Blog

Social media has become such a menace for kids that the city health commissioner is recommending parents don’t give their children cell phones till at least age 14.

Pediatrians also should make talking to parents and children about social media part of check-ups, says Big Apple Health Commish Ashwin Vasan.

“Adolescents using social media have a greater risk of experiencing poor mental health, including symptoms of depression and anxiety,” wrote Vasan and city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Chief Medical Officer Michelle Morse in a Sept. 5 letter to doctors and other medical professionals.

Read more here.

The pandemic boom might be over for many tech companies, but OnlyFans is still a money-making machine.

Its parent company, Fenix International, posted annual earnings on Friday for the fiscal year ending November 30, 2023. The company’s revenue grew by $217 million to $1.3 billion, up from $1.09 billion in 2022.

The filing shows that the total number of creator and fan accounts also surged by 29% and 28%, respectively, to 4.1 million creators and 305 million fans.

OnlyFans takes a 20% cut of creators’ earnings through its platform. Gross payments made through OnlyFans, representing how much fans pay creators for messages, photos, and videos, amounted to $6.6 billion, up by $1 billion from the prior year.

The group’s pretax profit jumped from $525 million to $658 million in 2023.

The subscription site popular with adult-content creators boomed during the pandemic, boosted by new creators and subscribers signing up during lockdown.

Company filings show that Leo Radvinsky, the owner of OnlyFans, was paid a dividend of $338 million in 2022 after earning more than $500 million from OnlyFans in the prior two years.

OnlyFans was founded in the UK in 2016 by the British entrepreneur Tim Stokely before he sold the company Radvinsky two years later for an undisclosed amount.

Keily Blair, the CEO of OnlyFans, said in a statement shared with Business Insider: “OnlyFans had a strong year in 2023. We have cemented our place as a leading digital entertainment company and a UK tech success story.”

Blair added that it helped its creator community “monetize their content and grow their global fan base” and that it will continue to invest in the creator economy.

Read more here.

The Warriors have a few concrete thoughts. Schools across the U.S. can be secured. So why aren’t they?

Please watch here. 

Anxiety over school shootings has become a common fear in America. When something that once seemed unthinkable happens with some regularity, added to our feeling of horror that it’s happened (again!) is another kind of alarm: Could this happen at my child’s school?

And many parents have begun to worry whether the news of school shootings, along with the active-shooter drills most schools are now conducting, are frightening children in a damaging way.

Responding to this concern, Jamie Howard, PhD, director of the Trauma and Resilience Service at the Child Mind Institute, says that parents tend to worry about school shootings more than their children do. “Even though they’re the ones going into school every day, I just don’t hear a lot of kids worrying about it,” she says. “When children are younger they’re more egocentric. As they get to become teenagers this changes.” Thisdevelopmental selfishness is a quality that often protects younger children from the kind of anxiety that the adults around them are experiencing.

This is good news for parents who worry about their children feeling afraid. But kids are very good at picking up on the fears of their parents, and if they sense that Mom or Dad is afraid, they will take notice.

Read more here. 

WARNING: Harrison Haynes was a 12-year-old, video game-loving middle school student when he said he met a stranger online through a video game.

Over the next few months, Haynes says that stranger, who claimed to be 19-years-old and whom Haynes never met in person, became someone whom Haynes considered his “best friend.”

“I’m not making friends, so this gaming space was like a really good space for solace for me,” Haynes, now a 20-year-old college student, told “Good Morning America.”

Referring to his friendship with the “teenager” he said he knew only as a fellow video game lover, he added, “We had so much fun.”

READ MORE HERE.

There are so many ways that the U.S. business sector can support survivors of sex and labor trafficking, starting with being informed about how to recognize and respond to suspected human trafficking in your workplace. Businesses can also support survivors and help them, over the long and short terms, by providing vocational training opportunities to survivors, and they can offer safe and quality long-term jobs that ensure economic stability and financial well-being.

Companies have an additional, powerful lever they can further deploy to aid survivors of human trafficking in their recovery: employment. As employers, companies are uniquely positioned to offer quality training and stable incomes. Vocational training and good jobs enable survivors to better build the skills and resources they need to achieve financial security and long-term safety. Doing so also helps survivors to overcome socioeconomic vulnerabilities, reducing the likelihood that they or their dependents will be exploited in the future.”

Let’s rally around this movement. If you can help and support this and own or operate a business, please contact [email protected]

Read more here. 

Thom Hartmann Writes –

This week saw a dramatic turn in our nation’s desperate efforts to clean up the increasingly poisonous online sewers that we call social media.

First, the backstory:

If you publish a newspaper or newsletter (like this one) and you publish “illegal” content — encouragement of crimes or homicide, offer to sell drugs, display child porn, advocate overthrowing the government by violence — you can go to jail. If you publish things that defame or lie about persons or corporations, you can be sued into bankruptcy.

If you own a bookstore or newsstand and distribute books, magazines, and newspapers and offer for sale illegal content — child or snuff porn, stolen copyrighted material, instructions for making illegal drugs or weapons — you can also go to jail. And if you sell materials that openly defame individuals or corporations, you can also be sued into bankruptcy.

In the first category, you’d be a publisher. In the second, you’d be a distributor.

But what is social media? Particularly those types of social media that use an algorithm to push user-produced content out to people who haven’t explicitly asked for it?

Twenty-eight years ago, social media sites like CompuServe and AOL were regulated as if they were publishers, with the occasional/secondary oversight as if they were distributors. They had an obligation to make sure that illegal or defamatory content wasn’t published on their sites, or, if it was, to remove it within a reasonable time period.

The internet back then was a relatively safe and peaceful place. I know, as I ran a large part of one of the largest social media sites that existed at the time.

But then things got weird.

Back in 1996, some geniuses in Congress thought, “Hey, let’s do away with the entire concept of the publisher or distributor having responsibility for what happens in their place if that publisher or distributor happens to be operating online as what is called social media.”

Seriously.  Selling drugs, trading in guns and ammunition, human trafficking, planning terrorist attacks, overthrowing governments, sparking genocides, promoting open lies and naked defamation. All good. No problem.

Read more here. 

Thom Hartmann writes –

This week saw a dramatic turn in our nation’s desperate efforts to clean up the increasingly poisonous online sewers that we call social media.

First, the backstory:

If you publish a newspaper or newsletter (like this one) and you publish “illegal” content — encouragement of crimes or homicide, offer to sell drugs, display child porn, advocate overthrowing the government by violence — you can go to jail. If you publish things that defame or lie about persons or corporations, you can be sued into bankruptcy.

If you own a bookstore or newsstand and distribute books, magazines, and newspapers and offer for sale illegal content — child or snuff porn, stolen copyrighted material, instructions for making illegal drugs or weapons — you can also go to jail. And if you sell materials that openly defame individuals or corporations, you can also be sued into bankruptcy.

In the first category, you’d be a publisher. In the second, you’d be a distributor.

But what is social media? Particularly those types of social media that use an algorithm to push user-produced content out to people who haven’t explicitly asked for it?

Twenty-eight years ago, social media sites like CompuServe and AOL were regulated as if they were publishers, with the occasional/secondary oversight as if they were distributors. They had an obligation to make sure that illegal or defamatory content wasn’t published on their sites, or, if it was, to remove it within a reasonable time period.

The internet back then was a relatively safe and peaceful place. I know, as I ran a large part of one of the largest social media sites that existed at the time.

But then things got weird.

Read more here.