Emily van der Nagel

@emvdn.bsky.social

I research social media, platform studies, and digital intimacies. My book, OnlyFans, comes out in October 2026 https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=onlyfans--9781509567188

Filming a Get Ready With Me video to introduce my students to Social Media Lab... turns out moisturising, cleansing, AND remembering the key critical questions of the unit is hard work, who knew! (influencers knew)

A woman in her bathroom wears glasses, a black jumper, and a lapel microphone. She is squirting cleanser from a bottle into a small white towel.

Please, AI slop scammers, there's no need to run my new book's blurb through whatever program you're using and promise me "discoverability" "opportunities". I wrote my book for human people to read. Would love to talk to human journalists/writers/podcasters/interviews! But not... this.

A screenshot of an email offering Dr van der Nagel "several opportunities" to "potentially increase" her book's "discoverability"

First minor Instagram suspension for posting about a book I wrote. This is going to be an interesting social media case study, actually - how to post about a book on OnlyFans, titled, "OnlyFans" with the kind of content moderation challenges faced by OnlyFans creators all the time

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The latest in the constant race to optimise recipe websites for maximum datafied attention metrics: requiring a whole ass user account for the privilege to open the recipe in print view so you can see it without a hundred popups crowding your screen

A screenshot of a website popup from Yummy Toddler Food prompting, "sign up to our mailing list to gain access to print this page"

Finding out that some universities* are cancelling classes next week because of the Canvas outage: @dangolding.com "I'm sure there will be absolutely no reflection on what this means for our teaching's dependency on external platforms though" *not Monash, we use Moodle

I booked tickets. I invited my mum and sister. I prepaid for a city carpark. I took the toll road from work to the city. I planned to meet for ramen so we'd make the show on time. I parked my car and got a text that the SHOW WAS CANCELLED (not Reuben Kaye's fault feel better soon king)

Hello Bluesky friends, I wrote a book about OnlyFans that is coming out SOON. Would you use this book as a set reading in your course/unit/subject? Would you like an inspection copy? Let me know! I'm thinking media studies (especially social media/internet studies), sociology, gender studies etc

So happy, and a bit overwhelmed, to find out my DECRA project, 'Social, ethical and regulatory challenges in the social media porn industry', has been awarded. What an immense privilege to have the next three years to dedicate to research!

So glad to have been part of the UQ symposium 'darkness to hyper-visibility' Really rich, thoughtful work from scholars of creator visibilities, a wonderful keynote on platform epistemologies from Kelley Cotter, and the opportunity to present my own work on OnlyFans

Two presenters in front of a screen that says Darkness to Hyper-Visibility A woman stands in front of a screen with a screenshot that reads, "OnlyFans: Sign up to support your favourite creators"

This weekend I'm MCing my first funeral (my grandfather died at 90 years old and I probably do the most public speaking in my family) and the next day hosting a baby shower for a friend. LIFE HEY.

"Once you’ve built the system to block kids from YouTube, you’ve built the system to block anyone from anything. And that system will be irresistible to future governments with different ideas about what content people need to be 'protected' from." — @mmasnick.bsky.social in @techdirt.com

Australia Completely Loses The Plot, Plans To Ban Kids From Watching YouTube

Last fall, heavily influenced by Jonathan Haidt’s extremely problematic book, Australia announced that it was banning social media for everyone under the age of 16. This was already a horrifically …

techdirt.com

Pleased to be on a panel with Alita Brydon of Bad Dates of Melbourne to get into dating and digital intimacy today! 💕🖱️🍆👉👌✨💻 Creative Directions is our annual student-run festival of ideas at Monash and Hinge or Cringe is a chef's kiss of a panel title, I reckon.

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It was incredible to watch this disaster unfold over several years: site owners increasingly competed for Google search traffic and placement in SERPs, abandoning every other avenue of reader engagement and retention, making their sites and the web worse. Then Google did this

Rusty Foster@rusty.todayintabs.com · last yr.

Hey is it bad if google AI search results stop people from leaving google dot com 99% of the time? All our news and information creators can survive just fine with one percent of their previous search traffic right? I’m sure it’s fine. www.404media.co/googles-ai-i...

Yesterday the Pew Research Center released a report based on the internet browsing activity of 900 U.S. adults which found that Google users who encounter an Al summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than use 's who don't encounter an Al summary. To be precise, only [my emphasis] 1 percent of users who encountered an Al summary clicked the link to the page Google is summarizing.