Category: Academic Analysis

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Rhys Parry, Research Fellow, Virology, The University of Queensland

For many people, news of a virus outbreak on a cruise ship immediately brings back memories of COVID spreading when the Ruby Princess docked in Sydney in March 2020. Of the passengers and crew who disembarked, 575 had COVID. The virus then spread to the community.

So it’s understandable people are concerned that passengers from the MV Hondius need to be quarantined after potential exposure to Andes virus, a rodent-borne hantavirus.

However, the comparison with COVID only goes so far. Andes virus is serious and authorities are right to respond cautiously. But experts, including from the World Health Organization, note it doesn’t have the characteristics needed to become “the next COVID”.

As of May 11, European health authorities have reported nine cases linked to the cruise ship, including seven confirmed and two probable cases. Three deaths have been reported.

Five Australians and one New Zealander are being repatriated to Australia for quarantine and monitoring. The passengers will initially quarantine at the Centre for National Resilience near RAAF Base Pearce in Western Australia.

Here’s what you need to know about Andes virus, the risk of transmission, and how it’s different to the virus that caused COVID.

How do hantaviruses spread?

Hantaviruses are a group of viruses usually carried by mice, rats and other rodents. People are most commonly infected after inhaling tiny particles of contaminated rodent urine, droppings or saliva.

Most hantaviruses are not known to spread between people. Andes virus is the exception. After the initial spillover from infected rodents, it is the only hantavirus with well-documented person-to-person transmission.

But that doesn’t mean it spreads easily between people. Further human-to-human spread is uncommon, but it can occur in close-contact settings such as households, among caregivers, during intimate contact, or after prolonged exposure in crowded or poorly ventilated indoor areas.

That is very different from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. SARS-CoV-2 spreads very efficiently through the air. People could infect others before they even realised they were sick.

Early estimates suggested each person infected with SARS-CoV-2 passed the virus to roughly two or more others, on average, in populations who had never encountered it before.

Andes virus can cause onward human-to-human transmission, but requires a perfect storm of conditions: symptomatic people in crowded, poorly ventilated spaces with close contact over time. This was the case on the MV Hondius.

This difference in transmission potential is why SARS-CoV-2 caused a pandemic and Andes virus has only produced contained outbreaks.

What are the symptoms of Andes virus?

Early symptoms of Andes virus infection can look like many other illnesses, including fever, headache, muscle aches, nausea and fatigue.

In some people, infection can progress to hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a life-threatening condition in which breathing becomes difficult.

How long after contact can you get symptoms?

The WHO recommends people exposed to Andes virus monitor for symptoms for 42 days after their last potential exposure.

This reflects the outer limit of the time between infection and symptom onset. It doesn’t mean people are infectious for 42 days.

Australian authorities have announced the returning passengers will initially spend three weeks in quarantine, with further monitoring arrangements to follow.

Melbourne’s Doherty Institute will undertake the testing using polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which detects the virus’s genetic material and blood-based antibody testing, known as serology.

A negative test early after exposure is useful, but not always definitive. If the virus is still incubating, there may not yet be enough viral genetic material or antibody response to detect.

How does the virus progress?

The long incubation period reflects how Andes virus progresses, compared to SARS-CoV-2.

COVID symptoms typically appear within days because the virus replicates rapidly in the respiratory system.

Andes virus progresses differently. Severe disease is linked to blood-vessel dysfunction and inflammatory responses. The breathing problems associated with the complication hantavirus pulmonary syndrome aren’t caused by the virus directly destroying lung tissue, but by the immune system’s delayed response. This causes fluid to leak into the lungs and makes breathing difficult.

How deadly is it?

Fatality rates vary significantly between hantavirus species.

European and Asian hantaviruses typically cause death in less than 1–15% of cases, while hantavirus pulmonary syndrome from American strains, including Andes virus, can reach up to 50%.

For context, in 2025, eight countries across the Americas reported 229 hantavirus cases and 59 deaths. These are severe infections, but they remain rare events.

A virus doesn’t become a pandemic simply because it’s deadly.

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Read more:
Hantavirus: here’s what you need to know about the infection that killed Gene Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa

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Can Andes virus be treated?

There is no specific antiviral drug for Andes virus. Health care for infected people focuses on close monitoring, supporting their breathing and managing complications to the heart and kidneys.

There is no licensed vaccine to prevent Andes virus.

However, there is also good news in how quickly the scientific response has come together after this outbreak started. Swiss laboratories collaborated quickly to sequence the complete genetic code of the virus from one patient and made it publicly available within days.

This gave researchers around the world a reference to compare other cases against. This can support faster confirmation of suspected cases, while helping public health teams identify which cases are linked to the outbreak and who needs monitoring or isolation.

Bottom line

The instinct to see another COVID in every viral outbreak is understandable but, in this case, misleading.

The Andes virus is dangerous to those infected, but it isn’t a good candidate for pandemic spread. It incubates slowly, typically spreads through close contact, and transmission appears most efficient when people are symptomatic.

It’s important to get the Andes virus under control but it’s not a pandemic threat like COVID.

Rhys Parry receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

– ref. Hantavirus is very different to COVID. Here’s why the ‘Andes virus’ won’t cause the next pandemic – https://theconversation.com/hantavirus-is-very-different-to-covid-heres-why-the-andes-virus-wont-cause-the-next-pandemic-282595

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By John Kerr, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Public Health, University of Otago

Four percent of Americans – roughly 12 million people – believe that “lizard people” secretly control the Earth. At least, that was the finding of an infamous 2013 public opinion survey.

Do so many people really believe such outlandish claims? Or do results like these partly reflect people giving silly answers or deliberately skewing surveys for fun?

US psychiatrist Alexander Scott believes the latter plays a significant role.

Using the survey as an example, he coined the term “the Lizardman constant” to describe the idea that a certain amount of noise and trolling will always exist in surveys about unusual beliefs.

As Scott warned: “Any possible source of noise – jokesters, cognitive biases, or deliberate misbehaviour – can easily overwhelm the signal.”

As researchers who study uncommon beliefs such as conspiracy theories, we wanted to investigate how this kind of cheeky trolling can muddy the waters.

Trolls and true believers

Building on earlier Australian research, we surveyed New Zealanders to test how common dishonest or joking responses were in conspiracy theory surveys.

We did this in two ways. First, we directly asked people a yes/no question at the end of the survey:

“Did you respond insincerely at any earlier point in this survey? In other words, did you give any responses that were actually just joking, trolling, or otherwise not indicating what you really think?”

Second, we included in the survey a “conspiracy theory” so ridiculous we could assume most, if not all, people who said they believed it were taking the mickey.

We asked them if they believed:

The Canadian Armed Forces have been secretly developing an elite army of genetically engineered, super intelligent, giant raccoons to invade nearby countries.

In our representative online sample of 810 New Zealanders, 8.3% of respondents confessed to being insincere in the survey.

Another 7.2% said they thought the Canadian raccoon army theory was probably or definitely true. That proportion – similar to findings from Australia – would equate to more than 300,000 adult New Zealanders.

To complicate things slightly, there was some overlap between those admitting to insincere answers and those claiming to believe the raccoon conspiracy. Combined, 13.3% of respondents fell into one or both groups – roughly one in eight people not appearing to take the survey seriously.

Importantly, these respondents were also much more likely to endorse other conspiracy theories, inflating estimates of how widespread those beliefs really are.

For instance, 6.5% of the full sample endorsed the claim that governments around the world are covering up the fact that 5G mobile networks spread coronavirus.

But once we removed the insincere responders, that figure dropped by more than half to 2.7%.

Across 13 different conspiracy theories, the estimated proportion of believers fell substantially once those respondents were excluded.

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Another interesting insight from our study was that people endorsing contradictory conspiracy theories were much more likely to show signs of responding insincerely.

Previous studies have found some people appear to believe conspiracy theories that directly contradict each other. In our survey, for example, some participants agreed both that COVID-19 is a myth and that governments are covering up the fact that 5G networks spread the virus.

But nearly three-quarters of those respondents also showed signs of joking or dishonest answers.

This suggests genuinely believing contradictory conspiracy theories may be less common than previously thought.

Not every conspiracy believer is joking

Our findings add further weight to the idea that surveys may overestimate how many people truly believe some conspiracy theories – thanks, in part, to trolls.

But does that mean all conspiracy theory research is bunk?

Fortunately not. Most research in this area is not focused on counting conspiracy believers, but on understanding why people hold these beliefs and what effects they can have.

We tested several well-established findings from earlier conspiracy theory research to see whether they still held up once insincere respondents were removed from the data.

For example, previous studies have found that people who endorse conspiracy theories are more likely to see the world as a dangerous and threatening place.

We found the same pattern. In fact, removing insincere respondents made little difference to the broader relationships identified in earlier research.

Nevertheless, we recommend that future surveys include ways to gauge whether respondents are answering sincerely and account for this in the analysis. At the very least, researchers should acknowledge that trolls and joking responses can distort their results.

While our research suggests some people are taking the mickey in surveys, it also shows a significant minority genuinely appear to believe some of these claims.

In some cases – such as believing authorities are covering up the fact that the Earth is flat – this may be relatively harmless. But other conspiracy beliefs can lead to real-world harm.

Good-quality research is essential for understanding how sincere believers end up down these rabbit holes, and how those beliefs influence real-world behaviour.

Research into why people embrace conspiracy theories – and the real-world consequences of those beliefs – remains important.

But when surveys suggest millions may believe in lizard overlords or genetically engineered raccoon armies, it is also worth remembering the “Lizardman constant”: some respondents may simply be having us on.

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The authors acknowledge the contributions of Rob Ross, Mathew Ling and Stephen Hill to this article.

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John Kerr is supported by a Royal Society Te Apārangi Mana Tūānuku Research Leader Fellowship.

This research was supported by the Marsden Fund Council from Government funding, managed by Royal Society Te Apārangi.

Mathew Marques does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Conspiracy theories: do 300,000 Kiwis really believe Canada is building an army of mutant super-raccoons? – https://theconversation.com/conspiracy-theories-do-300-000-kiwis-really-believe-canada-is-building-an-army-of-mutant-super-raccoons-282478

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Julien Cooper, Lecturer, Department of History and Archaeology, Macquarie University

We have been on a years-long campaign of satellite remote sensing of the vast desert landscapes in Eastern Sudan.

This involved using satellite aerial imagery to systematically and painstakingly search for archaeological features in Atbai Desert of Eastern Sudan, a small part of the much larger Sahara.

Our team – which includes archaeologists from Macquarie University, France’s HiSoMA research unit, and the Polish Academy of Sciences – wanted to tell the story of this desert region between the Nile and the Red Sea, without having to excavate.

One mysterious archaeological feature stood out. We kept finding large, circular mass graves filled with the bones of people and animals, often carefully arranged around a key person at the centre.

Likely built around the fourth and third millennia BCE, all these “enclosure burial” monuments have a large round enclosure wall, some up to 80 metres in diameter, with humans and their cattle, sheep and goats buried inside.

Our new research, published in the journal African Archaeological Review, reveals how we found 260 previously unknown enclosure burials east of the Nile River, across almost 1,000km of desert.

Who built them?

Already known from a few excavated examples in the Egyptian and Sudanese deserts, these large circular burial monuments have long puzzled scholars.

What seemed once isolated examples emerge now as a consistent pattern. It is suggestive of a common nomadic culture stretching across a vast stretch of desert.

Most are within the borders of modern Sudan on the slopes of the Red Sea Hills. Unfortunately, satellite imagery alone cannot communicate the whole story of these enclosure burial builders.

The carbon dates and pottery from the few excavated monuments tell us these people lived roughly 4000–3000 BCE, just before Egyptians formed a territorial kingdom we know of as Pharaonic Egypt.

But these “enclosure burial” nomads had little to do with urbane and farming Egyptians.

Living in the desert and raising herds, these were Saharan desert nomads through and through.

A new elite?

Some enclosures show “secondary” burials arranged around a “primary” burial of a person at the centre – perhaps a chief or other important member of the community.

For archaeologists, this is important data for discerning class and hierarchy in prehistoric societies.

The question of when Saharan nomads became less egalitarian has plagued archaeologists for decades, but most agree it was around this time of the fourth millennium BCE that a distinctive “elite” class emerged.

This is still a far cry from the sort of huge divisions between ruler and ruled as seen in societies such as Egypt, with its pharaohs and farmers. However, it ushers in the first traces of inequality.

Animals held in high esteem

Cattle seem very important to these prehistoric nomads (a theory also supported by ancient local rock art in the area).

Burying themselves alongside their herd, these nomads show they held their animals in esteem.

Thousands of years later, local nomads chose to reuse these now “ancient” enclosures for their burial plots – sometimes almost 4,000 years after they were first built.

In other words, the prehistoric nomads created cemetery spaces that lasted for millennia.

What happened to these people?

No one can say for sure.

The few dates we have for these monuments cluster between 4000–3000 BCE, nearing the end of a period when the once-greener Sahara was drying, a phase scientists call the “African Humid Period”.

From north to south, the summer monsoon gradually retreated, reducing rainfall and shrinking pastures. This led nomads to abandon thirsty cattle, increase the mobility of their herds, migrate to the south or flee to the Nile.

The monuments are overwhelmingly located near what were then favourable watering spots; near rocky pools in valley floors, lakebeds and ephemeral rivers.

This tells us that when the monuments were being built, the desert was already quite challenging and dry.

At some point, as grass and bush made way for sand and rocks, keeping their prized cattle became unsustainable.

Having large herds of cattle in this desert, at this period, may have been a way of showing off an expensive and rare possession – a prehistoric nomad’s equivalent to having a Ferrari. This may help explain why cattle were frequently buried alongside their owners in enclosure burial monuments.

A bigger story

These enclosure burials are only one part of the greater story of human adaptation to climate change across North Africa.

From the Central Sahara, to Kenya and Arabia, keeping cattle, goats and sheep transformed societies. It changed the food they ate, the way they moved around, and community hierarchies.

It’s no coincidence communities changed how they buried their dead at the same time as they adopted herding lifestyles.

These burial enclosures tell us even scattered nomads were extremely well-organised people, and expert adapters.

Our discovery reshapes the story of the Sahara deserts and the prehistory of the Nile.

They provide a prologue for the monumentalism of the kingdoms of Egypt and Nubia, and an image of this region as more than pharaohs, pyramids and temples.

Sadly, many of these enclosure monuments are currently being destroyed or vandalised as a result of unregulated mining in the region. These unique burials have survived for millennia, but can disappear in less than a week.

Maria Gatto (Polish Academy of Sciences) was an author on our paper. We also want to acknowledge Alexander Carter, Tung Cheung, Kahn Emerson, Jessica Larkin, Stuart Hamilton and Ethan Simpson from Macquarie University for their contribution. We are also grateful to the National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums (Sudan).

Julien Cooper receives funding from the Australian Research Council, (Future Fellowship, FT230100067).

Maël Crépy receives funding from the CNRS (HiSoMA) and the Ifao (NOMADES research program).

Marie Bourgeois receives funding from Ifao (NOMADES research program).

– ref. We found hundreds of huge ancient mass graves hidden in the Sahara desert – https://theconversation.com/we-found-hundreds-of-huge-ancient-mass-graves-hidden-in-the-sahara-desert-281978

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Tanya Latty, Associate Professor in Entomology, University of Sydney

Imagine trying to build a house without a blueprint, find a shortcut through an unfamiliar city without a map, or govern a large organisation with no leaders and no meetings.

It sounds impossible. Yet tiny-brained ants, working without leaders or blueprints, have been solving problems like these for millions of years – and no, the queen isn’t the boss telling them what to do.

By almost any measure, ants are a wildly successful group of animals – there’s an estimated 20 quadrillion of them on Earth and they thrive on every continent but Antarctica.

How have these minuscule animals managed to take over the world (and our kitchens)? The answer is teamwork.

Bustling colonies

Ants are social animals that live in colonies ranging from a few individuals to vast continent-spanning supercolonies containing billions of ants.

Bustling ant colonies display many of the features we associate with human societies, including:

• transportation networks
• collective care of the young
• food systems (including agriculture in some species)
• health care for injured nestmates.

In humans, this level of social complexity usually involves clear governance hierarchies, with leaders and middle managers directing our activities.

But ants don’t work that way. So who is in charge in an ant colony?

The answer is simple: no one.

The queen isn’t in charge

Ant colonies are a classic example of a self-organised system, where complex behaviour emerges from the combined actions of many ants. Each follow relatively simple rules while communicating and interacting with each other.

The human brain works in a similar way: individual neurons have simple behaviours and cannot think on their own, but together they give rise to the full range of human thought and behaviour.

The queen, whom many people assume is in charge, has little involvement in decision-making or leadership.

Instead, her role is to maintain the colony’s workforce by producing new ants.

In some ant species, workers will even kill their queens under particular conditions, such as declining productivity!

By working together, ant colonies are capable of complex behaviours and problem-solving skills far exceeding the abilities of an individual ant.

For example, some ant species run sophisticated transportation networks linking their colony to many food sources.

When a foraging worker finds a good source of food, such as some crumbs in your kitchen, she lays down drops of attractive chemicals called “pheromones” as she walks home.

Other ants in the colony are attracted to the trail, reinforcing it with more pheromones as they go. As a result, the colony can rapidly deploy large numbers of workers to quickly collect food.

While an individual ant is only aware of the foods she herself has visited, the trail network allows the colony as a whole to be “aware” of many foods.

Should a food source disappear or decline in quality, the colony can quickly refocus its efforts.

Ants can also optimise their trail networks by finding shortcuts.

Since pheromone trails evaporate over time, shorter paths that are traversed more quickly get reinforced more often. Longer paths, by contrast, receive less traffic and get reinforced less often, which in turn causes the pheromone trail to fade and become less attractive.

This simple feedback loop allows the colony to “discover” shorter routes that take less time to traverse while eliminating longer routes.

The resulting transportation network can be remarkably efficient.

Remarkable architects

Nest construction is another impressive example of the power of self-organisation.

Ant nests can be vast and intricately structured, with chambers for raising the young, food storage, and waste.

Yet no ant has a blueprint for the final nest design, nor is a boss ant in charge of directing construction activities.

Instead, ants use simple rules to create their remarkable nest architecture.

For example, in the black garden ant Lasius niger, nest building ants excavate soil and form it into small pellets.

These pellets carry chemical cues making other ants more likely to deposit their own pellets nearby.

Over time, this leads to the formation of structures such as pillars, walls, and eventually roofs, without any ant understanding the overall design.

This process, where individuals respond to cues left behind by other individuals, is called “stigmergy” and it underpins the construction of other insect-built structures such as termite mounds and honeycomb.

More humans, more problems – but not so for ants

The use of simple behavioural rules enables ants to coordinate remarkably effectively as a group.

In a study where groups were tasked with moving a T-shaped object through a tight space, human performance did not improve with group size.

When participants were instructed not to speak, performance actually declined as groups got bigger.

Similarly, it has long been known that as human group size increases, the performance of individual team members tends to decrease, a phenomenon known as the Ringelmann effect.

Ants, by contrast, showed the opposite pattern: as group size increased, their performance actually improved.

So next time you see a line of ants marching around your house, resist the urge to spray or whack them away.

Instead, take a moment to appreciate these tiny masters of teamwork.

Tanya Latty co-founded and volunteers for conservation organisation Invertebrates Australia, is former president of the Australasian Society for the Study of Animal Behaviour and is on the Education committee for the Australian Entomological Society. She receives funding from the Australian Research Council, NSW Saving our Species, and Agrifutures Australia.

– ref. In an ant colony, the queen isn’t in charge. So who is? – https://theconversation.com/in-an-ant-colony-the-queen-isnt-in-charge-so-who-is-278196

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Joel Scanlan, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Law; Academic Co-Lead, CSAM Deterrence Centre, University of Tasmania

As of May 8 end-to-end encryption is no longer available on direct messages on Instagram.

Meta, in announcing the policy reversal, said it had done so because few people used the feature. But this has raised questions about its impact on user privacy and whether it will improve child safety on the platform.

Instagram has long been a focal point for discussion about online safety – whether in relation to body image concerns, cyberbullying or sexual extortion. This policy change by Meta directly affects how safety and moderation are implemented in private messages.

This is important considering research has found that perpetrators first contacted roughly 23% of Australian sexual extortion victims on Instagram, the second most frequent method of contact, behind Snapchat (at 50%).

What is end-to-end encryption?

End-to-end encryption is a way of scrambling a message so only the sender’s and recipient’s devices can read it. The platform carrying the message, in this case Instagram, can’t access it.

This same technology is present by default on WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, and (since late 2023) Facebook Messenger.

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg first promised to bring end-to-end encryption across Meta’s messaging products back in 2019, under the slogan “the future is private”.

Instagram tested encrypted direct messages in 2021. It rolled them out as an opt-in feature in 2023.

End-to-end encrypted direct messages never became the default, and the low adoption rate of opting in to use the feature is Meta’s justification for removing it. As a spokesperson told The Guardian:

Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we’re removing this option from Instagram.

There is a circular logic to this: Meta has killed off a feature it buried so deep that most users never knew it existed, then cited low usage as the reason for its removal.

What does this mean for Instagram users?

In practical terms, every message you send on Instagram now travels in a form Meta can read.

Meta’s privacy policy lists the content of messages users send and receive among the data it collects. In principle, this enables the company to use this data to personalise features, train artificial intelligence (AI) models, and deliver targeted advertising.

While Meta has publicly committed not to train its AI models on private messages unless users actively share them with Meta AI, it has made no equivalent public commitment about advertising.

That leaves open the possibility that Meta could use unencrypted Instagram direct messages for ad targeting. And without encryption, Meta’s AI commitment is now backed by policy alone, not by the technology itself.

A clear reversal

This reads as a clear reversal of Meta’s privacy-first posture which Zuckerberg announced seven years ago.

Meta has been under sustained pressure from law enforcement, regulators and child protection organisations who argue end-to-end encryption creates spaces where platforms can’t detect child sexual exploitation and grooming. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has been clear that the deployment of end-to-end encryption “does not absolve services of responsibility for hosting or facilitating online abuse or the sharing of illegal content”.

This argument deserves to be taken seriously. The harms are real and disproportionately fall on young people.

However, sexual extortion research shows perpetrators don’t tend to stay on the platform where they make first contact, with more than 50% of sexual extortion victims saying perpetrators asked them to switch platforms.

Meta still uses end-to-end encryption on its other platforms, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and it needs to apply a consistent approach to child safety. Predators routinely ask victims to switch platforms, so the company’s safety approach needs to work for Instagram and their end-to-end encrypted services.

A false choice

Meta and privacy advocates often frame this as a choice between end-to-end encryption or child safety. But that’s a false choice. It’s not an “either-or” situation, even if they make it sound like one.

The technology already exists to detect harmful content while keeping messages encrypted in transit. It just has to run in the right place: on the user’s device, before the device encrypts and sends the message, or after it receives and decrypts it.

On-device approaches have a contested history, and any deployment must be genuinely privacy-preserving by design. But technology companies must weigh the objection against the harms that continue to occur. A safety by design approach is needed.

On-device safety measures have been demonstrated at scale with Apple’s on-device nudity detection for images sent or received via Messages, AirDrop and FaceTime. A 2025 study demonstrated high-accuracy grooming detection using Meta’s AI model designed specifically for on-device deployment on mobile phones.

Recently, both Apple and Google have started to take measures towards app store–based age verification in some jurisdictions.

The highest-profile real-world deployment of these is Apple enabling device-level privacy-preserving age verification in the UK.

Social media and private messaging companies, along with operating system vendors (Microsoft, Apple, and Google), all have a role to play in ensuring harmful content is detected, whether or not end-to-end encryption is used. Progress has been slow. But we, as a community, need to demand more from these companies.

Joel Scanlan is the academic co-lead of the CSAM Deterrence Centre, which is a partnership between the University of Tasmania and Jesuit Social Services, who operate Stop It Now (Australia), a therapeutic service providing support to people who are concerned with their own, or someone else’s, feelings towards children. He has received funding from the Australian Research Council, Australian Institute of Criminology, the eSafety Commissioner, Lucy Faithfull Foundation and the Internet Watch Foundation.

– ref. Instagram can now read all users’ private messages. Will this make kids safer or just boost ad targeting? – https://theconversation.com/instagram-can-now-read-all-users-private-messages-will-this-make-kids-safer-or-just-boost-ad-targeting-282496