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Spain plans to ban social media access for children under 16, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Tuesday, in a move designed to shield young people from the harms of online content. The progressive Spanish leader spoke at a summit in the United Arab Emirates, where he chided the world's biggest tech companies for allowing illegal content such as child sex abuse and nonconsensual sexualised deepfake images and videos on their platforms, saying that governments also needed to "stop turning a blind eye." "Today, our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone," Sanchez said. "We will no longer accept that." In doing so, Spain joins a growing number of countries, including Australia and France, which have taken or are considering measures to restrict minors' access to social media. In January, French lawmakers approved a bill banning social media for children under 15, paving the way for the measure to take effect at the start of the next school year
Censorship claims, technical problems and a report of a surge in app deletions are just some of the challenges TikTok is facing as it adjusts to a new ownership structure in the United States that was finalized last week. The company said Monday it was experiencing a "major infrastructure issue triggered by a power outage" at one of its US data centre partner sites. The outage led to bugs such as creators temporarily seeing zero views on their videos even if people had looked at them, as well as slow load times and timeout requests when posting videos. On Tuesday, TikTok said it had made significant progress restoring services though users could still see glitches while using the popular video sharing app. At the same time, users were raising concerns that the company is "censoring" videos, including ones critical of President Donald Trump, ICE or mentions of Jeffrey Epstein. The complaints were enough for California Gov. Gavin Newsom to announce on X Monday that he is launching a .
Egypt's Parliament is looking into ways to regulate children's use of social media platforms to combat what lawmakers called "digital choas," following some western countries that are considering banning young teenagers from social media. The House of Representatives said in a statement late Sunday that it will work on a legislation to regulate children's use of social media and "put an end to the digital chaos our children are facing, and which negatively impacts their future." Legislators will consult with the government and expert bodies to draft a law to "protect Egyptian children from any risks that threaten its thoughts and behavior," the statement said. The statement came after President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi on Saturday urged his government and lawmakers to consider adopting legislation restricting children's use of social media, "until they reach an age when they can handle it properly." The president's televised comments urged his government to look at other countries ...
A Pakistani court on Saturday sentenced two human rights lawyers to 17 years in prison each over social media posts the authorities claimed were hostile to the state and its security institutions. Judge Afzal Majoka announced the verdict a day after Zainab Mazari and her husband Hadi Ali Chattha were arrested in Islamabad, according to court documents. The couple appeared briefly via video link but boycotted the hearing, prompting the court to conclude the trial and deliver the verdict. Family and friends denounced the ruling. The couple denied all the changes. The court verdict said Mazari had posted multiple tweets in recent years that "portrayed the agenda" of the outlawed Baloch separatist group and Pakistani Taliban. The case stems from a complaint filed in August 2025 with the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency, alleging the couple used social media to malign the state and its security institutions. They were formally indicted last October and had repeatedly refused to