Spain Proposes Social Media Ban for Under-16s Amid Growing Concerns Over Online Harms
Spain proposed a ban on social media for children under the age of 16, joining a growing international trend to protect younger users from potential online harms. The announcement was made by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Tuesday at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
Sánchez criticized tech companies for their failure to control disinformation and illegal content, including child sex abuse material and sexualized deepfake images, on their platforms. He described social media as "a failed state, a place where laws are ignored, and crime is endured, where disinformation is worth more than truth, and half of users suffer hate speech." He added that it is "a failed state in which algorithms distort the public conversation and our data and image are defied and sold," according to Time.
The proposed ban reflects increasing global concerns about the impact of social media on children and teenagers.
In other news, the United Kingdom police are investigating Peter Mandelson, the former U.K. ambassador to Washington, over claims he leaked sensitive government information to Jeffrey Epstein, NPR Politics reported on February 4, 2026.
Meanwhile, some website operators are taking measures to combat high-volume web crawlers. One blog owner, writing on Hacker News, noted an increase in crawlers using old browser user agents, particularly Chrome, to gather data for LLM training. To reduce the load on his blog, he is experimenting with blocking these crawlers, which may inadvertently affect users with older browsers.
In the world of sports, the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics will mark the third time Italy has hosted the event, with Cortina d'Ampezzo previously hosting in 1956, Time reported. The 1956 Games featured 821 athletes competing in 24 events. One memorable moment from the 1956 Winter Olympics was when American figure skater Tenley Albright, a polio survivor, suffered a serious injury when her left skate cut her right ankle joint to the bone less than two weeks before competition.
In environmental news, Nature News reported that biodiversity loss continues at an unprecedented rate, with species becoming extinct at 100 to 1,000 times the average pre-human rate. Many conservation scientists are concerned that conservation efforts are not supported by strong evidence.
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