In addition to all its obvious benefits in terms of cat pictures, more and more research suggests that social media has some substantial drawbacks including negative social and psychological impacts. The latest such study was performed by two Italian academics, whose research, described in a paper titled "Online Networks and Subjective Well-Being" and published on arXiv, focused on measures of "social trust."

Deloitte Digital is partnering with Salesforce.com to form a new business practice that will help clients use the Salesforce1 Community Cloud to connect with employees, customers, and other companies. As part of the partnership Deloitte will advise clients in both the private sector and government on how to create new online communities focusing on external strategic goals, with an emphasis on customer relationship management.

Spectator sports and social media are a natural pairing, and over the last year quite a few new social networks for sports fans have launched, built around the idea of giving fans more access to their favorite players. Following is a quick round up of some of the new platforms.

While it may seem like the Internets is a never-ending gauntlet of conflict and controversy, most social media users are actually less likely to express opinions, both online and in real life, according to a new poll of 1,800 U.S. adults by the Pew Research Center. This appears to be part of a phenomenon Pew describes as the "spiral of silence," in which people are less likely to talk about controversial issues unless they already know that their audience agrees.

One of the most important things you can do in spectator sports, as in life, is to rank everything so everyone knows who is the best. Thus USA Today and Degree deodorant and antiperspirant are launching a new College Football Fan Index that combines social media activity and online voting to determine which football teams have the most committed followings (and which need to demonstrate a little more online spirit).

While we call it social media, ironically it may be quite the opposite: a new study suggests that screen time (including social media as well as texting, games, video, and so on) is correlated with decreased basic social skills in preteens. The good news is that the damage appears to be reversible, as reducing screen time seems to bring those skills back.

Broadly speaking, social media is now in its 12th year (measuring, quite arbitrarily, from the founding of Friendster in 2002) and it has quickly grown into a global phenomenon: over half the U.S. population is on social media, as well as one-quarter of the global population, with the latter set to rise to around a third by 2017.

The vast majority of posts on social media sites produce no engagement, according to a study by SocialFlow, which analyzed 1.6 million organic posts on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ by ordinary users, media companies, publishers, and marketers. On the positive side, however, SocialFlow also found that organic (as opposed to paid) posts still generate substantial reach.

You might think that the endless stream of news reports about identity theft, fraud and security breaches on social networks might have made some sort of impression on the social media-using public, but we remain blissfully ignorant of these threats, according to a new survey of 11,135 Internet users around the world by Kapersky Lab, which specializes in cyber-security.

Those evil bosses are at it again: more employers plan to begin or increase their monitoring of employees' social media use and other personal data over the next decade, according to a new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers -- and unsurprisingly, most employees are not exactly pleased with the idea, although millennials are slightly more receptive to the idea.