Selfie obsession fuelling skin cancer

Instagram and Facebook are 'fuelling skin cancer' because selfie-obsessed youngsters are ignoring warnings for a 'like' from friends.

 Social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook are helping to fuel an epidemic of skin cancer.

Harley Street dermatologist Christopher Rowland Payne said selfie-obsessed youngsters were ignoring warnings about long- term damage for a momentary ‘like’ from friends.

You can be tanned in three or four days, but the adverse consequences come much later. It’s short-term reward – pleasure now – but long-term cost.’

 

The selfie craze and “bragging” on Instagram and other social media sites… these make people try to be brown and that very much feeds into this problem.’

‘Smoking is now considered yucky, but tanning is not,’ he said, adding: ‘Women seek a tan more than men, but men admire women who are tanned.’

 

People also liked tanning because it gave them a physical high, he said, explaining that the sensation was akin to taking a drug.

Skin cancer is the most common and fastest rising form of cancer in the UK. 

Melanomas are the most deadly form, killing 2,500 people in Britain every year.

 

EU fines Facebook 110 million euros over WhatsApp deal

European Union antitrust regulators fined Facebook (FB.O) 110 million euros ($122 million) on Thursday for giving misleading information during a vetting of its deal to acquire messaging service WhatsApp in 2014.
Calling it a "proportionate and deterrent fine", the European Commission, which acts as the EU's competition watchdog, said Facebook had said it could not automatically match user accounts on its namesake platform and WhatsApp but two years later launched a service that did exactly that.
"The Commission has found that, contrary to Facebook's statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users' identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility," the Commission said.
Facebook said in a statement the errors made in its 2014 filings were not intentional and that the Commission had confirmed they had not affected the outcome of the merger review.
"Today's announcement brings this matter to a close," Facebook said.
The fine would not reverse the Commission's decision to clear the purchase of WhatsApp and was unrelated to separate investigations into data protection issues, it added.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that Facebook was set to be fined.

The Commission could have fined Facebook up to 1 percent of its turnover - which would have been $276 million based on 2016 results - but said that Facebook had cooperated with the proceedings and acknowledged its infringement.
The EU sanction comes after Facebook received a separate 150,000-euro fine on Tuesday by a French data watchdog for failing to prevent its users' data being accessed by advertisers.
Last week the Italian antitrust authorities levied a 3 million-euro fine on WhatsApp for allegedly obliging users to agree to share their personal data with Facebook. 

Facebook’s Fact Checking Can Make Fake News Spread Even Faster

After acknowledging that it has a problem with fake news, Facebook introduced a feature recently that flags certain posts as "disputed." In some cases, however, this appears to be having the opposite effect to the one Facebook intended.

According to a report by The Guardian, the tagging of fake news is not consistent, and some stories that have been flagged continue to circulate without a warning. In other cases, traffic to fake news posts actually increased after Facebook applied the warning.

Facebook started rolling out the new feature last month, as part of a partnership with a group of external fact-checking sites, including Snopes.com, ABC News, and Politifact.

When a user tries to share links that have been marked as questionable, an alert pops up that says the story in question has been disputed. The alert links to more information about the fact-checking feature and says that "sometimes people share fake news without knowing it."If the user continues to share the link or story anyway, the link is supposed to appear in the news-feeds of other users with a large note that says "disputed," and lists the organizations that flagged it as fake or questionable.
The idea behind the effort was to try to decrease the visibility of hoaxes and fake news, which many Facebook critics believe are spread rapidly by the site's news-feed algorithm.