It can be both.
My husband and I met through an online forum, and were friends for a long time before we decided to try a romantic relationship.
I think it’s a fallacy to assume “online” only means dating sites these days. Many people’s social lives are online, so that’s where they meet friends and partners
I teach beginning readers, and the best guess I have is, they’re sight words (high frequency words that don’t follow phonetic rules - you just have to recognize them on sight).
That being said, I don’t know what good just having these words around will do. Sure, you have to be able to recognize them, but there’s no context if they’re just randomly on stairs.