Eight-year-old Sejal Yadav was pulled from the wreckage of a derailed train in northern India and rushed alone to hospital. Hours later she was reunited with her brother -- thanks to WhatsApp.

Facebook on Wednesday said that it has bought facial recognition startup FacioMetrics, potentially using the technology for photo or video effects to better challenge rival Snapchat.

"How people share and communicate is changing and things like masks and other effects allow people to express themselves in fun and creative ways," a Facebook spokesperson said in an email reply to an AFP inquiry.

A Dutchman accused of launching an unprecedented 2013 cyberattack that reportedly "nearly broke the internet" escaped jail Monday even though he was sentenced to some eight months in prison as most of the term was suspended.

Internet freedom declined for a sixth consecutive year in 2016 as governments around the world cracked down on social media and messaging applications used to express dissent, a watchdog group said Monday.

The Freedom on the Net report by the activist group Freedom House said a growing number of regimes are restricting or censoring messaging platforms such as WhatsApp in addition to popular social networks.

President-elect Donald Trump credited his provocative use of Twitter and other social media with helping him win the US elections, saying it gave him a way of "fighting back."

In an interview that airs in full on Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes," Trump said with some reluctance that he would be more restrained in his use of social media once in the White House, but said it was nothing to be ashamed of.

Facebook accidentally declared its founder Mark Zuckerberg and many other users dead on Friday, acknowledging after fixing the problem that it had committed a "terrible error."

They are under-represented in the industry and sometimes made to feel unwelcome in geek-infested workspaces, but women are making their voices heard at Europe's largest technology marketplace.

A Russian court on Thursday ruled that professional networking website LinkedIn can be blocked under a controversial new law because it does not store local users' data inside the country.

Spanish police said Thursday they had arrested 56 men suspected of sharing photos online of severe abuse on young children, some of them babies, in a nationwide crackdown on child pornography.

German police launched an investigation Thursday after the addresses of Jewish institutions were published on Facebook by neo-Nazis on the anniversary of the 1938 pogroms against Jews.