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By Joey Roulette WASHINGTON (Reuters) -NASA said on Monday it was opening the marquee U.S. moon landing contract to other bidders because Elon Musk's SpaceX has experienced mounting delays with its Starship lunar lander. The move paves the way for rivals such as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to snatch a high-profile mission to land the first astronauts on the moon in half a century. "I'm in the process of opening that contract up. I think we'll see companies like Blue get involved, and maybe others," the U.S. space agency's acting chief Sean Duffy, who also serves as U.S. Transportation Secretary, told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. Duffy's comments follow months of mounting pressure within NASA to speed up its Artemis lunar program and push SpaceX to make greater progress on its Starship lunar lander, while China progresses toward its own goal of sending humans to the moon by 2030. They also present a major shift in NASA's lunar strategy, starting a new competitive juncture in the program for a human-rated moon lander just two years before the scheduled landing date. Blue Origin is widely expected to compete for the mission, while Lockheed Martin has indicated it would convene an industry team to heed NASA's call. Starship, picked by NASA in 2021 under a contract now worth $4.4 billion, faces a 2027 moon landing deadline that agency advisers estimate could slip years behind schedule, citing competing priorities. Musk sees Starship as crucial to launching larger batches of Starlink satellites to space and eventually ferrying humans to Mars, among other missions. "They do remarkable things, but they're behind schedule," Duffy said of SpaceX's lunar lander work, adding President Donald Trump wants to see the mission take place before his White House term ends in January 2029. Musk appeared to brush off the specter of more competition. "SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry," the SpaceX CEO wrote on X, replying to a user on Monday. "Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words." The mission involving SpaceX, Artemis 3, would be the first human lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. Bezos' space company Blue Origin, with its Blue Moon lander in development, has a similar lunar landing contract awarded by NASA in 2023 but for later Artemis moon missions. The company had protested NASA's initial decision to only pick SpaceX in 2021 and fought for years to convince the agency and lawmakers to select another proposal as a redundancy. Duffy's reference to Blue Origin on Monday suggests Bezos' space company could contend for Artemis 3. NASA has not returned requests for comment and specifics on Duffy's remarks. Blue Origin has been developing its Blue Moon lander in Florida with relatively little public attention under a contract worth roughly $3 billion. SpaceX has been developing Starship in Texas in a whirlwind campaign of test-to-failure demonstration missions, but NASA has grown uneasy with a lack of progress on lunar lander-specific development milestones. In a statement to Reuters, Bob Behnken, vice president of Exploration and Technology Strategy at Lockheed Martin's space unit, said the company this year has been conducting "significant technical and programmatic analysis for human lunar landers." "We have been working with a cross-industry team of companies and together we are looking forward to addressing Secretary Duffy's request to meet our country’s lunar objectives," said Behnken, a retired NASA astronaut. NASA's multibillion-dollar Artemis program is a series of missions involving multiple contractors aimed at returning humans to the moon for a long-term presence there. Artemis 3 has been planned for 2027 with SpaceX's Starship. Artemis 2, a 10-day flight around the moon and back involving systems built by Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, is on track for April and could get moved up to February, he added. Bezos and Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp reportedly spoke with Trump over the summer when the Republican president was feuding with Musk, a supporter in the 2024 election who was tapped to lead efforts to cut the federal government known as DOGE. Representatives for SpaceX and Blue Origin could not immediately be reached for comment. (Reporting by Susan Heavey; additional reporting by Deborah Sophia and Jaspreet Singh; Editing by Nick Zieminski and David Gregorio)

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By Greg Bensinger, Shubham Kalia and Deborah Mary Sophia SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Amazon.com said on Monday that a cloud computing unit at its data center in northern Virginia had largely contained fallout from a widespread internet outage that caused global turmoil among thousands of sites, including some of the web's most popular apps like Snapchat and Reddit. Amazon said it had addressed the underlying issue and was close to a resolution, but some users were still complaining of lingering difficulties using services such as digital wallet Venmo and video calling site Zoom. The disruption knocked workers from London to Tokyo offline and halted others from conducting normal everyday tasks like paying hairdressers or changing their airline tickets. It was the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies. It was at least the third time in five years that AWS's northern Virginia cluster, known as US-EAST-1, contributed to a major internet meltdown. Amazon did not address a request for more clarity about why that particular data center keeps being impacted, instead pointing to an online statement that said the matter had been "fully mitigated." The problems stemmed from what is known as the Domain Name System, or DNS, which prevented applications from finding the correct address for AWS's DynamoDB API, a cloud database relied upon to store user information and other critical data. After hours of disruptions, many applications were gradually coming back online in the afternoon in the U.S. But AWS acknowledged that elevated errors were still affecting several services. There were "tons of broken internal services still now as individual resolution and repair occurring," read language from an internal problem ticket describing the outage and reviewed by Reuters. Lambda, one of AWS's computing services, was experiencing errors due to issues with an internal subsystem, AWS had said earlier. "We are taking steps to recover this internal Lambda system," it said. Earlier, AWS said the root cause of the outage was an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers used to distribute traffic across several servers. The issue, AWS said, originated from within the "EC2 internal network." EC2 refers to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS. Businesses use EC2 to run virtual servers to develop, launch and host applications. AWS had said earlier in the day it was seeing signs of recovery for EC2 use at a few data centers. It was taking similar measures at the remaining locations and expects the problems to subside, AWS added, without providing a specific timeline. While some apps like Reddit and Roblox had largely stabilized, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat and Duolingo, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day. Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, said software developers need to build better fault tolerance into their code. He said AWS provides tools developers can use to protect themselves in the event of a problem at one of any of its sprawling network of data centers, and developers can also create backups with other cloud providers.  "When people cut costs and cut corners to try to get an application up, and then forget that they skipped that last step and didn't really protect against an outage, those companies are the ones who really ought to be scrutinized later," Birman told Reuters. ISSUE ORIGINATED FROM AWS SITE KNOWN FOR PREVIOUS OUTAGES AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world's largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft's Azure and Alphabet's Google Cloud. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms – ranging from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems – that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS said on its status page that Monday's outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered outages in 2021 and 2020. According to documentation on the AWS website, the US-EAST-1 site is often the default region for many AWS services.  "FRAGILE INFRASTRUCTURES" The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and their reliance on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch wreaking havoc on business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said. "This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures," said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at European cybersecurity firm ESET. In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were all hit, according to Downdetector's UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website. "The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service," said Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey's Department of Computer Science. Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident. "For major businesses, hours of cloud downtime translate to millions in lost productivity and revenue," said Ryan Griffin, U.S. cyber practice leader at insurance broker McGill and Partners. Wall Street was largely unfazed, sending Amazon shares 1.6% higher to $216.48. FROM SNAPCHAT TO VENMO: OUTAGE TAKES DOWN APPS Ookla said at least a thousand companies were affected by the outage. Snapchat last had over 7,500 reports on Downdetector, lower than the peak of more than 22,000 but still higher than the 4,000 outage instances at around 7:00 a.m. ET. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS. Amazon's own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, although Downdetector last showed a decrease in severity. Fortnite, owned by Epic Games; Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber rival Lyft was also knocked down in the United States. In a post on X, Signal President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage as well, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work. (Reporting by Shubham Kalia, Devika Nair, Ananya Palyekar and Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by James Pearson, Jaspreet Singh and Arsheeya Bajwa; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty, Joe Bavier, Richard Chang and David Gregorio)

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NEW YORK (Reuters) -Proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services on Monday recommended investors vote down plans for AI company CoreWeave to buy infrastructure company Core Scientific in what was billed as a $9 billion deal. Investors will vote on October 30. ISS wrote that Core Scientific has achieved considerable success as a standalone company and could continue going it alone. CoreWeave, which offers cloud infrastructure for artificial-intelligence capabilities, proposed to acquire Core Scientific, which offers computing power, in an all-stock deal with an implied value of $20.40 when it was announced in early July. Soon after, investor Two Seas Capital said it would vote against the deal, citing concerns with the sale process, deal structure, and valuation. It said the fixed exchange ratio left Core Scientific shareholders vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of CoreWeave shares. CoreWeave's shares have fallen since July, thereby reducing the deal's value. On Monday, Core Scientific's stock price jumped over 5% in post-hours trading after having closed trading at $18.81, signaling investors may prefer to have the company stay independent. (Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Sonali Paul)

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NEW YORK (Reuters) -Proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services on Monday recommended investors vote down plans for AI company CoreWeave to buy infrastructure company Core Scientific in what was billed as a $9 billion deal. Investors will vote on October 30. ISS wrote that Core Scientific has achieved considerable success as a standalone company and could continue going it alone. CoreWeave, which offers cloud infrastructure for artificial-intelligence capabilities, proposed to acquire Core Scientific, which offers computing power, in an all-stock deal with an implied value of $20.40 when it was announced in early July. Soon after, investor Two Seas Capital said it would vote against the deal, citing concerns with the sale process, deal structure, and valuation. It said the fixed exchange ratio left Core Scientific shareholders vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of CoreWeave shares. CoreWeave's shares have fallen since July, thereby reducing the deal's value. On Monday, Core Scientific's stock price jumped over 5% in post-hours trading after having closed trading at $18.81, signaling investors may prefer to have the company stay independent. (Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Sonali Paul)

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BEIJING (Reuters) -Chinese electric vehicle battery giant CATL saw net profit growth accelerate in the third quarter, even as it faced increased competition from smaller rivals. Net profit rose 41.2% to 18.5 billion yuan ($2.60 billion) in the July-September period from a year earlier, picking up from a 33.7% increase in the second quarter, according to a stock filing on Monday. Revenue rose 12.9% year on year to 104.2 billion yuan, up from a 8.3% gain in the second quarter. ($1 = 7.1230 Chinese yuan renminbi) (Reporting by Qiaoyi Li, Zhang Yan and Brenda Goh; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)

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By Liz Lee BEIJING (Reuters) -China has accused the U.S. of stealing secrets and infiltrating the country's national time centre, warning that serious breaches could have disrupted communication networks, financial systems, the power supply and the international standard time. The U.S. National Security Agency has been carrying out a cyberattack operation on the National Time Service Center over an extended period of time, China's State Security Ministry said in a statement on its WeChat account on Sunday.  The ministry said it found evidence tracing stolen data and credentials as far back as 2022, which were used to spy on the staff's mobile devices and network systems at the centre. The U.S. intelligence agency had "exploited a vulnerability" in the messaging service of a foreign smartphone brand to access staff members' devices in 2022, the ministry said, without naming the brand. The national time centre is a research institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences that generates, maintains and broadcasts China's standard time.  The ministry's investigation also found that the United States launched attacks on the centre's internal network systems and attempted to attack the high-precision ground-based timing system in 2023 and 2024. The U.S. embassy in Beijing did not address the accusations directly but said cyber actors based in China have compromised major U.S. and global telecommunications providers' networks to conduct broad significant cyber espionage campaigns. "China is the most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks," an embassy spokesperson told Reuters in an email. China and the U.S. have increasingly traded accusations of cyberattacks in the past few years, each portraying the other as its primary cyber threat.  The latest accusations come amid renewed trade tensions over China's expanded rare earths export controls, and the U.S. threatening to further raise tariffs on Chinese goods.   (Reporting by Liz Lee; Editing by Michael Perry)

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By Greg Bensinger, Shubham Kalia and Deborah Mary Sophia SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Amazon.com said on Monday that a cloud computing unit at its data center in northern Virginia had largely contained fallout from a widespread internet outage that caused turmoil among thousands of sites globally, including some of the web's most popular apps like Snapchat and Reddit. Amazon said it had fixed the underlying issue but customers were complaining of lingering difficulties using services such as digital wallet Venmo and video calling site Zoom.  It was the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies. It was the second time in four years that AWS's northern Virginia cluster, known as US-EAST-1, contributed to a major internet meltdown. Amazon did not address a query from Reuters beyond pointing to an online statement that said the matter had been "fully mitigated." The problems stemmed from what is known as the Domain Name System, or DNS, which prevented applications from finding the correct address for AWS's DynamoDB API, a cloud database relied upon to store user information and other critical data. After more than nine hours of disruptions, many applications were gradually coming back online in the afternoon in the U.S. But AWS acknowledged that elevated errors were still affecting several services. There were "tons of broken internal services still now as individual resolution and repair occurring," read language from an internal problem ticket describing the outage and reviewed by Reuters.    Lambda, one of AWS's computing services, was experiencing errors due to issues with an internal subsystem, AWS said in an update on its status page. "We are taking steps to recover this internal Lambda system," it said. Earlier, AWS said the root cause of the outage was an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers used to distribute traffic across several servers. The issue, AWS said, originated from within the "EC2 internal network." EC2 refers to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS. Businesses use EC2 to run virtual servers to develop, launch and host applications. Steps to resolve EC2 system-related issues resulted in some early signs of recovery across a few data centers, AWS said in an update on its status page. It is taking similar measures at the remaining locations and expects the problems to subside, AWS added, without providing a specific timeline. While some apps like Reddit and Roblox had largely stabilized, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat and Duolingo, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day. Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, said software developers need to build better fault tolerance into their code. He said AWS provides tools developers can use to protect themselves in the event of a problem at one of any of its sprawling network of data centers, and developers can also create backups with other cloud providers.  "When people cut costs and cut corners to try to get an application up, and then forget that they skipped that last step and didn't really protect against an outage, those companies are the ones who really ought to be scrutinized later," Birman told Reuters. ISSUE ORIGINATED FROM AWS SITE KNOWN FOR PREVIOUS OUTAGES AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world's largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft's Azure and Alphabet's Google Cloud. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms – ranging from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems – that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS said on its status page that Monday's outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered outages in 2021 and 2020. According to documentation on the AWS website, the US-EAST-1 site is often the default region for many AWS services.  "FRAGILE INFRASTRUCTURES" The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and their reliance on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch wreaking havoc on business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said. "This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures," said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at European cybersecurity firm ESET. In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were all hit, according to Downdetector's UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website. "The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service," said Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey's Department of Computer Science. Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident. "For major businesses, hours of cloud downtime translate to millions in lost productivity and revenue," said Ryan Griffin, U.S. cyber practice leader at insurance broker McGill and Partners.  FROM SNAPCHAT TO VENMO: OUTAGE TAKES DOWN APPS Ookla said at least a thousand companies were affected by the outage. Snapchat last had over 7,500 reports on Downdetector, lower than the peak of more than 22,000 but still higher than the 4,000 outage instances at around 7:00 a.m. ET. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS. Amazon's own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, although Downdetector last showed a decrease in severity. Fortnite, owned by Epic Games; Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber rival Lyft was also knocked down in the United States. In a post on X, Signal President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage as well, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work. (Reporting by Shubham Kalia, Devika Nair, Ananya Palyekar and Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by James Pearson, Jaspreet Singh and Arsheeya Bajwa; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty, Joe Bavier, Richard Chang and David Gregorio)

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By David Shepardson and Akash Sriram WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Monday it has opened a preliminary investigation into about 2,000 Waymo self-driving vehicles after reports that the company's robotaxis may have failed to follow traffic safety laws around a stopped school bus. The probe of the Alphabet unit is the latest scrutiny of self-driving systems by regulators reviewing how driverless technologies interact with pedestrians, cyclists and other road users. NHTSA opened the investigation after a recent media report aired video of an incident in Georgia in which a Waymo did not remain stationary when approaching a school bus with its red lights flashing and stop arm deployed. The report said the Waymo vehicle initially stopped then maneuvered around the bus, passing the extended stop arm while students were disembarking. Waymo's automated driving system surpassed 100 million miles of driving in July and is logging 2 million miles per week, the agency said. "Based on NHTSA’s engagement with Waymo on this incident and the accumulation of operational miles, the likelihood of other prior similar incidents is high," the agency said. A Waymo spokesperson said the company has “already developed and implemented improvements related to stopping for school buses and will land additional software updates in our next software release.” The company added "driving safely around children has always been one of Waymo's highest priorities." The company said Waymo "approached the school bus from an angle where the flashing lights and stop sign were not visible and drove slowly around the front of the bus before driving past it, keeping a safe distance from children." NHTSA said the vehicle involved was equipped with Waymo's fifth-generation Automated Driving System and was operating without a human safety driver at the time of the incident. Waymo has said its robotaxi fleet numbers more than 1,500 vehicles operating across major U.S. cities, including Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Austin. In July, NHTSA closed a 14-month investigation into a series of minor collisions "with clearly visible objects that a competent driver would be expected to avoid" and "unexpected behavior" from Waymo self-driving vehicles, after 22 reports about its robotaxis driving in ways that potentially violated traffic safety laws. The probe ended after two recalls. (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Tasim Zahid)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -NASA's top official on Monday said the U.S. space agency was opening up the contract for its Artemis 3 moon mission to compete against SpaceX, which he said was running behind schedule.  "I'm in the process of opening that contract up. I think we'll see companies like Blue get involved, and maybe others," NASA administrator Sean Duffy, who also serves as U.S. Transportation secretary, told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. Blue Origin is a SpaceX rival founded by Jeff Bezos. "We're going to have a space race in regard to American companies competing to see who can actually get us back to the moon first." NASA's multibillion dollar Artemis series of missions are aimed at returning humans to the moon as China plans a 2030 astronaut moon landing. Artemis 3 has been planned for 2027 with SpaceX's Starship. But Duffy said billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX was not on schedule and could put the United States behind its rival, with U.S. President Trump wanting to see the mission take place before his White House term ends in January 2029. "They're behind schedule, and so the president wants to make sure we beat the Chinese," Duffy told Fox.  Artemis 2, a 10-day flight around the moon and back involving systems built by built by Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, is on track for April and could get moved up to February, he added.  Bezos and Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp reportedly spoke with Trump over the summer when the Republican president was feuding with Musk, who backed Trump in the 2024 election and went on to lead the broad effort to cut the federal government known as DOGE. Representatives for SpaceX and Blue Origin could not be immediately reached for comment. (Reporting by Susan Heavey; additional reporting by Deborah Sophia and Jaspreet Singh; Editing by Nick Zieminski)

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By Jeff Horwitz NEW YORK (Reuters) -Meta researchers found that teens who report that Instagram regularly made them feel bad about their bodies saw significantly more “eating disorder adjacent content” than those who did not, according to an internal document reviewed by Reuters. The posts shown to those users featured “prominent display” of chest, buttocks, or thighs, “explicit judgement” about body types and “content related to disordered eating and/or negative body image.”  While such material is not banned on Instagram, the researchers noted that parents, teens and outside experts have told Meta they believe it is potentially harmful to young users.  Meta surveyed 1,149 teens over the course of the 2023-2024 academic year about whether and how often they felt bad about their bodies after using Instagram. Then they manually sampled the content those users saw on the platform over a three-month period. The study showed that for the 223 teens who often felt bad about their bodies after viewing Instagram, “eating disorder adjacent content” made up 10.5% of what they saw on the platform. Among the other teens in the study, such content accounted for only 3.3% of what they saw.  “Teens who reported frequent body dissatisfaction after viewing posts on Instagram… saw about three times more body-focused/ED-adjacent content than other teens,” the authors wrote, referring to eating disorders, according to a summary of the research reviewed exclusively by Reuters. In addition to seeing more eating disorder-adjacent content, researchers found, the teens who reported the most negative feelings about themselves saw more provocative content more broadly, content Meta classifies as “mature themes,”  “Risky behavior,” “Harm & Cruelty” and “Suffering.” Cumulatively, such content accounted for 27% of what those teens saw on the platform, compared with 13.6% among their peers who hadn’t reported negative feelings.  META RESEARCHERS EXPRESSED CONCERN The researchers stressed that their findings did not prove that Instagram was making users feel worse about their bodies. “It is not possible to establish the causal direction of these findings,” they wrote, noting the possibility that teens who felt bad about themselves could be actively seeking out that material.  The Instagram research, a redacted replica of which is published here and has not been previously reported, demonstrated that Instagram exposed teens who “report frequently experiencing body dissatisfaction" to high doses of content that Meta’s own advisors “have expressed support for limiting,” the writeup said. In a statement, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the document reviewed by Reuters demonstrates Meta’s commitment to understanding and improving its products.  “This research is further proof we remain committed to understanding young people’s experiences and using those insights to build safer, more supportive platforms for teens,” Stone said, noting the company’s recent announcement that it would attempt to show minors content in-line with PG-13 movie standards.   In the study, Meta said that its existing screening tools – which were designed to catch violations of platform rules – were incapable of detecting 98.5% of the “sensitive” content that the company believes might not have been appropriate for teens. The finding was “not necessarily surprising,” the researchers wrote, because Meta had only recently begun work on building an algorithm to detect the potentially harmful content they were examining. 'ASSOCIATION' BETWEEN CONTENT AND 'FEELING WORSE ABOUT ONE'S BODY' The study, which is marked, “Do not distribute internally or externally without permission,” is the latest internal research that demonstrates an “association” between viewing fashion, beauty and fitness content and “reporting feeling worse about one’s body,” the document states. The research was conducted as part of Meta’s efforts to understand interactions between users and its own products, which rely on algorithms to determine which content to show to users.  In the United States, the company has faced state and federal investigations of Instagram’s effects on children as well as civil suits by school districts alleging harmful product design and deceptive marketing of its platforms as safe for teens.  Those suits have prominently cited past leaked internal research from Meta in which researchers expressed their belief that the platform’s content recommendations might be harmful to youth with existing body image issues.  Since July of this year, Stone said, the company has reduced the amount of age-restricted content shown to teenage Instagram users by half.  CONTENT WARRANTED TRIGGER WARNING Jenny Radesky, a University of Michigan Associate Professor of Pediatrics who reviewed Meta’s unreleased research at Reuters’ request, called the study’s methodology robust and its findings disturbing. “This supports the idea that teens with psychological vulnerabilities are being profiled by Instagram and fed more harmful content,” Radesky said. “We know that a lot of what people consume on social media comes from the feed, not from search.” Past internal research at Meta “has demonstrated an association between frequency of reporting feeling worse about one’s body” and consuming Instagram fitness and beauty content, the writeup says.  Meta’s researchers wrote that teens, parents, pediatricians, external advisors and Meta’s own Eating Disorder & Body Image Advisory Council have urged Instagram to limit how much of that content it shows to teenagers, warning that it “may be detrimental to teen well-being, specifically by precipitating or exacerbating feelings of body dissatisfaction.” Such content falls afoul of Meta’s rules against content that overtly promotes eating disorders. The report included samples of problematic content including images of skinny women in lingerie and bikinis, fight videos and a drawing of a crying figure scrawled with phrases including “how could I ever compare” and “make it all end.” One of the example posts showed a closeup of a woman’s lacerated neck.  Though the content did not violate Meta’s rules, the researchers found it disturbing enough that they issued a “sensitive content” warning to colleagues reading their work. (Reporting by Jeff Horwitz in Oakland, Calif. Editing by Kenneth Li and Michael Learmonth)

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