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Modern conflicts are fought both in the dirt and on the communications battlefield. The proliferation of propaganda and 'fake news' - uploaded online or broadcast over the airways - makes it extraordinarily difficult for those involved in conflict to strategise, maintain morale or even know exactly what is going on within their borders. For this reason, governments have a marked tendency to overreact when dealing with the free flow of information in fraught times: security issues nearly always trump free expression concerns.

This was recently illustrated in Ukraine, where, the Ukrainian Institute of Mass Information (IMI) reported, sanctions were imposed on several Russian media outlets considered to be working against Ukraine's national interests. The sanctions were decided upon by the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine in April 2017 and put into force by presidential decree this week.

The move has provoked broad condemnation from IFEX members who argue that it will have a disproportionately negative effect on Ukrainians' free expression and access to information.

The decree is actually part of an expansion of Ukrainian sanctions imposed as a response to Russia's illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the decree will apply to 468 companies and 1,228 individuals, including Russia's most popular news and social media services, such as the RIA Novosti news agency and the broadcasters Channel One, VGTRK, Zvezda, TNT, Ren TV, TV-Center, NTV-Plus, RT and RBC. The Russian social networking sites Odnoklassniki and VK (formerly known as VKontakte) will also be hit. These sites are immensely popular in Ukraine where (as Isaac Webb on the Global Voices website reports) Odnoklassniki and VK had 11 million and 27 million users respectively in 2014.

IMI provides a list of the kinds of restrictions the media outlets will face. Briefly, they involve the "blocking of assets, suspension of economic and financial obligations, limitation or termination of the provision of telecommunication services and use of public telecommunication networks."

The sanctions will stay in place for up to three years.

In their statements on the decree, both CPJ and ARTICLE 19 highlight the broader, worsening environment for free expression in Ukraine, pointing specifically to the barring of certain Russian journalists from the country and to an intensification of the crackdown on social media users who express "separatist views."

But there is some question as to how effective the new sanctions will be. IMI's executive director, Oksana Romaniuk, told Human Rights Watch of her doubts regarding the decree's enforceability without specific changes to the law. And on the Global Voices website, Kevin Rothrock reports that Russia is already interfering in the affair: news channel Rossiya-24 has been providing on-air instructions to its viewers on how to circumvent the media ban.

Those IFEX members who issued statements were unanimous in calling for the ban to be lifted immediately.

Nina Ognianova, Central Asia Programme Coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, said: "Attempts to ban Russian media in Ukraine are antidemocratic, are likely to be ineffective, and could easily backfire by making the government appear afraid of allowing citizens to make up their own minds. We call on Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to reverse this misguided order and to cease interfering with Ukrainian citizens' right to receive information and opinion from a range of sources."

Katie Morris, Head of Europe and Central Asia for ARTICLE 19, said: "The decision to block access to social networking sites is a serious violation of the right to freedom of expression. Website blocking is a severe form of censorship: it catches legitimate content at the same time as content that may be legitimately prohibited. In this case, blanket blocking of some of the most popular sites within Ukraine will inevitably result in unnecessary and unjustifiable restriction on freedom of expression, affecting millions of people within Ukraine."

Tanya Cooper, Ukraine researcher at Human Rights Watch, called for an international response. She said: "This is yet another example of the ease with which President Poroshenko unjustifiably tries to control public discourse in Ukraine. Poroshenko may try to justify this latest step, but it is a cynical, politically expedient attack on the right to information affecting millions of Ukrainians, and their personal and professional lives. In a single move Poroshenko dealt a terrible blow to freedom of expression in Ukraine. It's an inexcusable violation of Ukrainians' right to information of their choice, and the European Union and Ukraine's other international partners should immediately call on Ukraine to reverse it."

Link:
Eastern block: Ukraine bans Russian media and social networking sites - IFEX

Their study, #StatusofMind, surveyed almost 1,500 young people aged 14 to 24 on how certain social media platforms impact health and well-being issues such as anxiety, depression, self-identity and body image.

YouTube was found to have the most positive impact, while Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter all demonstrated negative affects overall on young people's mental health.

Instagram -- the image-saturated app with over 700 million users worldwide -- topped the list in terms of negative impact, most notably among young women, stated the report, published Friday.

Instagram draws young women to "compare themselves against unrealistic, largely curated, filtered and Photoshopped versions of reality," said Matt Keracher, author of the report.

"Instagram easily makes girls and women feel as if their bodies aren't good enough as people add filters and edit their pictures in order for them to look 'perfect,' " an anonymous female respondent said in the report.

To tackle the problem, the Royal Society for Public Health has called for social media platforms to take action in order to help combat young users' feelings of inadequacy and anxiety by placing a warning on images that have been digitally manipulated.

"We're not asking these platforms to ban Photoshop or filters but rather to let people know when images have been altered so that users don't take the images on face value as real," Keracher said.

"We really want to equip young people with the tools and the knowledge to be able to navigate social media platforms not only in a positive way but in a way that promotes good mental health," he added.

The survey concluded that while Instagram negatively affected body image, sleep patterns and added to a sense of "FOMO" -- the fear of missing out -- the image app was also a positive outlet for self-expression and self-identity for many of its young users.

"Because platforms like Instagram and Facebook present highly curated versions of the people we know and the world around us. It is easy for our perspective of reality to become distorted," she said. "Socializing from behind a screen can also be uniquely isolating, obscuring mental health challenges even more than usual."

Green added that it is important we lay the groundwork now to minimize potential harm as the first generation of social media users become adults.

YouTube was the only social media platform that demonstrated an overall positive impact on young people's mental health in the study.

The report also found that it's not just what young people are engaging with on social media but also how long they are engaging with it.

Young people who spend more than two hours per day connecting on social networking sites are more likely to report poor mental health, including psychological distress, according to the report.

"Platforms that are supposed to help young people connect with each other may actually be fueling a mental health crisis," Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the royal society, noted in the report.

To address this, the society has also recommended the introduction of a pop-up warning to alert users that they have been online for too long.

Seven in 10 young people surveyed supported the recommendation, but with experts describing social media use as more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol, it's not clear whether a "heavy usage" pop-up would be enough to break through that barrier.

Sir Simon Wessely, president of the UK's Royal College of Psychiatrists, supports an education-based approach and warns that demonizing social media is not the answer.

"I am sure that social media plays a role in unhappiness, but it has as many benefits as it does negatives," he said. "We need to teach children how to cope with all aspects of social media -- good and bad -- to prepare them for an increasingly digitized world. There is real danger in blaming the medium for the message."

See the article here:
Instagram worst social media app for young people's mental health - CNN

Orkut is coming back to India with something brand new. No, we are not talking about the once-popular social networking platform that had the air taken out of it with Facebooks advent. Instead, we are talking aboutOrkut Bykkkten the platforms founder, whose new app Hello is now open for Indian users.

Back in the day, Orkut was probably thesocial network to have around. Everyone we knew was using Orkut and everyone who wasnt, was getting pestered by their friends to do so. Things were going great until Facebook came. With Zuckerbergs platform, we had one of the largest mass migrations in human history as droves of people left Orkut. The service dragged on its existence for a few years until 2014, when Google announced that it would be shutting it down for good.

It took Orkut two years to find his next idea, Hello. In 2016, he announced a platform that would be built around common beliefsand wold seek to connect people who held shared interests. The service is finally available in India as well.

The service is app only, and it has two different iterations for iOS and Android. Again, it is important to note that the platform does not lay as much focus upon people as it does upon activities. So, folks who like doing the same sort of stuff are more likely to be thrown together.

While announcing Hello, Orkut had said:

The world is a better place when we get to know each other, when we are a little less strange to each other Fear and hatred have no place when you make such a simple and friendly gesture to someone else.

The company currently has around 20 members, and is headquartered in San Francisco. Meanwhile, there isnt much buzz about its India launch yet, and Orkut may find pulling users from Facebook and all of its other properties, harder than it was for Facebook to pull users from Orkut back in 2008.

The rest is here:
Hello, the social network launched by Orkut's founder, is now open to Indian users - The Tech Portal

Social networking for the proteome, upgraded: New study maps ... Science Daily Researchers have mapped the interaction partners for proteins encoded by more than 5800 genes, representing over a quarter of the human genome, ... and more »

Go here to read the rest:
Social networking for the proteome, upgraded: New study maps ... - Science Daily

Ukraine will block access to the country's most popular social networking sites and other Russian-based web businessesundernew sanctions against Russia for itsannexation of Crimea and war in east Ukraine.

Access to Yandex, a Russian equivalent of google that provides search engines, maps, and other popular tools,and social media sites Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki, will be banned under a decree signed by Petro Poroshenko, the president of Ukraine, on Tuesday.

The decree bans Ukrainian web hosts from linking to the Russian websites from May 15.

The decision was described in a decree posted on the presidential website as part of economic sanctions against Russia, which annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and has sent weapons, equipment, and troops to support a fuel the separatist side in a war in eastern Ukraine.

However, some Ukrainian officials have also described it as a national security measure.

"The servers of these Russian social networks ... store the personal data of Ukrainian users and information on their movements, contacts, communications," Volodymyr Ariev, an MP from President Petro Poroshenko's political faction, said on Facebook.

Other websites blocked under the order include those of the cyber security firms Kaspersky Lab and DrWeb.

The decrees also imposes asset freezes and broadcast bans on Russian television channels TV Tsentr, RBK, VGTRK, NTV-Plus, Zvezda, TNT, REN and ORT.

It is not clear how Ukraine will enforce the ban.

About 60 percent of Ukrainian internet users are active on Vkontakte, a survey by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology found last year.

The rest is here:
Ukraine bans Russian social networks in sweeping expansion of sanctions - Telegraph.co.uk