Since 2010 (to 2022), anxiety has increased 139% amongst ages 18-25.

Social Media

2 in 3 people now use social media

…more than half of the current total only started using social media within the past 10 years.

Key stats for 2025:

Around 5.20 billion users user social media worldwide, which is around 64% of the global population.

Facebook remains the largest social media platform, with over 3.15 billion monthly active users.

YouTube is the second-largest social media platform, with over 2.5 billion active users.

Instagram has over 2 billion active users, making it the fourth largest social media platform.

TikTok has surpassed 1 billion active users, becoming one of the fastest-growing social media platforms.

The risk of depression increased by 13%… for each hour increase in social media use in adolescents. TSSM [time spent on social media] is associated with depression in a linear dose−response and gender-specific manner, which suggests the need for better monitoring of adolescent social media use.

Jonathan Haidt provides an important perspective for this:

So even if you zoom in on social media, you’re still blending Snapchat, Instagram, and Tik Tok and others, but those are the big three. And what happens? Instagram is by far the best at causing girls to be anxious, depressed, think that they’re ugly, think that they’re fat.

So Instagram has a special relationship. It causes internalizing disorders in girls. Snapchat doesn’t do that. Snapchat, however, is the main way that sexual predators get to kids. Sometimes it’ll start on Instagram, but then they move to Snap because Snap is designed to have disappearing messages. And Snapchat does not keep records of the conversation. So drug dealers and extortionists, it’s perfect for them.

They go on, they communicate, and while they tell me that they do keep the metadata, they know that there was some connection, but they destroy the evidence. So Snapchat isn’t causing depression, but it is causing sextortion. And then many suicides happen when boys get sexedtorted. They sometimes kill themselves.

So Snapchat causes all kinds of severe harms, but it’s not connected to the number of hours you’re using. It’s are you talking to strangers? Are you looking for drugs that are lending? So Instagram depression and girls Snapchat meeting men who want money or sex from you will harm you.

Tik Tok is destroying your concentration. Tik Tok is by far the worst thing for concentration. So it’s three different platforms, three different effects.

How does the research go? First thing we do is we say, well, all we’re going to look at is time, just hours spent on any social media platform. And what’s the correlation of that with depression? And the answer is very small. Of course, it is. You’re taking three platforms only one of which has a special relation with depression. You’re ignoring all the other harms. And then you conclude that, oh, the correlation is there, but it’s too small.

And then when you look at boys, we’re not seeing the same kind of correlation between the social media use and the anxiety and depression. That’s right. But notice how you phrase that. We’re not seeing a correlation between social media use because all we’re thinking about is are they on it for how long. And if we look at that, let’s say with Snapchat, we’re not going to find an effect. In fact, I saw a study recently, the correlation of time spent on Snapchat with mood and things is actually slightly positive. Now, does Snapchat cause the positivity or is that the really social kids are more positive? But for Snap, the problem isn’t that it makes them depressed.

For Snap, the problem is that it introduces them to strangers on disappearing platforms.

…social media accounts for 35.8 percent of our daily online activities, meaning that more than 1 in 3 internet minutes can be attributed to social media platforms.

On average, women spend 16 minutes per day more than men do using social media, meaning that women spend roughly 12 percent longer using social media compared with men.

YouTube tops the ranking by total time spent, with the platform’s Android app users spending more than 10 trillion minutes per month watching YouTube videos.

…findings suggest that the average user now spends more than an hour per day – every day – using TikTok.

Artificial Intelligence

More than 1 billion people now use AI every month

the likely monthly user figure for ChatGPT around 1 billion in its own right.

In a census-representative survey of 2,028 UK participants, we found that 33% had used AI models for emotional purposes in the last year, while 8% do so weekly, and 4% daily.

At the beginning of 2024, for the first time, models performed better than experts (biology PhDs) on our open-ended biology questions. Since then, we have observed continuous improvements on these question sets. Today, models can provide complex insights that would otherwise require years of chemistry or biology training. 

We consistently found across our experiments that the factors that increased model persuasiveness, such as information-focused prompting and persuasion reward modelling, systematically decreased factual accuracy. This implies that optimising models for persuasion may come at a cost to truthfulness.

…the strongest levers of persuasion are not model scale or personalisation – they are post‑training and prompting techniques, which significantly shape how much information models present and how they structure arguments.

A 2025 Common Sense Media survey found that 72% of U.S. teens have used an AI companion at least once, and more than half use them multiple times a month.

By offering the prospect of an immortal body through transhumanism, Peter Thiel echoes the same promise made by Satan in Genesis 3: The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die!  For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3:4-5 NASB 1995 In the interview, Peter Thiel asserts that he and fellow proponents of singularity do not merely seek to transform themselves like transgender individuals who undergo surgical alterations. Instead, Thiel and the transhumanists aim to offer humanity a completely new heart, mind, and soul. Key points to consider: 1. Transhumanism is a secretive cult that, if allowed to flourish, could ultimately lead to the end of humanity. 2. Transhumanism and the concept of The Singularity are attempting to co-opt the framework of Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. 3. Transhumanists are deliberately undermining humanity’s cognitive freedom. 4. Peter Thiel has mentored and shaped JD Vance for his current role for over a decade. 5. Christians must recognize that transhumanism poses a significant threat to humanity and represents a false gospel that falsely promises eternal life.

NEW: Meta has secured a patent for an AI system designed to simulate deceased users by analyzing their past data, enabling the account to continue posting, sending messages and even conducting video calls in their behavioral style.

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The second image is from an alleged Meta employee 3 years ago blowing the whistle on project Lazarus… Today this headline hits: “Meta patents AI that takes over a dead person’s account to keep posting and chatting.” The whistleblower said the project was taking a dark turn.

You can’t imagine how fast Chinese humanoid robots are evolving. In just one year, they have evolved from robots to “humans”. 2025&2026 Chinese Spring Festival Gala

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This aired tonight to 1 billion people in China. A year ago these robots could barely wave a handkerchief, now they can do backflips and kung fu with nunchucks. Physical intelligence is the next frontier.

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A new Atlas robot from Boston Dynamics, showcasing smooth, human-like movement and advanced mobility beyond human limits

This is actually what the future will look like. When wearable AR glasses saturate the market a whole generation will grow up only knowing reality through a mixed virtual/real spatial computing lens. It will be chaotic and stimulating. They will cherish their digital objects.

Hollywood gatekeeping is dying. Very soon, blockbuster-level films will come from tiny teams of obsessed hobby directors armed with AI, taste, and zero permission. Big budgets won’t matter. Gatekeepers won’t matter.

The AI Slopacalypse is near.

Bytedance, the Chinese tech company behind TikTok, just rolled out its new AI video generator, Seedance 2.0, and it’s sparking backlash and despair in Hollywood. CBS News’ @jolingkent reports from Los Angeles.

AI just recreated a scene from The Last of Us… by fully recasting it.

AI chat box that allows you to “speak to the dead” I have quite a few mixed feelings on this. Logically, I find it to be a bad idea. Emotionally, I would absolutely be drawn to this if I lost someone extremely close to me

Advertisements

…the world’s marketers are on track to spend USD $1.16 trillion in 2025, with that global total up by 6.5 percent compared with 2024 levels.

Depending on how we aggregate the data, Statista’s analysis indicates that online search advertising accounts for the single largest share of ad spend, well ahead of spend on both online video and traditional TV advertising.

…that figure means that advertisers will spend just below USD $1 billion per day on search advertising in 2025.

In the latest wave of GWI’s ongoing research, just 80.3 percent of online adults said that they used a search engine like Google or Yahoo! within the past month, which is the lowest figure we’ve seen for this question and its previous equivalents in GWI’s survey.

It’s important to stress that the percentage of online adults declaring usage of search engines had already started to decline before Q4 2022, so it’s unlikely that ChatGPT and its ilk are the only cause of this decline.

And in fact, respondents’ reported use of search engines actually increased steadily between Q4 2022 and Q2 2024.

Regardless of the cause, however, GWI’s survey data shows that the share of online adults that visit search engines each month has fallen by a relative 2.5 percent (-210 basis points) over the past twelve months.

Gaming

In 2024, it was found that consumers in the United Kingdom (UK) spent approximately 1.7 billion British pounds on mobile gaming…

In 2023, Roblox reported over 13,000 instances of child exploitation, leading to over 1,300 law enforcement requests.

8% [of teens (13-17) who play video games] have been sent unwanted sexually explicit things

8–12-year-olds spent an average of 2 hours and 18 minutes per day playing video games in 2019, and that increased to 2 hours and 27 minutes in 2021. This report did not specify what percentage of children spent this much time gaming. However, a 2015 report found that one-in-three of boys and one-in-ten of girls in this age group played for at least two hours daily, with ten percent of boys exceeding four hours. Among older adolescents (ages 12–18), a 2021 survey found that 57% of boys and 36% of girls reported gaming for at least 3.5 hours per day.

A 2018 survey of 2,865 adolescent gamers found that 13% had played gambling-style games online. One survey found that in 2019, 43.7% of eighth-grade boys purchased a loot box in the past year, which rose to 48.6% in 2022. In other words, half of 8th grade boys are gaining practice and familiarity with gambling.