“I’m sorry, but this portrait looks like he’s in hell,” one person posted in comments under artist Jonathan Yeo’s and the royal family’s joint Instagram post revealing and explaining the image.

“Without sounding rude this is the worst royal portrait I’ve ever seen,” another added.

“It looks like he’s bathing in blood,” a third concluded.

The painting, which stands at an impressive 6½ by 8½ feet, was commissioned three years ago by the Worshipful Company of Drapers, a medieval guild of wool and cloth merchants that now focuses on philanthropy. The piece will hang at the gallery in Drapers’ Hall in downtown London, Yeo wrote.

King Charles sat for four sessions with the artist, a trustee at the National Portrait Gallery who has painted Queen Camilla when she was duchess of Cornwall as well as Charles’ father, the late Prince Philip, albeit in much more flattering tones. Charles had a creative say in the project, suggesting the artist include the butterfly landing on his shoulder, doing double duty as a symbol of his commitment to the environment and to show his transformation as he ascended to the throne.

“When I started this project, His Majesty The King was still His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, and much like the butterfly I’ve painted hovering over his shoulder, this portrait has evolved as the subject’s role in our public life has transformed,” Yeo wrote.

“I do my best to capture the life experiences and humanity etched into any individual sitter’s face, and I hope that is what I have achieved in this portrait. To try and capture that for His Majesty The King, who occupies such a unique role, was both a tremendous professional challenge, and one which I thoroughly enjoyed and am immensely grateful for.”

Despite his involvement in the project, King Charles was “initially surprised by the strong color,” the artist told the BBC, and TikTok royals commentator @matta_of_fact noted that the king appeared to jump a bit when he pulled the cloth away to reveal the painting.

The online opinions didn’t stop at hellfire, however. Allusions to the royal family’s bloody colonial past, Charles and Camilla’s infamous tampon scandal and the family’s current woes, including the king’s recent cancer diagnosis, ran rampant.

But not everyone seemed bothered. Queen Camilla took one look at the painting, the BBC reported, and said, “Yes, you’ve got him.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Facebook parent Meta said it will start publicly providing more details about how advertisers target people with political ads just months ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.

The announcement follows years of criticism that the social media platforms withhold too much information about how campaigns, special interest groups and politicians use the platform to target small pockets of people with polarizing, divisive or misleading messages.

Meta, which also owns Instagram, said it will start releasing details in July about the demographics and interests of audiences who are targeted with ads that run on its two primary social networks. The company will also share how much advertisers spent in an effort to target people in certain states.

“By making advertiser targeting criteria available for analysis and reporting on ads run about social issues, elections and politics, we hope to help people better understand the practices used to reach potential voters on our technologies,” Jeff King wrote in a statement posted to Meta’s website.

The new details could shed more light on how politicians spread misleading or controversial political messages among certain groups of people. Advocacy groups and Democrats, for example, have argued for years that misleading political ads are overwhelming the Facebook feeds of Spanish-speaking populations.

The information will be showcased in the Facebook ad library, a public database that already shows how much companies, politicians or campaigns, spend on each ad they run across Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. Currently, anyone can see how much a page has spent running an ad and a breakdown of the ages, gender and states or countries an ad is shown in.

The information will be available across 242 countries when a social issue, political or election ad is run, Meta said in a statement.

Meta collected $86 billion in revenue during 2020, the last major U.S. election year, thanks in part to its granular ad targeting system. Facebook’s ad system is so customizable that advertisers can target a single user out of billions on the platform, if they wanted.

Meta said in its announcement Monday that it will provide researchers with new details that show the interest categories advertisers selected when they tried to target people on the platform.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of a Senate panel examining social media’s negative effects on young people has dismissed as “a public relations tactic” some safety measures announced by Facebook’s popular Instagram platform.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, on Wednesday faced off with senators angry over revelations of how the photo-sharing platform can harm some young users and demanding that the company commit to making changes.

Under sharp questioning by senators of both parties, Mosseri defended the company’s conduct and the efficacy of its new safety measures. He challenged the assertion that Instagram has been shown by research to be addictive for young people. Instagram has an estimated 1 billion users of all ages.

On Tuesday, Instagram introduced a previously announced feature that urges teenagers to take breaks from the platform. The company also announced other tools, including parental controls due to come out early next year, that it says are aimed at protecting young users from harmful content.

The parental oversight tools “could have been announced years ago,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told Mosseri. The newly announced measures fall short and many of them are still being tested, he said.

A pause that Instagram imposed in September on its work on a kids’ version of the platform “looks more like a public relations tactic brought on by our hearings,” Blumenthal said.

“I believe that the time for self-policing and self-regulation is over,” said Blumenthal. “Self-policing depends on trust. Trust is over.”

Mosseri testified as Facebook, whose parent now is named Meta Platforms, has been roiled by public and political outrage over the disclosures by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen. She has made the case before lawmakers in the U.S., Britain and Europe that Facebook’s systems amplify online hate and extremism and that the company elevates profits over the safety of users.

Haugen, a data scientist who had worked in Facebook’s civic integrity unit, buttressed her assertions with a trove of internal company documents she secretly copied and provided to federal securities regulators and Congress.

The Senate panel has examined Facebook’s use of information from its own researchers that could indicate potential harm for some of its young users, especially girls, while it publicly downplayed the negative impacts. For some Instagram-devoted teens, peer pressure generated by the visually focused app led to mental-health and body-image problems, and in some cases, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts, the research detailed in the Facebook documents showed.

The revelations in a report by The Wall Street Journal, based on the documents leaked by Haugen, set off a wave of recriminations from lawmakers, critics of Big Tech, child-development experts and parents.

“As Head of Instagram, I am especially focused on the safety of the youngest people who use our services,” Mosseri testified. “This work includes keeping underage users off our platform, designing age-appropriate experiences for people ages 13 to 18, and building parental controls. Instagram is built for people 13 and older. If a child is under the age of 13, they are not permitted on Instagram.”

Mosseri outlined the suite of measures he said Instagram has taken to protect young people on the platform. They include keeping kids under 13 off it, restricting direct messaging between kids and adults, and prohibiting posts that encourage suicide and self-harm.

But, as researchers both internal and external to Meta have documented, the reality is different. Kids under 13 often sign up for Instagram with or without their parents’ knowledge by lying about their age. And posts about suicide and self-harm still reach children and teens, sometimes with disastrous effects.

Senators of both parties were united in condemnation of the social network giant and Instagram, the photo-sharing juggernaut valued at some $100 billion that Facebook acquired for $1 billion in 2012.

Already in July, Facebook said it was working with parents, experts and policymakers when it introduced safety measures for teens on Instagram. In fact, the company has been working with experts and other advisers for another product aimed at children — its Messenger Kids app that launched in late 2017.

Senators pressed Mosseri to support legislative remedies for social media.

Among the legislative proposals put forward by Blumenthal and others, one bill proposes an “eraser button” that would let parents instantly delete all personal information collected from their children or teens.

Another proposal bans specific features for kids under 16, such as video auto-play, push alerts, “like” buttons and follower counts. Also being floated is a prohibition against collecting personal data from anyone aged 13 to 15 without their consent. And a new digital “bill of rights” for minors that would similarly limit gathering of personal data from teens.

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Facebook said late Monday that “the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change” and that there is “no evidence that user data was compromised as a result” of the outage. The company apologized and said it is working to understand more about the cause, which began around 11:40 a.m. Eastern Monday.

Facebook was already in the throes of a separate major crisis after whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, provided The Wall Street Journal with internal documents that exposed the company’s awareness of harms caused by its products and decisions. Haugen went public on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program Sunday and is scheduled to testify before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday.

Haugen had also anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement alleging Facebook’s own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation and leads to increased polarization. It also showed that the company was aware that Instagram can harm teenage girls’ mental health.

The Journal’s stories, called “The Facebook Files,” painted a picture of a company focused on growth and its own interests over the public good. Facebook has tried to play down their impact. Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of policy and public affairs, wrote to Facebook employees in a memo Friday that “social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out.”

The outage didn’t exactly bolster Facebook’s argument that its size and clout provide important benefits for the world. London-based internet monitoring firm Netblocks noted that the company’s plans to integrate the technology behind its platforms — announced in 2019 — had raised concerns about the risks of such a move. While such centralization “gives the company a unified view of users’ internet usage habits,”

Netblocks said, it also makes the services vulnerable to single points of failure.

“This is epic,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company. The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour. The stricken content-delivery company in that case, Fastly, blamed a software bug triggered by a customer who changed a setting.

For hours, Facebook’s only public comment was a tweet in which it acknowledged that “some people are having trouble accessing (the) Facebook app” and said it was working on restoring access. Regarding the internal failures, Instagram head Adam Mosseri tweeted that it feels like a “snow day.”

Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s outgoing chief technology officer, later tweeted “sincere apologies.”

In Monday night’s statement, Facebook blamed changes on routers that coordinate network traffic between data centers. The company said the changes interrupted the communication, which had “a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

There was no evidence as of Monday afternoon that malicious activity was involved. Matthew Prince, CEO of the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, tweeted that “nothing we’re seeing related to the Facebook services outage suggests it was an attack.”

Facebook did not respond to messages for comment about the attack or the possibility of malicious activity. While much of Facebook’s workforce is still working remotely, there were reports that employees at work on the company’s Menlo Park, California, campus had trouble entering buildings because the outage had rendered their security badges useless.

But the impact was far worse for multitudes of Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users, showing just how much the world has come to rely on it and its properties — to run businesses, connect with online communities, log on to multiple other websites and even order food.

It also showed that despite the presence of Twitter, Telegram, Signal, TikTok, Snapchat and a bevy of other platforms, nothing can easily replace the social network that over the past 17 years has effectively evolved into critical infrastructure. The outage came the same day Facebook asked a federal judge that a revised antitrust complaint against it by the Federal Trade Commission be dismissed because it faces vigorous competition from other services.

There are certainly other online services for posting selfies, connecting with fans or reaching out to elected officials, But those who rely on Facebook to run their business or communicate with friends and family in far-flung places saw this as little consolation.

Kendall Ross, owner of a knitwear brand called I’d Knit That in Oklahoma City, said she has 32,000 followers on her Instagram business page @id.knit.that. Almost all of her website traffic comes directly from Instagram. She posted a product photo about an hour before Instagram went out. She said she tends to sell about two hand-knit pieces after posting a product photo for about $300 to $400.

“The outage today is frustrating financially,” Ross said. “It’s also a huge awakening that social media controls so much of my success in business.”

So many people are reliant on Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram as primary modes of communication that losing access for so long can make them vulnerable to criminals taking advantage of the outage, said Rachel Tobac, a hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security.

“They don’t know how to contact the people in their lives without it,” she said. “They’re more susceptible to social engineering because they’re so desperate to communicate.” Tobac said during previous outages, some people have received emails promising to restore their social media account by clicking on a malicious link that can expose their personal data.

Jake Williams, chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm BreachQuest, said that while foul play cannot be completely ruled out, chances were good that the outage is “an operational issue” caused by human error.

“What it boils down to: running a LARGE, even by internet standards, distributed system is very hard, even for the very best,” tweeted Columbia University computer scientist Steven Bellovin. Twitter, meanwhile, chimed in from the company’s main account on its service, posting “hello literally everyone” as jokes and memes about the Facebook outage flooded the platform. Later, as an unverified screenshot suggesting that the facebook.com address was for sale circulated, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “how much?”

—-

AP business writer Mae Anderson in New York and AP technology writer Matt O’Brien in Providence, R.I., contributed to this report.

FRANK BAJAK and BARBARA ORTUTAY | AP News

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A study by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health researchers examines how cannabis vaporizer brands use Instagram to market their products by employing visuals that may appeal to young people and tagging popular musicians, social media influencers, and cannabis products to expand the brands’ reach. Findings are published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

Instagram has over 100 million monthly active users, with 25 percent between the ages of 13 and 24. In the United States in 2018, 72 percent of teenagers ages 13 to 17 said they used Instagram. Facebook (the company that owns Instagram) prohibits paid advertising of illegal, prescription, or recreational drugs; however, posts to brand pages and profiles, while frequently used for marketing purposes, are not subject to this policy.

The research was overseen by Daniel Giovenco, PhD, an assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia Mailman who studies social and environmental determinants of tobacco use disparities. Torra Spillane, MPH ‘17, a project coordinator in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences, conceptualized and spearheaded this study. Bryce Wong, MPH ‘19, previously a Lerner Center Research Fellow in Sociomedical Sciences, is a co-author.

The researchers performed a content analysis of Instagram posts uploaded between October 2017 and October 2018 by three popular cannabis vaporizer brands: Kandypens (731 posts), G Pen (454 posts), and Pax (71 posts). Posts had a wide reach, with a total of 467,700 followers across the brands, although reach may be wider as G Pen and Pax had public profiles with no age-verification process at the time of the study.

About a third of posts by the three brands tagged Instagram accounts of social media influencers or other individuals (34.3%); approximately the same portion of posts tagged other companies or their products (31.9%). Musicians (34.6%) and “cannabis influencers” (29.1%)—Instagram users with established relationships with cannabis brands who promote products through the platform—were the most common occupational identities in accounts tagged.

Two-thirds (68.0%) of posts depict someone using the product, although cannabis was rarely mentioned (8.9%) or depicted (10.0%) in posts. Few posts mention age restrictions (0.3%), health risks (5.2%), or health benefits (0.2%). Encouragingly, the three companies do not appear to be alluding to unfounded or weakly authenticated health claims about their products or cannabis consumption, a practice often employed by the recreational and medical cannabis industry.

Kandypens’ website claims their products are for aromatherapy purposes, and the researchers found the brand’s Instagram posts had few mentions of cannabis. However, the account frequently tagged users labeling themselves as cannabis influencers, suggesting that brands may indirectly promote themselves for use with cannabis in order to avoid regulatory oversight.

Visual Appeals to Young People

Three brands present themselves in different ways. Generally, G Pen posts images of musicians, video games, and youthful models in hip, urban settings. Pax presents upscale domestic images and relatively older models. Kandypens favors a retro “hippie” aesthetic with nearly all of its posts of young women, including sexualized images. (Kandypens requires users to report their age as over 18 to access its posts). Among the brands’ Instagram posts that feature a person, 84 percent depict female users.

“Most cannabis users in the United States are men, so the widespread use of female models may indicate that cannabis vaping companies are attempting to reach to a broader audience, a strategy similar to those historically used by the tobacco industry,” notes Spillane, the study’s lead author.

Is More Regulation Needed?

he researchers write that Facebook could update its policies to include a mechanism for oversight and regulation of brand-owned pages that market cannabis and related products, including guidelines to protect the public’s health, such as age-gating and information on consumer safety. Many states with recreationally legal cannabis restrict marketing practices including unfounded health claims, promotional activities, and youth targeting, although these rules do not restrict Internet marketing efforts, which might require federal policy action.

Spillane notes, “We’d like to see more research exploring cannabis marketing, including an expanded focus on the diversity of administration methods and substance forms. A better understanding of brand marketing can help inform relevant policies, educational interventions, and other initiatives that reduce population health risks and promote consumer safety.”

Background on Vaping Cannabis

Vaping cannabis, which involves heating cannabis flower or concentrates to a vapor that users inhale, has recently gained mainstream popularity. Estimates of adults who have ever vaped cannabis range from 32 to 61 percent. Use is also high among young people, with research finding that almost half (44%) of adolescent cannabis users reporting lifetime cannabis vaping. Another survey found that past 30-day prevalence of cannabis vaping was 14 percent among high school seniors in 2019—a massive 86-percent increase over 2018.

Little research exists on the health effects of vaporizing cannabis, and evidence is mixed. Some experts express concern over high concentrations of THC in cannabis concentrates, dry herb, and other cannabis products that are frequently vaped, along with new additives, solvents, and flavor extracts that are largely unregulated. In 2019, cannabis vaping products, particularly those purchased from informal sources, were linked to an outbreak of lung injuries in the U.S.; vitamin E acetate, a thickening agent added to some THC vaping liquids, is thought to have played a major role. Conversely, vaping cannabis has been associated with fewer respiratory problems and may reduce exposure to smoke-related toxins and carcinogens when compared to smoking.

The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (DP5OD023064). The authors report no conflicts of interest.

-Columbia University

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Some people may not be aware of this issue, but it’s a harsh reality all over the world. This is an important problem and we should start doing something about it. Because humans are the more conscious being, but not the most important for the ecosystem, indisputably animals and plants are.

One big problem

Keeping exotic animals as pets has become a trend all over the globe,Instagram stories and Facebook videos showing animal caretakers doing their job, we romanticize the idea of having one of those animals with us.

This could perhaps be the reason the black market of unusual animals is growing. That’s the case of the traffic of otters in Southeast Asia, it’s increasing so much that some people are willing to pay more than a thousand dollars for just one of them. Otters are adorable, we all know that, but they are a wild animal, when in their natural habitat they hunt fish and crustaceans, they don’t play with toys and Teddy bears. Otters still don’t have the classification of endangered species, but they’re certainly getting there, and their numbers keep decreasing with each passing day.

Social media and their impact

It is necessary to emphasize the influence that social media has nowadays, thanks to Youtube, Facebook and Instagram, the commerce of otters increased exponentially, some of them are even being sold via Facebook. Almost every country in Southeast Asia has banned all otter trade but people still market this poor animals.

Otters are just one of the species that is affected but there’s a lot more, some kinds of turtles, monkeys, even tigers. Humans sometimes don’t realize what effect we can have on our own planet. We need to stop following this ‘influencers’, we can admire this magnificent animals but we shouldn’t keep them from living freely in the wild on account of our vanity. We still have a lot to learn about compassion.

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