Australia Has Banned Social Media for Kids Under 16. How Does It Work?

Instagram is generating SEO-bait headlines for its users' posts, a move aimed at enhancing visibility and engagement on the platform. This development reflects Instagram's ongoing efforts to leverage artificial intelligence to optimize user-generated content and improve discoverability.

Australia is set to implement a ban on social media access for individuals under the age of 16, effective December 10, 2025. This initiative aims to enhance online safety for minors amid growing concerns about the risks associated with social media usage. The move has attracted attention from various governments worldwide, including Denmark and Indonesia, who are considering similar measures.

Instagram has been criticized for generating misleading headlines for posts that appear in Google Search results, leading users to feel that their content is misrepresented. This issue raises concerns about the accuracy and reliability of information shared on the platform.

Meta is implementing changes to simplify Facebook, aiming to improve user experience by streamlining various features and functionalities. This initiative reflects the company's ongoing efforts to address user feedback and enhance engagement on the platform.

The introduction of SPOT (Stopping Points in Online Threads) marks a significant advancement in the field of natural language processing, providing the first annotated French corpus designed to identify critical interventions in online discussions. This corpus consists of 43,305 annotated Facebook comments related to misinformation, offering a new lens through which to analyze online discourse.

A new method called TopiCLEAR has been introduced for topic extraction from social media posts, addressing challenges posed by the informal nature of platforms like X, Facebook, and Reddit. This method utilizes Sentence-BERT for embedding text and Gaussian Mixture Models for clustering, refining the clusters iteratively to improve topic modeling accuracy.

A new study introduces a Confidence-Aware Fine-Grained Debate (CFD) framework that utilizes multiple open-source large language models (LLMs) to enhance data enrichment for mental health and online safety. This framework simulates human annotators to reach consensus on labeling real-world indicators, addressing the challenges of dynamic life events. Two expert-annotated datasets were created, focusing on mental health discussions on Reddit and risks associated with sharenting on Facebook.

TikTok has announced the launch of a new feature called Shared Collection, which allows users to organize and share their saved videos. Additionally, the platform plans to introduce a Shared Feed, a daily curated selection of 15 videos, aimed at enhancing user engagement globally. These updates are designed to make the app more social and interactive for its users.