The Canadian government has introduced a new digital safety bill that would ban social ⁠media for children under 16, with exemptions for platforms that meet certain safety standards.

The bill also aims to make AI chatbots safer by setting up a digital regulator ⁠to establish safety standards, a government official said.

The proposed “Digital Safety Act” makes Canada the latest in a wave of countries moving to crack down on social media platforms over concerns of harm to children.

“We have seen the very serious consequences that online harms can have. The safety of children cannot be an afterthought,” the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, Marc Miller, said in a statement.

Companies could face penalties of 3% of global revenue or up to C$10 million ($7.2 million), whichever is more, for failing to comply.

“Social media platforms and AI chatbots are designed to capture attention. They do not support healthy childhood development and have become a source of anxiety, isolation, depression and a range of other mental health challenges for many young Canadians,” Miller said.

“This legislation will provide a safer environment for young Canadians and empower them to connect in-person, build friendships, focus in school, and learn real-world skills so they can thrive.”

The bill’s introduction in Parliament comes weeks after families affected by one of the country’s worst mass shootings sued OpenAI, alleging that the company knew the killer was planning the attack after it banned the shooter from its platform in June last year over the user’s troubling conversations on ChatGPT, but did not warn police.

In its proposal for Bill C-34, the Canadian government said that apart from individual behaviour, online harms “are also shaped by how digital services are designed and operated. Features such as algorithmic recommendation systems, engagement-based feeds, autoplay, and endless scrolling can amplify harmful content and increase exposure, particularly for young users.”

AI has added new challenges, and digital services have “not kept pace with the scale, speed, and severity of online harms”, the government said.

Against that backdrop, the bill aims to set up new safety requirements for social media and AI chatbot services, requiring them to identify risks of harm on their platforms, adopt measures to address certain risks, implement safety-focused and age-appropriate design features, provide tools, such as blocking and flagging, and more.

It also wants platforms to remove content that includes the non-consensual sharing of intimate images within 24 hours of being flagged, according to local media reports.

In December, Australia became the world’s first country  to ban social media for children under 16. ⁠A month after its law was introduced  social media companies collectively deactivated the accounts of nearly 5 ⁠million teenagers. Government officials in a technical briefing said it could take a year for the bill to pass, and 18 months to set up the digital regulator once it does.

France, Denmark and ⁠Poland are also considering tightening rules around social media use for children, while Greece in April announced it would ban access to young people under 15 from January 2027.

(Aljazeera)

American teenager Cooper Lutkenhaus produced a stunning performance to hold off Olympic champion Emmanuel Wanyonyi in the men’s 800m at the Diamond League meeting in Norway.

The 17-year-old crossed the line in a personal best of one minute and 42.08 seconds to edge out the Kenyan by one hundredth of a second in Oslo, despite Wanyonyi recording his fastest time of the season (1:42.09).

Lutkenhaus was unbeaten in his five previous 800m finals this year, having claimed gold at the World Indoor Championships and become the Diamond League’s youngest ever winner on his debut in Stockholm last weekend.

“This boy [Lutkenhaus] is in a good shape,” said the 21-year-old Wanyonyi, who missed the event in Sweden following the birth of his first child.

“Can you believe that as an Olympic champion, you are trying to knock down a 17-year-old boy?

“I started the race in front and after 600m to go, I tried to see who is coming to push me. Then I saw him passing me so then I tried to respond. But my target today was to run my season best, to improve.”

British sprinter Amy Hunt placed second in the women’s 100m in 10.99 seconds, with St Lucia’s Olympic champion Julien Alfred taking victory in a time of 10.76.

Amber Anning was fourth in the women’s 400m as Norway’s Henriette Jaeger enjoyed success, while her fellow Briton, Jake Wightman, finished fifth in the Dream Mile behind Kenya’s Timothy Cheruiyot.

There was Ethiopian dominance in the women’s 3,000m race, with Freweyni Hailu, Likina Amebaw, Senayet Getachew and Hawi Abera occupying the top four positions.

Hailu recorded the fastest time in the world this year, crossing the line in 8:24.22, while GB pair Megan Keith and Innes Fitzgerald finished seventh and ninth respectively.

In the final event of the evening, home favourite Karsten Warholm’s time of 47.40 was only enough to earn the Swede second place behind Brazilian rival Alison dos Santos (46.89) in the men’s 400m hurdles.

[BBC Sports]

An enormous whale graveyard around 1,200km (745 miles) long has been discovered in the south-eastern Indian Ocean.

The site, which is 7km (four miles) deep, has been found in the Diamantina fracture zone, a range on the sea floor of ridges and trenches.

But it is the age of the remains – some from 5.3 million years ago – that has prompted huge excitement in the scientific community.

The underwater necropolis, which was discovered by a team of researchers from China, Italy and New Zealand, is teeming with organisms and species that “may be new to science”, according to journal Nature.

One of the study’s authors Xiaotong Peng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said: “Discovering a necropolis of this scale was completely unexpected.

“The size of distribution, the depth and the age range were far beyond anything we had imagined.”

During 32 dives to the site, explorers collected samples from 485 whale-fossil sites and active whale falls, and found a treasure trove of remains, including one extinct whale’s skeleton.

The beaked Pterocetus benguelae, which is 5.3 million years old, was discovered to be one of the fossilised skulls in the graves.

A five-metre long Antarctic minke whale’s carcass was the largest discovery made.

A new species which the team has called Pterocetus diamantinae, after the site, was also uncovered.

Jellyfish, worms and crustaceans are among the community of creatures living off the huge spread of carcasses.

“Peng and colleagues’ encounter with a vast fossil graveyard is a truly unique discovery,” Stephen J Godfrey of the Calvert Marine Museum wrote in Nature.

“Although the site has limited accessibility, it seems likely to hold many other exciting finds, and it will no doubt inspire more submersible dives in similar environments.

“Peng and colleagues’ paper reminded me of a trailer for the first in a series of epic movies. I hope that there will be many more of these blockbusters to come.”

[BBC]

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