People Like Having Too Much Content, Says Swiss Study on Information Abundance
Plus: FTC loses Facebook case, building a fertility abundance agenda, ICE staffer arrested in underage sex sting, and more...
"What if people appreciate having an abundance of content and communication, more than they feel overloaded by it?" Rasmus Klein Nielsen, a communication professor at the University of Copenhagen, recently asked on X.
That may feel like an occasion to dust off that old Marcia Brady "sure, Jan" meme. But Nielsen links to new research suggesting the counterintuitive position here may be right.
"We found that appreciation for abundance was about twice as common as overload," write Anne Schulz and a team of European researchers in a new paper published in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media.
You are reading Sex & Tech, from Elizabeth Nolan Brown. Get more of Elizabeth's sex, tech, bodily autonomy, law, and online culture coverage.
Information abundance "is characterized by a vast, readily accessible supply of information available through various sources (e.g., apps, channels) and devices (e.g., smartphones, radios)," per the paper. Sometimes people do not perceive an abundance of information. When they do, it may spur feelings of overload—"a state in which the amount of available information exceeds human information processing capacities"—but also of appreciation, "where an individual values the availability of abundant information" and perceives it "as helpful, stimulating, or exciting."
Schulz's team developed something called the Information Overload and Information Appreciation Scale and used it to assess people's responses to information abundance across digital news, entertainment, and personal communication options.
Interestingly, some people—especially younger people—reported high levels of both overload and appreciation, highlighting how these aren't mutually exclusive responses.
Both responses remind me a bit of a book I read earlier this year, Ysabel Gerrard's The Kids Are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life, in which Gerrard talked to a lot of young people about their digital experiences and found our common narrative about them all being distressed and negatively affected by social media was too simplistic. They were distressed by social media, at times, but they also perceived a lot of benefits from it.
This is something I think the most measured and interesting writers on technology understand—that of course there are downsides to many of our uses, but these can coexist alongside many upsides. (That doesn't sound terribly profound, I know, but it's something that somehow seems to elude, like, 75 percent of people opining about tech.)
Anyway, back to that information abundance study. It was conducted in Switzerland, which means we can't say for sure whether the results would hold in a U.S. context. There has, however, been some previous research—including in the U.S.—to support the idea that people can have positive feelings about information abundance.
The study involved 2,049 participants, roughly half female, with an average age of 45 years old. It found "younger individuals reporting higher overload and higher appreciation levels in news and entertainment contexts…suggesting ambivalent perceptions of information abundance. Gender differences emerge in the news and entertainment contexts." Men reported more appreciation for news and entertainment abundance; there were no significant sex differences when it came to news overload.
Meta Isn't a Monopoly
A federal court on Tuesday dismissed the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) antitrust complaint against Meta. The FTC had accused Facebook's parent company Meta of illegally using monopoly power and sought to break up Meta by requiring it to divest of Instagram and WhatsApp. Its main beef with the company was that it had acquired those other apps, even though U.S. regulators did not object to the acquisitions at the time.
The case was first brought by the first Trump administration. A U.S. District court dismissed it in 2021. But the court gave leave for the FTC to file an amended complaint, and it did.
Now, a U.S. District Court has again dismissed the case.
"Believing that the only constant in the world was change, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus posited that no man can ever step into the same river twice. In the online world of social media, the current runs fast, too. The landscape that existed only five years ago when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust suit has changed markedly. While it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down," wrote Judge James E. Boasberg in his decision.
Boasberg was responding to the FTC's decision to define the relevant market here—"personal social networking"—in a way that excluded TikTok, YouTube, and many other platforms, which allowed the FTC to claim Meta had more of a monopoly in that market than it actually does.
One of the reasons Boasberg rejected the FTC's market definition involves an experiment conducted by economist John List. "He recruited 6,000 people and had them install a device that tracked how much time they spent on each of their phone's apps," Boasberg explains. After tracking their app usage for four weeks, List offered half the group $4 for each hour that they shaved off their Facebook and Instagram use, for a period of four weeks:
The experiment thus made it more expensive to use Meta's apps and so simulated what would happen if Meta exercised monopoly power (or, if one accepts the FTC's view, what would happen if Meta further exercised that power). It worked: people in the treatment group reduced the time they spent on Facebook or Instagram by about two-thirds.By measuring which apps users reallocated that time to, List could test
which apps they considered the next-best thing.Among people paid to use Facebook less, the app that they transferred the greatest share of time to was YouTube. […] The second-biggest share went to Instagram. Third was TikTok.
Turning to the group paid to use Instagram less, the app they reallocated the most time to was YouTube.
You can read the full decision here.
"Today's win means not only will consumers continue to be able to enjoy the products and services at issue in this case, but more generally that a more subjective approach to antitrust that would shift the focus away from consumers is unlikely to be adopted by the courts in the future," said Jennifer Huddleston of the Cato Institute in a statement.
The FTC's theory of harm in this case was weird. It argued that Facebook's pricing was monopolistic even though consumers paid nothing to use Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp.
Increasingly, we've seen today's antitrust zealots try to stretch the traditional bounds of antitrust law and play fast and loose with definitions in order to use antitrust as a cudgel against tech companies. Thankfully, we've also seen the courts repeatedly reject these tactics.
A Fertility Abundance Agenda?
Continuing with the abundance theme today, British scientist and writer Ruxandra Teslo is calling for a "fertility abundance agenda." I don't necessarily agree with all of her solutions, which are heavy on government action, but I do appreciate her focus on boosting birth rates by helping to extend women's reproductive options and lifespan, rather than attempting to turn back the societal clock.
Writing in The New York Times, Teslo notes that "for years, pronatalist policy in the United States has been largely conservative, emphasizing earlier childbearing and implicitly asking women to trade autonomy for family formation. But this message does not resonate with young women." And "asking young women to choose between autonomy and family repels the very group whose decisions will shape our demographic future."
"A society that claims to value families shouldn't treat the ability to have one as a test of luck or wealth. It shouldn't force women to reorganize their entire lives around a biological deadline while offering little support when that deadline approaches," Teslo continues. "What we're asking for is hardly radical: a system that treats fertility as a legitimate part of health care, and recognizes that building a full life and building a family are goals that coexist for most women."
Follow-up: Marriage Myths
On Monday, I wrote about 12th-grade girls being more uncertain about marriage now than girls were 30 years ago. The Substacker Cartoons Hate Her (CHH) takes up the topic of marriage hesitancy today, attributing some of it to the fact that social media and personal essays actually paint a negatively skewed view of marriage (since that's what sells/gets engagement). But many common myths about marriage—like that marriages are less stable than ever, or that falling marriage rates are a product of women choosing education and career over family, or that high-earning men don't want to marry—simply aren't true, CHH points out:
Your "average" married couple in 2025 married later in life, has more money and more education than your average married couple in 1970. They are also less likely to get divorced. The divorce rate is not skyrocketing, and people are not walking away from marriage due to the aforementioned skyrocketing divorce rate. You have been tricked by Big Personal Essay.
More here.
More Sex & Tech News
• A man who works as an auditor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was picked up in a Bloomington, Minnesota, police sting after offering to pay a police officer posing as a 17-year-old for sex. "When he was arrested, he said, 'I'm ICE, boys,'" Bloomington Police Chief Booker Hodges said at a press conference. "Well, unfortunately for him, we locked him up."
• Nat Purser, a senior policy advocate at Public Knowledge, rebuts the idea, promulgated by people like Joel Wertheimer, that we must treat Big Tech like big tobacco. "Tech policy ideas come in waves. There was the privacy and surveillance wave, the antitrust wave, the disinformation wave, and now an AI wave," writes Purser:
Each reinterpreted the internet's problems through the lens of the moment, and some combination of legal viability, political salience, and public appetite determined what stuck. So it's striking that in 2025, we're still seeing sweeping Section 230 reform proposals — as if the last 10 years of jurisprudence and litigation never happened.
Joel Wertheimer's piece "Treat Big Tech Like Big Tobacco" argued that the harms of social media resemble nicotine addiction and should be treated similarly. He proposed to do this by stripping social media platforms that use reinforcement learning-based recommendation algorithms of their Section 230 immunity, letting tort law force them to "internalize" the costs of attention addiction. The comparison is arresting, but both it and the proposed solution unravel under close scrutiny.
• "Virginia's government cannot force you to read a book in one-hour chunks, and it cannot force you to watch a movie or documentary in state-preferred increments. That does not change when the speech in question happens online," said Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center. NetChoice is suing over a Virginia law that would require social media platforms to verify user ages and impose one-hour limits on social media use by people under age 16 unless they have parental consent to scroll more.
• Another study—this one from the nonprofit Phoenix Center—suggests age verification laws are ineffective.
• Culture writer Katherine Dee traces a line from Gamergate to the alt-right to today's young-ish Republican staffers group chatting about Hitler, and explores the way "the language of the Internet: trolling and mockery" fueled these transitions. "One has to wonder if an administration now posting AI-generated meme slop would have done so had they spent less time on Twitter. I tend to believe they wouldn't," writes Dee.
