Month: November 2026

The Adult Children Cleaning Up Their Parents’ Feeds ⇥ nymag.com

Jessica Lucas, in a fascinating New York magazine article about older people succumbing to compulsive social media use, and the adult children who are trying to stabilize their feeds:

Most adult children seem to know instinctively that their parents’ social-media use has long since outstripped whatever cognitive good it once served. They have watched their parents surrender ever-larger portions of their lives to their phones, triggering a kind of grief and, occasionally, anger. Every hour handed over to the feed can feel like a choice on their parents’ part to willingly accelerate their own deterioration. Anne, a 55-year-old writer living in New York, regularly travels out of state to visit her mother, Rosa, who is in her 80s. She often arrives to an unsettling scene: Rosa on the couch, “hunched over” her phone, “slack-jawed.” Over the years, Anne says she has watched her mother abandon crossword puzzles, newspapers, and books in favor of the feed. “I don’t think a younger version of her would have recognized that behavior as something she had as a goal for herself later in life,” she tells me.

Lucas also describes a kind of A.I.-generated video genre that preys on seniors; these videos are everywhere. If I am not signed into my YouTube Premium account, I often see ads from some company named Oathill Media with A.I.-generated seniors extolling the benefits of cheap life insurance. I cannot imagine this is wholly legitimate, and I know people who have been tricked by similar videos.

More broadly, this is one reason I think age-based regulations are insufficient. We should expect more from the giant corporations that make their money from, apparently, building compelling venues for advertisers. That should not be solely because Google and Meta collect an enormous amount of data to enable targeting. The platforms they manage are not actually safe; they are just popular. And, with descriptions like those in this article, it seems difficult to argue even the most frequent users are actually enjoying themselves without further intervention.

Colossus is Silicon Valley’s Investor-Backed ‘In-Flight Magazine’ ⇥ sfstandard.com

In September, I linked to a lengthy profile of Mark Zuckerberg written by Jeremy Stern in Colossus. It was a useful complement to Meta’s Connect presentation. But I had not heard of Colossus before then, and I wish I had done more digging into how what seemed to be a small publication was granted such generous access.

Andrew Fedorov, the San Francisco Standard:

Colossus is the brainchild of Patrick O’Shaughnessy, a Connecticut-raised heir to an oil fortune, who went to work for his father James’ firm, O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, in 2007. Patrick took over the company in 2018 and sold it four years later to Franklin Templeton. In 2016, he launched a podcast called “Invest Like the Best,” borrowing the title of a book his father published in 1994.

Well, that makes sense. This is yet another venue where, after mainstream media outlets and even tech-focused publications recognized a more skeptical tone toward the industry, CEOs and executives can appear to deliver their talking points with little pushback. It is in the same vein as Cheeky Pint and Alex Heath’s Sources, except there is a serious-looking print copy you can order to leave in waiting rooms and on shelves around the office.

‘No One Paid Me to Disagree With Jonathan Haidt’ ⇥ made-not-found-by-danah-boyd.ghost.io

danah boyd, like Andrew Gelman and Candice Odgers, says she was not paid by Meta or anyone else to disagree with Jonathan Haidt’s conclusions about social media:

What kills me in the contemporary teens-and-tech debate is that there’s no space for actual research or critical nuance. You’re either opposed to the tech companies or in their pockets. And this week’s absurd discovery reinforces this infuriating polarity, painting those of us who are critical of Jonathan Haidt as being corporate shills. I find this especially frustrating because I did work in tech for a lot of my career. I played the role of friction inside many companies (although never Meta). I repeatedly got threatened by tech executives for challenging corporate mantras or providing research that contradicted their interests – and yet I persisted. Cuz many tech companies are far more complicated than people realize.

I had been meaning to link to a piece by Mizuko Ito, writing in the MIT Press Reader, for weeks; I think it complements boyd’s perspective:

We can advocate for features and policies that make platforms better for learning, belonging, and wellbeing. When parents and teens are asked, they want to keep using social media with more ways to flexibly protect their privacy, control recommendation algorithms, and monitor their own technology use. The emphasis on bans has come at the cost of progress on platform policies and features that make the online world better for people of all ages. These include privacy legislation and efforts centered on children’s digital rights and the duty of care.

You do not need to be paid by Meta — or Snap, or TikTok — to find Haidt’s conclusions unconvincing or unhelpful. But because some of its executives discussed following the same playbook as big companies in other controversial industries, like agribusiness, fossil fuels, and tobacco, in swaying research to be more favourable, the well has been poisoned. The people most visibly criticizing Haidt’s work insist they came to their conclusions entirely independently. I believe them. After those meeeting notes became public, however, I would not be surprised if many people do not.