Browsing the internet today can be a minefield for the user, increasingly helpless against commercial practices that blur the line between personal content and advertising. Unfair practices, such as using hashtags hidden to notify advertising or imperceptible notices of only one second, have become widespread in an increasingly anarchic environment, which especially confuses the most vulnerable consumers, such as adolescents and the elderly.

Susanna Ramírez worked at a school in l'Escala based on the Montessori method. She liked it so much that, when later on she had to join another faculty, with a very different way of working, she contributed ideas and activities she had learned back then. She saw that they were well-received, to the point that a colleague encouraged her to post them on social media and share them. From this, the Instagram profile @propostes.per.infantil was born, a space that Susanna feeds with what she puts into practice in the classroom, with the simple goal of "weaving a network and helping each other out".

Almost 400 podcast episodes later, a resident of Bages could hold one of the keys to connecting with the youth vote in the next general elections. Jordi Wild, or Jorge Carrillo de Albornoz Torres (Manresa, 1984), has turned The Wild Project in one of the benchmark podcasts of the digital ecosystem in Spanish. Now, a few days before the elections, the content creator has managed to get Pedro Sánchez, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and Ada Colau to agree to step up to his microphones. Although it was planned that Santiago Abascal would also submit himself to the questions of the man from Manresa, the leader of Vox declined the interview after passing through La Revuelta, by David Broncano. The three remaining interviews will be published in the coming hours, in a move that places a youtuber at the center of the communication strategy of the main candidates for the Moncloa.

A study from Pompeu Fabra University reveals that young people can improve their Catalan thanks to short videos on TikTok and Instagram. The research analyzed the quality of short videos on social networks and surveyed 76 users aged 14 to 25. The result: 8 out of 10 Catalan speakers claim that their Catalan has improved thanks to this content.

The debate has returned regarding the duty of parents to monitor the social networks their children navigate.

1. Saturday in Barcelona a poisonous mushroom of tension sprouted: about five hundred young people dressed in black caused destruction around Plaça Catalunya. These are moments of social and political tension with the right-wing forces launched in the reconquest of power and with neo-fascist music throughout Europe, and agitation is the order of the day. The reactionary wave is spreading, duly directed, while democratic parties of the right and left are rather faltering. And the Barcelona unrest leaves signs that suggest that something is moving and the traditional schemes are not working.

On Saturday, 500 violent youths did not meet at Plaça Catalunya. 500 youths met in a context that makes almost any adolescent capable of doing things they would never do alone.

Did they expect it? The answer is yes. The Mossos d'Esquadra were expecting protests this Saturday in Barcelona. They had been monitoring social media for days and had detected calls to emulate the riots in Paris. They knew there were Telegram groups with 700 youths. Since 4 p.m., more than 300 youths were identified and hammers and other metal tools were seized that they intended to use to loot businesses. But were they surprised? Very much so. Initially, about 300 people were expected, and there were more than 500.

Digital platforms have radically transformed the way we listen to music. Never before had we had access to such an extensive catalog of songs, artists, and styles, but this apparent abundance hides a paradox: even though we have countless proposals at the reach of a click, music consumption is increasingly concentrated on a small part of the content.

For a decade, the ideal young woman wore neutral tones, emptied her closets, and turned order, self-control, and productivity into an aesthetic. It was 2014 and Sophia Amoruso was unaware that a hashtag, #girlboss, would change everything. A hand extended to thehustle-culture, the culture of busyness, accompanied by a minimalist trend in dressing and decorating everything, drew an apparently self-sufficient femininity: a young woman who worked, was entrepreneurial, took care of her body, maintained an impeccable appearance and home and routines to the minute, always hand in hand with a specialty coffee (or a matcha latte, nowadays). Now, the pendulum seems to have swung back, after years of hustle-culture have caused an almost predictable burnout. Ribbons, pastel colors, and extravagant prints are arriving, a whole ode to kitsch, accompanied by a feeling of nostalgia and a need to recover play, to be little girls again. From the girlbossto the girl dinner (the least elaborate girl's dinner) or girl math (the mental gymnastics to justify an expense); from minimalism to maximalism; from the young woman who could do it all to the young woman who wants to play again. The whimsy-maxxing is one of the most recent expressions to define this phenomenon.

Platforms like Instagram, Tiktok or Facebook will from now on have to guarantee that they are safe if they want to operate in the European Union. The European Commission presented this Thursday the European law for the protection of children on the internet, which bans access to social networks for those under 13 years of age and limits their use for minors, in order to protect them from the associated risks. To achieve this, it has announced that it will force companies to present "compliance plans" before the rule comes into force, if they do not want to be left out of the community market.

You open your phone and there is a news story that outrages you. Before you even finish reading the headline, you already feel like sharing it. You react, you write, you continue scrolling. And it is not an isolated incident. The problem, according to neuroscience communicator Núria Martín Muyo, is that we are increasingly living in this immediate response mode.

Her Instagram profile is represented by a photo of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, a film that she assures me she has seen more than seventeen times. Karanezi began to stand out by commenting on current events through tweets and short videos, and has ended up being a scriptwriter for La competència and a member of Nexe Nacional, a group of left-wing nationalists born after the Procés.How did you become politicized?

The Catalan clothing brand Desigual has once again pulled a Juan Carlos in Botswana with its now iconic "I am very sorry... it will not happen again." The reason? The latest campaign, in which, with a clearly sarcastic and mocking treatment, it makes gentrification, touristification, overcrowding, rising prices, and insecurity in Barcelona the central theme to promote its latest collaboration with the Berlin brand Ottolinger. A campaign that has ignited social media and received a mostly negative reception. Firstly, because many have perceived it as a trivialization of the problems that currently stifle the Catalan capital. Furthermore, this treatment, beyond the fact that a brand based in Barcelona is shooting itself in the foot by ridiculing the city's image, does not aim upwards as a form of denunciation. What we must be clear about is that not all irony is a critique. And if, in addition, all of this is done to sell a few t-shirts, it is even harder to find any real desire to question anything.And I say that they have pulled a Joan Carles again because it is not the first time, in recent times, that Desigual has had to rectify its advertising campaigns. The most recent one, in 2025, starred actress Ester Expósito wearing the slogan Not a doll(I am not a doll), with an apparently feminist intention of women's empowerment. The problem is that, in parallel, the t-shirt campaign Protect the dolls was taking place, to support the trans community following the attacks and harassment by Donald Trump's American government. A campaign that, in no case, was minor, but rather had a great reach, with the adherence of renowned figures such as actor Pedro Pascal, singer Troye Sivan, or designer Haider Ackermann. The campaign itself could have been good, provided it had been carried out in a parallel world. The problem is that contexts are fundamental and seeing Expósito proudly wearing a t-shirt with the phrase "Not a doll", at that moment made the reading go from feminist to transphobic.In December 2012, it launched the campaign Tengo un plan, composed of three advertisements in which three conventionally beautiful women dressed up, in a sexy and uninhibited attitude, in front of the mirror while they explained their future plans. The first, to travel to Thailand to have sexual adventures and leave her life behind, including her boyfriend. The second, to tell her family that she had a female partner. And the third, that she had decided to sleep with her boss. A campaign that, despite wanting to empower women, fell into a false representation of equality by the adoption, on the part of these three women, of behaviors traditionally associated with men.The most serious one, however, was released following Mother's Day 2014, titled Tú decides. A normatively sexy girl, after putting a pillow under her dress to see what she would look like pregnant, took a strip of condoms and poked holes in them. An advertisement that clearly treats women's freedom of choice in the clumsiest way, since, apart from ignoring the other person's reproductive consent, it disregards the risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases.Seeing, therefore, the promotional trajectory of Desigual, we could think that at the head of the marketing department they have a monkey at the wheel, with a total disconnection from the world and what is cooking. But, seeing the repeated blunders, perhaps what they have is a clever person who, in the face of a company that is struggling with sales, has opted for the old formula that says "let them talk about us, even if it is badly". A dangerous tactic that must be executed very well so that it does not end up being bread for today and hunger for tomorrow.In any case, perhaps the latest campaign regarding the touristification of Barcelona is better thought out than we locals have been able to see. With a brand owned by the Swiss Thomas Meyer and sales directed mostly to the international market, perhaps the campaign was not intended to amuse the people of Barcelona. Perhaps, precisely, its audience was those who experience the city from the other side: as a backdrop to visit, consume, and, now also, wear.

The CUP councilwoman in Moià, Lakshmi Roset Sala (Moià, 1995), took a stand last Friday when the video in which she criticized the expansion of the slaughterhouse accumulated hundreds of sexist messages about her physical appearance and her political affiliation.

Meta has agreed to pay nearly $17 billion to settle lawsuits filed by dozens of U.S. states accusing it of designing Facebook and Instagram to foster addiction among minors.Some time ago, it caught attention to know that some executives of large technology companies strictly limited their children's access to social networks. Perhaps no one knew better than them the power those algorithms had to retain attention.The 17,000 million accepted represent the implicit recognition that something went wrong. What we can no longer recover is the lost time or the consequences that all this business may have left on an entire generation of young people and adolescents.If a company pollutes a river, the money from the fine can be used to clean it up. If an accident is compensated, the victims can be compensated. But how is adolescence repaired? How is the deterioration of self-esteem, the permanent comparison with unreal lives, the lost hours of family coexistence, or the anxiety problems that many psychologists associate with the intensive use of social networks compensated?I'm clear: there are damages that can no longer be repaired.And this is the most important thing. The problem is not just Meta. The problem is that the legislator and the judiciary continue to arrive late when it comes to technology. It happened with the internet. It has happened with social networks. And it will happen again with artificial intelligence.It is not about stopping innovation. The Internet and social networks have brought extraordinary things. AI will also bring them. The issue is something else. If we know that a technology can modify behaviors, generate dependence, or affect delicate processes such as learning, mental health, or the development of minors, does it make sense to wait ten years to start regulating it?Bill Gates has just written on his personal blog that governments must pace the advancement of AI with the capacity of economies to absorb the labor and professional retraining that it will entail.Technology will continue to advance much faster than laws. And needless to say, also much faster than social and economic policies. Precisely for this reason, the big debate should no longer focus on what sanctions we impose when damage has already been done. It should focus on what limits we want to establish before damages appear that no compensation can repair.It is something that I find incomprehensible. How is it possible that we take so long to adopt measures and establish limitations to protect health, employment, and job stability?And this is said by a liberal.

The CUP councilwoman in Moià, Lakshmi Roset Sala, has been the victim of a harassment campaign and openly sexist comments on social media after publishing a video clip through the party's channel, CUP Moià - Capgirem. The objective of the publication was to denounce the controversial expansion of a slaughterhouse that is causing disturbances in the municipality and which has resulted in blood being seen on the streets of the town this Thursday, spilled by the meat trucks.

Meta avoids a historic trial and dodges the risk of reliving the 90s setback against tobacco companies. Mark Zuckerberg has agreed with 47 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories to pay approximately 17 billion dollars – about 14.3 billion euros – in exchange for dropping the case accusing the technology company of designing addictive social networks for minors and deceiving consumers about the safety of its products.

If the climatic trend is the same as this summer's, it is likely that we will have a warm autumn, but not hot in the usual journalistic sense. For various reasons, these types of heatwaves are over. A few days ago, a friend of my generation and I were recalling the politically torrid autumns of the Transition and comparing them to the current apathy. We were twelve or thirteen years old, and everything was boiling: factories, universities, neighborhoods, the media. Nothing was certain, however; even the boiling itself was often ambiguous. Exactly half a century ago, in 1976, the dictatorship still existed, but society ignored it as much as it could. Everyone did it in their own way, obviously, but almost no one trusted the viability of that rickety artifact, which, in appearance, was already outdated. Fifty years later, this is perhaps the fundamental key to understanding that period: Franco's death had left a void that the Arias Navarro government did not know how to fill in any way. The kleptocracy remained intact, parties were still prohibited, strikes were illegal, and the police were handing out beatings right and left. Strengthened by years of clandestine struggle, the labor movement turned 1976 into a year of great labor conflict. Without wanting to idealize anything, it is true that there were massive assemblies in the factories, that neighborhood committees articulated social demands, that the university was already out of control de facto... The feeling was that society was moving faster than the government. In any case, the memory of the Vitoria massacre on March 3, with five workers dead, loomed over any protest. The so-called Platajunta, which brought together the main opposition forces, achieved unprecedented political coordination and turned social pressure into a real negotiating force. Viewed with fifty years of perspective, however, that somewhat forced unity led to the pact of forgetting. It began to take shape right then, and it contained several political time bombs that would eventually explode decades later. To confirm this with a simple brushstroke: the founder of the party that very soon may govern Spain hand in hand with Vox, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, was the Minister of the Interior on that fateful March 3...

The historic trial against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, for the pernicious effects of its social networks on children and adolescents, forces the debate on young people's access to social networks to be reopened. The Spanish state is already studying a regulation to oblige digital platforms to establish effective controls to ban minors under 16 years of age; a proposal that the Minister of Youth and Childhood, Sira Rego, hopes will be approved after the holidays, according to statements made in a recent interview with the Europa Press agency. Spain would join a movement led by Australia, which banned access to networks for minors under 15 years of age in December. France also aspired to join the trend; although its law, which was to come into effect on September 1, was overturned by the Constitutional Council, alleging that the prohibition "did not provide the necessary legal safeguards to guarantee the right to respect for private life." The body also observed a clear conflict with the freedom of expression of the affected users.