Social media use damages children’s ability to focus, say researchers
Increased use of social media by children damages their concentration levels and may be contributing to an increase in cases of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a study.The peer-reviewed report monitored the development of more than 8,300 US-based children from the age of 10 to 14 and linked social media use to “increased inattention symptoms”.Reseachers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Oregon Health & Science University in the US found that children spent an average of 2.3 hours a day watching television or online videos, 1.4 hours on social media and 1.
5 hours playing video games,No link was found between ADHD-related symptoms – such as being easily distracted – and playing video games or watching TV and YouTube,However, the study found that social media use over a period of time was associated with an increase in inattention symptoms in children,ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder with symptoms including impulsiveness, forgetting everyday tasks and difficulty focusing,“We identified an association between social media use and increased inattention symptoms, interpreted here as a likely causal effect,” said the study.
“Although the effect size is small at individual level, it could have significant consequences if behaviour changes across population level.These findings suggest that social media use may contribute to rising incidence of ADHD diagnoses.”Torkel Klingberg, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute, said: “Our study suggests that it is specifically social media that affects children’s ability to concentrate.“Social media entails constant distractions in the form of messages and notifications, and the mere thought of whether a message has arrived can act as a mental distraction.This affects the ability to stay focused and could explain the association.
”The study found the ADHD link was not affected by socioeconomic background or a genetic predisposition towards the condition.Klingberg added that increased use of social media may explain part of the increase in ADHD diagnoses.Its prevalence among children has risen from 9.5% in 2003-07 to 11.3% in 2020-22, according to the US national survey of children’s health.
The researchers stressed the results did not imply all children who used social media developed concentration problems.But they pointed to increased use of social media by children as they got older and to children using social media well before they turned 13, the minimum age for apps such as TikTok and Instagram.The report said: “This early and increasing social media use underscores the need for stricter age verification and clearer guidelines for tech companies.”The study found a steady increase in social media use from about 30 minutes a day at age nine to two and a half hours a day by age 13.The children were enrolled for the study at the ages of nine and 10 between 2016 and 2018.
The study will be published in the Pediatrics Open Science journal.“We hope that our findings will help parents and policymakers make well-informed decisions on healthy digital consumption that support children’s cognitive development,” said Samson Nivins, one of the study’s authors and a postdoctoral researcher at the Karolinska Institute.
Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’
A single person claims to have authored 113 academic papers on artificial intelligence this year, 89 of which will be presented this week at one of the world’s leading conference on AI and machine learning, which has raised questions among computer scientists about the state of AI research.The author, Kevin Zhu, recently finished a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and now runs Algoverse, an AI research and mentoring company for high schoolers – many of whom are his co-authors on the papers. Zhu himself graduated from high school in 2018.Papers he has put out in the past two years cover subjects like using AI to locate nomadic pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa, to evaluate skin lesions, and to translate Indonesian dialects. On his LinkedIn, he touts publishing “100+ top conference papers in the past year”, which have been “cited by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and more”
Cloudflare apologises after latest outage takes down LinkedIn and Zoom
Cloudflare has apologised after an outage on Friday morning hit websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector, the company’s second outage in less than a month.“Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the internet down again,” it said in a blogpost, adding that it would release more information next week on how it aims to prevent these failures.The outage on Friday came after Cloudflare adjusted its firewall to protect customers from a widespread software vulnerability revealed earlier this week, and was not an attack, it said. Earlier, it said a separate issue had been reported with its application programming interfaces.The issue, which affected 28% of its traffic, lasted for half an hour and was resolved shortly after 9am GMT, it said
‘Urgent clarity’ sought over racial bias in UK police facial recognition technology
The UK’s data protection watchdog has asked the Home Office for “urgent clarity” over racial bias in police facial recognition technology before considering its next steps.The Home Office has admitted that the technology was “more likely to incorrectly include some demographic groups in its search results”, after testing by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) of its application within the police national database.The report revealed that the technology, which is intended to be used to catch serious offenders, is more likely to incorrectly match black and Asian people than their white counterparts.In a statement responding to the report, Emily Keaney, the deputy commissioner for the Information Commissioner’s Office, said the ICO had asked the Home Office “for urgent clarity on this matter” in order for the watchdog to “assess the situation and consider our next steps”.The next steps could include enforcement action, including issuing a legally binding order to stop using the technology or fines, as well as working with the Home Office and police to make improvements
New York Times sues AI startup for ‘illegal’ copying of millions of articles
The New York Times sued an embattled artificial intelligence startup on Friday, accusing the firm of illegally copying millions of articles. The newspaper alleged Perplexity AI had distributed and displayed journalists’ work without permission en masse.The Times said that Perplexity AI was also violating its trademarks under the Lanham Act, claiming the startup’s generative AI products create fabricated content, or “hallucinations”, and falsely attribute them to the newspaper by displaying them alongside its registered trademarks.The newspaper said that Perplexity’s business model relies on scraping and copying content, including paywalled material, to power its generative AI products. Other publishers have made similar allegations
I spent hours listening to Sabrina Carpenter this year. So why do I have a Spotify ‘listening age’ of 86?
Many users of the app were shocked, this week, by this addition to the Spotify Wrapped roundup – especially twentysomethings who were judged to be 100“Age is just a number. So don’t take this personally.” Those words were the first inkling I had that I was about to receive some very bad news.I woke up on Wednesday with a mild hangover after celebrating my 44th birthday. Unfortunately for me, this was the day Spotify released “Spotify Wrapped”, its analysis of (in my case) the 4,863 minutes I had spent listening to music on its platform over the past year
Elon Musk’s X fined €120m by EU in first clash under new digital laws
Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, has been fined €120m (£105m) after it was found in breach of new EU digital laws, in a ruling likely to put the European Commission on a collision course with the US billionaire and potentially Donald Trump.The breaches, under consideration for two years, included what the EU said was a “deceptive” blue tick verification badge given to users and the lack of transparency of the platform’s advertising.The commission rules require tech companies to provide a public list of advertisers to ensure the company’s structures guard against illegal scams, fake advertisements and coordinated campaigns in the context of political elections.In a third breach, the EU also concluded that X had failed to provide the required access to public data available to researchers, who typically keep tabs on contentious issues such as political content.The ruling by the European Commission brings to a close part of an investigation that started two years ago
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Bill Kingdom obituary