Internet for all? Biden seeks to widen online access Special

The Pakistan government imposed an hours-long shutdown of social media and instant messaging platforms on Friday, after days of violent anti-France protests.

Before arriving in Madrid, Muhammed, Ayham, Okba and Moussa honed their skills as journalists during Syria's bloody civil war and now they have opened Spain's first refugee-led digital magazine.

Ireland's data regulator has launched an official inquiry into Facebook after details on 533 million users were leaked on a hacking website, a spokesman said Wednesday.

Russian police on Wednesday raided the offices of student news site DOXA and charged staff with inciting minors to protest as authorities piled fresh pressure on independent media.

Myanmar youth are fighting the junta's internet shutdown and information suppression with an explosive underground printed newsletter they are secretly distributing across communities.

A recent loss of Facebook data provides a timely reminder of the risks in terms of the volume and detail of personal data held by social media sites. In the wrong hands such data leads to digital identity theft.

Worried about reports of rising domestic violence during lockdown, Polish teen Krysia Paszko set up a website purporting to be a cosmetics shop that actually offers victims covert help.

Twitter has launched an emoji to spotlight the "#MilkTeaAlliance" online protest movement that has forged links between pro-democracy activists across Asia, the social media giant said Thursday.

The Brave Girls were losing courage just weeks ago, on the verge of breaking up and abandoning their dreams of K-pop stardom after years of going nowhere.

Facebook said Tuesday that hackers "scraped" personal data of some half-billion users back in 2019 by taking advantage of a feature designed to help people easily find friends using contact lists.

A Singaporean blogger said he had crowdfunded almost $100,000 that he was ordered to pay as damages for defaming the prime minister by sharing an article on Facebook.

533 million Facebook users accounts have been put up for free on a hacker site. The Australian government wants people to provide 100 points of ID for all social media accounts. This is a virtual gift for hackers.

It’s a very sick statistic. 65% of Australian women report online abuse and harassment. There are indications that extremist groups are grooming younger guys in this. Is this just part of the ongoing polarization of humanity, or more?

Papua New Guinea's health minister on Thursday called disinformation spread on Facebook the "biggest challenge" to efforts to curb the rampant spread of Covid-19 in the poor Pacific nation.

Some jokingly said the cryptic tweet, ";l;;gmlxzssaw," was a US nuclear launch code. Others, that the Pentagon had been hacked.And some even thought it was a signal to political conspiracists.

Venezuela hit back at Facebook over "digital totalitarianism" after President Nicolas Maduro's account was frozen for 30 days for spreading disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic.

Facebook said Saturday that it was "freezing" Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's page for a month after repeated violations of the platform's rules against Covid-19 misinformation.

Former French national team striker Thierry Henry has said he is quitting all social media until platforms do more to tackle racism and harassment, becoming the latest celebrity to scale down their online presence over abuse.

From a converted storeroom on the roof of his mother's Seoul apartment, Kim Min-kyo plays video games for up to 15 hours a day -- and makes a fortune from the thousands of fans watching him.

US lawmakers unleashed a torrent of criticism against social media top executives Thursday, blaming the companies for amplifying false content and calls to violence, while promising new regulations to stem rampant online disinformation.

American model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen quit Twitter on Wednesday, becoming the latest celebrity to ditch the platform after facing abuse.

Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders announced Tuesday that it has filed a lawsuit against Facebook in France, saying the website breaks its own terms by failing to protect users against hate speech.

Every Monday at 4:30 pm British time -- 5.30 pm in France -- Elliot Bellman, 20, keeps an unlikely appointment with 97-year-old Jacqueline Tolu."Comment allez-vous?" (how are you?) he asks Tolu over Skype.

Fifteen years ago Jack Dorsey typed out a banal message -- "just setting up my twttr" -- which became the first ever tweet, launching a global platform that has become a controversial and dominant force in civil society.

An internet spin on talk radio, the new social network Clubhouse has become a sandbox for people tinkering with ways to win fans and make money with audio.

If this news is to be believed, the actual person Q has been identified. It’s someone on the internet’s answer to Groundhog Day, 4Chan, who used the avatar Q. Doesn’t that just make the last 4 insane years so worthwhile?

The encrypted messaging app Signal, recommended by Tesla's Elon Musk, appeared to have been blocked in China on Tuesday, closing off one of the last US social media platforms still freely available in the country.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp on Tuesday announced a three-year content deal with Facebook in Australia, weeks after Canberra introduced laws forcing digital platforms to pay for news.

A ban on girls singing in public imposed by education officials in the Afghan capital last week has been overturned after a social media campaign that included local women uploading videos of themselves belting out their favourite songs.

The decades-long cyberwars are a very sore point for most Western governments. Not to say the West doesn’t do its own cyberespionage, but the level of malice in recent cyberattacks is over a line. The US is considering active responses.

TikTok has introduced changes for users under age 18. These changes are aimed at driving higher standards of user privacy and safety by default.

Russia said Wednesday it planned to slow down Twitter for users in the country over what it said was the social media platform's failure to remove "illegal" content.

The lawyer for the family of beheaded French teacher Samuel Paty expressed her anger on Tuesday over lies spread on social media which led to the murder.

How to smile, where to place a hand, which direction to face: young Vietnamese social media users are snapping up a popular influencer's course on posing for the perfect photo.

A prominent Bangladeshi cartoonist was granted bail on Wednesday as several hundred people staged more protests over the death of a fellow government critic also arrested under the country's harsh internet laws.

In the technology world, one of the major talking points centers on the challenges regarding consumer data privacy. There is no coherent approach, however, and many people have strong, and differing, opinions about privacy.

Prince William has warned that anti-vaccination messages are rife on social media and urged those eligible to get jabs, following a similar appeal by his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II.

Twitter users have reacted with mockery after a video emerged showing a golden statue of Donald Trump being wheeled around at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida.

Plots of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are being illegally sold on Facebook Marketplace, and include national forests and land reserved for indigenous peoples. Some of the plots are as large as 1,000 football pitches.