They also filed another lawsuit against Daniel Defense, which manufactured the AR-style rifle used in the May 24, 2022, shooting — and has already been sued.

It added to mounting lawsuits over the attack and came as the small Texas city gathered to mourn the anniversary of one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. The gunman killed 19 students and two teachers. Officers finally confronted and shot him after waiting more than an hour to enter the fourth-grade classroom.

“There is a direct line between the conduct of these companies and the Uvalde shooting,” said Josh Koskoff, an attorney for the families. “This three-headed monster knowingly exposed him to the weapon, conditioned him to see it as a tool to solve his problems and trained him to use it.”

Some of the same families on Wednesday filed a $500 million lawsuit against Texas state police officials and officers who were part of the botched law enforcement response that day. More than 370 federal, state and local officers responded but waited more than an hour to confront the shooter inside the classroom as students and teaches lay dead, dying or wounded.

Friday’s lawsuits are not the first to accuse technology companies of having a role in radicalizing or influencing mass shooters. Families of victims in a May 2022 attack on a Buffalo, New York, supermarket sued social media companies, including Meta and Instagram, over content on their platforms.

The lawsuit against Georgia-based gun-maker Daniel Defense was filed in Texas by the same group of 19 families who sued on Wednesday. The lawsuit against Meta and Activision Blizzard — the maker of Call of Duty — were filed in California with additional families of victims from the attack.

Activision called the Uvalde shooting “horrendous and heartbreaking in every way, and we express our deepest sympathies to the families and communities who remain impacted by this senseless act of violence. Millions of people around the world enjoy video games without turning to horrific acts.”

A video game industry trade group also pushed back on blaming games for violence, arguing research has found no link.

“We are saddened and outraged by senseless acts of violence. At the same time, we discourage baseless accusations linking these tragedies to video gameplay, which detract from efforts to focus on the root issues in question and safeguard against future tragedies,” the Entertainment Software Association said.

The amount of damages sought in the new lawsuits was not immediately clear.

According to the lawsuits, the Uvalde shooter had played versions of Call of Duty since he was 15, including one that allowed him to effectively practice with the version of the rifle he used at the school. The families also accused Instagram of doing little to enforce its rules that ban marketing firearms and harmful content to children.

The Uvalde shooter opened an online account with Daniel Defense before his 18th birthday and purchased the rifle as soon as he could, according to the lawsuit.

“Simultaneously, on Instagram, the shooter was being courted through explicit, aggressive marketing. In addition to hundreds of images depicting and venerating the thrill of combat, Daniel Defense used Instagram to extol the illegal, murderous use of its weapons,” the families’ attorneys said in a statement.

Daniel Defense and Meta each did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment.

In a congressional hearing in 2022, Daniel Defense CEO Marty Daniels called the Uvalde shooting and others like it “pure evil” and “deeply disturbing.”

A separate lawsuit filed by different plaintiffs in December 2022 against local and state police, the city, and other school and law enforcement, seeks at least $27 billion and class-action status for survivors. At least two other lawsuits have been filed against Daniel Defense.

In Uvalde, community members planned a vigil to remember those killed. Other events included a bell ringing and butterfly release at a local church.

“As we mark this solemn day, may we pray for those we lost, their loved ones, and all those who were wounded,” President Joe Biden said in a letter to the community. ___

This story has been updated to say that the gunman killed 19 students and two teachers.

The post Uvalde families sue Meta and Call of Duty maker on second anniversary of school attack appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

The ads do not meet the levels of disclosure Meta says the platform needs for AI-generated posts linked to India’s election, raising questions about enforcement.

 In early March, a realistic AI-generated image of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, styled as Bhishma Pitamah from the ancient Hindu epic Mahabharata, was boosted as a political advertisement on Instagram.

With long wavy grey hair, a sun-shaped mark on his forehead and donning body armour, the image depicted what Modi fans see as his role in today’s world: a reincarnation of supreme commander Bhishma who fought against foreign threats.

This Instagram image, created by the right-wing page Hokage Modi Sama and first posted in 2023, was boosted as a political advertisement for two days in March, garnering more than 35,000 impressions.

An Al Jazeera review of Meta Ad Library data of political advertisements in India over the past three months revealed that, between February 27 and March 21, Hokage Modi Sama promoted nearly 50 pieces of AI-generated images of Modi, making it the leading advertiser of AI-generated Modi images on Instagram.

The Meta Ad Library is a public archive that hosts a collection of political advertisements run on its platforms, which include Instagram and Facebook.

The common theme across all the images shared by the handle was the valorisation of Modi as a Hindu leader. Popular AI images boosted through sponsored posts on Hokage Modi Sama feature Modi as a reincarnation of Bhishma, a suit-wearing son of god, embracing Hindu heritage and the King of Hindu Rashtra settled on his throne, garnering millions of likes and views. (Hindu Rashtra is the contentious ideology of a Hindu-majoritarian rule of India, a move away from its secular founding principle.)

“Through these images, the attempt appears to be to impart a simultaneous sage-like and warrior-like quality to Modi, both of which create the aura of a political leader who is indefatigable, undefeatable, beyond reproach and thus worthy of our unquestioned loyalty,” Amogh Dar Sharma, a lecturer at the University of Oxford who studies political communications, told Al Jazeera.

But the posts by the most prolific online advertiser of Modi’s AI images also show the challenges with enforcing AI-related rules on social media, amid fears of manipulated images being leveraged for propaganda among voters who might not fully understand the extent of alteration that photos and memes could have gone through.

Meta is aware of such use and before a crucial 2024 election year, it announced that starting January, political advertisements on Instagram and Facebook created using artificial intelligence (AI) will have to disclose the use or risk getting banned.

In the 30 days leading up to March 29, Hokage Modi Sama spent 537,799 Indian rupees ($6,500) to boost 363 pieces of political content, including images and videos on its Instagram page, according to Meta Ad Library data. Our analysis shows that nearly 14 percent of all sponsored advertisements, amounting to 50 images, were AI-generated.

All Hokage Modi Sama AI ads were sponsored posts on Instagram and the disclosure of AI’s use was through hashtags such as #aiartwork, #midjourneyart, #midjourneyai and others. Midjourney, which the hashtags appear to refer to, is a popular generative artificial intelligence program.

But Meta told Al Jazeera that hashtags are not an acceptable disclosure for an advertisement which is digitally created or altered. In cases where advertisers need to disclose that their content is digitally created or altered, Meta will add a label that says “Digitally created” near the “Paid for by” disclaimer, including in the Ad Library. Such labels are currently not present on Hokage Modi Sama AI advertisements.

Meta did not answer Al Jazeera’s specific question on whether the photorealistic images advertisements of Modi violated its policy of depicting a real person doing something they did not, or depicting a realistic-looking event that did not happen.

Instead, Meta pointed Al Jazeera’s reporter to a blog post from March 2024 on AI disclosure requirements for advertisers and how the company is preparing for the Indian elections.

Prateek Waghre, the executive director of the India-based Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), told Al Jazeera that since these particular advertisements are tagged as #aiart, there is a need for content creators to acknowledge the attempt at boosting AI images through some form of disclosure to comply with Meta’s recently updated policies requiring AI disclosure.

AI used to push ‘strategic narratives’

Indian election campaigns have been a vehicle for a slow diffusion of AI-generated images and videos, including through AI resurrections of dead political leaders, and their use as campaign art in official party accounts, as Al Jazeera reported earlier. Despite the threat of AI-generated election misinformation, deepfakes aren’t being exclusively used to deceive voters. Instead, generative AI is being co-opted to build a narrative.

“While disinformation is definitely a serious problem that requires our attention, it also deflects attention from the more subliminal ways in which AI-generated content can help push strategic narratives of political parties,” Sharma of Oxford University told Al Jazeera, after reviewing the AI image advertisements.

“It is not simply that AI is ‘deceiving’ voters into believing something that is blatantly false; rather, AI enables content to be produced that is more creative and that can draw upon more innovative cultural references – this yields political propaganda which is more entertaining and therefore more shareable, which enables widespread circulation” he added.

For instance, the most popular AI image posted by the Hokage Modi Sama page is the “Our Saffron Superhero”. It shows Modi wearing saffron kurta pyjamas, with a flowing cape walking beneath the “Om” flag, a Hindu spiritual symbol. The AI image has nearly two million likes with comments such as, “Who wants India to be a Hindu nation?” in the comments section on Instagram. Most images recast the Indian prime minister as a “saviour”, “saffron-clad guardian of India’s future”, “symbol of Hindu renaissance” and more.

Sharma pointed out that while mythologising political leaders or featuring them in Hindu epics is not new, AI is allowing it to be executed with greater finesse.

“These AI-generated images of Narendra Modi seem to be the latest iteration in a long-running strategy of the BJP to create a cult about [Modi] as a wise and sagacious leader,” Sharma said.

While the Instagram and Facebook pages of Hokage Modi Sama do not have explicit disclaimers on a direct affiliation to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the page has a history of publishing pro-Hindutva and pro-BJP content. Previously, the page had gained traction after sharing an image of social media platform X’s owner Elon Musk as a Hindu monk, with the caption, “Our fellow bhakt Elon”, denoting Musk as a Hindu nationalist.

Multiple attempts to contact the administrator of Hokage Modi Sama were unsuccessful. In the anime Naruto, “Hokage” is a prestigious title bestowed on a village leader, while Sama is a respectful way to say “sir” in Japanese, so the page roughly means “Leader Modi Sir”. The Instagram handle with 130,000 followers now sells merchandise such as T-shirts, coffee mugs and diaries based on the saffron superhero AI image.

Globally, AI images have been used in political campaigns. In March, supporters of United States presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign used fake AI images of him posing with Black voters for “strategic outreach” to the Black community. In Argentina, two presidential hopefuls used AI-generated images to boost their popularity and attack opponents. And in Indonesia, President-elect Prabowo Subianto, the once-feared military dictator, used AI images to rebrand himself as a “cuddly grandpa” on his campaign trail.

In India, in the run-up to the Telangana state elections in December 2023, fact-checking outlet BOOM Live reported that AI images falsely portrayed regional political leader K Chandrashekar Rao at the launch of a free meals scheme for students, which he never attended.

An Al Jazeera review of the Meta Ad Library from December 2023 revealed that the page Mana Telangana shared multiple fake AI images on Instagram and Facebook of Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi of the Congress Party posing with children and farmers. Farmers constitute an influential voting block in India and have frequently protested against Modi’s market-friendly agriculture laws.

There are multiple fake AI images on Instagram and Facebook of Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi of the Congress Party [File: Altaf Hussain/Reuters]

Gandhi’s fake image with farmers was accompanied by the caption: “Rahul Gandhi empathizes with farmers, promising unwavering support and a commitment to addressing their concerns individually.” The sponsored post contained the hashtags #aigenerated and #aiimages, indicating they were AI-generated, and had an estimated 7,000 impressions.

West vs Global South

There is also a disparity in the way platforms in the West and the Global South are tackling the trend of AI images ahead of elections.

For instance, to mitigate the potential abuse of AI images ahead of the November US presidential elections, popular AI image-generator Midjourney banned the creation of fake President Joe Biden and Donald Trump images in March.

But there have been no such steps in India, raising “concern regarding the equitable enforcement of policies by tech platforms across different regions”, Baybars Orsek, the managing director of Logically Facts, told Al Jazeera. Logically Facts is part of Meta’s third-party fact-checking programme and part of the misinformation combat alliance in India.

Attempts by Al Jazeera to generate AI images on Midjourney of Modi and Gandhi shaking hands were successful, while the prompt to generate an image of Modi and Trump shaking hands resulted in a “Banned Prompt Detected” notification.

“This decision brings to light the disparities in how such moderation policies are applied globally, especially in the context of the Global South, including countries like India, which is heading into the most significant election of the year,” Orsek said.

Al Jazeera emailed Midjourney about the disparity in moderation and is yet to hear back.

It is similar to how social media companies such as Facebook or Twitter policies to keep their platforms safe are skewed towards the West and often neglect perspectives from the Global South, added the IFF’s Waghre.

The post Before India election, Instagram boosts Modi AI images that violate rules appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

In a policy advisory note, the company’s oversight board stated: “The Board has found that Meta’s current approach disproportionately restricts free expression, is unnecessary, and that the company should end this blanket ban.”end of list

Meta’s oversight board was established in 2020. It is funded by Meta but operates independently of the company. When Facebook and Instagram make decisions to remove certain content from their platforms, Meta can ask the board to review those decisions, particularly when they cause controversy. The board effectively acts as an ombudsman which makes recommendations and issues rulings either endorsing or overruling such decisions made by Meta.

Here is what we know about the recommendation made by the oversight board and how it came to its decision.

Why does Meta remove content containing the word ‘shaheed’?

Meta’s current content moderation policy considers that the term “shaheed” is used as “praise” when it is mentioned in relation to organisations which have been included on its Dangerous Organizations and Individuals (DOI) list.

The top tier of this list includes what it terms “hate organisations; criminal organisations, including those designated by the United States government”. According to Meta, these are individuals and organisations which are deemed to be engaging in “serious offline harm”.

Why did Meta ask for advice about the word ‘shaheed’?

The policy advisory from the oversight board comes after repeated criticism levelled against Meta over its approach towards content posted by Palestinian and Arabic speakers.

Most recently for example, in December last year, Human Rights Watch issued a report which concluded that Meta’s content moderation policies amounted to censorship of content relating to the continuing Israel-Palestine conflict.

In a 51-page report, the human rights group said that Meta had misused its DOI policy to “restrict legitimate speech around hostilities between Israel and Palestinian armed groups”.

Meta began its own internal dialogue in 2020 over its approach to the use of the term “shaheed” on its platforms but failed to reach a consensus.

An independent investigation launched by the group in 2021 found the company’s content moderation policies “appear to have had an adverse human rights impact on the rights of Palestinian users”, and were adversely affecting “the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred”.

In February last year, therefore, Meta asked the oversight board to provide a policy advisory about whether it should continue to remove content using the Arabic term in reference to individuals or groups designated under its DOI policy.

Palestinian activists and journalists protest against what they consider censorship of Palestinian content by Facebook, in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, on November 24, 2021 [Hazem Bader/AFP]

How did the oversight board go about considering this issue?

Nighat Dad, a member of the oversight board, told Al Jazeera that Meta suggested multiple options for the board to consider, including maintaining the status quo, but the board was not bound by those options and also explored other avenues after “extensive, more than a yearlong deliberation”.

She added that the group’s discussion on the usage of “shaheed” involved testing out the recommendations in real-life situations after the war started in October last year.

“We wanted to see how people will use Meta platforms and did our research to see people’s usage. We found out that our recommendations held up even under the conditions of the current conflict,” she said.

What did the oversight board recommend?

In its report, which was issued on March 26, the oversight board said Meta’s current approach to the term “shaheed” is “over-broad, and substantially and disproportionately restricts free expression”.

The report further added that Meta had failed to comprehend the term’s “linguistic complexity”, saying its content moderation policies only treated it as the equivalent of the English word “martyr”.

The board observed that Meta operated on a presumption that reference to any individual or organisation on the designated list “always constitutes praise” under the company’s DOI policy, leading to a blanket ban.

“Doing so substantially affects freedom of expression and media freedoms, unduly restricts civic discourse and has serious negative implications for equality and non-discrimination,” it added.

Dad said discussions within the board were extensive as the group explored the use of the term in different contexts and “paid extremely close attention to potential for real-world harm with any policy change”.

“We, as board, ultimately decided that Meta’s approach to tackle the word was counterproductive, which often affected journalists from reporting on armed groups as well as limited people’s ability to debate and condemn violence,” she said.

Are recommendations from the oversight board binding?

Meta said it would review the board’s recommendations and respond within 60 days. However, the board’s recommendations in this matter are not binding.

“Our decisions on any matter related to Meta are binding, but when it comes to policy advisory which is sought by Meta itself, they are not,” Dad explained.

However, she added, the board has a “robust mechanism” through which it can follow up and ensure that implementation of the recommendation is considered.

“We have an implementation committee, and we regularly reach out to Meta to follow up on what they have done with our advisory opinion,” she said.

The post Meta’s oversight board urges Facebook, Instagram to lift ban on ‘shaheed’ appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

Meanwhile, relativism—the view that truth and falsehood, right and wrong are not universal but products of differing conventions—is a prominent framework many use to understand the world. If we peer through this lens, we can easily slip into subjectivism, believing that judgments about truth and morality are simply expressions of our own feelings.

Without a recognition that some things are true and some false, some actions right and others wrong, young people, in particular, are at risk of conforming their opinions to the opinions of those they look up to and follow, whether internet influencers, celebrities or friends. This is not a new problem. Famed British writer, scholar and philosopher C.S. Lewis warns of the danger in his 1943 work “The Abolition of Man”: Without a framework through which to evaluate claims about the world, the young become prey for propagandists.

Emotions and Reality

In “The Abolition of Man,” Lewis notes that in World War II-era Europe, some educators were concerned that sentimental individuals were being easily swayed by emotional propaganda. This concern resulted in pedagogical efforts to “fortify the minds of young people against emotions.” But Lewis saw the true problem as the opposite: In his view, many young people were led astray by their lack of sentiment, along with their acceptance of the prevailing cultural message that emotions are just subjective feelings standing in opposition to rational intellect.

Contrary to that message, Lewis argues that emotions are not divorced from objective reality; rather, they are appropriate (or not) to the extent that they conform to reality. Lewis examines this idea through the lens of an elementary school grammar textbook that he’d been sent for review. The book recounted a well-known story from Coleridge about a tourist who called a certain waterfall “sublime.” The textbook’s authors claimed that the tourist was merely commenting on how he felt about the waterfall, but Lewis argues that the tourist was making a statement that conformed to reality. Some waterfalls really are sublime; therefore, the tourist’s emotions were appropriate or, as Lewis puts it, “ordinate to reality.”

Lewis points to patriotism as another example, one particularly resonant in wartime: A person’s love for his or her country and willingness to die for it also conforms to reality, because humans’ natural inclination is to feel a sense of attachment or connection to where they were born and raised. The sentiment is not only subjective but also reasonable.

Today the emotional responses of young people are either dismissed as unscientific, subjective feelings divorced from reality or celebrated as noteworthy products of their lived experience and therefore above critique. In both scenarios, no one considers whether the emotional dispositions of the young are rooted in a set of objective values. Without being rooted in such a framework, young people are more likely to fall prey to the gurus: the influencers who set out to shape their worldview. When the young lack first principles—a core set of values according to which they operate—what they value will be determined by the propagandists, whom Lewis calls “conditioners.”

Going back to the patriotism example, if people value their heritage and truly love their country, their homeland, then they take seriously the necessity to both defend it and improve it. They cannot be swayed by influencers who say they ought to hate it and everything about it, nor by those who decry any criticism as treasonous.

Lewis points to one of his own flaws to provide another example. He admits to not “enjoying the society of small children,” but he recognizes that this is a personal failing, not a properly ordered sentiment. Therefore, he could not be convinced by a guru that disliking the company of children is an acceptable human reaction simply because it’s his lived experience.

Teaching the Tao 

To avoid allowing the young to become prey for propagandists, Lewis argues for inculcating in them a doctrine of objective moral values—first principles—which he calls the Tao or the Way. He claims that most worldviews throughout history, including the Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian and Eastern traditions, teach this doctrine of objective value: “[t]he belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false.” Attitudes or emotional responses, according to Lewis, are alogical, but they can either conform to reason or not. Objective values are what guide us as we determine whether our emotional response to some claim an internet guru has made is appropriate or inappropriate.

Essentially, Lewis advocates for educating the young using a framework that acknowledges the existence of truth and falsehood, recognizing that emotional responses can, and ought to, conform to reality. When young people follow the Tao, Lewis explains, their agreements or disagreements are responses to the objective order; thus, emotional states can be in harmony with reason or out of harmony with it.

According to Lewis, the task of those charged with educating the young is not to eliminate their emotions—which are a core element of being human—but rather to encourage sentiments that conform to objective values. In other words, their task is to train emotions.

To achieve this, Lewis advocates for traditional education, which is (as the phrase implies) education rooted in a tradition. He assumes—or wishes—that students and teachers are operating within a shared set of values, but any tradition will do so long as it recognizes objective value and aims to correspond with reality. The goal of education then becomes not merely shaping the young’s emotional responses but transmitting human heritage.

Being Human

Traditional educators, according to Lewis, initiate “the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity,” which encompasses teacher and students alike. Educators are, as Lewis puts it, “old birds teaching young birds to fly.” They teach using human exemplars and show how our nature—our rationality, our emotions and our appetites—dictates how we process and respond to inputs.

A liberal arts education, for example, achieves Lewis’ aim through the texts students read. The character Antigone, in Sophocles’ tragedy of the same name, faces capital punishment for defying the king to give her brother a proper burial. She does what is morally right by her brother despite the risk to her own life. Euripides’ Medea, on the other hand, commits a morally reprehensible act by murdering her children in an act of revenge against her husband. Both texts provide the opportunity to discuss and nurture appropriate emotional responses to moral questions.

When young people are armed with a doctrine of objective value, they can confront the gurus of this age properly prepared to either agree or disagree with their claims rather than blindly accept whatever they are selling. And these young people will understand that emotional responses don’t need to be completely stripped away—nor should they haphazardly drive how people react to content they encounter on the internet. Young people trained in this way will be prepared to objectively filter value-based claims and respond to them appropriately.

The post Teaching Objective Values in an Age of Gurus appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

The ban is to come into force immediately, the Ministry of Public Sector Transformation and the Civil Service wrote on Twitter on Friday.

“In order to guarantee the cybersecurity of our administrations and civil servants, the government has decided to ban recreational applications such as TikTok on the professional phones of civil servants,” Stanislas Guerini said on Friday.

He added that for several weeks, several of France’s European and international partners have adopted measures to restrict or ban the downloading and installation of or the use of the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok by their administrations.

Guerini said recreational applications do not have sufficient levels of cybersecurity and data protection in order to be deployed on administrations’ equipment, adding that exemptions can be given for professional reasons, such as institutional communication of an administration.

Widening ban

A string of governments and institutions have banned TikTok in recent weeks, including the White House, the UK parliament, the Dutch and Belgian administrations, the New Zealand parliament, and the governments of Canada, India, Pakistan, Taiwan and Jordan.

Concerns regarding alleged security risks posed by TikTok have most prominently been raised by US lawmakers and national security officials who say that user data gathered by the app could be accessed by the Chinese government.

Calls to ban TikTok from government devices gained momentum after FBI Director Christopher Wray said in November it poses national security risks.

Late last month, the European Union’s two biggest policy-making institutions – the Commission and the Council – banned TikTok from staff phones for cybersecurity reasons.

Concerns have mounted globally about the potential for the Chinese government to access users’ location and contact data through ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company.

The company’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, pushed back on assertions that TikTok or ByteDance are tools of the Chinese government during a questioning by US lawmakers on Thursday. The company has been reiterating that 60 percent of ByteDance is owned by global institutional investors.

A law China implemented in 2017 requires companies to give the government any personal data relevant to the country’s national security. There’s no evidence that TikTok has turned over such data, but fears abound due to the vast amount of user data it collects.

Beijing has accused Washington of spreading disinformation and suppressing TikTok.

Earlier this month, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said the US has yet to present evidence that TikTok threatens its national security and was using the excuse of data security to abuse its power to suppress foreign companies.

The post France bans ‘recreational’ use of TikTok, Twitter, Instagram appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

These are the key events so far on Monday, March 14. Get the latest updates here.

Russia-Ukraine talks resume

• Talks between the two sides are to resume on Monday by videoconference, according to Ukrainian negotiators and the Kremlin, after both sides hailed progress at earlier rounds aimed at ending the fighting.

Air raid hits Kyiv apartments

• One person is killed and 12 others injured after an air raid on a residential building in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. The death toll was revised down from an earlier figure of two dead.

Nearly 2,200 killed in Mariupol

• Nearly 2,200 residents of Ukraine’s besieged city of Mariupol have been killed since hostilities began, the local authorities say, raising the toll by almost 1,000 since Wednesday.
• Mariupol faces “a worst-case scenario” if the warring parties do not urgently reach a “concrete humanitarian agreement”, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warns.

Zelenskyy warns NATO

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned NATO could see member states come under Russian attack if they do not act to impose a no-fly zone over his country. His comments came after at least 35 people were killed in a Russian attack on a military base near the Polish border.

Instagram is no longer accessible in Russia

• Instagram was inaccessible in Russia on Monday after Moscow accused its parent company Meta of allowing calls for violence against Russians, including the military, on its platforms.
• The move comes after Facebook and Twitter were blocked in early March as part of sweeping efforts by Moscow to control information available to Russians about its military operation in Ukraine.

The US, China aides to meet amid tensions over Russia

• The United States and China are sending top aides to meet in Rome on Monday amid mounting tensions between the two countries over the Russia-Ukraine war, with the US saying Russia has asked China for military equipment to help press its campaign.
• China has accused Washington of spreading “disinformation” over Beijing’s role in the Ukraine conflict.

Nearly 2.7 million flee

• Almost 2.7 million people have fled the war in Ukraine, more than 100,000 of them in the past 24 hours, the United Nations says. More than half of them have gone to Poland.

Moscow says West wants ‘artificial default’

• Russia’s finance ministry accuses foreign countries of trying to force it into an “artificial default” through unprecedented sanctions.
• Russia has said it will hit back with its own measures, putting limits on local media and international news sources.

Hundreds held in Russia protests

• Russian police have detained more than 800 people across 37 cities for protesting against Moscow’s “military operation” in Ukraine.
• Nearly 15,000 people have reportedly been detained in rallies across the country since the invasion began on February 24.

The post Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: List of key events from day 19 appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

”I just hate this blue eyes filter! As if it’s ugly to have brown eyes,” says Berra Demir, a 19-year-old student from Istanbul, as she took an Instagram selfie with one of its filters on that gave her brown eyes a bluish effect.

When asked to take a picture without a filter, she said she is not confident enough with the way she looks.

“I don’t find my normal self beautiful.”

Demir’s answer reveals a deep complexity many men and women face in general today.

In our “screen time” period, we express ourselves with the pictures we put on social media applications such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. But the edits that we make to our photos – from changing the complexion of our face to the color of our eyes – tempts us to hide our ”normal” selves.

Think a little, how many filters can you count? Blue eyes, small noses, a perfectly shaped face, a thinner body, lighter skin tone, flushed cheeks, and even gender reassignment… Apart from these, there are now also apps that only consist of filters to create yourself an imagined reality.

A study conducted by City University London with 175 young women and nonbinary people in the UK shows that 90 percent of them use a filter or edit their photos before posting them, changing their skin tone, reshaping their jaw or nose, shaving off weight, brightening or bronzing their skin or whitening their teeth.

“I don’t think it’s surprising that so many people use it,” said Demir as she started to edit her selfie, shaping her face with an app called FaceTune.

She also highlighted that young girls and women try to be their best selves on social media since they experience a lack of confidence and fear of being judged.

”Don’t you do that too? Admit it. When you take a picture, you ask me to filter or edit it because I’m good at this! I know what people want,” she told me.

As one study argues, many people, especially young women, are trying to achieve a society-approved appearance by using filters and do not appreciate their natural beauty.

The young generation is suffering from low self-esteem and is dissatisfied with the beauty standards imposed on them by social media filters.

The impact of reality vs imaginary

And what’s worse is, these social media companies already know how harmful such apps can be for the mental health of young women.

A report from the Wall Street Journal states that Facebook’s internal study on Instagram shows how damaging the app’s perfection filters and comparisons can be for teenage mental health, especially for young girls.

“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from the 2019 research about teen girls who undergo such issues.

Additionally, 60 percent of girls feel upset when their real impression doesn’t match the online version of themselves, according to the research of Dove Self-Esteem Project.

”When I look at myself in the mirror after taking a selfie with my filtered lips, I just want to change them,” Demir said as she straightened her nose in her selfie.

Moreover, the beauty filters can do more harm than good, altering self-image and pressuring young girls to try and be the way the filters make them look on the apps.

And such pressure can cause depression, eating disorders and even prompt suicidal thoughts among teenagers. From a psychiatric perspective, it’s called pressure-driven body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a mental health illness where a person spends a lot of time stressing about his/her appearance.

For instance, 13 percent of British users and 6 percent of American users have traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram. In this regard, teens accuse Instagram of exacerbating the rate of anxiety and depression, as the app fuels competition amongst people and makes it worse.

”I spend most of my time on Instagram compared to other apps, and see perfect bodies, faces and lives,” said Demir, explaining that most of the young girls around her age most likely spend their time on this application, especially during the pandemic, either to compete with themselves on having ”likes” or check out others.

Yet, this perception does not only affect the young generation.

Children and adults of all ages are significantly influenced by social media and can develop what is being called Snapchat dysmorphia, a type of body image disorder that reflects this need to laboriously edit one’s own digital image, which has been linked to an increase in plastic surgery trends. More interestingly, these people are bringing their filtered selves as their inspiration.

Finally, Demir showed the final version of the picture she had edited while repeating her hesitation about the color of her eyes again. The difference between her picture-perfect self and her real self was astounding.

”You choose, blue eyes or my own brown eyes? ” she asked eventually.

The answer was her natural and real brown eyes, which are never meant to be perfect and never should be.

The post How Snapchat and Instagram beauty filters destroy our self-confidence appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

The platforms were down for tens of thousands of users on Monday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

The website was showing outages in heavily populated areas like Washington, DC, and Paris, with problems being reported from about 15:45 GMT.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” Facebook said on Twitter. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.” A similar message confirming the outage also was posted on WhatsApp’s Twitter account.

The error message appearing on Facebook.com read: “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.”

Al Jazeera could not immediately confirm what was affecting the platforms.

Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Reuters and AFP news agencies on the outage.

The error message on Facebook’s webpage suggested a Domain Name System (DNS) error, Reuters reported.

Downdetector, which only tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform, showed there were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Facebook and Instagram.

But the outage might be affecting more users. WhatsApp was also down for more than 22,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 3,000 users.

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“Instagram, in particular, exploits young people’s fear of missing out and desire for peer approval to encourage children and teens to constantly check their devices and share photos with their followers,” the letter (PDF) from the non-profit organisation Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) said.

BuzzFeed News last month reported that Instagram is planning to launch a version for preteen kids.

CCFC said the social media site’s focus on looks and branding is already a major challenge to young kids’ privacy and wellbeing.

But those under the age of 13 are even less equipped to deal with these challenges as they navigate a crucial stage of development where they begin to learn about social interactions and their strengths and challenges.

The group claims that the current version of Instagram is not safe for children under 13, and urged the Facebook chief to do something to protect millions of children who have lied about their age to create Instagram accounts.

The presence of underage children on the platform could be a violation of the United States’ Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and other nations’ privacy laws, they added.

The new version of Instagram will likely target children under the age of 10 because those between 10 and 12 who have existing Instagram accounts are unlikely to move to the new kids’ version after experiencing the real deal, the letter said.

It also went on to warn of the perils of excessive screen time. Obesity, lower psychological wellbeing, decreased happiness, decreased quality of sleep, increased risk of depression, and increases in suicide attempts have all been linked to excessive social media use.

Social media is a less-than-friendly space for children. Fifty-nine percent of US teenagers say they have been bullied on social media and young girls say they feel pressure to post sexualized selfies to get “likes” and validation, the CCFC added.

And to make matters worse, social media platforms are rife with child sexual abuse images and materials, easily accessible to kids.

The Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention in South Africa, the Norwegian Cancer Society, and the Consumer Federation of America are among dozens of international organisations that signed the letter. Individuals signing the petition include child psychiatrists, human rights lawyers and professors.

CCFC is a non-profit organisation that believes that child-targeted marketing and excessive screen time are damaging to child development. It is also dedicated to ending marketing to children.

The post Keep kids under 13 off Instagram, advocacy group tells Zuckerberg appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

The platform has launched three new stickers created for Ramzan that started today and will continue until May 12. The new stickers can be used in Instagram Stories.

Instagram frequently launches stickers to celebrate festivals, and commemorate important events around the world.

Tara Bedi, Public Policy and Community Outreach Manager, Instagram, Facebook India, posted the stickers on her Instagram account and spoke about the new features.

Instagram worked with Hala AlAbbasi, an illustrator from Bahrain, to create the three stickers for the occasion.”Ramzan Mubarak, Ramadan Kareem! Today we`re launching new themed product features while celebrating acts of kindness around in this #MonthofGood,” Bedi wrote in the caption.

“Stickers: We worked with @haluulie to create 3 new stickers so that you can share the traditions of Ramadan on Instagram. Hala AlAbbasi, an illustrator in Bahrain, was inspired by her favorite aspects of the holiday, and chose to reflect on the “beautiful moments that we share together,” added Bedi.

“Hala hopes that her stickers will be used throughout Ramadan to mark moments of celebration, from greetings to special suhoors and iftars, all the way to celebrate Eid. Swipe to see all 3 stickers,” the post further read.

The three stickers include the moon, iftar food, and a mosque in colorful illustrations. Instagram has also placed the stickers under `Featured` so they appear on top in the sticker stray.

The recently-released stickers will also be visible through a multi-author story on Instagram. So if you have people you follow, use any of the stickers, they’ll appear together in a collated story in your feed.

How to use the stickers:

1. Open the camera on your Instagram application.

2. Take a photo or record a video that you wish to put up as a story.

3. Tap on the sticker icon available on the top bar.

4. The new stickers will be visible under `Featured`.

5. Select any as per your liking or all of the stickers and place them on your story.

The post Instagram launches new stickers on Ramzan, here’s how to use them appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.