Teens banned from social media might just turn to AI chatbots instead – Sherwood News
As Australia enacts a world-first ban, a survey finds more US teens are using social media — and chatbots — daily.
This week is a dark one for web-obsessed teens living Down Under (or at least they might think so), after Australia’s social media ban for children under 16 came into effect on Wednesday.
The new national law will block under-16s from accessing 10 of the largest social media platforms — including Alphabet’s YouTube, Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, and ByteDance’s TikTok — by banning their accounts, making Australia the first country in the world to enact a policy of this kind.
The outcomes of the ban will be followed closely by regulators around the globe, even as it draws criticism from young campaigners, free speech advocates, and, naturally, the social media companies that will face fines of up to AU$49.5 million (~$33 million) for “serious or repeated” breaches.
Social media has undeniably become more prevalent in the lives of young people everywhere. On Tuesday, Pew Research Center published an update for 2025 to its survey on teens and social media, which found record numbers of Americans aged 13-17 using these apps and sites — including huge shares that visit YouTube (76%) and TikTok (61%) every single day.
Of those, an alarming number of teens reported being on those platforms “almost constantly” (17% and 21% for YouTube and TikTok, respectively), a figure that had increased for the three largest platforms year over year.
Perhaps more concerning, though, is Pew’s findings about young people’s AI chatbot use, marking the first time the survey has included questions about the tech. Roughly two-thirds (64%) of surveyed American teens reported ever using chatbots like ChatGPT and Character.AI, with 28% saying they use the tools daily.
With the ubiquity and frequency of chatbot use rising — just this week, ChatGPT was said to be nearing 900 million weekly active users — there’s a good chance that this tech could have an even greater effect on teens in the coming years than social media does now.
From helping students with their homework to acting as an online companion, a growing number of young people are turning to AI, and the impact that is already having on mental health is well documented. In the absence of scrolling, this might only become more profound.
The global film industry officially has its second billion-dollar film of the year, as Disney’s “Zootopia 2” surged past the $1 billion box office mark in just 17 days. The other billion-dollar film this year, the live-action “Lilo & Stitch,” was also made by Disney.
“Zootopia” was the fastest to reach 10 figures of any animated film. The animated hit, which had the highest-grossing global debut of the year over Thanksgiving weekend, has benefited from massive numbers in China.
Disney also logged two billion-dollar films last year with “Inside Out 2” and “Moana 2.” (The latter also came out over the Thanksgiving holiday.) The only other film to cross the mark in 2024 was “Deadpool and Wolverine,” which featured Disney’s IP.
Most of the biggest songs of 2025 aren’t from 2025.
The day after his assassination in September, Charlie Kirk’s Wikipedia page was viewed over 170 times per second, or almost 15 million times, according to figures from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Like with most other years, the top entries of the year reflected the fact that millions flock to the platform to learn more about political figures, films, and fatalities.
Though there’s been much talk about the impact of AI-generated search summaries and chatbots on Wikipedia — not least from the platform itself — it’s still clearly a major go-to resource for anyone looking to learn a little about a lot online, especially if this week’s year-end figures are anything to go by.
Though there’s been much talk about the impact of AI-generated search summaries and chatbots on Wikipedia — not least from the platform itself — it’s still clearly a major go-to resource for anyone looking to learn a little about a lot online, especially if this week’s year-end figures are anything to go by.
A new survey indicates US adults across all age groups are increasingly taking a break from constant breaking news.
If you were asked to name the person who saw the biggest spike in Google searches across 2025, you might plump for a pope, perhaps, or a major political figure. Unless you were one particular Polymarket user, you maybe wouldn’t have put too much money on d4vd, a popular 20-year-old singer who reportedly remains an active suspect in the death of a teen girl.
However, when Google revealed its Year in Search 2025 today — a feature that, importantly, seems to reflect the figures and topics that have seen searches spike from last year, rather than overall search volume — d4vd, whose hits like “Romantic Homicide” and “Here With Me” have racked up billions of Spotify streams, sat atop the “People” section, beating Kendrick Lamar for the top spot.
As people in the business of making charts all day, you could say that we’re pretty au fait with Google Trends data. Even so, we can admit that Polymarket user 0xafEe may be a true savant when it comes to understanding what people are using the search engine for (though there are also allegations that the user is a Google insider or had other access to the information).
In any case, thanks to a series of what are now proving to be very prescient positions on Polymarket’s “#1 Searched Person on Google This Year” market, 0xafEe has made a medium fortune in the last 24 hours. There was a ~$10,600 “yes” position on d4vd himself — now worth more than $200,000 — as well as “no” positions across other candidates for the title, such as Donald Trump, Pope Leo, and Bianca Censori, all of which have profited substantially. All told, 0xafEe made just shy of $1.2 million on the market.
