social media and published his findings on widely read threads on Twitter, now known as X.

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06 November 2023

Anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson has had his account reinstated on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was reinstated alongside political commentator Katie Hopkins.

Hopkins was banned in 2020 and Robinson's account was suspended in 2018 - Twitter accused both of breaking its rules on hateful conduct.

A number of controversial figures have been allowed back on the platform since it was bought by Elon Musk last year.

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01 November 2023

UK Safer Internet Centre writes: 'We have seen the much-anticipated development of the Online Safety Bill receiving Royal Assent. This brings together years of campaigning by ourselves and individual work by the UK Safer Internet Centre partners, prominent figures, and many organisations who have understood the need for this vital legislation to come in to place as the Online Safety Act.'

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