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A number of documents and manuals used to train Facebooks moderators have been exposed in an investigative report by The Guardian, revealing the type of content users are and arent allowed to post on the social networking site.

That includes taking some controversial stances. For instance, its allegedly Facebook policy to allow the livestreaming of video of people attempting self-harm, only removing the video once theres no longer an opportunity to help the person unless [the videos] are newsworthy.

Another example is in relation to violent language, which Facebook only deems as against the rules if the specificity of language makes it seem like its no longer simply an expression of emotion but a transition to a plot or design. General statements like lets beat up fat kids (a direct quote) can remain on the site, whereas someones request for a presidential assassination would be removed.

The Guardian report is part of a series the site is calling Facebook Files a combination of articles that discuss the guidelines in depth, and also provide samples of the original moderation documents themselves. The guidelines cover a huge range of specific topics, ranging from the showing of animal cruelty to non-sexual child abuse, and detail how Facebook feels each should be addressed.

Facebook already has around 4,500 content moderators whose sole job it is to wade through reports from users of disturbing or inappropriate content, and the company has said it plans to hire another 3,000 to help deal with the massive workload. While this army of screening staff deal with these reports, they apparently dont touch any of the content when it first gets posted that job is instead relegated to automated systems and checks.

These issues are obviously ethically complex, and for many people it will be irksome to see these topics discussed through the lens of corporate interest, no matter how reasonable the policy surrounding each problem may be.

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Banned on Facebook: how the social network tackles controversial topics - TechRadar

Instagram has been rated the most damaging social media platform for young peoples mental health in a new study out of the U.K.

After Instagram, the next low-scoring platform was Snapchat, followed by Facebook, Twitter and then YouTube, which was ranked the healthiest network for youth mental health and wellbeing.

The research, conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement and published on Friday, surveyed 1,479 people in the U.K. between the ages of 14 and 24 in early 2017.

The participants were asked to rate the impacts of the five social media platforms on different aspects of their wellbeing such as, sleep, depression, self-identity, body image, loneliness, bullying, anxiety and fear of missing out (or FOMO as its often called).

According to the findings, Instagram was given low scores in seven categories for its effect on young peoples body image, sleep, bullying, anxiety, depression, loneliness and FOMO.

The photo-sharing networking site was rated highly for its promotion of self-expression, self-identity and emotional support, however.

The most positively-viewed service, YouTube, scored poorly for its impact on the respondents sleep, but did well in nine other categories including emotional support, depression, loneliness, self-expression and awareness of other peoples health experience.

The papers authors point to past studies that have raised concerns about the detrimental effects of social media on developing minds to justify the importance for this kind of research.

The way young people communicate and share with each other has changed, the study states. With social media being such a new phenomenon, the exact effect it is having on the mental health, emotional wellbeing and physiology of young people is currently unclear.

According to the study, 91 per cent of the surveys participants use the internet for social networking and that social media has been called more addictive than cigarettes.

The researchers also point to increasing rates of anxiety and depression in youth (up by 70 per cent in the past 25 years) and how networking sites have been linked to it.

Call for action:

The two health organizations involved in the study also called for a number measures to protect young users from the potentially harmful effects of social media.

Some of the demands include:

- Pop-up warning messages to alert users of their heavy usage

- Including a watermark to identify photos that have been digitally manipulated

- More education in schools on the effects of social media

- Creation of social media platforms to identify users who may be suffering from mental health problems and directing them to support resources

- More research into the impact of social media on young peoples mental health

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Instagram ranked worst for youth mental health: study - CTV News

The president of Ukraine banned four of the nations most popular websites Monday with a new round of sanctions targeting Russia over its 2014 annexation of Crimea and subsequent aggression.

President Petro Poroshenko issued a decree Monday evening broadening anti-Russian sanctions and expanding Kievs blacklist to 468 companies and 1,228 people, including Mail.ru, the Moscow-based firm in control of Ukraines two most popular social networks, VK and Odnoklassniki, as well as Yandex, a Russian-owned search engine, in addition to several major Russian television channels and banks.

The challenges of hybrid war demand adequate responses, Mr. Poroshenko said in a statement Monday. Massive Russian cyber attacks across the world particularly the interference in the French election campaign show it is time to act differently and more decisively.

Russia used cyber warfare trying to influence the results of elections across Europe and in the U.S., Mr. Poroshenko added during a Monday night television address, IB Times reported. We expect that they will try to do the same thing to Ukraine.

The sanctions took effect immediately and quickly earned condemnation and cries of censorship from affected entities and open internet advocates as well as ridicule from Russian President Vladimir Putins administration in Moscow.

We have always steered clear of politics, said VK, which claims about 16 million social network users in Ukraine alone. We believe that in its very essence, the internet has no borders.

Supposedly this is because Russia is making money from our users and we are at war. But, excuse me, these are sanctions against the citizens themselves, opined Oksana Romaniouk, Reporters Without Borderss Ukrainian representative.

Dmitry Peskov, Mr. Putins spokesperson, called the sanctions short-sighted and warned Russia had not forgotten about the principle of reciprocity. Russias Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, called the sanctions a manifestation of politically motivated censorship, not withstanding its own repressive internet restrictions.

Other targets of Ukraines latest sanctions include Russias leading cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky Labs, in addition to several banks and television stations, including Rossiya Segodnya, RBC, VGTRK and TNT, among others.

Moscow annexed Crimea from Kiev in 2014 after Ukraines pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown from office and replaced by Mr. Poroshenko. Pro-Russian separatists purportedly backed by Moscow instigated a civil war in eastern Ukraine later that year, the likes of which has claimed at least 10,000 lives in the last three years.

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Ukraine blocks social networking sites with new sanctions against Russia - Washington Times

Instagram has been ranked as the worst social networking app when it comes to its impact on young people's mental health, according to a new survey published by the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) in the UK.

The #StatusofMind survey asked 1479 young people, aged 14 to 24, to score popular social media platforms on issues such as anxiety, depression, loneliness, bullying and body image.

The photo-sharing app, which has over 700 million users worldwide, appeared to be more detrimental to young people's mental health when compared to Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Chief executive of the RSPH, Shirley Cramer, said social media sites pose a real and immediate threat to the health of young people.

"Social media has been described as more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol, and is now so entrenched in the lives of young people that it is no longer possible to ignore it when talking about young people's mental health issues", Ms Cramer told The Telegraph.

"It's interesting to see Instagram and Snapchat ranking as the worst for mental health and wellbeing - both platforms are very image-focused and it appears they may be driving feelings of inadequacy and anxiety in young people.

"The platforms that are supposed to help young people connect with each other may actually be fuelling a mental health crisis", Ms Cramer said.

The report offers an insight into the possible link between mental illness and heavy social media use.

"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.

"This [social media] resulted in me not eating properly and losing a lot of weight and becoming very depressed, I finally recovered which was hard for myself to be bullied online again in year 8. Overall I would say social media has caused me many issues and has caused me to be depressed many times", another respondent said.

The report also identified the length of time that people are engaging with social media platforms as the greatest cause for concern.

"Seeing friends constantly on holiday or enjoying nights out can make young people feel like they are missing out while others enjoy life", it notes.

"These feelings can promote a 'compare and despair' attitude in young people.

"Individuals may view heavily photo-shopped, edited or staged photographs and videos and compare them to their seemingly mundane lives".

Young people who spend more than two hours per day connecting on social networking sites are more likely to suffer from increased levels of psychological distress, depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation, according to the report.

However, it isn't all bad news; social media platforms can also promote a sense of community and provide emotional support for at-risk youth.

"I have anxiety and on many occasions I have found videos that put how I feel into words and explain it, and this benefits me a lot making me feel more confident", an anonymous respondent said.

Despite the criticisms levelled at Instagram by a host of respondents in the survey, the app was found to have a positive effect on self-expression and self-identity.

However YouTube was the only social media platform found to have an overall positive impact on young people's mental health.

In an effort to counter the negative impacts of heavy social media, experts listed a series of checks and measures designed to bolster mental health, including:

The impact of five social media sites were evaluated in the following order:

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'Fuelling a mental health crisis': Instagram worst social network for young people's mental health - The Sydney Morning Herald

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."

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