According to Pangram, one in four social media posts are now fully synthetic or AI generated. Of all posts they flagged as AI-generated, two-thirds came from LinkedIn.
Depressed girls use social media more, she says, but social media use doesn't seem to predict later depression. The real crisis, in Odgers' telling, is among adults: parental overdose deaths more than doubled between 2011 and 2021, and caregivers' mental health is among the strongest predictors of child outcomes.
The students said that they only stayed on TikTok because other people were on it too, and they were afraid of missing out. FOMO is not utility; it's a bad equilibrium.
I don't know at what point performing for friends and rooting for your team falls over the edge into something darker. I don't know at what point we forget that the person on the other end of our comments is a human being. I don't know at what point our rage becomes more important than the object of our fury.
an important aspect of that story, and one I did not include in that column, is that text-based social networks as a category don't appear to be growing, either.
The behavior that makes Jake and Logan hard to take seriously is the same behavior that has kept them at the center of everything. Over the past two decades, Jake and Logan built a social media empire in public, amassing a combined following of more than 150 million and becoming a case study in growing up in the attention economy.
The word "staged" exploded on social media following the attack, as both right and left-wing influencers and anonymous accounts spread unfounded conspiracy theories.
The "6-7" meme was revelatory because of the immense gap between its symbolic payload — essentially nonexistent — and its cultural penetration. It worked like tracer dye running through our information ecosystem, revealing its functions and dysfunctions.
The quirky art culture, vibrant street scenes, and mosaic of small independent businesses that defined 2000s Japan are vanishing under the relentless assault of aging, economic stagnation, and social media.
There was a time — in the days when the internet was still a force for fun — when Chuck Norris jokes flooded our screens. It was the mid-2000s. Twitter and Facebook were not yet ascendant. We weren't yet glued to our phones.
Basically, spreading hate and divisiveness on social media is a form of entrepreneurship. As Eugene Wei has written, social media is all about getting social status. 10,000 followers on X may not sound like a media empire to rival CBS News, but for most people it's more attention than they would otherwise get in their entire life.
one of the ironies of writing a book is that your publisher asks to you sharpen your Instagram skills so that you can sell it on a platform that is wildly post-literate and is the same time the home of many writers dancing as fast as they can to create attention for the product of all that sweat and toil.
The paradox of Jason Lee—to me, The Enemy, at least—is that he is a celebrity who openly invites fans to come hang out with him on a regular basis, but who also has historically remained a notably private person.
In a social media landscape where the difference between real and artificial has grown nearly imperceptible, the unmistakable humanity of real-time video is a refreshing draw.
5mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
