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Have you ever wondered what would happen to humanity if we all stopped having babies? The extinction of the human race may be a scary thought to most of us, but not for the “anti-natalists”. They’re a thriving online community based on Facebook and Reddit that firmly believes human life only brings suffering and should therefore come to an end. While some entertain the idea on a purely philosophic...

YouTube has been criticised for failing to take responsibility for videos posted on the platform. So can it be trusted to control potentially harmful content? The video-sharing site is just 14, but there's no doubt it has become a giant of global communication. According to the company's own figures, it has more than a billion users around the globe, watching more than a billion hours of videos ev...

What does the QAnon conspiracy theory tell us about American politics today? It’s a sprawling set of allegations which has a number of branches and offshoots –but if one thing unites its believers, it’s that they all support President Trump. We meet Dylan Wheeler, an influencer with more than 370,000 followers on Twitter, as he speaks at a gathering of Trump supporters. Although the people in the...

Many people who believe the Earth is not round first heard the idea on YouTube. While it’s hard to accurately say how many flat Earthers there are worldwide, it is undeniable that their community has grown in recent years. Flat Earth meet-ups and conventions have popped up in a number of countries, while online searches for the topic have reached unprecedented levels. YouTube hosts thousands of fl...

Growing up, Dina – not her real name – would browse social media and imagine a life far from the one she was living. She felt shackled by the rules imposed on her by her parents, religion and the culture of the United Arab Emirates. So one day she escaped, using social media to navigate through networks of people and ex-Muslim communities, to get to the West. Several recent high-profile cases of E...

After a Sudanese protester was killed, there was a wave of sympathy on social media – but scammers took advantage. In early June, 26-year-old activist Mohamed Mattar was shot and killed in Khartoum. He was one of 100 protesters who died in a government crackdown on a sit-in. Blue was his favourite colour, and at the time of his death, the avatar on his social media pages displayed a deep shade sim...

It was a moment that defined online activism. When tens of thousands of people came out to Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand the end of the rule of Hosni Mubarak in January 2011, they weren’t responding to a political party or a leafleting campaign – but instead to a Facebook page. It was called “We are all Khaled Said” - in honour of a 28-year-old man who was tortured to death by Egyptian police. I...

Online debate is broken – full of angry shouting and mindless agreement. And that’s even before you get to the trolls, lies, misinformation, and fake news. This week we visit Inverness, in the Highlands of Scotland, to meet a man with a plan to fix this problem. Six years ago, when he was a curious, guitar-playing student, Kal Turnbull started a subreddit – a section of the website Reddit - called...

Nina spends three hours a day on Facebook – not sharing selfies or catching up on news, but trying to make the network a nicer place. She’s a German member of a large and growing international movement called #IAmHere. Started in Sweden in 2016, tens of thousands of volunteers in more than a dozen countries organise in closed Facebook groups. They target popular posts, often from mainstream news o...

They were meant to be private, and the people posting them considered them “jokes”. But when female students at the University of Warwick found out about hundreds of violent and obscene messages – some of them directly naming themselves and their friends - they were horrified and scared. We heard from the women who were named in the group chat, and who alleged that a later university investigation...

Why are there so many conspiracy videos on YouTube? The company has clamped down on extremist and dangerous content, but conspiracies, outright fakes, and hoaxes are still very easy to find. Sometimes they’re only watched by a few people, but often these videos go viral. The reason why they so often pop up on your screen, says former Google employee Guillaume Chaslot, is YouTube’s algorithm. Chasl...

Officials in Brussels are worried. With the elections for the European Parliament rapidly approaching, they say Russia is using disinformation and fake news to sow discord and to undermine people's trust in the European Union. Moscow flatly denies such accusations. But EU officials say Russian disinformation could help anti-EU parties and movements. And, if you were to believe the polls, populist...

It’s a dangerous cosmetic surgical procedure that’s all over social media. About one in every 3,000 women who undergo a Brazilian Butt Lift - or BBL - will die, but the stark statistics haven’t stopped its popularity. In the United States, for instance, the number of BBLs has doubled in just a few years. Fuelling the trend are social media photos and influencers who show off their hourglass shapes...

Where did it all go wrong? The liberating promise of the internet and social media has recently been swamped by worries about privacy, misinformation and online radicalisation. Now that doubts about our digital technologies are all over the news, what should we do about it? Author and podcaster Douglas Rushkoff wants a new fight against “anti-human” technologies. He says that many recent technolog...

There’s a new wave of political activism in South Africa. Young activists with social media savvy have shaken up the system and could be a decisive factor in next month’s general election. We’ve been to Johannesburg to meet Sankara. His day job is selling eggs, and he’s a staunch supporter of the African National Congress (ANC) – the political movement that has been in power ever since Nelson Mand...

Trending investigates claims that innocent men were framed to try to discredit demonstrations against Sudan’s former leader Omar al-Bashir. After mass street protests, the military stepped in to end President Bashir’s 30-year rule earlier this month. But the BBC has uncovered evidence that the regime organised a fake news campaign to try to portray peaceful protesters as violent rebels. Students w...

How did an ambitious musician fool thousands of people using social media? Jered Threatin successfully managed to fake an entire existence as a rock star. He persuaded people he was an award-winning musician who had played to sold-out venues. And as a result of his seemingly popular social media accounts and faked web pages, he orchestrated a European tour, got his eponymous band booked in venues...

The video-sharing app TikTok has taken the teenage world by storm. But where there are kids, there are also predators. We found dozens of adults using TikTok to post sexual comments on videos uploaded by teenagers and children. TikTok, which has 500 million users worldwide, says it is working hard to protect its users from inappropriate approaches. But a BBC Trending investigation exposed some wor...

Roger McNamee was a Facebook fan and an advisor to Mark Zuckerberg. Now he says he’s sad about the way the company is being run and the impact that it’s having on the world. Zuckerberg first sought out his advice, McNamee says, in 2006, shortly after Yahoo was making a $1bn bid to buy the social media company. McNamee, a veteran Silicon Valley investor, says he saw Facebook’s potential and urged t...

Where does the extremist culture that inspired the Christchurch killer come from? A graphic live-streamed video and a rambling document included clues as to how the Christchurch shooter was radicalised. He used the message board 8chan to announce his attacks, which killed 50 people in the New Zealand city. And throughout his online postings are clues to how connected he was with the online culture...

Since the election of Donald Trump, there’s been a disturbing wave of street violence across America. The epicentre is Portland, Oregon, a place better known for its chilled out hipster lifestyle – but which has been the scene of dozens of far-right marches and rallies. Those events often result in arrests and violence. BBC Trending went there to meet two activists who have been on opposite sides...

There is a disturbing new wave of political street violence in America. Groups on the far right and the far left have clashed in New York, Berkeley, California, and Charlottesville, Virginia. But one liberal enclave is the main battleground: Portland, Oregon - a progressive city in the Pacific north-west. BBC Trending has visited Portland to meet two activists who have traded insults and threats o...

After she got a death threat, Ginger Gorman dove headfirst into the world of trolls. It all started when she wrote a light feature about a gay couple who had adopted a child. Years later, the couple were arrested on child sexual abuse charges, and although she had no knowledge of their crimes, internet trolls swarmed to attack her – even sending her and her family death threats. Where some would r...

Recently, printers around the world started spewing out pages without any direction from their owners. Then a mysterious video showed up on smart TVs. Both hacks were designed to promote PewDiePie, the most popular vlogger on YouTube, in his battle to maintain subscriber supremacy against popular Indian channel T-Series. The hackers say they did it to expose the flaws and dangers in some connected...

There is no independent media in Eritrea, a country that ranks near the very bottom of press freedom indexes. But one man is trying to change his country’s repressive system. “J” is the editor of Eritrean Press, a Facebook page which is a mix of political reporting, satire, sport, and light features. It’s an almost unique development aimed at Eritrean readers both inside the country – where only a...