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Reporting Highlights

National Geographic •

What is AI-induced psychosis?

Armed with her camera phone and her glasses, Kendra started filming TikToks with a mission: to callout the psychiatrist that she believed had wronged her. Standing in front of her fridge, staring directly into the camera lens of the phone held in her hands, she began to record video after video, interacting with her followers’ questions in real time. This went on for days.  Kendra posted religiously. Her marathons would stretch on for so long that they could be used to track the time. Her first...
The Cut •

Mold, Mold Everywhere

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Every night for the past three years, Brittney Gaskin diligently turned the couches in her living room into beds for herself, her son and daughter, and her husband. She ran air purifiers almost constantly and regularly fogged her San Marcos, Texas, home with a solution of hypochlorous acid to sanitize the air. As much as possible, she kept her children outside, often jum...
WIRED •

The Anonymous YouTubers Street-Racing Through New York

The first time that MBox ever went speeding around Times Square in New York City, he didn’t know it was going to change his life.He had slipped into the car of his friend, a driver known online as Squeeze or Squeeze.benz, who MBox says was 21 years old—and set off for a drive in the early hours of the morning. The duo was armed with nothing but a camera, Squeeze’s BMW, and the shared desire to “go viral.”The video they ended up filming that night shows them running red lights, narrowly avoiding...
Business Insider •

For God, for country, for rain

It's 9:30 a.m., and Augustus Doricko, the mulleted 24-year-old founder of the cloud-seeding company Rainmaker, is clutching a coffee. He and his colleagues spent the prior evening hopping from one Las Vegas hot spot to the next, gorging on "monstrously large" steaks and smoking cigars. They tried to end the night at Bruno Mars' jazz club, The Pinky Ring, but fled due to some sort of metaphysical disturbance."The vibe was off," Doricko said. "What you'll come to find, should we get to be friends...
The Verge •

The teens making friends with AI chatbots

Aaron is one of millions of young people, many of whom are teenagers, who make up the bulk of Character.AI’s user base. More than a million of them gather regularly online on platforms like Reddit to discuss their interactions with the chatbots, where competitions over who has racked up the most screen time are just as popular as posts about hating reality, finding it easier to speak to bots than to speak to real people, and even preferring chatbots over other human beings. Some users say they’v
Insider •

She spent her inheritance sending money to TikTok Livestreamers. What started as a game turned into addiction.

Before losing most of her inheritance on TikTok, Cindi White wasn't very interested in social media.

White, a 65-year-old former insurance investigator who lives alone in Burlington County, New Jersey, spent the year she retired traveling — dining in Dubai, sipping cocktails by the sea in Montego Bay, Jamaica, or strolling among monks in Kathmandu, Nepal.

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But in 2020, the pandemic hal
The Verge •

The fight over what’s real (and what’s not) on dissociative identity disorder TikTok

As a result of this reduced stigma around mental health — at least in certain online communities — the way that conditions like dissociative identity disorder appear online has started to look very different to what clinicians are used to. On DID TikTok, some creators present their alters as having unique and distinct genders and styles, like the Winter System, whose alter Mason uses an ice-blonde wig, electric blue-colored contacts, and drawn-on face tattoos to make himself feel more at home in
Cosmopolitan •

The Doll Mommies Are Fighting

Getting hit with severe COVID-19 should have been the most stressful thing to happen to Kiersten Haley last January. In a feverish fog, the 28-year-old military vet could think of little else besides fighting off the virus—even as she was at the center of a separate raging war. The latter was happening on TikTok, with hundreds of strangers swarming her account, denouncing her as selfish, telling her she deserved the hate flooding her comments (“You should be ashamed!!! ASHAMED!!!!”). As she phys
Rolling Stone •

They Hired a P.I. to Find Missing Loved Ones. He Turned Them Into YouTube Content

Ashley Easterling’s son had been missing for 40 days when she says she got a call from a stranger offering to help find him.

She dropped off her 30-year-old son, Robert “Alex” Easterling, at an acquaintance’s house in Pickens, Mississippi, on April 20, 2022, and he had not been seen or heard from since. The family had conducted three large-scale ground searches, used drones and dog teams, and done everything to try to locate Alex — but they felt their local sheriff’s department hadn’t made any
BuzzFeed News •

After These People Tried Erotic Hypnosis, They Couldn’t Recognize Themselves

When 31-year-old Ava was first introduced to the Bambi Sleep files in summer 2019 — under the guidance of someone we’re calling James, a self-described hypnotist whom she’d met through the website Seeking Arrangements — she thought it was going to be fun. (BuzzFeed News is using pseudonyms to refer to the people in this story to protect their identities, due to their fears about potential retaliation and the nature of the traumatic events discussed in this article. Our sources had not brought fo
The Daily Beast •

Why These Men Are Risking It All to Grow Bigger Dicks

Miguel didn’t have any desire to try and grow his penis until he broke it. The fateful moment happened in January 2020, during a particularly vigorous session of anal sex with his then-wife. Although he experienced ongoing pain after the incident, and difficulty maintaining an erection, Miguel’s doctor wrote off his attempts to get help as a mental health issue. That was, of course, until his penis started to bend.

A visit to a urologist confirmed Miguel’s worst fears: He had developed a condit
BuzzFeed News •

The Underground World Of Virtual Reality Sex Parties

VRChat — the world’s most popular social virtual reality platform — bans sexually explicit content in its public spaces. But behind the scenes, attendees at one of its most prominent underground sex clubs were starting to gather for an invitation-only event. It was raining, so the club’s expansive roof terrace was slick and wet. In a corner of the rooftop, a muscled white man with fox ears and a prominent erection made small talk with a busty, purple-haired fox woman half his size. Her only clot
The Verge •

Sensual ASMR has boomed on YouTube — but creators are facing a crackdown

She wasn’t alone. According to ASMR University, there are roughly 500,000 ASMR (an abbreviation of autonomous sensory meridian response) channels and 25 million ASMR videos on YouTube alone, and the hashtag #asmr has attracted more than 460 billion views on TikTok. Creators in the space create sound-based content designed to elicit the sensation of ASMR in viewers, often attracting millions of views in the process. The niche involves the recording of specific sounds — often things like tapping o
The Verge •

Why the worst recipes imaginable are blowing up on TikTok

“I was perfectly willing to eat random things for the entertainment of my friends. I would take a ketchup packet from the diner and suck it up or eat an entire block of Parmesan cheese,” remembers Betchik, now 23, who makes and sells jewelry from their basement in Ohio. “The more I did that, the more I started realizing I could do this on the internet. I thought that I would be able to entertain people.”

Betchik is one of TikTok’s premiere rage-bait chefs: influencers who make videos of gruesom
Rolling Stone •

Getting Blackmailed Was Their Kink. Then It Went Too Far

On the rare occasions that Tris engages consensual blackmail, they usually assume that they’re safe. The act – which requires dominatrixes to “blackmail” their subordinates in exchange for cash, using sensitive or humiliating information provided to them by the client, or “sub” – is supposed to be fun.


Of course, it doesn’t always end that way. Tris learned that the hard way several years ago, after they sent nude pictures of themself to a domme. “Without my consent, [the domme] tweeted these
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