How Australia’s tough social media ban compares to laws in other countries

Laws will bar under-16s from accessing social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit and X

Romanian court orders recount of presidential election’s first-round votes

Also, presidential office says officials detected online efforts to influence vote won by little-known far-right candidate

A spy story from Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger gang

The podcast studio behind the Rest Is … universe goes deep on the 1953 Iran coup in The Rest Is Classified. Plus: five of the best expert advice podcasts

Reddit overtakes X in popularity of social media platforms in UK

Discussion platform takes fifth place in rankings and is the fastest growing large social media platform in the UK

X trying to block transfer of platform’s InfoWars accounts to the Onion

Social network says it must give permission for accounts to be sold or transferred after sale of rightwing InfoWars

TikTok to block teenagers from beauty filters over mental health concerns

Social media platform under pressure to improve security as it announces plans to block under-13s from signing up

Online influencers need ‘urgent’ fact-checking training, warns Unesco

Research shows six in 10 social media content creators do not verify accuracy of information before posting it

If so many experts oppose a social-media age ban, why is the government intent on rushing it through?

Labor has been at pains to say people won’t need digital ID or to hand over their passport – but there’s nothing in legislation preventing it

Australia should delay social media ban until age-check trial finishes, Google and Meta say

Coalition-backed bill is ‘inconsistent and ineffective’ and should not go ahead until after trial is completed next year, Meta says

‘You get desensitised to it’: how social media fuels fear of violence

Young people in Birmingham attest that violent content on apps is having a real-world impact

Violence on social media making teenagers afraid to go out, study finds

Quarter of teens who see violence online are being served clips via algorithms, survey in England and Wales finds

Greens and One Nation accuse Albanese of trying to ‘ram’ social media ban through parliament

Sarah Hanson-Young says online safety review ‘kept secret from public’ as Senate committee given just four hours to hear expert evidence

For now, let’s revel in Bluesky’s promised land and kid ourselves it’ll never get like X

Watching the numbers migrate from Elon Musk’s toxic platform is addictive, but the best social media is finite

I’ve joined Bluesky and it feels like a breath of fresh air – in some ways…

The flourishing new platform may be like Twitter once was. The problem is the limited algorithmic scope of all social media

Jeff Jarvis: ‘Elon Musk’s investment in Twitter seemed insane, but it gave him this power’

The US media pundit on the dangers of overregulation online, why he’s more frightened of the tech bros than AI itself, and how to reclaim the web by getting rid of the geeks