This digest is meant to provide a high-level overview for anyone who is fortunate enough not to follow gambling news every day. If daily news is more your speed, I recommend three newsletters that I relied on to compile this post: Straight to the Point from and the Event Horizon and the Closing Line, both from .

To the (nonexistent) news:

Americans like gambling (and, ahem, hedging financial risk) on soccer

One sportsbook executive pegged the amount bet in the U.S. on the World Cup as the equivalent of “10 Super Bowls.” Meanwhile, $40 billion was bet traded on Kalshi on the World Cup (not all from the U.S.).

Prediction markets are in the business of stepping on rakes, and business is booming

At this point, you have to wonder if it’s on purpose. Prediction markets remain front page news thanks to some scandals and some strange new products.

• A Wall Street Journal investigation showed Polymarket using a bunch of shady advertising practices, including using dummy websites so social media influencers could fake big wins and—without acknowledging that they were being paid—post about the “free” money they won. The CFTC, which (allegedly) regulates prediction markets, is investigating.

• President Trump’s teleprompter operator was caught betting on the words the president would say. Kalshi is patting itself on the back for catching him, even though he was only betting because the company created an economic incentive for him to do so. Also, who is going to pay back all the people who were on the losing end of the ill-gotten winnings?

• Kalshi paused a plan to offer contracts on airline delays but is setting up to allow bets on college conference realignment.

Congress doing congressional things

A subcommittee of the U.S. House Agricultural Committee—the committee that oversees the CFTC, because the agency is supposed to be regulating pork belly derivatives, not Houston Astros parlays—held a hearing on prediction markets. This came a few days after a half-dozen Democratic members of Congress, with the support of one of the Kalshi CEOs, put out a bill requiring facial recognition for accessing prediction markets or sportsbooks, ostensibly to protect children. Lo and behold, the bill also includes language to make it easier for the CFTC to approve contracts related to “gaming.”

In the meantime, states remain the battleground over prediction markets. Two bizarre situations are unfolding in the Midwest:

• Wisconsin: The state has an old law on the books that residents are not allowed to bet on an election in which they also vote, meaning someone who votes in Wisconsin cannot purchase an event contract on the outcome of that election. This is probably headed to court.

• Michigan: After a state court ordered Kalshi to stop offering sports events contracts, the CFTC demanded that Kalshi not comply with the order and told the company not to cancel any trades. So much for states’ rights.

The state of Washington also won an injunction against Kalshi for operating an unlicensed gambling site. The company is rapidly building a track record of taking Ls in court.

Don’t forget about good old-fashioned online sports betting

A bettor in Philadelphia lost $2 million after he claims he developed a gambling addiction. He is suing FanDuel and DraftKings (among others), and the Philadelphia Inquirer released a portion of a video with a personal shoutout from Philadelphia Phillies star Bryce Harper, allegedly commissioned for the bettor by his FanDuel VIP host. Harper has since issued a statement that he did not know what or who the video was for, or how it would be used.

New research

One of the landmark working papers on sports betting has been released in the Journal of Financial Economics. The paper finds that the spread of sports betting “does not displace other gambling or consumption but significantly reduces savings,” especially in low-income households.

Until next month

That’s it for this month’s nonexistent gambling news. The scandals will keep grabbing headlines. Meanwhile, gambling is becoming an ordinary, frictionless part of American life, while the costs, especially for households with the least money to spare, are becoming harder to ignore.

This post was written by Ben Samuels. In addition to his work on online gambling, he writes about policy and politics every two weeks.

Since the Supreme Court allowed states to legalize sports gambling in 2018, it’s been an all-out land grab for FanDuel, DraftKings, and other gambling platforms: to push for state-by-state legalization, to acquire customers, and to make gambling an integral part of watching sports.

By almost every measure, they’ve succeeded. State-licensed sports gambling is legal in 39 states; it’s legal online in 27 states.1 But as the American Institute for Boys and Men has written about extensively,2 this has had profound social consequences:

• When states legalize online betting, bankruptcy rates rise as much as 30%.3 One study found that for every dollar bet on sports, investment contributions fall by 99¢.4

• When states legalize online betting, alcohol consumption goes up, calls to gambling helplines go up, child maltreatment goes up, and food insecurity goes up. Problem gamblers are much likelier to have suicidal tendencies.

• Projected state tax revenues from online gambling have been far lower than what was promised. When you factor in societal costs—higher bankruptcies, higher rates of substance abuse, more violent tendencies—states may be losing money.

When you look at young men, what we’re seeing is even more concerning. So-called “prediction markets” like Kalshi, which are largely unregulated and available to any American 18 or older, are really just sports gambling platforms in disguise. They’re exacerbating this problem.5

Most alarmingly of all, gambling apps, prediction markets, pseudo-gambling apps, freemium games, and more are all targeting boys under 21. These companies are creating a funnel that has young men habitually—and often problematically—gambling well before they should legally even be allowed to open an account.

Boys under 21 can’t legally gamble, but they’re doing it anyway

Common Sense Media put out a terrific report on how boys under 18 are gambling. Gambling is pervasive, even among boys as young as 11.6

Source: Common Sense Media

This isn’t inherently bad. I think most parents would be fine with their teenage boys playing a poker game at home with friends, or putting a few dollars into a March Madness pool. For lots of boys under 21, it really is just that.

But home poker games don’t blow up your phones with notifications, nor do they offer ACH withdrawal, nor are they available 24 hours per day.

Minors can access online casinos through offshore and unlicensed platforms, crypto casinos, or accounts belonging to parents and older siblings, all of which are common and easy workarounds. Consequently, even if it’s nominally illegal, young men—who are especially susceptible to gambling addiction—are getting themselves into serious trouble.7

There’s a lot of harrowing, well-researched reporting on boys getting themselves into serious debt before they turn 18. And of course, countless other stories are never told.

• “Teen gambling is turbocharged thanks to sports-betting and prediction markets. Parents often have no idea.” (MarketWatch)

• “Gamification and memes lure young people to sports wagering apps and prediction markets” (Associated Press)

• “‘Public health crisis’: Experts weigh the stakes of youth gambling in America” (ABC News)

• “Prediction markets have made betting easier than ever—and young men are paying the price” (Fortune)

• “Young man reveals how online gambling put him thousands in debt before age of 18” (ABC 7 NY)

These trends are likely to accelerate as prediction markets—which are available in every state, are less regulated, and have an age limit of 18 rather than 21—become more prevalent.

While we know that prediction markets can feed gambling addictions, we don’t know how many of their users are under 21. That’s because they’re not required to disclose who’s gambling on their platforms.

Despite requests from members of Congress, these companies have opted not to share that information.

Gambling ads reach—and target—boys under 21

Obviously, boys who are watching television are going to see the (ubiquitous) ads for FanDuel, DraftKings, Kalshi, and other platforms that are spending billions per year on advertising.8

That may not be ideal, but it’s hardly unique. Beer companies get to advertise on television, and that’s not meant to reach minors.

What’s more alarming is that boys are more likely to encounter gambling ads on platforms capable of targeting them directly (namely, YouTube and social media):

Source: Common Sense Media

The content on social media can be relentless, and it seldom includes disclaimers about gambling addiction, which violates the gambling industry’s own guidelines.

FanDuel, DraftKings, and others have public positions about their commitment to promoting responsible gambling and preventing minors from gambling. In practice, they don’t operate that way.9

Their public comments on the topic are fairly explicit. Here are a few examples from investor presentations and earnings calls:

• Back in early 2021, FanDuel put together slides on “Attracting and Engaging Gen Z” and “Building a Product for Gen Z.” Keep in mind that at the time, the vast majority of Gen Z wasn’t of legal gambling age: approximately 20% of Gen Z was 21+, and approximately 40% was 18+.10

• FanDuel and DraftKings are actively thinking about how to make sure that young adults are in their pipeline. This question came up in a DraftKings earnings call earlier this year,11 and FanDuel last year announced the launch of FanDuel Predicts explicitly as “a new prediction market product which will include sports in states without access to regulated sports betting.” Prediction markets are 18+, not 21+.

• Super Group, a gambling company that trades on the NYSE, spoke about “a growing population of customers turning 18 and 21 every year” abroad as a demographic opportunity for the company.

Moreover, all of these companies are hiring brand ambassadors who are popular with people under 21. Take Pat McAfee, who just signed a sponsorship deal with DraftKings to replace his FanDuel sponsorship deal, which was worth up to $30 million per year. He has a large TikTok following, and his content is immensely popular among people under 18and among people ages 18-21, who are exposed to all of his gambling content.12

Polymarket may be the most shameless, hiring brand ambassadors in fraternities and paying them to recruit new customers. College campuses have been particularly lucrative for prediction markets.

Believe it or not, these aren’t even the worst actors. Plenty of illegal casinos operate without proper disclosure, operate without licenses, and target minors.13 Ads for these casinos are nominally prohibited on Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch, but they proliferate anyway, and teenagers have found themselves deep in debt well before they’re legally allowed to gamble.

What can be done?

As anyone who’s ever been a teenager on the internet can attest, it’s very easy to break the rules. And while some of that creativity is admirable—a fake moustache to get around AI age verification tools, for instance—minors can get themselves into serious trouble before they even turn 18, much less 21. Gambling companies have little interest in keeping them from seeing their ads and sponsored content.

What’s more, these companies use aggressive, predatory methods that aren’t legal elsewhere in the world to reach new customers. U.S. regulation hasn’t caught up.

Four policies that are obvious and urgent:

1. Regulate advertising for prediction markets. Right now, they’re basically unregulated. That’s a regulatory oversight at best, and they should be subject to the sorts of rules that other online casinos face.

2. Require more extensive disclosures. For prediction markets, how many 18-to-20-year-olds are using these platforms? How many minors are trying to create accounts? How much of their content on social media is being seen by minors?14

3. Limit how much young gamblers can wager per month. Flutter, an Ireland-based gambling company, limits gamblers under 25 to £500 per month. That should be enshrined in American regulation.

4. Crack down on illegal gambling. Crypto casinos and other unlicensed offshore casinos are operating in the U.S. without consequence. State and federal regulators must do better to enforce the laws already on the books.

This is a perpetual game of regulatory cat-and-mouse. Despite what they’ll tell you, gambling platforms are reliant on high-frequency problem gamblers, who drive much of the platforms’ profits. They know that young men in particular are especially vulnerable—and, therefore, especially lucrative.

7

Good data on what constitutes “serious trouble” is challenging to come by, but this chart tells an interesting story:

Source: Common Sense Media

There is more than one way that gambling can be problematic. But using your parents’ credit cards without their knowledge is unquestionably problematic behavior—even if it doesn’t constitute a formal gambling addiction.

Steven joined our pornography research convening in Minneapolis in June, and this conversation picks up where that meeting left off. We discuss:

• Where he’d like to see pornography researchers focus: Researchers study men in the problem, rarely men who’ve come out the other side. He’d like to see work following men six, nine, twelve months into recovery that studies whether and how shame recedes, confidence returns, and intimacy develops.

• Frequency is the wrong metric. After working with thousands of men, Steven doesn’t ask how often. He looks for loss of control and accumulating consequences: relationships, sexual function, work, general peace of mind.

• Porn as a regulation tool, not a sexual behavior. For the men he works with, porn has become the primary way they manage anxiety, boredom, loneliness, anger. With a phone in every pocket, he compares pornography to being newly sober from cocaine while carrying a pocketful everywhere you go.

• Which is why “just stop” fails. Recovery, as he describes it, has surprisingly little to do with not watching porn. It’s about becoming emotionally regulated, socially connected, and honest — building a life you don’t want to escape from.

• “Men need other men to become better men.” While therapy can generate useful insight, Steven has observed that behavior changes in the company of other men you don’t want to let down. Those groups exist, but they carry stigma and still aren’t easily accessible for your average 18-year-old.

• Recovery as something you’re building toward. Recovery is often understood by what’s being left behind. Steven frames the process as a move toward healthy masculinity — integrity, brotherhood, service, alignment between values and behavior. “You can fool the world, but you can’t fool the man in the mirror.”

• Losing the tolerance for discomfort. His recovery work with young men transcends pornography. Most young men, growing up with a phone always within reach, have not sat with discomfort long enough to develop the resilience.

• Moving toward alignment with values. “There’s this idea that this is about morality, that these are men without values — that can’t be further from the truth. They’re suffering because they’re living a life not in alignment with their values.”

PS: Steven’s personal story is inspiring, unlikely, and quite funny. To learn more, check out his interview with Theo Von.

Over the course of the next year, we’re partnering with National Research Group (NRG) on an ambitious project examining young men’s wellbeing and how it relates to their lives online.

While the study's structure is set, we’re still developing our hypotheses, and we’d like your help. What should we be asking young men about the pathways to purpose, connection, and flourishing? What hypotheses should we have in mind when we’re studying how young men use technology to meet their goals and desires? But before we ask for your input, first some background on where we are now:

For too long, it was difficult to ask whether boys and men were doing okay without appearing to diminish the challenges facing women. Much of the public conversation about young men focused on harmful masculine norms, including aggression, misogyny, emotional suppression, domination, and the influence of the so-called manosphere. Those are real concerns, but they offer an incomplete framework to understand how young men are actually doing, what they want from life, and what might help them flourish.

Thankfully, the conversation about young men is becoming more curious, with growing recognition that concern for men and concern for women are complementary. Over the past 18 months, the Institute for Family Studies, Public Agenda, Cygnal, the Young Men Research Project, and Equimundo have all published survey research examining young men’s goals, identities, relationships, worries, and wellbeing. Qualitative work, including and ’s Nobody to Call report, offers texture to the findings in the words of young men themselves through in-depth interviews.1

The reports have some differences. They cover various age ranges, ask different questions, and assess through different interpretive lenses. Most are cross-sectional surveys, meaning they can describe patterns but cannot tell us what causes them.

Even so, a fairly consistent picture emerges.

Young men are not without goals

None of the reports reveal a generation of apathetic young men.

Young men commonly say they want financial stability, decent work, independence, housing, close relationships, family, connection, respect, and the opportunity to contribute. What varies is whether they can see a clear, credible path toward the lives they want.

Cygnal found financial stability to be young men’s top current priority. The Young Men Research Project found respondents nearly divided over whether they felt financially secure. Equimundo emphasized the psychological consequences of economic insecurity in a culture where many men still feel pressure to provide.

The Institute for Family Studies reached a similar conclusion: Financial independence and personal responsibility ranked among the most important markers of adulthood. The report’s authors argue that many young men are not apathetic but demoralized. They have the same conventional aspirations as previous generations while doubting the pathways to achieve them.

Young men’s attitudes toward education illustrate the gap between conventional aspirations and uncertain pathways to success. Young men are often described as turning against college, but the surveys reveal something more complicated. Many believe college can create opportunities while also worrying about debt, uncertain returns, or choosing the wrong course of study. Trade school, apprenticeships, online learning, and entrepreneurship appear increasingly attractive, but none offers a risk-free path to economic stability.

The reports also complicate common portrayals of masculinity. Young men typically describe manhood with the prosocial language of virtue: responsibility, honesty, confidence, sacrifice, providing for others. Rarely do they cite dominance or aggression. At the same time, gender-based ideals can become burdens. Being relied upon can provide purpose, but feeling unable to provide can produce shame.

The same tension appears in relationships. Forming a family has not disappeared as an aspiration, but it has often become conditional on financial and emotional readiness. A young man may want a partner, marriage, or children while believing he must first secure a stable job or a place of his own.

And young men can be connected online without feeling known. Group chats, multiplayer games, Discord servers, subreddits, forums, and social media may satisfy their desire for companionship and community. But online interactions do not necessarily produce trust, recognition, or someone to call during a crisis.

The tensions are the story

Understanding the tensions running through these reports — rather than explaining them away as complications — is essential to developing realistic and credible solutions.

In focus groups and surveys, young men report feeling optimistic about their own lives while believing that success is becoming harder for men generally. They can doubt college while recognizing the advantages enjoyed by graduates. They can value autonomy while wanting more guidance. They can spend much of the day interacting with others while feeling lonely. A growing sense of responsibility manifests as both purpose and pressure.

Their online lives contain similar apparent contradictions. The same phone can teach a trade, maintain a friendship, organize a sports league, or dissolve an evening into a zombie night of doomscrolling. Gaming can provide mastery and camaraderie, or become a place to escape anxiety. YouTube can offer education, aspiration, and entertainment — and also contribute to social isolation.

Screen time is too blunt an instrument to distinguish between what enhances and inhibits thriving. Such blunt measures produce confusing results, and we can do better with more specificity: which young men, using which technologies in what ways, affect which outcomes — and through what mechanisms?

Better measures distinguish between what a young man is doing, why he is doing it, whether he chose it, who is with him, and what it displaces.

Survey data can tell us a good deal about what young men value and fear, but they reveal less about whether young men align their days with their aspirations, and what obstacles get in the way.

That is a gap we aim to address through our new research partnership with NRG.

Our research starts where other studies end

The study includes boys and young men across four distinct life stages: ages 14 to 18; ages 19 to 22 in college; ages 19 to 22 outside college; and ages 23 to 29.

We will include young men who consider themselves thriving, struggling, and the many who feel somewhere in between. We will also include variation in geography, socioeconomic background, identity, education, work, and patterns of technology use.

During phase 1, we’ll develop a detailed understanding of the online and offline lives and wellbeing of a sample of 30 young men through behavioral tracking of their devices, time diaries, and in-depth interviews.

In phase 2, we’ll broaden our focus to validate those findings and identify solutions through co-creation groups, digital ethnographies, and a nationally representative survey.

The goal is not to divide their days into a virtuous offline life and a harmful online life. Digital and physical experiences shape a single ecosystem of habits, routines, and relationships. We want to understand how that ecosystem supports and interferes with the life a young man is trying to build.

We aim to go beyond mere diagnosis by providing young men with the data, tools, and dialogues to identify what healthier relationships with technology would look like, and how to build them.

Our framework for young men’s wellbeing provides a starting point for this research

We need a descriptive framework of thriving and struggling to understand the role of technology in shaping young men’s wellbeing. Informed by academic literature on youth development and flourishing, our current framework has five layers:

First are goals, such as financial stability, work, learning, independence, health, relationships, family, connection, and civic leadership.

Second are four psychological needs. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory, we include autonomy, competence, and belonging — along with mattering:

• Autonomy: feeling ownership over one’s choices and time.

• Competence: feeling capable and able to make progress.

• Belonging/relatedness: feeling accepted and connected to others.

• Mattering: feeling valued and able to add value to one’s communities.

Third are the character strengths and supports that may help translate intentions into action: judgment, self-regulation, perseverance, initiative, reliability, care, mentorship, routines, useful feedback, and credible institutions.

We initially considered calling this the “virtues” layer. There is something important in that language: living well involves not only feeling good, but developing the character to pursue goals and meet obligations to others.

But “virtue” also risks implying that young men struggle because they lack character. No amount of perseverance can manufacture an affordable apartment, reliable transportation, a decent job, or a welcoming community. Personal capacities always operate within economic conditions, family circumstances, institutional opportunities, and digital environments.

Fourth is daily behavior: how time is actually distributed across work, school, relationships, exercise, sleep, hobbies, care, gaming, social media, video, and unstructured hours.

Fifth are the resulting outcomes. For instance: connection, confidence, progress, satisfaction, distress, or regret.

The framework is not a causal chain. Wellbeing can influence behavior just as behavior can influence wellbeing. Young men with greater resources may find it easier to exercise, join groups, sleep well, or use technology intentionally. Heavy online use may contribute to distress, or distress may lead people online.

Those rival explanations are part of what we want to investigate. Another goal is to move beyond simple models — “phones are bad (or good)” — to specific hypotheses that inform solutions, such as:

1. Isolated young men with few offline alternatives may experience stronger social connection and reduced loneliness through multiplayer games with voice chat.

2. Short-form video feeds may keep adolescent boys up late at night, disrupting their sleep and impairing their concentration and performance in school.

3. Young men whose only dating experience is through dating apps may experience greater romantic frustration, increasing their chances of giving up on dating altogether.

We also hope to shed light on foundational questions about how young men find pathways to thriving:

1. What gives a young man credible evidence and recognition that he is making progress?

2. What forms of guidance support autonomy, rather than coming off as controlling or patronizing?

3. Does having a recognized role — on a team, at work, in a family, or in a community— strengthen one’s sense of mattering and self-esteem?

This framework is provisional. Before we enter the field, we would value feedback and criticism from researchers, practitioners, parents, educators, technology professionals, and young men themselves.

You can respond via a brief Google Form, in a comment below, or by sending a direct message:

I’m filling in for this week. He’ll be back for the next digest.

Can a face scan keep teenagers off betting apps?

A bipartisan federal proposal announced last week would require sportsbooks and prediction markets to use facial recognition or facial age estimation when a user logs in or places a wager. It targets a real loophole — reporting from NPR describes how teens can bypass legal age restrictions to gamble by using shared devices or an adult’s phone.

Noting the workaround, Rep. Josh Gottheimer observes, “We wouldn’t accept that at a casino in Las Vegas. We shouldn’t accept it on the phone in our kid’s back pocket.” The move follows a similar effort by New York’s Governor Hochul in March.

But it leaves a harder question unresolved: should 18-year-olds be allowed to gamble on their phones?

The proposed bill could help prevent teens from placing bets on the phones of adults. It could also normalize 18 as the federal age to provide unlimited access to gambling. But most Americans think online gambling should be restricted to 21+. A recent poll of 1,514 registered voters by Change Research found that 76% of respondents think online gambling should be restricted to 21 and above. Majorities also preferred a 21-plus threshold for pornography websites and cryptocurrency trading apps, but not for AI companions, gaming platforms, or social media.

The Feed

New data on sports betting prevalence

New research by the Urban Institute examines how and why Americans bet on sports. Among the findings from a nationally representative survey (n=3,194):

• 17% of Americans age 18-29 report betting on sports in the past 12 months. Of adults overall, men (13%) are more likely to bet on sports versus women (9%)

• Most bettors bet infrequently: about half have only bet “once or twice” in the past year, and just 4% report betting daily.

• Few bettors report missing bill payment because of betting (3%), but more (12%) report having saved less money than they would have otherwise because of sports betting.

The Urban Institute also released similar research briefs on cryptocurrency and Gen Z’s financial attitudes.

Settlement manipulation in prediction markets

Using Polymarket’s trading records and Binance crypto data, the authors of this preprint find evidence of traders manipulating Bitcoi

n prices during the final seconds of five-minute “up/down” contracts. They identify roughly 1,600 likely manipulations and 821 accounts that earned $8.2 million from them; 93% of the resulting losses fell on retail traders. After sports, wagering on the price of crypto is the most common activity by volume on Kalshi.

Safer defaults reduce exposure to harmful content

Participants aged 13–15, 16–17, and adults used a simulated social platform with varying defaults for messaging, location sharing, and network expansion. Users frequently maintained safer, more restrictive defaults, suggesting that reducing harm need not depend entirely on self-control. With vibe-coding bringing down the cost of simulated platforms, we’d like to see similar studies testing default guardrails for gambling apps.

Prices, Probabilities, and Parlays

A prediction market contract trading at 30 cents is normally understood to imply roughly a 30% chance of paying out one dollar. This preprint paper finds that Kalshi’s 30-cent sports parlays won only about 24% of the time. Put simply, buyers paid 30 cents for something returning an average of approximately 24 cents before fees. The discrepancy grew as additional legs were added.

What else we’re reading

• Betting on Better Evidence — Arnold Ventures announces a $2.6 million research portfolio on gambling exposure, financial harm, industry tactics, and policy effectiveness.

• From isolated openings to streaks: a sequential observational study of loot box openings in livestreamed gaming — This paper examining loot-box openings in livestreams finds that the vast majority (93%) of loot boxes are opened in streaks rather than as isolated events.

• European Commission preliminarily finds the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook in breach of the Digital Services Act — The Commission found that Meta failed to address addictive design, including infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and highly personalized recommender systems.

• A year of age assurance under the UK Online Safety Act — Early evidence from the UK telecom regulator that age verification creates friction but remains incomplete and vulnerable to circumvention.

• Jonathan Haidt Is Wrong About Age-Gating the Internet — Kelsey Piper favors restrictions on advertising and engagement design, chronological feeds, and device-level controls. She suggests devices for adolescents that “as a hardware restriction, didn’t access vice sites (like porn or gambling).”

• How young people are coping with the attention economy — introduces a documentary series centered on young people’s own accounts of attention, connection, and digital well-being.

• Why Is Everything Gambling Now? — A holistic framing of gambling mechanics spreading across finance, entertainment, and digital platforms.

• Warren Buffett and Kalshi’s CEO disagree on gambling versus investing — "Since humans love to gamble so much, there's more money in cultivating gamblers than investors."

• How this World Cup is being used to turn a new generation of teens into gambling addicts — Researcher Darragh McGee argues that smartphones, in-play wagering, targeted advertising, inducements, and casino cross-selling have transformed sports betting from an occasional act into continuous engagement.

• The Black Markets Fallacy — argues that the existence of black markets is not a convincing case against banning vice.

  ---

Events & Funding Opportunities

• National Conference on Gambling Addiction & Responsible Gambling | Nashville, TN | July 22-24, 2026 | Call for presentations closed.

• NCPG welcomes grant applications from any U.S. based nonprofit engaging in problem gambling prevention programming | Deadline: August 19, 2026

• Family Online Safety Institute Conference | Washington, D.C. | November 19, 2026

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? How do you think we should handle young people’s technology use? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to stay up to date on Boys & Men Online.

Subscribe now

And share!

Share

• Courts may be the new front in tech regulation. Recent cases against Meta and other platforms are testing whether addictive and unsafe design features—not just user-generated content—can create legal liability.

• While the media have focused on financial penalties, court-imposed design changes could be more consequential. Courts could require changes to features such as autoplay, default notifications, age verification, and features that connect minors with unknown adults.

• Many safety tools, including parental controls, appear designed to reassure regulators rather than meaningfully change behavior. Internal company documents suggest that some platforms have measured safety interventions partly by ensuring they do not substantially reduce time spent online.

• Litigation and legislation should be complementary, not competing strategies. Democratic institutions should establish broad rules, but lawsuits can expose internal evidence, compensate people who were harmed, and correct risks that regulators failed to anticipate.

• The same design framework applies beyond social media. Sports betting, prediction markets, gaming, and other digital products increasingly use similar mechanics to extend use and spending, creating an opportunity for common standards around friction, transparency, limits, and user control.

• The ultimate goal is to restore human agency. Early online communities often helped people collaborate, learn, and build relationships. Today’s platforms too often make users feel that they are fighting an algorithm designed to override their intentions. Better policy should help technology work for people again.

For more from Pete:

• TIME: “Why Fines Alone Won’t Make Social Media Safer for Kids”

• Tech Policy Press: “What US Lawsuits Reveal About Platform Design That DSA Reports Don’t”

• KGI: “Designing Technology Remedies: Lessons for Social Media and Generative AI Chatbot Litigation”

• KGI: “Measuring Risk: What EU Risk Assessments and US Litigation Reveal About Meta and TikTok”

Introduction from David: In a recent edition of CTRL Agency, Anders Knospe highlighted a new study examining how state age-verification laws affect pornography use. We wanted to give the study a fuller treatment by inviting two of its authors, Matthew Brown and Emily Davis, to summarize their findings, limitations, and implications for policymakers. As we noted in a recent landscape scan, pornography policy is evolving faster than the evidence base. This paper—coauthored with Devin Pope—is a valuable example of policy-relevant research that uses an innovative study design and unusually detailed browsing data to measure not only whether regulation changes behavior, but also how users and platforms adapt in response.

By Matthew Brown and Emily Davis

Half of all U.S. states have implemented laws that require pornography sites to verify users’ age. In response, the largest porn website, Pornhub, blocked access to all users in states with such laws. Pornhub is one of the top 10 most visited sites in the world, receiving over three billion visits globally each month. So, when it disappears, do people stop watching porn—or do they find workarounds?

As academic economists who work on public policy, we thought this question was worth answering. These recent laws are some of the most ambitious online regulations in U.S. history, and other states, such as New York and Pennsylvania, are debating whether to implement their own versions. But the overall impact of these laws is not obvious. It’s plausible that some users are deterred from viewing porn by Pornhub’s access restrictions, but news reports have highlighted that others get around the restrictions by using VPNs or migrating to other porn sites that did not comply with the laws.

Using anonymized browsing data from more than 500,000 devices, we find that age verification laws do reduce porn-site viewing. But the effect is modest. Total time spent on porn sites fell by roughly 10% among the adult devices in our sample. Many users appear to have circumvented restrictions with VPNs or shifted to noncompliant sites that did not verify age.

Our findings suggest that age verification laws can reduce access to porn, but their impact depends heavily on enforcement, platform compliance, and how easily users can move to less regulated corners of the internet.

What we measured on 500,000 devices

We purchased anonymized internet activity data for over 500,000 mobile devices and computers from 2022 to 2024.1 With this data, we could observe every time a device visited a website and how long that visit lasted, along with some demographic information about the users of the devices.

While our data is much more detailed than data used by previous studies, it is not perfect. Crucially, it is not a representative sample of U.S. porn browsing in terms of demographics and device types. We also do not capture website visits from private browsers like Google’s Incognito mode.2 Most importantly, our data only contains devices owned by adults, even though the laws are targeted at minors. Therefore, our research directly measures how adults responded to the laws, which might provide indirect insights into impacts on kids and teens.

How did the laws affect porn viewing?

To measure the effects of the laws, we studied whether trends in internet activity changed in states right after they passed the laws. In the graph below, the “0” point on the x-axis represents the week that Pornhub blocks users in states where the laws took effect. Unsurprisingly, we see that time spent on Pornhub fell dramatically after the site blocked users.

What’s more interesting is that some users continued to visit Pornhub even though the site should have been blocked in their state. Time spent at Pornhub fell by about 0.75 minutes per device per week, but that decline only eliminated about half the time people were spending at Pornhub before the shutdown. The most plausible explanation for so much continued use of Pornhub is substantial VPN-based circumvention.

VPNs are not the only way to continue watching porn in states with age verification laws. While Pornhub chose to block access, other popular pornography sites (XVideos and XNXX) have continued operating without verifying users’ age.3

We found that time spent at those websites rose immediately after the laws passed, which is evidence that people were switching from compliant sites to noncompliant sites. Some have argued that this kind of substitution is a downside of regulation, as Pornhub has taken steps to eliminate illegal content (such as content related to nonconsensual activity or child sexual abuse), while many of its noncompliant competitors have not.4

The next graph shows how the laws affected total time spent across all of the 200,000+ porn sites in our data. Despite the presence of VPNs and noncompliant alternatives, age verification laws noticeably reduced porn viewing for our sample of devices.

Quantitatively, we estimate that age verification laws reduced total time spent at porn sites by roughly 10%.

Our final graph breaks down time spent at the top 25 porn websites before and after laws were passed by type of website (compliant or noncompliant), to illustrate the importance of the various channels that we measure. For every 100 hours spent at top porn sites before restrictions, about 50 hours remained accessible at noncompliant sites that never restricted access, 30 hours persisted through VPN-based circumvention, 10 hours shifted from compliant sites to noncompliant sites, and 10 hours were no longer spent on porn sites.

All of these results apply to adult users because we do not have data on minors. One could imagine that the laws’ impact on porn viewing for minors would be larger (young people may be less familiar with noncompliant sites than adults, and some VPNs require credit cards) or smaller (young people may be more familiar with VPNs than adults). We tried to use some patterns in our data to learn about whether impacts on minors were likely to differ, but our tests were inconclusive.5 Overall, though, the effects – modest reductions in porn site viewing, muted by VPN usage and switching to noncompliant sites – appear across many demographic groups within our adult sample.

Broader implications

Whether age verification laws are a good idea depends in part on whether and how they affect porn viewing. People disagree about age verification for many reasons: free speech, privacy, parental authority, child protection, and views about pornography itself.6 Our study does not settle those debates. It answers a narrower question: what happened to porn-site viewing after these laws took effect?

Debates about online regulation extend beyond porn. Policymakers around the world have attempted to regulate activities like social media use and video games. There are many ways to design such policies, and whether the regulations achieve policymakers’ goals depends on how platforms and users respond to these laws.

Platform noncompliance is a major factor limiting the impacts of current regulations for online pornography. Even if policymakers reduced VPN-based circumvention (for example, through device-based age verification), it may still be possible for users to switch to noncompliant sites based in jurisdictions where enforcement is difficult. In other areas of online life, there may be fewer plausible alternatives. For example, in contexts like social media, network effects tend to create markets with a few dominant platforms, and regulators may be able to force all of them to comply. As policymakers design future regulations for online activity, we hope they will consider the viability of enforcement and how platforms and users are likely to respond.

This July I’m (mostly) smartphone-less. I am a week into MonthOffline, a program where you switch to a flip phone (a “dumbphone”) and join a small group of neighbors for weekly meetings they describe as “part support group, part happy hour, part classroom”.

Logging off feels all the rage here in New York—it was just the “Summer of Ludd”, after all—but I was curious if the sentiment is widespread. The evidence is mixed:

• 63% of Americans wish they could take a break from their phone sometimes, but only 39% often do, according to a May 2025 poll from YouGov.

• Last year’s General Social Survey found roughly 70% of internet users had deliberately cut back at least once—with the reason for unplugging split by gender: women were more likely to cite physical or mental well-being (37% vs. 27% of men), while men were more likely to cite wanting more time for offline life (40% vs. 32% of women).

• As for dumphone sales, it’s hard to get a good number. Still, it’s safe to say they remain a niche consumer product.

The Feed

Despite implementation hurdles, Americans like under-16 social media bans

Australia’s landmark social media ban has had a rocky go of it.

• Yesterday, a research team which advised the government’s rollout found that platforms almost never ask users to prove their age. Of 50 test accounts the team opened across nine platforms (including Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat), each self-declared as 16, only one platform ever requested age verification.

• Echoing an earlier NBER working paper, a recent BMJ study found that 85% of Australian under-16s reported still using social media three months into the ban, with no significant differences by sex.

Still, youth social media bans remain popular in the U.S. According to a Pew poll, nearly 6 in 10 U.S. adults support banning social media for those under the age of 16. Another 21% opposed a ban, and 23% were unsure.

Other restrictions on minors social media first polled in 2023 remain popular:

For ongoing coverage of the age-verification debates — Australia, KOSA, the KIDS act, we’ve been reading Quire’s digital childhood briefing.

Putting the gambling genie back in the bottle

Ohio's proposed "Save Ohio Sports Act" would eliminate online sports betting in the state entirely. But as argues, dismantling regulated sportsbooks could just push betting behavior toward prediction markets or illegal operators, preserving the addictive dynamics while weakening state oversight.

Kalshi Suffers Federal Court Loss In New York

Kalshi’s legal fight over sports-related prediction markets continues, with Gouker reporting a federal court loss in New York and an expected appeal. The case remains one of the most important tests of whether sports event contracts will be treated more like financial products or gambling products.

What else we’re reading

• Gambling Addiction Starts in Middle School - Jessica Grose in the NYT

• Many Child Safety Features on Social Apps Don’t Work, Report Finds - NYT (Report)

• OpenAI teams up with kids’ safety group on California ballot measure - Politico

• Loot box purchases are associated with problem gambling severity and harms beyond traditional gambling activities - Kim et al.

• Online Sports Betting: The Problem and How to Respond - Ethics & Public Policy Center

• A loneliness epidemic meets uneven social infrastructure - Axios

• “Social Media Addiction” Is Way More Complicated Than You Think - Persuasion

• What Does a 13-Year-Old See on Snapchat in a Normal Week? - After Babel

• Multimodal imaging and transcriptomics reveal the pathway of mindfulness-mediated recovery in internet gaming disorder - Xu et al.

• CFTC conducting broad probe into prediction market Polymarket - Bloomberg

• At 17, She Sued Meta and Google, and Won. Now She’s Ready to Tell Her Story - Bloomberg

• These Are the Sharps Actually Making Money on Prediction Markets - Odd Lots

• The Digital Choices Shaping our Children’s Health - Emmanuel Macron and Tedros Ghebreyesus in Project Syndicate

Events & Funding Opportunities

• New* Brookings Webinar - Behind the screen: AI slop, young children, and the profit problem | 2 PM, July 16th.

• National Conference on Gambling Addiction & Responsible Gambling | Nashville, TN | July 22-24, 2026 | Call for presentations closed.

• New* NCPG welcomes grant applications from any U.S. based nonprofit engaging in problem gambling prevention programming | Deadline: August 19, 2026

• New* Family Online Safety Institute Conference | Washington, D.C. | November 19, 2026

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? Do you think logging off is good for you? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to stay up to date on Boys & Men Online.

Subscribe now

And share!

Share

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that Polymarket paid dozens of mostly college-aged social media creators to make videos placing fake bets on a near-perfect fake copy of their website. Of the 778 videos that showed a bet being placed, all were on the simulated site and at least 69 of the bets shown as wins would actually have been losses. Polymarket then paid a separate army of “clippers” to repost the content, targeting Americans (clippers were only paid if 60%+ of their audience was U.S.-based) despite the platform being banned from offering its crypto exchange to U.S. users since 2022.

I asked our sports betting policy lead Jonathan Cohen for his thoughts:

Of all the absurd things about prediction markets, advertising may be the most absurd. The platforms have taken advantage of the basically nonexistent rules governing their marketing to engage in some of the scuzziest and shadiest tactics imaginable. This might be a short term boost for the company, but will lead to a swifter and harsher crackdown

For more on the proliferation of gambling, check out last week’s webinar with CNN Commentator and AIBM fellow Kyla Scanlon, Fanatics CEO Matt King, and AIBM’s Sports Betting Policy Lead Jonathan Cohen.

And if you like our work or know someone who does, Boys & Men Online is hiring a part-time Digital Media Consultant for July-December 2026. You can find out more about the role and apply here.

The Feed

Sports betting legalization increased food hardship

A new NBER working paper finds that legalizing sports betting reduced household food sufficiency by 2.1% among working-age adults without a college degree — an estimated 10.5% decline among active bettors. Using Census Household Pulse Survey data from nine states that legalized between 2021 and 2023, the authors find that food insufficiency emerges within two months of legalization, persists for three to five months, and tracks the NFL season. The declines are largest among 25-44-year-olds and racial/ethnic minorities, and amount to an additional 284,000 food-insufficient households.

TikTok’s own words

Leaked internal TikTok documents obtained by The Times show the degree to which the company was aware of their products’ addictive qualities.

• A 2023 document describes TikTok as using “coercive design tactics that detract from user agency such as infinite scroll, constant notifications and the ‘slot machine’ effect.”

• A “Screen Time Management One Pager” defines six or more hours a day as “objectively harmful usage” and states that 10 million users (1.3% of daily active users, ) meet that threshold. A separate study estimates 3% of child users qualify.

• TikTok’s data shows 19% of 13-15-year-olds and 25% of 16-17-year-olds are active on TikTok between midnight and 5am.

• A “Digital Wellbeing Product Strategy” document acknowledged that “compulsive usage on TikTok is rampant” and that “the advertising-based business model encourages optimisation for time spent on the app”

Psychosocial effects of digital media use on boys and men

A new review in Current Psychiatry Reports, partially funded by our president Richard Reeves, synthesizes the evidence on how social media, gaming, and AI chatbots affect adolescent boys and young men in particular. They find that:

• Boys’ social media risks centers on risky body modification trends

• Gender is an independent risk factor for disordered gaming, but gaming also has real prosocial value: 94% of boys game with others and over half say it’s improved their friendships.

• 53% of adolescent boys have used generative AI, and 4-6% are turning to AI companions for emotional support rather than human help.

What else we’re reading

• Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact - Pew

• Interaction with AI Companions and Psychological Well-being - Zhang et al.

• A Viral Knicks Moment, Brought to You by a Prediction Market - New York Times

• Mark Zuckerberg Directed Meta to Create a Prediction Markets App - New York Times

• Why Fines Alone Won’t Make Social Media Safer For Kids - Time

• Feds move to formally allow sports “trading” on prediction markets - Axios

• U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory: Surgeon General’s Warning on the Harms of Screen Use

• Gambling-Related Financial Harm: A Public Health Approach to Financial Stability in a Digital Era

• Colorado’s gamble on sports betting: a 3-part special report - The Denver Post

• How your phone keeps you scrolling ... even when you want to stop - NPR: The Indicator

Events & Funding Opportunities

• National Conference on Gambling Addiction & Responsible Gambling | Nashville, TN | July 22-24, 2026 | Call for presentations closed.

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? How do you think prediction market advertising should regulated? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to stay up to date on Boys & Men Online.

Subscribe now

And share!

Share

Three forces have converged since the onset of COVID: more time spent on our devices in isolation, the expansion of legalized online gambling, and the rise of digital products designed around engagement loops. Sports betting is the most visible example, but the broader pattern includes prediction markets, crypto trading, Robinhood-style gamified investing, loot boxes in video games, online casinos, meme stocks, and even shopping apps that use gambling-like mechanics.

In this week’s episode, New York Times journalist moderates a discussion between CNN commentator and AIBM fellow , Fanatics CEO Matt King, and AIBM’s gambling policy lead .

There were real disagreements among the panelists. Jonathan Cohen argued that sports betting helped normalize gambling culturally, especially through advertising, celebrity endorsements, and sports broadcasts. Matt King pushed back, claiming that sports betting already existed illegally, and legal markets at least create an opportunity for consumer protections. Kyla Scanlon argued that the deeper issue is not sports betting alone, but economic insecurity, social media, and a broader culture of speculative risk.

Still, the panelists united on several themes:

An old impulse, transformed by new technology

People have always gambled, but it once required effort to get to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or a bookie. Now there is almost no friction. The casino follows you around, available all day, with endless new activities to bet on. Sports betting accelerated and normalized the broader trend. Pew found that 22% of U.S. adults bet on sports in the past year in 2025, and 36% of men under 30 did so.

The blurred line between gambling, investing, and entertainment

Gambling companies present as investment platforms, disguising risk-taking as financial self-improvement. Prediction markets are treated as financial products, but the vast majority of people use them to gamble. An AIBM/Ipsos poll found that 61% of Americans familiar with prediction markets see them as closer to gambling than investing, while only 8% see them as closer to investing.

Robinhood, crypto wallets, same-day options, perpetual futures, and sports betting increasingly live in the same mental and digital ecosystem. A user may open an app to manage money and be nudged toward riskier products. Gambling is quickly moving from niche vice to mainstream digital behavior, concentrated among young men and blended into finance, fandom, gaming, and news.

It’s getting worse, and younger

Nobody was asking to lower the age for online gambling from 21 to 18. But the Trump administration effectively opened a new national loophole by making prediction markets available to anyone 18 or older. President Trump lamented that “the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino.” And yet, Donald Trump Jr. serves as a key strategic adviser to the major platforms Kalshi and Polymarket, while Trump Media & Technology Group announced plans for its own crypto-based prediction platform, Truth Predict.

Economic insecurity and the search for escape

There are two ends of a barbell across the K-shaped economy, observed . For wealthy households, online gambling may satisfy young men’s natural desire for risk-taking in a world of complacent abundance. For low-income households, gambling becomes a tempting shortcut out of financial precarity when job insecurity, inflation, and expensive housing make conventional paths to economic stability feel out of reach.

It’s past time to regulate gambling and speculation

The panelists converge around several policy ideas:

• Raise or maintain age limits, especially for prediction markets and gambling-like products.

• Apply advertising restrictions across sports betting, prediction markets, crypto, and other speculative products.

• Require clearer disclosures when products are closer to gambling than investing.

• Separate long-term investment tools from high-risk entertainment products.

• Use responsible-gaming tools such as deposit limits, timeouts, forced breaks, and behavioral flags.

• Regulate influencer marketing and require transparency around paid promotion.

The gamblification of everything is broader than sports betting and prediction markets. Consumer technology companies first monetized attention and engagement through targeted advertising. Now, they have monetized risk taking and economic uncertainty through gambling products that cosplay as investment platforms while all but guaranteeing economic losses and, potentially, severe financial distress.

I spent a lot of time preparing for this episode … and then the conversation went somewhere else, somewhere fascinating and unexpected.

A few of the ideas we explore:

• Impulsivity used to help men hunt. Now it helps DraftKings make money. Risk-taking can be a pro-social trait, a willingness to sacrifice for the tribe. But in a world of frictionless betting, gaming, porn, and status loops, that same impulse is easily exploited.

• Boys and young aren’t addicted to games because they’re lazy. They may be starving for a quest. Digital worlds offer danger, mastery, status, progress, and heroic purpose — often more clearly than real life does.

• The gender double standard in how we talk about sexual fantasy. Male porn use is often pathologized, while female-coded erotica and romantasy are more likely to be celebrated as empowerment — even though both can become compulsive and displace offline sexuality.

• The most radical wellness practices may be the most boring. A cold shower. Silence. Doing hard things. Letting the mind rest instead of feeding it another hit of stimulation.

• Asking for help can tell someone they matter. Reframing help-seeking not as weakness, but as a way to tell someone: “You have value that I need.”

• Self-control is not enough when the casino is everywhere. Individuals have responsibility, but so do companies and policymakers — especially when addictive products are designed to exploid the developing minds of children.

And don’t forget, today, June 18, at 1 pm ET, we’ve got a webinar with , German Lopez, Matt King, and to discuss the gamblification of everything.

You can still sign up here.

Last Friday I watched the Knicks clinch a 105-104 win from outside a bar in Ridgewood, NYC. As a bandwagon Knicks fan, I was happy. But not as happy as our patio neighbor, an affable college freshman who had a $2,000 Kalshi bet riding on the game. When I asked how long he’d been a Knicks fan, he replied he wasn’t really one.

These days you don’t need to be into sports to gamble on sports. And if sports betting isn’t your thing, you can gamble on the next Los Angeles Mayor or the daily temperature in Phoenix. As we’ve covered before, feelings of financial precarity have made risky bets feel rational to many young people. Gambling—and high-risk investing—is everywhere.

Join us next week at 1:00pm ET June 18th, 2026 for a webinar on the gamblification of everything. New York Times journalist German Lopez will moderate the conversation, featuring author Kyla Scanlon, Fanatics CEO Matt King, and AIBM’s Sports Betting Policy Lead Jonathan Cohen. Register here.

The Feed

Sports betting tax design affects betting behavior

A new working paper by Matthew Brown and Jeffrey Ohl looks at how sports betting tax design matters. They find that when taxes are levied on sportsbook revenue—as most states do—costs fall on firms, who respond by cutting back on advertising and promotional offers rather than raising the price or worsening odds. This is effective at raising revenue, but doesn’t significantly reduce betting.

By contrast, when taxes are tied more directly to each bet—as with Illinois’s per-wager tax—sportsbooks are more likely to pass costs through to bettors through fees or higher minimum bets, which more directly discourages betting.The paper also finds that sportsbook advertising increases betting, largely by inducing more people to make deposits rather than by driving existing bettors to deposit more.

Age-verification modestly reduces porn site use

We’ve covered the early evidence on age verification before—in particular that these laws drive at least some traffic from compliant to non-compliant sites. This paper, also by Matthew Brown—along with AIBM research fellow Emily Davis and Devin Pope—shows the user side of the equation, albeit among adults only. They find that most adult-site use persists despite the laws. For every 100 hours previously spent on top adult sites, about 50 were already on noncompliant sites, 30 continued through VPN-style circumvention, 10 shifted from compliant to noncompliant sites, and 10 disappeared.

These estimates are for adults only, so they shouldn’t be read as a test of whether the laws reduce minors’ access.

Young people’s AI use falls into distinct social and emotional clusters

A new report by The Rithm Project asks what role AI is playing in young people’s social and emotional lives. Based on a YouGov survey of 2,383 young Americans aged 13-24, they identify four clusters: those who rarely or never use AI; those who use it mainly for information and tasks; those who use it for personal and relational support; and those who talk to AI characters.

One of the most interesting splits is in the third cluster. “Social Processors” use AI for advice on social situations. “Private Processors”, by contrast, appear to use AI more as a substitute for human support. This second group looks more vulnerable: they are much more likely to report turning to AI before people when upset, to feel like a burden, and to report an escalating urge to use AI more and more.

The concern, though, shouldn’t be limited to young people intentionally seeking emotional support from AI. A new paper by Yaoxi Shiet et al. argues that people can “stumble into” AI emotional dependence through routine chatbot use. In a month-long study, they found that daily five-minute personal conversations with ChatGPT decreased participants’ preference for seeking support from humans and increased their preference for seeking support from AI.

What else we’re reading

• Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly - Myers and Hooper

• Why Are Birthrates Down? Two New Studies Point to Phones. - New York Times

• Smartphones broke dating. AI might finish the job. - Vox

• 2026 Chatbot Legislation Tracker - Future of Privacy Forum

• Limbic Capitalism Has Been Driving Addiction for Hundreds of Years - After Babel

• Young People Don’t Want a Social Media Ban. We Want Better Social Media - Young People’s Alliance

• Could the problem with boys be money? - Jonathan Wroble

• We were promised sex robots - Business Insider

Events & Funding Opportunities

• National Conference on Gambling Addiction & Responsible Gambling | Nashville, TN | July 22-24, 2026 | Call for presentations closed.

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? Are you a state legislator thinking about how to design taxes on sports gambling? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to stay up to date on Boys & Men Online.

Subscribe now

And share!

Share

It’s sure to be a fascinating conversation about what the normalization of online gambling is doing to our culture, politics, and mental health. You can register here.

This week’s episode is an appetizer of sorts. I called up Jon Cohen, who leads our work on sports betting policy, to better understand the history of gambling in the United States as we approach our 250th anniversary of independence.

Jon notes that we describe the American dream as a story of pluck. But there has always been another version of the American dream built on luck.

When people believe that the system is rigged and the economic ladder is blocked, a lucky break starts to look like the only way up.

Online sports betting and prediction markets have arrived during a populist moment of deep institutional distrust. Many Americans believe the experts are wrong, elites are corrupt, and the financial game is stacked against them. Prediction markets channel the mood: the pundits must be wrong, and betting becomes a way to assert one’s agency.

Except the vast majority of regular users end up losing money. The rhetoric is empowerment, but the business model is extraction.

Still, Jon reminds us to never accept the present as permanent. Since the founding of the United States, lotteries spread, provoked backlash, disappeared in many places, survived through exceptions like the Louisiana Lottery, and eventually reemerged through state lotteries beginning in New Hampshire in 1964.

Even if gambling will always exist in some form, it doesn’t have to be as addictive, ubiquitous, and harmful as it has become in 2026.

We also discuss:

• The OG American dream: How a lottery helped fund the Jamestown colony

• The phones changed everything: Pro-social forms of gambling like a neighborhood raffle or poker night with friends are becoming displaced by apps that function more like slot machines: speed, repetition, anticipation, and reward.

• Addiction is not just in the brain: We discuss Hanna Pickard’s What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing But Cocaine? and its implications for sports bettors.

• The takeaways from the case of Carl Jacobson, the New Haven police chief who reportedly embezzled public money while gambling millions through legal betting platforms.

• The real reason why Colorado’s recent reform bill is significant, despite getting watered down on the way to Governor Polis’ signature.

• Why young men, in particular, need stronger guardrails to prevent disastrous financial harm.

• The three approaches AIBM is taking to reduce the harms of sports betting and prediction markets without resorting to prohibition.

Don’t forget, you can register for the June 18th webinar here.

It’s funny because it captures something real: many men do struggle to make and maintain friendships. But it also gets something important wrong, as I discuss with and :

The men likely to be disconnected are not, for the most part, college-educated boyfriends and husbands of successful urban women. They are men and women without college degrees.

So why is this a gender issue? Because fewer men are enrolling in higher education (a trend AIBM aims to address through the Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative).

Sam and Soren walk us through their recent report, Nobody to Call: An exploration of friendship, community, and purpose among men without college degrees.

It does something that much of the public conversation about men fails to do: it listens.

We’re talking about men without listening to them

Nobody to Call emerged from Sam and Soren’s frustration with elite discussions about working-class men.

Journalists, academics, and policymakers often have strong opinions about non-college-educated men despite having little direct contact with them. As a result, these disconnected men become villains, victims, voters, and problems to be solved. Their complex lives are flattened into stereotypes.

But if you listen, a different picture emerges. Throughout the 30 in-depth interviews, these men are craving connection and contribution. They want friends. They want mentors. They want to be useful.

They want someone to call, and they want to be the kind of person someone else can call.

Are friendships really so important?

Friendship is more than fun; it is a social safety net. It protects health, buffers stress, expands opportunity, and gives people a sense of being needed.

Beyond emotional and practical support, friends introduce us to job leads, romantic partners, financial tips, and other friends. They often motivate us to exercise, read a book, and take our medicine.

They help us live longer and healthier lives. Without strong social relationships, our bodies protest, creating more stress hormones, inflammation, and poorer sleep and cognitive function.

And yet, for many of the men in Nobody to Call, friendship had become fragile, distant, or absent.

More disconnected than was expected

Sam and Soren expected roughly one-quarter of the men to report having no close friends based on their original survey responses. Instead, about half said they lacked close friendships. Even those men who claimed to have close friends described relationships that appeared fragile or distant.

Some of the men had one meaningful connection—a friend, relative, partner, or coworker—but if that relationship disappeared through death, incarceration, conflict, or relocation, their entire social life would collapse over a single point of failure.

The friendship cliff and the slow drift

Most of the men had friends in high school. School provides proximity, shared experience, and repeated low-stakes interactions.

Work might seem like the obvious successor. But for many of the men Sam and Soren interviewed, work did not provide durable friendship. Some worked unstable schedules. Some moved between jobs. Others avoided becoming too attached because they had learned that workplace relationships could disappear quickly. Work gave income, but it rarely gave belonging.

Into their 30s, many men experienced slow social atrophy. Friends drifted away. People got busy. Someone moved. Someone stopped texting. Eventually, there’s nobody to call.

Family remains the strongest source of meaning

If friendship was often absent, family frequently served as the most common source of connection and purpose.

Fatherhood especially stood out. Many men described becoming fathers as a profound turning point that gave structure and meaning to their lives. Others found a similar sense of purpose as uncles, brothers, and caregivers.

However, caregiving responsibilities could easily become overwhelming. Some men felt so consumed by work and family obligations that they had little capacity left to build friendships or community outside of the home.

The biggest obstacle may be shame

Many of the men blamed themselves for their isolation. They described lacking confidence, social skills, self-esteem, or initiative. They felt they needed to “fix themselves” before they could build relationships.

Clearly, confidence and social skills matter, but Sam and Soren arrived at a different conclusion: disconnection is a societal failure. The burden should not rest entirely on isolated individuals to solve a problem created by the erosion of community institutions.

Men are more emotionally open than stereotypes suggest

The participants were often remarkably candid, vulnerable, and emotionally articulate. They spoke openly about loneliness, grief, regret, and longing.

Soren notes the stark contrast between what he heard in interviews and the common image of emotionally closed-off men. The issue isn’t an unwillingness to talk. Rather, it is a shortage of opportunities to be heard.

Building emotional and social skills into basic education could certainly help. But especially for men, we must also rebuild the institutions, rituals, spaces, and relationships that make connection possible in the first place.

Technology is not the whole story, or enough

Given our work on boys, men, and online life, I expected technology to come up more often in the interviews. So too did Sam and Soren.

It did come up, occasionally. Some men played video games with others. Some had online friends. Some followed influencers who served as substitute mentors, especially when fathers or other role models were absent.

But technology did not dominate the interviews in the same way it tends to dominate media and podcast discourse about loneliness and disconnection.

The more important finding was that online connection rarely translated into in-person community. This does not mean online friendships are necessarily superficial. I have meaningful online relationships that I value deeply, and, likely, you do too.

But online connection by itself is not enough. The men in this report wanted to be seen, known, and needed in the places where they actually live. So far, our social technologies have been designed to capture attention more than build belonging.

Calling men in

Calling men in means building spaces and rituals where connection is easier to find and harder to lose. That could include:

• Mentorship built into vocational programs, apprenticeships, community colleges, and workforce training.

• Local rites of passage that help young men understand what adulthood asks of them and what their community offers in return.

• Low-cost spaces where men can contribute, repair, coach, build, teach, serve, and be useful.

• Stronger support for fathers, uncles, caregivers, and men who find purpose through family.

• More attention to the transition after high school as a period of social risk, not just educational or economic risk.

• Public or national service models that give young people shared responsibility, cross-class relationships, and a role in something larger than themselves.

• Technology designed to introduce neighbors, support mutual aid, and move people toward local relationships rather than endless passive consumption about distant celebrities.

There is no single solution, as Sam emphasizes toward the end of our conversation. Social infrastructure is the accumulation of many places, rituals, habits, institutions, and invitations that cultivate belonging.

The male loneliness discourse often asks: What is wrong with men? Nobody to Call asks a better question: How do we rebuild and renew the structures that once helped men build connected lives?

For more coverage of Nobody to Call, see:

The Social Wealth Men Without College Degrees Need by

More in Common US Newsletter

Nobody to Call: “I wouldn’t say, at this point in my life, I have any more close friends.”

Sam Pressler and Soren Duggan are friends of More in Common. Their recent report, Nobody to Call, for which they interviewed thirty working-class men (defined as men without college degrees) about their relationships and connections, is the most interesting thing we’ve ever read about male loneliness…

Read more

2 months ago · 19 likes · More in Common US

Joyful Belonging by Casper ter Kuile

Nobody To Call: What's going on with men without college degrees?

This week sees the release of a new report that broke my heart…

Read more

3 months ago · 17 likes · 11 comments · Casper ter Kuile

American Storylines

What Happens When There Is No One to Call?

Photo credit: EJ Baker | https://www.inkcap.design…

Read more

2 months ago · 18 likes · 2 comments · Daniel Cox

Connective Tissue

Nobody to Call

Today, we’re publishing Nobody to Call, a deep qualitative research project on friendship, community, and purpose among men without college degrees. The following essay introduces how the project emerged, what we heard during our interviews, and what we made of what we heard. We invite you to read the piece, and then go deeper by exploring our…

Read more

3 months ago · 100 likes · 28 comments · Connective Tissue, Sam Pressler, and Soren Duggan

Disclosure: Funding for Nobody to Call was provided by Rise Together, a donor-advised fund sponsored and administered by National Philanthropic Trust and established by Richard Reeves, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

Last week, co-hosted a webinar with the to bring together researchers using new tools to study digital interactions.

Many of the most important questions about technology—from sports betting and pornography to social media and AI companions—cannot be answered through recall surveys alone. People often misremember what they do online and struggle to reconstruct the context surrounding their digital behavior.

The five featured researchers share how they combine behavioral data, AI tools, and real-time surveys to study how digital technologies shape our lives.

Alexandra Rodman & Varun Mishra described the Connect Study’s approach to analyzing how digital experiences affect adolescent mental health using objective behavioral data rather than relying solely on surveys. Rodman described her motivation for the study: mental health disorders often emerge during adolescence, when teenagers are highly sensitive to online and offline social experiences.

The Connect Study follows adolescents for eight months and collects:

• Smartphone usage data

• GPS location data

• Physical activity data

• App usage data

• Smartwatch physiological data

• fMRI scans

• Repeated surveys and interviews

Instead of sending surveys at random times, the software monitors behavior patterns, identifies unusual behaviors, and immediately asks participants what is happening in the moment. For example, if a teenager who rarely uses Instagram late at night suddenly spends hours on the platform on a school night, the system can detect that anomaly and ask follow-up questions about what they were doing, who they were interacting with, and how they were feeling.

This allows Rodman and her colleagues to move beyond simple measures of screen time and instead understand digital behavior in context.

Matthew Brown collected actual betting data alongside surveys to ask: Are sports bettors making informed choices, or are they systematically misunderstanding the risks?

Study participants predicted they would roughly break even. In reality, they lost about 7.5 cents for every dollar wagered.

The study participants underestimated the true financial cost of betting, which may strengthen the case for stronger consumer-protection policies.

Brown suggested that behavioral data and surveys should be viewed as complements. Behavioral data tells us what happened, while surveys can help explain why.

He also highlighted two challenges using sensitive observational data:

1. People willing to share account data are not representative of all bettors. (External validity)

2. Researchers must manage attrition so that participants who drop out do not bias the representativeness. (Internal validity)

Fiona Baker provided an overview of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, one of the largest longitudinal studies ever conducted:

• Over 11,000 participants

• Began when participants were ages 9–10 in 2016-2018

• Has followed them for about a decade

• Combines neuroimaging, surveys, health measures, and digital behavior data

• Just recently released data through the participants’ seven-year follow-up visit.

Using the EARS app to capture smartphone data, researchers found that adolescents averaged about 70 minutes of phone use during school hours — mostly on social media, streaming video, and games. During the 10 PM–6 AM period, adolescents averaged roughly 50 minutes of phone use, with social media the dominant activity.

Future studies will combine smartphone usage, sleep data, heart rate measurements, and physical activity data to explore how digital behavior affects sleep, health, and development.

Richard Landers introduced QUAIL (Qualtrics AI Link), an open-source system that allows researchers to embed AI conversations directly into Qualtrics surveys.

Rather than asking participants how they think they would respond in a hypothetical situation, researchers can simulate realistic conversations and observe actual behavior.

For example, participants could be randomly assigned to interact with different AI personas:

• Self-reliance framing

• Anti-stigma framing

• Neutral framing

Researchers could then compare how these different conversational styles influence disclosure, help-seeking, or emotional expression.

Landers argued that AI-based interactions could become valuable tools for studying loneliness, stigma, mental health disclosure, and other sensitive topics that are difficult to capture through traditional surveys alone. At the same time, he cautioned that AI systems evolve rapidly, models change over time, and rigorous validation (by humans) remains essential.

Three Big Takeaways

1. Digital behavior should be measured directly whenever possible. Surveys remain useful, but people are often inaccurate when recalling their online behavior. Researchers increasingly need tools that capture behavior as it occurs.

2. Context matters more than raw screen time. Beyond raw screentime numbers, researchers are now asking: “What were you doing, with whom, under what circumstances, and how did it affect you?”

3. The next generation of digital interaction research is multimodal. Researchers increasingly combine behavioral data, wearable devices, real-time surveys, and AI-powered interviews.

During the Q&A, panelists emphasized that collecting better data requires building greater trust. Researchers ought to ensure easy-to-understand disclosure, participant ownership of data, and giving participants value in return for sharing their data.

They also noted the need for better tools, more collaboration, shared methodologies, and better ways to track behavior across websites and platforms.

If we want better answers about how technology shapes attitudes and behaviors, we need more accurate methods of observing how people actually behave.

is a writer, researcher, and media commentator focused on pornography, internet culture, censorship, and digital sexuality. She is known for bringing a nuanced, sex-positive but critical perspective to debates about pornography’s effects on relationships, intimacy, technology, and culture, including in the Netflix documentary Money Shot: The Pornhub Story.

I first saw pornography when I was 19. Noelle’s experience was different. She first watched pornography around age 10 or 11 — much closer to the norm for today’s adolescents. Like many young people growing up online, pornography was available long before she had a lived experience of sex, intimacy, or relationships.

I wanted to speak with Noelle because we approach pornography from different perspectives and generations. Noelle often defends the pornography industry against censorship, moral panic, and surveillance. I’m more concerned about pornography’s negative effects on relationships and compulsive digital habits among boys and young men.

Unexpectedly, we ended up agreeing more than not.

Noelle reminded me that society’s approach to sex before online pornography wasn’t ideal either. Ignorance, shame, coercion, and poor communication all pre-dated PornHub and the “tube sites.” Pornography did not create all of today’s many challenges facing sexual development. Rather, it filled a gap left by parents, schools, and policymakers unwilling to talk honestly about sex.

Too often, pornography debates become moral arguments about whether porn is good or bad. But pornography is not one thing. It can support sexual exploration, but it can also replace it. It can help couples communicate about desire, or it can help them avoid difficult but necessary conversations. It can affirm a young person’s sexuality or convince them that sex is primarily a performance to be evaluated by body types, stamina, novelty, dominance, and escalation.

We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, and we each reveal how our respective thinking has changed about pornography addiction, AI-generated porn, infidelity, sex education, and the ingredients of the good life.

Much like gambling and gaming, the question is not whether pornography is good or bad in the abstract. My concern is less that pornography exists, and more that sexual desire is increasingly mediated by companies whose business model depends on attention, escalation, and habit formation.

So where do we go from here? To start, researchers must go a level deeper: when does pornography help people live fuller embodied lives, and when does it pull them away from the lives they actually want? They’ll need funding to finance the studies, something most foundations and federal agencies have been reluctant to provide.

As a starting point, and with Noelle’s helpful input, I’ve developed a list of potential positive and negative uses of pornography that ought to be tested as hypotheses, not taken as assumptions:

Positive uses of pornography

• Pleasure: Porn can be a source of sexual pleasure and fantasy.

• Relief: Like any entertainment media, porn can offer a temporary escape from stress, anxiety, boredom, or loneliness.

• Sexual curiosity: Porn can help people explore identities, fantasies, and boundaries privately before involving another person.

• Affirmation: For anyone whose body type, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, age, or desires are rarely represented as attractive, porn can offer validation.

• Inspiration: Porn can give individuals or couples ideas for new sexual acts, scenarios, conversations, or forms of play.

• Arousal support: Porn can help some people get into an erotic mindset, especially when stress, fatigue, or mismatched libido makes desire harder to access.

• Couples’ intimacy tool: Some couples use porn together to discuss desire, reduce inhibition, introduce novelty, or make sex feel more playful.

• Sexual knowledge: Some people assess their sexual readiness and learn vocabulary, possibilities, or basic sexual concepts from it.

Negative uses of pornography

• Substitute for sex education: Porn can teach young people scripts about sex before they understand consent, communication, contraception, pleasure, or emotional intimacy.

• Compulsive or habitual use: Porn can displace sleep, work, school, dating, exercise, friendships, or the life a person desires.

• Avoidance of intimacy: Porn can become an easier substitute for asking someone out, repairing a relationship, tolerating loneliness, or having difficult conversations about desire.

• Algorithmic escalation: Tube sites and social platforms often push users toward more extreme or attention-grabbing content, making it harder to know whether consumption reflects genuine desire or platform conditioning.

• Shame and moral conflict: Some users feel guilt because their porn use conflicts with their values, politics, or religion. Shame can worsen secrecy and compulsive patterns rather than resolve them.

• Unwanted exposure: Porn is no longer only something people seek out; it often finds and follows users through algorithmic feeds.

• Distorted sexual scripts: Porn can normalize performance-heavy, aggressive, or one-sided sex. Some young people, especially women, report feeling pressured to engage in sexual practices they do not necessarily want.

• Body image and performance anxiety: Porn can teach men that normal sex requires an unusually large penis, extreme stamina, muscular bodies, constant erection, and instant arousal.

• Relationship conflict or secrecy: Pornography can be positive inside some relationships, but damaging when it is hidden, used to avoid a partner, or experienced by a partner as betrayal.

• Parasocial dependency: OnlyFans and other camming platforms can blur the line between erotic entertainment and pseudo-intimacy, especially for lonely users.

• AI pornography and dehumanization: Generative AI porn may remove the remaining human presence from sexual media, raising concerns about antisocial fantasy, isolation, and sexual habits increasingly detached from real human connection.

What we still don’t know

I’m grateful to Noelle for our conversation and for helping me think through the potential benefits and risks of pornography as it rapidly evolves from pixelated JPEG images to AI-generated, immersive virtual reality.

Attempts to prohibit access to pornography rarely work and may backfire. Boys and young men will always have sexual desire and seek sexual fantasy. The task ahead is to ensure they can become men capable of restraint, consent, confidence, and real intimacy.

Pornography can become less central to sexual formation if young people have access to better guidance, technology companies have fewer incentives to exploit human vulnerability, and research produces more practical answers.

Two problems come up constantly when studying digital technology.

First, the variation in how people use it, even within the same app. Spending an hour on Instagram might mean messaging friends or comparing yourself to strangers.

Second, self-reported survey data is often unreliable. Most people can’t accurately recall how much time they spent on their phone, nevermind what apps they used.

Fortunately, researchers are solving the measurement problem with new tools that capture what people actually do online—tools like the EARS app, which allows researchers to record keyboard activity.

Join Boys & Men Online and the Psychology of Technology Institute today at 3pm ET for a webinar on these tools, and how they can help us better study our digital lives. Registration here.

The Feed

Are AI romantic companions reshaping relationships?

A new Wheatley Institute survey of 2,431 partnered young adults (18–30) finds that 1 in 7 regularly chat with AI romantic companions—defined as AI systems designed to simulate romantic, sexual, or emotional relationships (~18% of men vs. ~12% of women). Several findings stand out:

• Married young adults are the heaviest users, with 17% regularly chatting with an AI romantic companion, significantly more than those who are dating or engaged

• Among frequent users, 60% wish their real partner behaved more like their AI companion and 68% wish real conversations felt more like conversations with AI

• 54% of users say they’re using AI to replace specific human relationships

Per my introduction, the results should be interpreted cautiously, as survey-based research on emerging technologies is often noisy. Still, they add to the growing evidence that AI companions may start to reshape users’ emotional and relational lives.

Gambling ads in sports television

The Washington Post used AI to analyze 50 hours of televised football, basketball, and hockey and found a gambling reference, promotion, or commercial every four minutes on average. The analysis builds on our earlier coverage of the Campaign for Accountability’s report on gambling advertising on YouTube and podcasts. Gambling is increasingly embedded in the mainstream sports-viewing experience.

As gambling advertising continues to grow Senators Katie Britt (R-Ala.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) have introduced bipartisan legislation—the Gaming Advertisement to Minors Enforcement (GAME)—to ban targeted sports betting advertising to minors on social media and other online platforms.

What courts should make platforms do next

A new report from the Knight-Georgetown institute examines how court-ordered remedies in social media and AI chatbot litigation can change company behavior. The authors draw on almost 100 prior remedies from tobacco, pharma, e-cigarette, and FTC cases to argue that monetary relief alone won’t change platform design because companies can absorb fines. Instead, courts should require injunctive relief: bans on unsafe design features, safer defaults for minors, independent external monitors, and mandated experiments measuring whether changes reduce harm in practice. The report’s release coincides with the second phase of the New Mexico bench trial, where a judge is deciding right now whether Meta can be compelled to redesign its products.

Prediction markets under fire at Senate Commerce Committee hearing

The central question of the Commerce Committee hearing was whether sports event contracts are federally regulated investment products or state-regulated gambling products by another name. Dr. Harry Levant of the Public Health Advocacy Institute argued in written testimony that sports prediction markets “constitute gambling,” and warned that online platforms and prediction markets have expanded sports gambling into a mental-health crisis affecting children, young adults, and families.

Minnesota bans prediction markets

Less than 24 hours after Minnesota became the first state to ban prediction markets, the CTFC stepped in, suing to block the law. The Minnesota law does not place any restrictions on users, but would make it a felony to operate platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. This is the latest development in the debate over whether to regulate these products as investments or gambling. Our polling with Ipsos showed that Americans are much more likely to view prediction markets as gambling rather than investing, with 61% saying the former and just 8% the latter.

What else we’re reading

• Kalshi Retail Bettors Have Lost $100M+ on Parlays This Year - Sportico

• Adolescents and loot boxes: a systematic review of behavioral mechanisms and problematic outcomes - Han et al.

• From bans to recalls: A public health framework for AI companion bots - Brookings

• Child-safety groups including the Anxious Generation Movement, Fairplay, and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation have asked the FTC to investigate Roblox. - The Guardian

• Prediction Markets Underperform Simple Baselines for Infectious Disease Forecasting - Dudley et al.

• An Evaluation of Chat Safety Moderations in Roblox - Kaushik et al.

Events & Funding Opportunities

• International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking | Las Vegas, NV | May 26-28, 2026.

• National Conference on Gambling Addiction & Responsible Gambling | Nashville, TN | July 22-24, 2026 | Call for presentations closed.

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? Are you a researcher using novel methods to study our digital lives? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to stay up to date on Boys & Men Online.

Subscribe now

And share!

Share

Co-hosted by Boys & Men Online and the Psychology of Technology Institute, the webinar will feature four short presentations followed by audience Q&A.

Speakers include:

• Alexandra Rodman & Varun Mishra, Northeastern University — UbiWell Connect, a custom passive data collection tool developed for the longitudinal Connect Study.

• Fiona Baker, SRI — The ABCD Study’s approach to digital data collection, including the EARS app and Fitbit integration.

• Matthew Brown, University of Chicago — The use of SharpSports to measure sports betting spending and lessons learned about collecting data on web browsing.

• Richard Landers, University of Minnesota — QUAIL, an open-source tool that collects data from LLM conversations inside Qualtrics surveys.

The trouble with asking people what they do online

How many times did you pick up your phone yesterday?

I guessed 30. My screen time app says 84. Yikes.

I’m not the only one off by a wide margin. In one study tracking 23 users over two weeks, participants estimated 36 pickups per day. The actual average was 85.

And it’s not just young people. In another study, over half of parents of young children underestimated their phone use. Among parents who said they checked their phone fewer than 10 times a day, the real average was 52.

You might assume we all underestimate, but a 2021 meta-analysis of 49 comparisons between self-reported and logged use found that discrepancies were evenly split between underreporting and overreporting. Rarely were they accurate; only three of the 49 studies had mean self-reported use within 5% of the logged mean. And the association was even weaker when researchers asked about problematic use.

It’s hard to accurately recall and estimate phone use, especially when we’re asked about use that can invoke shame, like gambling and pornography.

And yet, much of the influential research on social media, online gambling, gaming, and pornography still relies on self-reported use. Media coverage of these studies rarely distinguishes between what people say they do and what they actually do. Much of what we think we know about technology use is still based on asking people to remember and report their behavior.

Everybody Lies

Surveys are blunt instruments, and humans are unreliable narrators. In Everybody Lies, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz catalogs several examples where survey responses don’t match actual behavior, including:

• Self-reported sex frequency and condom use imply billions of condom uses per year. Actual condom sales tell a different story.

• Surveys and Facebook self-disclosure put the share of gay men at 2–3%, with sharp differences between tolerant and intolerant states. Google and pornography search data put the figure closer to 5%, with the state differences largely disappearing.

People routinely mislead pollsters and researchers. They especially lie in surveys about sex, drugs, and money. There is no reason to think they suddenly become honest when asked about their phones.

Surveys remain essential for understanding attitudes, beliefs, intentions, and self-perception. But when the question is behavioral — what people actually do online — we need better tools that allow researchers to go beyond mere exposure. Two hours on YouTube could be guitar lessons, outrage bait, help fixing an appliance, or falling into a sports betting rabbit hole. The same app, duration, and device can tell completely different stories.

Better tools for measuring what people actually do

A new generation of research tools is making it easier for researchers to observe digital behavior more directly, and to pair that observation with well-timed questions about motivation, mood, and context.

Some tools measure basic patterns of phone and app use: pickups, duration, app switching, notifications, and time of day. Others go further. Apps like EARS can log keyboard activity, allowing researchers to study not only how long someone spends in an app, but the content and tone of digital interactions. Other systems monitor traffic through an encrypted VPN, giving researchers a fuller picture of browsing and app use, including sessions in private browsing mode.

Most of these tools support ecological momentary assessments (EMAs): short surveys delivered at the moment they are most relevant. A researcher can trigger a survey every time a participant spends two consecutive hours on a given app. Or a survey might be triggered by a specific word pattern detected through keyboard logging. Instead of asking someone on Friday how they felt while scrolling on Monday night, researchers can ask closer to the moment itself.

AI interviews and richer qualitative data

Large language models also open new possibilities with AI-led interviews and focus groups. Platforms like Conveo and Glaut allow researchers to design in-depth video interviews conducted by an AI agent with a large number of participants. These tools can elicit more nuanced responses than a standard survey and also analyze the participant’s voice, expression, and emotional tone.

The AI agent can ask follow-up questions, show images or videos, and explore why a participant responded in a particular way. These platforms do not replace human qualitative research, but they allow researchers to conduct nuanced interviews at a scale that was previously impractical.

Better measurement, new risks

These tools promise better data, more precise measurements, and a clearer understanding of how digital technologies shape behavior and well-being.

They also present new ethical considerations, including serious questions about privacy, consent, disclosure, data security, and the responsibilities of institutional review boards.

Monitoring web traffic, logging keystrokes, or triggering surveys based on sensitive behavior can produce valuable research. It can also present ethical risks if participants do not fully understand what is being collected and how it will be used.

On May 27 at 3 p.m. Eastern, we will discuss the opportunities, challenges, and real-world lessons from researchers using these tools to study digital interactions. I hope you can join us by registering here.

The commentary had become overheated. Young men were either being algorithmically radicalized into violent woman-haters or zombified into degenerate gamblers, gamers, and porn addicts.

We thought there was a need—and an audience—for calm, rigorous, and open-minded analysis.

At their best, online tools are a “bicycle for the mind” — extending agency, connection, and purpose. But at their worst, they become slot machines of stimulation, hijacking otherwise healthy drives for mastery, intimacy, and achievement, and redirecting them into compulsive, often solitary loops.

I’ll admit that I have been tempted by the crisis framing myself. Alarm travels faster than nuance. But the reality is more complicated: Boys and men also find useful information, fun, skills, romance, and genuine friendships online.

How can researchers, platform designers, and policymakers harness those benefits while addressing the harms? The real task is to understand when online life becomes a tool for agency and connection, and when it becomes a trap.

What We’re Learning

I want to highlight four lessons from our first five months:

Prediction markets, everywhere

In February, we hosted a webinar on the future of online sports betting with three industry experts. They all pointed to prediction markets as the big disruptor. They were right.

Congress has introduced over 20 bills, resolutions, and amendments related to prediction markets. Kalshi just raised another billion at a valuation of $22 billion, and later this month, the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on sports betting — including on prediction markets. Over ten states are involved in lawsuits with prediction markets, and the Supreme Court will likely decide whether federally regulated prediction markets preempt state gambling laws.

Whatever the courts decide, prediction markets won’t be the last innovation in online gambling. Gamified finance will continue to blur the line between investing, gambling, and entertainment.

Our position is not prohibition, but commonsense regulation. We developed a policy framework of specific solutions to reduce harms while preserving fun and innovation. We are fortunate to have leading this work with support from AIBM’s gambling research and policy fellow, . We have much more in the works, as I describe below.

Porn, intimacy, and the return of romance

Teenage boys, aware that any message could be screenshotted or that a clumsy approach could go viral, may be reluctant to take romantic risks. Meeting one’s sexual needs has never been easier online, while pursuing real relationships feels more perilous. Fewer than half of high school seniors today report they are dating, down from more than 80% in the 1990s.

It’s time for a real conversation about porn, as I wrote in a commentary at AIBM. We also need better evidence, as shown in our synthesis of the latest research on pornography’s impact on boys and men.

Last month, we hosted a webinar with the authors of that evidence scan. And next month, we’ll convene more than 25 of the leading pornography researchers to develop a forward-looking research agenda. We aim to identify the most urgent evidence gaps on pornography’s impact — and on the broader decline in dating.

There is no reason to shame young men for seeking sexual stimulation. But we should have better evidence on whether it is displacing human connection.

Gaming (in moderation) can be fun and healthy

Gaming is often treated as if it were one thing. But a cooperative game with friends is not the same as a solo game with addictive features. An hour of play after school is not the same as all-night avoidance of life’s troubles.

Over the last 15 years, boys and young men more than doubled their average time per week spent gaming, observes Claire Cain Miller. For most teenagers, the perceived benefits outweigh the harms:

Annie Maheux notes that boys are especially likely to use gaming for connection while Jason Nagata points to recent evidence suggesting that video gaming may strengthen cognitive and executive functioning in adolescents and young adults.1

Gaming is neither good nor bad. We need more specific research about which games, for which boys, and under what conditions, as my colleague raised in a recent research digest.

If you’re a parent concerned about your child’s gaming, check out my discussion with Kruti Kanojia and Jim Festante for some practical tips:

An FDA for high-risk technologies

My first piece for argued for an FDA-like approval process for high-risk technologies like AI companions.

We do this for medicine, cars, and food, but high-risk digital products are used by millions of children and adolescents without any safety screening.

There is a better way to regulate high-risk technologies than bans or legal liability. A pre-approval process would create incentives for companies to design for flourishing from the start. It would also provide researchers with better data to assess the likelihood of potential harms before products reach massive scale.

When I first wrote about the idea, I thought it was a pipe dream. But the rapid advancements of AI have changed the game.

The White House is considering an executive order to evaluate leading AI models through an FDA-like approval process. Senators Hawley and Blumenthal proposed an evaluative approval process housed within the Department of Energy. Senators Warren and Graham proposed a new federal agency to “regulate digital platforms, including with respect to competition, transparency, privacy, and national security.”

AI created the urgency, but the precedent could then extend to other high-risk technologies, and offer a smarter approach than all-out bans or litigious liability.

So what comes next?

We’ve got a lot in the works:

• May 20: A Substack Live conversation with and about their new interactive report, Nobody to Call, an examination of male disconnection. (Register here.)

• May 27: A webinar in partnership with the Psychology of Technology Institute on new tools and methods to study digital interaction. (Register here.)

• June: Kicking off a new research project on how young men define a good life, how it shows up in their daily lives, and what gets in the way.

• June: A webinar with , German Lopez of The New York Times, and Matt King of Fanatics on gamblification and financial nihilism.

• June: A podcast with Anna Lembke about dopamine, reward loops, and addictive design.

• July: A synthesis of new directions for research on pornography use.

And more: Anders’ biweekly CTRL Agency digest on digital technology in the lives of young men, our first creators council meeting, and profiles of our partners and graduate student fellows.

Thank you for being with us from the beginning. We are trying to build a space for clearer thinking about a noisy subject. We want to take the harms seriously without surrendering to panic, and take the benefits seriously without drifting into rose-tinted optimism.

Our digital lives are too vast to be simply good or bad. Feature by feature, we can address the harms while harnessing the benefits.

Age verification is in vogue. Australia’s under-16 social media ban is just over five months old, and 25 US states have now enacted laws mandating age verification for adult content.

This week’s digest looks at some early evidence on how age verification is working in practice.

The Feed

Are teens bypassing Australia’s social media ban?

Just about one in four 14-15 year olds comply with Australia’s social media ban, finds a recent NBER working paper surveying 835 Australian teenagers. When asked why they continue to use banned platforms, 42% of non-compliant teens cited their friends still using the platforms and 27% cited fear of missing out. On average, they said two-thirds of their peers would need to stop using social media before they would stop themselves.

The authors summarized their takeaway in a New York Times opinion piece:

To succeed, a ban has to push compliance past a tipping point — staying off becomes the new normal and nonusers no longer suffer from FOMO. The Australian ban hasn’t done that, and under the current design it won’t…

When the value of a product comes from collective participation, a mandate alone might not be enough to change behavior.

Many teens would get off social media, but only if their friends got off too: in effect, a collective trap.

Effects of age verification on porn website traffic

Between June 2022 and July 2025, five states adopted age-verification laws for porn websites. In response, some websites adopted age gates (e.g. xHamster), some blocked access altogether (e.g. Pornhub), and others did not comply (e.g. XVideos).

A recent study examines the impact of these bans on web traffic. They find that:

• Age-gate adopting platforms’ traffic dropped by 36%.

• User-blocking platforms lost 55% of traffic.1

• Non-adopting platforms saw little change overall, but traffic to large non-adopters XVideos and XNXX increased by roughly 35-40%.

The authors also found little increase in traffic to fringe porn sites.

UK teens bypass the Online Safety Act

A new Internet Matters offers early evidence on the UK Online Safety Act. In a survey of 1,270 UK children aged 9-16 and parents, 46% of children say age checks are easy to bypass, and 1 in 3 said they had done so. 1 in 4 parents say they have helped their child bypass age checks.

First-in-nation law targeting VPNs comes into effect in Utah

Utah’s SB 73, an amendment to Utah’s law requiring age checks for online adult content, is an unprecedented step for age verification laws. The amendment says a person counts as accessing a site “from Utah” so long as they are physically in the state, even if they use a VPN to mask their location. Critics say enforcing this requirement puts sites in a bind: because they cannot reliably identify whether a VPN user is physically in Utah, they may be pushed to block VPN traffic altogether, require age verification for far more visitors than just Utah residents, or face liability.

What else we’re reading

• The Clip Economy - ProfG Markets

• The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches - Allcott et al.

• Scrolling to Financial Agency: How Gen Z Navigates Financial Advice on Social Media - New America

• Health Benefits of Video Games in Adolescents and Young Adults - Nagata et al.

• Report: Child, Adolescent and Youth Mental Health in the 21st Century - OECD

• Global prevalence of internet gaming disorder in children and adolescents: a systematic review and meta-analysis - Barboza et al.

• High Tech, Low Play: The Life of American Children - IFS

• Common Sense Media Launches Youth AI Safety Institute - Common Sense Media

• Struggling With Phone Addiction? Try These Remedies. - NYT

Events & Funding Opportunities

• Young Futures Express Yourself Grant | Supporting bold solutions that help girls, boys and trans- and gender-expansive young people build confidence, belonging, and agency in a digitally shaped world. | Proposals due May 19th, 2026, 8 PM ET.

• *New* Commerce Committee Hearing — No Sure Bets: Protecting Sports Integrity in America | 10 AM, May 20th

• International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking | Las Vegas, NV | May 26-28, 2026.

• National Conference on Gambling Addiction & Responsible Gambling | Nashville, TN | July 22-24, 2026 | Call for presentations closed.

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? What did we get wrong about making age verification work? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to stay up to date on Boys & Men Online.

Subscribe now

And share!

Share