Technologies

Social Media Should Censor Itself, Without Government Intervention, Most Americans Say

New polling from the firm Ipsos finds that most Americans worry about bad behavior on social media, and want companies to act.

Social media is getting under our skin, and new polling data shows that Americans want tech companies to fix it.

Surveys released by polling firm Ipsos on Monday show that a majority of Americans support content moderation on social networks, including putting warning labels on misinformation, deleting incitements to violence and suspending or banning offending accounts. Only 19% of Americans believe tech companies should do nothing and allow incitements to violence to be posted. Even fewer people, just 17%, believe social media companies should do nothing and allow posts containing misinformation or bullying.

«Basically, public opinion is giving license to tech companies to curate themselves,» said Cliff Young, president of US Public Affairs at Ipsos. He added that another Ipsos poll found that Americans don’t support government intervention with social media content. «What we see across the board is support for self-action» by tech companies, he said.

The Ipsos data, based on about 200 questions asked in eight polls over the past year and made available to the wider public Monday, offers an unusually clear indication of what Americans want social media companies to do about bad behavior on their platforms.

For much of the last decade, politicians, tech executives and people using the internet have argued about how much social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google’s YouTube and TikTok should moderate their platforms. Companies that track hate groups say the companies aren’t aggressively pulling down enough posts, while many politicians, including former President Donald Trump, say tech companies have gone too far.

In some cases, conservative politicians, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, have signed new laws aimed at punishing social media companies for «wrongful censorship» on their platforms. Though many of those efforts have struggled amid constitutional arguments in the courts, some of the loudest voices in American politics have made clear they believe big tech companies shouldn’t moderate potentially hateful, bullying or incendiary political speech.

Shortly after the US Capitol riots on Jan. 6 last year, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube removed Trump and some of his most vocal advocates from their platforms. They cited concerns that Trump’s months long campaign of bullying, threats and lies about his election loss had sparked the carnage that left five people dead, including a Capitol Police officer. Trump has since released many statements denying his culpability, arguing instead that tech companies had acted wrongly. Trump’s actions related to the Jan. 6 riot led to his second impeachment by the US House of Representatives, and they’re a focal point for a bipartisan congressional commission investigating the event.

Young, at Ipsos, said the Capitol riots were a key moment when many Americans began to reexamine social media’s role in their lives.

Indeed, older polls from the Pew Research Center showed that before the 2020 election and 2021 riot, Americans were much more split about how to treat tech. A 2019 study by Pew found that 77% of Democrats thought social mediacompanies «have a responsibility to remove offensive content from theirplatforms.» By comparison, about 52% of Republicans had the sameview back then.

Fast-forward to 2021, when Ipsos polling performed in the months after the Capitol riots indicated that more Americans in both parties want tech companies to curb bad behavior online. «This was an inflection point for decision makers wanting to better understand the relationship between society and tech,» Young said.

Nuanced but similar views

Tech companies are among the most profitable, most valuable and most powerful businesses in the world. They’re also front of mind for many Americans, who rate disinformation, conspiracy theories, social media-driven radicalization and hacking above other big issues, like racism and the climate crisis. More than 79% of respondents to one Ipsos poll, in September, said they were concerned with at least one of those tech issues, roughly tying with «crime and public safety» and «the economy and jobs.»

Ipsos data also found that Republicans, Democrats and independents largely agreed on the importance of these issues, with hacking, malware and data breaches scoring among the top three concerns from all three groups.

Additionally, Ipsos surveys found that Americans largely understand the difference between social media companies and other tech giants, with 88% saying search engines and the ability to find things on the internet improved their lives, while only 45% felt the same about social media. When discussing specific companies, respondents saying they’re Republican or independent overall had a negative view of Facebook and Twitter, while less than 15% of Democrats viewed either company favorably. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple were all viewed more favorably, Ipsos data showed.

Technologies

Speediance’s Compact Resistance Trainer and Wearable Make Wellness and Fitness More Connected

Speediance unveils a portable strength training device and a wearable at CES.

Speediance unveiled its new Gym Nano and Speediance Strap products this week at CES 2026. The smart fitness equipment manufacturer, which previously developed its own smart home gym, the Gym Monster 2, designed the Gym Nano and Speediance Strap to complement its current equipment ecosystem.

«Rather than developing products in isolation, we’re building a comprehensive training and health ecosystem that adapts to users’ real lives and empowers better decision-making over time,» Speediance founder and CEO Liu Tao said in a statement.

Speediance used the consumer tech expo in Las Vegas to demonstrate the Gym Nano, a portable, motor-driven cable resistance training system designed to occupy minimal space for those who prefer to work out at home. The strap is a prototype wearable device designed to read your health data and provide training recommendations based on this insight.

CNET previously tested Speediance’s VeloNix AI Smart Bike and named it the best AI-powered exercise bike.

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Gym Nano

The Gym Nano is a compact digital cable resistance machine trainer that fits any space and delivers full-body workouts. It’s meant to make strength training at home easier if you have limited space and can’t commit to larger home gym equipment.

The Gym Nano offers up to 220 pounds of resistance through adjustable 1-pound increments. It also has five dynamic weight modes: Eccentric, Chain, Standard, Fixed Speed and Sled.

Speediance Strap

The strap can be used for both endurance and strength training activities and recognizes various types of exercises, movement patterns, training volume and other insights that can help you learn how well your body is responding to your training.

The Speediance Strap is a screen-free wearable that collects data related to your sleep, training and core body temperature. It then uploads and shares this data to the Speediance Wellness Plus app, where it makes suggestions for your daily training and recovery based on this information. Similar to other wearables, the Speediance Strap assesses your readiness each day and can detect stress factors to determine if you should focus more on recovery on that day.

«With Speediance Strap, we are exploring how wearable data can function as part of a decision-support layer within a connected fitness system, rather than existing as isolated metrics,» Tao said in a statement.

Additionally, everyday insights (like core and recovery data) will be free to you unless you want to upgrade to the Wellness Plus access, which will come at an additional cost to receive long-term insights and AI planning.

It’s unclear when the Gym Nano will be available for purchase, but the Speediance Strap is expected to launch through a Kickstarter campaign in spring 2026.

Technologies

OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Health: A Dedicated Tab for Medical Inquiries

The company wants you to upload your medical records and connect the wellness apps you use.

ChatGPT is expanding its presence in the health care realm. OpenAI said Wednesday that its popular AI chatbot will begin rolling out ChatGPT Health, a new tab dedicated to addressing all your medical inquiries. The goal of this new tab is to centralize all your medical records and provide a private area for your wellness issues.

Looking for answers about a plethora of health issues is a top use for the chatbot. According to OpenAI, «hundreds of millions of people» sign in to ChatGPT every week to ask a variety of health and wellness questions. Additionally, ChatGPT Health (currently in beta testing) will encourage you to connect any wellness apps you also use, such as Apple Health and MyFitnessPal, resulting in a more connected experience with more information about you to draw from.

Online privacy, especially in the age of AI, is a significant concern, and this announcement raises a range of questions regarding how your personal health data will be used and the safeguards that will be implemented to keep sensitive information secure — especially with the proliferation of data breaches and data brokers.

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«The US doesn’t have a general-purpose privacy law, and HIPAA only protects data held by certain people like health care providers and insurance companies,» Andrew Crawford, senior counsel for privacy and data at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in an emailed statement.

He continued: «The recent announcement by OpenAI introducing ChatGPT Health means that a number of companies not bound by HIPAA’s privacy protections will be collecting, sharing and using people’s health data. And since it’s up to each company to set the rules for how health data is collected, used, shared and stored, inadequate data protections and policies can put sensitive health information in real danger.»

OpenAI says the new tab will have a separate chat history and a memory feature that can keep your health chat history separate from the rest of your ChatGPT usage.

Further protections, such as encryption and multifactor authentication, will defend your data and keep it secure, the company says. Health conversations won’t be used to train the chatbot, according to the company.

Privacy issues aside, another concern is how people intend to use ChatGPT Health. OpenAI’s blog post states the service «is not intended for diagnosis or treatment.»

The slope is slippery here. In August 2025, a man was hospitalized after allegedly being advised by the AI chatbot to replace salt in his diet with sodium bromide. There are other examples of AI providing incorrect and potentially harmful advice to individuals, leading to hospitalization.

OpenAI’s announcement also doesn’t touch on mental health concerns, but a blog post from October 2025 says the company is working to strengthen its responses in sensitive conversations. Whether these mental health guardrails will be enough to keep people safe remains to be seen.

OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

If you’re interested in ChatGPT Health, you can join a waitlist, as the tab isn’t yet live.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Technologies

I Tested the Honor Magic 8 Pro and Found a Huge Problem With the Camera

I discovered a catastrophic problem with this phone’s cameras and it needs to be fixed fast.

I’ve found a big problem with the Honor Magic 8 Pro’s camera that urgently needs addressing. I’ve taken hundreds of test photos in my weeks with the company’s latest flagship phone, and while plenty of them are perfectly decent, many of the images I’ve taken with the ultrawide lens display horrendous image processing issues around the edges that ruin them completely.

I discovered the issue when I first got the phone late last year, and while it’s had several significant software updates since then, the problems persist. So what’s gone wrong? It’s possible that I’m monumentally unlucky and happen to have been given a broken unit. If so, I fully expect the replacement models I’ll be testing to be free of any issues. Or, maybe it’s a more widespread problem and I’ll see the same issues cropping up again. I personally think it’s more likely to be an issue at the software level, and as such, it could be a simple fix for Honor to push out in the coming days and weeks.

I’ve spoken to Honor about this and, unsurprisingly, the company is keen to say that this isn’t widespread, stating «Our internal investigation confirmed that the issue was limited to an isolated hardware anomaly in that specific early development sample. It doesn’t reflect the hardware or software polish of the final retail units now launching in the European market.» And sure, my test unit was an early non-EU version, but it is also the phone that the company did send me to review. Receiving early prerelease samples is common in the industry and while small hiccups can sometimes be expected, I rarely find such significant problems as this.

Honor is sending additional retail units for further testing and I hope that I’m able to confirm that this isn’t an issue seen on all models. I was prepared to write a full review of this new flagship phone, but these camera issues are severe and raise more questions than answers. I will update this article with more information and my testing results as they become available.

Read more: Best Phone to Buy in 2026

Even if it is an isolated incident, it’s still disappointing to see such significant problems on a new phone, especially a flagship that costs £1,099 in the UK. Honor doesn’t officially sell its phones in the US, but for reference, that price converts to roughly $1,480.

The phone does have some positives. I like its processor performance and display, for example, which I’ll come on to later. But the camera issues I’ve seen mean I can’t recommend buying this phone until it’s clear whether they’re limited to my review device or if they’re issues common across all models.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s going on.

Honor Magic 8 Pro camera troubles

Taken with the camera’s standard zoom, the shot above is fine — there’s a decent amount of detail and the exposure is even overall.

But switch to the ultrawide mode and things go horribly wrong. There’s a vibrant purple fringe around the edge that’s full of image processing artifacts that ruin the shot.

It’s not a subtle problem; it’s a huge red flag that something is very wrong with this phone.

For reference, here’s the iPhone 16 Pro’s ultrawide shot. Notice the difference?

As you can see, it’s not an isolated incident. It seems to be more apparent when there are areas of shadow in the edges. It makes me suspect that the phone is seeing these dark patches and trying — and failing — to brighten them and add detail back into the scene. It’s not dissimilar to the early problems I found on Google’s Pixel 8 Pro, which also struggled with shadow detail, suggesting to me that this is a software fault, rather than a mechanical problem with my unit.

It also doesn’t seem to affect the ultrawide lens when recording video, which again suggests it’s not a hardware issue as I’d expect to see the same problems from the lens in any mode. The downside of that is that it could theoretically affect all models of the Honor Magic 8 Pro. However, the big upside is that software problems can be easily remedied with over-the-air updates.

To be honest, I don’t love the camera elsewhere, either. The image processing has gone overboard in this image, brightening the shadows and trying to rescue the highlights in the background excessively. It’s resulted in an over-processed image that looks unnatural.

The iPhone 16 Pro’s attempt has allowed those shadows to remain what they are — shadows — and I vastly prefer this version as a result.

I’ve also noticed that there can be significant color shifts when switching between the main and ultrawide lenses, which I would again prefer not to see on a camera phone of this price.

However, this could be attributed to the same software processing issues I’ve already discussed, so I’ll have to leave my verdict on the camera for when I’ve done more testing.

On the upside, this shot of the Tennents brewery in Glasgow looks good.

And I like the colors and tones in this sunset scene in Edinburgh. So it’s not all bad — it can take a decent photo sometimes. So what about the rest of the phone?

Honor Magic 8 Pro: Display, performance and battery life

I like the phone’s 6.71-inch display, which is bright and vibrant. It’s lovely for gaming, too, thanks to its max 120Hz refresh rate. It’s powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon Elite Gen 5 processor, which puts in some of the best scores we’ve ever seen on our benchmark tests for both processor performance and graphics processing.

It certainly feels nippy in everyday use. Games like Genshin Impact, unsurprisingly, played smoothly at max graphics settings. The phone runs on a 6,270-mAh battery, which, while sizable, only gave average results on our battery drain tests. Battery performance sits alongside phones like the Galaxy S25 or Google Pixel 10, but it’s a big step below the iPhone 17 Pro Max or OnePlus 15.

If it feels like I’m glossing over the rest of the phone somewhat, it’s because I am. With the issues I’ve seen so far, it’s possible that there may be other early teething troubles elsewhere, so I’m going to hold off giving any kind of definitive verdict on any part of the phone until I’ve tested more models and have a full appreciation of what the phone is really like to use.

Honor Magic 8 Pro: Should you buy it?

Right now, I absolutely don’t think you should. The issues I’ve seen with the camera are significant and badly need addressing. It could be that it’s a simple software fix that can be rolled out in the coming weeks, or it might be an isolated incident that affects me and me alone. I’ll be retesting on multiple devices and it could be that they’re absolutely fine.

But unless you’re desperate for a new phone today and you absolutely have to have an Honor phone, then I recommend waiting until we’ve got more clarity about how deep these problems lie.