TikTok has agreed to pay Alabama at least $100 million and adopt new restrictions for teenage users, including a two-hour daily limit, overnight access restrictions, stronger age verification, a ban on beauty filters, and an option for a non-personalized feed. The settlement could grow to as much as $300 million if enough other state attorneys general join similar agreements. The Guardian reports: A trial had been set to begin on Monday in the southern US state over claims by Alabama that TikTok misled parents about tools meant to shield children from harmful content. [...] Attorney general Steve Marshall hailed Friday's settlement as "a great day for Alabama parents." He said: "Tonight, they can rest easier knowing real protections are in place to shield their children from the dangers of social media addiction." Under the settlement, TikTok will send $100m to Alabama and could possibly pay up to $300m in total if 40 other attorneys general sign similar agreements with the company within a specified timeframe. In addition, the Alabama deal includes a conditional restriction that Meta also agreed to: expanding the night-time shutdown period to 10pm to 7am if other platforms also commit to do the same. "TikTok's priority has always been fostering a safe and positive space where people can be creative, discover what they love, and connect with their community," a company spokesperson told AFP. "This builds on our commitment and core objective to continually enhance our robust safety tools to protect teens," the spokesperson added. More than a dozen other states, including California and New York, still have suits against TikTok.

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New Zealand has introduced legislation that would ban children under 16 from social media platforms and AI companion services. "We have protections to keep children safe in the real world and we need them in the virtual world too," said Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in announcing the bill. Jurist.org reports: The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill would require an age restriction on platforms with harmful features for children. These features include recommender systems, endless feeds, feedback features and time-limited features. The bill also seeks to restrict underage users from accessing AI companion services. However, it explicitly excludes messaging apps, professional networking sites, gaming and music platforms, and other educational and health tools. Notably, age verification through self-declared dates of birth and formal identification does not satisfy the platforms' duty under the law. It also requires platforms to verify their users' age through other methods such as facial scans and user activity patterns. The bill would also require platforms to conduct child safety risk assessments for all users under 18 and protect them from harmful content such as bullying, violence, and sexually explicit materials.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from RathBiotaClan: Millions of people finish short video after short video every day; a new brain-scan study shows that the very act of finishing a clip they like temporarily quiets the brain regions that normally help them stay focused and weigh longer-term goals. When people watch a short video they enjoy enough to finish, two brain regions involved in cognitive control show significant deactivation. That is the central finding of a new study from Zhejiang University, published in NeuroImagein January 2026. Using functional MRI alongside proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (H-MRS), the research team examined 56 young adults while they freely watched short video clips inside an MRI scanner. Both the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) showed reduced activity specifically when participants watched clips they liked enough to view to completion. Cognitive control helps people balance immediate pleasures against longer-term goals, and impairments in this system are linked to conditions such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, and addiction. Short-video platforms present rapid, algorithmically curated streams that are built for continuous, low-effort consumption. Prior behavioral research has tied both internet addiction and smartphone addiction to weaker self-control, and separate neuroimaging work has documented disruptions to reward and cognitive-control circuits in people with behavioral addictions. Despite this, few studies had directly tested whether the act of watching entertaining short videos itself suppresses the brain's cognitive control regions. The Zhejiang University team set out to answer that question, along with a second one: what neurochemical factors might explain why this suppression varies from person to person?

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Japanese officials have repeatedly asked the Trump administration to stop using characters from franchises such as Mario, Pokemon, and Naruto in unauthorized government memes and pro-war videos, warning that the posts could damage the intellectual property involved. IGN reports: Official US government social media accounts, including The White House's X account, have posted various memes and videos using characters from popular Japanese anime and games over the past year. Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has repeatedly called on the US government to cease uploading such posts, stating that "It's inappropriate even for public institutions to reproduce copyrighted materials without the rightsholders' consent." This concern was voiced by Minister for Foreign Affairs Toshimitsu Motegi in a parliamentary session back in April, when he made direct reference to a pro-war video that used Nintendo's Wii Sports. However, according to a report by Mainichi Shimbun this week, the Japanese Ministry called on the Trump administration to stop using IPs like Naruto, Pokemon and Mario at least twice more this June through the US Embassy in Japan. Japan requested that the US administration take into account the potential damage to these IPs when used without permission in US policy and pro-war related content. [...] It's not just the Japanese government and related parties who have spoken out against these posts. They have also sparked backlash from Japanese anime fans. Notably, self-proclaimed manga and anime fan Nana Suzuki kicked off the "Protect Japanese Manga" petition on Change.org, which has received international news coverage (from the New York Times, BBC and others). The organizer claims to have submitted their petition to the Japanese Cabinet Office back in March, as well as alerting Japanese politicians to the US government's unauthorized use of Japanese IPs, potentially drawing more official attention to the issue. Renewed backlash was triggered in June, when President Trump shared an AI-generated video depicting himself as Naruto, the protagonist of the popular manga and anime of the same name, on Truth Social. This prompted the petition organizer to reopen the petition "as an urgent effort to convey our protest and concern regarding this matter to the rights holders and to work in solidarity to lobby the Japanese government." The Naruto clip also prompted renewed discussion of this issue in Japan's media and government. As reported in the Hokkaido Shimbun and others, Cabinet Minister Kimi Onoda was asked about it in a June 12th press conference. She emphasized that "obtaining permission from the copyright holder is the underlying principle for fair use," and stated that this position had been conveyed to the US government multiple times through diplomatic channels.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: LinkedIn, a social network awash with long AI-generated posts from executives and other corporate workers, has introduced a new button that users can click to flag if a post "seems like AI slop," according to 404 Media's own tests. If you have been anywhere near LinkedIn in the past couple of years, you have undoubtedly seen users posting blatantly AI-generated missives. Often these posts take some sort of news event, and opine on how this relates to thought leadership, or some other LinkedIn brainrot term. It's also pretty wild the button specifically uses the term "AI slop" and not, say, "It seems this was generated with AI." [...] After publication of this piece, Hari Srinivasan, chief product officer at LinkedIn, wrote their own post about the button. "AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this. People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas and expertise. Here are a few more changes to keep it that way," he wrote. The button in part will help LinkedIn tune its own models for identifying AI slop. "We are ramping up a series of new and improved classifiers that identify if a post is AI-slop or generally low-quality content. This will reduce the amount of AI slop you might see in suggested content and content from outside your network," the post said. "We are ramping the ability for members to tell us if they believe a post or comment seems like AI slop. Slop is hard to define and the definition changes; this lets us tune our models and make better feeds." Srinivasan also said LinkedIn is removing the AI-powered "enhance your post" feature with another that "proofreads your words, but does not change your voice."

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