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.

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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…

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17 days 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…

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a month 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

17 days 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

a month 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.

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I’m stepping in for this week’s introduction while Anders is out on holiday. He’ll be back in your inbox with another roundup on May 13.

Our work centers on two themes:

1. Simulations of Mastery & Purpose

2. Simulations of Connection & Belonging

Here’s an example of each:

Prediction markets: gambling disguised as investing

“Sports event contracts serve no economic purpose beyond entertainment,” writes our colleague in his public comment to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.

And yet wagering on sports event contracts is regulated as an investment and available on Robinhood, a brokerage app, where young men could be investing in their future rather than gambling on sports.1 A new paper, detailed below, finds that 70% of prediction market users lose money, while 84% of all gains are captured by the top 1%. That sounds like a bad gamble, and a worse investment.

AI-generated pornography

The 25-year decline in dating and sex has coincided with the rise of ubiquitous pornography2 — from pixelated images, to five-minute clips on tube sites, to paid OnlyFans subscriptions, and now AI-generated pornography. A few recent papers offer a glimpse into the newest platforms, though we still lack rigorous data on prevalence and impacts.

Valerie Lapointe and colleagues studied 98 AI-porn platforms. 90% prohibited some content generation; 65% prohibited child sexual abuse material; 55% prohibited depictions of real people; just 25% prohibited nonconsensual activity. Governance and enforcement vary widely.

Nicola Döring et al. examined Reddit posts about AI pornography from August 2024. Most users described fun and fascinating experiences; a minority voiced concerns over excessive use, addictiveness, and warped dating and sexual expectations. Others expressed shame and anger about nonconsensual deepfakes, especially of friends and family.

Finally, Alejandro Cuevas and Manoel Horta Ribeiro study the impact of the TAKE IT DOWN act from May, 2025, which criminalized the publication of nonconsensual intimate imagery and deepfakes. Analyzing activity on 4chan and two anonymized sites, they find that activity stayed at or above the counterfactual, with increases in sharing, in requests for new content, and in some cases new contributors—suggesting that the new law did not reduce nonconsensual deepfake activity overall but coincided with its redistribution to other platforms.

Desiring economic stability and human relationships

In multiple surveys, young men name economic independence and healthy relationships as their top priorities. They also report economic anxiety driven by AI's effects on the workforce, and describe dating as fraught. Meanwhile, they encounter the simulation of investing in prediction markets and the illusion of intimacy in AI-generated pornography.

The findings by Cuevas and Horta Ribeiro suggest the limitations of prohibition. Efforts to reduce the allure of simulated intimacy and gamblified investing will need to be paired with efforts to make dating and savings easier and more satisfying.

The Feed

Gambling ads are widespread on YouTube

A new Campaign for Accountability report finds that gambling advertising is widespread on podcasts and YouTube. Reviewing 200 top YouTube and Spotify podcasts, CfA found that gambling sponsorships were especially common on male-centered shows. Of male-hosted shows with host-read ads, two-thirds had promoted gambling products in the last year—as had 83% of sports podcasts and 93% of podcasts hosted by male stand-up comics.

As we’ve featured in past digests, gambling advertising on YouTube serves as a major pipeline into risky behavior:

• 1 in 5 teenage boys and more than 1 in 3 Black teenagers say they use YouTube “almost constantly”, and 6 in 10 boys report seeing gambling ads on Youtube

• Social Finance’s UK survey found that ads were the top source of exposure to gambling among young people, and that those who followed gambling content-creators were significantly more likely to participate in high risk investments (40%) versus those who did not (2%).

Last year, YouTube announced a policy of age restricting videos promoting online gambling—but exempted sports betting ads.

Most prediction market traders lose

A new working paper offers a clear look at who wins on prediction markets. Using more than 70 million trades on Polymarket, the authors find that the top 1% of users capture 84% of all gains, while 70% of users lose money. Users who concentrated more of their betting in long-shot contracts, and who traded more frequently overall, were more likely to lose money.

Americans widely support youth social media restrictions

Data from a new NORC survey finds that almost one in four Americans support restricting social media use for children under the age of 16. Concerns about social media age restrictions overwhelmingly center around implementation concerns: 65% cite young people turning to less trustworthy websites, and 58% cite the difficulty of enforcing restrictions.

David French on how tech has supercharged vice

In a recent opinion piece—and debate with Chris Christie—David French argues that sports gambling and pornography have become easier as opportunities have become harder:

If you want to watch porn or place a prop bet, the wind is at your back. If you want to go to college or start a business, the wind is in your face.

French notes that gambling and pornography are not new phenomena, but the frictionless ease with which they can be indulged today is.

What else we’re reading

• How ‘Zombie Flow’ Took Over Culture - Derek Thompson

• Are prediction markets good for anything? - Asterisk Magazine

• The Case Against Social Media “Addiction” - CATO

• Generation AI starts early: A guide to technologies already shaping young children’s lives - Brookings

• Social media age restrictions for children: Why they are rising and what comes next - OECD

• Prediction market giant Kalshi suspends congressional candidates over election bets - Politico

• Where Does Our Free Time Go in Retirement? Too Often, It’s Social Media - WSJ

• Teens’ Experiences on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat - Pew Research

• Roblox gaming platform reaches $12 million settlement with Nevada enhancing youth protections - AP

Events & Funding Opportunities

• Young Futures Block Party | Austin, TX | May 13-14, 2026.

• 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.

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

• Young Guys Thrive | Online | June 12

• *New* Request for Applications for Research on Sports Betting, Alcohol and Substance Abuse - Up to $437500 including indirect costs | Applications due July 17th, 2026

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

• International Conference on Behavioral Addictions | Istanbul | August 24-26, 2026. Late registration open.

What did we miss this week? Do you have an upcoming conference or study we could feature in the next edition? Do you think under-18 social media restrictions would be effective? 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.

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This week’s digest is all about… video games!

Gaming is easy to talk about badly. It can have real downsides for boys and young men if it slips into compulsive behavior or crowds out offline life. But it can also offer tremendous benefits. This week we walk through some research and resources on video games, and connect the findings to our broader work.

The Feed

Walking through different ways video games might affect mental health

Gaming is not one thing, nor are its effects. This paper walks through 13 plausible mechanisms through which gaming could influence mental health, and shows how to translate intuitions into causal models that can be rigorously tested. The authors suggest that researchers should study specific features and causal pathways, rather than treat “gaming” as a single variable. So, for example, instead of studying whether gaming is good or bad for mental health, researchers can explore whether late-night, high-intensity gaming worsens mood by disrupting sleep, or whether social gaming improves well-being relative to solo gaming.

The same shift would benefit research on pornography. Rather than testing associations between porn use and mental health, researchers ought to rigorously test specific causal mechanisms.

A new video game play dataset

Researchers at Oxford released Open Play, a new longitudinal dataset which includes psychological measures (mental health, well-being, etc.) and digital trace data across multiple gaming platforms (Steam, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android), time diaries, and a host of other measures.

I downloaded the dataset, threw it into Claude Code, and spent half an hour playing around. Here’s one finding: Overwatch 2 players have the lowest average well-being of any major game in the dataset. (If you’ve played Overwatch, you will not be surprised.)

Some other questions you can use the Open Play dataset to explore:

• Do people stay up later gaming after a stressful day?

• Is the relationship between gaming and well-being different for weekend versus weekday gamers?

• How does becoming a caregiver reshape gaming patterns?

• How do reaction times relate to time spent gaming?

Differences between problematic gaming and problematic gambling

An fMRI meta-analysis comparing Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) and Gambling Disorder (GD) found no significant shared activation cluster in the brain, suggesting different underlying cognitive mechanisms. While GD was associated with greater activity in regions linked to reward valuation, IGD was associated with greater activity in regions associated with attention, monitoring, and emotional-cognitive regulation. Treating these disorders as neurologically similar may be incorrect.

Did better video games pull young men out of the workforce?

Between 2000 and 2015, working hours for men aged 21–30 fell about 12 percent—significantly more than for older men, women, or any other group. The economists who wrote this paper traced where those lost work hours went, and found that the majority went to video gaming and recreational computer use. The paper’s key insight is that gaming functions as a “leisure luxury” for young men—meaning the more free time they have, the disproportionately more they devote to it. As gaming technology improved through the 2000s, they argue, it raised the value of free time relative to paid work. The paper doesn’t argue gaming caused young men to stop working, but that it got good enough to shift the calculation, especially for those living with parents for whom the financial cost of working less was cushioned.

→ Of note: Over at AIBM.org, Thomas O’Rourke’s analysis of American Time Use Survey data finds that both male and female NEETs spend roughly 5 hours per day watching TV and engaging in “other” leisure activities, but male NEETs spend roughly 2 additional hours per day playing video games.

What else we’re reading

• Gambling, Drugs, and Porn: What I Learned at a Conference on Vice Policy - Isaac Rose-Berman

• How early porn exposure is impacting young men - USA Today

• Siena/SBU Survey: Over half of men 18-49 have sportsbook accounts - Siena & St. Bonaventure University

• Social Snacks: AI Companions and the Hunger for Connection - Data & Society

• CFTC sues Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois over prediction market regulation - CNBC

• Do 3pm to 3am screentime bans work? - Center for Teen Flourishing

• Teens are using AI—but not how we think - Brookings: TechTank podcast

• Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes Report - Ofcom

Events & Funding Opportunities

• *New* Webinar: Financial Health, Gambling, and Prevention: A Cross-Industry Conversation | April 16th, 2026.

• Online Gambling and The Public Health Movement: An International Symposium | Boston, MA | April 24th, 2026.

• *New* Young Futures Block Party | Austin, TX | May 13-14, 2026.

• *New* 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.

• 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? How do you think we should design video games for well-being? 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.

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The average American boy first encounters pornography around age 12. By the time he graduates high school, he’s spent years consuming content that looks very different from what researchers have studied—or what most parents imagine.

But the research hasn’t kept pace. And neither have parents, educators, policymakers, or funders. As a result, young people are navigating unprecedented, always-on access to sexually explicit content with very little guidance or honest conversation.

In this episode, we bring together leading researchers to take stock of what we know, what we don’t, and where the field needs to go next. You can view a recording of the webinar below, or listen to the audio on our podcast feed.

Researchers: If you are studying these questions and would like to be part of a research convening this summer, please contact David at david@aibm.org.

And stay tuned as we’ll continue publishing more interviews with pornography researchers over the coming weeks and months.

Finally, if you want a good laugh, here’s a clever public service announcement from New Zealand’s Keep It Real Online initiative:

Last week, a jury found Meta and YouTube liable for harming a teenage girl’s mental health. The $6 million verdict targeted the design features of the platforms—infinite scroll, autoplay, and algorithmic amplification—rather than the content.

That’s a meaningful legal distinction. As my colleague David has pointed out, the verdict is a warning shot for sports betting apps and prediction markets, which rely on the same engagement-maximizing design features as social media.

For more on why the Meta/Youtube case is so important, see this discussion by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin. For a helpful guide to the legal issues at play, see this article by Jonathan Cederbaum in Lawfare.

Pornography Research Webinar

Please join us tomorrow (April 2nd) at 2 p.m. ET for a webinar on what we know about pornography use and its effects. Bailey Way, Shane Kraus, and Josh Grubbs will present their findings alongside Marc Potenza and Emily Rothman. Register here.

The Feed

Two bills take aim at sports prediction market contracts

On March 23rd, Senators Adam Schiff (D-Calif) and John Curtis (R-Utah) introduced legislation to ban prediction market contracts tied to sports and casino-style games. Three days later, Senators Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) went further, adding contracts related to military acts, elections, and other government actions.

Addictive technologies are displacement machines

Derek Thompson’s recent piece in The Argument threads the needle between those who blame phones for every modern problem, and those who decry the whole thing as an unfounded moral panic.

“My argument, in short, is this: The smartphone is not a poison, it’s a displacement machine. When you stare into your phone, you are displacing some other activity — sleeping, socializing, playing outside, paying attention in class, watching TV…”

The larger takeaway should not be that displacement is benign because they’re only replacing already-degraded alternatives. The more important conclusion: we need to proactively rebuild and invest in alternatives that promote flourishing.

More evidence on the financial harms of sports betting

A new Federal Reserve Bank of New York report finds that legalizing mobile sports betting increases sportsbook spending by a factor of 10 (from $2.50 to $46), and raises quarterly take-up by 3.1 percentage points. Using credit report data, they find modest increases in delinquency (+0.31 percentage points from a 10.71% base), with the strongest effects among those under 40. The paper also finds significant spillovers across state lines. One of the report’s more striking findings is that average sportsbook spending continues to rise after legalization, with no leveling off in sight.

This adds to the existing evidence of sports bettings deleterious impact on financial security.

Causal evidence for marketing’s impact on gambling

Most evidence linking marketing and gambling behavior has been correlational. A new randomized control trial aims to fill the gap by splitting bettors into two groups, one of which opted out of direct marketing from gambling operators. Over two weeks, the opt-out group had spent 39% less and reported 67% fewer short-term gambling harms compared with the control.

The paper should be taken with a grain of salt, as many of those allocated to the opt-out group didn’t actually opt out and were excluded from the analysis. Still, it bolsters evidence that marketing both attracts new gamblers and amplifies existing gambling behaviors.

What else we’re reading

• Senator Chris Murphy on prediction markets - Pablo Torres Finds Out

• Interview with CASPR’s Nicholas Reville: Public Policy Misses the Mark on Problem Gambling - Gambling Insider

• How to win slots and influence people - Bloomberg

• The Political Backlash to Prediction Markets Has Arrived - Front Office Sports

• News Brief: Washington Attorney General Sues Kalshi - Event Horizon

• A Jury Hit Meta With a $375 Million Verdict. The Open Internet May Pay the Price. - Reason

• What we’re missing about the social media verdict - TechnoSapiens

• A blow against free speech in California - The Washington Post

• If You Want to Build Community, You Have to “Waste Time” with People - Vivek Murthy

Events & Funding Opportunities

• Online Gambling and The Public Health Movement: An International Symposium | Boston, MA | April 24th, 2026.

• 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? Do you have thoughts on Derek Thompson’s idea of a “displacement machines”? 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.

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1. Sports betting doesn’t belong on prediction markets — and shouldn’t be accessible to anyone under 18.

2. If we’re legalizing online gambling, we need to actually enforce it — which means shutting down illicit offshore sites, especially for young people.

3. Legal sportsbooks must do more to protect users from compulsive use and financial ruin.

Over the past few weeks, there have been meaningful developments on all three fronts.

Before diving in, it’s worth grounding this discussion in what’s at stake, as my colleague laid out in a new PBS roundtable:

The Meta Verdict Is a Liability Warning for Sportsbooks

A jury recently found Meta and YouTube liable for $6 million in punitive and compensatory damages tied to addictive design and mental health harms. That case is a warning shot for tech platforms, including sports betting and prediction markets. As Michael McCann writes in Sportico:

The case invites questions about the addictive qualities of sports betting and sports prediction apps and their exposure to similar legal theories. Sports betting and sports prediction apps might be more vulnerable to arguments they cause users to become addicted and suffer various harms.

Mark Gottlieb of the Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI), which is suing DraftKings for unfair and deceptive practices, told McCann:

Much like the social media companies on trial in Los Angeles, the leading sports gambling platforms all use—and compete on the basis of—advanced algorithms created by tracking every click and demographic detail of each of their users to maximize time on device and engagement with their products.

This is the first major deceptive practices lawsuit against a sports betting app to move to a full trial. Legal analysts are comparing it to significant, early lawsuits against the tobacco companies.

PHAI is also supporting a new lawsuit in Pennsylvania alleging that sportsbooks are using fast-paced microbets and defective design to make users addicted to gambling:

This argument is reminiscent of litigation against Meta and other social media companies accused of designing their platforms to cause children to become addicted through engagement boosters such as infinite scrolling and manipulation of algorithmically tailored feeds of photos and videos. Here, the sportsbook apps are depicted as knowingly taking advantage of people with gambling addictions and worsening those addictions.

While the courts consider liability, Congress is moving with unusual urgency on prediction markets.

A Flurry of Prediction Market Legislation

Several bills assert that prediction markets should not function as sportsbooks:

Prediction Markets Are Gambling Act

Introduced in the Senate by Sens. Adam Schiff and John Curtis on March 23, this bill would prohibit CFTC-registered entities from listing contracts that resemble sports bets or casino-style games. It is the Senate companion to Titus’s House sports bill (below) and frames those markets as gambling rather than legitimate financial contracts.

Fair Markets and Sports Integrity Act

This House bill from Rep. Dina Titus would ban prediction markets from offering sports bets and casino-style contracts outside state regulation.

Prediction Markets Security and Integrity Act

Introduced by Sen. Richard Blumenthal on March 11, this is the broadest consumer-protection bill in the set: it would impose federal rules on insider trading and manipulation, ban markets tied to war, death, and military action, require age verification, and push authority back toward the states.

Skepticism is warranted about the passage of any of these bills. But one detail is worth noting: the bipartisan Schiff–Curtis bill comes from states without legal online sports betting, which weakens allegations of industry protectionism or inconsistent views.

At the state level, a Nevada court issued a temporary restraining order blocking Kalshi’s event contracts (including sports) unless it obtains a state license. It explicitly treats these offerings as illegal, unlicensed gambling under state law, even though the platform claims federal oversight.

Public opinion is largely aligned. Americans view purchasing event contracts on prediction markets as closer to gambling than investing (61% to 8%), based on our latest poll with Ipsos.

There have also been several bills addressing ethics and insider trading on prediction markets:

• Public Integrity in Financial Prediction Markets Act of 2026

• End Prediction Market Corruption Act

• Event Contract Enforcement Act

• DEATH BETS Act

• BETS OFF Act

In our poll with Ipsos, just 9% of respondents say they are confident that prediction markets could prevent individuals with non-public information from unfairly profiting on the platforms.

States Look to Refine Regulatory Approach

Several states are contemplating reform bills to address the harms of legalized sports betting. The following bills cluster around three themes: harm reduction (deposit limits, credit card bans), operator constraints (ads, promos, limiting bettors), and market boundaries (especially around prediction markets).

Colorado SB 26-131 (passed committee)

Limits deposits, bans credit cards and push notifications, restricts advertising, and prohibits sportsbooks from limiting winning bettors.

Kentucky HB 904 (passed House)

Raises the age to 21, mandates acceptance of bets up to $1,000, increases transparency around limits, and bans partnerships with prediction market platforms.

Maryland HB 518 (passed House)

Bans college prop bets, prohibits credit card deposits, and requires deposit/time limits.

Massachusetts S 302 (passed committee)

Raises taxes, bans in-play and prop bets, restricts advertising, imposes affordability checks, and mandates data sharing for research.

New York A7962 (in committee)

Imposes deposit and wagering caps, bans credit cards, and restricts advertising and promotions.

You can find more details and analysis of each of these bills from .

Offshore and Illicit Gambling Enforcement

The third front, illicit access, is moving more unevenly but in a clear direction.

Last August, all 50 state attorneys general urged the DOJ to crack down on offshore gambling, calling it a “rampant” and growing threat. They specifically asked DOJ to seize domains and assets; pursue injunctions; and work with payment processors to block transactions.

In the meantime, some states are targeting dual-currency sweepstakes apps that mimic casino gambling:

Minnesota HF 4410 would prohibit online sweepstakes games that use dual-currency systems and simulate casino gambling. The legislation followed AG enforcement against illegal gambling sites, including both offshore operators and sweepstakes platforms.

Maryland HB 1140 would prohibit operating, promoting, or supporting online sweepstakes games and would require the state to deny or revoke licenses tied to that activity.

Takes on Gambling in Brokerage Apps

Reining in the Chaos

Federal courts, Congress, state legislatures, and attorneys general are all addressing the chaotic proliferation of online gambling. The Meta/YouTube verdict challenges the addictive design of sportsbook products; Congress is moving to close the prediction-market loophole; and states are tightening rules on both legal operators and gray-market alternatives.

A growing policy consensus treats online gambling less like a neutral entertainment product and more like a high-risk, behavior-shaping system that requires guardrails.

Stay tuned: we’ll continue tracking developments in policy, enforcement, and litigation as they happen.

Yesterday, we released results from our poll with Ipsos on prediction markets. A few takeaways:

• Americans don’t buy the rebrand: Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour took pains in a recent interview to stress the distinction between prediction markets and gambling. Americans don’t buy it; 61% of respondents view prediction markets as closer to gambling than investing, while just 1 in 10 view it as closer to investing.

• Public sentiment is negative: Fewer than 1 in 20 Americans say prediction markets are good for society, with 38% saying they are bad, and 34% saying they are neither good nor bad.

• Young men are early adopters: 1 in 4 young men have used at least one sports betting, prediction market, or other gambling platform in the last six months.

If prediction markets are new to you, Sam Schneider offers a clear and entertaining overview.

The Feed

Online betting is reshaping who seeks gambling treatment

Addiction psychiatrist Timothy Fong, co-director of UCLA's Gambling Studies Program, tells Nautilus that the rise of online betting is changing the face of gambling addiction: treatment seekers are getting younger, and women's gambling appears to be rising even as help-seeking among women stays low. He also walks through biological, psychological, and social treatment options.

From our DMs:

Self-regulation tools don’t work if users can turn them off

A study of 24,453 Australian online sports bettors — tracking every wager over a full year — finds that bettors are 7–8 percentage points more likely to bet after either a win or a loss. After wins, they raise their stakes by 41%; after losses, they shift toward longer odds. The average bettor loses AUD 2,561 per year.

They also find that only 13% of bettors ever use a safe-gambling tool, and do so inconsistently, activating after losing streaks and then abandoning after winning streaks. The only tools that actually change behavior are the ones the user can’t override. The finding gives reason to be measured about the proliferation of voluntary self-control apps across adjacent domains, from porn to gaming to screen time.

Gen Z turning to gambling and high-risk investments to catch up

A Northwestern Mutual survey finds nearly a third of Gen Z Americans are invested in or considering crypto (32%) and sports betting (32%). Among those participating or considering it, 73% say they feel financially behind and see high risk as a faster path to their goals — a figure that rises to 80% specifically among Gen Z.

We often focus on the similarities between sports betting, porn, and other digital technologies—addictive design, for instance. But there are important differences. Sports betting and crypto are often understood as pathways to financial advancement; for porn or problematic gaming, that narrative makes less sense.

What else we’re reading

• When Teenagers Are Banned From Public Life - HopeLab

• Situating problematic gaming and psychotic-like experiences in the adolescent landscape of affordances: A cohort study - Paquin et al.

• Connectome-based predictive modelling of problematic gaming in youth from the ABCD study - Park et al.

• Connectome-based prediction of problematic use of social media in

  adolescents: Findings from the ABCD study - Park et al.

• The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all - Taylor Lorenz in The Guardian

• Joint statement of security and privacy scientists and researchers on Age Assurance - reported in Politico

• Generation AI: What Kids and Families Think About AI - Common Sense Media

• The Family Tech Cycle: Navigating Screens, Devices, and Social Media - Joan Ganz Cooney Center

• All wired up and nowhere to go - Halina Bennet in Slow Boring

Events & Funding Opportunities

• Common Sense Media Summit | San Francisco, CA | March 23-24

• Online Gambling and The Public Health Movement: An International Symposium | Boston, MA | April 24th, 2026.

• 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? Do you have an intuition about how pathways into problematic gambling may have changed over the past decade? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

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A New York bill targeting harmful chatbot design features—rather than focusing on downstream harms—may signal a new trend in tech regulation for minors.

Last month, a N.Y. bill aimed at restricting unsafe chatbot features for minors (S9051)—crafted by Sen. Kristen Gonzalez with the Attorney General’s office—moved out of the Senate Internet & Technology Committee.

Much of the existing and proposed legislation around chatbots is focused on preventing the most dramatic harms—for example, by requiring platforms to take measures that prevent encouragement of self-harm and the generation of sexually explicit material. This bill, by contrast, would bar chatbots displaying behaviors that simulate companionship when interacting with minors—like use of first-person pronouns, or suggesting to the user that it is human.

The idea, basically, is to move upstream. Rather than catalogue every downstream harm, target the design mechanics that enable attachment and dependency in the first place. Whether or not it passes, S9051 could be an important bellwether for that approach.

The Feed

A 50-state scorecard for gambling policy…

The Center for Addiction Science, Research, and Policy (CASPR) has released scorecards evaluating states’ gambling policies. They offer the most points for not allowing iCasino and sports gambling apps, followed by strong restrictions like mandatory loss limits.

… and a 50-state scorecard for policies around childhood in the digital age

The policy team at the Anxious Generation has introduced the Childhood Index, a 50-state ranking evaluating how well states are protecting children online and supporting offline childhood. The index grades states on policies like phone-free school rules, age-verification requirements, and gubernatorial leadership. Utah and New York lead the pack, earning the designation of national leaders.

New sexual behavior dataset

Writer and sex researcher Aella released results from her Big Kink Survey, a 970k-respondent self-report survey covering sexual preferences and experiences along with demographic variables. Alongside a data explorer tool, she’s also shared a subsample of the full dataset for download (with particularly sensitive responses redacted).

While she released a version re-weighted to better match population demographics, the dataset is still a convenience sample promoted through her own fairly niche audience—so the resulting bias likely isn’t entirely corrected by demographic controls.

That said, it’s a cool dataset worth exploring. For example, a 2020 paper by Aleksandar Štulhofer showed that non-consensual sexual behavior was predicted by callousness, but not past porn use. And with Aella’s much-larger sample, we can at least do the simplest non-causal check and see they’re positively correlated in her sample.

(Of course, this doesn’t imply causality, and it doesn’t incorporate porn use as a variable. That’d be a natural next step.)

Pew survey finds strong race and class angles to teen AI-use

A recent Pew survey finds that Black teens are about twice as likely as white teens to say they’ve used AI chatbots for emotional support/advice (21% vs. 8%), and Black parents are more comfortable with their children doing so (27% OK with emotional support vs 17% of White parents). This may reflect class differences: 30% of parents making below $30k report being okay with emotional support use, versus 18% of parents making >$75k.

Differing use rates could be a product of unequal access to emotional support, but it might also simply reflect different attitudes towards AI: Black teens are significantly more likely to be extremely or very confident using chatbots (37% vs. 23% of White teens), for instance.

Black and Hispanic adults are also especially likely to engage in sports betting, compared to white adults.

Surprising feelings about sports gambling

Two findings jumped out from a recent Sacred Heart University poll examining perceptions of sports gambling.

First, 53% of respondents affirmed that the sports gambling industry behaves completely or mostly responsibly, versus 31% who said the industry behaves somewhat or very irresponsibly. I’ll admit I’m surprised trust is this high, especially after recent high profile sports integrity scandals.

Second, when asked about preferred accessibility, respondents were roughly evenly divided between wanting sports betting more accessible (31%), less accessible (28%), and equally accessible (31%). Strikingly, the share who wanted sport betting less accessible (28%) was barely greater than the share who said sport betting should not be legal, period (27%). In this survey, at least, there is essentially no one who wants sports betting legal but more difficult to access.

An interview on violent porn and porn research

In an interview with Undark, psychologist Melissa de Roos discusses the proliferation of child sexual abuse material, links between violent porn and violent behavior, and the difficulty of researching porn. She touches on results from her recent paper showing that perceived realism mediates the relationship between violent porn and violent behavior:

Violent pornography, in and of itself, does not typically or necessarily lead to real-world sexual violence. You tend to need to have other ingredients present as well. Now, if you are watching something and you think, “Wow, that is insane, that is so not realistic,” you are going to be less likely to adopt that into your blueprint of how a relationship works or a sexual encounter works.

What else we’re reading

• Launch of AI Psychological Harms Research Coalition

• How strong is New York’s “illegal gambling” case against Valve’s loot boxes? - Ars Technica

• Getting Global Age Assurance Right: What We Got Wrong and What’s Changing - Discord

• We are all going to regret Kalshi - Dave Karpf

• FTC declines to enforce a kids privacy law for data collected to verify users’ ages - The Verge

• Age assurance as a spectrum: a risk-based approach from a European perspective - 5rights Foundation

• Former Top Trump Official Is Going After Prediction Markets - Wired

Events & Funding Opportunities

• *New* Online Gambling and The Public Health Movement: An International Symposium | Boston, MA | April 24th, 2026.

• Movember Request for Proposal - Esports and Gaming Mental Health Awareness Training | Closes March 6th, 2026.

• 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 role do you think culture and policy should play in managing vice? 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.

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• Shifting the focus from “how much screentime” to “what’s on the screen?”

• How to show interest, not fear, in your boys’ digital experiences.

• The core needs boys seek online: achievement, curiosity, escape, community, and identity.

• How to build competing interests offline that meet those same core human needs: e.g. sports, museums, planning trips, clubs.

• Online friends and communities are genuine support systems, often underrated, and sometimes even lifelines.

• Why structure matters more than bans or time limits: Using shared family spaces (e.g., computers in one room) and norms like “headphones are earned.”

• How to make parenting less tedious and more joyful.

Jim and Kruti offer more wisdom and practical tips throughout our 30-minute discussion. Here’s a 5-minute clip:

What did you think of the conversation, and what advice would you share?

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The American Enterprise Institute hosted a panel, Male Vice in an Internet Age, featuring our president Richard Reeves in conversation with Charles Fain Lehman and Daniel Cox (watch here). Their most interesting disagreement was about the role of policy and culture. Lehman’s view—which you might call “policy-first”—was channelled by Ross Douthat in a NYT piece that ran the next day:

In any society, politics is an arena for debates about the good life. The way the government taxes and spends and bans and regulates has a powerful effect on the behavior of its citizens, and what the law allows or forbids has some effect — not decisive, but inevitably influential — on what ordinary people think and do.

Richard Reeves was more wary about the role of the state versus the importance of agency and culture:

if we can kind of get to a place where we’re seeing heavy-handed law at least as the last resort rather than the first, that will lead to a better culture… I worry that if we end up reaching too quickly for prohibit prohibition, that will undermine the very character traits that we need to be able to live without it. (53:50)

Still, the tension between policy and culture shadows a wide area of agreement. Lehman, I suspect, agrees with Reeves that “the role of regulation is to add friction, [to] make it harder for [use] to become problematic use.”

The Feed

Does proximity to vice mean support for restrictions?

Eitan Hersh and Lucia Morissa-Corsetti put out a working paper (with accompanying Substack) on the relationship between exposure to vices and support for restrictions.

Across the board, they find that more frequent use is associated with more permissive attitudes towards regulation—even after controlling for demographic variables. The study also examines the attitudes of those who have a parent, child, partner, etc. who is a heavy user.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that becoming a frequent user causes more lenient attitudes. We asked Eitan to speculate on the mechanism at play.

From our DMs:

This is one of our favorite replies so far—Eitan is entirely right: more research is needed.

Public opinion and technical guidance on age assurance tech

Age verification is spreading rapidly: most recently, Discord announced that it will required an ID or face scan for access beginning in March. A Common Sense Media report finds mixed feelings about the policy. A wide majority favor requiring age verification for pornographic websites (84%) and gambling services (80%). But around the same share say they are very or somewhat concerned about children finding ways around age verification (80%) and about their children’s age data being sold or shared without their consent (86%).

Getting to the nuts and bolts, the Knight-Georgetown Institute released a report on what age assurance architectures look like in practice. A central insight of the report is that there’s no singular use case for age assurance. Some approaches are better for safer default settings (e.g., restricting personalized feeds), while others are better suited for full blocking (e.g., pornographic content). Adults want verification, and they want efficacy and privacy. But it’s much less clear where they would land on the concrete tradeoffs across different architectures.

On attachment hacking

Tristan Harris interviews Zak Stein on how technologies like AI companions can hijack our attachment system. One of my takeaways is that hijacking mechanisms (whether targeted at attachment or attention) can go both ways. If we have a grasp of the design features by which AI companions capture our need for attachment, we can design technology with those mechanisms in mind:

If it feels like you can have a more engaging conversation with this machine than with your teacher, either the machine is way too fancy or your teacher’s not trained well, but it should be the case that the machine should make it [so that you say], “Wow, I want to talk about that with my teacher.” So don’t do the deep anthropomorphization.

What else we’re reading

• CFTC chief sides with prediction markets over state regulators in a legal battle with big implications - NBC News

• Not your dad’s old Playboy magazine: How AI is blurring the boundaries of sex, intimacy and emotional connection - Movember

• So we’re betting on everything now? - Good Work

• Super Bet Sunday - Bill Maher

• Who Calls 1-800-GAMBLER? Around Big Sports Events, It’s Often Young Men. - NYT

• The Football YouTubers Who Are Therapists for Troubled Fans - NYMag

• Deepfake Pornography is Resilient to Regulatory and Platform Shocks - Cuevas et al.

• TikTok’s infinite scroll is too addictive, say EU regulators - The Verge

• Gambling Addiction Research to See Federal Funding for First Time - Barron’s

• Instagram Chief Says Social Media Is Not ‘Clinically Addictive’ in Landmark Trial - NYT

Events & Funding Opportunities

• *New* Movember Request for Proposal - Esports and Gaming Mental Health Awareness Training | Closes March 6th, 2026.

• 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 role do you think culture and policy should play in managing vice? 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.

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After reading Common Sense Media’s new report on gambling among boys aged 11-17—more on this soon—we reached out to some teachers to ask how gambling is showing up in their schools.

One teacher said students estimated that 70% of other senior boys place at least one bet per week, and mentioned one student who had bet 13k on college basketball this season. Another teacher described a high school junior whose parents are working with the school because he can’t stop gambling.

These anecdotes got me thinking about an anecdote from Harry Levant during a recent webinar on sports betting reforms by CASPR.

During a school presentation, Levant showed a DraftKings ad featuring Cam Wilder. Most of the 11th and 12th-graders didn’t know who he was, but the fifth and sixth-graders erupted when Cam Wilder’s picture went on the screen. Even if gambling starts to show up in high school, the groundwork is laid even earlier.

What’s next for sports betting in 2026? We’ll be hosting a webinar tomorrow (Feb. 5th) at 1 p.m. ET, with Brianne Doura-Schawohl (Campaign for Fairer Gambling), (Eilers & Krejcik Gaming), and (Straight to the Point Consulting). You can register here.

The Feed

Findings

Almost half of 17-year-old boys have gambled in the past year

Common Sense Media’s new report finds that 36% of boys age 11-17 have gambled in the past year, with the highest among 17-year-olds (49%). Of those who gamble, the majority (59%) report that gambling-related content “just started showing up” in their feeds—suggesting that algorithms are driving discovery.

Porn “onset” research may be measuring the wrong thing

When does porn use begin? Researchers often use “age of first exposure” as if it were equivalent to “age began regularly using porn”. A recent paper by AIBM fellow Bailey Way shows why this can be misleading. Grouping users by age of first exposure and age of regular use, the study finds three profiles. Early engagers (67%) and late engagers (25%) both saw porn at around the same age (~14), but diverged sharply on when they became regular users (~18 vs. ~39).

A smaller, third group (7%) uses porn the least, are the most religious, and report more distress about porn usage than later engagers—consistent with moral incongruence mechanism (distress about use despite relatively low use).

Policy & News

Senate hearing on impact of screen time on kids

The Senate Commerce Committee convened researchers last month for a hearing on tech and mental health among youth. The committee was unusually united; after Democratic senator Ben Ray Luján urged congress to subpoena social media CEOs over their “damaging” products, Chair Ted Cruz responded that Luján was “preaching to the choir.” Cruz is a co-sponsor, along with Sen. Brian Schatz, of the Kids Off Social Media Act, which would restrict social media platforms for users age 13-and-under, and restrict addictive content for users under 17.

Addictive social media design on trial in K.G.M. case

Addictive social media design is now being tested in court. The plaintiff, identified as K.G.M., is suing over claims that features like recommendation algorithms, autoplay, infinite scroll, and notifications aren’t neutral “speech,” which would be protected by Section 230, but rather product mechanisms that drive compulsive use and worsen mental-health outcomes. Section 230 has long shielded platforms from liability for user-generated content. This case argues that shield shouldn't extend to the product features that determine how content reaches users.

If you’re interested in better understanding the case, we found the Bloomberg Law Podcast’s episode especially helpful.

Meta halts use of AI characters for teens

In a January 23rd blog post, Meta announced that they will no longer allow teens to access AI characters as they build “a new version of AI characters, to give people an even better experience.” The move follows growing concern about AI companion apps and their effects on young users, particularly around emotional dependency and social displacement. Meta did not offer an explanation for the sudden reversal, however. Teens will still be able to use Meta’s AI assistant.

Takes

Reflections on Taming Big Tech

The Niskanen Center published four essays on why Big Tech has proven so difficult to tame, and how a political movement could rise to the challenge. Each draws on historical comparisons to past social movements and technological upheaval. What’s most interesting, though, is where those analogies might fall apart.

Christopher Allbritton describes a “flywheel” effect, where companies grow by offering something genuinely valuable to users, before exploiting users for profit, then bankrolling the next company that users jump to. He worries we’re not equipped to address the modern version:

But what if the flywheel’s velocity has changed the math? Maybe the cycle now spins fast enough to outrun patient preparation. Maybe the platforms now so thoroughly control the online equivalents of union halls, where organizing might happen, that we can never quite prepare the ground.

If platforms control the very spaces where organizing against them would happen, how do you build a counter-movement?

Adam Garfinkle argues that digital addiction is less dramatic but more insidious than traditional vices:

for any practical purpose, all the elements of cyberaddictions are packed into an individual’s headspace, making them more insidious than conventional addictions even as they tend to be both less dramatic, less unhealthy in a manifest bodily sense, and — again — much less socially anomalous.

A new VICE documentary takes on sports betting

In their new documentary, Out of Bounds: The Sports Betting Boom, VICE examines sports betting’s rise over the last decade. Some of our highlights:

• 0:47:34: A particularly poignant moment from one of the three ASU students at the center of the documentary.

• 0:54:48: on how sports betting companies rely on big losers as from a very small number of consumers.

• 1:22:12: on sports betting as a potential stepping stone to online casinos.

What else we’re reading

• How to Bet on (Literally) Anything - New York Times

• The sole federal regulator over prediction markets says it’s easing off - Business Insider

• FanDuel Introduces “Play with a Plan:” A Research-Based Approach to Responsible Gaming - FanDuel

• The App stores should remove online gambling apps - Recursive Adaptation

• Which Young Men Are “All In” On Crypto? - Young Men Research Initiative

• Pornhub Will Block New UK Users Starting Next Week to Protest ‘Flawed’ ID Law - WIRED

• Kalshi in court over 19 federal lawsuits. What's the future of prediction markets? - NPR

Events & Funding Opportunities

• *New* Friendship in the Screen Age: What is it, and How is it Changing? | February 12, 2026 | Online

• 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? Do you have a take on how to approach regulating big tech? Let us know at bmonline@substack.com, or shoot me a message here.

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