Study suggests children’s social media use leads to loss of one night’s sleep a week

  • A study by De Montfort University in Leicester found that children under 12 may be losing around one night’s sleep a week due to their social media habits.
  • Around two thirds of children used social media apps 2 hours before bed and 12.5% of children surveyed were waking up during the night to check their phones.
  • Whilst children need around 9 to 11 hours of sleep a night, the survey found the average night’s sleep of children was 8.7 hours.
  • For more on this, visit the Insider website.

Molly Russell’s inquest to put focus on big tech

  • The 14-year-old died by suicide in 2017 after viewing material about self-harm and suicide on social media sites owned by Meta.
  • Molly’s father, Mr Harrow, is a campaigner for online safety and believes the harmful content she viewed up until her death may have been a major contributor.
  • Her story provides ‘fresh impetus’ for new legislation that would regulate the power and responsibility of big tech companies such as Meta.
  • For more on Molly’s story, please go to the BBC website.

Study finds YouTube’s Dislike button doesn’t do what we think

  • Researchers at Mozilla Corporation studied half a billion YouTube recommendations that were made after users clicked on one of the platform’s negative feedback tools.
  • These included using the ‘Dislike’ or ‘Don’t Recommend Channel’ buttons as a way to prevent being recommended such content.
  • The study found that disliking a video only stopped 12% of recommendations users did not like, and that pressing ‘Don’t Recommend Channel’ stopped only 43% of similar content.
  • For more on this study, please go to the Wired website.