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The Facebook logo is displayed during the F8 Facebook Developers conference on April 30, 2019 in San Jose, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Imagine $225 billion of Facebook's $565 billion market cap was gone. That's how much HSBC Global Strategies said is threatened by the social media giant's dance with regulators.

The firm initiated coverage of Facebook with a reduce rating, recommending investors sell the stock. HSBC said regulatory overhang isequivalent to 38.5% of Facebook's current valuation.

"Although it has taken time for policy makers and regulators to ready their ideas, it should now be clear they have well-advanced plans for intrusive interventions," said HSBC senior analyst Nicolas Cote-Colisson in a note to clients.

Facebook has drawn negative attention from politicians and regulators from the U.S. and all over the world. TheFederal Trade Commission,the the European Union have all announced investigations into Facebook, either on the tech giant's practices on digital competition or concerns about its digital currency Libra. Despite the regulatory overhang, shares of Facebook are up over 50% this year. But HSBC said its only a matter of time before the stock prices in the real threat of privacy, regulatory and antitrust risk.

"In a sense, Facebook's sheer pace of growth is becoming a risk factor in its own right, as it is likely to accelerate scrutiny and intervention," said Cote-Colisson.

The results of the regulatory crackdown, including fines and policy changes could cost Facebook almost 40% of its market value, the firm said.Trust-busting, anti-competitive fines, privacy fines, taxation, merger control and telecoms-type regulation all pose potential implications to valuation.

"For instance, the possibility of imposition of telecoms-type regulation to make it easy for users to move to competitors," saidCote-Colisson.

HSBC said due to the risk, growth will become more challenging, therefore consensus estimates are overly ambitious.

The average 12-month price target for Facebook on Wall Street is $238.28 per share, according to FactSet. HSBC lowered its 12-month price target for Facebook to $178 per share. Facebook's stock closed at $198.71 on Wednesday.

with reporting from CNBC's Michael Bloom.

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Nearly 40% of Facebook's valuation is on the line from regulatory risk, HSBC says - CNBC

FROM checking why you have a tickle in your throat to searching for why your eye is twitching - we're all guilty of googling our health symptoms.

However, for some people, they become completely consumed by health anxiety after excessively searching for a likely diagnosis.

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This has been dubbed "cyberchondria" - when you constantly surf the internet to self-diagnose real or imagined health problems.

And the condition is said to be costing the NHS millions in wasted appointments.

Here, associate professor Jill Newby and psychology lecturer Eoin McElroy from the University of Leicester write for The Conversation about what cyberchondria really is and what to do if you have it...

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The term cyberchondria describes the anxiety we experience as a result of excessive web searches about symptoms or diseases.

Its not an official diagnosis, but is an obvious play on the word hypochondria, now known as health anxiety. Its obsessional worrying about health, online.

Some argue cyberchondria is simply a modern form of health anxiety.

But studies show even people who dont normally worry about their health can see their concerns spiral after conducting an initial web search.

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Cyberchondria is when searching is:

If this sounds like you, theres help.

We tested whether an online treatment program helped reduce cyberchondria in 41 people with severe health anxiety.

We compared how well it worked compared with a control group of 41 people who learned about general (not health-related) anxiety and stress management online.

The online treatment is based on cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), which involves learning more helpful ways of thinking and behaving.

Participants completed six online CBT modules over 12 weeks, and had phone support from a psychologist.

Are you a hypochondriac?

TheNHSlists hypochondria as "health anxiety".

According to the health organisation, it is commonly listed as having the following symptoms:

Anxiety itself can cause symptoms like headaches or a racing heartbeat, and you may mistake these for signs of illness.

The treatment explained how excessive web searching can become a problem, how to search about health effectively, and practical tools to prevent and stop it (see a summary of those tips below).

We found the online treatment was more effective at reducing cyberchondria than the control group.

It helped reduce the frequency of online searches, how upsetting the searching was, and improved participants ability to control their searching.

Importantly, these behavioural changes were linked to improvements in health anxiety.

Although we dont know whether the program simply reduced or completely eliminated cyberchondria, these findings show if youre feeling anxious about your health, you can use our practical strategies to reduce anxiety-provoking and excessive online searching about health.

Here are our top tips from the treatment program:

1. Be aware of your searching

Dont just search on auto-pilot.

Take note of when, where, how often, and what you are searching about.

Keep track of this for several days so you can spot the warning signs and high-risk times for when youre more likely to get stuck in excessive searching.

Then you can make a plan to do other things at those times.

2. Understand how web searches work

Web search algorithms are mysterious beasts.

But top search results are not necessarily the most likely explanation for your symptoms.

Top search results are often click-bait the rare, but fascinating and horrific stories about illness we cant help clicking on (not the boring stuff)

3. Be smart about how you search

Limit yourself to websites with reliable, high quality, balanced information such as government-run websites and/or those written by medical professionals.

Stay away from blogs, forums, testimonials or social media.

4. Challenge your thoughts by thinking of alternative explanations for your symptoms

For example, even though you think your eye twitch might be motor neuron disease, what about a much more likely explanation, such as staring at the computer screen too much.

5. Use other strategies to cut down, and prevent you from searching

Focus on scheduling these activities at your high-risk times.

These can be absorbing activities that take your focus and can distract you; or you can use relaxation strategies to calm your mind and body.

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6. Surf the urge

Rather than searching straight away when you feel the urge to search about your symptoms, put it off for a bit, and see how the urge to search reduces over time.

And if those dont help, consult a doctor or psychologist.

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Do you have cyberchondria? The 4 signs your health anxiety is getting out of control - The Sun

A father in the Philippines holds his child, who was immunized for measles. Jason Beaubien/NPR hide caption

A father in the Philippines holds his child, who was immunized for measles.

After decades of progress against one of the most contagious human viruses, the world is seeing measles stage a slow, steady comeback.

The World Health Organization and the CDC say in a new report that there were nearly 10 million cases of measles last year, with outbreaks on every continent.

An estimated 140,000 people died from measles in 2018, WHO says, up from an all-time low of 90,000 in 2016.

And so far 2019 has been even worse.

Don't see the graphic above? Click here.

In Samoa a measles outbreak has shut down that nation's schools indefinitely. Government offices in the Pacific island nation have been closed for the last two days as part of a national immunization drive. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, measles has claimed more than 5,000 lives since January as many people as have died in that country's ongoing Ebola outbreak.

"In 2018 there's been an increase in both the cases and the deaths that have occurred from measles. In other words, we're backsliding," says Kate O'Brien, WHO's top executive on immunization, speaking in a video statement accompanying the new report.

"The reason we're having increases in cases and deaths of measles has to do fundamentally with people not getting vaccinated."

There are various reasons for the drop-off. O'Brien denounces misinformation about vaccines that's gained traction on some social media networks. In other places the health systems are so poor that vaccines simply don't reach the kids who need them.

To halt a measles outbreak in any given community, health officials say they need to get 95% of the population immunized against the virus.

Xavier Crespin, UNICEF's chief of health in the Democratic Republic of Congo, says only 50% of Congolese kids have had measles shots through routine childhood checkups. When measles outbreaks flare up, Crespin says, armed conflicts in parts of the country make it extremely difficult to respond.

"Because of the security issue, we cannot go everywhere we need to go," Crespin says from the capital Kinshasa. "There are some hot spot measles areas but it is very difficult for local teams to move toward these areas and to vaccinate children."

Most measles deaths are among children under age 5. Kids tend to get more complications than adults if they contract the disease. A common cause of death is when children who catch measles go on to develop pneumonia.

And because measles is so contagious the virus can live in the air for two hours after someone who is sick coughs or sneezes --it's one of the first diseases to make a comeback when health systems start to break down. "Measles is the canary in the coal mine," says Robert Linkins, head of the Accelerated Disease Control and Surveillance Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He says the current resurgence of measles reveals problems in basic health-care delivery systems.

"[Measles] indicates that there are problems in a community with other vaccine preventable disease coverage," he says. "And in many respects, it's a signal that we've got to pay more attention to where measles is occurring."

And currently that is all around the world.

See the article here:
Measles Cases Around The World Show A Sharp Spike In Past Two Years : Goats and Soda - NPR

Breaking habits is hard. We all know this, whether weve failed our latest diet (again), or felt the pull to refresh our Instagram feed instead of making progress on a work project that is past due.This is largely because we are constantly barraged by stimuli engineered to make us craveand consume, stimuli that hijack the reward-based learning systemin our brains designed initially for survival.

Put simply, reward-based learning involves a trigger (for example, the feeling of hunger), followed by a behavior (eating food), and a reward (feeling sated). We want to do more of the things that feel good and less of the things that feel bad or stressful. These three components (trigger, behavior, and reward) show up every time we smoke a cigarette or eat a cupcake. This is especially true at work. Each time we try to soothe ourselves from a taxing assignment we reinforce the reward, to the point where unhealthy distractions can become habits.

So why cant we just control ourselves and decide to replace bad habits with good ones? The doctrine of self-control has been promulgated for decades, despite the fact that researchers at Yale and elsewhere have shown that the brain networks associated with self-control (e.g. the prefrontal cortex) are the first to go offline when faced with triggers such as stress. Still, in medical school, I was taught to pass self-control rhetoric on to my patients. Need to lose weight? Quit eating junk food. Trying to quit smoking? Stop cold turkey or use a nicotine replacement.

When I started actually practicing medicine, however, I quickly learned that it doesnt work this way in real life.

Self-control theories have missed something critical: reward-based learning is based on rewards, not behaviors. How rewarding a behavior is drives how likely we are to repeat that behavior in the future, and this is why self-control as an approach to breaking habits often fails.

Over the past 20 years, Ive researched ways to create a better method by bringing the scientific and clinical practices together. My time spent studying the behavioral neuroscience of how habits form, and the best way to tackle them, helped me find a surprisingly natural way to do this: mindfulness.

By using mindfulness training to make people more aware of the reward reinforcing their behavior, I can help them tap into what is driving their habit in the first place. Once this happens, they are more easily able to change their association with the reward from a positive one to a more accurate (and often negative) one.

When someone joins our quit smoking program, for example, the first thing I have them do is pay attention while theyre smoking. They often give me a quizzical look, because theyre expecting me to tell them to do something other than smoke, like eat candy as a substitute when they have a craving. But because a reward drives future behavior, and not the behavior itself, I have my clients pay attention to what it tastes and feels like when they smoke. The goal is to make the patient aware of the reward value, or the level of positive reaffirmation they are getting from the habit they want to change. The higher the value, the more likely they are to repeat the behavior.

I see the same thing happen over and over again the reward value of the habit decreases because it isnt as gratifying as people remember. One client of mine, for instance, thought the act of smoking made her look cool as a teenager. Even though that motivation had dissipated in her adulthood, her brain still associated positive feelings with smoking. Hence, her reward value was high. When that same client started paying attention as she smoked, she realized that cigarettes taste bad, commenting, Smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals. Yuck. This helped her brain update the reward value of her habit. She was able to get accurate information about how smoking feels right now, which then helped her become disenchanted with the process.

After seeing how effective this practice was with my clients, I decided to test it even further. My lab and I developed three apps that deliver this same kind of mindfulness training to anyone with a smartphone via short sequential lessons over a period of three to four weeks. The apps are designed to help people break bad habits such as smoking, overeating, and anxiety (which oddly enough, is driven by the same habit loops as the other two behaviors).

Tens of thousands of people from around the world have used these apps, and my lab has published a number of studies showing significant, clinically meaningful results: 5x the smoking quit rates of gold standard treatment, 40% reductions in craving-related eating, and a 63% reduction in anxiety. In a recent randomized controlled trial, we even found that our mindfulness app for smoking cessation taught users how to better control the part of their brain that gets over-activated by smoking cues and chocolate cravings.

While our research has been focused primarily on changing health-related habits, we believe it is highly relevant to the workplace. Our strategy can help workers up their productivity, morale, and overall performance by teaching them how to overcome the habits that may be holding them back from thriving. Heres how to get started:

Similar to the advice I give to people in my outpatient clinic, the first step to breaking a habit (no matter what it is) is to figure out your triggers. If the habit is procrastination or stress eating at work, for example, pay attention to the circumstances surrounding you when you do those things. Do you have a big project youre trying to avoid? Do you have too much on your plate to manage?

Once you know your triggers, try to identify the behaviors you engage in when you are acting out. Do you check social media instead of doing work? Do you snack on sweets during challenging assignments? You must be able to name the actions you turn to for comfort or peace of mind before you can evaluate their reward values.

The next step is to clearly link up action and outcome. Remember my patient who struggled to quit smoking? Just like I asked her to pay attention to the act of smoking, I am asking you to pay attention to how you feel when you partake in your habit.

If you stress eat, how does it feel to eat junk food when you arent hungry? How does what you eat impact the state of your mind, and body, fifteen minutes after the fact? If you procrastinate, what do you get from surfing the internet for pictures of cute puppies? How rewarding is it in the moment, especially when you realize that it isnt helping you get your work done?

Remember your answers to these questions, or write them down to help solidify them in your mind.

This new awareness you have developed will help your brain accurately update the reward value of the habit you want to break. You will begin to see that X behavior leads to Y consequences, and often, those consequences are holding you back from reaching your full potential.

The final step to creating sustainable, positive habit change is to find a new reward that is more rewarding than the existing behavior. The brain is always looking for that bigger, better offer.

Imagine you are trying to break a bad habit like stress eating at work, and willpower hasnt quite worked out for you. What if, instead of indulging in your candy craving to counteract a negative emotion, you substituted it with curiosity about why you are having that craving in the first place, and what it feels like in your body and your mind?

The reward value of curiosity (opening yourself up) is tangibly different than stress eating (closing yourself down) in this instance. Ultimately, curiosity feels better in the moment and is much more enjoyable than the rumination that often occurs after giving into a bad habit.

To tap into their curiosity, I teach my patients a simple mantra: Hmmmm. As in, be curious about your feelings. What does this craving feel like when it first arrives, before I have decided to indulge it?

People often learn, pretty quickly, that cravings are made up of physical sensations and thoughts, and that these come and go. Being curious helps them acknowledge those sensations without acting on them. In other words, they can ride the wave of a craving out by naming and sitting with the thoughts and feelings that arise in their bodies and minds from moment to moment until those moments pass.

If youre curious to see how well this might work for you, now is a good time to give it a try.

The next time you find yourself indulging in a bad habit, take a moment to pause and consider using mindfulness to help you overcome it. Your behaviors may not change immediately but stick with it. If you can hack your mind using our methods, you will eventually be able to break free of unwanted habits and comfortably watch your cravings pass by.

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How to Break Up with Your Bad Habits - Harvard Business Review

by Kirk KardashianDec 04, 2019

In the past 20 years, social media has emerged as one of the most pervasive and influential forces in society.

As of March 31, 2019, Facebook alone reported having 1.56 billion daily active users. By 2022, the total number of social media users is expected to grow to 3.29 billion, representing about 42 percent of the global population. Those legions of users are not just visiting social media platforms to stay in touch with friends and family. Social media has become a digital commons where people and corporations share ideas, sell their wares, make political arguments, and even start revolutions.

Social media has become a vital marketing and communications channel for businesses, organizations and institutions alike, including those in the political sphere.

In The Future of Social Media in Marketing, a paper forthcoming in The Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Tuck assistant professor Lauren Grewal examines social media from the perspective of a marketer, discussing nine themes that will arise in the short, medium, and long terms. To craft this conceptual/theoretical paper, Grewal and her co-authors Gil Appel (Marshall School of Business), Rhonda Hadi (Sad Business School), and Andrew T. Stephen (Sad Business School) had conversations with executives from a wide range of companies and examined recent research in the fields of digital and social media marketing to understand what we do and dont yet know. It is important to consider the future of social media in the context of consumer behavior and marketing, they write, since social media has become a vital marketing and communications channel for businesses, organizations and institutions alike, including those in the political sphere.

While all nine themes are important in their own right, we challenged Grewal to choose the three most relevant social media considerations for 2020, a year when a presidential election will take center stage, and when people will continue to make sense of the costs and benefits of our hyper-connected and tracked world.

Barack Obama in 2008 was the first presidential candidate to leverage social media to help win an election, using it to connect with voters and urge them to get out to the ballot box. Two years later, social media was a critical driver of the Arab Spring. During the 2016 presidential election, social media was usedby legitimate and illegitimate actorsto influence voters opinions in ways that have caused concerns for their effects on democracy. Now, social media remains in the spotlight as a new presidential election is taking place and people are skeptical of the truth and authenticity of political speech on the internet. Twitter recently announced it would not sell political advertisements because it couldnt verify their truthfulness, but Facebook declined to take that step.

Platforms decisions are going to significantly impact our coming election, Grewal says. Social media platforms like Facebook have a lot of power here, and for those that choose to show political ads, not being able to fully understand the algorithms behind the ads, and who sees whatit could exacerbate the echo chamber effect, wherein people only see content they agree with or believe to be true, even when its not. The ramifications of what type of information is offered, and how its shown to various people, could be huge.

Consumers are increasingly concerned that companies are buying, selling, and using their personal data. In her paper, Grewal cites one study showing that nearly 40 percent of digitally connected individuals admitted to deleting at least one social media account due to fears of their personal data being mishandled, and that nearly half of the surveyed consumers believed brands to be complicit in negative aspects of content on social media such as hate speech, inappropriate content, or fake news. The takeaway for businesses is that they must hold social media platforms accountable, work hard to develop transparent policies for consumer data, and take steps to rebuild consumer trust.

Its reasonable to assume that hyper-connectivity to others via the internet would engender feelings of belonging and community. And yet, over the last 50 years in the U.S., rates of loneliness and isolation have doubled, and Generation Z (those born between 1996 and 2010) is considered the loneliest generation in history.

If its used too much to avoid negative aspects of life, things may eventually become worse as everything will eventually come to a head.

The role of social media in this loneliness epidemic is being hotly debated, the authors write. The research results are mixed. At the extreme end of the social media use spectrum, people report higher perceived isolation, loneliness and depression. On the other hand, social media can have positive benefits, such as developing socialization skills, providing access to information resources, and giving people the opportunity to meet likeminded friends who might live far away.

This is a difficult area, because the same thing can be a positive or a negative, depending on how its used, Grewal says. If youre using social media as a release or an escape, that can be a good thing depending on a persons situation. But on the other side, if its used too much to avoid negative aspects of life, things may eventually become worse as everything will eventually come to a head.

Excerpt from:
Three Social Media Themes to Watch in 2020 - Tuck School