My wanting to share every waking thought became eclipsed by a desire for an increasingly rare commodity — a private life.

Online social interactions are no substitute for the real thing.

Ismail Ajjawi, 17, a Palestinian from Lebanon, said he was denied entry after a customs agent took issue with posts written by others.

New court documents in the Roundup litigation allege Monsanto paid internet trolls to post comments on social media to counter bad publicity. Details here.

Foreign propagandists are getting a strong foothold in France, and the traditional media can’t fight it

Christina Farr used to spend 5 hours a week posting and interacting with friends on Instagram. She quit cold this summer, and her life changed dramatically for the better.

Generation Z has grown up online – so why are a surprising number suddenly turning their backs on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat?

Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2017. “How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument.” American Political Science Review, 111, 3, Pp. 484-501.

Seven in 10 said Instagram made them feel worse about body image and half of 14-24-year-olds reported Instagram and Facebook exacerbated feelings of anxiety. Two-thirds said Facebook made cyber-bullying worse.

Everyone wants to be popular online. Some even pay for it. Inside social media’s black market.

Steven Pinker is a liberal, Jewish professor. But social media convinced people that he’s a darling of the alt-right.

Democracy assumes a set of capacities: the capacity for deliberation, understanding different ideas, reasoned discourse. This grounds government authority, the will of the people. So one way to talk about the effects of these technologies is that they are a kind of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the human will. Our phones are the operating system for our life. They keep us looking and clicking. I think this wears down certain capacities, like willpower, by having us make more decisions. A study showed that repeated distractions lower people’s effective IQ by up to 10 points. It was over twice the IQ drop that you get from long-term marijuana usage. There are certainly epistemic issues as well. Fake news is part of this, but it’s more about people having a totally different sense of reality, even within the same society or on the same street. It really makes it hard to achieve that common sense of what’s at stake that is necessary for an effective democracy.

The story of how one metric has changed the way you see the world