This is a headline straight out of 2005 (or 1995): “The World Wide Web is Serving Up Sex and Drug Pictures to Minors”. Very much a moral panic headline.<p>I wonder what material impact seeing a video of boobs or people doing drugs actually has on minors. Like are they supposedly thinking, “I am going to go have unsafe sex now because I saw people do it on TikTok”?<p>Social media is so ephemeral and detached from the actual physical acts depicted in it that I don’t see how seeing “immoral” posts would materially affect a child’s behavior. If your kid is receiving and retaining subliminal moral instruction from browsing social media it means they are not getting it from elsewhere.
This is obviously an anti-China propaganda piece. It's not that Xi is throwing TikTok-preloaded Xiaomis onto Amish villages from the sky. That "WAP" song was THE mainstream last year, and it's widely known that Snapchat, for example, shows ads/stories that are way beyond what would be considered normal to show to kids.
I’ve been looking at porn since I was 11. I feel hypersexualized but there was no stopping me from going on Bangbros lol. Kids are going to expose themselves to this material out of curiosity and hormones.
In our family, we've given our kids dumbphones and (I kid you not) pagers. They can play with their friends' phones, but that's obviously pretty limited. And thanks to Covid, we've been much better about getting the kids to keep to themselves and focus on classes. They're 11 and 9, so we'll see how it goes when they get older.
No child is going to be mentally scarred for seeing softcore porn or someone doing a bong rip. I don’t think there is anything that bad on TikTok that a teenager cannot handle it.<p>It says in the article that parents have to approve accounts for children under 18 anyways. If you let your kid on the internet without supervision they are probably going to see the worst things imaginable, thats the price of unfettered communication. Don’t let your kid on TikTok if you want to shelter them.
It's not just TikTok, Youtube also has similar problems:<p>- The disturbing YouTube videos that are tricking children: <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-39381889" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-39381889</a><p>- YouTube is reportedly pointing kids to thousands of disturbing, violent, and inappropriate videos: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/youtube-is-reportedly-pointing-kids-to-thousands-of-disturbing-violent-and-inappropriate-videos/articleshow/61569050.cms" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/youtube-is-reportedly-po...</a><p>- On YouTube, a network of paedophiles is hiding in plain sight: <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtube-pedophile-videos-advertising" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtube-pedophile-videos-adv...</a>