• Misleading and harmful online content about Covid-19 has spread easily because the UK still lacks a law to regulate social media, an influential group of MPs has said.
• The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee urged the government to publish a draft copy of promised legislation by this autumn. It follows suggestions that the Online Harms Bill might not be in force until 2024.
• The group’s chairman Julian Knight said “we still haven’t seen correct legislative architecture put in place, and we are still relying on social media companies’ consciences”.

• Sir Iain Duncan Smith has called for Tik Tok to be banned in the UK following claims it poses “as much threat as Huawei”.
• A number of senior Conservative MPs have voiced concerns over the social media platform, which they say raises similar security concerns and “very significant political and data privacy issues”.
• TikTok has insisted that China’s Communist Party does not have access to the personal information of its account holders and it is safe to use.
• Sir Iain Duncan Smith said: “Tik Tok has the ability to harvest data and is considered a security risk, not just in the UK and USA but in countries as diverse as India and Japan”.

• The first of Snap’s new mini applications rolled out Monday, with tools from meditation app Headspace, part of an initiative “to help support the mental health and emotional wellbeing of Snapchatters,” a Snap spokesperson said in a statement.
• The minis are miniature apps made by third-party developers that run inside of Snapchat to create more social experiences among friends.
• The Headspace Mini is one of four which Snap is launching this week. The others are: Let’s Do It, which lets groups make decisions together, Prediction Master from Mammoth Media, which “serves timely questions on everything from the Stock Market to sneaker drops, so Snapchatters can see which of their friends is the true psychic,” and Flashcards by Tembo, to create study aids.

• Research has found that girls are being informally excluded at a higher rate than boys from some schools in England.
• The study, which was completed by Social Finance, a not-for-profit group which focuses on social problems, shows that girls are being excluded through moves to other schools or early exit, which means they leave before the end of year 11 but do not finish school elsewhere.
• The research showed that in the case of “early exits”, which is one of the so-called informal exclusion routes, the rate among boys was just over 4% while among girls it was just under 6%.
• The study focuses on exclusions in Cheshire West and Chester, but researchers say the findings have national implications.

• Privacy campaigners say England’s test and trace programme has broken a key data protection law.
• The Department of Health has conceded the initiative to trace contacts of people infected with Covid-19 was launched without carrying out an assessment of its impact on privacy.
• The Open Rights Group (ORG) says the admission means the initiative has been unlawful since it began on 28 May.
• Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said “in no way has [there] been a breach of any of the data that has been stored”. 
• ORG’s executive director, Jim Killock, said the government had been “reckless” in ignoring this legally-required safety step and had endangered public health.

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