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Many popular TikTok videos of the invasion — including of Ukrainians livestreaming from their bunkers — offer real accounts of the action, according to researchers who study the platform. But other videos have been impossible to authenticate and substantiate. Some simply appear to be exploiting the interest in the invasion for views, the researchers said.

The clip was then used in many TikTok videos, some of which included a note stating that all 13 soldiers had died. Ukrainian officials later said in a Facebook post that the men were alive and had been taken prisoner, but the TikTok videos have not been corrected.

“People trust it. The result is that a lot of people are seeing false information about Ukraine and believing it.”

TikTok and other social media platforms are also under pressure from U.S. lawmakers and Ukrainian officials to curb Russian misinformation about the war, especially from state-backed media outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik.

For years, TikTok largely escaped sustained scrutiny about its content. Unlike Facebook, which has been around since 2004, and YouTube, which was founded in 2005, TikTok only became widely used in the past five years.

The app has navigated some controversies in the past. It has faced questions over harmful fads that appeared to originate on its platform, as well as whether it allows underage users and adequately protects their privacy.

That includes TikTok’s algorithm for its “For You” page, which suggests videos based on what people have previously seen, liked or shared. Viewing one video with misinformation likely leads to more videos with misinformation being shown, Ms. Richards said.

But audio can be misused and taken out of context, Ms. Richards said.

“Video is the hardest format to moderate for all platforms,” said Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former head of security at Facebook. “When combined with the fact that TikTok’s algorithm is the primary factor for what content a user sees, as opposed to friendships or follows on the big U.S. platforms, this makes TikTok a uniquely potent platform for viral propaganda.”

“I feel like lately, the videos I’m seeing are designed to get me riled up, or to emotionally manipulate me,” she said. “I get worried so now, sometimes, I find myself Googling something or checking the comments to see if it is real before I trust it.”

“I guess I don’t really know what war looks like,” she said. “But we go to TikTok to learn about everything, so it makes sense we would trust it about this too.”

Parents need to know that when children go online, they are entering a world of influencers, many of whom are hoping to make money by pushing dangerous products. It’s a world that’s invisible to us

when we log on to our social media, we don’t see what they see. Thanks to algorithms and ad targeting, I see videos about the best lawn fertilizer and wrinkle laser masks, while Ian is being fed reviews of flavored vape pens and beautiful women livestreaming themselves gambling crypto and urging him to gamble, too.

Smartphones are taking our kids to a different world

Greyson Imm, an 18-year-old high school student in Prairie Village, Kan., said he was 17 when Zyn videos started appearing on his TikTok feed. The videos multiplied through the spring, when they were appearing almost daily. “Nobody had heard about Zyn until very early 2023,” he said. Now, a “lot of high schoolers have been using Zyn. It’s really taken off, at least in our community.”

all of this is, unfortunately, only part of what makes social media dangerous.

The tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris International acquired the Zyn maker Swedish Match in 2022 as part of a strategic push into smokeless products, a category it projects could help drive an expected $2 billion in U.S. revenue in 2024.

P.M.I. is also a company that has long denied it markets tobacco products to minors despite decades of research accusing it of just that. One 2022 study alone found its brands advertising near schools and playgrounds around the globe.

the ’90s, when magazines ran full-page Absolut Vodka ads in different colors, which my friends and I collected and taped up on our walls next to pictures of a young Leonardo DiCaprio — until our parents tore them down. This was advertising that appealed to me as a teenager but was also visible to my parents, and — crucially — to regulators, who could point to billboards near schools or flavored vodka ads in fashion magazines and say, this is wrong.

Even the most committed parent today doesn’t have the same visibility into what her children are seeing online, so it is worth explaining how products like Zyn end up in social feeds

influencers. They aren’t traditional pitch people. Think of them more like the coolest kids on the block. They establish a following thanks to their personality, experience or expertise. They share how they’re feeling, they share what they’re thinking about, they share stuff they l

With ruthless efficiency, social media can deliver unlimited amounts of the content that influencers create or inspire. That makes the combination of influencers and social-media algorithms perhaps the most powerful form of advertising ever invented.

Videos like his operate like a meme: It’s unintelligible to the uninitiated, it’s a hilarious inside joke to those who know, and it encourages the audience to spread the message

Enter Tucker Carlson. Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News megastar who recently started his own subscription streaming service, has become a big Zyn influencer. He’s mentioned his love of Zyn in enough podcasts and interviews to earn the nickname Tucker CarlZyn.

was Max VanderAarde. You can glimpse him in a video from the event wearing a Santa hat and toasting Mr. Carlson as they each pop Zyns in their mouths. “You can call me king of Zynbabwe, or Tucker CarlZyn’s cousin,” he says in a recent TikTok. “Probably, what, moved 30 mil cans last year?”

Freezer Tarps, Mr. VanderAarde’s TikTok account, appears to have been removed after I asked the company about it. Left up are the large number of TikToks by the likes of @lifeofaZyn, @Zynfluencer1 and @Zyntakeover; those hashtagged to #Zynbabwe, one of Freezer Tarps’s favorite terms, have amassed more than 67 million views. So it’s worth breaking down Mr. VanderAarde’s videos.

All of these videos would just be jokes (in poor taste) if they were seen by adults only. They aren’t. But we can’t know for sure how many children follow the Nelk Boys or Freezer Tarps — social-media companies generally don’t release granular age-related data to the public. Mr. VanderAarde, who responded to a few of my questions via LinkedIn, said that nearly 95 percent of his followers are over the age of 18.

They’re incentivized to increase their following and, in turn, often their bank accounts. Young people are particularly susceptible to this kind of promotion because their relationship with influencers is akin to the intimacy of a close friend.

The helicopter video has already been viewed more than one million times on YouTube, and iterations of it have circulated widely on TikTok.

YouTube said it eventually determined that four versions of the Carlson Zyn videos were not appropriate for viewers under age 18 under its community guidelines and restricted access to them by age

Mr. Carlson declined to comment on the record beyond his two-word statement. The Nelk Boys didn’t respond to requests for comment. Meta declined to comment on the record. TikTok said it does not allow content that promotes tobacco or its alternatives. The company said that it has over 40,000 trust and safety experts who work to keep the platform safe and that it prevented teenagers’ accounts from viewing over two million videos globally that show the consumption of tobacco products by adults. TikTok added that in the third quarter of 2023 it proactively removed 97 percent of videos that violated its alcohol, tobacco and drugs policy.

Greyson Imm, the high school student in Prairie Village, Kan., points to Mr. VanderAarde as having brought Zyn “more into the mainstream.” Mr. Imm believes his interest in independent comedy on TikTok perhaps made him a target for Mr. VanderAarde’s videos. “He would create all these funny phrases or things that would make it funny and joke about it and make it relevant to us.”

It wasn’t long before Mr. Imm noticed Zyn blowing up among his classmates — so much so that the student, now a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School, decided to write a piece in his school newspaper about it. He conducted an Instagram poll from the newspaper’s account and found that 23 percent of the students who responded used oral nicotine pouches during school.

“Upper-decky lip cushions, ferda!” Mr. VanderAarde coos in what was one of his popular TikTok videos, which had been liked more than 40,000 times. The singsong audio sounds like gibberish to most people, but it’s actually a call to action. “Lip cushion” is a nickname for a nicotine pouch, and “ferda” is slang for “the guys.”

“I have fun posting silly content that makes fun of pop culture,” Mr. VanderAarde said to me in our LinkedIn exchange.

I turned to Influencity, a software program that estimates the ages of social media users by analyzing profile photos and selfies in recent posts. Influencity estimated that roughly 10 percent of the Nelk Boys’ followers on YouTube are ages 13 to 17. That’s more than 800,000 children.

I’ve spent the past three years studying media manipulation and memes, and what I see in Freezer Tarps’s silly content is strategy. The use of Zyn slang seems like a way to turn interest in Zyn into a meme that can be monetized through merchandise and other business opportunities.

Such as? Freezer Tarps sells his own pouch product, Upperdeckys, which delivers caffeine instead of nicotine and is available in flavors including cotton candy and orange creamsicle. In addition to jockeying for sponsorship, Mr. Carlson may also be trying to establish himself with a younger, more male, more online audience as his new media company begins building its subscriber base

This is the kind of viral word-of-mouth marketing that looks like entertainment, functions like culture and can increase sales

What’s particularly galling about all of this is that we as a society already agreed that peddling nicotine to kids is not OK. It is illegal to sell nicotine products to anyone under the age of 21 in all 50 states

numerous studies have shown that the younger people are when they try nicotine for the first time, the more likely they will become addicted to it. Nearly 90 percent of adults who smoke daily started smoking before they turned 18.

Decades later — even after Juul showed the power of influencers to help addict yet another generation of children — the courts, tech companies and regulators still haven’t adequately grappled with the complexities of the influencer economy.

Facebook, Instagram and TikTok all have guidelines that prohibit tobacco ads and sponsored, endorsed or partnership-based content that promotes tobacco products. Holding them accountable for maintaining those standards is a bigger question.

We need a new definition of advertising that takes into account how the internet actually works. I’d go so far as to propose that the courts broaden the definition of advertising to include all influencer promotion. For a product as dangerous as nicotine, I’d put the bar to be considered an influencer as low as 1,000 followers on a social-media account, and maybe if a video from someone with less of a following goes viral under certain legal definitions, it would become influencer promotion.

Laws should require tech companies to share data on what young people are seeing on social media and to prevent any content promoting age-gated products from reaching children’s feeds

hose efforts must go hand in hand with social media companies putting real teeth behind their efforts to verify the ages of their users. Government agencies should enforce the rules already on the books to protect children from exposure to addictive products,

I refuse to believe there aren’t ways to write laws and regulations that can address these difficult questions over tech company liability and free speech, that there aren’t ways to hold platforms more accountable for advertising that might endanger kids. Let’s stop treating the internet like a monster we can’t control. We built it. We foisted it upon our children. We had better try to protect them from its potential harms as best we can.

The transformation of social media into mass media is largely because the rise of TikTok has demonstrated to every social-media company on the planet that people still really like things that can re-create the experience of TV

Advertisers also like things that function like TV, of course—after all, people are never more suggestible than when lulled into a sort of anesthetized mindlessness.

In this future, people who are good at making content with high production values will thrive, as audiences and tech company algorithms gravitate toward more professional content.

On these formerly-social platforms, whether content is coming from creators with better equipment and more skills, or Hollywood studios testing the waters, hardly matters. In the end, it will all look remarkably similar to the consumer.

It will look

like flipping through cable channels does, only our thumb on the remote has been replaced by our thumb on the screen of our phone, swiping from one TikTok, YouTube Short, or Instagram Reel to the next.

A telling indicator is the rise of a new kind of entertainment professional—the “creator.”

A creator is anyone who records or makes something that can go viral on the internet

TikTok is now more popular than Netflix among consumers younger than 35,

While YouTube and TikTok have always been about video, just about every other social-media platform that wants to keep people engaged is emphasizing it more than ever, so that’s what creators have to make,

His agency gets involved with creators and musicians at the earliest stages of their careers, helping them plan content, update their style, understand what the algorithms of different platforms demand, and connecting them with potentially lucrative brand deals

. Even more telling: In first place is YouTube, the original online TV analog.

Where attention flows, money—and content—must also. In 2023 brands will spend an estimated $6 billion on marketing through influencers—a subspecies of creators

Globally, the total addressable market for this kind of marketing is currently $250 billion

Then there is a new generation of shows that are going straight to TikTok, bypassing even streaming services

In the wake of the success of YouTube and TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn are all pushing more and more content made by professionals into our feeds,

In order to quantify how TikTok has mastered the art of discerning our interests and feeding us the most compelling possible content, Faltesek, of Oregon State University, conducted a two-year project to study exactly what kind of content TikTok pushes

With a team of students, he created dozens of fresh TikTok user accounts that didn’t like or interact with content in any way—they just let the algorithm play one video after another.

At the end of this exhaustive process of gathering data on TikTok’s algorithm, the conclusion became obvious, says Faltesek. “TikTok is television. It flips channels like TV, it provides a flow like TV.”

By this logic, Instagram’s move to copy TikTok, which is in turn encroaching on the turf of YouTube by allowing longer videos, and the increasing dominance of professional content on all three, means they’re all turning into TV. Even Threads, the new offering from Facebook parent company Meta, is fast becoming a broadcast medium for news, as Twitter was before it.

In every case, the structure of social networks has become one in which a handful of accounts create most of the content that others see, and the role of everyone else on the network is, primarily, to amplify and consume that content,

Some, like Magana, believe we’ll eventually see an ever more complete blending of what were once “social” platforms with the traditional television networks and even film studios.  

aren’t convinced they’ll eat the rest of the entertainment industry. “It’s hard to say this kind of short-form video will be the only kind of TV,” she reflects. “A long time ago, the internet became the new thing, but we still have the other forms on television, and scripted streaming shows. It’s almost like this is just another avenue for that—of watching shows and movies on your phone.”

in March 2020 alone, users spent as much time on it as there has been since the stone age: 2.8bn hours, or nearly 320,000 years.

TikTok became the first app not owned by Facebook to cross the 3bn download mark. For context, there are 5.3bn mobile phone users worldwide.

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.

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U.S. tech giant Facebook has now banned all pages linked to Myanmar’s army - and has itself been banned.

The video app, which is used by more than 150 million Americans, has become hugely popular for memes and entertainment. But lawmakers and U.S. officials are concerned that the app is passing sensitive information about Americans to Beijing.

In his complaint, Mr. Yu, 36, said that as TikTok sought to attract users in its early days, ByteDance engineers copied videos and posts from Snapchat and Instagram without permission and then posted them to the app. He also claimed that ByteDance “systematically created fabricated users” — essentially an army of bots — to boost engagement numbers, a practice that Mr. Yu said he flagged to his superiors.

Mr. Yu says he raised these concerns with Zhu Wenjia, who was in charge of the TikTok algorithm, but that Mr. Zhu was “dismissive” and remarked that it was “not a big deal.”

he also witnessed engineers for Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, tweak the algorithm to elevate content that expressed hatred for Japan.

he said that the promotion of anti-Japanese sentiments, which would make it more prominent for users, was done without hesitation.

“There was no debate,” he said. “They just did it.”

The lawsuit also accused ByteDance engineers working on Chinese apps of demoting content that expressed support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, while making more prominent criticisms of the protests.

the lawsuit says the founder of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, facilitated bribes to Lu Wei, a senior government official charged with internet regulation. Chinese media at the time covered the trial of Lu Wei, who was charged in 2018 and subsequently convicted of bribery, but there was no mention of who had paid the bribes.

Mr. Yu, who was born and raised in China and now lives in San Francisco, said in the interview that during his time with the company, American user data on TikTok was stored in the United States. But engineers in China had access to it, he said.

The geographic location of servers is “irrelevant,” he said, because engineers could be a continent away but still have access. During his tenure at the company, he said, certain engineers had “backdoor” access to user data.

White House officials have never offered evidence to demonstrate conclusively that Chinese authorities would seek to obtain TikTok user data.

Naturally, Gen Z has picked up on them too, and the mockery that was once reserved for Boomers is now coming for me. “The way the quintessential Millennial behaves online is basically a bunch of silly little nuances strung together to create a personality that is very giddy and excitable about the normal or mundane,” Michael Stevens, a 24-year-old TikTok creator based in New England, told me

Those “silly little nuances” include starting videos with a sigh, doing dramatic zooms into their own faces for emphasis, and using phrases popularized on Twitter and Tumblr—like “doggo” and “I can’t even”—in real life. “My husband just went to the new Trader Joe’s next to our house and I think it wins the internet for the day,” Stevens says in a Millennial parody from July. “If this is adulting, sign me up.”

Other creators have mocked Millennials for how they pose in photos (taking selfies from above is so over), for using Gen Z phrases (“slay, bestie”) on TikTok, for adopting something called a “BuzzFeed accent” when they talk to the camera.

Millennials take Instagram way too seriously, using portrait mode and filling their captions with forced puns.

They love to turn their social-media bios into lists—for instance, mine would read: “Kate. Ravenclaw. Cat mom. Knitting enthusiast. PA > OH > NYC.”

Although Boomers fell out of the internet zeitgeist, they never had as far to fall as Millennials—the first cohort to watch their youth fade in real time, with evidence of their growing irrelevance meticulously documented in memes, trends, and headlines published on the very internet they once reigned over.

They’re no longer the hot new item brands are scrambling to attract, nor the ones the world is turning to for the next fashion trend. The internet has moved on, and Millennials can either adapt or, like a Gen Xer still listening to Pearl Jam, not care if their choices make them seem old.

The mania behind these products is heightened by their collectability and the sense of connection they offer, industry experts say.“Material things have always been markers of identity,” Drenten said.

It’s also compounded by biology — puberty and cognitive development can feel upending and confusing, said Mindy Weinstein, the founder and chief executive of digital marketing company Market MindShift. So buying into a trend or product — perhaps popularized by older teens — can ease those uncomfortable feelings.

It’s known as the “bandwagon effect, and it’s really pronounced in that age group,

“they aren’t always sure where they fit into the world. But now by buying that [item] they feel like they fit in.

Every generation of tween has had products, accessories, brands and styles they covet. A decade ago, it was Justice clothing, colorful iPod minis, Sidekick cellphones and EOS lip balm. In the early 2000s, Juicy sweatsuits, North Face fleece jackets, Nike Shox, Abercrombie & Fitch and Razr flip phones reigned. In the ’90s it was buying from the Delia’s catalogue magazine, Lip Smacker balms, United Colors of Benetton and Tommy Hilfiger polos. The ’80s had Guess jeans, Keds, banana hair clips and J. Crew sweaters. In the ’70s it was mood rings, Wrangler and Levi’s jeans, Puma sneakers and Frye boots.

More than half of U.S. teenagers (ages 13 to 19) spend at least four hours a day on social media, according to Gallup, and most of that time is spent on YouTube and TikTok

And it’s highly effective — consumers are more likely to consider buying a product and have a favorable opinion about it if it went vira

“TikTok influencers already have their trust … teens and tweens see them and they want to also be into that trend and feel like they’re belonging to that social group,

It used to be that our hair, makeup and skin care products were only visible to those who entered our bedrooms, scanning vanities and opening drawers. Now, teens and tweens are filming “Get ready with me” videos, showing off their Rare Beauty liquid blush ($23), Laneige lip balm ($18) and Charlotte Tilbury setting spray ($38) as they complain about school or recap a friend’s bat mitzvah.

Margeaux Richmond and her friends spend a lot of time talking about skin care. The 12-year-old from Des Moines said she got a $62 Drunk Elephant moisturizer for Christmas. “It’s kind of pricey, but if it’s good for your skin it’s worth it,” she said. “It’s kind of important to me and my friends because we don’t want our skin to look bad or anything.”

This also fuels a collectability culture. The customer no longer wants one water bottle, one pair of Air Jordans, one Summer Fridays lip balm or one Nike sweatshirt — they want them in every color.

“We have to think about today’s consumers, not as consumers, but as fans; and fandom has always been intertwined with collecting,” Drenten said. “In today’s culture, particularly among young people, we’ve kind of shifted away from obsession with celebrities to obsession with brands.”

Having and displaying a collection on shelves and on social media is seen as a status symbol.

Superfans also collect accessories for some of these products, Briggs said, spawning a whole side industry for some products.

Who’s doing the actual buying is harder to track. Not all adolescents have jobs or parents who are able or willing to spend $550 on Apple AirPods Max or $275 on a Tiffany & Co’s Pink Double Heart Tag Pendant necklace. “These products, to some extent, are a point of privilege and status,

Some of the spending could be attributed to more young people in the workforce: Roughly 37 percent of 16- to 19-year-olds had a job or were looking for one last year,

That’s the highest rate since 2009.

Richmond said she uses her babysitting money to buy Drunk Elephant skin care or Kendra Scott jewelry — items “my parents won’t buy me.” She’s saving up for her second Stanley tumbler.

Drenten emphasized that shopping or gift hauls on social media don’t reflect what every teen or tween wants. It varies by socioeconomics, demographics and personal preference. “At the end of the day, they can still be influenced by who they’re around and not necessarily what they’re seeing as the top line products online.”

Rising inflation has led to surging prices for groceries, cars and many essentials. The cost of a college education has skyrocketed in two decades, with the average student debt for federal loans at $37,000, according to the Education Department. Overall debts for Americans in their 30s jumped 27% from late 2019 to early 2023—steeper than for any other age group.

home prices have risen considerably, while wages haven’t kept pace.

“What Dave Ramsey really misses is any kind of social context,” says Morgan Sanner, a

She began paying off $48,000 in student loans (a Ramsey do) and also took out a loan to buy a 2016 Honda (a Ramsey don’t). Her rationale was that it was safer to pay extra for a more reliable car than a junker she could buy with cash. S

he feels these sorts of real-life decisions don’t factor into his advice.

When she saw a comment from Ramsey online about how people receiving pandemic stimulus payments were “pretty much screwed already,” Israel felt it came across as shaming people. The pandemic shutdowns ended a decadelong economic expansion for Black Americans, a disproportionate number of whom lost their jobs and relied on those checks.

“Moralizing financial decisions is very damaging to marginalized groups,” says Israel, who is Black.

Many young adults scratch their heads over his advice that people should let their credit scores dwindle and die.

People need a good credit score, says Mandy Phillips, a 39-year-old residential mortgage loan originator in Redding, Calif. She uses TikTok and other social media to educate millennials and Gen Z about home buying. Scores are vital when applying for mortgages and rentals.

She also takes issue with Ramsey’s advice to only obtain a home loan if you can take out a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage with a down payment of at least 10%. Few younger buyers can pay the large monthly bills of shorter-term mortgages.

“That may have worked years ago in the ’80s and ’90s, but that’s not something that is achievable for the average American,” Phillips says.

Housing is a particularly hot-button topic. He advises people to only buy a house with their lawfully wedded spouse. Yet many young adults are pooling their finances with partners, friends or roommates to buy their first homes. 

Ramsey is perhaps best known for advocating a “debt snowball method”: People with multiple loans pay off the smallest balances first, regardless of interest rate. As you knock out each loan, he says, the money you have to put toward larger debt snowballs. Seeing small wins motivates people to keep going, he says.Conventional economic theory would be to pay off the highest-interest loans first, says James Choi, a finance professor at the Yale School of Management, who has studied the advice of popular finance gurus.

Ramsey’s save-not-spend message sounds logical, young adults say. It’s his all-or-nothing approach that doesn’t work for them.

Kate Hindman, a 31-year-old administrative assistant in Pasadena, Calif., who has taken an anti-Ramsey stance on TikTok, ended up with $30,000 in credit-card debt after she and her husband faced income-reducing job changes. They’ve since turned it into a consolidation loan with an 8% interest rate and pay about $1,200 a month.

She wonders if the debt aversion is generational. Perhaps younger people are less willing to make huge sacrifices to be debt-free. Maybe carrying some amount of debt forever is a new normal.

Over the same period, ByteDance has flourished. Its TikTok app has been downloaded a billion times, of which nearly 100 million came from the United States, and it has a jaw-dropping valuation of $75 billion.

ByteDance has also been working with Xinjiang authorities under a program called “Xinjiang Aid,” whereby Chinese companies open subsidiaries or factories in Xinjiang and employ locals who have been detained in the camps. Its operations are centered on Hotan, an area of Xinjiang considered backward by the Communist Party and where the repression has been among the most severe.

Leaked documents have previously shown how ByteDance censors content that the Chinese government disapproves of, including Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong.

ByteDance has been guiding and helping Xinjiang authorities and media outlets to use its news aggregation app and Douyin to “propagate and showcase Hotan’s new image,” according to the ASPI report.

In the case of Huawei, which is locked in an existential battle with the Trump administration, there is evidence of extensive and direct work with Chinese security organs in Xinjiang, including helping authorities there with the “digitization requirements” of public security projects.

“Together with the Public Security Bureau, Huawei will unlock a new era of smart policing and help build a safer, smarter society,” a Xinjiang government website quoted one Huawei director as saying last year.

When the Xinjiang Public Security Department and Huawei signed the agreement to establish an “intelligent security industry” innovation lab in the regional capital of Urumqi last year, a local official said Huawei had been supplying “reliable technical support” for the department, according to the report

Huawei has also participated in a program called “Safe Xinjiang,” which the ASPI experts said was “code for a police surveillance system.”

“The Chinese tech companies in this report enjoy a highly favorable regulatory environment and are unencumbered by privacy and human rights concerns,” it concludes. Many are engaged in deeply unethical behavior in Xinjiang, where their work directly supports and enables mass human rights abuses.”

If OnlyFans’s creator earnings were taken as a whole, the company would rank around No. 90 on Forbes’s list of the biggest private companies in America by revenue, ahead of Twitter (now called X), Neiman Marcus Group, New Balance, Hard Rock International and Hallmark Cards.

Many creators now operate like independent media companies, with support staffs, growth strategies and promotional budgets, and work to apply the cold quantification and data analytics of online marketing to the creation of a fantasy life.

The subscription site has often been laughed off as a tabloid punchline, a bawdy corner of the internet where young, underpaid women (teachers, nurses, cops) sell nude photos, get found out and lose their jobs.

pressures to perform for a global audience; an internet that never forgets. “There is simply no room for naivety,” one said in a guide posted to Reddit’s r/CreatorsAdvice.

America’s social media giants for years have held up online virality as the ultimate goal, doling out measurements of followers, reactions and hearts with an unspoken promise: that internet love can translate into sponsorships and endorsement deals

But OnlyFans represents the creator economy at its most blatantly transactional — a place where viewers pay upfront for creators’ labor, and intimacy is just another unit of content to monetize.

The fast ascent of OnlyFans further spotlights how the internet has helped foster a new style of modern gig work that creators see as safe, remote and self-directed,

Creators’ nonchalance about the digital sex trade has fueled a broader debate about whether the site’s promotion of feminist autonomy is a facade: just a new class of techno-capitalism, selling the same patriarchal dream.

But OnlyFans increasingly has become the model for how a new generation of online creators gets paid. Influencers popular on mainstream sites use it to capitalize on the audiences they’ve spent years building. And OnlyFans creators have turned going viral on the big social networks into a marketing strategy, using Facebook, Twitter and TikTok as sales funnels for getting new viewers to subscribe.

many creators, she added, still find it uniquely alluring — a rational choice in an often-irrational environment for gender, work and power. “Why would I spend my day doing dirty, degrading, minimum-wage labor when I can do something that brings more money in and that I have a lot more control over?”

it is targeting major “growth regions” in Latin America, Europe and Australia. (The Mexican diver Diego Balleza said he is using his $15-a-month account to save up for next year’s Paris Olympics.)

“Does an accountant always enjoy their work? No. All work has pleasure and pain, and a lot of it is boring and annoying. Does that mean they’re being exploited?”

Adams’s operation is registered in state business records as a limited liability company and offers quarterly employee performance reviews and catered lunch. It also runs with factory-like efficiency, thanks largely to a system designed in-house to track millions of data points on customers and content and ensure every video is rigorously planned and optimized.

Since sending her first photo in 2021, Adams’s OnlyFans accounts have earned $16.5 million in sales, more than 1.4 million fans and more than 11 million “likes.” She now makes about $30,000 a day — more than most American small businesses — from subscriptions, video sales, messages and tips, half of which is pure profit

Adams’s team sees its business as one of harmless, destigmatized gratification, in which both sides get what they want. The buyers are swiped over in dating apps, widowed, divorced or bored, eager to pay for the illusion of intimacy with an otherwise unattainable match. And the sellers see themselves as not all that different from the influencers they watched growing up on YouTube, charging for parts of their lives they’d otherwise share for free.

“This is normal for my generation, you know?

“I can go on TikTok right now and see ten girls wearing the bare minimum of clothing just to get people to join their page. Why not go the extra step to make money off it?”

the job can be financially precarious and mentally taxing, demanding not just the technical labor of recording, editing, managing and marketing but also the physical and emotional labor of adopting a persona to keep clients feeling special and eager to spend.

enix International Limited, is based, the company said its sales grew from $238 million in 2019 to more than $5.5 billion last year.

Its international army of creators has also grown from 348,000 in 2019 to more than 3 million today — a tenfold increase.

The company paid its owner, the Ukrainian American venture capitalist Leonid Radvinsky, $338 million in dividends last year.)

portion of its creator base and 70 percent of its annual revenue

When Tim Stokely, a London-based operator of live-cam sex sites, founded OnlyFans with his brother in 2016, he framed it as a simple way to monetize the creators who were becoming the world’s new celebrities — the same online influencers, just with a payment button. In 2019, Stokely told Wired magazine that his site was like “a bolt-on to your existing social media,” in the same way “Uber is a bolt-on to your car.”

Before OnlyFans, pornography on the internet had been largely a top-down enterprise, with agents, producers, studios and other middlemen hoarding the profits of performers’ work. OnlyFans democratized that business model, letting the workers run the show: recording their own content, deciding their prices, selling it however they’d like and reaping the full reward.

The platform bans real-world prostitution, as well as extreme or illegal content, and requires everyone who shows up on camera to verify they’re 18 or older by sending in a video selfie showing them holding a government-issued ID.

OnlyFans operates as a neutral marketplace, with no ads, trending topics or recommendation algorithms, placing few limitations on what creators can sell but also making it necessary for them to market themselves or fade away.

After sending other creators’ agents their money over PayPal, Adams’s ad workers send suggestions over the messaging app Telegram on how Bryce should be marketed, depending on the clientele. OnlyFans models whose fans tend to prefer the “girlfriend experience,” for instance, are told to talk up her authenticity: “Bryce is a real, fit girl who wants to get to know you

Like most platforms, OnlyFans suffers from a problem of incredible pay inequality, with the bulk of the profits concentrated in the bank accounts of the lucky few.

the top 1 percent of accounts made 33 percent of the money, and that most accounts took home less than $145 a month

Watching their partner have sex with someone else sometimes sparked what they called “classic little jealousy issues,” which Adams said they resolved with “more communication, more growing up.” The money was just too good. And over time, they adopted a self-affirming ideology that framed everything as just business. Things that were tough to do but got easier with practice, like shooting a sex scene, they called, in gym terms, “reps.” Things one may not want to do at first, but require some mental work to approach, became “self-limiting beliefs.”

They started hiring workers through friends and family, and what was once just Adams became a team effort, in which everyone was expected to workshop caption and video ideas. The group evaluated content under what Brian, who is 31, called a “triangulation method” that factored their comfort level with a piece of content alongside its engagement potential and “brand match.” Bryce the person gave way to Bryce the brand, a commercialized persona drafted by committee and refined for maximum marketability.

One of the operation’s most subtly critical components is a piece of software known as “the Tool,” which they developed and maintain in-house. The Tool scrapes and compiles every “like” and view on all of Adams’s social network accounts, every OnlyFans “fan action” and transaction, and every text, sext and chat message — more than 20 million lines of text so far.

It houses reams of customer data and a library of preset messages that Adams and her chatters can send to fans, helping to automate their reactions and flirtations — “an 80 percent template for a personalized response,” she said.

And it’s linked to a searchable database, in which hundreds of sex scenes are described in detail — by price, total sales, participants and general theme — and given a unique “stock keeping unit,” or SKU, much like the scannable codes on a grocery store shelf. If a fan says they like a certain sexual scenario, a team member can instantly surface any relevant scenes for an easy upsell. “Classic inventory chain,” Adams said.

The systemized database is especially handy for the young women of Adams’s chat team, known as the “girlfriends,” who work at a bench of laptops in the gym’s upper loft. The Tool helped “supercharge her messaging, which ended up, like, 3X-ing her output,” Brian said, meaning it tripled.

Keeping men talking is especially important because the chat window is where Adams’s team sends out their mass-message sales promotions, and the girlfriends never really know what to expect. One girlfriend said she’s had as many as four different sexting sessions going at once.

Adams employs a small team that helps her pay other OnlyFans creators to give away codes fans can use for free short-term trials. The team tracks redemption rates and promotional effectiveness in a voluminous spreadsheet, looking for guys who double up on discount codes, known as “stackers,” as well as bad bets and outright fraud.

Many OnlyFans creators don’t offer anything explicit, and the site has pushed to spotlight its stable of chefs, comedians and mountain bikers on a streaming channel, OFTV. But erotic content on the platform is inescapable; even some outwardly conventional creators shed their clothes behind the paywall

Creators with a more hardcore fan base, meanwhile, are told to cut to the chase: “300+ sex tapes & counting”; “Bryce doesn’t say no, she’s the most wild, authentic girl you will ever find.”

The $18 an hour she makes on the ad team, however, is increasingly dwarfed by the money Leigh makes from her personal OnlyFans account, where she sells sex scenes with her boyfriend for $10 a month. Leigh made $92,000 in gross sales in July, thanks largely to revenue from new fans who found her through Adams or the bikini videos Leigh posts to her 170,000-follower TikTok account

“This is a real job. You dedicate your time to it every single day. You’re always learning, you’re always doing new things,” she said. “I’d never thought I’d be good at business, but learning all these business tactics really empowers you. I have my own LLC; I don’t know any other 20-year-old right now that has their own LLC.”

The team is meeting all traffic goals, per their internal dashboard, which showed that through the day on a recent Thursday they’d gained 2,221,835 video plays, 19,707 landing-page clicks, 6,372 new OnlyFans subscribers and 9,024 new social-network followers. And to keep in shape, Adams and her boyfriend are abiding by a rigorous daily diet and workout plan

They eat the same Chick-fil-A salad at every lunch, track every calorie and pay a gym assistant to record data on every rep and weight of their exercise.

But the OnlyFans business is competitive, and it does not always feel to the couple like they’ve done enough. Their new personal challenge, they said, is to go viral on the other platforms as often as possible, largely through jokey TikTok clips and bikini videos that don’t give away too much.

the host told creators this sales-funnel technique was key to helping build the “cult of you”: “Someone’s fascination will become infatuation, which will make you a lot of money.”

Adams’s company has worked to reverse engineer the often-inscrutable art of virality, and Brian now estimates Adams makes about $5,000 in revenue for every million short-form video views she gets on TikTok.

Her team has begun ranking each platform by the amount of money they expect they can get from each viewer there, a metric they call “fan lifetime value.” (Subscribers who click through to her from Facebook tend to spend the most, the data show. Facebook declined to comment.)

The younger workers said they see the couple as mentors, and the two are constantly reminding them that the job of a creator is not a “lottery ticket” and requires a persistent grind. Whenever one complains about their lack of engagement, Brian said he responds, “When’s the last time you posted 60 different videos, 60 days in a row, on your Instagram Reels?”

But some have taken to it quite naturally. Rayna Rose, 19, was working last year at a hair salon, sweeping floors for $12 an hour, when an old high school classmate who worked with Adams asked whether she wanted to try OnlyFans and make $500 a video.

Rose started making videos and working as a chatter for $18 an hour but recently renegotiated her contract with Adams to focus more on her personal OnlyFans account, where she has nearly 30,000 fans, many of whom pay $10 a month.

One recent evening this summer, Adams was in the farm’s gym when her boyfriend told her he was headed to their guest room to record a collab with Rose, who was wearing a blue bikini top and braided pigtails.

“Go have fun,” Adams told them as they walked away. “Make good content.” The 15-minute video has so far sold more than 1,400 copies and accounted for more than $30,000 in sales.

Rose said she has lost friends due to her “lifestyle,” with one messaging her recently, “Can you imagine how successful you would be if you studied regularly and spent your time wisely?”

The message stung but, in Rose’s eyes, they didn’t understand her at all. She feels, for the first time, like she has a sense of purpose: She wants to be a full-time influencer. She expects to clear $200,000 in earnings this year and is now planning to move out of her parents’ house.

“I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And now I know,” she said. “I want to be big. I want to be, like, mainstream.”

The heaviest users and most engaged American audience on the internet are no longer millennials but our successors in Generation Z

we’ve grown used to an internet whose form and culture was significantly shaped by and molded to our preferences. The American internet of the 2010s was an often stupid and almost always embarrassing internet — but it was a millennial internet. There were no social networks on which we felt uncomfortable; no culture developments we didn’t engender; no image macros we didn’t understand.

There was a time in my life when it was trivial to sign up to a new social network and pick up its patterns and mores on the fly. Now, I feel exhausted by the prospect.

millennials’ screen time has been on a steady decline for years. Only 42 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds say they’re online “almost constantly,” compared to 49 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds. We’re no longer the earliest adopters, even: 18- to 29-year-olds are more likely to have used ChatGPT than 30- to 49-year-olds — though maybe only because we’re no longer being assigned homework.

it may simply be because it’s not our internet anymore. It belongs to zoomers now.

Frankly, that should be freeing. Being extremely online, on an internet geared to your interests (in the same way that heroin is geared to your brain), is not exactly a quality conducive to personal happiness

Zoomer internet is, at least on the surface, quite different than ours.

The celebrities are unrecognizable (Kai Cenat???); the slang is impenetrable (gyatt???); the formats are new (GRWM???). Austerely tasteful overhead shots of meticulously arranged food posted on Instagram have been replaced with garishly lit minute-long videos of elaborate restaurant meals posted on TikTok. Glibly chatty blog posts about the news have been replaced with videos of recording sessions for podcasts

the creative expression and exuberant sociality that made the internet so “fun” to me a decade ago are booming among 20- somethings on TikTok, Instagram, Discord, Twitch and even X. “Skibidi Toilet,” “Fanum tax,” “the rizzler”

True, the fun I’m talking about is co-opted and exploited by a small handful of powerful and wealthy platform businesses

When you drill down, what mostly seems to have changed about the web over the last few years isn’t the structural dynamics but the cultural signifiers.

Perhaps what frustrated, alienated and aging internet users like me are experiencing here is not only the fruits of an enjunkified internet but also the loss of the cognitive elasticity, sense of humor and copious amounts of free time necessary to navigate all that confusing junk nimbly and cheerfully.

I suspect there is another factor driving the alienation and discomfort felt by many of the people who feel as though the internet is dying before our eyes: We’re getting old.

The more alienating the mass internet is to me, the more likely I will put to good use the hours I previously spent messing around

Or, at least, the more likely it is I will find corners — group chats, message boards and elsewhere — geared to my specific interests rather than the general engagement bait that otherwise dominates.

these statements are an apt description of much of American life since Gen Z was born. It has been witness to a financial crisis that deferred or destroyed dreams and wealth with little consequence to those who caused it; the whiplash of the Obama and Trump presidencies; political gridlock; an information ecosystem built atop viral advertising platforms that have democratized information, allowing it to be weaponized to the point of blurring reality; seemingly endless digitally documented police violence; and forever wars. They were born into a time of stark and widening inequality, a time when voter suppression is both called out but rarely acted upon.

Alienation is not a feature of Gen Z experience — it is the overarching context.

it is likely to have profound impacts on their politics and all of our lives.

What, for example, are the results of a year or two of young adulthood lost to social distancing due to a pandemic? Or of graduating into a potential economic depression behind a generation that graduated into a recession?

“ … older generations of liberals are now talking about teens and Kpop fans in the same way that Trump boomers talk about 4chan: as vigilante forces they love but don’t understand.”

Keidra Chaney, a culture writer, who notes that white K-pop fans have received the bulk of credit in the press for the fandom’s anti-racist activism, obscuring the contributions and experiences of black fans. Ms. Chaney told Ms. Ohlheiser that it “feels like a punch in the gut — that we are being used for our social currency and then discarded.”

members of the same generation are most likely also fueling far-right message board trolls, nihilist “Doomer” groups and extremist online communities with a disdain for political correctness. Their platforms of choice like TikTok still brim with unchecked extremist content and far-right conspiracy theories.

s a recent Pew Research Center survey suggests, “members of Gen Z look similar to millennials in their political preferences,” which suggests that online extremism associated with millennials is likely to evolve in this successive generation.

A 2019 Business Insider survey of over 1,800 Gen Zers revealed that a majority did not identify as either conservative or liberal, a result of either indecision or disillusion or both.

Now, after the Peronista government of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has failed to halt the country’s economic decline, a new force among Argentina’s Generation Z is rising.

This time, it’s young men who are at the forefront. Milei is speaking for them.

An admirer of Donald Trump and former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, Milei is campaigning on an Argentine version of “Drain the Swamp.” His aggressive style, outlandish comments and unusual presentation — he claims he hasn’t brushed that hair in years — have drawn millions of viewers to his videos and disrupted traditional politics

He has branded Pope Francis — the Argentine former Archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Bergoglio, the first South American pontiff — an “evil” leftist. Climate change, he says, is a “socialist lie.” He would hold a referendum to undo the three-year-old law that legalized abortion. He has called for creating a market for the sale of organs.

But he has also offered frustrated Argentines a break from the status quo: He has proposed shutting down the central bank, dollarizing the economy and taking a “chain saw” to government spending.

His attacks on the peso are already shocking the Argentine economy; the currency has taken a nose dive in the widely traded black market in recent weeks. The inflation rate has skyrocketed.

If Milei wins, it will likely be on the strength of the country’s young. Voters aged 18 to 29 account for a quarter of the electorate, and polls show they’re overwhelmingly inclined to vote for the iconoclast. That’s especially true for young men.

Coronel grew up watching the North American right-wing provocateurs Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos on a YouTube channel that translated their words into Spanish. “They were a fundamental part of my ideological awakening,” he said. But his greatest inspiration was Trump.

“We stopped listening to the intellectuals to listen to the politicians,” Coronel said.

“While everyone was focused on feminist demands and gay rights, there was a generation slowly starting to pay attention to Javier Milei.”

He decided to become an economist in 1989 during the early days of hyperinflation in Argentina. He worked as a risk analyst for Corporacion America, owned by one of Argentina’s billionaires, before leaping into television as a regular guest on shows.

Milei’s unconventional ideas and brash style — rants peppered with personal insults — was a TV hit. As the peso plunged and inflation skyrocketed, his economic theories began to find an audience.

He was elected to Congress in 2021 on pledges to tear the political elite down. He gained national prominence by raffling off his congressional salary each month.

Milei describes himself as a liberal-libertarian or a miniarchist. He supports limiting government to just a few functions — ideally, only security and justice — a night-watchman state.

He promises to slash the number of federal ministries from 18 to eight. He applies his free-market ideas to just about everything — he proposes loosening gun restrictions to “maximize the cost of robbery” — and letting the invisible hand of the market do the rest.

“Sometimes I have to pinch myself to ask whether I am living a dream or it’s a reality,” he told The Washington Post. “Because what Javier Milei proposes in politics hasn’t been heard in Argentina for 80 years.”

Milei’s originality is perhaps exactly why Gen Z is so transfixed by him. It’s a generation craving authenticity, Argentine political analyst Ana Iparraguirre said. “They see this guy telling it like it is,” she said. “I might not like that he’ll be selling guns in the streets, but at least this guy is not faking it.”

Most of his 1.4 million TikTok followers are younger than 24, according to his social media team. Iñaki Gutierrez, a 22-year old unpaid volunteer who manages his TikTok, said Milei managed to win the primaries in remote provinces “we didn’t even set foot in.” “TikTok was the answer,” Gutierrez said.

The fastest-growing social media site in Latin America has helped elect a wave of millennial presidents in the region, including Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and, last week, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador.

Milei’s TikTok posts offer Gen Z voters an outlet for rebellion against a system that they say is doing very little for them.

According to one recent survey, more than 65 percent of young voters say they would leave Argentina if they could.

“They feel they have no future,” Iparraguirre said. “If you’ve got nothing to lose you may as well try something different.”

Fragoso’s girlfriend, Victoria Alegre, 23, walking with him in a mall in Buenos Aires this week, said she thinks Milei is a machista who could roll back rights for women. Fragoso said he also dislikes the way Milei speaks about feminism. But he’s willing to overlook it, he said, to take a chance on something — anything — different.

“They said we were dangerous and that we needed to be quiet,” Milei shouted. “But we’re here, we fought the battle and we’re going to win!

Until recently, the people said, Meta executives viewed the company’s reliance on China to make Oculus virtual reality headsets as a relatively minor concern because the company’s core focus was its social media and messaging apps.

All that has changed now that Meta has rebranded itself as a hardware company

“Meta is building a complicated hardware product. You can’t just turn on a dime and make it elsewhere,”

Facebook’s public criticism of China began in 2019 when Zuckerberg warned, in a speech at Georgetown University, that China was exporting a dangerous vision for the internet to the rest of the world — and noted that Facebook was abandoning its efforts to break into that country’s market.

The anti-China stance has since extended into a full-blown corporate strategy. Nick Clegg, the company’s president, wrote an op-ed attacking China in The Washington Post in 2020, the same year Zuckerberg attacked China in a congressional antitrust hearing.

At the antitrust hearing in Congress in 2020, Zuckerberg used his opening remarks to attack China in terms that went much further than his industry peers. He said it was “well-documented that the Chinese government steals technology from American companies,” and repeated that the country was “building its own version of the internet” that went against American values. He described Facebook as a “proudly American” company and noted that TikTok was the company’s fastest-growing rival.

“They were trying to find things that [Zuckerberg] could agree with Trump on, and it’s a pretty slim list,” said one of the people, describing how the company landed on its anti-China strategy. “If you’re not going to try to be in this country anyway, you might as well use it to your political advantage by contrasting yourself with Apple and TikTok.”

These online crusades can be waged in good faith or in bad faith, and some can become deeply destructive. (The classic example of a bad-faith battle is Gamergate, a 2014 culture war that started as a feud over video game journalism but morphed into a toxic campaign of violent misogyny and racism that paved the way for the alt-right.)

because trading stocks costs money — and required some level of expertise and time commitment — it was mostly left to professionals.

Smartphone-based trading apps like Robinhood changed that, by introducing commission-free trades and an interface that made executing a gamma squeeze as straightforward as ordering a burrito from Uber Eats. Suddenly, millions of amateurs could organize themselves, generate their own market research and investment theses, drum up excitement in Reddit threads and TikTok videos, and enter the casino with the big boys

If you can get past the all-caps lunacy and strange inside jargon, the Redditors make some good points

Big banks and hedge funds really do play by different rules than retail investors. Wall Street banks really did get bailed out after the 2008 financial crisis while Main Street homeowners suffered. M.B.A.s in fancy suits are probably no more likely to give you good investing advice than guys on YouTube with names like “RoaringKitty.”

author Martin Gurri calls “the revolt of the public.” Mr. Gurri writes that the internet has empowered ordinary citizens by giving them new information and tools, which they then use to discover the flaws in the systems and institutions that govern their lives. Once they’ve discovered these shortcomings, he writes, these citizens often rebel, tearing down elites and dominant institutions out of anger at having been lied to and withheld from.

The result, Mr. Gurri writes, is a kind of vengeful nihilism, an urge to burn down the establishment without a clear sense of what’s supposed to replace it.

Retail investors, armed with new kinds of tools and information that allow them to compete on equal footing with professionals, are looking at the Masters of the Universe and going: Really? Those guys run the market?

this is not just a speculative bubble or a stupid prank. It’s an authority crisis. And even if GameStop stock crashes or regulators step in and call off the party, these disillusioned day traders will keep trying to create chaos for the elites they feel have spent decades profiting at their expense.

for the Reddit day traders, the important victory was always the symbolic one. They might lose their shirts, but they’ve sent the message that with enough passion and rocket-ship emojis, a crowd of profane, irreverent degenerates — again, their words, not mine — can turn the stock market on its head.