Meta has confirmed that it may use images analyzed by its Ray-Ban Meta AI smart glasses for AI training. The policy applies to users in the United States and Canada who share images with Meta AI, according to the company. While photos captured on the device are not used for training unless submitted to AI, any image shared for analysis falls under different policies, potentially contributing to Meta's AI model development.

Further reading: Meta's Smart Glasses Repurposed For Covert Facial Recognition.

WhatsApp and its parent Meta asked a judge to award them a total win against spyware maker NSO Group as punishment for discovery violations in a years-long case accusing the Israeli company of violating anti-hacking laws. From a report: NSO Group violated the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, repeatedly ignoring the court's orders and its discovery obligations, according to a motion for sanctions filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. "NSO's discovery violations were willful, and unfairly skew the record on virtually every key issue in the case, from the merits, to jurisdiction, to damages, making a full and fair trial on the facts impossible," they said. Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton should award the companies judgment as a matter of law or, "if the court finds that the limited discovery produced in this case does not suffice," enter default judgment against NSO, WhatsApp and Meta wrote.

The social media platforms first filed their complaint in October 2019, accusing NSO of using WhatsApp to install NSO spyware on the phones of about 1,400 WhatsApp users. The move follows Apple asking a court last month to dismiss its three-year-old hacking lawsuit against spyware pioneer NSO Group, arguing that it might never be able to get the most critical files about NSO's Pegasus surveillance tool and that its own disclosures could aid NSO and its increasing number of rivals.

Two Harvard students have developed smart glasses with facial recognition capabilities, sparking debate over privacy and surveillance. The project, dubbed I-XRAY, uses Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses coupled with facial recognition software to identify strangers and retrieve personal information about them. AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, the creators, tested the technology on unsuspecting individuals in public spaces. The glasses scan faces, match them against online databases, and display personal details on a smartphone within seconds. The students claim their project aims to raise awareness about potential privacy risks.

At its Connect event earlier this week, Meta said it'll be adding conversational voices to its AI chatbot from celebrities like Awkwafina, John Cena, Dame Judi Dench, Keegan-Michael Key and Kristen Bell. The Verge reports: These celebrity voices will only be available to US users of Meta's apps to start. And if you prefer a voice that is a little more mundane, you can also pick from non-celeb voices with names like "Aspen," "Atlas," or "Clover." [...] Meta is explicitly announcing celebrity partnerships, which likely involve payment or some other deal. Meta hasn't shared those details, but the company has paid each celebrity "millions of dollars" for their voices, according to The Wall Street Journal. And in negotiations, some of the people reportedly wanted to limit what their voices could say and to make sure they weren't liable if Meta AI was used. [...]

Meta's AI updates aren't just about voice conversations. Its chatbot will also now "answer questions about your photos" when you upload images. Send a picture of a cake, ask how to make it, and it'll grab you a recipe that hopefully does just that. And if you want something "added, changed, or removed" from an image, Meta says you can describe anything from "changing your outfit to replacing the background with a rainbow," and it'll carry out that request.

Meta has been fined $101.5 million by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) for storing over half a billion user passwords in plain text for years, with some engineers having access to this data for over a decade. The issue, discovered in 2019, predominantly affected non-US users, especially those using Facebook Lite. AppleInsider reports: Meta Ireland was found guilty of infringing four parts of GDPR, including how it "failed to notify the DPC of a personal data breach concerning storage of user passwords in plain text." Meta Ireland did report the failure, but only some months after it was discovered. "It is widely accepted that user passwords should not be stored in plaintext, considering the risks of abuse that arise from persons accessing such data," said Graham Doyle, Deputy Commissioner at the DPC, in a statement about the fine. "It must be borne in mind, that the passwords the subject of consideration in this case, are particularly sensitive, as they would enable access to users' social media accounts."

Other than the fine and an official reprimand, the full extent of the DPC's ruling is yet to be released publicly. The details published so far do not reveal whether the passwords included any of US users as well as ones in Ireland or across the rest of the European Union. It's most likely that the issue concerns only non-US users, however. That's because in 2019, Facebook told CNN that the majority of the plain text passwords were for a service called Facebook Lite, which it described as being a cut-down service for areas of the world with slower connectivity.

Meta Platforms' claims that Facebook doesn't polarize Americans came under new doubt as the journal Science raised questions about a prominent research paper the tech giant has cited to support its position. WSJ: In an editorial Thursday, Science said that Meta's emergency efforts to calm its platforms in the wake of the 2020 election may have swayed the conclusions of the paper, which the journal published in July 2023. The editorial, titled "Context matters in social media," was prompted by a letter that Science also published presenting new criticism of the paper. Because the study of Facebook's algorithms relied on data provided by Meta when it was undertaking extraordinary efforts to restrain incendiary political content, the letter's authors argue that the paper may have overstated the case that social media algorithms didn't contribute to political polarization.

Such criticisms of peer-reviewed research often appear below papers in academic journals, but Science's editors felt their editorial was needed to more prominently caveat this original paper's conclusions, said Holden Thorp, Science's editor in chief. "It was incumbent on us to come up with a way somehow that people who would come to the paper would know of these concerns,â Thorp said in an interview. While no correction was warranted, he said, "There's an election coming up, and we care about people citing this paper." Meta said it had been transparent with researchers about its actions during the time of the study, and the company and its research partners say it had no control over the Science paper's conclusions. Meta called debates of the sort aired on Thursday as part of the research process.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: After a horseback riding accident left him paralyzed from the waist down in 2009, former jockey Michael Straight learned to walk again with the help of a $100,000 ReWalk Personal exoskeleton. Earlier this month, that exoskeleton broke because of a malfunctioning piece of wiring in an accompanying watch that makes the exoskeleton work. The manufacturer refused to fix it, saying the machine was now too old to be serviced, and Straight once again couldn't walk anymore. "After 371,091 steps my exoskeleton is being retired after 10 years of unbelievable physical therapy," Straight posted on Facebook on September 16. "The reasons [sic] why it has stopped is a pathetic excuse for a bad company to try and make more money. The reason it stopped is because of a battery in the watch I wear to operate the machine. I called thinking it was no big deal, yet I was told they stopped working on any machine that was 5 years or older. I find it very hard to believe after paying nearly $100,000 for the machine and training that a $20 battery for the watch is the reason I can't walk anymore?"

Straight's experience is a nightmare scenario that highlights what happens when companies decide to stop supporting their products and do not actively support independent repair. It's also what happens without the protection of right to repair legislation that requires manufacturers to make repair parts, guides, and tools available to the general public. Specifically, a connection wire became desoldered from the battery in a watch that connects to the exoskeleton: "It's not the actual battery, but it's the little green connection piece we need to be the right fit and that's been our problem," Straight posted on Facebook. Straight's personal exoskeleton was broken for two months, he said in a video on Facebook. He was eventually able to get the device fixed after attention from an article in the Paulick Report, a website about the horse industry, and a spot on local TV. "It took me two months, and I got no results," he said in the video. With social media and news attention, "it only took you all four days, and look at the results," he said earlier this week while standing in the exoskeleton. "This is the dystopian nightmare that we've kind of entered in, where the manufacturer perspective on products is that their responsibility completely ends when it hands it over to a customer. That's not good enough for a device like this, but it's also the same thing we see up and down with every single product," Nathan Proctor, head of citizen rights group US PIRG's right to repair project told 404 Media. "People need to be able to fix things, there needs to be a plan in place. A $100,000 product you can only use as long as the battery lasts, that's enraging. We should not have to tolerate a society where this happens."

"We have all this technology we release into the wild and it changes people's lives, but there's no long-term thinking. Manufacturers currently have no legal obligation to support the equipment indefinitely and there's no requirements that they publish sufficient documentation to allow others to do it," Proctor said. "We need to set minimum standards for documentation so that, even if a company goes bankrupt or falls off the face of the earth, a technician with sufficient knowledge can fix it."

Meta unveiled prototype AR glasses codenamed Orion on Wednesday, featuring a 70-degree field of view, Micro LED projectors, and silicon carbide lenses that beam graphics directly into the wearer's eyes. In an interview with The Verge, CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated the device's capabilities, including ingredient recognition, holographic gaming, and video calling, controlled by a neural wristband that interprets hand gestures through electromyography.

Despite technological advances, Meta has shelved Orion's commercial release, citing manufacturing complexities and costs reaching $10,000 per unit, primarily due to difficulties in producing the silicon carbide lenses. The company now aims to launch a refined, more affordable version in coming years, with executives hinting at a price comparable to high-end smartphones and laptops.

Zuckerberg views AR glasses as critical to Meta's future, potentially freeing the company from its reliance on smartphone platforms controlled by Apple and Google. The push into AR hardware comes as tech giants and startups intensify competition in the space, with Apple launching Vision Pro and Google partnering with Magic Leap and Samsung on headset development.

Tony Isaac shares a report from WOSU Public Media: Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the birthplace of our hyper-connected Internet age, the hub of companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook. However, a pioneering company here in central Ohio is responsible for developing and popularizing many of the technologies we take for granted today. A listener submitted a question to WOSU's Curious Cbus series wanting to know more about the legacy of CompuServe and what it meant to go online before the Internet. That legacy was recently commemorated by the Ohio History Connection when they installed a historical marker in Upper Arlington -- near the corner of Arlington Center and Henderson roads -- where the company located its computer center and corporate building in 1973. The plaque explains that CompuServe was "the first major online information service provider," and that its subscribers were among the first to have access to email, online newspapers and magazines and the ability to share and download files. CompuServe, founded in 1969 in Ohio as a subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance, began as a computer time-sharing service for businesses. In 1979, it launched an online service for consumers, partnering with RadioShack since they "were key in reaching early computer users."

Acquired by H&R Block in 1980, CompuServe became a leader in digital innovations like email, online newspapers, and chat forums, with The Columbus Dispatch becoming the first online newspaper. "... it turned out that what was most popular is not reading reliable news sources, but just shooting the breeze with your friends or arguing with strangers over politics," said former tech journalist and early Compuserve user Dylan Tweney.

Despite competing with Prodigy and AOL through the 1990s, CompuServe struggled with the rise of the internet. AOL acquired the company in 1997, but CompuServe remains a digital pioneer for fostering online communities. "For a lot of people, CompuServe was a connection to the world and their first introduction to the idea that their computer could be more than a computer," said Tweney. "It was a communications device, an information device."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hollywood Reporter: In a major coup for the artificial intelligence company, Stability AI says that Avatar, Terminator and Titanic director James Cameron will join its board of directors. Stability AI is the firm that developed the Stable Diffusion text-to-image generative AI model, an image- and video-focused model that is among those being closely watched by many in Hollywood, particularly in the visual effects industry. In fact, Stability AI's CEO, Prem Akkaraju, is no stranger to the business, having previously served as the CEO of visual effects firm WETA Digital. Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook and founder of Napster, also recently joined the AI firm as executive chairman.

As a director, Cameron has long been eager to push the boundaries of what is technologically possible in filmmaking (anyone who has seen the Terminator franchise knows that he is also familiar with the pitfalls of technology run amok). He was among the earliest directors to embrace the potential of computer-generated visual effects, and he continued to use his films (most recently Avatar: The Way of Water) to move the entire field forward. "I've spent my career seeking out emerging technologies that push the very boundaries of what's possible, all in the service of telling incredible stories," Cameron said in a statement. "I was at the forefront of CGI over three decades ago, and I've stayed on the cutting edge since. Now, the intersection of generative AI and CGI image creation is the next wave. The convergence of these two totally different engines of creation will unlock new ways for artists to tell stories in ways we could have never imagined. Stability AI is poised to lead this transformation. I'm delighted to collaborate with Sean, Prem, and the Stability AI team as they shape the future of all visual media."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: With the perennial tensions between proprietary and open source software (OSS) unlikely to end anytime soon, a $3 billion startup is throwing its weight behind a new licensing paradigm -- one that's designed to bridge the open and proprietary worlds, replete with new definition, terminology, and governance model. Developer software company Sentry recently introduced a new license category dubbed "fair source." Sentry is an initial adopter, as are some half dozen others, including GitButler, a developer tooling company from one of GitHub's founders. The fair source concept is designed to help companies align themselves with the "open" software development sphere, without encroaching into existing licensing landscapes, be that open source, open core, or source-available, and while avoiding any negative associations that exist with "proprietary." However, fair source is also a response to the growing sense that open source isn't working out commercially.

"Open source isn't a business model -- open source is a distribution model, it's a software development model, primarily," Chad Whitacre, Sentry's head of open source, told TechCrunch. "And in fact, it places severe limits on what business models are available, because of the licensing terms." Sure, there are hugely successful open source projects, but they are generally components of larger proprietary products. Businesses that have flown the open source flag have mostly retreated to protect their hard work, moving either from fully permissive to a more restrictive "copyleft" license, as the likes of Element did last year and Grafana before it, or ditched open source altogether as HashiCorp did with Terraform. "Most of the world's software is still closed source," Whitacre added. "Kubernetes is open source, but Google Search is closed. React is open source, but Facebook Newsfeed is closed. With fair source, we're carving a space for companies to safely share not just these lower-level infrastructure components, but share access to their core product." Further reading: As Companies Try 'Open Source Rug Pull', Open Source Foundations Considered Helpful

Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads) announced Monday that Russian state media outlets like RT are now "banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity," reports CNN.

CNN adds that Meta is alleging that the "Kremlin-controlled networks" have "engaged in deceptive influence operations and attempted to evade detection... Prior to Monday's ban, RT had 7.2 million followers on Facebook and 1 million followers on Instagram." The move comes days after the US Justice Department announced charges against two RT employees for funneling nearly $10 million into a US company, identified by CNN as Tenet Media, to create and amplify content that aligned with Russian interests. The covert influence campaign was aimed at the American public ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, US officials said.
Last week the U.S. State department "revealed declassified U.S. intelligence findings that suggest RT is fully integrated into Russia's intelligence operations around the world," CNN reported earlier" In addition to its covert influence operations, the leaders of RT also administered an online crowdfunding effort to supply military equipment to Russian soldiers in Ukraine, Blinken alleged. The crowdfunding effort supplied "sniper rifles, suppressors, body armor, night vision equipment, drones, radio equipment, personal weapon sights, diesel generators" to Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, according to Blinken.

The goal of the U.S. announcement — and private discussions with allied diplomats — is to make sure that countries know that RT and Russian intelligence agencies are working together to sow division and harm democratic processes, while simultaneously making it much more difficult for RT to operate globally, a senior administration official said...

Asked for comment by CNN, RT responded with a mocking email that read in part: "We've been broadcasting straight out of the KGB headquarters all this time."
More from Reuters: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday that countries should treat RT's activities as they do covert intelligence operations... In briefing materials shared with Reuters, Meta said it had seen Russian state-controlled media try to evade detection in their online activities in the past and expected them to continue trying to engage in deceptive practices going forward.
A YouTube spokesperson told Reuters they've also terminated over 230 channels affiliated with Kremlin-controlled outlets — channels which were previously only blocked from viewers.

YouTube "began blocking Russian state-sponsored news channels globally in 2022," reports NBC News, "including those tied to RT and Sputnik. Over the years, according to YouTube, the platform has blocked thousands of channels and millions of videos." James Rubin, coordinator for the State Department's Global Engagement Center, said RT is "where propaganda, disinformation and lies are spread to millions, if not billions, of people around the world."

Meta and Apple have increasingly been rivals, and Mark Zuckerberg only expects their competition to intensify in the coming years. From a report: "I think in a lot of ways we're like the opposite of Apple," Zuckerberg said. "Clearly, their stuff has worked really well too. They take this approach that's like, 'We're going to take a long time, we're going to polish it, we're going to put it out,' and maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture."

Zuckerberg went on to say Meta approaches product releases differently, saying, "there are a lot of conversations that we have internally where you're almost at the line of being embarrassed at what you put out." "You want to really have a culture that values shipping and getting things out and getting feedback more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out," he continued.

He also took the opportunity to critique Apple's approach. "If you want to wait until you get praised all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when you could've learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version you're going to ship," he said. [...] Zuck said one of his goals for the next 10 or 15 years is "to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win."

A conspiracy theory known as "Dead Internet Theory" has gained traction in recent years, positing that most online social activity is artificial and designed to manipulate users. This theory has grown alongside the rise of large language models like ChatGPT. On Monday, software developer Michael Sayman launched SocialAI, an app that seems to embody aspects of this theory. ArsTechnica: SocialAI's 28-year-old creator, Michael Sayman, previously served as a product lead at Google, and he also bounced between Facebook, Roblox, and Twitter over the years. In an announcement post on X, Sayman wrote about how he had dreamed of creating the service for years, but the tech was not yet ready. He sees it as a tool that can help lonely or rejected people.

"SocialAI is designed to help people feel heard, and to give them a space for reflection, support, and feedback that acts like a close-knit community," wrote Sayman. "It's a response to all those times I've felt isolated, or like I needed a sounding board but didn't have one. I know this app won't solve all of life's problems, but I hope it can be a small tool for others to reflect, to grow, and to feel seen." As The Verge reports in an excellent rundown of the example interactions, SocialAI lets users choose the types of AI followers they want, including categories like "supporters," "nerds," and "skeptics." These AI chatbots then respond to user posts with brief comments and reactions on almost any topic, including nonsensical "Lorem ipsum" text.

Anduril Industries, a defense startup founded by Palmer Luckey, will integrate its Lattice suite of software into Microsoft's Integrated Visual Augmentation System headset for the U.S. Army. The deal aims to enhance soldiers' battlefield awareness by displaying real-time data from drones, vehicles, and defense systems.

Luckey, who sold virtual reality company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion, launched Anduril in 2017 to challenge traditional defense contractors. The firm recently secured a contract to develop an experimental robotic fighter jet, beating out industry giants. While Microsoft's IVAS faced initial user complaints of nausea and headaches, the Army plans to invest $21.9 billion in the project.

In 1980 a 23-year-old woman was shot multiple times by an unknown assailant in a small county in central Kansas.

44 years later, the county sheriff made a Facebook post... Over the years, dozens of law enforcement officers looked at the case to no avail. In mid-2022 I was approached by Detective Sgt. Adam Hales to reopen the case using new techniques and technology that were now available at the time of the murder. In all honesty, it was with some degree of skepticism that I authorized the expenditure of manpower and resources... Many of the witnesses as well as law enforcement officers that were originally involved in the case had died and interviews were not possible.
A statement from the Kansas attorney general's office says the police investigation culminated with an interview with Steven Hanks, a neighbor of the woman, who admitted to the killing. Hanks (who is now 70 years old) was arrested and charged with murder and second-degree, according to the county sheriff's Facebook post: On a personal note, I was 18 years old and a senior in high school when this homicide occurred. I remember it well. By 1982 I had started with the Sheriff's Office as a reserve deputy and have been associated with the Barton County Sheriff's Office ever since. I worked for the four Sheriff's that preceded me and this homicide has haunted all of us. It bothers me that many of the people who were so affected by this tragic crime have since passed away prior to bringing the suspect to justice. I consider myself fortunate that I had the resources and the diligent personnel to close this case.
The Facebook post ends with a 1980 photo of 23-year-old Mary Robin Walter — who besides being a nursing school student was also a wife and mother — next to a booking photo of 70-year-old Steven Hanks.

Hanks has been sentenced to up to 25 years in prison

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The home of the Golden State Warriors was packed on Tuesday evening this week, but it wasn't to watch Steph Curry. Thousands of fans gathered at the Chase Center in downtown San Francisco to watch one of Silicon Valley's biggest ballers, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, sit down for a conversation with the hosts of the Acquired podcast, David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert. Shortly after hopping onstage, Zuckerberg joked that he might need to schedule his next appearance in order to apologize for whatever he was about to say. After a beat, he added that he was just kidding and that, in fact, his days of apologizing are over.

Zuckerberg has had something of a rebrand recently. He raises cattle in Hawaii now, has long bouncy curls and a gold chain, and commissions Roman-style statues of his wife. Onstage, the Facebook founder wore a boxy T-shirt he designed himself alongside fashion designer Mike Amiri that read "learning through suffering" in Greek letters. The tongue-in-cheek comment about apologizing was a reference to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who himself addressed a flub he'd made on the Acquired podcast earlier this year, via a pre-recorded video on a screen hanging over the crowd. Huang's original comment -- that he never would have started Nvidia if he knew what he did today -- was grossly taken out of context, he said. In the video, he clarified that he absolutely would start Nvidia again, and that his comment was more about the blissful ignorance of startup founders.

While Zuckerberg's opening comment was just a friendly jab at Huang, it set the tone for Zuckerberg's new attitude toward life and business. The founder of Facebook has spent a lot of time apologizing for Facebook's content moderation issues. But when reflecting on the biggest mistakes of his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a "political miscalculation" that he described as a "20-year mistake." Specifically, he said, he'd taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook's control. "Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don't actually think we were," said Zuckerberg. "When it's a political problem there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame."

Facebook has admitted that it scrapes the public photos, posts and other data of Australian adult users to train its AI models and provides no opt-out option, even though it allows people in the European Union to refuse consent. From a report: Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh was pressed at an inquiry as to whether the social media giant was hoovering up the data of all Australians in order to build its generative artificial intelligence tools, and initially rejected that claim. Labor senator Tony Sheldon asked whether Meta had used Australian posts from as far back as 2007 to feed its AI products, to which Ms Claybaugh responded "we have not done that".

But that was quickly challenged by Greens senator David Shoebridge.

Shoebridge: "The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That's the reality, isn't it?
Claybaugh: "Correct."

Ms Claybaugh added that accounts of people under 18 were not scraped, but when asked by Senator Sheldon whether public photos of his own children on his account would be scraped, Ms Claybaugh acknowledged they would.

Television has ceased to be the main source of news in the UK for the first time since the 1960s as Britons turn increasingly to online news and social media apps, according to research by the media regulator. From a report: Ofcom said on Tuesday that viewing of TV news had continued to fall steeply, with online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok and digital versions of broadcasters now slightly more widely used as a source of news.ÂIn its annual study of audience habits, the watchdog said 71 per cent of adults obtained news online, compared with 70 per cent via TV -- a finding it described as "marking a generational shift in the balance of news media."

The reach of TV news has fallen from 75 per cent last year. More than four-fifths of people between the ages of 16 and 24 obtained their news from social media, Ofcom found. The report underlines the pressure on more traditional linear broadcasters such as the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 to accelerate moves to digital platforms, which include their own streaming sites as well as social media apps such as TikTok.Â

It's hard to get 42 states to agree on much. But a bipartisan group of attorneys general on Tuesday demanded that Congress require Surgeon General warning labels on social media apps to help curtail addiction and a mental health crisis among young adults. From a report: "As state Attorneys General, we sometimes disagree about important issues, but all of us share an abiding concern for the safety of the kids in our jurisdictions -- and algorithm-driven social media platforms threaten that safety," the 42 attorneys general said in a letter to Congress. States have taken legal action against a number of social media companies, including Meta and TikTok. But they argue more needs to be done in Washington to alert people to the dangers social media platforms present.

"In addition to the states' historic efforts, this ubiquitous problem requires federal action -- and a surgeon general's warning on social media platforms, though not sufficient to address the full scope of the problem, would be one consequential step toward mitigating the risk of harm to youth," the attorneys general said. The letter echoed much of what Surgeon General Vivek Murthy outlined in a scathing New York Times op-ed in June, that drew a direct comparison between the apps -- TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and others -- to cancer causing cigarettes.

Murthy cited several studies, including a 2019 American Medical Association study published in JAMA that showed teens who spend three hours a day on social media double their risk of depression. Teens spend nearly five hours a day on social media apps, according to a Gallup poll.