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Amid mounting fears about child predators and pedophile rings operating online, YouTube has announced that it is disabling comments on videos that feature minors.

For now, the efforts are focused on videos that feature young children, but in the coming months it will expand to include older minors that YouTube says "could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior". The site is also stepping up its use of algorithms to not only identify videos that contain children, but also to monitor and moderate comments.

It's the bane of any internet user. You stumble across a link to a fascinating-sounding article and click it only to discover that the site hosting the post is paywalled. Gah!

The Medium platform is one that can include paywalled content, and there's good news for Twitter users. If you access a Medium article via a tweet, it does not matter if it is a paid-for article or not -- you will be able to access it for free.

A detailed report about fake news by a parliamentary committee in the UK has accused Facebook of being a "digital gangster" that has deliberately broken privacy and competition laws. The report by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee calls for the social network to be subject to statutory regulation.

The report comes after an 18-month investigation, and it is damning of Facebook and its executives in general, and Mark Zuckerberg in particular. Criticism is levelled at the lack of action taken against fake news and misinformation on the social network, and there is concern that current election laws were not enough to prevent sites such as Facebook being used by hostile foreign agents to interfere with the democratic process.

In recent years it seems that there has been an astonishing increase in the number of Flat Earthers -- people who believe that the Earth is flat, and anything that suggests otherwise is a conspiracy. The thinking is that, for some reason, NASA, international government, scientists and so on are all desperate to convince people that the Earth is round when it is in fact flat.

While Flat Earther numbers are still relatively small, the increasing membership of this school of thought in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is both confusing and worrying. So just what is going on? The rise in internet usage has been blamed for the spread of fake news, conspiracy theories and all manner of bizarre ideas, and a new study has concluded that one particular site is responsible for the increasing support for the Flat Earth theory. That site is YouTube.

When you delete a direct message on Twitter, it is gone forever, right? From a user's point of view, this is true -- a deleted message vanishes. But a security researcher has discovered that Twitter is actually hanging onto these messages.

Karan Saini found that he was able to see messages he deleted years ago when he downloaded an archive of his Twitter data from the site.

The battle Facebook wages against the spread of fake news and misinformation could be set to expand to include removing anti-vaccination content from the social network.

The anti-vaxxer movement has long been fairly vocal, and it has found a home on Facebook. The viral spread of anti-vaccine groups on the social network has been blamed -- at least partly -- for outbreaks of measles in the US. Facing pressure to block the spread of dangerously misleading information, Facebook has said that it could demote anti-vaxxer content and remove it from recommendations.

Facebook is under pressure to stem the flow of pseudoscience among its users. The social network has faced criticism and pressure about many issues including the dissemination of fake news and disinformation, and false information spread by anti-vaxxers is the latest target of concerned experts.

There has been much concern about how Facebook could be used to influence elections, but there are growing calls for the social media giant to step in and prevent anti-vaccinations groups from being used to spread false information. Despite medical evidence pointing to not only the efficacy but also the safety of vaccinations, the anti-vaxxer movement has found a home on Facebook which experts say is dangerous.

Mozilla has sent an open letter to Facebook calling on the social network to do more to fight disinformation and asking for increased transparency about political advertising.

The letter -- also signed by 32 other organizations including human rights and press freedom groups -- has been sent to Facebook in the run-up to the 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections. It comes after Mozilla's COO wrote to the European Commission to express her concerns about the lack of transparency at Facebook.

The head of Instagram has announced plans to introduce "sensitivity screens" in the wake of concerns about the spread of photos of self-harm on the image-based social network.

Adam Mosseri says that Instagram will use image-blurring similar to that used on Facebook to hide graphic content. The move comes in the wake of the suicide of a British teenager, the parents of whom said self-harm images on Instagram were a contributing factor.

The ability to edit tweets is one of the most frequently requested features for Twitter. The most common reason for wanting to make edits is to fix typos, but concern has been voiced about the potential for an editing facility to be abused -- which perhaps explains Twitter's apparent reticence at rolling out such a feature without careful thought.

While tweet editing has yet to appear, there has long been speculation about how it could be implemented. In a move that is sure to fuel rumors that an edit function is just around the corner, Twitter chief Jack Dorsey has talked about how the feature could work.

Instagram users around the world were briefly thrown into a mixture of confusion, delight and anger today when timelines switched to a new horizontal scrolling mode.

Greeted by a message that Instragram was "Introducing a New Way to Move Through Posts", users found that they could now tap to scroll through their feed horizontally. This is something that Instagram is known to have been testing for a little while now, but it seems that today's rollout was entirely accidental -- albeit one that gave a tantalizing glimpse into the future. The company has now reverted feeds to the familiar verticals scrolling mode, blaming the temporary change on a bug.

Attaining a blue tick of verification remains a goal for many Twitter users, but it remains elusive for most. It is quite some time since Twitter paused the option for anyone to request verification, and now the company has revealed that opening it back up is far from a priority.

The idea behind pausing the application process was to give the company the opportunity to work on fixing what was seen as a broken verification system. Product lead Kayvon Beykpour says that Twitter doesn't have the "bandwidth" to sort things out right now, and instead needs to concentrate on sorting out election integrity in the run-up to the US mid-term elections.

Facebook is primarily about connecting with other people, but its "block" functionality certainly has its place for avoiding those you don't want to be in touch with for one reason or another. It's a great option to have... until it goes wrong.

And that's precisely what happened. The social network has admitted that more than 800,000 were hit by a bug that meant people they had blocked on either Facebook or Facebook Messenger were temporarily unblocked and able to see content that had been posted.

In the latest attempts to clean up its platform, Twitter has suspended a number of accounts for trying to game the system. A number of well-known accounts were hit for stealing tweets without giving credit, and mass retweeting each other's content to force virality -- a practice sometimes known as tweetdecking.

As is customary, Twitter is not willing to comment on individual cases, but it is thought that the company was unhappy with repeated violations of its policies against spam.

While much of the US was celebrating Thanksgiving, social image hosting site Imgur was made aware of a security breach that took place back in 2014. Around 1.7 million user accounts were affected.

This is a relatively small percentage of Imgur users, and COO Roy Sehgal points out that the site has never asked for "personally-identifying information." Nevertheless, the company is contacting the owners of affected accounts, advising them to change their passwords.