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ysabel

@ysabel.bsky.social

1.4K followers 410 following 470 posts

• qualitative social science academic researching tech + young identities • new book out with @ucpress: THE KIDS ARE ONLINE https://tinyurl.com/jv33yjaf • words in @guardian @WIRED @WSJ @glamour • she/her find me @ ysabelgerrard.net/home

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ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · Oct 21

I feel so proud to announce that my first book - The Kids Are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life - will be published in March 2025, by @ucpress.bsky.social 🫶🏼

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ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 3d

Well

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 3d

A bit late to this one, but: “Globally, among babies born in 2000, a staggering 1.6m girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. This year that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.”

www.economist.com/leaders/2025...

The stunning decline of the preference for having boys

Millions of girls were aborted for being girls. Now parents often lean towards them

www.economist.com

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 3d

V excited to read Cory Doctorow’s new book - “The experiences we enjoyed in the early days of social media and on-demand apps turned out to be unsustainable; the services that were initially free or subsidized would have to pay for themselves eventually.”

www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

The Age of Enshittification

In a new book, the technology critic Cory Doctorow expands on a coinage that has become bleakly relevant, in Silicon Valley and beyond.

www.newyorker.com

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ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 7d

Maybe I’m misunderstanding but I’m not seeing the USP here? Or is their strategy just to create a carbon copy and hope it sticks better than the others?

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

OpenAI Launches Video Generator App to Rival TikTok and YouTube

The company’s new social media app allows users to create short videos with audio from text prompts and insert themselves in AI-generated scenes.

www.wsj.com

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 7d

I am so unfathomably late to this party, but aren’t audiobooks great?!

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 9d

TW: disordered eating

This story highlights precisely how difficult it is to blame social media (Instagram, here) outright for someone’s health condition, while also recognising the app’s blatant harms to people like Karolina, and to others within the same community. www.thecut.com/article/karo...

The Woman Who Ate Only Fruit

Karolina Krzyzak went to Bali to meet the raw-vegan influencers she’d followed for years. She never made it back home.

www.thecut.com

Reposted by ysabel

emily moonlight @threnody.bsky.social · 26d

hi, cis folks!

the WSJ endangered trans lives with false reporting yesterday. it’s still accepted as truth by many, regardless of it being false. the article’s still up with a little note. it needs full retraction.

it's not even a phone call—it's email. you can do this.

contact info below.🧵⬇️

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article detailed how an internal law enforcement bulletin said that ammunition recovered following the Charlie Kirk shooting was engraved with expressions of "transgender and anti-fascist ideology." Justice Department officials later urged caution about the bulletin by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, saying it may not accurately reflect the messages on the ammunition, and the article was updated Thursday to reflect that.

This editor's note was appended on Friday, Sept. 12, after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said the engravings included one that said "Hey fascist!" along with other messages and symbols. He gave no indication that the ammunition included any transgender references.

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ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 26d

Lol exactly. It also says in the article that some schools have now banned iPods etc, but I’ll bet the people enacting the new bans love listening to music in their downtime, just like the kids want to do…

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 26d

“Mike Givens, 51, remembers listening to his Walkman on the bus but being instructed to leave it in his locker during school hours. He now belongs to a Reddit forum for iPod enthusiasts that has been flooded with students scrambling to prepare for phone bans.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/s...

Their Schools Banned Phones. Out Came the iPods and Cassette Players.

www.nytimes.com

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ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 27d

‘In December, Google sent an internal guideline to its contractors working on Gemini that they were no longer allowed to “skip” prompts for lack of domain expertise, including on healthcare topics…’

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 27d

And this, reader, is why the AI Overview sucks:

“One work day, her task was to enter details on chemotherapy options for bladder cancer, which haunted her because she wasn’t an expert on the subject.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart

Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent

www.theguardian.com

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ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 29d

And from Pete Etchells: ‘“It’s really difficult to craft a story that explains the complexity of the research literature, but still gives people something to take away with them to do. And that’s what parents are craving”.’

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 29d

Candice Odgers, quoted in the piece: ‘“if our goal is addressing the main causes and contributors to youth mental health, then social media is not the logical place to start”.’

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · 29d

If you have a spare 15 minutes today and care about the kids X smartphone debate, then read this excellent, excellent article: www.tes.com/magazine/tea...

Is Jonathan Haidt right about smartphones?

In ‘The Anxious Generation’, Haidt makes the case that social media and smartphones have ‘rewired’ today’s teenagers, but his critics say the evidence tells us something very different - and that bann...

www.tes.com

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ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · Sep 6

‘Alison Bennett, a mom in Los Angeles, has been going "full '90s" in her efforts to avoid buying her 8-year-old a phone. Bennett bought her an MP3 player for music, rents DVDs for movies, and gets paper delivery of the Los Angeles Times.’

www.businessinsider.com/tin-can-land...

Tin Can is a 'landline' for kids. It comes as more parents are trying to keep their kids from cellphones.

Tin Can is a kid-friendly WiFi phone that replicates an old-fashioned landline. It's aimed at parents who want to delay giving their kids a cellphone.

www.businessinsider.com

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ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · Sep 6

I am quite late to discovering this article in @thecut.com (lovely new baby etc), but it is *wild* and well worth a read if you have a spare bit of time:

www.thecut.com/article/kend...

Who Was Cyberbullying Kendra Licari’s Teen Daughter?

For a year, parents and school officials searched for the person behind the vicious, relentless texts. The culprit was under their noses all along.

www.thecut.com

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · Sep 2

Exactly - by the time they reach the ‘real world’ they’ll probably have to adapt to a newer tech anyway 🤷🏻‍♀️

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · Sep 2

In the article one of the interviewees (an OF creator) says she suspects the most successful people on the platform already had a following of some sort. I haven’t used OF so I’m not sure what the interface is/how you ‘discover’ new people but if it’s anything like social media I guess this tracks!

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · Sep 2

Vice voces for all!

(🫠)

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · Sep 2

“The median OnlyFans creator makes just $180 per month. The top 1 percent of accounts make 33 percent of all the money, and the top 10 percent gobble up 73 percent of the funds paid out.”

www.townandcountrymag.com/society/mone...

The Rise of the Campus OnlyFans Side Hustle

Remember when coeds made some extra cash stacking books at the library or working a shift at a restaurant? Now, with tuition skyrocketing and talk of entrepreneurship and fast and easy millions in the...

www.townandcountrymag.com

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ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · Sep 2

“…members of Gen Z appear to be mining the past to enrich their present lives — especially by fostering a greater appreciation for offline living.”

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · Sep 2

Here, nostalgia is argued to be a productive force shaping Gen Z’s relationship w/tech.

“…nostalgia is, counterintuitively, a future-oriented endeavor. We draw on it to resolve our dissatisfactions in the present and to move forward with hope and determination.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/24/o...

Opinion | Why Gen Z Is Resurrecting the 1990s

www.nytimes.com

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · Sep 2

I like this quote: “Contrary to much popular opinion, college is not in the information transfer business; we are in the identity formation business.”

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ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · Sep 2

“Tuesday is the 1,000th day since ChatGPT’s release. In that short time, it’s already clear that the arrival of software that can generate unlimited amounts of OK-ish text will devalue many kinds of writing.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o...

Opinion | Students Hate Them. Universities Need Them. The Only Real Solution to the A.I. Cheating Crisis.

www.nytimes.com

ysabel @ysabel.bsky.social · Aug 26

To be clear, and as ever, you can’t straightforwardly place all blame on ChatGPT for this tragic situation, as there are so many other motivators.

But you can, I think, make a very strong argument for its partial culpability.