CIS Focal Issue

Millennials are living longer and are the best-educated generation in history.

and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, Stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services,” Zuckerberg wrote.

Advertisers worldwide will continue to shift spending from the News Feed to Stories, slowing ad revenue growth for Facebook in 2019. Stories monetize at a lower rate than the News Feed.

More social commerce: Facebook is likely to expand its “Checkout on Instagram” to new countries and companies throughout 2019.

What’s better than something that is basically a story about you?”

AI will transform business and the economy, and increasingly, some are convinced it will radically change how we do science.

“The most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America,” the former Google chief executive reportedly told

“Globalization means that they get to play too.”

in the longer term, there’s a real risk American companies could get supplanted by the likes of WeChat, TikTok

But we don’t have the level of independent decision-making we think we have. We think we see the recommendations and then we do what we want, but algorithms are actually nudging us in interesting ways

The key message is that we are going into a world where these algorithms will help us make better decisions. We’ll have growing pains along the way.

Germany last year began prohibiting hate speech

The rules would apply to social media platforms, discussion forums, messaging services and search engines.

Western democracies

are becoming more willing to intervene.

Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.

All the kids I spoke to said that class pages have been critical in making them feel more comfortable about leaving home.

We’re happiest when our ties with others are deep and strong. And the research tells us that the ebb and flow of happiness in America is clearly linked to the quality and character of our social ties—including our friendships, community ties, and marriage. It’s also linked, specifically, to the frequency with which we have sex.

So we investigated four indicators of sociability among today’s young adults—marriage, friendship, religious attendance, and sex—in an effort to explain

married young adults are about 75 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not married

As it turns out, the share of young adults who are married has fallen from 59 percent in 1972 to 28 percent in 2018. The decline has been similar for men and women, although from 2016 to 2018 the share of married men fell, while the share of married women rose.

Faith was the second factor. Young adults who attend religious services more than once a month are about 40 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not religious at all

The share of young adults who attend religious services more than monthly has fallen from 38 percent in 1972 to 27 percent in 2018, even as the share who never attend has risen rapidly.

The third factor was friendship. The effect of seeing friends frequently is less clear than that of marriage or religion, but young adults who see their friends regularly do seem to be about 10 percent more likely to report being very happy than their less-sociable peers.

Indeed, it may be that rising social time spent with friends in recent years could be buffering young adults from the declines in institutions such as marriage or religion, as friends stand in place of other relationships or forms of community.*

And, finally, we looked at sex. Young adults who have sex at least once a week are about 35 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who have no sex.

This trend in rising sexlessness is broadly confirmed in other surveys of sexual behavior,

Less sex, we speculate, could help account for declining happiness for many young adults.

What’s more, as the #MeToo era has taught us, there has been too much unwanted or nonconsensual sex out there, which is obviously bad for the (more often female) target of such advances. From this perspective, the so-called sex recession might just amount to a sexual recalibration, with a lot of bad sex being eliminated from our social lives—and this would be a good thing. For all these reasons, the feminist family historian Stephanie Coontz is “suspicious of any hand-wringing” about the sex recession.