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.

Swimming in the sea is one of the blessings of summer. The act of slowing down, being outdoors, and cooling off is an anti-stress balm that alleviates the headaches accumulated throughout the year. Although the sea offers us multiple virtues, not all those attributed to it can be taken for granted. Regarding seawater specifically, messages are spread, especially through social networks, such as that drinking it "remineralizes," "balances electrolytes," "alkalizes the body," or even "hydrates better," but the fact is that scientific evidence does not support claims like these and, on the other hand, the risks of drinking it are well identified.The idea that drinking seawater is beneficial spread over a century ago with the French biologist René Quinton, who maintained that seawater resembles blood plasma because life originated in the sea and that it contains the chemical elements the body needs. Based on this hypothesis, Quinton developed the so-called "marine therapy." In recent times, with the popularization of social networks, the attribution of benefits to the intake of seawater – even untreated – has spread even further, but one must carefully consider who is saying it and what exactly they are saying to avoid falling into pseudoscientific practices.

Food is not usually good or bad in itself. It all depends on how it is used (or abused). The same applies to social networks, from Instagram to X. On the other hand, there are activities that are not permitted for minors, such as the sale of alcohol or tobacco. So, why shouldn't there be any kind of limitation on minors' access to social networks, which, in addition to positive contributions, also have negative ones, especially for users who have not yet reached adulthood and are still developing?

The Constitutional Council of France has blocked President Emmanuel Macron's flagship bill that aimed to ban access to social networks for minors under 15 years of age. The body, responsible for ensuring the constitutionality of laws, has determined that the measure constitutes an "inadequate, unnecessary, and disproportionate infringement" on the freedom of expression and communication of young people.

When 24-year-old Clàudia Ferro told her parents that she wouldn't be staying in any hotel or had booked any apartment that summer, the first question was inevitable: “And where will you stay?”. The answer summarizes a new way of understanding travel: “I will work a few hours a day and, in return, I will have a place to sleep”.

Just a few hours had passed since tens of thousands of migrants entered Ceuta, and the Spanish government was setting its sights on social networks. Pedro Sánchez's executive assured that these were the channels through which it had been amplified that the border between Morocco and the autonomous city was open and that the returns of people who entered swimming would not occur because the Supreme Court had so decreed. More than ten days later, the executive maintains the thesis: "[Social networks] They were the detonator. The vehicle that led thousands of people to Ceuta," stated the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, this Tuesday at a press conference from the autonomous city. Various investigations have detected content in these digital channels claiming success – not being expelled – if one swam from Morocco to Ceuta. Even maps with drawings representing the crossing.

A video recorded in Brazil, showing parents making their son believe he has worms in his stomach from eating too many sweets, has generated enormous controversy. In the images, the parents show him a fake ultrasound in which a supposed worm appears to be moving inside his stomach. The boy, who still has a sweet in his mouth, ends up crying and promising to stop eating them.

During the month of August, I will step away from the usual economic matters. I will talk about behavior: about those little quirks of our mind that influence how we buy, work, argue, choose, and spend. I love the analysis of human behavior! In fact, that's why I like economics so much.The phenomenon I want to write about today is called the "spotlight effect". It consists of overestimating the attention others pay to us. We believe that our mistakes, our appearance, or our gestures are much more visible than they really are.We leave the house with a stain on our shirt and think that everyone has seen it. We say something foolish during a dinner and, when we go to sleep, we continue reconstructing the scene, even losing sleep over it. We put our foot in it during a work meeting, convinced that the next day the whole room is still thinking about it. Normally, almost no one has noticed any of these things.The explanation is as follows: each person lives at the center of their own movie. It's the movie of our lives. We hear our own thoughts, know our own insecurities, and remember every little mistake. It's hard for us to understand – and remember! – that others are starring in another movie, just as absorbing, in which we barely appear as supporting characters.The spotlight effect has economic consequences. We buy clothes to make an impression that perhaps no one will register. We choose a car thinking about what it will communicate. We pay more for a brand because we imagine it will be observed and interpreted. We also hide mistakes at work, avoid asking questions, and reject opportunities for fear of appearing clumsy. The supposed judgment of others conditions real decisions.Social networks have reinforced this illusion. We post a photo and measure the reactions of "lovers" and "haters". We turn our lives into a small shop window. However, those who look at the screen spend a few seconds on each image before returning to the subject that interests them most: themselves.In fact, a large part of social anxiety is born from confusing the intensity with which we live our lives with the attention we attract outside of ourselves. They are two completely different magnitudes.Understanding this bias brings immediate relief. We can dress more freely, ask what we don't know, and more naturally accept our stumbles. Most of our mistakes are forgotten much sooner than we think.We think we live under a spotlight. In reality, each person carries their own on top. And they are too busy illuminating themselves to carefully examine others.

Summer has traditionally been synonymous with disconnection, rest, and time to regain strength. However, in the midst of the digital age, this notion seems to have changed. Nowadays, free time has become a showcase where it seems essential to demonstrate that constant experiences are being lived. If summer was once an opportunity to slow down, now many people feel they have to fill each day with activities, getaways, or trips that are worth sharing on social media. When this doesn't happen, an uncomfortable feeling arises: that of wasting vacation time.

Whatever your age, you who are reading this article know that technology is moving faster than human capacity to adapt to a new perception of reality. We have become a kind of overwhelmed jugglers or tightrope walkers traversing a cable far above our heads. I don't know if we have always been surpassed by technology throughout history; I suspect so, but never with such great acceleration, on so many fronts at once, and with such extensive shared knowledge of the metamorphosis we are immersed in as a society.

From Gilbert K. Chesterton we could learn that reality is not flat but paradoxical. In plain terms, that things are not black or white, not even gray, but black, white... and gray, all at once, in a complex creative dynamic. And he showed us that, to understand the world we live in, we must see the dialectical logic that advances thanks to the combat between contraries. More dangerous than single-mindedness is linear, static, or metaphysical thinking, which flattens everything.

The death this Sunday of Argentine YouTuber Gaspar Prim Díaz, known as Gaspi, and American singer Oliver Tree, has shocked social media and the music world. The collision between two helicopters in Rio de Janeiro left six dead, including audiovisual producer Lucas Vignale and Brazilian Lucas Brito Chaves. According to local authorities, the causes of the accident are still being investigated. One of the aircraft crashed into a parking lot, causing a fire that destroyed about twenty vehicles.

The impunity of big tech companies is over in the United Kingdom. Or at least that is what Prime Minister Keir Starmer intends, who this Monday made a 180-degree turn and announced the prohibition of access for minors under sixteen years of age to social networks. Furthermore, adolescents up to 18 years of age will also have their ability to continuously browse social networks until late at night restricted, in what has been compared to a kind of curfew, in this case, technological. The legislative reform also aims to go further with changes to video game and live streaming platforms, so that strangers cannot contact minors. Last week, Starmer already gave an "ultimatum to Google and Apple to activate mechanisms that prevent minors from sending, receiving, or making sexually explicit images from their mobile phones.

Elon Musk is the first person with a fortune of one trillion (with a t) dollars, equivalent to all the wealth generated by a prosperous country like Switzerland in a year or, as Oxfam states,, as all that 3.8 billion people have, 46% of the world's poorest population. The stock market launch of SpaceX, a company owned by the magnate that will benefit from the privatization of the aerospace business, is born with a record valuation.

1. I would like to know how much, at European level, the public expense amounts to, which is the sum of the exit polls discussed on TV in each election and minor election with the intention of keeping people in front of the screen. The need for this absurd spectacle, with no real informational value, only justifiable in entertainment terms, suggests a considerable anomaly. The presence of certain "experts" adds an additional grotesque component to the ceremony. In relation to the Zapatero case, there are indications that seem solid and forceful, but for the moment nothing has been proven. And whoever says Zapatero says any other similar case, regardless of the party. Let's remember, to give just one example, the imaginary foreign accounts that brought down Xavier Trias' political career. Despite the cost, it's fine to please people with electoral speculations while they have dinner. It's another thing to entertain them with rumors about very serious matters. 2. The accusation against Zapatero appears at a time when public verification systems –journalistic, judicial, police– are immersed in a growing epistemological uncertainty. This does not mean that truth has disappeared from the map, but rather that the collective capacity to distinguish it from falsehood is more fragile than at other times. Photographs have always been altered and documents falsified; it is nothing new. The news is the extraordinary current ease and speed of doing so. I am not doubting what has been made public so far; I simply recall that I myself, who don't know a bit about computing, can generate in less than a second a realistic image where Zapatero dances a waltz with Pharaoh Amenhotep IV. 3. The logic of suspicion –to put it another way– has mutated within a media ecosystem that increasingly relies on social networks and less on professional journalism (in the long run, this will have important consequences). The accusation is already considered a fact, and circulates with the same speed and intensity as news referring to any other event. This leveling means that accusations against a relevant public figure become a real treat and are often located in the sphere of entertainment, not information. Their plausibility depends not so much on evidentiary consistency as on the emotional and ideological predisposition of the recipients. In the new logic of suspicion, the only important thing is the effect it causes and the profits it generates.

The title phrase is said by one of the passengers on the cruise ship MV Hondius, the one with the hantavirus, in a video that has become, precisely, one of the most viewed stories on social media this week. The passenger's name is Jake Rosmarin and he makes a call to whoever sees his video not to be forgotten. He cries as he says it, and you can see he is afraid, an objective and justified fear because he is on a ship where three people have already died. But then there is another fear that also makes him cry: that of not being able to count on the support or empathy of others, of us who are watching his video. Of becoming, as he says, a story, which in social media language is a video or an image that circulates for an ephemeral time and then simply disappears.Jake Rosmarin expresses this fear from the other side of the black mirror of the screen. He too is a social media user, like everyone else, and he too has surely seen videos similar to the one he recorded himself: people who were suffering, who found themselves in terrible, desperate situations. Surely Jake Rosmarin had looked at these videos with indifference or with a brief shiver (of compassion, of rage, of disgust: this already depends on the specific emotion that each video seeks to excite), and then had not thought about it anymore. It is, by no means, any reproach to Jake Rosmarin: it is how more or less all of us behave as users, or as consumers, of social media. What Jake Rosmarin, passenger of the hantavirus cruise, asks of us is that we do not do this to him and his unfortunate companions. That we do not pause briefly at their tears and then move on to another video, who knows, of celebrities on a red carpet, or of funny animals, or of in-laws formulating conspiracy theories.Jake Rosmarin's plea surely comes late. For a long time now we have been accustomed to contemplating people subjected to extreme pain on the screens of our mobile phones. For a long time now we have become accustomed to seeing people cry while we dine in front of the television: victims of bombings, immigrants shot down in boats, elderly women evicted by vulture funds, bodies abused or raped or blown up. Sensationalism, banality, the algorithm, and the desire to make easy money (in short, what we call technocapitlism) come together to help us become spectators — more passive, more abulic than ever — of the misfortune of others. People who suffer like flies trapped inside a glass, which is the screen.The horror is to go from being the spectator to being the fly. Jake Rosmarin rebels, with good reason, against this horror, but his tears will predictably have the same trajectory as those of so many, so many people who appear crying every day on our screens. We will be moved, of course, if in a while a film, or a series, is released narrating the ordeal of the hantavirus cruise, with the corresponding tagline: “Based on true events.”

Harassment, insults, manipulated photographs to mock, or spying on someone's phone. These are the digital violences perpetrated by Spanish youth, mostly against people of their own age, friends, or work and leisure companions, and also against their partners. A study by FAD Joventut indicates that 26% of those aged between 15 and 29 have been digital aggressors in the last 15 years, with no significant gender differences, but there are differences by age: 32% of adolescents (15-19 years old) report having engaged in cyberviolent behaviors compared to 24% of those aged 20-24 and 20% of the 24-29 age group. The victim's profile is an adolescent belonging to a vulnerable group, such as an immigrant, a member of the LGBTIQ+ community, someone with a disability, or from a socially vulnerable family.

Youth ask me, in a tricky way, why ARA doesn't release information about the Esplugues crime, and if it's because they want to hide it. "They're hiding that it's a jihadist attack," they complain. "The man said 'Allah is great,'" they tell me. "Why doesn't ARA publish the video of the man shouting 'Allah is great?'"

The far-right has been generating synergies with fake media for years to influence public opinion. But it is not an exclusive strategy of this political space, at least in Catalonia. A journalistic investigation confirms that Comuns and ERC manage and finance content platforms in web format and through social networks aimed at younger audiences. These are El Moment (ERC) and La Futura (Comuns), two digital channels that, in the eyes of the public, present themselves as media outlets, but are used as tools for disseminating the ideology of political parties. The PSC, for its part, has created Posem el focus, a podcast in which they do not explicitly state their political brand.

Several students from a high school in the north of the Netherlands, among whom there would be Catalan exchange students, were threatened with a supposed firearm, humiliated, and filmed by strangers in two incidents that took place this Monday in the municipality of Haren. According to local television RTV Noord, it was the school itself (the Harens Lyceum center) that reported the events in a letter sent to parents and guardians of the center. Sources from the Department of Education confirm that an incident has occurred and explain that the Government is already monitoring this situation in coordination with the Spanish consular authorities in the Netherlands "to have a more precise understanding of the events that may have occurred and to study the necessary actions."