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In the American creator economy, no platform is quite as direct or effective as OnlyFans. Since launching in 2016, the subscription site known primarily for its explicit videos has become one of the most methodical, cash-rich and least known layers of the online-influencer industry, touching every social platform and, for some creators, unlocking a once-unimaginable level of wealth.

More than 3 million creators now post around the world on OnlyFans, which has 230 million subscribing “fans” — a global audience two-thirds the size of the United States itself

fans’ total payouts to creators soared last year to $5.5 billion — more than every online influencer in the United States earned from advertisers that year,

You may have seen the tins that contain 15 little white rectangles that look like the desiccant packs labeled “Do Not Eat.” Zyns are filled with nicotine and are meant to be placed under your lip like tobacco dip. No spitting is required, so nicotine pouches are even less visible than vaping. Zyns come in two strengths in the United States, three and six milligrams. A single six-milligram pouch is a dose so high that first-time users on TikTok have said it caused them to vomit or pass out.

We worry about bad actors bullying, luring or indoctrinating them online

I was stunned by the vast forces that are influencing teenagers. These forces operate largely unhampered by a regulatory system that seems to always be a step behind when it comes to how children can and are being harmed on social media.

fifth, sixth and seventh graders learn online for a significant portion of their in-class math periods at the path and pace that fit their individual needs. Meanwhile, teachers will coach the students to keep up with their math goals and help them apply the math concepts in small-group and class-wide projects.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are working to improve cognitive tutor software that utilizes the most cutting-edge cognitive science and neuroscience to improve learning for individual students

entrepreneurs are creating educational video games and embedding gaming techniques inside online learning experiences to boost student motivation and make learning fu

The potential for abuse of online porn is well documented, with research showing that chronic masturbators who engage with online porn for up to 20 hours a day can suffer a “hangover” as a result of the dopamine drop-off. But there are other collateral costs. “What you look at online is going to take you offline,” says Craig Gross, a.k.a. the “Porn Pastor,” who heads XXXChurch.com, a Christian website that warns against the perils of online pornography. “You’re going to do so many things you never thought you’d do.”

He also learned that his fixation on sex was a way of avoiding his insecurities and tackling the emotional issues that first led to his addictive behavior. “The addiction will take you to a place where you’re walking the streets at night, so keyed up, thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll just see if there’s anybody out there,’” he says. “Like looking for prey, kind of. You’re totally jacked up, adrenalized. One hundred percent focused on this one purpose. But my self-esteem was shot.”

Max Dubinsky, an Ohio native and writer who went through a torturous 14-month period of online-pornography dependence. He says a big problem with his addiction was actually what it prevented him from doing. “I couldn’t hold down a healthy relationship. I couldn’t be aroused without pornography, and I was expecting way too much from the women in my life,”

Education will end up being dominated by a few huge incumbents.  As we see with Facebook and Twitter and, well, almost everything, the internet offers huge returns to scale, and substantial network effects.

Online education will kill the liberal arts degree.

 The important aspect for this discussion is that what they teach is hard to test efficiently.  There's enormous variation in grading of, say, English papers, and even if it were easier to standardize, that grading requires hours of expensive labor.

For all the good they can find there, other influences, from screen games and commercial pop-ups to YouTube, social media, and online erotica, introduce them to images and information they are not developmentally equipped to understand. The combination of their innate eagerness to mimic what’s cool, and the R- to X-rated quality of the cool they see, has collapsed childhood to the point that we see second-graders mimicking sexy teens and fourth-graders hanging out with online “friends” and gamers far older and more worldly. Life for six- to ten-year-olds has taken on a pseudosophisticated zeitgeist far beyond the normal developmental readiness of the age.

inwardly, many children experience a suffocating squeeze on developmental growth that is essential for these early school years.

At a developmental time when children need to be learning how to effectively interact directly, the tech-mediated environment is not an adequate substitute for the human one.

let's acknowledge that both candidates fudged, exaggerated, or flat-out lied on just about everything pertaining to foreign economic policy during last night's debate.  It was a truly bipartisan fib-fest.  I could go through the debate transcript line by line, but let's just hit the highlights.  At varous points, one or both of the candidates tried to convince undecided voters of the following:  1)  Energy independence is the cure for what ails the U.S. economy; 2)  The U.S. loses from trade with China, and tougher trade enforcement will fix that; 3)  Free trade with Latin America will create millions and millions of jobs; 4)  The only reason China is doing well comparatively is that it's keeping its currency undervalued; and finally 5)  Illegal immigration is threatening the American economy.  Let's inject a little reality here, shall we?  Repeat after me:  1)  Because most energy sources are traded in global markets, energy independence has zero effect on the economy (though there might be a few security dividends). 2)  The United States benefits a great deal from trade with China and the rest of the world. 3)  Perfect trade enforcement would have only a marginal impact on employment; 4)  China's currency interventions have been slowing down for much of 2012.  Literally. 5)  Illegal immigration into the United States "has been in reverse for several years."

The biggest whoppers in last night's U.S. presidential debate

After spending the past year designing  and making this course, however, let me say that those who believe that it will be easy to "scale up" existing lecture courses into the online world are kidding themselves.

“I don’t think any of us had any idea what the words ‘going viral’ meant when we rolled this out 10 or 12 years ago,” said James Robertson, a retired federal judge in Washington who helped guide the introduction of the federal electronic filing system.

In interviews, several plaintiffs’ lawyers said the current online environment was already deterring potential clients from filing suit. Now a Google search can forever portray even a successful litigant as “the complainer, or the slut who allegedly slept with the boss,” as Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland law professor, put it. Those who have suffered privacy violations, like nude pictures posted online, risk making the original damage worse if they sue, since courts are generally reluctant to allow plaintiffs to file anonymously.

Leigh Goodmark, another Maryland law professor, said the online boom of gender-related court documents was a harbinger of a future in which virtually no legal document — an eviction notice, a divorce pleading with embarrassing details — would be safe from public consumption.

now online shopping is muddy and suspicious in a different way—you never really know what you’re buying, or when it will arrive, or why it costs what it does, or even what options might be available to purchase. The problem isn’t the Dash button, but the way online shopping works in general, especially at the Everything Store.

The company appears to give people what they want, including correcting problems when they arise.But a customer-service orientation masks how Amazon has changed consumer expectations and standards as they relate to retail purchases.

That brings us to Germany’s Dash-button ban: It’s difficult to know exactly what the product costs when you press the button to order it. Prices on Amazon sway up and down in mysterious ways, driven by computational pricing models that consumers can never see or understand. If configured to do so, pressing the Dash button can send a notification to the account holder’s smartphone, which can be followed to confirm pricing and cancel the order if desired.

n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way

Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one

but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.

activists spearheading unlikely assemblies in rural and conservative corners of the country have faced fierce online backlash and armed intimidation, which in some places is unfolding with the apparent support of local law enforcement.

The reaction, local activists say, threatens not just their safety and free-speech rights. It also endangers their ability, they say, to take the movement touched off by the police killing of George Floyd beyond urban hubs — to places like Omak or Bethel, Ohio, a village of 2,800 where a recent protest drew 700 counterprotesters.

The armed mobilization sheds light on the growth of anti-government militia groups, whose efforts — often coordinated on Facebook and other online platforms — have expanded since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and the nationwide outburst of protests for racial justice. Militia activity has marked recent protests in places across the country, often driven by false online alerts about infiltration by antifa and other left-wing militants.

Recent research shows that the vast majority of Americans — 80 to 85 percent of the American population — don’t follow politics closely or at all. And among voters, the most important issues are the economy, the coronavirus pandemic, criminal justice and policing, race relations, and health care, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll in early September.

There are partisan differences: Democrats care more about climate change than Republicans, Republicans care more about abortion than Democrats, and the importance of immigration has dropped precipitously for members of both parties.

Twitter, however, is not so essential to most Americans. According to the Pew Research Center, just 10 percent of Twitter users create 92 percent of the platform’s content:

It didn't take long for Neff to find the hashtag's meaning. "Where We Go One We Go All" is one of several mottoes of QAnon, a collective of online conspiracists.

The pastor and his wife, who live in Arcola, Mississippi, began watching the vast collection of QAnon videos posted online by "researchers" who decipher the cryptic messages of "Q," an anonymous online persona who claims to have access to classified military and intelligence operations.

Since its inception in 2017 QAnon has quickly metastasized, infiltrating American politics, internet culture and now -- religion.

Around half of all U.S. adults under 30 have used a dating site or app at some point in their lives, and one in 10 adults with partners say they met their significant other by dating online

Online-dating growth has been slowing. Paying users declined 6% in the first quarter of the year at Match Group, whose portfolio includes the League, Tinder and Hinge, compared with a 3% dip in the first quarter of 2023. The Bumble app grew paying users 18% in the first quarter, compared with 31% growth in the period a year earlier. 

Nearly half of all online daters and more than half of female daters say their experiences have been negative, according to Pew, and a growing tide of users are sharing their dissatisfaction

“self-radicalization”—the process by which those unconnected to organized jihad are lured toward extremism via the Web.

how exactly does this process work? How does one become so imbued with hatred online as to be willing to pack a pressure cooker with ball bearings and detonate it at the feet of an 8-year-old boy? What Internet “community” could motivate a floppy-haired teenager to send hot shrapnel into the body of a Chinese exchange student?

The constant on my feed—the thing that made me long for the Facebook where high-school friends squabbled about the efficacy of gun control legislation—was ceaseless images of dead children, mostly killed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Snap’s business model, which depends on TV-style advertising that (so far) offers marketers fewer of the data-targeted options pioneered by web giants like Google, feels refreshingly novel. And perhaps most important, its model for entertainment and journalism values human editing and curation over stories selected by personalization algorithms — and thus represents a departure from the filtered, viral feeds that dominate much of the rest of the online news environment.

Before Snapchat, the industry took for granted that everything users posted to the internet should remain there by default. Saving people’s data — and then constantly re-examining it to create new products and advertising — is the engine that supports behemoths like Google and Facebook.

Snapchat’s “ephemeral” internet — which has since been imitated by lots of other companies, including, most recently, Instagram — did not just usher in a new idea for online privacy. It also altered what had once been considered a sacred law of online interaction: virality.

Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking site has always struck me as one of the most noxious, dependent for its success on the darker aspects of online life: the zeal for constant self-fashioning and self-promotion, the pursuit of virtual forms of “community” and “friendship” that bear only a passing resemblance to the genuine article, and the relentless diminution of the private sphere in the quest for advertising dollars.

the problem is not that Facebook doesn’t make money. It’s that it doesn’t make that much money, and doesn’t have an obvious way to make that much more of it, because (like so many online concerns) it hasn’t figured out how to effectively monetize its million upon millions of users.

This “huge reach, limited profitability” problem is characteristic of the digital economy as a whole

Mr. Russell, a co-founder of Invisible Children, acknowledges that he has not made the most nuanced or academic of films. The video charts his personal odyssey to tell the world about Mr. Kony’s reign of terror and bring it to an end. He may have boiled down the issues, but that is what it takes to captivate so many people, he contends.

Activism in conflict zones has long brought both benefits and unforeseen consequences. It clearly helped make the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region an international issue. But many analysts also argue that the one-sided way activists painted the conflict — highlighting the Sudanese government’s crimes against villagers while largely ignoring the atrocities committed by rebels — ultimately made it harder to negotiate an end to the crisis

Some have called the video a pitch-perfect appeal to so-called slacktivism, a pejorative term for armchair activism by a younger generation, often online.

A study of students enrolled in the Virtual High School, for example, found that 75 percent of the students passed their courses with a C or better while 25 percent got a D, F, or Incomplete or dropped it.

It seems to me online learning can actually be less distracting than being in a classroom of 30 students, provided the students have access to computers. Indeed, two of the predictors of success are home access to a computer and/or a school period given over to online work. Other predictors were age, grade point average, technology use, self-efficacy and achievement beliefs, organizational skills, and risk taking.