TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale

Related ongoing thread: <i>Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43704382">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43704382</a>

Haidt is not the world&#x27;s most careful data analyst [0], so a determined skeptic would probably not find this persuasive. But I think he&#x27;s been directionally correct about all his major points in the past decade:<p>* Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms [1]<p>* Social media is making many people a little worse off and it makes some people a <i>lot</i> worse off<p>* having our phones on us all the time is bad for just about everything that requires sustained attention [2], including flirting and dating [3]<p>* Technology won&#x27;t solve this problem. AI will make things worse [4]. If TikTok gets banned and some slightly more benevolent version takes it place, we&#x27;re still headed in the wrong direction. What we need is culture change, which Haidt is trying his darndest at. Hats off to him.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matthewbjane.github.io&#x2F;blog-posts&#x2F;blog-post-7.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matthewbjane.github.io&#x2F;blog-posts&#x2F;blog-post-7.html</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;03&#x2F;23&#x2F;business&#x2F;jonathan-haidt-smartphones-coddling.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;03&#x2F;23&#x2F;business&#x2F;jonathan-haidt-s...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thecritic.co.uk&#x2F;its-the-phones-stupid&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thecritic.co.uk&#x2F;its-the-phones-stupid&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sexual-culture.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;its-obviously-the-phones" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sexual-culture.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;its-obviously-the-phones</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;04&#x2F;726709657&#x2F;sometimes-fascinating-sometimes-excruciating-fall-hums-with-energy#:~:text=But%20his%20best,its%20best%20moments." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;06&#x2F;04&#x2F;726709657&#x2F;sometimes-fascinati...</a>

&gt; But when the Kentucky AG’s office was preparing to post their brief against TikTok, whoever was in charge of doing the redaction simply covered the relevant text with black rectangles. Even though you can’t see the text while reading the PDF, you can just use your cursor to select each black section, copy it, and then paste it into another file to read the hidden text.<p>Incredibly hilarious. Only leet hackers can pull this off though, same as pressing F12 in the browser to hack the mainframe!

I don&#x27;t have kids, so I&#x27;m not in the trenches on this one. But a personal anecdote that might serve as evidence that other things are possible to everyone navigating tech and kids...<p>When I was a kid living in a trailer in the midwest in the eighties I asked my parents to buy me a secondhand set of 1973 Encyclopedia Britannica from our local library - for $7. It fed the same curiosity and joy of discovering new things that you would want your kid to get from resources online.<p>When we went on trips we always drove. And even if I didn&#x27;t already have a book or books from the library that I was reading at the time, my parents would suggest I take a volume of the Encyclopedia. And sure enough if I got bored I&#x27;d break it out. (Unless it was too dark to read at which point I&#x27;d just fall sleep.)<p>That&#x27;s all to say there are alternatives that cut the gordian knot, which kids can really dig if you frame it right. My parents were both voracious readers themselves, and it didn&#x27;t take long for their reading to my sibling and I to turn into reading on our own. So when we got something that provided the novelty and agency of navigating your own way through an encyclopedia, it was a huge hit.<p>Of course things are very different today. And I&#x27;m not a luddite or even someone who believes that old ways are intrinsically better. But there are ways to feed the many various and often contradictory needs kids have that aren&#x27;t reliant on contemporary tech.

I am surprised how common it is for younger women and teenagers to receive requests for gifting and get sexualized comments which this article mentions. I don&#x27;t see a lot of people talking about it but I think it would really warp someone&#x27;s mind to be under 18 and be receiving requests for foot pics, &quot;spoiling&quot;, and more. I&#x27;ve wanted to put this out there for a long time but felt like no one wanted to talk about it.

Related critcism of the book and the authors of this site: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;3quarksdaily.com&#x2F;3quarksdaily&#x2F;2024&#x2F;07&#x2F;why-academics-are-annoyed-with-jonathan-haidt-again.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;3quarksdaily.com&#x2F;3quarksdaily&#x2F;2024&#x2F;07&#x2F;why-academics-...</a>

From the badly redacted Kentucky AG PDF:<p>&gt; As the U.S. Surgeon General recently explained, children’s and parents’ attempts to resist social media is an unfair fight: “You have some of the best designers and product developers in the world who have designed these products to make sure people are maximizing the amount of time they spend on these platforms. And if we tell a child, use the force of your willpower to control how much time you’re spending, you’re pitting a child against the world’s greatest product designers.&quot;<p>This struck a chord. I struggle with addictive tendencies and I&#x27;ve been having to re-teach myself that stumbling is not always because &quot;I didn&#x27;t try hard enough&quot; but because I live in a world thats optimizing for retention&#x2F;subscriptions&#x2F;etc...

My favorite part is how incompetent they were in handling the redaction:<p>&quot;But when the Kentucky AG’s office was preparing to post their brief against TikTok, whoever was in charge of doing the redaction simply covered the relevant text with black rectangles. Even though you can’t see the text while reading the PDF, you can just use your cursor to select each black section, copy it, and then paste it into another file to read the hidden text. It is great fun to do this — try it yourself! Or just read our version of the brief in which we have done this for you.&quot;

&gt; <i>As one internal report put it: [...damning effects...]</i><p>I recall hearing of related embarrassing internal reports from Facebook.<p>And, earlier, the internal reports from big tobacco and big oil, showing they knew the harms, but chose to publicly lie instead, for greater profit.<p>My question is... Why are employees, who presumably have plush jobs they want to keep, still writing reports that management doesn&#x27;t want to hear?<p>* Do they not realize when management doesn&#x27;t want to hear this?<p>* Does management actually want to hear it, but with overwhelming intent bias? (For example, hearing that it&#x27;s &quot;compulsive&quot; is good, and the itemized effects of that are only interpreted as emphasizing how valuable a property they own?)<p>* Do they think the information will be acted upon constructively, non-evil?<p>* Are they simply trying to be honest researchers, knowing they might get fired or career stalled?<p>* Is it job security, to make themselves harder to fire?<p>* Are they setting up CYA paper trail for themselves, for if the scandal becomes public?<p>* Are they helping their immediate manager to set up CYA paper trails?

I don&#x27;t disagree with the claim that brainrot literally rots brains. But, I strongly oppose laws that ban social media on the grounds of &quot;protecting children.&quot;<p>Parents are fully capable of monitoring and regulating their children&#x27;s internet usage without Daddy Government getting involved.

Just children? I&#x27;ve had to block social media for myself because of how addictive it was &#x2F; how much time I was wasting.<p>I will say though, if you are trying to watch videos more from an educational perspective then it can be useful. Although, I would advise getting an LLM summary of the video, and then speed reading the summary in order to determine if their is any useful content in there.

I wish parents blocked such sites on their children&#x27;s devices, so we didn&#x27;t have to expand the censorship &amp; surveillance state to protect them.

&gt; We conducted a nationally representative survey of 1,006 Gen Z young adults (ages 18-27). We asked respondents to tell us, for various platforms and products, if they wished that it “was never invented.” [...] and the most regretted platforms of all: TikTok (47%) and X&#x2F;Twitter (50%).<p>Ouch, Gen Z <i>really</i> hate Twitter.

&gt; In this post we argue that Americans should welcome the disappearance of TikTok because the company is causing harm to children, adolescents, and young adults at an industrial scale.<p>protip: this isn&#x27;t the reason people are trying to ban the app, and it shouldn&#x27;t be banned. Currently I think you have to be 13+ to go on the app. If you think it&#x27;s harming kids as the reason to ban it, you could advocate maybe for 18+ access instead. The fact this isn&#x27;t the advocated change, to me suggests that&#x27;s not the reason why people are trying to ban it (concern for children&#x27;s well-being). If this were the case, you&#x27;d also have to ban probably the other U.S. social media. It&#x27;s probably also important to note how much good social media does by freely sharing valuable information (while people focus on the negative info that&#x27;s shared).

Parents who let their kids mindlessly use TikTok, YouTube, etc., are guilty of neglect IMO.

Great, Meta next?

When we talk about harm on the internet, we often separate the activity from the harm, e.g., a problem with [activity] is that it could cause [harm].<p>But it&#x27;s now clear that the activity is the harm. The issue isn’t that using TikTok might make you addicted; the issue is that you are using TikTok.<p>Just as there’s no such thing as responsibly huffing paint fumes, there’s no such thing as responsible social media use, only sub-diagnosable use.

The general problem is media companies that:<p>1. show you more stuff automatically, and<p>2. optimize for engagement when choosing what to show you next<p>That optimization works, and they have little incentive to optimize for anything else (like minimizing harm to users). TikTok is not the only offender, but they are the best at it (read: worst for users).<p>It is an additional concern that they are ultimately controlled by a foreign country that is relatively hostile to us and has low transparency to our law enforcement apparatus and regulators. Facebook and YouTube have to at least be worried about breaking our existing laws or annoying our Congress. This reins them in at least a little bit. TikTok actually did annoy Congress enough to prompt bi-partisan action (a very high bar in today&#x27;s climate), but successfully won a game of chicken, as the law they are violating is officially being ignored.

Adults too

Each and every one of these points applies to Meta in a huge way:<p>&gt; 1. Addictive, compulsive, and problematic use 2. Depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm, and suicide 3. Porn, violence, and drugs 4. Sextortion, CSAM, and sexual exploitation 5.TikTok knows about underage use and takes little action<p>Hell, it&#x27;s even a matter of congressional record!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;07&#x2F;1211339737&#x2F;meta-failed-to-address-harm-to-teens-whistleblower-testifies-as-senators-vow-act" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;07&#x2F;1211339737&#x2F;meta-failed-to-add...</a><p>it doesn&#x27;t make it right, but this current political climate&#x27;s myopic focus on tiktok alone destroys any credibility on this.

I do not disagree that tiktok is a negative experience for anyone. However the hyperfocus on Tiktok these investiationds had on tiktok is entirely clear from the context.<p>What should be mentioned in an article ccondemming tiktok is that most other social media young people may try are horrible as well.<p>The amountr of sexual explitation that takes place on snapchat is quite staggering from what I have read.<p>I do not see how Tiktok would be any less of a threat and cause less harm if it is partially owned by a US company. There is no evidence that US social media doing a fanastic job avoiding harm for kids and teens.<p>I would go so far as to say modern social media is nearly founded on the idea of addiction, and endless attempe at behavioral manipulation to sell ever more ads.

&gt; But when the Kentucky AG’s office was preparing to post their brief against TikTok, whoever was in charge of doing the redaction simply covered the relevant text with black rectangles. Even though you can’t see the text while reading the PDF, you can just use your cursor to select each black section, copy it, and then paste it into another file to read the hidden text. It is great fun to do this — try it yourself! Or just read our version of the brief in which we have done this for you.<p>I feel like there needs to be more education about redaction and obfuscation tools, namely this black box tool and blurring. It is usually possible to reverse blurring. Not redacting information properly is just embarrassing.

The problem is not TikTok in isolation. It&#x27;s all of the deeply algorithmic based apps out there trying to get you addicted. Apps are able to utilize so many dark design patterns and there is almost no protection, especially for young people.

&gt; An internal presentation on the 2021 strategy for TikTok describes the company as being in an *&quot;arms race for attention&quot;*<p>We have a collective psychological experiment in the form of social media, but short-form content combined with an endless scrolling feed is functionally identical to the experiment with the rat pressing the cocaine button.<p>It is not beneficial for the population to have an increasingly shrinking attention span. If you can&#x27;t pay attention for 30 minutes to look up candidate position while voting, or you can&#x27;t even be bothered to pay attention to that boring &quot;politics stuff&quot; in the first place, then we have a major problem.

the same old story repeating with every generation. historically however, none of the &#x27;devilish technologies&#x27; was banned

Stop framing TikTok, this is a social media problem which will continue to exist even if TikTok is banned tomorrow.

That is absurd. A competing children-harming platform that is not north american?<p>Only the US can harm children in industrial scales. Any threat to its sovereigness will be dealt with by our child soldiers.

TikTok, Snapchat, Meta (FB, Instagram) - all this garbage needs to go, at least for anyone younger than 18.<p>We have a plethora of evidence on how destructive social media has been for (especially young) people and still nothing is being done about it.

To all the people saying- &quot;but there are benefits!&quot;:<p>Well of course, numbnuts, or else no one would use this stuff.<p>There are benefits to caffeine, nicotine and other drugs that we still agree we shouldn&#x27;t expose to children.<p>Because the harms outweigh the benefits!<p>Simply don&#x27;t give your kids a screen. No iPad, no iPhone, no video games, no nothing until they reach a more appropriate age.<p>What that age is might vary from child to child, but it&#x27;s certainly not 3 years old!

Instagram is just as bad, meaning it should be put to the same scrutiny. It’s not ok just because it’s from the US

How do I pretend to fit in here, what is the actual number one proof that some random websites are &quot;causing serious harm&quot; to children? I had to stop reading to stop my blood from boiling at the quote below, before making it to the slew of legal pontification.<p>&gt; As one internal report put it:<p>&gt;&gt; “Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” in addition to “interfer[ing] with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work&#x2F;school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.”1<p>This doesn&#x27;t prove or imply anything. They can believe they are killing people (and probably do, especially with the &quot;large amount of users = woah, i&#x27;m god&quot; effect). It still won&#x27;t be true unless they actually are (which I doubt, but I have never seen this supposedly ground breaking social media webpage before). There are companies causing actual harms on the internet and those are the ones censoring everything and spying on users (coincidentally, not to be a point against this thread) and making false narratives of why everyone needs to buy their spying product and put it on their web page and require using google chrome or mozilla firefox to view the website to be compatible with their spyware.<p>Edit:<p>I just scrolled through and only read the CSAM part because that&#x27;s the only big enough bait to get me to read it and:<p>&gt; PARA 112: these leaders knew about agencies that recruited minors to create Child Sexual Abuse Material and commercialized it using LIVE.<p>That sounds incredibly unlikely, when you interpret it at face value. So you&#x27;re saying some good boy CS grad like everyone on HN - the most milquetoast people on the planet - just went from being afraid of even publishing easily rebukable misinformation, to knowingly assisting people in the most punishable crime on the planet?<p>&gt; PARA 114: TikTok has long known that virtual gifting is used as a predatory grooming tactic on LIVE. TikTok has internally acknowledged that “perpetrators tend to use tactics such as gift giving, flattery, and gifting money to win the trust of minors.”<p>Are we supposed to conclude that &quot;gifting&quot; causes child sexual abuse? Okay, then what about the fact that being able to communicate at all does?

In the U.S. people under 18 are allowed to own and shoot firearms, typically rifles. It&#x27;s silly to allow that that and then complain about a tiny box that shows videos.<p>Parents are responsible for their children. If a parent doesn&#x27;t feed their kid, they go to jail. If a parent harms or allows harm through negligence to children, the parent is the one who suffers the consequences and has the child taken away.<p>If a parent is giving a child a phone and allowing them to use a harmful product, the parent is at fault and should suffer the consequences. Not the rest of us. I don&#x27;t know why I should have my access to anything restricted because of bad parents. Parents choose to be parents and have and&#x2F;or keep children and that is their business. Bad parents should suffer consequences and one of those can be no longer being allowed to be a parent.<p>It&#x27;s one thing if a provider is specifically trying to get children on its platform - and if a company advertises its services in public places, it&#x27;s again on the parent to be in control there. Social media companies aren&#x27;t holding a gun to children&#x27;s heads trying to get them to join. Kids wanting to do stuff because other kids think it is cool has always existed and that happens when children are not supervised or disciplined. Kids not doing what they are supposed to be doing of their own choice is a parental failure.<p>Someone under 18 shouldn&#x27;t be able to purchase a cell phone, and if a parent wants to get them a cell phone, then the parent should accept responsibility for everything on that phone.<p>The addiction argument is tired. Anything pleasurable can be addictive. If you want people addicted to less things, design society where everyday life is less boring (getting rid of 2 hour commutes and having more parks would be a good start).

there are two kinds of hackers<p>those with children<p>those without<p>as a hacker without children because i got priced out of the market, why should i care about what tiktok does or ceases to do?<p>honest question, if tough to answer<p>or maybe i&#x27;m only trying to explain why I don&#x27;t have a model of being in a formative state.... I mean, dogs don&#x27;t use tiktok

I think the first thing that needs to be broken up is Apple’s grip on how screen time can be exported.<p>If screen time data can be accessed, then we can actually know how much time we spend on these doomscrolling social media apps. Only allow X time and no more

or is it parents who don&#x27;t control their children&#x27;s access to such content?

The world my kids inhabit, they spend most of their time on SnapChat.

Social media is hurting all of us on a worldwide scale.<p>It&#x27;s a shame because there are good sides to it too.

China will need to have 4 undercover agents meet in the same place at the same time. They won&#x27;t all meet each other, but a series of hand offs.<p>Conveniently, a small local college asian club wants to have a stop asian hate rally on the weekend of the 17th, at a local park which would be an ideal location. Tiktok gets word from Bytedance, who by Chinese law have party members on their board, that this rally needs to be heavily promoted organically to other Asians who live in the area. No ads, if someone talks about it in their tiktok, push it. Push it especially towards beloved Asian influencers with a large follwing.<p>The day comes and the turnout is a total blowout. A sea of Asians filling the park to support a noble cause.<p>80% of them are there because the CCP wanted them there to cover their operation, but when asked, every single one laughs at the idea that &quot;Tiktok is a tool for propaganda&quot;. They say &quot;I have never seen anything that promotes red flag communism or CCP ideals.&quot;<p>The scenario above is why the US government wants tiktok banned. The privacy stuff is second and the screen addiction stuff a far far third.

youtube shorts, same - instagram reels, same - snapchat stories - same.<p>I honestly think the solution has to be external as these platforms cannot govern themselves and are incentivized to keep your eyes on them at every waking moment.

not just children. just go to testosterone sub and we have been getting weekly posts from 16-18 years old looking to inject due to tik tok gym bros. They are literally destroying their body.

Instagram isn’t far behind when it comes to questionable content.

I hold the opinion that any parent willing allowing their child use content apps like TikTok and YouTube unsupervised are knowingly harming their children and should be ashamed of their behaviour. And if this is you then shame on you.<p>It&#x27;s honestly shocking what kids are watching on these apps. &quot;Brain-rot&quot; is obviously a funny euphemism that&#x27;s come about for this content in recent years, but it&#x27;s a pretty good description of reality. I watched a kid last weekend skipping YouTube every 30 seconds because he couldn&#x27;t concentrate beyond a minute, and the content he was watching included a video featuring a dude who lives a house full of piss bottles. The kid in question is 7 for context.<p>The fact his mum just allows him to do this for hours on end I think is disgraceful. It&#x27;s so obviously doing him harm and despite the vast majority of people being aware that these apps are harming children for some reason (I guess because it&#x27;s legal) there is no moral outrage. It&#x27;s vile parents are doing this to their children.

We can keep social media, but the content algorithms must be made illegal. If Meta, et al. were really serious about communities they would focus on that, instead Facebook is a morass of anger and scams intended to feed the beast.

Ever since Meta was found to cooperate with Israel and ever since they tried to buy Tiktok through bids, I became sure all those articles are merely intended to control a social media outlet to control narrative.

YouTube shorts and Instagram reels are no better.

I think a tangential proof of this that is very telling and does get brought up often enough (but I’ll repeat it oncemore just in case) is that they have a different app in China, that’s the Chinese tiktok; Douyin. Made by the same company and although it has short form content all the same the difference is that the algorithm in China is designed for Nationalist content, educational content and is restricted to 40 minutes a day for minors.<p>This is like the children of silicon valley CEOs growing up without phones and tablets and such but on a worldwide scale.<p>It’s frighteningly genius to be honest, douse the next generation of countries you are competing with with quick dopamine hits till they are basically just existing to swipe, scroll, etc and then rake in all the power for yourself &#x2F; your own country.

It&#x27;s no coincidence that the anti-Tiktok rhetoric is ratcheting up at the exact same time as the Trump administration is fomenting a trade war, and possibly an actual war, with China.<p>Every criticism you can make of Tiktok applies to Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit, Twitter or Snapchat. So why single out Tiktok?<p>Easy: because every other company is American-owned and operates in lockstep with American foreign policy. Social media is just an extension of mass media and both play a key role in manufacturing consent [1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chomsky.info&#x2F;consent01&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chomsky.info&#x2F;consent01&#x2F;</a>

How come this is off the front page :&#x2F;

Just children?

It&#x27;s not surprising that TikTok is this damaging--YT Shorts, IG Reels, Twitter&#x27;s auto play video feature after finishing any video clip originally embedded on a post are all lumped into that for my anecdote here.<p>Throughout the past four years or so, as more of my friends (all range 22-35) in my wider social bubble have started consuming shortform content in general, I&#x27;ve noticed that I&#x27;m unable to hold a conversation without my friends making reference to some obscure shortform video they saw.<p>It&#x27;s fine, I don&#x27;t think thats the crux of the issue I&#x27;m griping about. Reverberating things recently-seen is common in all conversations--I&#x27;d be a hypocrite to say I don&#x27;t do the same. The only shortform content I consume are things only sent to me by my friends who would think I would enjoy it--most of which I do, but I leave my consumption at that. Having my social sphere as a filter in which I consume that stuff is the best way to keep it at arms length, at the expense of knowing everyone around you scrolls endlessly and deeper into it.<p>What&#x27;s really the issue is when your friends are unable to talk about anything without prefacing that what I&#x27;ve said reminds them of something they saw, or reciting an opinion of someone else without actually forming their own. I&#x27;m seeing my creative friends drop their hobbies because they feel like they have no time for it anymore when they don&#x27;t realize how much time they waste scrolling. While I&#x27;m in between tech jobs amongst the chaos of the market right now and moving across the country, two of my closest friends that I&#x27;m happy to be working with as they referred me this nice warehouse job alongside them, do nothing but scroll youtube shorts in between our tasks at the office and it&#x27;s mind numbing and just sad to see. When I met them nearly a decade ago, they were making music and learning new ways to make art and perform, now it&#x27;s just tiktok slop and memes and bottom of the barrel stuff.<p>I&#x27;m just one of two friends out here spurring them to make art again in an environment that is robbing people of their creative thinking, they&#x27;re having a hard time finding how to even get into that flow state of creativity again. I can&#x27;t imaging what that&#x27;s going to do to children who want to scroll and never play.

TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter ... no need to single out TikTok. They are all equally bad.

Is it TikTok harming the kids or families who don&#x27;t regulate their kids doing the harm?<p>In other words if I leave my kid alone in the house with a liquor cabinet, and the kid gets drunk every day, did the liquor do the harm or did I?<p>That&#x27;s an imperfect analogy though, because -- at least in the U.S. -- our society has already aligned itself such that our institutions and our devices raise our kids, not our families. As long as we keep that norm, then in a nation that values free speech and capitalism as much as the U.S. does, we&#x27;re certain to have this problem.<p>So as another commenter said, if we ban TikTok something slightly more benign will take its place, and that&#x27;s because we aren&#x27;t dealing with the real issue: we don&#x27;t raise our kids anymore.<p>Personally I look at the commonality of nuclear families[1] as a big culprit here. Once you isolate kids from aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents you&#x27;re left with just the parents to raise them. Those not rich enough to afford daycare have to either split the duty so they can afford a roof over their heads or leave the kids alone.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nuclear_family#Compared_with_extended_family" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nuclear_family#Compared_with_e...</a>

foreign adversary my ass. our sons of bitches don&#x27;t like competition from their sons of bitches. add facebook and youtube and twitter and twitch and... to the list, and i&#x27;ll get on board.

Infinite scroll itself should be outlawed anywhere in the world.

ALL social media are harming children at industrial scale.

This is NOT a productive discussion in this thread.

So is YouTube

Reminder that such common intuitive observations used to meet with &quot;cAn SoMeOnE tHiNk oF tHe ChIlDrEn?!&quot; on sites like reddit&#x2F;hacker news.

As new tech, Facebook gave us Trump, I cannot imagine the nemesis that ChatGPT will bring about.

At some point in the distant future (if we haven&#x27;t blown each other up by then,or reduced ourselves to Somalia) .. We will figure out good robust rules and regulations to snuff out this depravity from the tech giants. .. Thankfully, my kid is already in grad school. Maybe in time for her grandchildren.

Please add YouTube to the list. I&#x27;m watching my kids&#x27; brains slowly melt as they go from YouTube short to YouTube short like little crack addicts trying to get their next fix. Throw in a bunch of AI generated bottom of the barrel swill and I&#x27;m on the verge of blocking YouTube entirely yet again. I blocked YouTube for years because of all the garbage child targeted auto generated videos that were flooding the platform. It&#x27;s very frustrating because there is a lot of good content that I would like them to continue to have easy access to, but the cost of entry is way too high.

The content on Tik Tok is far superior to YouTube shorts and IG reels. There are even memes about it. Shorts and especially reels is geared more towards a millennial to boomer audience.

the panda is dissatisfied<p>tiktok is geofenced

Someone should do something, like pass a law.<p>... Oh wait.

OK let&#x27;s ban social media and roll back to 20 years ago. I&#x27;m perfectly happy with that. With social media it&#x27;s so easy to manipulate than emails, websites and phones.<p>Technological advancement is not always good (for ordinary people).

I love the parents in the tech community. They had unfettered computer and internet access which formed them into the successful people they are today. But they were special and their circumstance was special and their kids are not allowed to use the internet because now its bad.<p>old_man_yells_at_cloud.jpg

Between TikTok and fentanyl China is covertly doing serious damage to the USA, and most people don&#x27;t care.

TL;DR<p>If you have a kid, please be a parent.

I would love to first shut off Facebook before we do anything to TikTok.

Same goes for instagram reels, the cheapest and shittiest copy seen in a generation

Cherrypicking? What about all the TikTok content promoting body positivity, etc?

The main reason TikTok is being targeted is because it doesn&#x27;t silence pro-Palestinian perspectives on the conflict. This is a direct threat to the leadership of the people in charge because it fractures their narrative they work tirelessly to promote (the perpetual victim).

While I don’t agree with the whole “Palestinian views should be censored” thing, that might be the ticket we need to set a precedent for regulating children’s access to social media. That’s the thing about politics—you have to be willing to make compromises with people you don’t see eye to eye on.<p>If your principles get in the way of making compromises that could help, you’re letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Something to think about.

&quot;The Chinese government is using TikTok to harm our kids. Someone else should be using TikTok to harm our kids, and other people should be using other apps to harm our kids.&quot;<p>Infinite, algorithmically-curated content is the problem. It&#x27;s designed to be addictive and manipulative. There&#x27;s data that shows that stuff like this basically exploits our ability to delay gratification by offering big pops of reward at random intervals. This develops pathways that encourage continued interaction because, essentially, you don&#x27;t know when a reward is coming but you know that a reward is coming eventually so your brain keeps drip-feeding you from the memory of the last reward. It&#x27;s similar to how people end up mindleslly bashing away at penny slots all day for years and years.