🎧 Listen | 5:54 mins

Friends,

Since emerging from my lurker identity, I’ve been dreaming of starting a podcast. I adore the medium of audio. At the risk of sounding much older than I actually am, I grew up listening to George Burns and Gracie Allen.1 In high school, I volunteered at Alabama Public Radio. As a young adult, I crushed on Ira Glass.

There’s a certain intimacy to audio. Having someone’s voice in your ears while going about your day integrates them into your routine in a way that’s not possible when you have to stop to watch something. And sometimes, visuals can distract you from listening to a speaker’s actual words. From hearing the hesitation or energy in their voice.

But audio isn’t just about nostalgia and romance. It’s a critical part of the information landscape — one that doesn't get nearly enough attention.

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Audio endures because it fits into the rhythms of everyday life. If you’re commuting, cleaning, getting ready in the morning, going for a run, cooking, or doing a night-time feeding, audio can accompany you in all of that. And even as digital technologies continue to expand, radio in particular remains critical to the ecosystem because a quarter of the world is still not online – a gap that exists in the United States and Europe as well.

For those with digital access, podcasts’ role in shaping public opinion and politics has become impossible to ignore. In the United States, The Joe Rogan Experience – widely credited with influencing the 2024 Presidential election – has dominated Spotify’s podcast rankings for the last six years, and now tops Apple and YouTube charts as well.

Though audio is broadly seen as effective for engaging disaffected and vulnerable audiences, it faces relatively little scrutiny. And it remains underused as a public information tool.

I’ve seen this play out in my own work. In the push to go digital, institutions running public service campaigns tend to focus on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or even the dreaded chatbot. And when individual experts begin to experiment with making content, many gravitate naturally toward writing on platforms like Substack or Medium. Despite its endurance and influence around the world, audio often falls through the cracks in conversations about the digital ecosystem.

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That’s why I’ve been so eager to experiment with it myself – and why I knew I could only do it with the brilliant .

Michelle and I have been friends and colleagues for over seven years. Like many adult friendships, we met through work. I had just secured the information ecosystem pilot at Meta, when I connected with the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), where Michelle was serving as Executive Director.

What started as a partnership around user education evolved into years of collaboration that included producing new research and doing international advocacy. In Australia and New Zealand, Michelle and I met with researchers and government officials about their upcoming elections, media literacy, and public trust.

What I love about spending time with Michelle is that we bring very different experiences to the table. She has spent 25 years in media and education; I’ve spent 15 years in tech and policy. But we share the same curiosity about how media and technology shape people and societies. And though we’re both in different roles now, our commitment to helping people develop more intentional relationships with media, technology, and information has only grown.

We don’t always agree, but every conversation with Michelle teaches me something new. That’s what Did You See? is about.

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In each episode, Michelle and I use specific media moments – from news to entertainment – as starting points to dig deeper into their connections to culture, technology, politics, and the way we understand the world.

My work with Feed for Thought is dedicated to exploring the future of expertise, institutions, and trust. But media shapes far more than professional life or public discourse. It affects daily life: what we pay attention to, what feels true, and how we relate to one another.

That’s the humanity that institutions and the experts within them are meant to serve. We’re all just people living in this world together.

With so many forces colliding at once, our media landscape can feel overwhelming. Michelle and I wanted to create a space to slow down and process it together. I hope you’ll join us.

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Listen to our first episode: Did you see that Australia banned social media for kids?

We talk about how a lot of Australian teens are still able to access platforms, whether the policy is working, and whether bans are the right response to the teen mental health crisis. We also discuss the new novel, Yesteryear, and the Met Gala.

You can follow Did You See? with Jena and Michelle on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I’ll also post episodes here on Feed for Thought.

And as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and suggestions for the media moments you’re processing right now. Hit reply to this email; I read every note.

See you out there,

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Read our writing about social media and teen mental health

• Michelle Ciulla Lipkin’s response to The Anxious Generation, NAMLE newsletter, 2024.

• Is the online child safety debate for young people, or for adults?, Feed for Thought, 2026.

Check out our recs:

• Is social media bad for kids’ mental health?, Aspen Ideas Festival, 2023.

• Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World by Devorah Heitner, 2023.

Want to learn more?

• Anxious Generation Movement

• Health advisory on social media use in adolescence, American Psychological Advisory, 2023.

• Social Media Minimum Age: Compliance Update, Australia eSafety Commissioner, March 2026.

• Social Media and Youth Mental Health, Office of the Surgeon General (US Department of Health and Human Services), 2023.

• The great rewiring: Is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?, Nature, 2024.

• We’re not the anxious generation by Maximilian Milovidov, 2025.

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About Did You See? with Jena and Michelle

Did you see that? Whether it’s in the news or pop culture, in print or online, we are living in a media overload. It’s a lot to process!

Did You See? is for anyone looking for space to pause and work through the media moments shaping how we see and understand the world.

Michelle Ciulla Lipkin spent 25+ years in media and education — as a media literacy educator, advocate, and CUNY lecturer.

Jena Wuu spent 15+ years in tech and policy — building Uber in Europe and founding Meta’s global information ecosystem program.

Two friends, two different perspectives on the same media landscape, and a shared belief that there’s always something more to the story. ◾

This essay first appeared in the April 2026 newsletter of the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) (full transparency: I’m a proud Board member). NAMLE is the largest membership organization dedicated to media literacy education in the United States, and reaches thousands of K-12 educators across the country. If you want to support the teachers helping young people navigate an uncertain world, consider giving a donation.

🎧 Listen | 5:18 mins

Just look it up.

It feels like this is now the default answer for every question these days. Even small moments of curiosity get truncated by the ability to just look it up.

Unfamiliar with something on the menu at dinner? Let’s not ask our server who’s trained to talk about food. Quick, google it before they come back!

Noticed an interesting flower on this morning’s walk? Let’s send a pic to ChatGPT. We must know what it is right now!

I jest – mostly. There is, of course, a certain power and something magical about having the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. But how will our ability to learn on demand change the way we think? The way we ask questions? Our willingness to sit in our own wonder?

Anyone who has taught knows the feeling of looking out at a silent classroom. And anyone who has been a student knows the fear of raising your hand. Asking questions has always been a fraught experience; it exposes yourself as someone who doesn’t know something that others already do.

Now that I’m at an age where younger people come to me for advice, I’m realizing how much of my own life has been enriched by my comfort with not knowing things. Not willful ignorance, of course. But there is a certain resilience that can only come with going through the process of learning, and being okay with looking a little lost along the way.

For example, I was never the best math student. But I didn’t have to fear math tests because my teachers credited showing your work as much as getting the right answer. The act of trying – of communicating your thinking in your long division or geometry proof – was what mattered most.

I’ve taken that philosophy to places far beyond the classroom. After college, I moved abroad and spent time in places where I don’t speak the local language. Could I whip out my phone to translate simple orders at the bakery? Sure. But it’s much more rewarding (and often faster) to find commonalities with people – like the universal language of pointing and miming – rather than focusing on how to overcome my limitations.

It’s a mindset that does more than open you up to unexpected moments of laughter over a baguette. It also builds your confidence and resilience in moments of uncertainty.

Here’s the tension though. Young people are entering a work culture that rewards algorithmic thinking above almost everything else. Employers’ fervor to incorporate AI in as many workflows as possible is creating a standard that doing more is the same as doing better. And in this job market – especially for young people competing with machines for entry-level work – digital fluency is no longer a special skill on your resume but a basic necessity.

So the pressure is on. To know things faster. To communicate with certainty. Because that’s how the LLMs do it.

But being comfortable in curiosity and rushing to know things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Because in our new world, asking questions is a core technical skill. There may be no bad questions, but when using AI there are definitely better and worse ways to formulate one.

And there are bad answers, presented as complete. AI makes answers cheap and instant, so our role as humans is to interrogate what it gives us. We need to know where there’s context that the AI can’t be aware of. Understand where there are outliers and exceptions. And make decisions on where and how to apply the outputs AI offers us.

Technology can only replace human judgment if we allow it to. Those who will thrive are the ones who use it as a tool – not a crutch.

As is so often the case, teachers are on the front lines of helping young people navigate all of this. Nobody knows what the future will look like. And it’s no small task to prepare students for a world that rewards certainty while offering none.

That’s why it’s such an honor to serve on the NAMLE Board. This community has always understood that teaching students to think is different from just teaching them to know. And that distinction has never mattered more.

Because even if the world runs on 1s and 0s, life doesn’t. And that’s one of its best features. ◾

🎧 Listen | 7:34 mins

Last week, Reese Witherspoon called on women to learn about AI. The thing I’ve learned about technology, she said, is that if you don’t get a little bit of understanding at the beginning, it just speeds past you.

The reaction has been strong and mixed – especially from the entertainment industry, which is going through its own tech-driven upheaval. There are many legitimate questions about how AI impacts actors, writers, production crews, and creative originality as a whole. And there’s skepticism about whether Reese, a savvy businesswoman and longtime champion of women authors, has some financial interest involved. As many point out, she’s jumped on tech trends before, like NFTs and cryptocurrency. (Reese has since said that she isn’t being paid to talk about this).

Those in the No AI camp have good reasons to be there: AI (and its extra-controversial cousin, GenAI) raise legitimate concerns about ethics, environmental impact, critical thinking, and the concentration of power among the (mostly) men building it.

All of this is true.

But the point Reese and others (hi, Sandra Bullock) are raising isn’t about whether AI is good or bad. Their point is: it’s here.

But is it really here to stay? Some argue that AI doesn’t have to be inevitable. And plenty of previous tech hype hasn’t stuck around.

@goodnoticingspod @goodnoticingspod ♬ original sound - Good Noticings

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I agree that inevitability was a talking point before AI was even real, and that there are significant financial incentives at play.

But even constructed momentum can take a life of its own. AI is now embedded in hiring systems, health platforms, government services, and the information environments shaping public knowledge. At some point, the question becomes less about whether it should exist. It's about how you navigate a world that already has it — whether or not you choose to use it yourself.

AI isn’t just technical. It reflects and magnifies the structural gaps that already exist in the real world.

That’s why AI is a women’s issue.

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According to the UN, women’s jobs are three times more likely than men’s to be replaced by AI. This largely stems from how AI is being deployed to automate operational and administrative roles often held by women.

But AI’s impact goes beyond just task replacement.

It’s also changing how work itself is structured: how organizations allocate labor, evaluate performance, and decide which human skills to invest in. Across sectors, employers are already surveilling workers in the name of AI — and using it to justify mass layoffs.

These shifts don’t happen in a vacuum. They’re being absorbed within structures that already disadvantage women through lower representation in leadership, unequal advancement opportunities, and disproportionate responsibility for work that is essential but undervalued. For non-White women, the existing work environment can be especially precarious.

In medicine, for example, women make up roughly half of medical students, yet around 40% leave full-time practice within six years of residency. That’s due to systemic failures like limited caregiving support, workplace harassment, and unfair pay.

In academia, women dominate non-tenure-track roles, but represent just 36% of full professors. Even within tenure-track positions, they carry a disproportionate share of service work – committees, mentorship, and community-building – on top of teaching and research.

And in government, women are better represented than in the private sector, but still face lower promotion rates than men. At senior levels, they also experience higher burnout and attrition.

While we can’t fully predict how AI will reshape work, we do know that women have less structural buffer to absorb these shifts. They are overrepresented in roles that are vulnerable to automation and underrepresented in the leadership positions that decide how to use AI.

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But AI isn’t just changing how women work. It’s also showing up in how they live — often filling gaps that institutions have long failed to address.

One of the clearest examples is women’s health – historically one of the most underfunded and underserved areas of medicine. AI is now driving a wave of new products focused on issues like fertility, endometriosis, breast and cervical cancer detection, and menopause.

And it’s not just tech bros building these products. AI coding is making it easier for those closer to these problems — such as former care providers — to create tools themselves. In doing so, experts aren’t just adopting technology; they’re changing what the tech sector looks like.

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If we want to learn from the past, we need to recognize that technology has long filled gaps left by institutions.

Social media grew in part because it helped women and other marginalized groups connect and find information in ways that mainstream channels didn’t.

Digital platforms are undeniably women’s spaces. 84% of all social media creators are women. And it might surprise you that Reddit – an erstwhile nerd haven – is now one of the fastest growing platforms for women.

Like much of the media made by and for women, online content is often dismissed as trivial or unserious. As I’ve written about before, that’s a mistake we can’t afford to make again. Digital platforms are central to how people share knowledge, find information, and decide whom to trust.

That matters more than ever because AI systems are being built on top of them. Reddit is increasingly cited in AI systems, and has formal content partnerships with both OpenAI and Google. LinkedIn and YouTube are also frequent sources for AI.

@feed_for_thought#ChatGPT is already using #socialmedia as a source of truth. #Reddit is the leader. 🔗 https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/chatgpt-reddit-youtube-citations

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And in many cases, AI prioritizes information based solely on its perceived usefulness – not on the creator’s credentials. That changes the calculus for any expert wanting to shape how their field is presented and understood by the public.

The information gaps created by the absence of experts online won’t resolve themselves in the AI age. They’ll compound.

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Let me be clear: being skeptical about AI does not mean that you don’t understand it. Many people who are closest to these systems are also its strongest critics.

But understanding something and choosing not to use it are different from being unaffected by it. In health, research, and public service, AI is already shaping workflows, decision-making, and how the people you serve find information.

And when things move this fast, it’s an ongoing process to keep pace with technology, and how it affects the people and issues you care about. So yes, learn with Reese. Or explore with me. Or with whomever talks about this in ways that resonate with you.

That you have so many options for exploring and debating AI – and so many voices to choose from – is itself a product of this transformation. ◾

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🎧 Listen | 4:01 mins

Friends,

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about technology and kids. You might have too, after the recent court rulings that held Meta and Google responsible for harming youth.

I have some experience with how the tech industry approaches child safety. I helped launch Uber’s first product for teens. At Meta, I developed digital literacy curricula for teachers. Recently, I worked with parenting creators to help with family discussions about tech.

Child safety is one of the hardest issues I’ve worked on. It’s emotional, and the stakes are high. While we know logically that no one can prevent every bad thing from happening, there’s also never enough you can do to keep kids safe.

Tech companies know this — and they also know that they’re not child safety experts. That’s why it’s common practice to work with organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, ConnectSafely, and Family Online Safety Institute, among others. These kinds of partnerships can include informing product design, developing learning resources, and hosting community events. I also worked regularly with law enforcement, privacy advocates, educators, and parents’ groups to try to get as many perspectives at the table as possible.

As I reflect on that time though, I’m realizing how often youth themselves are sidelined in these discussions. It’s because — at least in my experience — parents are the customers of kids’ products. They’re the ones paying for it and deciding whether to use it. It’s the same dynamic for policymakers: parents are the voting stakeholders, not their children.

That explains why so much focus on online child safety has centered on building features for parents. We call them parental controls — tools that let parents monitor their children’s online activities and set limits.

But if the goal is to actually improve things for youth, is that the right approach?

I recently revisited an excellent essay, We’re Not the Anxious Generation, by Columbia student Maximilian Milovidov. He argues that discussions about technology often overlook young people’s lived experiences. His generation is growing up through a pandemic, school shootings, climate anxiety, and eroding institutional trust. So the phone may be a mirror of a broken world, not the sole cause of it.

Milovidov asserts that young people aren’t passive victims, either. They’re artists, organizers, and coders. They use technology to build movements and find communities that their towns and schools can’t provide. During the pandemic, digital platforms were a lifeline for many of them — especially for queer and neurodivergent youth.

He challenges adults’ instinct to control teens’ behavior. Authoritarian approaches like bans may actually increase risk, he says, by pushing youth into underground spaces. Or silencing them if they go around rules to access something online, and then need help.

We’re not the anxious generation, he writes. We’re the ignored generation.

Milovidov suggests that adults engage with youth about these issues, instead of talking about them. Control doesn’t teach resilience — conversation does.

I’m certainly up for one. Are you?

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Below are other things I’ve been reading and thinking about this month.

Do you have a content piece to share or a favorite expert creator to highlight? Send them my way by commenting or hitting reply. I’d love to include them in the next issue!

See you out there,

News & Commentary

📝 The stark divide in the UAE and India war info systems

Rest of World | ~ 3 mins read

Indranil Ghosh, an Indian journalist in Abu Dhabi, describes the different information ecosystems in the United Arab Emirates and India upon the start of the war in Iran. Both countries use WhatsApp for messaging; both governments took measures to restrict misinformation. But Ghosh’s experiences vary widely between the two countries.

It’s a reminder that technology is just a tool, whose usefulness often relies on how humans use it.

📝 ChatGPT Health under-triaged half of medical emergencies in a new study

NBC News | ~ 4 mins read

A new study in Nature Medicine found that OpenAI’s health-focused chatbot under-triaged over half of medical emergencies. It often recommended a doctor’s appointment when patients needed the emergency room.

There’s no doubt that AI holds great promise for easing provider workloads and expanding access to care. But being able to pass medical exams is not the same thing as practicing medicine. Expertise is more than knowledge; it’s judgment shaped by context.

📝 AI exposes where learning was thin to begin with

Inside Higher Ed | ~ 5 mins read

Xinyao Yi, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, describes how AI is revealing longstanding weaknesses in teaching. She asks whether educators have focused too much on accuracy while underweighting students’ actual understanding.

Yi hasn't banned AI from her classroom, and shares how she now assesses reasoning along with correct answers.

📝 Cursive is back. But should students be learning the skill?

NPR | ~ 5 mins read

Sherisse Kenerson, a middle school teacher in Virginia, started an after-school cursive club when she realized her students couldn’t read her handwriting on the board. Cursive was omitted from the Common Core standards in 2010, and some call it a waste of time and effort since print and tech are easily available.

But the kids don’t care about that (and neither do I). They just like it. One student feels proud to be the only person in her class who can read the Declaration of Independence, which I find lovely.

Even in a digital age, kids still appreciate pencils. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.

📝 A UC professor won criminology’s highest honor. Americans still don’t believe her research.

San Francisco Chronicle | ~ 7 mins read

UC Irvine Professor Charis Kubrin is receiving her field’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize for two decades of research showing that immigration does not increase crime. Yet, 57% of Americans believe the opposite, which has made it easier politically for the US government to enforce anti-immigration policies.

Kubrin aims to get her research to policymakers, and hopes it won’t languish in journals. I hope not too. But research alone doesn’t translate into public belief, and policymaking is based as much on politics as it is on evidence.

If you don’t have a San Francisco Chronicle subscription, you can read more about Kubrin’s honor and work here.

🎥 Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere

Netflix (trailer) | 1:31:20 watch

British documentarian Louis Theroux has built his filmography around exploring subversive cultures. So it’s not surprising for him to dig into the world of manosphere creators, who promote extreme views of masculinity and gender roles — mostly to vulnerable young men.

The film reinforces that these creators are more businessmen than ideologues. It’s a world where everything is a transaction, and everyone leverages each other to their own benefit. Even the ethics of Theroux’s documentary itself comes into question in this regard.

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Experts of the month

✍️ Cutaway Notes | Public Health Matters

In What If We Treated Femicide the Way We Treat Heart Disease?, Cutaway Notes argues that femicide is a preventable public health crisis. Viewing it as a crime often leads to late intervention. However, seeing it as a health issue allows for screening, education, and early warning tools.

What stayed with me is how straightforward implementation could actually be. A standardized screening question at annual checkups. A high school health unit. The Danger Assessment Tool in a pharmacy. The infrastructure exists, but we often choose not to use it.

Also, check out my interview with Cutaway Notes about her experience writing Public Health Matters.

✍️ Joanne Schneider Demeireles | A little woo

Joanne Schneider Demeireles is a healthcare executive and former women’s health founder who writes about why smart patients are questioning medicine, and the tension between institutional authority and lived experience. She’s lived both sides — building health systems and being failed by it as a patient.

In The Problem with ‘Trust the Science,’ she argues that the phrase has become shorthand for trust in institutions and policies, even as science inherently evolves. And when evidence gets presented as absolute, patients who ask questions or push back get viewed as difficult — rather than curious or engaged.

The better frame is trust the process: being honest about what’s settled versus recommended, and understanding patients’ individual thresholds for uncertainty.

📣 Eugene Healey | @eugbrandstrat (IG, TikTok) | Considered Chaos

Eugene Healey is a brand strategy consultant and educator who’s built a big following for his sharp analyses of society through a brand lens. Though his work focuses on the private sector, many of his insights apply to public service fields as well. After all, we all aim to build trust and inspire behavior — whether it’s making a purchase or considering a vaccine.

This video essay stands out to me in particular. It’s nothing new that media shapes people’s understanding of the world. What’s new is how the growing dissonance between people’s lived and presented realities is driving them to tap out completely.

@eugbrandstratThe mythologies that hold our reality together are collapsing. Today - a special collab with Jasmine Bina. Together, we go into the collapse of the mythologies that hold the West together, and the consequences for brands building upon ontological beliefs that have ceased to exist. #brandstrategy #marketing #marketingstrategy #communicationsstrategy

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Happy place

In honor of March Madness, the American college basketball tournament that just concluded, I’d like to highlight Coach Jackie J. Jackie tells stories about women’s sports, and is known for the tongue-in-cheek series, Is she gay or does she just coach women’s basketball? Amid all the politicized talk about women's sports right now, Jackie is a true advocate and fan.

You can find Jackie on Instagram or TikTok.

@jcubedhaxI need her to motivate me like she did yesterday but just to go to the grocery store #womenssports #marchmadness #wbb

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🎧 Listen | 6:39 mins

Last week, the social media debate came back to the top of newsfeeds. Two US courts held Google and Meta responsible for harming youth. After Australia banned social media for people under 16, it was expected that more countries would follow suit with rulings and policy changes against tech companies.

I’ve been in this field long enough to stay calm through the tides and turns of tech discussions. These are important and hard questions, and it’s a good thing that people care.

What concerns me is how much expert commentary about social media uses the same kind of emotionally charged language that media literacy teaches us to be wary of. Scolding platforms and shaming users may sell books, but it oversimplifies the very complex issues at play.

Take the recent New York Times op-ed, There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate by Georgetown professor, Cal Newport. His argument is valid — digitization affects attention spans. We should be more intentional with our phone use.

But when Newport labels TikTok videos digital Doritos and writes bluntly, don’t use TikTok. Don’t use Instagram. Don’t use X, he’s missing the point. He focuses on individual behavior while glossing over the structural issues behind it.

If we’re comparing social media to ultraprocessed food, let’s follow it through. Because the reason people eat Twinkies and Pop-Tarts isn’t due to lack of willpower or knowledge, as Newport suggests. It’s that the world we live in gives them limited options. The same is true for how we consume information.

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First, there’s time. Convenience foods and packaged breakfasts didn’t arise because people were lazy or ignorant. In fact, it’s the opposite. They developed because of how the workday was restructured during the Industrial Revolution.

Short-form content serves a similar purpose. Many people work multiple jobs and pick up extra shifts to make ends meet. Outside of work, personal responsibilities and schedules keep getting busier. That leaves people with limited time and mental energy to process in-depth information. So in many ways, the rise of short-form content simply reflects modern realities.

Next, there’s availability. Just as food deserts deny communities healthy food options, information deserts leave people without relevant information. That’s how platforms got popular in the first place — they filled gaps that the mainstream left open.

LGBTQ+ youth find online communities that don’t exist in their physical environments. Women find validation and advice with health questions that traditional sources lack. Minority language speakers find any content at all in their own language. Until those needs are met in the real world, digital spaces will remain crucial.

Now, let’s talk about skills. We urge people to eat fresh food, but don’t teach them how to cook. The same goes for content consumption.

Like Newport, I’d love for people to read more long-form. A good starting point would be improving their ability to read. With over half of American adults reading below a sixth-grade level, it’s unproductive to frame their engagement with simpler content as a personal failure.

And as a communicator, I’d argue that short-form is its own discipline and intellectual exercise. In my previous life, I was trained to write research papers and policy briefs; flowy sentences were my jam. Now, I’m writing for broader audiences online, and it’s given me a whole new appreciation for brevity as a skill.

Finally, environmental factors matter. Our culture simply doesn’t support analog life anymore. We shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about using our phones when daily life revolves around them – they’re how we pay bills, call our families, and yes, read books.

You can see this both at work and at school. TL;DR became standard email etiquette because coworkers stopped reading long memos. Presentations replaced documents because visualizing your points works better in meetings. And while schools move to ban phones, nearly all of them give students devices like Chromebooks and iPads to do coursework on – without making digital or media literacy a standard part of teaching.

This is where much of the expert discourse on technology falls short. We focus on the behavior — what people are consuming, how often, and for how long — without fully accounting for the conditions that shape those behaviors in the first place.

When expert discourse ignores people’s realities, it reinforces a growing disconnect from the people it’s meant to serve.

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I understand why people are celebrating the court rulings against Meta and Google. Accountability matters, and platforms should be held to higher standards.

But we’re kidding ourselves if we think that’s enough to address the real issues young people face with body dysmorphia, loneliness, bullying, and anxiety. These aren’t just tech problems — they’re human ones. And I really don’t want to delegate the responsibility of solving some of humanity’s most complex issues to tech companies.

If courts and policymakers want to negotiate delaying access and changing product features, they have real momentum now.

In the meantime, let’s focus on our roles as experts, public servants, and educators to address the underlying dynamics. Here are some suggestions to start:

• Standardize digital and media literacy education for K-12 students. We can fund it by taxing the platforms.

• Include digital literacy in medical and graduate programs, so the next generation of experts can navigate how changing information flows impact their work and how they can use technology as a tool.

• Prioritize public engagement from institutions and experts. We can’t improve public knowledge by wishing people sought traditional sources. We need to meet them where they are.

• Elevate high-quality content online. Platforms are designed to reflect users’ engagement – but when only 10% of people like, comment, or share, they skew the signals for everyone else. Intentional lurking is how we change what these spaces reflect.

If you’re an expert, this is the work in front of you: not just sharing knowledge, but participating in how people build understanding about your field. And making intentional choices about how (and whether) you show up.

Holding tech accountable is essential, but it’s just part of the solution. It doesn’t absolve the rest of us. Because if we keep centering technology in solutions to human problems, we’re entrapping ourselves in it even more. ◾

🎧 Listen | 5:54 mins

The online misinformation problem is often framed as a failure of content moderation: if platforms just removed the bad stuff from people’s feeds, the information ecosystem could stabilize.

Here’s the problem with that: content moderation is a constant game of whack-a-mole. It’s important, but not enough by itself.

Even if it could be done perfectly, it relies on a big assumption: that enough credible information exists online, waiting to show up in people’s feeds. It doesn’t.

I spent years at Meta working to fill this gap with trustworthy content from primary sources. The goal was to lighten the load on overworked moderators and fact-checkers. From 2018 to 2024, I helped hundreds of public service organizations run information campaigns — including governments, UN agencies, universities, and NGOs. Most organizations were learning to use social media for the first time. We focused on critical moments when misinformation could spread: the COVID-19 pandemic, national elections, natural disasters, and the war in Ukraine.

The program worked. Together, we reached over two billion people worldwide. We helped users better identify potential falsehoods and increased their trust in expert information.

Unfortunately, the program ended when I left Meta in 2024.

◾

At first, I tried to recreate the program independently. But without major funding, it could not be replicated. So that path closed.

But the problem isn't going anywhere. If anything, it's getting worse. Trust in institutions continues to erode. At the same time, media overload is driving people toward smaller, more private communities — which can feel safer, but makes it harder for centralized sources to reach them. And of course, AI is about to change how people find and assess information in ways we don't fully understand yet.

So I decided to dig deeper.

I started talking to experts across fields that rarely intersect — like medicine, academia, government, and NGOs. I wanted to understand the human impact of today’s changing information landscape. Not just for the public at large, but for the experts themselves.

Through these conversations, I realized that the problem goes beyond content.

Expertise itself is in crisis.

A physician providing care that’s suddenly deemed illegal. A researcher watching her work lose funding and get misrepresented in the same news cycle. A public servant starting over after the agency where he built his dream career disappeared. A humanitarian trying to guide people digging through conflicting advice in chat groups.

These aren’t isolated events. They’re downstream effects of the same underlying shift: in an open and algorithmic environment, authority is no longer owned centrally by institutions, but earned continuously in dispersed spaces across the web.

This changes how people decide what to believe, value, and act on. And those choices have real world consequences: what gets funded, what policies get passed, and whose expertise gets taken seriously.

That’s a major cultural reset. Most experts are navigating it alone.

◾

The deeper challenge is that many experts don’t see public engagement as part of their role at all. That makes sense within institutions, where credibility stems from credentials, hierarchy, and peer review. In these settings, public engagement is often either reserved for those at the top of the food chain, or delegated to marketing and comms teams.

The problem is: for everyone else, that model is breaking down. Of course, platforms are marketing tools. But they have also become much more than that: they’re core information infrastructure.

Platforms have fundamentally changed the way people decide what — and who — is relevant to their lives. Personal familiarity and shared values matter as much for trust-building as institutional ties. And as AI flattens both knowledge and nuance, people are turning to messengers who offer lived experience and perspective.

None of that diminishes the value of earned expertise. It simply changes how it needs to show up. You can participate online without being an influencer — in fact, if you’re scrolling at all, you already are.

That’s what Feed for Thought is about.

◾

This project has been years in the making, but it’s also still very new. I don’t know where exactly it will go, but here’s what I hope to do:

I hope to name the dynamics you sense, but may not have words for.

Pull back the curtain on how tech products get built and regulated, and what’s coming next.

Have honest conversations about the line between traditional credibility and modern-day trust, and how professional identity is evolving.

And help you find clarity on what intentional participation looks like for you.

◾

The funny thing is: I find myself on a similar journey as you. Though I built a career helping others share knowledge online, I never did it myself under my own name. I always thought my expertise applied only within the institutions I worked in.

So here I am. An ex-lurker. Speaking without the filter of my employer, sharing what I know, and joining the conversation.

That feels like a good place to start. ◾

I discovered the public health newsletter Public Health Matters shortly after I started writing on Substack. I had been looking for writers with institutional experience who are finding new ways to make knowledge more accessible online.

Public Health Matters is written by a recent college graduate who goes by the handle Cutaway Notes. It’s a relatively new newsletter (like Feed for Thought), but I was immediately struck by its clarity of perspective and tone. Through storytelling, Cutaway Notes explores issues like perimenopause and intimate partner violence, framing them as critical public health issues. It’s the kind of work that’s needed, as public trust shifts from institutional authority to personal voices online.

We connected last week over video to talk about her experience writing publicly for the first time. Our conversation touched on imposter syndrome, institutional blind spots, and why public health research needs better storytellers.

◾

Jena: Hi! It’s so nice to meet you after reading your writing. I’m curious to hear more about your background. How did you get into public health?

Cutaway Notes: I graduated last April from University of Michigan with my Bachelor’s, and I majored in public health. I knew I wanted to have a health-adjacent major, but I also knew I didn’t want to go to medical school.

And then I was fortunate enough to do a two-year research project on reproductive health. We were looking at the reproductive landscape post-Roe, the political campaigning of the 2024 election, and how abortion existed in the post-Roe landscape according to differing state laws. And then we got published in a law review, which was a mixture of both worlds, law and public health.

So my focus became women’s health, specifically reproductive health. That is where I felt like, Oh my God, this is my passion. I really, really love this.

And now I am pivoting into law school. Because I had moved so much between both worlds, public health and law, I was really beginning to understand how my future career and role would land. And although I had done a ton of advocacy, research, and community work in public health, I felt that the next stop, getting a JD, would be the answer to the advocacy I wanted to be a part of.

At the core of my work was people, my interactions with them. And I felt like the way I could make a difference that was most aligned with me, and reaching my future clients, was a JD.

J: Congratulations on graduating! And on finding something you love. What made you want to start Public Health Matters?

CN: It really comes back to that reproductive health project I mentioned. That’s how I discovered Substack.

I was doing a lot of research around reproductive health policies. I started reading Abortion, Every Day by Jessica Valenti. That’s how I got introduced to Substack and where I got a lot of my research.

After we got published, we were supposed to pursue a spin-off project post-graduation. We were excited to explore projects around a possible short book or feature story.

However, we were stopped dead in our tracks when the political landscape flipped on its head. We were struggling to find funding, and there were just a lot of issues. We tried to find grant money in other ways, but it was just a bunch of waiting.

And then I was like, You know what? I’m not gonna wait anymore. I’m just gonna pick up and start writing.

J: Good for you! I empathize with the funding issues. It’s such a hard time right now, unfortunately. Did you have an idea of what you wanted the Substack to be when you started?

CN: At first it was supposed to be comedic, about personal stuff. I loved reading people’s personal Substacks and thought it was so much fun. Like Twitter but not toxic.

But when I started working, I saw a lot of institutional failure-esque topics that really angered me. I wrote a piece about perimenopause, and I’m writing now about femicide. I feel like all of my work and research have been focused on institutional failure. And that’s kind of my niche, which I discovered during my reproductive work, sitting at the intersection of law and public health.

J: Did you feel nervous about starting to write publicly?

CN: I literally debated the decision of writing for three months. I feel like I was waiting for something to happen, this perfect day to come for me to begin writing.

I wanted to do writing in my jobs, but it just wasn’t working. A lot of places don’t do writing like this. Their communications are more like, let’s do a poster, or let’s write about this holiday. They don’t write about actual public health issues.

Then when I tried to write for health magazines, they weren’t hiring. I reached out to professors for help, but I felt like so many things weren’t working. And that’s why I started ruminating again.

J: What were you ruminating about?

CN: A lot of imposter syndrome. Because I only have a Bachelor’s in Public Health. I noticed that a lot of writers were doctors or dietitians or nurse practitioners. And I thought, Wow. These people must know a lot more than me. What if I post something and they’re like, “What do you know?”

I had also spent so much time on Reddit, and I saw how defensive and hostile people could be there.

It was honestly just a lot of fear and a lot of talking myself out of it so that I could stay in my comfort zone instead of trying something new.

But then, after I tried to get writing jobs and the research funding went out the window, I was just like, I’m gonna try.

I can’t tell you how I actually plucked up the courage to start writing. But one day, I just did.

J: I think a lot of people – myself included – can relate to feeling imposter syndrome. Are there any specific goals you have for Public Health Matters?

CN: I have two goals, two dreams.

First, I always wanted to start a podcast. I feel so much more free when I talk. When I write, I edit and re-edit. I’m thinking so much about these issues anyway so when I write, it’s like I start overthinking.

But strangely, when I talk, it’s not like that. Like the conversation you and I are having now… I find this so much more fun than us typing.

J: I agree – this is fun! So there’s the podcast. Was there a second dream you wanted to share?

CN: Yes, the other one was, honestly, just to have a community to talk to other people. I like connecting with people. Especially now in a world where we’re shifting so much into AI, you don’t really know who wrote what.

It’s so fun to talk, like we are now, or in the comments. Because that’s when I know that people are reading my posts.

But I’m really struggling with Notes. I am having a hard time landing a reaction with them, haha.

J: Ugh, I can’t figure out Notes either. Some people are really good at it. So what is your writing process like?

CN: My first ever post that I wrote was the most raw one. It was my why post and I forced myself to write it because I like reading other people’s why.

With public health, I feel like there’s so many great people. So many great doctors, nurses, professors, so many great people in academia, and all the people who are actually engaging with the literature and working with it.

But there’s not enough people disseminating it. And I wanted a tangible way for people to engage with public health that wasn’t too gatekeepy or with too much medical jargon.

I want to be the middleman. Like: here’s this complicated thing. Let me talk to you about it in a very easy, conversational way. Let me tell you a story about it, and let’s have a discussion.

When it comes to how I choose topics, I focus on things that a lot of people don’t talk about.

For example, my piece about perimenopause was more personal, because I was close with someone who had an MPH and was a pharmacist, and even she had such an awful time getting her perimenopause diagnosed and properly addressed. And the more research I did, the more I realized that this was such an overlooked issue and rarely talked about.

Public Health Matters

If You’re Googling Perimenopause Symptoms, You’re Not Alone

In our lives as women, we seem to always be given ‘general’ guidelines around when things are supposed to happen…

Read more

3 months ago · Cutaway Notes

There’s a lot of information about perimenopause, but it’s so academic. The articles talk about things like the exact neurotransmitters that run through your body at a certain age, or hormonal gymnastics that are hard to understand without a background. And that’s all valuable. But being that middleman, by disseminating that information, I just want to say: Here’s why you feel like this. You’re not alone. You’re not crazy.

And I feel like it’s because I have a huge problem with people, especially women, apologizing for how they feel. It makes me so mad. Don’t apologize! This is normal.

As for what I write, I write about institutional failures. I write about things that make me angry, because I feel like that emotion shows in my writing.

I try to write about things that we don’t always perceive to be public health, but they should be. And I want to write thought provoking things, but in a way that makes sense to a regular person.

J: That passion does come through in your writing. How do you decide what to write about? How long does it take you to write?

CN: I have a list of ideas, and I organize everything in Notion. And then I go with what my gut is feeling at the time.

Let’s say this week, I could write about a number of different angles on femicide. I sit down and do more research. If I find myself in a rabbit hole of research for more than 30 minutes, I know I’ve hit the jackpot.

I like to start broad, and then narrow down. I’ll outline the angle, my hook. Then I’ll just do research and sit down for a chunk at a time to write. Two to three hours, maybe longer.

When I have a draft, I always skip a day. Come back, edit. And then shorten it down.

I never do my closing the first time I draft. So when I do my edit, that’s when I write my closing. And then I try to find a catchy title. That’s always the most difficult part – picking a title, picking a picture.

And then I transfer everything that lives on Notion onto Substack.

J: How do you carve out the time for research and writing?

CN: You know, it’s been hard. I work a job now and I juggle different things on the side. So sometimes it’s hard for me to justify sitting down and carving time to write. Because for me, the Substack is my passion project.

I’m writing for myself. No one’s looking over my shoulder for this. That’s also the difficulty of it, because I have to keep myself accountable and not talk myself out of writing.

I don’t know about you, but everyone around me is just obsessed with work. I know people who work two jobs, and sometimes they work a different job on the weekend. It’s just crazy. And then, when I tell people, Oh, I write for fun, they’re like, Oh, you don’t get paid for that? It’s wild for them to hear.

J: I get that. What do you think would make it easier for more young people to start writing and sharing their ideas publicly?

CN: I hope there can be a bridge for younger people to start writing. For me personally, I wish there was some kind of manual or guide to walk me through how to write and post on Substack. I instead found myself getting stuck in the loop of people who wanted to sell me their courses online by promising the fastest way possible of getting subscribers. I had a lot to figure out on my own, which really prolonged my posting process.

I think we need to cultivate more talent and brain power from young people and graduates from institutions. They are the people interacting with the work, disseminating it, engaging with it.

They are, in their own way, the experts in their own fields. ◾

Thank you to Cutaway Notes for sharing your experience with us! Subscribe to Public Health Matters for more storytelling about public health.

Over the past year, I’ve had many similar conversations with health providers, professors, and public servants about how digital platforms are changing their work.

Everyone agrees on the diagnosis: people now go online first for information. Anyone can shape public opinion about a field. Trust in institutions is falling, and that affects how experts do their jobs.

For doctors and nurses, it’s becoming harder to treat patients who increasingly disregard their providers’ advice.

For public servants, it’s becoming harder to secure funding for vital work.

And in some cases, these dynamics lead to political uncertainty that poses existential risk.

Part of the reason is that digital platforms haven’t just changed how people access information — they’ve changed how people decide whom to trust. Institutional credentials still matter. But they now compete with other credibility signals: accessibility, familiarity, and personal relatability.

And yet, when I ask experts whether they would participate online themselves — to help make their knowledge more accessible, familiar, and relatable — the conversation almost always takes a turn. Hesitation sets in.

◾

These dynamics aren’t new. Public trust has been moving from centralized authority to private individuals over the last two decades.

Companies have adapted by moving away from corporate messaging towards personal storytelling featuring founders and employees. Big brands like Starbucks and Ulta have taken it further by incentivizing staff to post about work on personal accounts. The idea is: if both employer and employee can benefit, why not do it together?

@bigpictureclubThe Pay-Less-Earn-More model: companies pay us a lower salary but we earn more from our own platforms #sheerluxe #futureofemployment #corporatejobs #creatoreconomy @SheerLuxe

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So far, it’s working. Business is now the only major institution that people still trust.

It’s understandable that government, academia, and healthcare take a more cautious approach to technology. Much of this work is publicly funded, involves sensitive data, or operates in highly-regulated spaces. And the tech sector’s track record doesn’t always inspire confidence. Caution is necessary and often built into institutional processes. Sometimes, skepticism even feels like a badge of honor.

But two things can be true: opting out can be an act of principle, and absence has consequences.

In today’s digital ecosystem, absence connotes silence. And silence isn’t neutral. In fact, 53% of people assume the worst of entities that stay silent on social issues.

For those who built their careers inside these institutions, the consequences are personal: the perceived value of expertise itself is eroding. More young people question whether higher education is worth it and many plan to never work for a traditional employer. This isn’t shocking in a world where institutional credentials don’t seem to impact your career trajectory.

@drjessicaknurickThis from the administration that brought you the “ENDING ILLEGAL DISCRIMINATION AND RESTORING MERIT-BASED OPPORTUNITY” executive order. 😒 Help stop the nomination for Casey Means for U.S. Surgeon General! Contact your senator, especially if they serve on the Senate HELP committee and make your opposition clear. 📞 Call: Dial the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to your senator. 📧 Email: Go to your senator’s website and use the contact form 🗣️ What to say: “I’m a constituent and I’m asking Senator ___ to oppose confirming a wellness entrepreneur who did not complete residency training as the next U.S. Surgeon General. This role requires medical credibility, scientific grounding, and real public health leadership.” If you live in Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor, chairs the HELP Committee and has significant influence over what happens next. Call his office and make your voice heard. For more info, please see my stories.

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◾

Some experts are stepping into this gap on their own. Doctors and nurses post health information to educate the public and counter false messaging. Academics write newsletters to share and refine ideas faster than the peer review process allows. Politicians make digital-first videos to humanize the political process.

Most do this without institutional support and sometimes face criticism from colleagues for even trying.

@rey_philosophyReplying to @Mark #feminism #leftist

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Among health, government, and academia, the medical field is likely the most advanced in this regard. Many medical programs offer communication training for provider-patient interactions. But when over half of Americans do their own health research online, providers may already be on the back foot by the time the patient comes in to clinic.

Digital literacy and social media training are still rare in medical school. In 2010, the Mayo Clinic launched its Center for Social Media and Social Media Health Network, which offered training and social media rotations for medical residents. They even live-streamed the Center director’s colonoscopy to raise awareness and help reduce fear. The program was ahead of its time, but it was sunset five years ago.

Government isn’t much further along. 62% of OECD member countries have social media guidelines for government agencies, but these focus on privacy and risk mitigation. Only 18% provide practical resources to help civil servants use digital platforms for citizen outreach.

With only 1% of social media users shaping public knowledge for the other 99%, there is real space online for expert voices. But whether experts feel comfortable participating often depends on the institutions they work for.

So what can institutions actually do?

◾

Let’s start with clear social media policies. Most organizations have policies governing their official accounts. What’s less common are guidelines for employees who want to build an independent presence online.

For experts already inclined towards caution, a lack of policy isn’t neutral. It effectively acts as an implicit prohibition. It’s human nature to avoid doing things you believe might jeopardize your job. Case in point: the policy at Columbia University School of Nursing highly discourages clinicians from providing medical advice on their social accounts. That’s enough to deter anyone from even debating the semantics of general health information versus medical advice.

Clear guidelines serve two purposes: they signal permission and they protect the institution.

From a legal and privacy perspective, the model exists — individual accounts can mirror guidelines for institutional accounts. For medical professionals, protecting against legal liability and ensuring patient privacy are key. For all sectors, individual accounts should be marked clearly, indicating that they reflect the person, not the institution. A code of conduct for online interactions should apply to both institutional and individual accounts.

Stanford University’s social media policy provides a solid starting point. But when it comes to staff’s individual accounts, there are more specific questions to consider. For example:

• Employer branding: How can an employee reference their employer’s name and logo online?

• Messaging alignment: How much can employees disagree with or speak beyond their employer’s official positions on topics?

• Political advocacy: Are there limits on discussing political issues or candidates — whether it’s related to their field or not?

• Brand partnerships: Do employees need to disclose or get employer approval for paid collaborations or endorsements?

• Facility and equipment use: Can staff create content on-site or use work devices?

• Post-employment: Should employees agree to non-disparagement if their employment ends?

Much of my career has involved developing governance frameworks like these. I know how complex it can be to get legal, compliance, privacy, comms, operations, and other stakeholders together to address these kinds of questions.

Every institution will have different risk thresholds. But every one can make a clear policy.

◾

But policy alone isn’t enough. You can’t inspire action with just a list of things to avoid. You also need to empower.

In practice, enabling expert participation requires three things: building real capacity, removing practical constraints, and normalizing new professional behavior.

Here are some initial building blocks:

Digital literacy training as a foundational skill

Most experts already have social media accounts, but hesitate to post. So it doesn’t make sense to start with content training. That’s like trying to teach someone how to dive before they’re comfortable swimming.

That’s why I start with digital literacy instead: helping experts understand how information flows online, how people decide whom to trust, and how they shape the information ecosystem — even without posting. These foundational skills are essential for all public interest experts, regardless of whether they ever create content.

Social media training for those who want to be more active

When an expert decides they want to engage more actively online, practical support can make all the difference in their enjoyment and success with it. That might include guidance on choosing platforms, or opportunities to practice in safe, judgment-free environments.

Different experts will have different goals; there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Some may build a personal website. Others might write essays for peers. Or they may choose to speak to a broader public through videos and podcasts.

Being a creator also carries responsibilities. Access to media literacy training helps experts be intentional about representation, transparent about sources, and build a public presence while protecting their privacy.

Time and space

Public engagement is legitimate professional work, and should be treated as such. One practical step is for employers to designate space on-site for writing or recording. Ideally, experts could carve out protected time for public communications as part of their work.

Social listening briefings

Institutions can provide regular updates to help their staff track public discourse about their field. Whether experts spend time online or not, they benefit from knowing how their field is being publicly discussed. No one can do their job effectively in a bubble.

Coalition-building and community

Part of normalizing new professional behavior is to make it a field-wide effort.

For example, when I led Meta’s COVID-19 response, we created a tech coalition that met weekly with the World Health Organization (WHO) to support its global information campaign. Meta and Google helped the WHO to create and distribute content. Tinder – yes, the dating app – provided translation support (after all, they are experts in local slang and nuance!).

In short, competitors found ways to collaborate for a common goal. This partnership made each organization more effective at the work it was already trying to do.

◾

Change won’t happen overnight. But step by step, university by university, clinic by clinic, institutions can help experts engage online sustainably.

Trust in institutions is fragile. Enabling experts to connect with the public isn’t about PR or fundraising. It’s a strategy for ensuring the long-term resilience of the fields experts serve.

If you work inside a medical, academic, or public service institution, I’d love to hear about your experiences. How does your employer encourage staff to discuss their work online? What’s working well? What do you want to see more of? ◾

Hi friends,

Two months into 2026, it’s already an unsettling year. One surreal moment for me has been watching American journalist Savannah Guthrie use Instagram to seek help after her mother’s disappearance.

Savannah has decades of experience in national TV news. She understands media — its reach, incentives, and power. So the Guthrie family’s choice to go public on Instagram was likely strategic. Still, seeing their posts while scrolling through my usual feed of cooking and dog videos felt intrusive. Like witnessing something deeply personal and painful in a space meant for casual viewing.

Bringing the public into a live investigation feels like a new inflection point in our relationship with tragedy. The true crime genre has long blurred the line between awareness and entertainment. But when events unfold in real time — when people use digital platforms not just to document but to ask for help — the boundary between witness and participant becomes less clear.

A similar dynamic emerged during the ICE enforcement surge in Minnesota this winter. Confrontations between federal agents and local citizens — including the killings of Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti, and others — led to widespread, on-the-ground footage. These videos did more than offer government accountability and counter-messaging. They invited public participation in protest, resilience, and collective grief.

@mr.madamadamSuch a powerful song at Sunday’s march with Singing Resistance.

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In our violent and unjust world, this pattern won’t fade anytime soon. Do you think we’ll become active, responsible witnesses — or numbed observers scrolling through?

Below are other things I’ve been reading and thinking about this month.

Do you have a content piece to share or a favorite expert creator to highlight? Send them my way by commenting or hitting reply. I’d love to include them in the next issue!

See you out there,

News & Commentary

🎧 Can we build a better social network?

Hard Fork | 40:48 listen

Longtime tech reporters Kevin Roose, Casey Newton, and PJ Vogt are building a social network in the fediverse, a decentralized web of platforms that can talk to each other. Imagine if your Instagram could follow someone on TikTok. They want to see if a new platform design can foster kinder interactions online.

It’s an interesting experiment. However, with less than 0.3% of social media users on the fediverse, I have to wonder: will civility come from product design or just a small, self-selected user base?

📝 The world is trying to log off US tech

Rest of World | ~6 min read

Rina Chandran discusses how global skepticism of American tech companies is driving demand for locally-made alternatives — from email to rideshare to social platforms.

This is a positive thing. Throughout my tech career, I’ve seen firsthand how scale comes at the expense of nuance. The communities that rely most on these technologies are often the first to get deprioritized under global commercial pressures.

From an information standpoint, this means that the ecosystem will get even more fragmented. It will be harder to manage, but that may also be a necessary correction.

📝 The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films

The Atlantic | ~7 min read

University students enrolling in film courses are increasingly unable to sit through full-length movies. The ability to speed through slow scenes, replay missed moments, or half-watch while multitasking is reshaping both the discipline of film studies and the habits of young cinephiles.

For professors, the dilemma is familiar: should you adapt curricula to new norms, or maintain standards and risk lower enrollment? Every institution is navigating some version of this tradeoff right now.

📝 The role of doctors is changing forever

The New Yorker | ~12 min read

As authority decentralizes, doctors no longer command trust through credentials alone. Patients come with online research in hand, political movements challenge medical consensus, and AI is increasingly embedded in care delivery.

Dr. Dhruv Khullar argues this isn’t a distraction from real medicine, but a redefinition. Today, medical practice may extend beyond the exam room to sharing credible information online, engaging in advocacy, or building care-driven companies.

📝 How ChatGPT cites social media

Profound | ~9 min read

If you've ever wondered how LLMs use digital platforms as a source of truth, we now have some data. Reddit is the top source, accounting for roughly 2–3% of all ChatGPT citations. And individual content pieces are cited more often than creator profiles or organization pages. Notably, X is barely visible.

These findings underscore that AI systems are already treating user-generated content as knowledge infrastructure. So your engagement online isn’t just informing people; it’s also training the machines.

Shout-out to subscriber Carley Lake, who flagged this piece in her own newsletter. Carley writes about using AI intentionally to make us more human, not less — check it out!

📝 Podcasting at awards shows

Laineygossip | ~5 min read

It’s awards season, and this year we saw a new category at the Grammys and the Golden Globes: Best Podcast. It’s been fascinating to watch the medium evolve from scrappy creators in their basement to prestige properties led by mainstream personalities.

Sarah Marrs suggests that the real story is less celebratory. As writers and actors engage in ongoing labor negotiations, studios are now investing in podcasting for access to non-union content. And as podcasts become more professionalized, the independent creators who built the medium risk being pushed aside.

🎥 LISTERS: A Glimpse into Extreme Birdwatching

Owen Reiser | 1:59:09 watch

Released in August, this documentary follows brothers Quentin and Owen Reiser as they road trip across the US to explore the world of competitive birding. It’s sweet, funny, and visually stunning.

What’s remarkable is the Reisers’ distribution choice. Although they could have easily pursued the festival circuit, they released the film for free on YouTube. It’s another example of young creators bypassing legacy gatekeepers in favor of direct distribution.

Subscribe now

Experts of the month

🍎 Joanna Johnson | @Unlearn16 (TikTok)

An Ontario-based educator, Joanna’s account was recommended to me many times this winter when she posted explainer videos on the history of US-Venezuela relations. Her content isn’t optimized for speed: most videos run five to ten minutes, with just her blackboard.

@unlearn16It's always about the money, honey. #rant #teacher #teachersoftiktok #money

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Yet, she reaches millions of people.

Joanna shows us that depth isn’t a liability online, and there’s still demand for context. When knowledge is shared clearly and grounded in real teaching, audiences respond.

📚 Jiwon Yoon, PhD | Understanding Korea, One Story at a Time (Substack)

Jiwon’s essay for Media Education Lab on thinking critically about Korean content hit close to home for me. As an Asian-American, I’ve spent most of my life and career in predominantly White spaces. Her writing named something I have felt but never fully articulated about the recent rise of East Asian culture in the West.

When representation is unbalanced, it harms everyone — the underrepresented and the dominant culture. As Jiwon asks: what happens to your resilience and curiosity when the world arrives pre-translated for you?

🩺 Dr. Lara Zibners | Lara’s Substack

In her essay, Distrust is the Default, Lara reflects on her experience as a physician within a medical establishment increasingly viewed with suspicion. But trust doesn’t vanish; it shifts towards other (often less-qualified) voices. That complicates care for providers already navigating imperfect systems to do their jobs.

What struck me most was Lara’s humanity. Behind abstract discussions about institutions and credibility are people who have spent years training to help others. It’s a good reminder that today’s shifts in trust aren’t just an institutional problem. They’re a human one.

Happy place

This is a personal one for me. I spent my formative years as a university student in small-town Minnesota. Thank you to Brandi Carlile for supporting the brave people there, for celebrating the Singing Resistance Twin Cities, and for bringing comfort and community together online.

Are you a lurker? Someone who scrolls through the feed, watching, reading — but never posting?

If so, you’re not alone.

For over 20 years, the 90-9-1 rule (also called the 1% rule) has been used to describe how people participate in online communities. Of course, the proportions vary – an open platform like Instagram is different from a niche subreddit or a private Slack channel. But generally, the pattern holds.

Here’s how it works:

• 90% of people consume content only. Simply scrolling, watching, and reading.

• 9% of people engage in some ways. Such as commenting, liking, or sharing posts.

• Only 1% actually post or create new content.

When people talk about the quality of information online (or lack thereof), most focus on the 1%. That makes sense. A tiny number of people are shaping discourse in the spaces people now use as their primary source of information. In that regard, it’s not all too different from legacy media; from newspapers to the movies, a select group of people make content for the general public to consume.

But in the digital world, there’s no such thing as a passive audience. The 99% play an active role too, and it’s just as important in shaping the information ecosystem.

Here are five ways you’re contributing online, even if you never post:

1. You watch a video – even briefly.

You don’t have to watch a video to its end for a platform to count it as viewed. When I worked at Meta, that threshold was three seconds.

It doesn’t matter if the video is actually 10 minutes long. It doesn’t matter if you stayed on it because you wanted to give it a chance, or got distracted by something else.

Views matter because in a world where 90% of people never engage, they’re a foundational signal that a piece of content is ‘high quality.’ And ‘high quality’ content gets shown to more people.

2. You rewatch a video.

You know how a replay button shows up when videos end? Or on TikTok, videos automatically loop and restart?

Every time a video gets played again, it counts as another view.

Some creators will take advantage of this. For example, they’ll make a short video with long captions. That keeps the video playing (and re-playing) while you’re reading. Each loop counts as a new view, and signals quality.

3. You save something, or you share it.

These are two different actions, but I’m putting them together because they both indicate that a piece of content is useful.

That said, they’re not equal. Sharing content is a higher-value action because it means you are putting something out there for others. Saving posts, on the other hand, suggests that you want to reference it later for yourself.

Again, it doesn’t matter why you save or share a piece of content. You might save a post with misinformation for research or share it with colleagues to analyze what people are saying about your field.

But the platform cannot distinguish between endorsement and examination. It only sees actions that say the content is useful and worth spreading.

4. You comment.

Like saving and sharing, people comment for different reasons. It can be anything from light encouragement – Congrats on the new job! – to deeper thoughts and discussion. You might also comment on a post because you believe it’s misleading and want to correct it.

I spent time at Meta studying how much it matters to make corrections in comments. What I learned was that the simple act of commenting – regardless of what the comment says – is enough to encourage wider distribution. That means more people will see the original post (but whether they’ll see your correction is less certain).

Also, commenting risks sparking further conversation – and each subsequent comment gives more signal that the original post should be spread further.

5. You follow or subscribe.

Following or subscribing to a creator tells a platform and its users that this is a voice worth being heard. That helps to make their content more visible to other people who need it — either through platform recommendations, or through your network discovering them through you.

Beyond that, following a creator tells them that their voice matters. Remember: creators are people too, and it’s not easy to put yourself out there. That’s why only 1% of people do it!

Following creators you like increases the chances that they’ll keep doing it, and keep making the kind of content you want to see.

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It’s ok if you don’t want to make content. Most people don’t. But the way you lurk matters.

I know it doesn’t feel like much in the moment. But together, our small actions play a big role in shaping who and what gets elevated. Not just for the algorithms, but for the people using these metrics to decide what kind of content they should make.

You may never post. But if you’re online, you’re contributing to the ecosystem. ◾

Last week, YouTube argued in court that it is not social media. It’s a small part of what is otherwise a complex legal and ethical case. But it sparked headlines because it seemed absurd.

… I actually agree.

A core problem in the ‘social media’ debate is that we lack a clear definition of what the term even means anymore. That’s not because the platforms are new – Facebook is 22 years old, and YouTube is 21. In tech terms, they’re dinosaurs. What’s changed is how people use them.

It may not be immediately obvious to many of us – especially Gen Xers and millennials (myself included) who came of age alongside these platforms. They still look the same. And in many ways, so do our habits (if we’re even still on them). For many people, ‘social media’ has become a loaded term that sparks strong (often negative) emotions. That’s understandable.

But the original social media guinea pigs are today’s regulators, judges, journalists, experts, educators, and parents deciding how these platforms should be governed and used in daily life. So let’s be honest with ourselves: are we making those decisions based on our personal memories and emotions, or on what these systems actually are today?

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I was a junior in college when Facebook arrived on our campus. Tom was my first friend on MySpace. Back then, these platforms were marketed as tools for connection. For me, they revolutionized my ability to snoop on my crushes and frenemies.

By co-opting the term ‘friend,’ Facebook implied deeper interpersonal relationships than what often existed. It worked. The validation of receiving a friend request – wow, Alex from Econ wants to be my friend?! – was real.

So collectively, a whole generation internalized a definition of social media as a digital extension of ourselves.

That’s how we used it – and in many ways, how we still do. Wedding announcements on Facebook. Pets and good hair days on Instagram. Work promotions on LinkedIn. Our feeds became curated reflections of ourselves – the versions we felt comfortable immortalizing, even as it edged towards the performative.

But over the last two decades, the landscape has shifted. We all grew up (or at least, we grew older). The experimental generation became the incumbents.

In some ways, we may be well-suited to shape the future of social media. After all, we’re the last generation to grow up before the Internet and the first ones to come of age with it. But that may also be our blind spot, because many of us are still anchored to social media’s original form.

You can see this in the rising nostalgia for the early Internet. In The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka longed for the days of mundane posting – breakfast photos and everyday moments. And the team at Hard Fork is building a ‘better’ social network modeled on the openness of the ‘90s and early-naughts.

I get the appeal.

But nostalgia generally makes me wary, because it often masks a desire for control. There were no simpler times – only different forms of gatekeeping.

Wishing for social media to return to its original form assumes that everyone experienced that era the same way (we didn’t). More importantly, it overlooks what these platforms have become for most people: primary infrastructure for research, learning, and decision-making.

◾

Social platforms have now surpassed traditional search engines as the primary place where people look for information. TikTok – often dismissed by older generations – is a core search tool for younger people. And across age demographics, over 80% of Americans report doing their own research online when making major life decisions.

These behaviors aren’t about social connection. They’re about seeking information.

Yet, while these platforms serve as vital knowledge sources, credible voices often remain passive within them.

Across sectors, the same pattern persists.

Most people use social media to search, learn, and make decisions. Even as public trust erodes in institutions, it holds strong for individual experts.

Most experts have social media accounts. But they often lack training and support to use them for knowledge sharing.

This mismatch leaves a void — and in today’s world, voids don’t stay empty for long. Less credible voices will step in, disrupting public knowledge and reshaping standards for trust.

◾

I’m not especially interested in debating whether it’s good or bad that people use social media to find information. It’s simply the way it is.

That reality won’t change because we want it to, or because we personally quit the apps. And it won’t be solved by regulation or litigation alone. Content moderation and technical infrastructure matter, but they cannot compensate for the absence of high-quality content from credible sources of knowledge.

That’s why I see platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram less as ‘social media.’ They’re more like peer-based media — individuals publishing directly to other individuals.

And as AI becomes more common, their impact will compound. Large language models are increasingly drawing from social platforms as sources of truth. That means the quality (and gaps) of digital content won’t just shape what people see, but what machines learn.

Accepting the importance of peer-based media is not to diminish the value of editorial judgment or peer review. It simply recognizes that the future of public knowledge depends as much on accessibility as on credentials.

You don’t have to like this shift. I’d never ask anyone to like it.

But it’s here, and the future depends on who shows up to shape it. ◾

See ya, 2025. It’s been… interesting.

A second Trump presidency reshaping the world order. AI blurring the line between human craft and machine output. White collar jobs once seen as golden tickets now proving much less secure.

In real time, the nature of work, authority, and trust is being renegotiated all around us.

And yet — I’m ending the year feeling optimistic about the future of expertise online.

Let me explain.

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It’s been a rough time — to say the least — for anyone working in institutional environments. The layoffs that shocked tech and media workers a few years ago have now spread to all sectors. Universities, medical providers, government agencies, civil society, and humanitarian organizations are all making cuts due to reduced funding, inflation, rising costs, and political pressure.

Jobs that once promised security and purpose are becoming less predictable and fulfilling. Many skilled Millennials and Gen Xers, who spent years building their expertise within institutions, now live with uncertainty – whether they’ve already been laid off or are worrying about the possibility of it.

Beyond survivor’s remorse, those who keep their jobs face different strains. Academics grapple with fewer tenure-track positions. Doctors and nurses work within ever-constrained health systems that undermine patient care. Career public servants encounter rising hostility from both elected leaders and the public.

For experts who have long tied their identity and impact to their jobs, this moment is more than professionally destabilizing. It’s deeply personal.

Hoping to have a positive impact on the world, many people with institutional careers follow an established path: pursue rigorous training, work their way up a hierarchy, and build credibility inside institutions meant to last. When those structures weaken, it leaves people unsure of where their expertise lives — or how it should be exercised — outside of them.

That’s why online participation is now vital professional practice for institutional workers.

Building a personal body of work – through long-form writing, speaking on camera, or curating articles – allows experts to maintain agency and presence amid professional precarity. It helps them build continuity beyond any single role, while contributing to the public discourse about their field.

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The added benefit to greater expert participation is, of course, that it improves the overall quality of information online and builds bridges with the public. And as content creation becomes more accessible, experts serving marginalized communities can build direct connections and close information gaps that legacy systems have long neglected.

In fact, the digital ecosystem now demands exactly the kind of content that institutional experts have to offer: slow, substantive information rooted in lived experience and expert judgment.

@lana.k.socialWill 2026 be the year of the intellectual influencer? I think it might be… for these key reasons

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Yes, friends. The attention economy is finally fading away. For the past decade, digital media has been shaped by a race for virality. Creators made short, easily consumable content to trigger emotional responses and keep people watching. Instead of connection, it rewarded division.

Recently, AI seemed ready to supercharge that dynamic. Instead, it appears to have sped up its decline.

Around the world, audiences are exhausted by media overload. Young digital natives are increasingly skeptical of online content. Some even trust nothing at all — which presents a very different issue than the misinformation problem faced by older generations.

The Internet’s enshittification has had some unintended benefits, however. The flood of AI slop – generic, low-effort, low-quality content – has made it harder for creators lacking original perspective to stand out. At the same time, it highlights those who do. Tools like ChatGPT have changed how people seek information, flattening knowledge access while also raising demand for real-life context and expert judgment.

It’s a course correction that is yet to be named. Whatever we end up calling the next era – the intimacy economy, the cognition economy, the connection economy – the underlying shift is clear: people want substance and genuine human perspective.

You can see this shift in how platforms are evolving. Networks built on social connections and follower counts – think Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn – are adapting to search- and discovery-driven models like YouTube and TikTok. Ever the trendsetter, TikTok is advancing its focus towards specialized, learning-based content over broad generalities.

Furthermore, platforms no longer prioritize content based on superficial views or likes, but rather by depth of engagement. Do people watch your content to the end? Do they share it? Do they watch consistently?

See where this is going? Audiences want depth — and commercial sectors are adapting accordingly. Mega-creators now deliver less value for brands, as do traditional celebrity endorsements. Instead, niche creators with smaller, more engaged audiences are proving more valuable because of their specificity and credibility in their niche.

For experts, this is a far friendlier environment than before. Many believe that factual information can only survive online as soundbites stripped of nuance. Maybe that used to be true. It isn’t anymore.

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That’s where my optimism comes from. But it also feels urgent. If experts remain hesitant, they’ll cede space to less credible people with better content skills to shape public discourse about their fields. That risks exacerbating feelings of lost agency, relevance, and identity. But they can adapt. As with anything hard, it will be easier with help.

I’m on a mission to build tailored support for subject matter experts to participate online with confidence. You can learn more at my new website.

In the new year, I’ll be testing new formats for empowering experts to share their knowledge online. That includes educational content, cultural analysis, and case studies of experts who already excel at this. If there’s something you’d like to learn about, let me know.

And if you know a doctor, nurse, scientist, researcher, educator, humanitarian, or public servant – please share this with them. I’d love their feedback.

This project is a love letter to the passion, grit, and hope it takes to build expertise in something — and the people who do it to serve the public good.

Happy holidays, and see you in 2026. ◾

In the spring of 2020, as the world was shutting down for what was then an unknown and frightening virus, Meta came under intense scrutiny for the volume and speed of COVID-19 misinformation spreading across Facebook and Instagram. Conspiracy theories, as well as general falsehoods about the virus’ origins and vaccine safety were overwhelming people’s feeds and spreading confusion.

At the same time, Meta was rolling out a series of emergency measures, such as enhanced fact-checking support and prominent COVID-19 info centers within people’s feeds. And Mark Zuckerberg publicly committed to giving the World Health Organization (WHO) ‘as many free ads as they need’ to amplify public health messaging.

I had just launched Meta’s first national media literacy initiative in the US, and was also overseeing its corporate ads donations program. Misinformation programming was becoming my beat, and it was an honor to be asked to help design and deliver on Mark’s commitment.

Our first decision was to expand the program beyond the WHO to include government health authorities. COVID-19 was a global pandemic, but the response was fundamentally local. Each country had its own guidance and priorities, from lockdowns and curfews to mask mandates and toilet paper rationing. So a single global messenger wouldn’t suffice. Citizens needed to hear from their local leaders as well.

Our next decision was what kind of support would actually be helpful. Mark’s original offer of free ads was straightforward and strictly budgetary. Think of it as Meta buying gift cards that the WHO could then use to buy ads on Facebook and Instagram.

But very quickly, we realized that focusing solely on media buy would ignore deeper capacity constraints and structural challenges. Many health agencies had never run public information campaigns on social media, and needed help creating Facebook accounts. Others needed translation support – consider that India has 22 official languages, or even a country like Germany has large populations relying on Turkish, Russian, or Arabic – and that minority language speakers are often the most vulnerable to false information.

Even when health agencies had content to share, they often lacked experience using Meta’s Ads Manager to actually set up their campaigns. It makes sense – public health experts are usually focused on science and policy, rather than the latest marketing tools. And let’s face it: Meta’s Ads Manager is not beginner-friendly.

So we evolved the program further. What began as a simple ads donation program to the WHO quickly expanded to include external creative and translation services, plus white-glove, in-house support for account setup, distribution, and measurement for government authorities, UN agencies, and NGOs across 180 countries.

The program ran for three years. By the end, our global coalition reached over two billion people with authoritative health information and measurably increased public interest and perceived safety of the COVID-19 vaccine across all regions.

Cross-sector partnerships are often called for in moments of crisis, but they’re rarely described with operational clarity. And no one has spoken publicly about this particular effort with any detail.

Until now. Here’s how we did it.

Step 1: Make the content

There’s a lot of hype about video today, but even in 2020, video was already the strongest format for engagement. The problem was that very few public service institutions had the capacity or resources to produce it. We were already in lockdown, so organizing professional shoots wasn’t possible. And the kind of stripped-down, phone-shot videos we all know today weren’t yet mainstream enough to make them feel like viable options for government officials or health providers working on the frontlines of the crisis.

So our guidance to agencies defaulted to animations and infographics. It was an improvement over static posts, but still not optimized for a public that was already shifting its trust from authority to relatability.

Second, Meta’s ads system is rigid in a lot of ways – it’s not the free-for-all many assume it is. The company enforces a set of quality rules that advertisers must follow. When we started the program, for example, Meta enforced a 20% rule for text on ads — images with over 20% text were auto-rejected. The rule no longer exists, but text-heavy images are still considered low-quality content which may impact their distribution. The guideline preserves a visual-first feed, but wasn’t feasible for our campaigns which had to be largely text-based due to our production limitations.

In addition, Meta imposes strict spending caps for first-time advertisers — the majority of our program partners — until they establish a track record. It’s a fraud prevention mechanism that makes sense for most cases, but adds unnecessary friction for a time-critical campaign funded by Meta itself.

The most complicated challenge, though, was Meta’s social issues, elections, and political ads policy– which was actually one of my remits while I worked at the company. Introduced after the 2016 US election, it’s meant to address the risk of foreign interference in elections. The policy requires a ‘paid for by’ label on ads discussing politics, elections or social issues – which include health. It also requires advertisers to prove they reside in the same country where they are running these ads.

In an American context, the residence requirement is workable. But globally, it creates a myriad of operational barriers. In Europe, for example, it’s completely normal for an organization based in, say, Belgium or Austria to serve some or all 27 EU member states. Under Meta’s policy, though, they couldn’t.1

For the 20% rule and spending cap, our team had to secure exceptions for each agency participating in our program. We also successfully advocated to change the ads policy for the pandemic. Public health messaging about preventive measures, how vaccines work, or how to access them would not be subject to the same requirements as political ads.

I suspect this is why many of our campaigns are no longer visible in Meta’s Ad Library. While writing this piece, I went back to pull examples from our partners like the WHO, UK National Health Service (NHS), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC). But they’re not there anymore – taken down, per Meta, for violating their ads policies.

It’s true that the ads didn’t meet the requirements. But that’s because the requirements were not designed for urgent public information needs like this.

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Step 2: Distribute the content

My colleagues at Meta were incredible resources of knowledge about what makes an ad campaign successful. Besides content strategy, one of the first things they taught me was the standard cadence for an effective campaign: deliver an ad to the same person two times per week for four weeks.

That’s the general best practice for brands — the frequency most likely to drive a conversion, or in other words, for someone to take your desired action. Exceeding that risks audience fatigue, which can actually have the opposite effect and decrease interest.

So we calibrated our campaigns to those best practices. In Meta’s Ads Manager, the maximum setting per country was roughly 80% of its reachable users on Facebook and Instagram. We set campaigns to reach that maximum, with two impressions per person each week, for four weeks.

And it worked.

By late 2020, the first COVID-19 vaccines were pending approval and we helped the WHO run a global campaign explaining how vaccines are developed and vetted – with the goal of strengthening public confidence before the rollout began. After four weeks, our teams saw statistically significant increases in public interest in and perceived safety of the vaccine across every region.

A necessary disclaimer, though. Facebook and Instagram are incredible advertising platforms, but as I’ve mentioned, they are fundamentally designed for corporate marketing and sales conversion – not public sentiment or behavior analysis. We repurposed Meta’s brand lift tools – meant for measuring consumer affinity – to capture people’s self-reported changes in vaccine confidence, institutional trust, and media literacy skills. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best available option.

More sophisticated measurement could have provided a clearer picture of how people actually navigated COVID-19 discourse in their feeds – but in the interest of user privacy, it was not pursued.

Equity was our north star

Over three years, our program cost Meta more than $300 million. We were fortunate to do this work at an organization that could fund the actual cost of delivering authoritative health information without cutting corners. It was a privilege, and also an exercise in fiscal responsibility and ethics from the start.

Our driving principle was simple: information is aid.2 Uneven access to quality information makes structurally marginalized communities even more vulnerable. In a pandemic, that vulnerability becomes a matter of life or death.

Our program allocated resources based on the actual cost of running campaigns in each country. Meta’s ads system is an auction: the more competition for an audience, the higher the price of reaching them. That means the cost of delivering the same campaign – with the same parameters and objectives – varies dramatically across countries, depending on how many advertisers are targeting them. And what this exposes is the information inequity that is ingrained in our world.

To put this into perspective: reaching people in the United States was dramatically more expensive than reaching people in India — despite India having nearly double its number of Facebook users. A similar dynamic was true across the African Union, where we could reach hundreds of millions of people across 55 countries for a fraction of the cost of a single US campaign. In fact, we could reach the whole world for roughly the same cost as running a campaign in the US alone.3

This doesn’t just show how crowded the US digital ecosystem is. It illustrates how much more information and content flows toward American audiences, even though it is far more financially feasible to reach people in every other part of the world. In fact, nationwide campaigns could be run in a number of countries — from Central Asia to sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and even parts of Europe — for a few thousand dollars.

And in many of these places, the absence of institutional communication has real consequences. Many countries received the COVID-19 vaccine later than the so-called Global North. Maintaining trust, reinforcing safety guidance, and mitigating people’s frustration all required sustained public communication. But these were also the places most prone to information gaps.

That’s why local capacity building is so critical. As the pandemic taught us, global systems are optimized for scale – not depth or nuance. And focusing on scale alone guarantees that many communities will be missed.

Relatedly, we need to acknowledge that government messengers are not always the right ones. As the crisis wore on, COVID-19 responses became politicized, especially as shutdowns impacted trade and commercial activity.

In a handful of cases, a government partner would ask to use our program to promote official messaging that encouraged in-person activity or celebrated their own response successes, rather focusing on health guidance. Even then, our principles applied: our program was for centering COVID-19 public health.

When governments weren’t the appropriate messengers – either because their message didn’t align, or because they could not credibly reach vulnerable populations – we partnered with NGOs to fill the gaps. Organizations like AARP and AGE Platform Europe for older adults; International Medical Corps and Médecins Sans Frontières for displaced or vulnerable communities; and the National Congress of American Indians for Indigenous populations were essential. They helped ensure that people who might distrust or be overlooked by government channels still received accurate, actionable information from sources that specifically served them.

By the end of 2023, our program had reached over two billion people in 180 countries. Hundreds of government agencies and NGOs had received critical support and new capacity to use social media for public information campaigns. And people’s interest in the COVID-19 vaccine grew, as did their ability to identify potential misinformation.

Though Meta has undergone many changes since then, this infrastructure remains as a model for acute crisis response and information threats – deployed again and again in moments like the conflict in Ukraine, elections in Kenya, and wildfires in Los Angeles.

Aftermath and looking ahead

In 2024, Mark Zuckerberg apologized for Meta’s COVID-related content decisions and suggested they were made due to pressure from the Biden Administration.

That was not my experience. My reality was that hundreds of people across Meta’s policy, product, content review, legal, and partner support teams took very seriously our responsibility of stewarding the world’s largest public square during one of the most frightening periods of our lifetimes. Maybe that’s something Mark regrets now, but I don’t.

What this experience taught me is that it is 100% possible to build cross-sector coalitions, close information gaps, and meet people where they are. Removing misinformation only works if high-quality content emerges to fill the void – but that can’t happen if it’s not there to begin with. And news organizations can’t bear this burden alone, as their industry undergoes its own upheaval.

Institutions and subject matter experts need better support to participate in today’s information ecosystem. The good news is that this is far less expensive and more accessible today than it was in 2020. And we don’t need a tech behemoth to drive this work.

As the digital ecosystem shifts into its next era, now is the moment to organize experts across institutions, sectors, and geographies — not just to respond to the next crisis, but to build the information resilience we need for the future. ▪️

I help institutions and subject matter experts participate online with confidence and integrity. If you or your organization are grappling with navigating the information ecosystem, I’d love to help.

Learn more at my website

Friends,

It’s been quite a month back in the US. Wherever you’re reading this, I hope you’re finding moments of peace in these overwhelming times. I’m taking a quick study break to share the pieces I’ve been reading, and how the latest events may prove to be a watershed moment for the global information ecosystem.

Breaking news is always a messy time for media, both traditional outlets and peer-based platforms. The horrific assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk magnified that for many reasons — including the fact that he was a skilled and prolific creator, a social media staple to young Americans across the political spectrum.

For the most part, the response from public and political figures was pretty standard. Not quite ‘thoughts and prayers,’ but generic statements nevertheless: condemning political violence, mourning with Charlie’s loved ones and supporters, and calling for peaceful debate. This approach is understandable from a governance perspective; the US is facing a crisis of social division and political violence, and as many people are saying, the temperature must be lowered.

From an institutional trust perspective, however, the response missed the mark for many people. To them, its simplicity conflated performative debate with genuine discourse, and confirmed institutional naïveté about the digital ecosystem that millions of Americans live in. This disconnect is one of the fundamental challenges for institutions competing with individual creators for public trust, a dynamic that Charlie understood very well.

Here are some thoughtful pieces addressing this tension by Ta-Nehisi Coates,1 Moira Donegan, and Kahlil Greene.2

After Charlie’s death, I noticed a shift in President Trump’s communication. At the Tylenol press conference, he did something unusual. When asked about the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ statement that acetaminophen is safe during pregnancy, he said: ‘That’s the establishment. … And you know what? Maybe they’re right. I don’t think they are.’

@msnbcDr. Vin Gupta fact-checks President Trump's unsubstantiated claim linking Tylenol’s use during pregnancy to increased risk of autism in babies. "If you have any questions," said Dr. Gupta, "Talk to your medical provider." #trump #health #women #news

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It was one line in a long presser, but it stood out. Trump, normally absolute, conceded the possibility of being wrong. It was a flicker of ambivalence even as his health secretary insists on a firm link among vaccines, medications, and autism.

It’s one thing when a leader shares unfounded information because they believe it. It’s another altogether when belief no longer matters. When that happens, the ecosystem degrades not just into misinformation, but into meaninglessness. The message matters less than the act of speaking — with actual conviction reserved for political or personal gain, rather than public service.

In real time, we’re seeing that conviction affect career public servants, businesses, philanthropists, and of course, media. ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! was shocking but not surprising. In the short lifespan of Feed for Thought, I’ve already written about both the decline of late night and Jimmy’s own defiance of his network’s political challenges.

The show went back on the air after a week, but let’s be honest: all of the late night shows will probably go dark when current contracts end. The hosts — Stephen Colbert (whose show will end next year), Jimmys Kimmel and Fallon, and Seth Meyers — will be fine. They will almost certainly transition to independent content through podcasts, digital programs, books, or tours. It’s a path well-trodden by other network alums to great success.

Audiences will be fine too. They’ll still be able to access their favorite hosts-turned-creators’ content and commentary — most likely with fewer guardrails and greater convenience.

@jimmykimmelliveThe Rabbit Hole with Jimmy Kimmel: The dangers of #Trump’s nemesis… WINDMILLS!

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The people bearing the brunt of these changes are the shows' staff, vendors, house bands, and production crew, whose jobs are already being impacted by AI and an ever-democratized media landscape. Media’s shift towards individual creators is a business reality accelerated by technology and politics. But as traditional media fragments, the economic collateral damage falls on the skilled workers who once anchored the industry.

Beyond late night’s shifting economics, there’s been a larger reshuffling of financial flows in the digital ecosystem as well. Though met with surprisingly little fanfare, it will be far more consequential: the US approved a deal with China on TikTok.

The deal’s biggest winner is Larry Ellison — Oracle cofounder, occasional world’s richest person, and father of David Ellison (the owner of Paramount Skydance… sound familiar?). Oracle already handles TikTok’s user data in the US, and now Larry is also becoming an investor as part of the ownership changes. He joins the Murdoch family and other Trump allies on TikTok’s cap table.

The TikTok debate originated around national security, but as I’ve written elsewhere, we’ve yet to clarify major questions about data security and control.

And from an information ecosystem perspective, these changes should be ringing alarm bells. Considering the administration’s efforts to punish critics (see Charlie) and control media (see Jimmy), it’s not hard to foresee a potential attempt to influence the content decisions, moderation standards, and algorithmic updates on an app widely understood as a place for young and underrepresented people to express themselves.

With the heads of Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, and now TikTok inching closer to full-on alliance with the administration, the media fragmentation I predicted may come sooner rather than later. Communities will move to smaller, curated, and safer-feeling places. In the short term, these will probably be hosted on platforms like Discord, Patreon, Substack, and Slack. But no doubt, we’ll see new startups from all over the world popping up to fill this need.

For the future of information quality and public trust, it’s time for institutions and subject matter experts — primary sources, as Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah say3 — to claim active roles in the information ecosystem that’s taking shape around us. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s also our responsibility as stewards of knowledge to contribute to information readiness.

We must get comfortable with participating in modern media. We can learn together. Are you with me?

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For as long as most living Americans can remember, the United States’ position as world leader has felt unshakable. US innovation revolutionized global media and information – from CNN’s 24 hour news format to Hollywood’s export of American culture to Facebook’s democratization of speech. But the age of American dominance in global soft power is ending – ironically, much of it by the US’ own hand.

As a result, the global information order is also shifting. Commercial pressures have eroded editorial and moderation standards, while exposing how slowly institutions could adapt in their roles as public sources of information (even as they continue to play other roles in research, governance, and society). Combine that with today’s politics and the rapid advance of AI, and those forces are now dismantling institutional power and its ability to anchor public trust at an unprecedented pace.

What fills the void when American institutions lose their authority over public information? Perhaps the most American response of all: people go independent.

A Tale of Four Mediums

Across journalism, commentary, culture, and technology, the same pattern is repeating: early innovation leads to dominance, institutions falter, and individuals go their own way.1

But the Great Fragmentation isn’t just an American story. News consolidation and deserts stretch from Australia to Canada and across Latin America. Political comedians in India are facing retaliation, and Korea now dominates global pop culture. Everywhere, shifts in media and information are appearing in real time.

But now, we’re not in a game of Risk, with territories duking it out for the top spot. With institutional affiliation getting devalued and AI lowering barriers to entry, the next information order won’t belong to a single superpower. It will be woven together by a decentralized patchwork of voices around the world.

So where does this lead us?

Six predictions for where the global information ecosystem is heading

1. We’ll see more content and more mediocrity (yes, more of both). But originality will shine.

With both AI and institutional distrust growing, more individuals will enter the content game. If you already feel overwhelmed by too much media, buckle up (or take a preemptive nap) because it’s about to get even more crowded.

The good news is that AI will not just increase volume; it will also raise the baseline. Already, AI-generated ads and posts are flooding TikTok and LinkedIn feeds. Eventually, those reliant on it will start to sound the same and become indistinguishable from each other. That’s why originality will still matter. People with genuine thought, voice, and talent will stand out even more sharply against the noise.

2. Once a red flag, self-publishing will signal agency and authenticity.

Credibility used to hinge on institutional affiliation, but for many people these days, that feels more like a liability. Trust and credibility are now communicated through being an outsider: rejecting traditional structures, owning your IP, and cultivating your own identity.

Look at Taylor Swift: by re-recording her catalog into Taylor’s Version and buying back her masters, she single-handedly turned content ownership into a battle cry for empowerment, freedom, and financial control.

The same pattern is emerging across more ‘serious’ fields as well, albeit with somewhat less glitz and fanfare. In journalism, figures like Terry Moran, Don Lemon, and Joy Reid have turned their departures from network news into thriving independent platforms. And in academia, scholars like Tressie McMillan Cottom, Heather Cox Richardson, and Anne Helen Petersen have proven that the general public is eager for thoughtful commentary on American politics, history, and culture.

@black_was_geniusReplying to @Nicole

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3. Content hosting will be a new frontier.

The shift towards independence will create demand for new infrastructure, especially as content starts to double as both product and marketing strategy. Hosting platforms – like Substack for newsletters or Spotify for podcasts – will grow increasingly distinct from promotion channels like LinkedIn and Instagram.

Thanks to AI, no-code tools will make it easier for non-techies to build without waiting on Silicon Valley. This shift is already underway: open source platforms like Mastodon and Ghost are emerging amid declining trust in Big Tech, while major players are investing in decentralized platforms beyond traditional corporate control. The next generation of content platforms will almost certainly be built on protocols like these.

4. Platforms (and influencers) will get smaller and more specialized.

Creators and brands aren’t chasing the biggest audiences anymore; they’re optimizing for the right people to engage with. As a result, the major platforms we know today will start to resemble network TV – massive, generic, and dominated by either a handful of mega-creators or low-quality filler.

The real value – to both creators and audiences – will shift to bespoke channels that are built around specific needs: curating by genre, subject matter, or ideology; offering exclusivity through invite-only communities; or supporting learning through interactive formats. We’re already seeing this with Substack subscriptions, Discord servers, and Patreon communities. In a world of AI-driven sameness, curation will be king.

5. Underserved regions will finally get their due.

As channels become more specialized and product development more accessible, barriers to entry will fall for the parts of the world that have long been oversimplified by California-based companies and underserved by institutions unable to tailor their content for all audiences. In places like Southeast Asia, South America, and across Africa – where platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp often feel like the whole Internet – local innovators will increasingly build channels for their own communities.

Take, for example, the social network LINE in Taiwan. By investing in its original stickers market, the platform eschewed Western norms and deeply localized its product. Staying small has also enabled LINE to innovate on fact-checking while preserving end-to-end encryption. Today, LINE serves 94% of the Taiwanese population — much higher than the 65% on Facebook.

Or consider ShareChat in India, a country with 22 official languages. Built specifically for non-English speakers, it now serves 180 million users across 15 regional languages. By centering linguistic and cultural nuance, ShareChat serves audiences that have largely been ignored and harmed by US platforms.

Together, these examples show how the Western-centric hierarchy of information and moderation is giving way to a more polyphonic ecosystem.

6. Fragmentation will make the media harder to manage. That’s not necessarily bad.

The splintering of platforms into smaller, specialized channels means there will no longer be a handful of ‘public squares’ to observe or regulate. It will get harder for researchers to study information flows as credibility lines blur and conversations move into semi-private spaces. Governments, too, will find it harder to develop sound policy, or even track the messages circulating online (an outcome that can be either a blessing or a curse). Authority will become more diffuse, less predictable, and nearly impossible to steer from the top down.

For institutions and individuals seeking to reach people with quality information, it will get harder to amass large audiences. But that’s not necessarily a loss. Influence won’t be built on the number of followers anymore, but on your consistency in showing up, your comfort with building a personal brand, and your willingness to collaborate with others who engage different audiences than you. Those are things that you can control.

Together, these shifts point to a new information order: less centralized, but more open to those who participate.

The age of American dominance in global media and information is ending. What once felt like an unshakable hierarchy of institutions has fractured under its own weight, accelerated by politics and amplified by AI. What comes next won’t be another single superpower, but a mosaic of individuals, platforms, and communities around the world.

If we act quickly, these changes can hold real promise. As experts and primary sources of information, we need to accept that the next order won’t be built on a top-down standard of ethics, but a culture of participation. The challenge is whether we can adapt our own notions of credibility fast enough to meet this moment.

before you go…

Scrolling through

• In light of the programming changes at the Kennedy Center, I want to share the work of Final Bow for Yellowface, cofounded by Phil Chan (a college friend of mine) and Georgina Pazcoguin. The org advocates for greater Asian representation in the arts and reimagines canonical Western works like The Nutcracker and Madama Butterfly without Orientalism or harmful Asian portrayals. Just last year, they collaborated with the Kennedy Center itself.

• Here’s how Aaron Parnas, one of TikTok’s biggest news creators, explains his editorial approach to The Cut: ‘Anything that I can understand in five minutes or less, I cover.’ Thoughts?

• Anyone who’s been a fan of The Great British Bake-Off will enjoy this piece by former contestant Ruby Tandoh. Nowadays, it’s normal that so many social media stars are cooks and bakers. But as Ruby writes, ‘that’s because you are living in the world Bake-Off built.’

and one more thing…

Happy place

Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness 20 years ago on The Colbert Report — long before alternative facts made it into official talking points. Moving to The Late Show grew Stephen’s audience, but dulled his edge. I can’t wait to support whatever podcast / digital show / comedy special he does next.

Five years ago, as COVID-19 was shutting down the world, Mark Zuckerberg committed to give the World Health Organization (WHO) ‘as many free ads as they need’ to amplify vital public health information on Facebook and Instagram. I got called in to help design and execute that program, which supported not just the WHO but other UN agencies, government health officials, and nonprofits around the world. We reached over two billion people in 180 countries, and tangibly increased public interest in the COVID-19 vaccine. In the end, the effort took three years, hundreds of millions of dollars, and countless hours of hard work from Meta staff, public health experts, and creatives.

Today, a single doctor can build similar (if not more) trust, using just her phone.

This shift is happening everywhere: in public service sectors as well as commercial ones. By turning the camera on themselves, creators are bypassing the limits of institutional risk aversion and corporate energy. Instead, they’re embracing the hallmarks of what people trust today: humanized, unpolished, and emotionally authentic messaging.

Here are the patterns I see among the most effective medical creators:

Some specialty areas are natural fits for social media

Beauty has become one of social media's biggest categories, from Instagram reshaping fashion to social platforms now powering billion-dollar skincare businesses. These phenomena make sense, as women dominate men on almost all platforms, and digital commerce now drives over half of beauty sales globally.

With so many consumers already engaging online, it’s a clear strategic move for beauty-adjacent health experts to meet them there. For example, dermatologists like NYC-based Dr. Shereene Idriss (1.4M IG / 1.6M YT) and Dr. Andrea Suarez, based in Houston and known online as Dr. Dray (600k IG / 2.5M YT) have amassed huge audiences by incorporating medical information into the cultural zeitgeist and shouting at us to wear the damn sunscreen.

@shereeneidrissWear the damn sunscreen! 👏 Your skin will thank you for it in the long run. If not for your health, then for vanity sake, just do it 🤷‍♀️ #solareclipse #eclipse #sunscreen #sunscreenviral #spf #dermatologist #shereeneidriss #dridriss @ShereeneIdriss

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As one of social’s biggest categories, beauty is also a crowded space. With over 1.5 million beauty influencers in the US alone, people have a lot of choice in whose advice they want to follow, from enthusiasts to makeup artists to facialists and scientists. It goes without saying that medical creators will not reach everyone online. And that’s ok. Just like in life, one person may go to a spa for a chronic skin condition while another goes to a surgeon for something that can be addressed with makeup. We can’t change human nature, but we can give people more and better options for informing themselves.

Topics that are both urgent and taboo

On the other end of the spectrum, social media is giving space to medical topics that are considered too niche, embarrassing, or uncomfortable to talk about openly.

By this, we mean everyday health issues – things like periods, poop, perimenopause, and even death. And yet, these topics are systemically overlooked – either because they are deeply individual, rooted in shame, or considered socially taboo. With delayed treatment having potentially fatal implications, it’s all the more vital to meet people where they are and reduce stigma. And peer-to-peer media, with its simultaneously anonymous and intimate qualities, plays a critical role in normalizing conversations that our ‘real life’ social circles often don’t want to have.

@socalgastrodocDid you know most people poop in the morning? Coffee and your colons circadian rhythm are two contributing factors #guthealth #onthisday #poop #pooptok #medicalhumor #marriedlife

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Another striking example is the wave of hospice nurses coming on social media to educate the public about death, reduce fear, and support people experiencing loss. One of the best known creators in this space is California-based Julie McFadden, known online as @hospicenursejulie (479k IG / 1.7M TT). As her engagement has grown, I’ve been impressed by how respectful her comments sections have remained — even as platforms repeatedly remove her educational videos for supposed guidelines violations. Unfortunately, heavy-handed content moderation is a problem we continue to see on multiple legal health topics that platforms deem problematic, including reproductive care as well as end-of-life education.

@hospicenursejulieReplying to @Anette Aleksandersen why Im not afraid to die. The science behind death. Pg: 66 in my book, Nothing To Fear- Demystifying Death to Live More Fully. #hospicenursejulie #hospicenurse #nothingtofear #hospice #caregivers

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Know your people, know your platform

The most effective medical creators know that good information only counts if people actually absorb it. They understand that different platforms serve different purposes, and optimize their content accordingly.

This kind of creator literacy isn’t rocket science (or medical school). Bad actors mastered the craft of engaging people long ago, and convinced many of us that trustworthy content can't do the same. That's wrong. The key is understanding your audience, and matching your content strategy to your goals.

Someone who does this very well is Dr. Okezika Kanu, a Dallas-based doctor known online as Dr. Zikky (50k TT). For example, his video comparing the cold and flu demonstrates a thoughtful strategy to creating content for a discovery-driven platform like TikTok. He opens with a clear hook to quickly get the scroller’s attention, uses dynamic zoom-in and -outs for visual interest, and incorporates graphics that supplement detail. At 54 seconds long, the video covers a lot of ground and includes a final call to action.

@dr._zikkyCold and flu symptoms can overlap, but they differ in intensity. Colds develop gradually with milder symptoms, while the flu strikes suddenly with severe symptoms like high fever and body aches. Knowing the difference can help with quicker recovery. #ColdVsFlu #HealthTips #ColdSymptoms #FluSymptoms #SeasonalIllness #StayHealthy #FluSeason #Wellness #MedicalAdvice #PreventIllness Disclaimer: This content is intended for educational purposes only and should not be used as a substitute for professional medical diagnosis, advice, or treatment. Always consult with a qualified healthcare provider for concerns about your health, especially if you are unsure whether you have a cold or the flu. Early consultation can aid in better management and recovery.

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What makes Dr. Zikky's approach effective isn't just the format, but the strategy behind it. He understands that his audience isn’t necessarily looking for health information, but they might absorb it while scrolling. His content is quick and practical. It’s educational without feeling pedagogical. Authoritative but not intimidating.

At scale, effective health communication — or any topic for that matter — requires a portfolio approach. Examples like Dr. Zikky provide a glimpse of what could be possible with stronger collaboration between institutions and individual creators. Not competing for attention, but coordinating to reach different audiences where they are.

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The doctor’s humanity makes her trustworthy

In a time when legacy institutions are losing public trust, one of the most powerful things a doctor can do online is to simply show up as a person.

That’s not easy. For generations, medical authority was rooted in emotional distance to project clinical objectivity; personal vulnerability was viewed unfavorably. But professionalism means something different now. Especially for people who have felt ignored by the health system, an institutional badge might be the very thing they don’t trust. A real person, by contrast, can still cut through.

That’s how creators like Dr. Elisabeth Potter (191k TT / 183k IG), a reconstructive plastic surgeon in Texas, have built such powerful followings. Dr. Potter shares what it’s like to run a medical practice, navigate insurance bureaucracy, and advocate for her patients. Her content has gained so much traction that the insurance company United Healthcare retaliated against her — jeopardizing her clinic and her ability to treat cancer survivors.

Even though Dr. Potter doesn’t post a lot of medical advice, her medical credibility still rings through. And her followers aren’t just passive watchers; they’ve taken real action to support her.

This is what the best medical creators understand: building trust can change behavior. And in an information ecosystem where there is so much noise, that trust — earned one post at a time — might be medicine’s most powerful tool.

The credibility playbook is changing

Medical creators are doing more than reshaping public health communication. They’re proving that it is possible to express expertise online in engaging ways, and that a willingness to connect authentically can be more powerful than institutional authority alone.

This has implications far beyond medicine. Every field has experts who could be communicating more authentically online. The challenge is figuring out how to do it strategically while protecting your personal boundaries.

There’s a lot yet to learn, but here’s what’s certain: to continue to thrive, institutions need to build communication agility as our information ecosystems evolve. It’s not about dumbing down expertise or replacing institutional roles; rather, we need to adapt to new structures and amplify unified messaging across channels and voices.

before you go…

Scrolling through

• It’s not just doctors and nurses who post effective health content. Patients do too. Brooke Eby’s account, with so much candor and humor about her very serious experience with ALS, is easily among the most powerful ones out there. Follow her on TikTok or Instagram.

  

  @limpbroozkit😬

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• Stephanie Hinds wrote an excellent piece about the evolution of Netflix documentaries. Once hailed for serious work like Making a Murderer, they’re now leaning into a more formulaic (dare I say, algorithmic) approach — glossed up, over-simplified, and more in the image of Dateline than documentary film. With Ted Sarandos now touting the use of AI in production, it doesn’t bode well for the filmmakers and artists Netflix once courted heavily but no longer need.

• TIME has launched its inaugural TIME100 Creators list. On one hand, it’s a sign that digital content is finally being recognized as a legitimate medium. But a cynic might see a legacy institution using the very people disrupting its influence to stay relevant. As is often the case, legitimacy and relevance go both ways.

and one more thing…

Happy place

Honoring Colorado Poet Laureate Andrea Gibson, who won last week. I’ve been aware of Andrea’s work over the years, but admittedly not deeply. Their passing has prompted me to take time to explore, and it’s been a joy to experience their poetry and observations about life, love, gender, and dancing.

Note: I want to be ultra clear that this essay is not criticizing motherhood or anyone’s personal choices about parenting. It’s about how today’s media environment is making space for women to share their stories with more nuance, complexity, and vulnerability than ever before. In a culture that can oversimplify motherhood and womanhood, this is a powerful and important shift.

Last time, I wrote about how #tradwives and manosphere creators mainstreamed an old-fashioned, oversimplified view of womanhood, motherhood, and gender roles. Coming out of the pandemic, corporate burnout drove a nationwide audience to #quietquit and seek escapism through the warm aesthetic and cozy-looking lifestyle of ‘traditional living.’ Although not overtly political, tradwife creators curated a nostalgia for a past that never really existed – a tactic not dissimilar to the Make America Great Again playbook. Together, these cultural and political forces made President Trump’s second election almost inevitable.

This week, I’m looking at how our digital pendulum has swung since January, and the powerful new wave of storytelling that women are leading online. They’re talking about motherhood, freedom, choice, and the grey areas that come with real, unfiltered life.

Space for the unheard

Social media’s roots are in giving space to voices that don’t fit the mainstream. The powerful and elite were late to social media because they didn’t need it; they were already all over traditional outlets. We saw this pattern over and over throughout the 2010s and early 2020s — from Occupy Wall Street's protest against corporate greed, to #MeToo’s call for healing for sexual violence survivors, to Black Lives Matter's mobilization to fight systemic racism and police brutality against Black people. Digital platforms gave everyday people a collective voice and a way to organize, eventually crossing over from our online worlds to our physical streets and ballot boxes.

And so, with traditionalists suddenly feeling on the back foot, they co-opted the underdog’s tools and re-established themselves as the leaders in political and cultural power.

But just like our culture and politics, our digital ecosystem is fluid. And as the pendulum swings again, we’re seeing new patterns emerge: a softer approach driven by personal storytelling that’s a mix of celebratory, rebellious, and vulnerable.

Perfection is out. Authenticity is in.

To understand the latest shifts, we have to look at what’s changed in our information ecosystem.

Yes, I’m talking about TikTok.

In 2020, TikTok was already large at 100 million monthly active users in the US. But it wasn’t taken seriously, dismissed as an unserious lip-synching and dancing app for teens. By early 2025, however, its user base had exploded by 70%. Today, TikTok matches the size of Instagram, and continues to grow across every demographic.

Why does this matter? Because TikTok didn’t just change what people watch. It changed how content is found, who gets seen, and what people trust.

Before TikTok, platforms like Facebook and Instagram built feeds based on what you told them: who your friends are, what you like, whom you follow. TikTok flipped that by removing the limitations of building your feed based on the people and things you already know. By seeing how you scroll past content, pause to watch videos, write comments, and share, the app curates your feed and makes adjustments in real time as you continue to engage with it. You don’t need to know or follow anyone to see videos you’ll like. And creators don’t need a pre-existing audience to build one. It’s a kind of massive leveling of the playing field.

That’s why someone like Nate the Hoof Guy can rack up 2.6 million followers with hoof-cleaning videos. If you’re on TikTok, I’m sure you’ve seen his content. Be honest, would you ever proactively tell a platform that you were interested in bovine podiatry? But now you’re invested in the hoof health of these cows, right? That, my friend, is the innovation of TikTok.

@natethehoofguyIs the black spot bad??? #natethehoofguy #fyp #foryoupage #hooftrimming #hoofcleaning #hoofpicking #oddlysatisfying #bedtime #naptime #hoofcare

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Furthermore, unlike Instagram’s warmly filtered photos or Facebook’s laboriously written posts, TikTok is video-first. That changes the social contract between creators and viewers. As a medium, video demands more intimacy. It exposes your voice, your facial expressions, your quirks, and your environment. That’s why TikTok rewards emotional believability.

It’s also why we see legacy influencers often succeed on Instagram but struggle on TikTok. Take Meghan Sussex, for example. In 2017, she closed her personal blog and thriving Instagram account to enter British royal life. Now, she’s back online, building a business, and navigating a very new media landscape – one where the curated polish that made her aspirational in the Instagram era now reads, to many TikTok users, as over-produced and untrustworthy.

@meghantheduchessofsusMeghan Markle's Rebrand: As Ever #meghanmarkle #asever #harryandmeghan #princeharry #royals #duchessofsus #royalfamily #greenscreen

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Contrast that with creators like @justbeingmelani, who shares her everyday experiences of marriage, motherhood, and perimenopause. No filters. No tacos in ballgowns. No exotic vacations or fancy coffees. Melani’s stripped down content about normal life has earned her over a million followers on TikTok and a profile in the New York Times.

@justbeingmelaniThis is Married Life. Choose your battles.😂. #marriedlifehumor #laundryday #teamwork #marriedlifebelike

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Modern day Storycorps

It’s exactly this kind of simple, bare bones media environment that has made it easier for people to hit record and build an audience. And in our current era, women are choosing to share stories about their lives that are more personal and complicated than ever before.

A prolific creator in this space is @kelleydaring. Kelley reads anonymous submissions about relationships and parenthood that are deeply nuanced and encompass the storytellers’ whole mix of love, hope, guilt, grief, and fear. The emotional grab bag is the same, regardless of which path they go down.

For example, here is a complex, loving story from a father:

@kelleydaring#regretfulparents

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A common theme in the stories Kelley shares is an expectation from partners and families — often well-intentioned — and a young woman’s fear of disappointing them. I imagine that the social pressure for a traditional family structure presents in different and intense ways across cultures — expressed through a general absence of #childfreebychoice creators from immigrant communities. With social media providing the only glimpse that many young people have to life outside of their immediate circles, protecting their access to honest, diverse stories becomes all the more essential.

… and then there are the DINKs

Not all storytelling is heavy. Some of it is loud, funny, and cheeky.

Enter the DINK creators, showing off their Double Income No Kids lifestyle of traveling, going on dates, and buying excessively at Costco. While tradwives center wifedom and motherhood as purpose, DINKs position their decision to not have kids as a gateway to freedom.

@letravelstyleDINK life is the life for us #dinklifestyle #dinklife #childfreebychoice

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Like #tradwives, #dinklife is an oversimplification that packages a deeper political message inside a fantasy lifestyle. And in many ways, DINKS are echoing what parents are starting to say out loud.

I love my kids. But parenthood is hard.

This is particularly poignant at a time in America when politicians are advocating for more births, without supporting healthcare, caregiving, or education for children.

And with the growing divide between policymaking elites and the citizens they’re elected to serve, people are going online to show vulnerability and transparency in ways previously considered too personal or shameful to broadcast.

@kaylakosugaHow much is cost to give birth 😅

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Their cumulative voices are reaching mainstream reporting. This week, NYT Opinion ran a story about how American policies and institutions are repeatedly failing parents — especially mothers.

@nytopinionFifteen years after graduating college, American mothers earn 42 percent less than fathers. We spoke with dozens of mothers across the United States about how motherhood has impacted their aspirations, careers and financial stability. | 🎥 @emilyholzknecht, @adam.westbrook.art #motherhood #parenting #nytopinion

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These systemic failures are the weak link in the pronatalists’ plan. And the movement to expose them — and hopefully build the support structures parents need — isn’t a coordinated campaign, but a tapestry of millions of short stories, delivered straight to the people, and inspiring others to share their own. Feeling seen and less alone. No matter your cause, this is how culture shifts.

Cat ladies, stand up

Within the next five years, nearly half of working-age women — who now outpace men in higher education — will have never married or had children. And yet they’re frequently dismissed, seldom celebrated while alive because weddings, baby showers, and funerals remain adulthood’s most prized rituals.

But solo women are showing up online too, as the heroines of their own lives and living on their own terms. Even when it’s messy, it’s ok.

@theangelagentileYou got this 💕 #doinglifealone #chores #doingitall #childfreetiktok #dating #datingadvice #single #singlelife #singlefriend #singleproblems #alone #beingalone #loneliness #childfree #childfreeproblems #childfreebychoice #childfreemillennial #childfreelife #childfreetok

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What we’re witnessing isn’t a coordinated campaign, but a movement all the same. Led by women releasing the facade and telling the truth about their lives. The love, sweat stains, joy, and loneliness of it all. There’s no one right way to live. No one right way to feel.

As our politics try to funnel women back into a monolith, social media has become the place where nuance survives.

before you go…

Scrolling through

• Diego Luna, the star and co-executive producer of Andor (a Star Wars property that, unlike other cult series I’ve written about, actually served their story), guest hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live this week. He gave a powerful monologue on President Trump’s immigration policies and the importance of immigrants in the US.

  Traditional late night lost me a long time ago, but credit to Jimmy for handing over his mic to a message this unequivocal. I’d love to know whether they flagged it in advance to the suits at ABC/Disney – which airs Jimmy’s show, owns the Star Wars franchise, and has famously struggled with the current administration – and what the internal chatter was after it aired.
  

• As Venice plays reluctant host to Jeff Bezos’ and Lauren Sánchez’s wedding, Amy Odell of Back Row has highlighted another cultural pendulum swing. Sorry Shiv Roy, apparently #quietluxury is out. We’re firmly in the era of the tacky oligarchs.

and one more thing…

Happy place

Here’s something not nuanced at all about parenthood: teens say the darndest things. Please enjoy this glorious wrap-up of teen texts from @the_leighton_show

@the_leighton_showHere they are! The most popular of all the amazing texts you shared this year. Check out my New York Times Bestseller “What Time is Noon” for hundreds more #teenager #text #funny #dadsoftiktok

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Social media is a mirror and amplifier — not an inventor — of our values. And few cultural battlegrounds today are as charged as those over family and gender roles.

This week, I’m looking at how the conversation about gender has evolved since the end of the pandemic. From tradwives to worker burnout to the manosphere, creators have tapped into something deeper than nostalgia and set the stage for the current state of gender politics and discourse in the United States.

Tradwives and the virtues of traditional femininity

A tradwife, for anyone unfamiliar with the term, is a woman who espouses and glorifies traditional gender roles in her marriage and home (often with a subtext of a certain view of Christianity). While relying on her husband to pay the bills and support the family ‘in strength and defense,’ the tradwife’s domain is maintaining the household with a sense of nostalgia for the old days. For example, a tradwife may prepare foods from scratch which most people only know from plastic containers, she may wrangle farm animals, but almost always, she births and raises children. (it should go without saying that while doing all of this, she looks immaculately put together and remarkably well-rested).

While the tradwife trend reached its peak last year, its roots sprouted around 2020/2021 — back when we were all stuck in our own homes, staring at walls needing overdue paint jobs, and living out our secret gardening and bread baking dreams. It was a perfect moment for tradwives, with their soothing aesthetic and homemaking skills, to tap into a zeitgeist and a mainstream audience that they otherwise may not have reached as effectively. And so, as things tend to go these days, they racked up views and followers, followed by lucrative partnership deals and revenue.

This dynamic was well summed up by the New York Times in 2024, when they ran two stories, ten months apart, about the same woman. The first one ran in February with the headline: “She gave birth two weeks ago. Now she’s in a beauty pageant.” By the end of the year, NYT was pondering if this woman is a “tycoon or tradwife.” The answer is yes.

The beauty queen-mother-tycoon-tradwife in question is a woman named Hannah Neeleman, a former professional dancer, Mormon, daughter-in-law of the JetBlue founder, and one of today’s most recognizable tradwives. Interestingly, in the same year that NYT gave her two mostly positive profiles, Hannah found herself on the defensive after a critical Times of London piece questioned her authenticity (bless the Brits and their skepticism).

Another high-profile tradwife is Nara Smith, whose TikTok started to go viral towards the end of 2023. Like Hannah, Nara is married to a Mormon man and lives in Utah. Unlike Hannah, Nara is not American; she grew up in Germany with a Black South African mother and a White German father. Nara fascinates people, I surmise, because we’re not used to seeing non-White non-Americans espouse such traditional American living. I also find that her videos – in which she often cooks dinner while dressed like she’s heading to the Oscars – are laced with a cheekiness that feels like she’s letting us in on a joke. But whether it’s us she’s trolling or the general tradwife performance, is unclear.

While being an online tradwife can be big business (perhaps multiple oxymorons here), it’s important to distinguish them from other homemakers who have won at capitalism, like hosting queens Ina Garten and Martha Stewart, and even from celebrity lifestyle influencers like Gwyneth Paltrow and Meghan Sussex. What makes tradwives unique is the identity and politics behind their content. As cozy and idyllic as it looks, this is not about the joy of cooking. Rather, it’s about romanticizing a lifestyle that relegates a woman’s role to homemaking, child rearing, and ceding to her husband as the top dog.

Whyyyy, we all wondered, were we so captivated by this content? A thousand think pieces, news articles, talk show segments, podcasts, university courses, and subreddits were launched to figure out why we were all so damn into tradwives. It’s perhaps most puzzling to those of us who identify as proud, progressive feminists. After decades of fighting for our careers and financial independence, even we can’t scroll past a video of a woman spending hours making bread, peanut butter, and jelly from scratch for her seemingly very patient kids.

@naraazizasmithwho remembers the other bread and jam video I did? #homemadebread #jam #peanutbutter #toddlersoftiktok #fypシ #easyrecipes

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Institutions were failing workers (especially women)

In a world where women bear disproportionate responsibilities with less rewards, there can be something aspirational, even to career-driven women, about having the comfort, time, security, and resources to be able to forgo it all. How amazing it could be to rely on an imaginary perfect person to take on all the emotional labor of making (correct) decisions for our best interest. Indeed no one has seen a tradwife stress over the price of eggs for her perpetually-stocked kitchen.

That’s why I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the timing of #tradwives coincided with worker rights trends like the Great Resignation (2021) and #quietquitting (2022). Coming out of the pandemic, corporate hustle culture was exhausting already-drained people and leading to burnout. Moreover, these movements recognized how badly our systems and institutions were failing the majority of people, and affecting women more than men.

It was only natural for people to let it out online and take back what control they could. Overachieving for your boss was out; doing the bare minimum was in. We took joy in escapism and fantasy. Who hasn’t dreamt at least once in the last five years of bucking it all and starting a farm for a ‘simpler’ life?

@empoweredachieversHigh achiever ➡️ hobby farm enthusiast #highachieverprobs #highachiever #peoplepleaser #careermindset #careermindsetcoach #giftedkidburnout #hobbyfarm #corporateburnout #overachiever

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The manosphere got legit

If tradwives offered one type of fantasy to a disenfranchised public (e.g. comfort, submission, domestic beauty), then the manosphere offered another (e.g. control, dominance, defiance).

And so, while some of us were watching the rise of tradwives, others were enjoying a formidable male counterpart, which had reached a new milestone of legitimacy. In 2020, The Joe Rogan Experience, a conspiracy theory-friendly podcast which had already been thriving on YouTube and Sirius XM, went truly mainstream in an exclusive $100M deal with Spotify. Joe, along with other ‘manosphere’ creators who believe that feminism is harmful to society, have successfully tapped into and mobilized disaffected young men across the country who are honestly struggling. And while manosphere and tradwife creators are delivering it in different ways, the core of their message is the same: things were better when gender roles were simpler.

Proof is in the numbers. Over the last five years, Hannah’s Instagram account has grown 50X from 200k to 10M, and Joe’s doubled from 9.5M followers to nearly 20M (and he has consistently been Spotify’s most-listened-to podcast for years) . In other words, by the time progressives were balking at JD Vance’s much-memed ‘childless cat ladies’ remarks in the summer of 2024, the reality is that this kind of discourse had already been normalized for the masses.

People started to feel comfortable embracing their inner-MAGA

I don’t believe that creators like Hannah, Nara, or other tradwives started making content because they necessarily wanted to influence politics. But nevertheless, their story is just as much about information as it is about culture. Their content resonated with people because it tapped into a feeling that had already been brewing within a lot of Americans across the political spectrum. And by popularizing a nostalgia for a past that never existed, they helped to embolden more extreme messaging about gender and the Trump administration’s ensuing onslaught of harmful policies that have reduced women’s reproductive rights, freedom of movement, and economic opportunity.

Where are we now?

We live in a time warp these days, both online and in ‘real life.’ In the five months since President Trump’s inauguration, we’re seeing more direct discussion online on both sides, from the pronatalist movement to the #childfreebychoice trend. Next time, we’ll talk about how people online are getting more personal than ever about the realities of parenthood and the difficult decisions women face about becoming a mother.

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Scrolling through

• It’s hard to imagine a time when abortion was not a lightning rod topic — but it wasn’t until the 1990s. This vintage episode of The Daily revisits how Newt Gringrich and the Republican party recognized and positioned abortion as a critical wedge issue that could put Democrats on the back foot.

• There’s been controversy in Australia between two baking creators over alleged recipe plagiarism. It’s raising some interesting perspectives on imitation vs inspiration in a world where small business owners pretty much have to self-promote online.

  

  @abicaswellsome big news the past few days in the baking world 🥲 it seems like there’s always some type of #cakegate drama going on!!! recipes are so incredibly hard to protect, as well as intellectual property and content. what can be done?? this is just such a sad situation all around. you never want to see someone fail, or in the trenches with people trying to cancel them, but how do you defend it even if it is “just a caramel slice.” It’s the recipe makers heart and mind. Again, it’s just sad all the way around. We may never really know, but of course perception is everything. #brookibakehouse #brooki #bakeryowner #SmallBusiness #recipes #fyp #dayinthelife #workwithme #foryou #CapCut

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• Pop Culture Happy Hour analyzed the viral spirit tunnel videos from The Jennifer Hudson Show. They are super fun to watch, but hats off to Kathy Bates for channeling how I imagine I would react in the same circumstance. #introvertsunite

  

  @jenniferhudsonshowThe cast of @matlockcbs is here today! 🤩 #thejenniferhudsonshow #jenniferhudson #jhud

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Happy place

In honor of US Mothers Day this month, meet Mika and her mom who love to look at handsome celebrities together. Wishing all moms, daughters, and mother-figures similar laughter and fun with your loved ones, whatever your choice of shared hobby may be :-)

@mikaaameeksrunning this one back for obvious reasons….JASON 🗣️😮‍💨 @Philadelphia Eagles #jalenhurts #philadelphiaeagles

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Do you remember your first online rabbit hole? Mine was about TV, specifically Mad Men, a stylized and stylish drama on AMC in the mid 2000s about people working at an NYC ad agency in the 1960s. I loved the storytelling and the high production of this show, along with the beautiful cast, and so like one does… I got obsessed.

Like a sports fan feeding on post-game analysis for hours longer than the actual play time, I chased each new episode with fan commentary. My favorite was the blog, Tom and Lorenzo, which wrote excellent episode-by-episode deep dives on characters’ costuming and how these reflected their storylines (shoutout to legendary costume designer Janie Bryant). Suddenly, I started to watch television in a new way and with a closer eye. Talented, precocious Peggy in a power pantsuit always meant something good. Yes, these analyses boosted my ego and made me feel like a discerning consumer of the craft of storytelling. But these blogs also gave me a sense of shared experience with other nerds/snobs who loved the show as much as I did, and this community compounded the anticipation I felt for new episodes to drop each week.

Today, ten years after Don Draper dreamed up the hippie coke ad in Big Sur, TV fan analysis has gotten more sophisticated and become a content genre in its own right. The kind of fan fervor which used to be relegated to comics and sci-fi has now hit the mainstream. And so, regardless of whether your show of choice is like Game of Thrones or leans more Succession, I’ve found that today’s prestige TV watching process looks more or less the same:

1. Avoid all potential spoilers at all costs, including checking your texts or reading the news, until you can get home and watch your show

2. Watch episode

3. Immediately go on TikTok to recap what you just saw

4. Cross-reference TikToks with ‘professional’ critiques on traditional outlets like Vulture or The Guardian

5. Go on YouTube for deeper dives and Taylor Swift style Easter egg hunting

6. (optional step): Rewatch the entire episode if you have time

Is this time-consuming? Yes, and also sometimes stressful. Is it necessary? Probably not. But it’s fun, and can be great for creators and platforms. These rituals offer content creators of both the traditional and P2P varieties to milk more views and engagement on a weekly basis. So for a ten-episode season, creators can meaningfully grow their accounts in a very short period.

Let’s take Severance, for example, which just finished its second season on Apple TV+. If you haven’t seen it, all you need to know for now is that the show mostly takes place in the sparse office of a company called Lumon, but nevertheless is a goldmine for online Easter egg hunts: a sci-fi mystery, commentary on corporate greed, inter-conscious love triangles, marching band choreography, and in-office goats.

Viewers loved Severance, and the numbers show it. It is now Apple TV+’s most watched show ever and is credited with producing a 126% increase in Apple TV+ sign-ups in the lead-up to its second season premiere between 1st-19th January 2025, compared to the month prior.

Creators benefited too, especially smaller accounts for whom making content on trending topics can grow their audiences and engagement. One of my favorites was the creator @claire.healey, whose presence on #booktok, meticulous notetaking and bookshelf backdrop made her a credible and thoughtful commentator.

@claire.healeyReplying to @coffee #severance #seveancetheories #marks

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Here are Claire’s TikTok engagement metrics over the last six months — tracking her posts’ likes, shares, comments, and saves. A clear ‘Severance bump’ can be seen over its second season, which ran from 17th January to 21st March 2025. Claire’s a charming creator, and I’m thrilled for more creators like her to build their audiences. (note: it’s still early in this case, but I’d love to learn more about the longer term sustainability of these metrics bumps…)

Recently, I’ve started to wonder how the scale and immediacy of today’s fan engagement might impact actual storytelling decisions. After all, Hollywood writers, producers, and studio heads are also just people living in the world, seeing the same fan theories and ships that we do. It’s hard to believe that anyone can avoid it or be immune. We know that Severance executive producer and co-director Ben Stiller certainly can’t.

So I have to ask: what impact (if any) do our TV fandoms have on the shows we love so much?

In the case of Severance, my unpopular opinion is that the story suffered. Starting with the three-year wait between Seasons 1 and 2, fan expectations soared online, and there was no way that the show could both meet those and serve the story. Simply put, Season 2 tried to do too much. Yes, there was promise for interesting storytelling around race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism. But more often than not, these nudges towards depth and tension were abandoned for meme-able moments seemingly designed more for online sharing than for narrative advancing. By the time we got to Tramell Tillman’s amazing performance with the Lumon marching band in the Season 2 finale, I was simultaneously enthralled and agitated by the flaunting of all that Apple money.

Apple also gave us a swift confirmation for a third season of the show. Fan service is nothing new (if it was, Ross and Rachel would never have ended up together), and fan organizing to save cult favorites like Arrested Development and Community are the stuff of legends. What’s new, as is usually the case with the Internet, is the scale and speed we’re operating on. And while a third Severance season is great for its talented cast and crew, Apple, and the fans who want it, it does the story a disservice. Folks, it’s ok to let stories end with bittersweet ambiguity. Like the glorious ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, we don’t need to see what happens next. I know that we live in an era where not knowing things feels obsolete, but truly not every question needs to be answered.

Let me know what you think. Do you want a Season 3 of Severance? (to be fair, even though I will do it begrudingly, I will most definitely follow the aforementioned prestige TV watching process for it!). Also, do you think Ricken is a goat? What other shows do you love to analyze? Which creators should I follow for TV recaps and Easter eggs?

Scrolling through

• Pete Davidson laments that streamers are making movies simpler so that you can half-watch them while also scrolling on your phone. Commenters argue that this is nothing new, simply a genre that’s been around forever, and criticizing it devalues longstanding categories like daytime soap operas or telenovelas, which historically cater to stay-at-home women.

  

  @boardroomA paradigm shift is coming. #movies #petedavidson #netflix

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• Amy Poehler has a new podcast, Good Hang, and went on her ex’s podcast to promote it. Talk about #adulting with grace. All great listens.

• President Trump went to my hometown last week as the commencement speaker for the University of Alabama, the alma mater of my parents (both international students) and many of my friends. There’s not been a lot of national attention on this, despite consistent reporting about Trump dismantling higher education through his antagonizing of Harvard. I can’t help but feel like this is another example of how the mainstream’s focus on elites blinds us from the bigger, nuanced picture of how the right keeps connecting with voters and winning them over.

Happy place

Because dogs may just be one of the last purely joyful places on the Internet, let’s celebrate them. Meet Sydney, a 4-year-old Heeler who’s stolen hearts and minds simply by shaking her ass. We love her brother Oliver as well, even though he doesn’t twerk.

@oliversue_sydneyWhy is she like this? 😂 #cattledog #heeler #awkward

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