One calculation performed by an audience demographics firm found 32 million connections to male followers among the 5,000 accounts examined by The Times.

Interacting with the men opens the door to abuse. Some flatter, bully and blackmail girls and their parents to get racier and racier images. The Times monitored separate exchanges on Telegram, the messaging app, where men openly fantasize about sexually abusing the children they follow on Instagram and extol the platform for making the images so readily available.

“It’s like a candy store

The troubling interactions on Instagram come as social media companies increasingly dominate the cultural landscape and the internet is seen as a career path of its own.

Nearly one in three preteens lists influencing as a career goal, and 11 percent of those born in Generation Z, between 1997 and 2012, describe themselves as influencers.

The so-called creator economy surpasses $250 billion worldwide, according to Goldman Sachs, with U.S. brands spending more than $5 billion a year on influencers.

Health and technology experts have recently cautioned that social media presents a “profound risk of harm” for girls. Constant comparisons to their peers and face-altering filters are driving negative feelings of self-worth and promoting objectification of their bodies, researchers found.

he pursuit of online fame, particularly through Instagram, has supercharged the often toxic phenomenon, The Times found, encouraging parents to commodify their children’s images. Some of the child influencers earn six-figure incomes, according to interviews.

People believe that memory should be effortless, but their expectations for how much they should remember are totally out of whack with how much they’re capable of remembering.1

What is the most common misconception about memory?

Another misconception is that memory is supposed to be an archive of the past. We expect that we should be able to replay the past like a movie in our heads.

we don’t replay the past as it happened; we do it through a lens of interpretation and imagination.

How much are we capable of remembering, from both an episodic2 2 Episodic memory is the term for the memory of life experiences. and a semantic3 3 Semantic memory is the term for the memory of facts and knowledge about the world. standpoint?

I would argue that we’re all everyday-memory experts, because we have this exceptional semantic memory, which is the scaffold for episodic memory.

If what we’re remembering, or the emotional tenor of what we’re remembering, is dictated by how we’re thinking in a present moment, what can we really say about the truth of a memory?

But if memories are malleable, what are the implications for how we understand our “true” selves?

your question gets to a major purpose of memory, which is to give us an illusion of stability in a world that is always changing. Because if we look for memories, we’ll reshape them into our beliefs of what’s happening right now. We’ll be biased in terms of how we sample the past. We have these illusions of stability, but we are always changing

And depending on what memories we draw upon, those life narratives can change.

we have this illusion that much of the world is cause and effect. But the reason, in my opinion, that we have that illusion is that our brain is constantly trying to find the patterns

One thing that makes the human brain so sophisticated is that we have a longer timeline in which we can integrate information than many other species. That gives us the ability to say: “Hey, I’m walking up and giving money to the cashier at the cafe. The barista is going to hand me a cup of coffee in about a minute or two.”

There is this illusion that we know exactly what’s going to happen, but the fact is we don’t. Memory can overdo it: Somebody lied to us once, so they are a liar; somebody shoplifted once, they are a thief.

If people have a vivid memory of something that sticks out, that will overshadow all their knowledge about the way things work. So there’s kind of an illus

I know it sounds squirmy to say, “Well, I can’t answer the question of how much we remember,” but I don’t want readers to walk away thinking memory is all made up.

I think of memory more like a painting than a photograph. There’s often photorealistic aspects of a painting, but there’s also interpretation. As a painter evolves, they could revisit the same subject over and over and paint differently based on who they are now. We’re capable of remembering things in extraordinary detail, but we infuse meaning into what we remember. We’re designed to extract meaning from the past, and that meaning should have truth in it. But it also has knowledge and imagination and, sometimes, wisdom.

memory, often, is educated guesses by the brain about what’s important. So what’s important? Things that are scary, things that get your desire going, things that are surprising. Maybe you were attracted to this person, and your eyes dilated, your pulse went up. Maybe you were working on something in this high state of excitement, and your dopamine was up.

It could be any of those things, but they’re all important in some way, because if you’re a brain, you want to take what’s surprising, you want to take what’s motivationally important for survival, what’s new.

On the more intentional side, are there things that we might be able to do in the moment to make events last in our memories? In some sense, it’s about being mindful. If we want to form a new memory, focus on aspects of the experience you want to take with you.

If you’re with your kid, you’re at a park, focus on the parts of it that are great, not the parts that are kind of annoying. Then you want to focus on the sights, the sounds, the smells, because those will give you rich detail later on

Another part of it, too, is that we kill ourselves by inducing distractions in our world. We have alerts on our phones. We check email habitually.

When we go on trips, I take candid shots. These are the things that bring you back to moments. If you capture the feelings and the sights and the sounds that bring you to the moment, as opposed to the facts of what happened, that is a huge part of getting the best of memory.

this goes back to the question of whether the factual truth of a memory matters to how we interpret it. I think it matters to have some truth, but then again, many of the truths we cling to depend on our own perspective.

There’s a great experiment on this. These researchers had people read this story about a house.8 8 The study was “Recall of Previously Unrecallable Information Following a Shift in Perspective,” by Richard C. Anderson and James W. Pichert. One group of subjects is told, I want you to read this story from the perspective of a prospective home buyer. When they remember it, they remember all the features of the house that are described in the thing. Another group is told, I want you to remember this from the perspective of a burglar. Those people tend to remember the valuables in the house and things that you would want to take. But what was interesting was then they switched the groups around. All of a sudden, people could pull up a number of details that they didn’t pull up before. It was always there, but they just didn’t approach it from that mind-set. So we do have a lot of information that we can get if we change our perspective, and this ability to change our perspective is exceptionally important for being accurate. It’s exceptionally important for being able to grow and modify our beliefs

In an Atlantic essay, “Why The Past Ten Years of American Life have Been Uniquely Stupid,” and in a follow-up piece, Haidt argued that the Age of Gutenberg–of books and the depth understanding that comes with them–ended somewhere around 2014 with the rise of “Share,” “Like” and “Retweet” buttons that opened the way for trolls, hucksters and Trumpists

The new age of “hyper-virality,” he writes, has given us both January 6 and cancel culture–ugly polarization in both directions. On the subject of stupidification, we should add the fact that high school students now get virtually their entire stock of knowledge about the world from digital platforms.

Haidt proposed several reforms, including modifying Facebook’s “Share” function and requiring “user verification” to get rid of trolls. But he doesn’t really believe in his own medicine

Haidt said that the era of “shared understanding” is over–forever. When I asked if he could envision changes that would help protect democracy, Haidt quoted Goldfinger: “Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”

Social media is a public health hazard–the cognitive equivalent of tobacco and sugary drinks. Adopting a public health model, we could, for examople, ban the use of algorithms to reduce virality, or even require social media platforms to adopt a subscription rather than advertising revenue model and thus remove their incentive to amass ev er more eyeballs.

We could, but we won’t, because unlike other public health hazards, digital platforms are forms of speech. Fox New is probably responsible for more polarization than all social media put together, but the federal government could not compel it–and all other media firms–to change its revenue model.

If Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk won’t do so out of concern for the public good–a pretty safe bet–they could be compelled to do so only by public or competitive pressure. 

Taiwan has provide resilient because its society is resilient; people reject China’s lies. We, here, don’t lack for fact-checkers, but rather for people willing to believe them. The problem is not the technology, but ourselves.

you have to wonder if people really are repelled by our poisonous discourse, or by the hailstorm of disinformation, or if they just want to live comfortably inside their own bubble, and not somebody else’

If Jonathan Haidt is right, it’s not because we’ve created a self-replicating machine that is destined to annihilate reason; it’s because we are the self-replicating machine.

Understanding how empathy can immobilize us like that is a critical step for helping others — and ourselves.

Early researchers labeled it compassion fatigue and described it as the cost of caring.

Having concluded that nothing they do will make a difference, they start to become indifferent.

The symptoms of empathic distress were originally diagnosed in health care, with nurses and doctors who appeared to become insensitive to the pain of their patients.

Empathic distress explains why many people have checked out in the wake of these tragedies

when two neuroscientists, Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer, reviewed the evidence, they discovered that “compassion fatigue” is a misnomer. Caring itself is not costly. What drains people is not merely witnessing others’ pain but feeling incapable of alleviating it.

In times of sustained anguish, empathy is a recipe for more distress, and in some cases even depression. What we need instead is compassion.

empathy and compassion aren’t the same. Empathy absorbs others’ emotions as your own: “I’m hurting for you.”

Compassion focuses your action on their emotions: “I see that you’re hurting, and I’m here for you.”

“Empathy is biased,” the psychologist Paul Bloom writes. It’s something we usually reserve for our own group, and in that sense, it can even be “a powerful force for war and atrocity.”

Dr. Singer and their colleagues trained people to empathize by trying to feel other people’s pain. When the participants saw someone suffering, it activated a neural network that would light up if they themselves were in pain. It hurt. And when people can’t help, they escape the pain by withdrawing.

To combat this, the Klimecki and Singer team taught their participants to respond with compassion rather than empathy — focusing not on sharing others’ pain but on noticing their feelings and offering comfort.

A different neural network lit up, one associated with affiliation and social connection. This is why a growing body of evidence suggests that compassion is healthier for you and kinder to others than empathy:

When you see others in pain, instead of causing you to get overloaded and retreat, compassion motivates you to reach out and help

The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it.

in my research, I’ve found that being helpful has a secondary benefit: It’s an antidote to feeling helpless.

To figure out who needs your support after something terrible happens, the psychologist Susan Silk suggests picturing a dart board, with the people closest to the trauma in the bull’s-eye and those more peripherally affected in the outer rings.

Once you’ve figured out where you belong on the dart board, look for support from people outside your ring, and offer it to people closer to the center.

Even if people aren’t personally in the line of fire, attacks targeting members of a specific group can shatter a whole population’s sense of security.

If you notice that people in your life seem disengaged around an issue that matters to you, it’s worth considering whose pain they might be carrying.

Instead of demanding that they do more, it may be time to show them compassion — and help them find compassion for themselves, too.

Your small gesture of kindness won’t end the crisis in the Middle East, but it can help someone else. And that can give you the strength to help more.

Doing the opposite by writing a dissertation. The endless look-at-me-I’m-so-cute one-line reviews are a constant on Letterboxd, but there’s plenty that go too far the other way, too. I love a good longform review that does a deep dive and carefully considers themes, of a kind that wasn’t really possible in the era of all-print media. But this is not the venue. Start a blog like everybody else.

match your engagement to the structure of the network.

Fake contrarianism.

Comparing your taste to some other party who you know will be unpopular with other users.

Utterly superficial appeals to facile political critiques. These are usually wrong, and when right are shooting the fattest of fish in the smallest of barrels. Yes, Gone With the Wind is pretty fucked up in 2023 political terms! Where would we be without your wisdom to guide us? Using politics to inform a review is great. Explaining why the implicit or explicit political themes of a movie are trouble is fine. Arriving at a pat political condemnation as a substitute for having an aesthetic take on a movie is boring and pointless.

Inventing your own scoring system in a network with a five-star system. 78/100! B+! Three boxes of popcorn! There’s a star system right there baked into the app, jackass.

Pretending to believe (but not really believing) that people won’t recognize your name as a professional film critic

“I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay said in the interview. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”

this is like if Russell Moore came out and said that, on the whole, Christianity turns out to be a bad thing. It’s that big of a deal.

Thompson’s case centers around constraints and supply, particularly as they apply to content creation.

In the pre-internet days, creating and distributing content was relatively expensive, which placed content publishers—be they newspapers, or TV stations, or movie studios—high on the value chain.

The internet reduced distribution costs to zero and this shifted value away from publishers and over to aggregators: Suddenly it was more important to aggregate an audience—a la Google and Facebook—than to be a content creator.

Audiences were valuable; content was commoditized.

What has alarmed Thompson is that AI has now reduced the cost of creating content to zero.

what does the world look like when both the creation and distribution of content are zero?

Hellscape

We’re headed to a place where content is artificially created and distributed in such a way as to be tailored to a given user’s preferences. Which will be the equivalent of living in a hall of mirrors.

What does that mean for news? Nothing good.

So the challenges the New York Times face will be different than the challenges that NPR or your local paper face.

It doesn’t really make sense to talk about “news media” because there are fundamental differences between publication models that are driven by scale.

Two big takeaways:

(1) Ad-supported publications will not survive

Zero-cost for content creation combined with zero-cost distribution means an infinite supply of content. The more content you have, the more ad space exists—the lower ad prices go.

Actually, some ad-supported publications will survive. They just won’t be news. What will survive will be content mills that exist to serve ads specifically matched to targeted audiences.

(2) Size is determinative.

The New York Times has a moat by dint of its size. It will see the utility of its soft “news” sections decline in value, because AI is going to be better at creating cooking and style content than breaking hard news. But still, the NYT will be okay because it has pivoted hard into being a subscription-based service over the last decade.

At the other end of the spectrum, independent journalists should be okay. A lone reporter running a focused Substack who only needs four digits’ worth of subscribers to sustain them.

But everything in between? That’s a crapshoot.

Technology writers sometimes talk about the contrast between “builders” and “conservers” — roughly speaking, between those who are most animated by what we stand to gain from technology and those animated by what we stand to lose.

in our moment the builder and conserver types are proving quite mercurial. On issues ranging from Big Tech to medicine, human enhancement to technologies of governance, the politics of technology are in upheaval.

Dispositions are supposed to be basically fixed. So who would have thought that deep blue cities that yesterday were hotbeds of vaccine skepticism would today become pioneers of vaccine passports? Or that outlets that yesterday reported on science and tech developments in reverent tones would today make it their mission to unmask “tech bros”?

One way to understand this churn is that the builder and the conserver types each speak to real, contrasting features within human nature. Another way is that these types each pick out real, contrasting features of technology. Focusing strictly on one set of features or the other eventually becomes unstable, forcing the other back into view.

it lacks practical application. If humans found something on another planet that seemed to be alive, how much time would we have to sit around and wait for it to evolve?

The only life we know is life on Earth. Some scientists call this the n=1 problem, where n is the number of examples from which we can generalize.

Cronin studies the origin of life, also a major interest of Walker’s, and it turned out that, when expressed in math, their ideas were essentially the same. They had both zeroed in on complexity as a hallmark of life. Cronin is devising a way to systematize and measure complexity, which he calls Assembly Theory.

What we really want is more than a definition of life. We want to know what life, fundamentally, is. For that kind of understanding, scientists turn to theories. A theory is a scientific fundamental. It not only answers questions, but frames them, opening new lines of inquiry. It explains our observations and yields predictions for future experiments to test.

Consider the difference between defining gravity as “the force that makes an apple fall to the ground” and explaining it, as Newton did, as the universal attraction between all particles in the universe, proportional to the product of their masses and so on. A definition tells us what we already know; a theory changes how we understand things.

the potential rewards of unlocking a theory of life have captivated a clutch of researchers from a diverse set of disciplines. “There are certain things in life that seem very hard to explain,” Sara Imari Walker, a physicist at Arizona State University who has been at the vanguard of this work, told me. “If you scratch under the surface, I think there is some structure that suggests formalization and mathematical laws.”

Walker doesn’t think about life as a biologist—or an astrobiologist—does. When she talks about signs of life, she doesn’t talk about carbon, or water, or RNA, or phosphine. She reaches for different examples: a cup, a cellphone, a chair. These objects are not alive, of course, but they’re clearly products of life. In Walker’s view, this is because of their complexity. Life brings complexity into the universe, she says, in its own being and in its products, because it has memory: in DNA, in repeating molecular reactions, in the instructions for making a chair.

He measures the complexity of an object—say, a molecule—by calculating the number of steps necessary to put the object’s smallest building blocks together in that certain way. His lab has found, for example, when testing a wide range of molecules, that those with an “assembly number” above 15 were exclusively the products of life. Life makes some simpler molecules, too, but only life seems to make molecules that are so complex.

I reach for the theory of gravity as a familiar parallel. Someone might ask, “Okay, so in terms of gravity, where are we in terms of our understanding of life? Like, Newton?” Further back, further back, I say. Walker compares us to pre-Copernican astronomers, reliant on epicycles, little orbits within orbits, to make sense of the motion we observe in the sky. Cleland has put it in terms of chemistry, in which case we’re alchemists, not even true chemists yet

Walker’s whole notion is that it’s not only theoretically possible but genuinely achievable to identify something smaller—much smaller—that still nonetheless simply must be the result of life. The model would, in a sense, function like biosignatures as an indication of life that could be searched for. But it would drastically improve and expand the targets.

Walker would use the theory to predict what life on a given planet might look like. It would require knowing a lot about the planet—information we might have about Venus, but not yet about a distant exoplanet—but, crucially, would not depend at all on how life on Earth works, what life on Earth might do with those materials.

Without the ability to divorce the search for alien life from the example of life we know, Walker thinks, a search is almost pointless. “Any small fluctuations in simple chemistry can actually drive you down really radically different evolutionary pathways,” she told me. “I can’t imagine [life] inventing the same biochemistry on two worlds.”

Walker’s approach is grounded in the work of, among others, the philosopher of science Carol Cleland, who wrote The Quest for a Universal Theory of Life.

she warns that any theory of life, just like a definition, cannot be constrained by the one example of life we currently know. “It’s a mistake to start theorizing on the basis of a single example, even if you’re trying hard not to be Earth-centric. Because you’re going to be Earth-centric,” Cleland told me. In other words, until we find other examples of life, we won’t have enough data from which to devise a theory. Abstracting away from Earthliness isn’t a way to be agnostic, Cleland argues. It’s a way to be too abstract.

Cleland calls for a more flexible search guided by what she calls “tentative criteria.” Such a search would have a sense of what we’re looking for, but also be open to anomalies that challenge our preconceptions, detections that aren’t life as we expected but aren’t familiar not-life either—neither a flower nor a rock

it speaks to the hope that exploration and discovery might truly expand our understanding of the cosmos and our own world.

The astrobiologist Kimberley Warren-Rhodes studies life on Earth that lives at the borders of known habitability, such as in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The point of her experiments is to better understand how life might persist—and how it might be found—on Mars. “Biology follows some rules,” she told me. The more of those rules you observe, the better sense you have of where to look on other worlds.

In this light, the most immediate concern in our search for extraterrestrial life might be less that we only know about life on Earth, and more that we don’t even know that much about life on Earth in the first place. “I would say we understand about 5 percent,” Warren-Rhodes estimates of our cumulative knowledge. N=1 is a problem, and we might be at more like n=.05.

who knows how strange life on another world might be? What if life as we know it is the wrong life to be looking for?

We understand so little, and we think we’re ready to find other life?

In short, a complex and evolving system — whether that’s a flock of gold finches or a nebula or the English language — will produce ever more diverse and intricately detailed states and configurations of itself.

Some of these more diverse and intricate configurations, the scientists write, are shed and forgotten over time. The configurations that persist are ones that find some utility or novel function in a process akin to natural selection, but a selection process driven by the passing-on of information rather than just the sowing of biological genes

Have they finally glimpsed, I wonder, the connectedness and symbiotic co-evolution of their own scientific ideas with those of the world’s writers

Have they learned to describe in their own quantifying language that cradle from which both our disciplines have emerged and the firmament on which they both stand — the hearing and telling of stories in order to exist?

Have they quantified the quality of all existent matter, living and not: that all things inherit a story in data to tell, and that our stories are told by the very forms we take to tell them? 

“Is there a universal basis for selection? Is there a more quantitative formalism underlying this conjectured conceptual equivalence—a formalism rooted in the transfer of information?,” they ask of the world’s disparate phenomena. “The answer to both questions is yes.”

Yes. They’ve glimpsed it, whether they know it or not. Sing to me, O Muse, of functional information and its complex diversity.

The principle of complexity evolving at its own pace when left to its own devices, independent of time but certainly in a dance with it, is nothing new. Not in science, nor in its closest humanities kin, science and nature writing. Give things time and nourishing environs, protect them from your own intrusions and — living organisms or not — they will produce abundant enlacement of forms.

This is how poetry was born from the same larynxes and phalanges that tendered nuclear equations: We featherless bipeds gave language our time and delighted attendance until its forms were so multivariate that they overflowed with inevitable utility.

In her Pulitzer-winning “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” nature writer Annie Dillard explains plainly that evolution is the vehicle of such intricacy in the natural world, as much as it is in our own thoughts and actions. 

“The stability of simple forms is the sturdy base from which more complex, stable forms might arise, forming in turn more complex forms,” she explains, drawing on the undercap frills of mushrooms and filament-fine filtering tubes inside human kidneys to illustrate her point. 

“Utility to the creature is evolution’s only aesthetic consideration. Form follows function in the created world, so far as I know, and the creature that functions, however bizarre, survives to perpetuate its form,” writes Dillard.

“Of the multiplicity of forms, I know nothing. Except that, apparently, anything goes. This holds for forms of behavior as well as design — the mantis munching her mate, the frog wintering in mud.” 

She notes that, of all forms of life we’ve ever known to exist, only about 10% are still alive. What extravagant multiplicity. 

“Intricacy is that which is given from the beginning, the birthright, and in the intricacy is the hardiness of complexity that ensures against the failures of all life,” Dillard writes. “The wonder is — given the errant nature of freedom and the burgeoning texture of time — the wonder is that all the forms are not monsters, that there is beauty at all, grace gratuitous.”

“This paper, and the reason why I'm so proud of it, is because it really represents a connection between science and the philosophy of science that perhaps offers a new lens into why we see everything that we see in the universe,” lead scientist Michael Wong told Motherboard in a recent interview. 

Wong is an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Science. In his team’s paper, that bridge toward scientific philosophy is not only preceded by a long history of literary creativity but directly theorizes about the creative act itself.  

“The creation of art and music may seem to have very little to do with the maintenance of society, but their origins may stem from the need to transmit information and create bonds among communities, and to this day, they enrich life in innumerable ways,” Wong’s team writes.  

“Perhaps, like eddies swirling off of a primary flow field, selection pressures for ancillary functions can become so distant from the core functions of their host systems that they can effectively be treated as independently evolving systems,” the authors add, pointing toward the elaborate mating dance culture observed in birds of paradise.

“Perhaps it will be humanity’s ability to learn, invent, and adopt new collective modes of being that will lead to its long-term persistence as a planetary phenomenon. In light of these considerations, we suspect that the general principles of selection and function discussed here may also apply to the evolution of symbolic and social systems.”

The Mekhilta teaches that all Ten Commandments were pronounced in a single utterance. Similarly, the Maharsha says the Torah’s 613 mitzvoth are only perceived as a plurality because we’re time-bound humans, even though they together form a singular truth which is indivisible from He who expressed it. 

Or, as the Mishna would have it, “the creations were all made in generic form, and they gradually expanded.” 

Like swirling eddies off of a primary flow field.

“O Lord, how manifold are thy works!,” cried out David in his psalm. “In wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.” 

In all things, then — from poetic inventions, to rare biodiverse ecosystems, to the charted history of our interstellar equations — it is best if we conserve our world’s intellectual and physical diversity, for both the study and testimony of its immeasurable multiplicity.

Because, whether wittingly or not, science is singing the tune of the humanities. And whether expressed in algebraic logic or ancient Greek hymn, its chorus is the same throughout the universe: Be fruitful and multiply. 

Both intricate configurations of art and matter arise and fade according to their shared characteristic, long-known by students of the humanities: each have been graced with enough time to attend to the necessary affairs of their most enduring pleasures. 

Behavioral economics is at the center of the so-called replication crisis, a euphemism for the uncomfortable fact that the results of a significant percentage of social science experiments can’t be reproduced in subsequent trials

this key result was not replicated in similar experiments, undermining confidence in a whole area of study. It’s obvious that we do associate old age and slower walking, and we probably do slow down sometimes when thinking about older people. It’s just not clear that that’s a law of the mind.

And these attempts to “correct” human behavior are based on tenuous science. The replication crisis doesn’t have a simple solution

Journals have instituted reforms like having scientists preregister their hypotheses to avoid the possibility of results being manipulated during the research. But that doesn’t change how many uncertain results are already out there, with a knock-on effect that ripples through huge segments of quantitative social scienc

The Johns Hopkins science historian Ruth Leys, author of a forthcoming book on priming research, points out that cognitive science is especially prone to building future studies off disputed results. Despite the replication crisis, these fields are a “train on wheels, the track is laid and almost nothing stops them,” Dr. Leys said.

These cases result from lax standards around data collection, which will hopefully be corrected. But they also result from strong financial incentives: the possibility of salaries, book deals and speaking and consulting fees that range into the millions. Researchers can get those prizes only if they can show “significant” findings.

It is no coincidence that behavioral economics, from Dr. Kahneman to today, tends to be pro-business. Science should be not just reproducible, but also free of obvious ideology.

Technology and modern data science have only further entrenched behavioral economics. Its findings have greatly influenced algorithm design.

The collection of personal data about our movements, purchases and preferences inform interventions in our behavior from the grocery store to who is arrested by the police.

Setting people up for safety and success and providing good default options isn’t bad in itself, but there are more sinister uses as well. After all, not everyone who wants to exploit your cognitive biases has your best interests at heart.

Despite all its flaws, behavioral economics continues to drive public policy, market research and the design of digital interfaces.

One might think that a kind of moratorium on applying such dubious science would be in order — except that enacting one would be practically impossible. These ideas are so embedded in our institutions and everyday life that a full-scale audit of the behavioral sciences would require bringing much of our society to a standstill.

There is no peer review for algorithms that determine entry to a stadium or access to credit. To perform even the most banal, everyday actions, you have to put implicit trust in unverified scientific results.

We can’t afford to defer questions about human nature, and the social and political policies that come from them, to commercialized “research” that is scientifically questionable and driven by ideology. Behavioral economics claims that humans aren’t rational.

That’s a philosophical claim, not a scientific one, and it should be fought out in a rigorous marketplace of ideas. Instead of unearthing real, valuable knowledge of human nature, behavioral economics gives us “one weird trick” to lose weight or quit smoking.

Humans may not be perfectly rational, but we can do better than the predictably irrational consequences that behavioral economics has left us with today.

“Our systems are effective at reducing harmful content, and we’ve invested billions in safety, security and brand suitability solutions,” said Samantha Stetson, a Meta vice president who handles relations with the advertising industry. She said the prevalence of inappropriate content on Instagram is low, and that the company invests heavily in reducing it.

The Journal set up the test accounts after observing that the thousands of followers of such young people’s accounts often include large numbers of adult men, and that many of the accounts who followed those children also had demonstrated interest in sex content related to both children and adults

The Journal also tested what the algorithm would recommend after its accounts followed some of those users as well, which produced more-disturbing content interspersed with ads.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a child-protection group, separately ran similar tests on its own, with similar results.

Meta said the Journal’s tests produced a manufactured experience that doesn’t represent what billions of users see. The company declined to comment on why the algorithms compiled streams of separate videos showing children, sex and advertisements, but a spokesman said that in October it introduced new brand safety tools that give advertisers greater control over where their ads appear, and that Instagram either removes or reduces the prominence of four million videos suspected of violating its standards each month. 

The Journal reported in June that algorithms run by Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, connect large communities of users interested in pedophilic content. The Meta spokesman said a task force set up after the Journal’s article has expanded its automated systems for detecting users who behave suspiciously, taking down tens of thousands of such accounts each month. The company also is participating in a new industry coalition to share signs of potential child exploitation.

Following what it described as Meta’s unsatisfactory response to its complaints, Match began canceling Meta advertising for some of its apps, such as Tinder, in October. It has since halted all Reels advertising and stopped promoting its major brands on any of Meta’s platforms. “We have no desire to pay Meta to market our brands to predators or place our ads anywhere near this content,” said Match spokeswoman Justine Sacco.

Even before the 2020 launch of Reels, Meta employees understood that the product posed safety concerns, according to former employees.

Robbie McKay, a spokesman for Bumble, said it “would never intentionally advertise adjacent to inappropriate content,” and that the company is suspending its ads across Meta’s platforms.

Meta created Reels to compete with TikTok, the video-sharing platform owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. Both products feed users a nonstop succession of videos posted by others, and make money by inserting ads among them. Both companies’ algorithms show to a user videos the platforms calculate are most likely to keep that user engaged, based on his or her past viewing behavior

The Journal reporters set up the Instagram test accounts as adults on newly purchased devices and followed the gymnasts, cheerleaders and other young influencers. The tests showed that following only the young girls triggered Instagram to begin serving videos from accounts promoting adult sex content alongside ads for major consumer brands, such as one for Walmart that ran after a video of a woman exposing her crotch. 

When the test accounts then followed some users who followed those same young people’s accounts, they yielded even more disturbing recommendations. The platform served a mix of adult pornography and child-sexualizing material, such as a video of a clothed girl caressing her torso and another of a child pantomiming a sex act.

Experts on algorithmic recommendation systems said the Journal’s tests showed that while gymnastics might appear to be an innocuous topic, Meta’s behavioral tracking has discerned that some Instagram users following preteen girls will want to engage with videos sexualizing children, and then directs such content toward them.

Current and former Meta employees said in interviews that the tendency of Instagram algorithms to aggregate child sexualization content from across its platform was known internally to be a problem. Once Instagram pigeonholes a user as interested in any particular subject matter, they said, its recommendation systems are trained to push more related content to them.

Preventing the system from pushing noxious content to users interested in it, they said, requires significant changes to the recommendation algorithms that also drive engagement for normal users. Company documents reviewed by the Journal show that the company’s safety staffers are broadly barred from making changes to the platform that might reduce daily active users by any measurable amount.

The test accounts showed that advertisements were regularly added to the problematic Reels streams. Ads encouraging users to visit Disneyland for the holidays ran next to a video of an adult acting out having sex with her father, and another of a young woman in lingerie with fake blood dripping from her mouth. An ad for Hims ran shortly after a video depicting an apparently anguished woman in a sexual situation along with a link to what was described as “the full video.”

Instagram’s system served jarring doses of salacious content to those test accounts, including risqué footage of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos—and ads for some of the biggest U.S. brands.

Part of the problem is that automated enforcement systems have a harder time parsing video content than text or still images. Another difficulty arises from how Reels works: Rather than showing content shared by users’ friends, the way other parts of Instagram and Facebook often do, Reels promotes videos from sources they don’t follow

In an analysis conducted shortly before the introduction of Reels, Meta’s safety staff flagged the risk that the product would chain together videos of children and inappropriate content, according to two former staffers. Vaishnavi J, Meta’s former head of youth policy, described the safety review’s recommendation as: “Either we ramp up our content detection capabilities, or we don’t recommend any minor content,” meaning any videos of children.

At the time, TikTok was growing rapidly, drawing the attention of Instagram’s young users and the advertisers targeting them. Meta didn’t adopt either of the safety analysis’s recommendations at that time, according to J.

Stetson, Meta’s liaison with digital-ad buyers, disputed that Meta had neglected child safety concerns ahead of the product’s launch. “We tested Reels for nearly a year before releasing it widely, with a robust set of safety controls and measures,” she said. 

After initially struggling to maximize the revenue potential of its Reels product, Meta has improved how its algorithms recommend content and personalize video streams for users

Among the ads that appeared regularly in the Journal’s test accounts were those for “dating” apps and livestreaming platforms featuring adult nudity, massage parlors offering “happy endings” and artificial-intelligence chatbots built for cybersex. Meta’s rules are supposed to prohibit such ads.

The Journal informed Meta in August about the results of its testing. In the months since then, tests by both the Journal and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection show that the platform continued to serve up a series of videos featuring young children, adult content and apparent promotions for child sex material hosted elsewhere. 

As of mid-November, the center said Instagram is continuing to steadily recommend what the nonprofit described as “adults and children doing sexual posing.”

Meta hasn’t offered a timetable for resolving the problem or explained how in the future it would restrict the promotion of inappropriate content featuring children. 

The Journal’s test accounts found that the problem even affected Meta-related brands. Ads for the company’s WhatsApp encrypted chat service and Meta’s Ray-Ban Stories glasses appeared next to adult pornography. An ad for Lean In Girls, the young women’s empowerment nonprofit run by former Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, ran directly before a promotion for an adult sex-content creator who often appears in schoolgirl attire. Sandberg declined to comment. 

Through its own tests, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection concluded that Instagram was regularly serving videos and pictures of clothed children who also appear in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s digital database of images and videos confirmed to be child abuse sexual material. The group said child abusers often use the images of the girls to advertise illegal content for sale in dark-web forums.

The nature of the content—sexualizing children without generally showing nudity—reflects the way that social media has changed online child sexual abuse, said Lianna McDonald, executive director for the Canadian center. The group has raised concerns about the ability of Meta’s algorithms to essentially recruit new members of online communities devoted to child sexual abuse, where links to illicit content in more private forums proliferate.

“Time and time again, we’ve seen recommendation algorithms drive users to discover and then spiral inside of these online child exploitation communities,” McDonald said, calling it disturbing that ads from major companies were subsidizing that process.

Even as a liberal who has attended abortion rights demonstrations and written about standing up to racism, I sometimes feel afraid to fully speak my mind.

In the classroom, backlash for unpopular opinions is so commonplace that many students have stopped voicing them, sometimes fearing lower grades if they don’t censor themselves.

According to a 2021 survey administered by College Pulse of over 37,000 students at 159 colleges, 80 percent of students self-censor at least some of the time.

Forty-eight percent of undergraduate students described themselves as “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” with expressing their views on a controversial topic in the classroom.

When a class discussion goes poorly for me, I can tell.

The room felt tense. I saw people shift in their seats. Someone got angry, and then everyone seemed to get angry. After the professor tried to move the discussion along, I still felt uneasy. I became a little less likely to speak up again and a little less trusting of my own thoughts.

This anxiety affects not just conservatives. I spoke with Abby Sacks, a progressive fourth-year student. She said she experienced a “pile-on” during a class discussion about sexism in media

Throughout that semester, I saw similar reactions in response to other students’ ideas. I heard fewer classmates speak up. Eventually, our discussions became monotonous echo chambers. Absent rich debate and rigor, we became mired in socially safe ideas.

when criticism transforms into a public shaming, it stifles learning.

Professors have noticed a shift in their classrooms

I went to college to learn from my professors and peers. I welcomed an environment that champions intellectual diversity and rigorous disagreement

“Second, the dominant messages students hear from faculty, administrators and staff are progressive ones. So they feel an implicit pressure to conform to those messages in classroom and campus conversations and debates.”

I met Stephen Wiecek at our debate club. He’s an outgoing, formidable first-year debater who often stays after meetings to help clean up. He’s also conservative.

He told me that he has often “straight-up lied” about his beliefs to avoid conflict. Sometimes it’s at a party, sometimes it’s at an a cappella rehearsal, and sometimes it’s in the classroom. When politics comes up, “I just kind of go into survival mode,” he said. “I tense up a lot more, because I’ve got to think very carefully about how I word things. It’s very anxiety inducing.”

“First, students are afraid of being called out on social media by their peers,”

“It was just a succession of people, one after each other, each vehemently disagreeing with me,” she told me.

Ms. Sacks felt overwhelmed. “Everyone adding on to each other kind of energized the room, like everyone wanted to be part of the group with the correct opinion,” she said. The experience, she said, “made me not want to go to class again.” While Ms. Sacks did continue to attend the class, she participated less frequently. She told me that she felt as if she had become invisible.

Other campuses also struggle with this. “Viewpoint diversity is no longer considered a sacred, core value in higher education,”

Dr. Abrams said the environment on today’s campuses differs from his undergraduate experience. He recalled late-night debates with fellow students that sometimes left him feeling “hurt” but led to “the ecstasy of having my mind opened up to new ideas.”

He worries that self-censorship threatens this environment and argues that college administrations in particular “enforce and create a culture of obedience and fear that has chilled speech.”

Universities must do more than make public statements supporting free expression. We need a campus culture that prioritizes ideological diversity and strong policies that protect expression in the classroom.

Universities should refuse to cancel controversial speakers or cave to unreasonable student demands. They should encourage professors to reward intellectual diversity and nonconformism in classroom discussions. And most urgently, they should discard restrictive speech codes and bias response teams that pathologize ideological conflict.

We cannot experience the full benefits of a university education without having our ideas challenged, yet challenged in ways that allow us to grow.

The Lancet and the University College London Institute for Global Health Commission called climate change the biggest threat to global health—and mental health in particular—of the 21st century (The Lancet, Vol. 373, No. 9676, 2009).

Humans have evolved to adjust to some environmental stressors, researchers have found, through allostasis, the system by which the body responds to stress.

The greater the stressors and the longer we are exposed to them, the more likely our response systems are to fail—and those stress responses may remain elevated for the rest of our lives (Crews, D. E., et al., Annals of Human Biology , Vol. 46, No. 1, 2019)

In 2017, for example, APA and ecoAmerica defined “eco-anxiety” as “a chronic fear of environmental doom” (APA and ecoAmerica, 2017).

It’s not just those directly affected by a disaster who suffer. Often, simply knowing that others are in the path of disaster can trigger anxiety or depression, says Amy Lykins, PhD, an American clinical psychologist and researcher working in Australia and in South Pacific islands such as Fiji

It is normal for people to be worried about environmental issues—it isn’t a disorder to be stressed by stressors. “We certainly don’t want to pathologize someone’s reasonable distress about climate and environmental threats,” Doherty says. “But we also don’t want to minimize issues that are causing significant impairment to a person’s life.”

According to the February 2020 APA poll, 4 in 10 people have not changed their behavior in light of climate change, but 7 in 10 say they wish they could do more, while 5 in 10 say they don’t know where to begin

Other research bears this out: Even when people are concerned about climate change and the environment, they may feel paralyzed or useless when it comes to taking action (Landry, N., et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology , Vol. 55, 2018).

The risk was that the internet had become an echo chamber of stories produced by special interest groups and rogue states, he said.

The danger is that these huge platforms end up in an arms race with each other. They’re like elephants fighting and then everybody else is like mice that get stamped on without them even realising the consequences of their actions.”

there are huge consequences to this technology. And it’s not just the danger of ripping our industry apart, but also ripping other industries apart, all the creative industries. How many jobs are going to be lost? What’s the damage to the economy going to be if these rapacious organisations can continue to operate without any legal ramifications?

Rothermere revealed that DMGT had experimented with using AI to help journalists to publish stories faster, but that it then took longer “to check the accuracy of what it comes up” than it would have done to write the article.

Over the past four years, more than 1,600 cybercrime cases on TikTok have been reported to authorities, said Kuber Kadayat, a Nepal police spokesman. He said most of the complaints were related to sharing nude photos or financial extortion.

Last week, the government said it would require social-media companies running platforms used in Nepal to set up liaison offices in the country.

India banned TikTok—citing threats to national security—along with dozens of other Chinese apps in 2020 after a clash between Indian and Chinese troops on the countries’ disputed border.

Nepal isn’t the first to cite concerns about the content shared on the app. Pakistan has banned the app multiple times after authorities received complaints of indecent content, later lifting the bans after receiving promises from TikTok to better control the content. In August, Senegal blocked access to the app citing hateful and subversive content being shared on it.