Roughly one in five online Americans ages 15-54 (19%, to be precise) said they use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter while watching primetime TV on a daily basis, according to new data from the Council for Research Excellence. Meanwhile 16% of all primetime viewing occasions involve social media interaction of some kind, with around half of these (7.3%) relating specifically to the programming.

Back in high school we called this "pissing in someone's corn flakes," but if you prefer Napoleonic metaphors, Google has "stolen a march" on Facebook by buying Titan Aerospace, which makes high-altitude, solar-powered drones, apparently with the same basic goal in mind: providing wireless Internet access to areas of the planet that are still off the grid.

Data from a number of surveys suggests that teenagers are leaving social networks like Facebook in favor of social apps. The latest study comes from Project Tomorrow, a non-profit organization focused on digital technology for education, which recently released the results of its 2013 survey of 325,279 K-12 students across the U.S.

Here's one for the "depressing but not particularly surprising" file: a new study by researchers at the University of Strathclyde, the University of Iowa, and the University of Ohio found that Facebook use may result in an increased likelihood of negative body image issues among young women. The study, titled "Facebook and College Women's Bodies: Social Media's Influence on Body Image and Disordered Eating," surveyed 881 college women about their Facebook use, eating and exercise habits, and body image.

This time the Internet's self-selecting propriety police are shocked, yes shocked by a selfie taken by Nate Scimio, a student who was injured, along with nearly two dozen others, in Wednesday's mass stabbing at Franklin Regional Senior High School in west Pennsylvania. The selfie, taken in the hospital after the attack and posted on Scimio's Instagram, shows Scimio in a hospital gown with a bandage on his right arm. Scimio is smiling (perhaps a bit smugly) and pointing at the bandage.

The kids nowadays prefer that Instagram over the Facebook and Twitters, according to a new survey of 7,500 teens by Piper Jaffray. In its spring 2014 teen survey the consultancy found that 30% of teens ranked Instagram their most important social network, ahead of Twitter at 27% and Facebook at 23%.

Social media rumors can sow even more unhelpful (and potentially very dangerous) havoc amid major crises, and governments need to create emergency response systems to swiftly dispel misinformation online, according to a new study titled "Community Intelligence and Social Media Services: A Rumor Theoretic Analysis of Tweets During Social Crises," published in a journal called Management Information Systems Quarterly.

Social media stocks took it on the chin last week, with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all suffering declines on Wall Street. And last week's sobering performance is just the icing on the cake after prolonged slumps going back a month or more.

Social networks were the No. 1 target for phishing attacks in the U.S. in 2013, according to a new report from Kapersky Labs, drawing on anonymized data from the company's Security Network. Phishing refers to the practice of creating a fake Web site in order to collect personal information about users, usually for a criminal purpose.

Social media's utility as a channel for spreading dissent and catalyzing protest movements makes it an attractive tool for intelligence services seeking to destabilize their enemies. On that note, the Associated Press is reporting that the U.S. government created a social network in Cuban, ZunZuneo, which functioned as a sort of primitive "Cuban Twitter" and was intended to help undermine the Cuban dictatorship.