Mia Khalifa: The Cost of Clicks

The Cost of Clicks is a fiercely reported, propulsive portrait of the woman millions came to know as Mia Khalifa-from Beirut to suburban Maryland, from a viral storm to a deliberate rebuilding of work, voice, and boundaries. Moving between intimate scenes and lucid analysis, the book shows how a headline eclipsed a person-and what it took to reclaim one. It unpacks the machinery that turns attention into money and stigma: the platform incentives, the contract fine print, the moral clauses, and the reputational debt that lingers long after the feed scrolls on.
Part biography, part survival manual for public life, The Cost of Clicks asks a blunt question-what do we pay to be seen, and what does it cost to be seen as human again? Built from public records, interviews, and contemporaneous accounts (with reconstructed scenes transparently noted), this is a story about agency, consequence, and the hard work of starting over. For readers of So You've Been Publicly Shamed, Trick Mirror, and No Filter, this is the rare internet story that refuses to flatten its subject-and shows, step by step, how a life can be rebuilt beyond the algorithm.