Research by mobile phone experts Recombu revealed a "worrying" trend of people opening up their lives to strangers online. According to the survey of 2,000 people conducted in February, 2012 by OnePoll, 75% of Brits have accepted a friend request from someone they don't know on Facebook. Some 82% of Facebook users were found to speak to 25 or fewer of their Facebook friends on a regular basis. The global average for the number of Facebook friends is 190, but the average 22-year-old has closer to 1,000 online friends, according to official data from Facebook. Britain was also revealed to …

MEPs on a key European parliamentary committee have voted to reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta) by 19 votes to 12. Many regard it as the deathblow for the controversial treaty because the trade committee formally recommends how to vote to the wider parliament. The European Parliament vote is due to take place in July. Acta aims to tighten rules on both online and offline piracy but has attracted many critics. One of its harshest detractors has been UK MEP David Martin, the lead member of the committee.

The relaunched web site with a new design has promised users a "new wave of interactive content" later in the year focused on the broadcaster's own journalism. The redesign which went live on this week, has seen the site undergo changes in response to "significant advances in technology" since its 2007 launch "and by the enormous change that social media has wrought in the way that news is sources and delivered", according to a press release.

ABC figures have revealed the site received 91,687,074 unique visits in May - up over a million from April. The Guardian website came second, with 60,847,400 views; followed by the Telegraph website on 49,958,693 - up five million from April. However, it was the London Evening Standard's website that saw the highest growth from April: up 33.31% to 3,356,950.

The UK failed to pick up any major awards in the digital or radio categories at this year's Cannes Lions, the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, prompting one juror to call it a "wake up call" for British agencies. In their worst performance since 2007 in the digital category, known as the Cyber Lions, UK agencies failed to win a single gold. The UK has one of the highest proportionate spends of ad money on the internet, close to GBP5 billion last year, accounting for 28% of total advertising spend on all media, according to the Internet Advertising Association. The …

A study of more than 600 journalists across the world found that more than half source and verify news stories using known sources on social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Weibo. The research found 75% of journalists in the UK do so. The annual Oriella Digital Journalism Study, which surveys journalists across 16 countries, found the use of social media in the gathering of news "is now a majority pursuit" when working with known sources on such platforms. More than half, 53%, of journalists use "microblog updates" from known sources, and in the UK alone this figure rises …

Quartz, which will launch in September, is primarily aimed at tablet users and is free of charge. It will target the international business class that lives life on the move. "If you look at the business people operating in this new economy, they are people who are in a sense post-national," Justin B. Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company toldThe Independent. "They spend more time outside their own countries, they are on aeroplanes all the time, they're borderless and living mobile existences." Other news organisations will watch Quartz as a potential model for digital news provision.

Shows like House, Grey's Anatomy or Mad Men have been a hit around the world. But for every House, there's a Sons of Anarchy: An edgy cable show that doesn't always translate well for the average European, which means it can be challenging to get enough people to tune in. Unless you take them online. That's the lesson to be learned from a new strategy used by Germany's ProSiebenSat.1. The country's biggest not publicly funded TV company recently started to use its YouTube cloneMyVideo to exclusively stream some U.S. TV shows, and instantly hit a nerve with viewers: Its online-only …

The sportswear firm has been ordered to stop a Twitter marketing drive involving England football stars Wayne Rooney and Jack Wilshere following a complaint, according to guardian.co.uk. For other organisations planning their own social media initiatives, the case provides some clarification as to how brands are able to use prominent Twitter users to spread their message. The ASA told Nike the problem was that tweets were not clearly identifiable as promotional material; for instance, by including '#ad' in the messages.

Media website, Press Gazette, reports that the YouGov SixthSense research questioned participants on several aspects of their magazine consumption habits. And it found that women in particular have a "strong affinity for print", with 45% plumping for the physical format over digital; 41% said they liked the look and feel of printed magazines; and 36% said they liked the "convenience" of print magazines. Nevertheless around half of all those surveyed said they were buying magazines less frequently - 27 % of men and 34% of women attributed this to expense.