September 6, 2024 | Taylor Owen spoke about the online harms of social media and how having uniform social media regulations enforced across all digital platforms, can help with the online governance on .

Instagram is aiming to make it harder for potential scammers and criminals to coerce teens into sending nude photos and extort them for money. The company announced on Thursday it is testing new features to curb an alarming trend called financial sextortion, which often targets kids and teenagers. ()Ìý
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October 20, 2023 | This opinion piece by Taylor Owen talks about the reasoning behind why he decided to take a break from X, formerly Twitter, a platform he has been using as a gateway to information for over a decade.Ìý
He said "the platform is now broken. Where it once filtered valuable information about the world in a timely manner, it is now calibrated to anger and extremes under the ownership of a spiteful billionaire clearly caught in an ideological rabbit hole."

June 20, 2022 | With the 's new report hot off the press, Commission co-chair and Max Bell School professor Taylor Owen sat down for an interview with CBC Radio to discuss the recommendations on curbing online harm that he and his colleagues have proposed.
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April 27, 2022 | Taylor Owen and Supriya Dwivedi of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy write that Elon Musk's recent purchase of Twitter might strengthen the democratic governance that social media companies have fought against.

Principal and Vice-Chancellor Suzanne Fortier has announced the 2022 winners of the Principal’s Prize for Public Engagement through Media.ÌýStephanie Zito, a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology, was announced as the winner of the Prize for Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Fellows for her work in using socia

March 25, 2022 | Screen Time podcast is an eight-episode podcast miniseries that explores the rapidly evolving relationship between kids and technology. Co-hosted by Max Bell School professor Taylor Owen, who also directs the School's , Catch up on the first three episodes:

February 11, 2022 | As part of the Schwartz Reisman Institute's Seminar Series, Max Bell School professor Taylor Owen delivered a presentation on the regulatory frameworks governments are putting in place to mitigate the potential negative impacts of digital ecosystems, including Big Tech social media platforms.
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November 8, 2021 | Max Bell School professor Taylor Owen recently spoke at a virtual symposium hosted by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.Ìý“We’ve had this experience where everybody needs to know similar things and trust similar institutions, and even behave in similar ways, (like) taking a vaccine. It’s difficult because antivax content and misinformation about the vaccine, and about the pandemic itself, has been incentivized to circulate far and wide.â€

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told British lawmakers that the social media giant stokes online hate and extremism, fails to protect children from harmful content and lacks any incentive to fix the problems, providing strong momentum for efforts by European governments working on stricter regulation of tech giants. While her testimony echoed much of what she told the U.S. Senate earlier this month, her appearance drew intense interest from a British parliamentary committee that is much further along in drawing up legislation to crack down on social platforms.

 October 14, 2021 | In this opinion piece, Max Bell School professor Taylor Owen, former Supreme Court chief justice Beverley McLachlin, and chair of the Canadian Citizens' Assembly on Democratic Expression, Peter MacLeod argue that the latest Facebook controversy surrounding the testimony by Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen has the potential to change the debate about regulating social media.ÌýThey also explain why the

Facebook and Facebook-owned apps Instagram and WhatsApp were up and running again late Monday after being hit by an outage that affected users around the world. The social media giant said the disruption to network traffic "had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt." It said there is no evidence that user data was comprised. It was the largest such outage ever tracked by the web monitoring group Downdetector, which collates complaints about web outages.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump won't return to Facebook – at least not yet. Four months after Facebook suspended Trump's accounts for inciting violence that led to the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the company's quasi-independent oversight board upheld the bans. But it told Facebook to specify how long they would last, saying that its "indefinite" ban on the former president was unreasonable. The ruling, which gives Facebook six months to comply, effectively postpones any possible Trump reinstatement and puts the onus for that decision squarely back on the company.

Misinformation about COVID-19 is spreading from the United States into Canada, undermining efforts to mitigate the pandemic. A led by º«¹úÂãÎè shows that Canadians who use social media are more likely to consume this misinformation, embrace false beliefs about COVID-19, and subsequently spread them.

Can combining deep learning (DL)— a subfield of artificial intelligence— with social network analysis (SNA), make social media contributions about extreme weather events a useful tool for crisis managers, first responders and government scientists? An interdisciplinary team of º«¹úÂãÎè researchers has brought these tools to the forefront in an effort to understand and manage extreme weather events.