By the time you’ve read this article, you may have felt the pull to check your smartphone—more than once. Americans are inexorably tethered to the little black screens in our pockets even though we know they can bring us more harm than good. So how do we keep our smartphone use in check? In 2018,…

“Most of us when we use these platforms, we don’t really think we could be the product. It was consciously designed that way. The end funnel isn’t funneling you just something to buy, but funneling you to an ideology.” Siyamak Khorrami sits down with Nick Janicki, media relations director with Gan Jing World. Today he…

Ohio’s Lt. Gov. Jon Husted is proposing a new law that would require certain online services to obtain permission from parents before allowing kids to use their platforms, insisting that such measures are necessary to protect children from harmful content. The “Social Media Parental Notification Act” requires online companies to create a method to determine…

Analysts at Bernstein Research are equating social media video app TikTok with drug addiction, warning about a “digital crack epidemic” as competition heats up in the sector. TikTok has replaced “the friction of deciding what to watch and ‘boring’ status update images” with a “sensory rush of bite-sized videos powered by a Chinese-owned, black-box algorithm,”…

A recent study by a group of psychologists from Sydney’s Macquarie University reveals that young people with lower executive function, such as weak self-control and greater impulsivity, are more vulnerable to gaming addiction. It also found that kids who don’t have their basic needs met in real life, like self-esteem, being socially included or feeling…