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ByMichael Blanding

It's March2022 and Bradley Burkhard is sitting in an MIT lab, doing his best to follow instructions. Move your index finger, says technician Mikey Fernandez, and a finger moves dutifully up and down. What about the other digits? he asks, and other fingers curl, a bit more awkwardly. The thumb? Fernandez asks. Theres only the barest of perceptible movement. Yeah, the thumbs not really doing a whole lot, the 32-year-old Burkhard sighs, slumped back in an office chair. Hes been at this now for three days, and clearly hes getting tired.

The fact that Burkhard can move any fingers is practically a miracle. The hand he controls is not his own, but a robotic prosthesis clamped to a lab bench 3 feet away. A tangle of 16 white wires extends back to Burkhards residual arm, which ends just above the elbow. The aluminum and rubber prosthesis looks like an android arm from a science fiction movie, and indeed it is called the LUKE arm after theStar Warshero who famously lost his hand. The next-generation artificial limb, created by Segway inventor Dean Kamen and his team, allows for a finely articulated range of motion. But the real miracle isnt that arm, its Burkhards own and the first-of-its-kind surgery that allows him to control the prosthesis with finely tuned electrical signals from his residual muscles.

As Burkhards muscles flex under electrodes connected to those 16 wires, lines of computer code scroll past on a monitor. Fernandez and other scientists at theMIT Media Labwill use that output to calibrate the prosthesis to Burkhards motions, in a way they hope will eventually give him an unprecedented amount of control. Ultimately, they plan to attach the artificial limb to Burkhards own, and allow him to use it seamlessly, exactly how his arm worked before an ATV accident three years ago.

Doing amputations kind of sucks, says Dr. Matthew Carty, a reconstructive plastic surgeon at Brigham and Womens Hospital. It has been regarded for thousands of years as a failure like,I can no longer help this patient by trying to save their limb, so we just gotta cut it off.But we do ourselves and our patients a disservice by thinking about it that way. This procedure is a new way of thinking.

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He lost his arm in an accident. A new surgery and a bionic prosthetic are giving him back unprecedented control. MIT Media Lab - MIT Media Lab

Police form a line as activists and supporters of residents of a homeless encampment protest at Echo Park Lake in Los Angeles late on March 24, 2021. Ringo Chiu/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Police form a line as activists and supporters of residents of a homeless encampment protest at Echo Park Lake in Los Angeles late on March 24, 2021.

The harsh treatment of journalists by police at Los Angeles' Echo Park Lake a year ago this month drew outrage, but it did not occur in a vacuum.

The melee served as a bookend to months of protest and tumult much of it directed at law enforcement agencies following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in late May 2020.

Police across the country found themselves charged with containing the protests for social justice many of them focused on police violence and suppressing the associated rioting and destruction that periodically ensued.

The year 2020 set records for detentions of journalists in the United States. In 2021, that figure dropped but was still high. According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker project, 59 journalists were arrested or detained across the nation.

More than a quarter of those incidents occurred on that single night last March in Echo Park, where protests against plans to sweep an encampment of homeless people picked up steam.

Reporters say they ran into a buzz saw, caught between angry protesters and indifferent or vindictive police officers.

The Los Angeles Police Department says it has worked in good faith to improve relations with the news media beginning long before Echo Park and renewed in earnest in the year since. It also says it was caught up in waves of change outside its control: changes in technology, in the nature of the news media, and in society more generally.

As the protests flared from 2020 through 2021, the LAPD lost control of its image and its cool, its critics charge.

Los Angeles Police Department armed unit on parade in 1931. Fox Photos/Getty Images hide caption

Los Angeles Police Department armed unit on parade in 1931.

The LAPD's mystique had been the stuff of legends and grist for Hollywood, a collaboration stretching back more than three-quarters of a century. Its reputation for efficiency and incorruptibility was built up in the pages of local newspapers, often working hand in hand with police officials. It was promoted nationally on television shows and movies, often with police on the payroll. In turn, police often went easy on movie stars acting badly.

Tensions over law enforcement conduct flared into public view at times, such as the deadly and destructive Watts riots, prompted by the arrest of a Black motorist by a white California Highway Patrol officer in LA. Yet the press often missed the key stories due to its own racism and close working ties to police. In one infamous instance in 1979, the Los Angeles Times botched its reporting on police shooting and killing a Black woman on her front lawn who had been confrontational over her gas bill.

A couple of years later, the Times wrote a piece headlined "marauders from inner city prey on LA's suburbs." The racial subtext, with direct references to ghettos, barrios, and a permanent underclass, was hardly hidden. The newspaper apologized for its record in an editorial and a 2021 column by Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the paper in 2018.

Over the course of the 1980s, a tougher journalistic stance emerged in the Times and other media outlets, as chronicled by the LA Times' late media critic David Shaw. And then decades of scandal over brutality, racism and corruption arrived for the LAPD, kicked off by the beating of motorist Rodney King by officers in 1991. It was followed by the Ramparts scandal in the late 1990s, which implicated dozens of police officers in violence and corruption and cost the department nearly $100 million in settlements and payouts.

LAPD Officers Ted Briseno (second from left) and Laurence Powell (right) are escorted by a Ventura County deputy sheriff and Powell's father (second from right) through the media room after they were acquitted of all charges except for one against Laurence Powell on April 29, 1992. A mostly white jury acquitted the four police officers accused of beating Rodney King. Hal Garb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

LAPD Officers Ted Briseno (second from left) and Laurence Powell (right) are escorted by a Ventura County deputy sheriff and Powell's father (second from right) through the media room after they were acquitted of all charges except for one against Laurence Powell on April 29, 1992. A mostly white jury acquitted the four police officers accused of beating Rodney King.

A federal judge ordered supervision by the U.S. Justice Department that would last a dozen years. Police say that helped usher in an era of reform at the LAPD in which they now take pride.

"They really see themselves as the gold standard for policing in the U.S.," says Kate Cagle, an anchor for Spectrum News 1 in Los Angeles who often covers law enforcement and social issues. "They're really proud of that."

The scandals over police brutality and corruption also were accompanied by legal fights over the rights and treatment of reporters. Rough police treatment of reporters during the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles inspired a lawsuit. The ensuing settlement with seven journalists led to the requirement that the LAPD had to establish media staging grounds for protests and public events at which journalists could legally gather without harassment.

TV cameras film Los Angeles Police Department officers as they take over a street corner adjacent to the Staples Center, site of the 2000 Democratic National Convention, after a confrontation between police and protesters on Aug. 16, 2000. Gerard Burkhart/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

TV cameras film Los Angeles Police Department officers as they take over a street corner adjacent to the Staples Center, site of the 2000 Democratic National Convention, after a confrontation between police and protesters on Aug. 16, 2000.

"There's some apprehension of the press" inside the force, says former LAPD Deputy Chief Michael Downing, who retired from the force in 2017 after 35 years. "There's a segment of the population within police departments, I think, that are standoffish and don't trust the press. And the press has done some things that have been kind of harmful to their reputation and [to] the character of policing."

But Downing says he has appreciated some of the tougher news coverage, and his philosophy was to find ways to work with the press. "If you ever said anything that was not completely truthful, by the end of the day, whatever you hid would be exposed," Downing says.

Under former LA Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, who led the LAPD from 2002 to 2009, police officers at all levels of the force were empowered to speak directly to the press, Downing says.

Still, frictions repeatedly surfaced.

A jury awarded $1.7 million to a video journalist for the local Fox TV station who alleged she had been beaten by police at a May Day protest for immigration rights at LA's MacArthur Park in 2007.

Los Angeles Police Commission Executive Director Richard Tefank (left) speaks to Los Angeles Police Commissioner Bill Bratton during a Police Commission meeting on May 8, 2007. The agenda included a discussion of the LAPD's response to the May Day demonstration held at MacArthur Park. Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images hide caption

Los Angeles Police Commission Executive Director Richard Tefank (left) speaks to Los Angeles Police Commissioner Bill Bratton during a Police Commission meeting on May 8, 2007. The agenda included a discussion of the LAPD's response to the May Day demonstration held at MacArthur Park.

"There was a war against the media out there that day,'' the attorney for camerawoman Patricia Ballaz had told the jury.

A producer for KPCC, a large NPR member station, sued over mistreatment at the same protests. She received $39,000.

Over time, reporters say, the staging ground established by the court ruling became a mechanism to keep them far away from protests and police actions, rather than a guarantee they could be present to cover them. Body cameras were meant to offer another conduit of accountability. Downing says he is skeptical when police officers claim that the cameras malfunction. That's a way to avoid scrutiny, he says.

Several court rulings over the decades sought to establish guidelines over how the LAPD establishes order during chaos.

In LA, as in much of the nation, the George Floyd protests would send police practices careening off the rails once more. The handling of the press would often serve as a warning for how police treated others: After all, many reporters have major media corporations to stand behind them and major platforms on which to air their grievances. Most people do not.

The decline of long-established press outlets has created breathing room for newer, lesser-known news media. The rocky fortunes of the alternative paper LA Weekly led to a diaspora of journalists seeking platforms and pay elsewhere.

LA Taco surfaced as a home to food and culture writers and evolved into a site offering news as well. Lexis-Olivier Ray, who started as a freelance photographer for LA Taco, became its first full-time reporter, writing pieces on law enforcement, social justice and city policies. He became caught up in mass detentions by police at Echo Park last March.

Lexis-Olivier Ray is a staff reporter for LA Taco. He became caught up in mass detentions by police at Echo Park in March 2021. Philip Cheung for NPR hide caption

Lexis-Olivier Ray is a staff reporter for LA Taco. He became caught up in mass detentions by police at Echo Park in March 2021.

So were reporters from the news site Knock LA, founded by members of a progressive grassroots group called Ground Game LA. The site's agenda remains clearly left-of-center, with sympathetic pieces about immigrants, affordable housing and the rights of criminal defendants. Yet Knock LA's articles appear to be rooted in reported facts, the building blocks of news. Knock LA has posted investigative news reports about the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which is run separately from the LAPD, for example.

Another journalist caught in the fray with police was independent news videographer Sean Beckner-Carmitchel, who posts primarily on his social media accounts and as a freelancer on left-of-center news blogs. In an internal memo, the LAPD refers to LA Taco's Ray and Beckner-Carmitchel as people who "self-identify as members of the press," while casting doubt on that status.

Why should the police get to determine who counts as a journalist and who doesn't? Ray asks.

That night at Echo Park, police arrested Beckner-Carmitchel and Knock LA reporters Kate Gallagher and Jon Peltz and took them into formal custody. Ultimately, no reporters were prosecuted for any crime, though the LAPD's formal after-action report about the night's events would cite "a legal justification for arrest" of journalists.

The department's chief spokesman, LAPD Capt. Stacy Spell, says some journalists from newer outlets or who post primarily on social media act in adversarial or confrontational ways toward officers. Spell says protesters sometimes wear badges or other labels identifying them as reporters to confuse police.

Adam Rose is a former news editor who heads the LA Press Club's press rights committee. Philip Cheung for NPR hide caption

Adam Rose is a former news editor who heads the LA Press Club's press rights committee.

Adam Rose, the head of the press rights committee of the LA Press Club, says he always asks police officials for proof that reporters are interfering with their law enforcement responsibilities. He says he has never been offered any evidence of such incidents. And as the LAPD acknowledges, people do not need to be accredited or licensed to practice journalism.

Spell says his media relations unit seeks to train rank-and-file officers on how to handle reporters, noting that they can often convey important safety messages to the public. The LAPD should also work, he says, to build better ties to nontraditional journalists and unconventional news outlets.

During his tenure, Spell has personally called journalists and met with Rose and leaders from the local chapters of the Radio Television News Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists to address their concerns. Spell's training video for reporters, produced jointly with an official of the RTNA, was publicly posted in April 2021, a month after Echo Park.

Such outreach was needed, as relations had been deteriorating for months.

On May 30, 2020, protests erupted after the posting of an eyewitness video of Floyd's murder by a police officer. That night, as they covered demonstrators marching under the banner of Black Lives Matter, multiple reporters found themselves caught in the undertow across the nation.

In Los Angeles, Cerise Castle, a journalist then working for public radio station KCRW, was hit and injured by a rubber bullet fired by LAPD while covering Black Lives Matter protests in the tony Fairfax district. So was a reporter for Los Angeles Magazine. Police tear-gassed Chava Sanchez of KPCC and its sister site, LAist, at the same incident.

Several other journalists were detained or injured in the hours that followed.

That next day, KPCC reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez was badly injured after being hit in the throat by a rubber bullet fired by police in nearby Long Beach during protests there. CT scans showed that Guzman-Lopez's fillings had been knocked from his teeth by the impact of his rubber bullets. he wrote. Long Beach's mayor apologized publicly.

In September, Josie Huang of KPCC and LAist was forcefully thrown to the ground by sheriff's deputies and arrested after covering a news conference on the deadly ambush of two deputies at a hospital in Compton, south of Los Angeles. Huang, who was wearing a KPCC press pass, taped deputies arresting a man just outside the news conference. She was charged with obstruction of justice on suspicion of interfering with a lawful arrest for filming the incident on her mobile phone.

A journalist for KABC-TV videotaped Huang's arrest and also captured deputies repeatedly stepping on her phone as it continued to record video, apparently in an attempt to destroy it. It took hours for KPCC news executives to succeed in tracking Huang down in custody.

The sheriff's department initially issued a public statement saying Huang had failed to identify herself. The KABC video disproved that. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva then dismissed the idea that deputies would have heard of KPCC one of the nation's largest public radio stations saying it is "not a household name."

The press club's Adam Rose says Huang's treatment by deputies inspired his drive to look more broadly at such incidents.

"It was deeply disturbing to see how she was treated," Rose tells NPR. "It was clearly unnecessary and it was clearly wrong. And so the journalism community here in Los Angeles at that moment started to speak up a lot more. But then we started doing more research, going back, and realized that this had really been a bigger issue for the past year."

Rose created a database of such events and says a striking number involved journalists of color, including Castle (who wrote in-depth pieces on the sheriff's department for Knock LA), Guzman-Lopez, Huang and others.

Echo Park was a capstone for a season of discontent on both sides, rather than a bolt from the blue, Rose says.

On March 25, 2021, beyond the arrests and detentions and zip-tying of other journalists, police shot Christian Monterrosa, a freelance photographer frequently hired by The Associated Press and The New York Times, and Luis Sinco, a veteran Los Angeles Times photojournalist, with what are called "less-lethal" rubber bullets. (For the record, Monterrosa is Latino, while Sinco is Filipino American.)

LAPD officers shot rubber bullets at photojournalist Christian Monterrosa while he was covering a protest in Echo Park, Los Angeles in March 2021. Kayana Szymczak for NPR hide caption

LAPD officers shot rubber bullets at photojournalist Christian Monterrosa while he was covering a protest in Echo Park, Los Angeles in March 2021.

"For Los Angeles as a city, Echo Park became both this turning point for the relationship between police and journalists," says Monterrosa, "and also a reference point for how bad things have gotten in the city between police and journalists."

City council members, press advocates and media executives demanded answers for what had happened. The explanation could have been found in history books and, in the case of news executives, their own publications, news sites and broadcasts: The clashes with the press at Echo Park were built on decades of tensions and months of confrontation.

NPR's Marc Rivers contributed to this report.

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How the LAPD's handling of reporters went from cozy to chaotic - NPR

The UK government has expanded its sanctions against Russia to 14 more people and organisations principally involved with information and media, including a prominent TV anchor and the group that controls the RT television channel.

The new measures, unveiled by the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, are aimed at countering what Truss called the torrent of lies from Russian media about the invasion of Ukraine.

Another individual targeted in this set of sanctions is Col Gen Mikhail Mizintsev, the senior officer in charge of the siege of Mariupol, the southern Ukrainian city being bombarded relentlessly by Russian forces at enormous civilian cost. Mizintsev, who heads the Russian national defence management centre, is accused of employing tactics similar to those used to bomb Syrian cities.

Among those also facing sanctions is Sergey Brilev, a presenter on the Russian state-run Rossiya channel. The Foreign Office notice said Brilev previously lived in the UK but would no longer be able to visit or to access any UK assets.

Also targeted is TV-Novosti, which controls RT, the Russian TV station whose licence to broadcast in the UK was revoked recently by the UK regulator, Ofcom. Another media group named is Rossiya Segodnya, which controls the state-run news agency Sputnik.

So far, the UK has imposed sanctions on 817 individuals and more than 1,200 individuals and entities combined, officials say.

Other individuals named include: Aleksandr Zharov, the chief executive of Gazprom-Media and former head of Roskomnadzor, Russias federal service for the supervision of communications, information technology and mass media; Alexey Nikolov, the managing director of RT; and Anton Anisimov, the editor-in-chief of Sputnik.

We want to continue to further ratchet up the pressure on Putin and his regime, Boris Johnsons official spokesperson said. We know that countries can adapt to sanctions over time, so its right that we keep moving forwards on this. Its equally right to place sanctions on those who are seeking to misinform people on a mass scale, and that is what these sanctions are targeted at.

Truss said: Putins war on Ukraine is based on a torrent of lies. Britain has helped lead the world in exposing Kremlin disinformation, and this latest batch of sanctions hits the shameless propagandists who push out Putins fake news and narratives.

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UK sanctions target Russian general and media heavyweights - The Guardian

The logo for the new Russian Instagram, Rossgram, which was launched to select creators on March 28. Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Russian developers have launched an Instagram alternative called Rossgram, after the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine and international backlash has made it unclear if Instagram has a future in the country.

Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine at the beginning of February, global social media companies including Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook have either blocked or restricted their services in the country, or have been banned outright.

Rossgram joins a slate of Russian versions of major platforms that seek to mimic larger and more popular social media companies, resulting in a landscape of Russian knockoffs that often struggle to attract users while raising questions about how much access the Kremlin has to users' data.

Even before the invasion, experts say that Russia already had generational and economic gaps in how people in Russia get their news and the social media networks they use. Recent bans and restrictions on social media use have exacerbated these divides, with younger tech-savvy people being more likely to work around restrictions, rather than turning to potentially invasive state controlled services.

Russia has been trying to coax internet users to turn to its own versions of popular sites, such as YouTube knockoff RuTube, for years. Authorities this year offered online creators the equivalent of $1,700 a month to move their content to RuTube, according to Coda Story, attempting to make up for its minuscule audience.

A 2021 report by the Levada Center, an independent polling organisation, found that YouTube is used by 37% of Russians, Instagram by 34%, and TikTok by 16%. But some native platforms hold influence too. Out of Russia's 70 million active social media users, according to research by Linkfluence, a market research platform, 83% use a social media platform similar to Facebook called VKontakte, and 55% use another called OdnoKlassniki.

According to Alyssa Demus, an associate international and defense researcher at Rand corporation, Russia has long been building up an ecosystem of alternative social media platforms. But people tend to be more sceptical and cautious when using them out of fear that the government is involved in their operations and users' information isn't secure.

"Either Russia has a hand in the building of the platform from this start, or they strong arm or co-opt whatever is popular later," Demus told Insider. "I know there's significant use of platforms like WhatsApp or others that are believed to be encrypted for that very reason so that there can be open communication without the fear of reprisal."

Russia has also enacted laws to exert influence on non-Russian social media platforms, including passing legislation stating companies need to place their servers for Russian accounts on Russian territory.

"Presumably so they can then sort of meddle and do whatever kind of surveillance they need to," Demus said.

TikTok's refusal to cooperate with this law is what led to the development of a video sharing platform called Yappy at the end of 2021. It was developed with support of the Innopraktika Foundation, a research institute with clients such as oil giant Rosneft and nuclear energy company Rosatom, which Putin's alleged daughter Katerina Tikhonova runs, according to the Moscow Times.

The Russian government has spent years attempting to either recreate or co-opt popular platforms. In 2014, VKontakte's founder Pavel Durov often referred to in media as Russia's version of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was driven out of his company by a coup after the platform was being increasingly used by opposition groups against Putin.

"He left the country for some reason, and then essentially was voted out as CEO by the board," Demus said. "And then subsequently the Russian government took over."

VKontakte and OdnoKlassniki, often shortened to VK and OK, are still very entrenched in the lives of Russian people, Demus added, but they tend to be used with a "growing understanding that anything Russia touches has the potential to land you in jail."

As in the United States, there is also a generational divide in how Russians use different social media platforms and the various demographics associated with each. Younger generations, researchers say, tend to be more attracted to global platforms such as Instagram and Twitter while more older Russians use VK and OK.

"There's a huge generational gap in Russia, not just with social media platforms, but in where they go for their news," Mary Blankenship, a policy researcher at Brookings Mountain West of the University of Nevada, told Insider.

According to the Levada Center report, television is where most Russian people get their news, but its dominance is declining dropping from 90% to 62% in five years. Younger generations are more likely to get their news on social media sites, and use virtual private networks (VPNs) to access sites that have been blocked by the government. The ability to use international platforms with less government control also results in access to media that's more critical of Putin and the Kremlin.

"Typically, the users that are older, that are less wealthy, less educated, and are in rural areas, support Russia and are way more aligned with Russian beliefs and rhetoric about the war in Ukraine than the people who are younger, wealthier, and live in urban areas," she said. "A lot of that has to do with the access to information that they get."

Younger people are less likely to believe Kremlin propaganda, Blankenship said, but are still susceptible to social media platforms reinforcing beliefs and narrowing the range of opinion they see.

"There are a lot of different echo chambers within social media, no matter what political issue or political leaning you are," she said. " You eventually create this bubble of people that are aligned with your views."

Russian speakers who believe the conspiracy theories and propaganda coming from the Kremlin will have their beliefs confirmed by other users sharing those same views, she said. For Russian people who are critical of the government and distrust its disinformation campaigns, Demus said, watching propaganda thrive as platforms with freedom of speech diminish must be "terrifying."

"They're becoming even more oppressed in their own country and have fewer civil liberties and less of a voice," she said. "But they're also being villainised by the world. It's a really tough position to be in."

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Russia launches its own version of Instagram, adding to its list of knockoff social media platforms - Business Insider South Africa

Some social media influencers have recently been promoting tanning products containing melanotan II, an illegal artificial hormone that can accelerate tanning. These products come in the form of injections and nasal sprays.

Authorities in multiple countries have issued safety warnings surrounding melanotan IIs use due to its link to conditions such as skin cancer and kidney infarction.

To understand more about melanotan II, Medical News Today spoke with four experts about the risks of using the hormone, what regulators could do to prevent its usage, and safe alternatives.

Melanotan II is a synthetic melanotropic peptide that is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is not approved for human use, said Dr. Anand N. Rajpara, associate professor of Dermatology at the University of Kansas.

It is either injected into the skin or inhaled through the nose. It works by stimulating our melanocytes to produce the skin darkening pigment melanin, he explained.

In conversation with MNT, Dr. Faraz Mahmood Ali, from the Department of Dermatology and Wound Healing at Cardiff University, the United Kingdom, listed several side effects of the drug:

Furthermore, there are long-term concerns about the increased risk of developing new moles and skin cancers such as melanoma, said Dr. Ali.

Dr. Elena Minakova, assistant professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine, added that setmelanotide, a recently FDA-approved drug for obesity-associated genetic syndromes, works similarly to melanotan II.

Its side effects, she said, thus overlap with those for melanotan II and also include:

When asked what regulators could do to prevent people from using melanotan II, Dr. Faraz said [t]here needs to be increased awareness regarding the potential harms of using melanotan, especially for the youth who may be subject to misinformation.

Social media and other popular news and media outlets need to do more to stamp out false or misleading content [while] allowing experts to disseminate scientifically-accurate information, he added.

More studies and case reports are necessary to ascertain long-term unknown harms and side-effects. People wanting to consider tanning options should do so by discussing options with a dermatologist, he explained.

MNT also spoke with Prof. Tony Cass, professor of chemical biology at Imperial College London, the U.K., who was involved in a recent analysis of 10 tanning kits.

While Prof. Cass and his colleagues expected to find around 10 ingredients in a licensed medication, they were shocked to discover that some of the products analyzed contained over 100 unidentified ingredients, alongside melanotan II.

With unregulated/ illegal products, the label has no information, and as our analysis showed there were many other constituents, [and] there is no way for the consumer to find out what these are, Prof. Cass told MNT. Regulation is very difficult in this case, especially as internet influencer-based promotion is in any case difficult to control.

Making consumers aware may help, although as we see with smoking, even lurid warnings dont necessarily work. Internet companies [] could use AI [artificial intelligence software] to put a warning on the screen, but Im not sure they have the will to do so, he added.

We already know about the damaging effects of chronic sun exposure, including skin cancers and premature aging. Therefore, this method of tanning should always be avoided, Dr. Ali emphasized.

Sunless tanning options are the safest to consider in the long-term which include spray-on bronzers and stainers. One should always consult a dermatologist to discuss potential risks, side effects, and benefits prior to embarking on any new treatments.

Dr. Faraz Mahmood Ali

Dr. Rajpara agreed that spray-on options could be an alternative:

Sunless tanners and sprays containing DHA (dihydroxyacetone) are generally considered safe as long as you are avoiding inhalation and eye contact. However, they offer zero sun protection, so sunscreen is still a must.

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Melanotan II: Tanning injections, nasal sprays harmful to health - Medical News Today