It’s harmful to everyone not just children, and so is Instagram. This sounds like more mandatory ID propaganda given how the government won’t stop the most obvious of pedophile sex traffickers.
Edit: It literally is:
Of course, if TikTok is removed, many children will just move to TikTok’s competitors: Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. This is why it’s so important for countries to follow Australia’s lead: raise the age for opening social media accounts to 16 and require the companies to enforce it.
Is TikTok really harming children, or is this just our generation’s “television/internet/video games are bad for children”?
It’s Ok now though cause TikTok was bought by Fox News.
I feel like this is just “videogames cause violence” part 2
Social media is a scourge on society, mostly bcz of the propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation campaigns from state actors. This is a very different and real issue we as a species are dealing with.
If I ever have children, TikTok will be one of the first things I’ll have blocked for them.
Right before Facebook, Instagram, Xitter, and probably some other social scourges that I forget about.
Oh look, another company that knows it’s harming people and society, hides it and keeps on chasing profit and power.
Just remember tick tock is illegal for citizens to use in the country that invented it.
Yeah that’s because they have a state sanctioned version of TikTok that is controlled by an algorithm that police’s peoples speech and what they do and reports anything untoward to the proper authorities.
And now that Fox News has bought TikTok, the US has their own version of an algorithm that will police people’s speech and what they do, and most likely report anything untoward to the proper authorities.
As if the US didn’t have that before
Not only tiktok. My parents are addicted to facebook stories and YouTube stories ;)
The same algorithm…
What is more there a lot of Russian propaganda and misinformation. But in Poland that’s common in social media
Same in Germany. 😒 Why can’t we cut off Russia from our networks or do anything to counter them.
I feel like we are sleepwalking into a disaster.
People need to understand that we are at war and treat Russia as the enemy.
It doesn’t matter that there is little hard proof Putin, his secret service or who ever is behind this. When EVERYTHING points to their direction then you have to act.
We make them bigger than they have to be by ‘playing fair’ when they stopped doing that decades ago or never even did themselves. This is entirely an advantage we can take from them.
Although I admit it’s much harder for an open, democratic society to agree to play ‘unfair’ like the enemy. But maybe there is another way? Don’t compromise your ideals but bring pro western propaganda to Russian minds.
They don’t respect our cyber sovereignty for lack of a better word. Why should we respect theirs.
Other countries do this as well and we need to build our defences or otherwise we will be the punching bag for others.
Sounding like the villain from Doctor strangelove
Yeah ofc. It’s run by genocidal fascists now. Libs wanted this.
It was run by genocidal fascists before. Just different ones.
Children are not the only ones being harmed here. This selective focus is only going to destroy the perception of other groups in terms of harm. Teenagers, young people, old people are also being harmed here - it is by design, and its everyone.
I bet this is related to Palantir facial recognition. Seems like identifying people and feeding it into some database is very important lately.
Always has been. You’ve been fingerprinted on the web for 10 years minimum. You know those secret aliases you had? Yeah they always knew they were you.
Stop. I’m not fucking playing this stupid game. I’m well aware of data brokers and selling our data. This is clearly different uploading pictures of yourself with id as a requirement to access websites.
If she had wheels she’d be a bike
I don’t know where that was ever mentioned, though.
Yup, nobody is immune or above being harmed by the algorithms.
I never wanted TikTok for this reason, and I remember the damage YouTube did to my brother, despite my warnings.
He was happily watching Tree Happy Friends as a toddler.
Jesus, happy tree friends fucked me up and I was legally an adult
I enjoyed happy tree friends as a kid and it didn’t effect me negatively. Different strokes for different folks I guess. It’s like arguing that GTA makes kids violent.
It was sort of funny, but it only had one punchline and wore out quickly for me. Shock humor has a really low retention rate. Compare that to say, Rejected or the parody GI Joe PSAs, they’re really not great and a wonder why Youtube hired them to make their old copyright volition training videos.
I don’t wanna die - I just wanna ride my motorcycle.
I’m thinking, how are youtube shorts and Instagram reels any different from tiktok
They tried warning us about fb over 10 years ago and nothing happened
25 years ago. Every study on social media and mental health back then showed it was bad.
nothing happened
Nah, the perpetrators continues to make endless money, etc. Lots of capitalist stuff has been happening.
Then literally Web 2.0 is the problem. All social media stops existing if we go back from Web 2.0.
let’s just go back to dial up internet.
social media just needs http requests to exist, how does pre web 2.0 fix things honestly. gui apps have existed since windows 95 or even earlier, how is the tiktok app technically different than the space cadet paddle game with added network functionality?
Web 2.0 is the umbrella term for a bunch of things that enabled the social media we see today. Infinite scroll, notification toasts and asynchronous loading of new content to name a few.
If we had to reload a page every time we wanted new content we would see way less and move on more quickly.
Just go back to gopher.
I wouldn’t say nothing happened. Young people migrated off of it and it’s now the lead gasoline of the social media world
Yeah but young people didn’t migrate off it because it was harmful
They migrated in part to instagram which Facebook bought and made even more harmful than Facebook itself
Yeah ig is the worst part of Facebook, just people curating what they want people to think their life looks like
This is in stark contrast to… Facebook???
facebook has a very different target audience
facebook is mostly about 60+ year olds holding their beer and saying sth like “beer, car, church is all we need” while instagram is predatory on 16-y.o girls telling them that they’re not pretty and worthy of love if they’re not significantly (scarily, in fact) underweight and wear lots of makeup to cover their true emotions/face.
That’s not how fb started
^ liberal “science” on social media.
At least Facebook has Facebook Marketplace.
back then it wasn’t about political independence from the US.
the EU has made a lot of noise in the last 2 weeks about getting off of US platforms. Here’s a few examples:
https://apnews.com/article/europe-digital-sovereignty-big-tech-9f5388b68a0648514cebc8d92f682060
https://ecfr.eu/publication/get-over-your-x-a-european-plan-to-escape-american-technology/
There’s many more. The movement is significant.
Damn… money laundering though LIVE with its “gifts” I never thought about this. Everything else is wrong, at scale, but this surprised me.
If you watch a decent amount of twitch streaming it’s pretty obvious. I’m sure there are a ton of whales out there willing to dump >$1000 in one go on a streamer, but just watch something like a “subathon”, or a “hype train”. You’ll see more dollars than viewers they have move around in the span of like 30 minutes.
Or when streamers “bet” each other large amounts of gift subscriptions. That’s explicitly money, and abstracting it behind subs only masks how damn much a lot of these “bets” are really for.
I’m not going to claim that anywhere near all of it is straight laundering, but it’s pretty damn obvious just how fucking easy it would be to use it all for washing/tumbling of dirty funds.
The exact same thing happened with Instagram years ago.
and Facebook.
and MySpace.
and club penguin.
and…
But club penguin is kill. I remember. I was at home, eating dorito.
It’s starting to feel this whole capitalism for children isn’t healthy.
i mean yeah that helps the growth of idiocracy so is it a surprise?
I’m looking forward to the day when social media is heavily regulated and age-gated.
Already happening in some places, like Australia. Though I’m not sure if they’ll actually be able to enforce it.
I’m looking forward to the police kicking in my door and typing my keys for me. jfc.
Or parents can do their job. We have to suffer with age verification bullshit laws that’s just there to have us all in a database.
One lawmaker proposed a law that would make it illegal to allow your children to see “drag” so none of this has to deal with parents doing their jobs and everything to deal with giving Nazis control over what other people are allowed to see
Not having it be regulated makes it a lot harder for parents to do their job, because the kids with responsible parents are getting peer-pressured by the kids with irresponsible parents.
Or put another way: you’re not making parents do their jobs; you’re making their jobs impossible by forcing them to choose between ruining their kid’s mental health by letting her be exposed to social media, or ruin her mental health by forcing her to be ostracised for not using social media.
The only way to have a successful outcome is to force everyone else’s kids not to use it, not just your own, and no amount of rugged individualist good parenting can accomplish that by itself!
That said, I am extremely sympathetic to the arguments against age verification laws too, which is why my preferred solution would be to fucking outlaw and destroy corporate social media entirely, for kids and adults alike!
You are exactly right. We’re all in this ugly, trapped situation, together, like it or not.
As a parent, do you remove the obviously ruinous toxins from the kiddo’s environment, entirely? Seems like the only sensible choice.
But then again…for the kid, few things could feel worse. An entire childhood spent alienated from their peers? Permanently out of the loop, to where that becomes the personality trait noticed and remembered by others?
What a horrible bargain, I completely hate it.
“Well, a little hideous poison for you, routinely, I guess, dear. I wouldn’t want you to end up weird, after all…”
Agreed. Just the peer pressure for having a smartphone at all is immense. Some kids have one below the age of 10. That is absolutely insane to me.
Or like, use the ample parental controls to limit their time to a reasonable amount 🤷♂️.
the parent can only do that on devices they own. they can’t do that on classmates devices
Oh god, they’ll get some access? Like, I can’t completely control my children and they are individuals who have the right to start making choices? Jesus Christ, I’m not going to be able to exert my will over them indefinitely?
If your child is old enough to leave the house and sneak around on you they were going to do that. You should be teaching them to live in society, not just avoiding it and dumping them into an environment without the skills to process the reality of life.
Exerting will over them infinitely is literally the objective here
Did you sneak around and do things you were told not to? Probably.
While doing so, did you have the context that you shouldn’t do it? Maybe. Sometimes the learning happens when you get caught, get hurt or have other consequences.
Sure, the answer is education. Tell them that they shouldn’t do <thing> and why. Hopefully, the guilt/shame/pain of doing the thing they know is incorrect will be enough of a deterrent, but adults are fallible and kids cannot be expected to be better at it than adults who also have vices they know intellectually are bad. I don’t want to “completely control” my children, but I do want to prevent harm. Same way we put guard rails at the edge of a cliff.
Just to be clear:
Oh god, they’ll get some access? Like, I can’t completely control my children and they are individuals who have the right to start making choices? Jesus Christ, I’m not going to be able to exert my will over them indefinitely?
Are you recommending that we just sit back and let kids random-walk through tiktok? At what age should algorithm-dopamine-drug-app be allowed? There are studies out there showing that this stuff is harmful to ADULTS and this thread is about known impacts on kids. We prevent kids from smoking or drinking. Why do you think preventing access to social media like this is a step too far?
There’s also a question of age. I’m talking as a parent of a pre-teen. I need these controls where I can get them because the internet is a dopamine machine. It’s a real challenge to limit access to it and my kid isn’t prepared to stop watching tiktok the same way they aren’t prepared to stop eating candy. I can physically limit the candy in the house, but guess where I find rogue candy wrappers? Maybe by the time they are 15, I’ll have taken the training-wheels off, in which case we probably agree.
Finally, there’s an additional context for parents that is cultural context: My kid has never watched squidgames, five nights at freddy’s or stranger things. Many, maybe even most, of his peers have, and that leaves him out of those conversations. There are threads up in this post that haunt me: Am I preventing my child from being able to socialize because I won’t let them play/watch <content> that I think is unacceptable? I don’t want roblox, fortnight, or predatorily-monitized games in my kid’s hands until they are ready.
I recently relented on fortnight. My kid spent about $20 of their money on skins and a battle pass. I asked them recently if it was worth it. They said, “no”. I also recently let them create a roblox account. It took about 2 hours for them to determine the whole game was dumb. I think I’m a good parent.
Yeah man, you’re on top of it.
It’s just lazy parents, right? Like they’re not even trying, huh?
Couldn’t really have anything to do with - I dunno, NO parents except the born-rich, being able to parent properly, on account of having to make the dollars keep adding up.
Probably also NOT the wildly, disgustingly sophisticated Big Fucking Tech doing everything they can to pull our children into their hilariously successful maze of dissatisfaction.
If only the parents would just use the obviously available parental controls! Duh.
Fuck you, in every way, for real.
Nobody can parent 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Clearly you’ve never been to a PTO/A meeting or town hall on education, or entire motorcades of parents spending days traveling with their kids for sports 🤣
Why do so many CLEARLY non parents react so strongly to a topic they have little to no experience in 🤣
Nobody has time 🤣, thank you so much for this chuckle.
Quite the charmed life you apparently lead. If you manage to peer outside your own economic bubble someday you’ll see what I mean. Doesn’t sound like you’ll be doing that though.
Oh won’t someone think of the parents though?! How can they be expected to parent their own children, oh the humanity
It’s not their childrens they belong to the State / Corporations / System
best thing on that front is same fix for most of the working classes problems…
-more pay
-shift to 6hr/4d work week
-actually invest in education
most people are good, amd would probably love to spend more time with their family, but in the US especially they’re overworked and underpaid, one accident away destitution
Most parents won’t. People are people. Those that would want to have to ballance the risk of excluding their children from the collective.
Durable societies are unfortunately bound to have such inconveniences for some in exchange for the betterment of many.
Tech companies have released the equivalent of digital opium so they and the government are accountable.
When we look back at the opioid epidemic of the 90s we don’t blame the addicts or their families (well I suppose we did at one point, without the benefit of hindsight or a bigger picture view), we blame the Sacklers, pharmaceutical companies, doctors that took kickbacks etc.
I’d hate for us to make the same mistake just because the drug is delivered in a way we don’t completely understand yet.
It’s also not as simple as asking parents to simply be better at parenting, whatever that may mean. The drug is already out on the street, widely available, and ridiculously addictive. Keeping your child from it is not only depriving them of a dopamine hit that their brains are not developed enough to simply ignore (even most adults are addicted) and it is in many cases relegating them to social ostracization.
This is far beyond what one parent or group of parents can fix. It requires a societal level change which generally needs to come from the government, whether we like it or not.
I’d be happy to hear out possible solutions and, as a parent, share what is viable and what isn’t. It would be nice to hear from other parents also.
This rhetoric is very dangerous. It’s fueling censorship specifically targeting marginalized people
Some important context on this user before anyone else gets dragged into a discussion: check their post history, multiple to a “Youth Liberation” community.
No shade meant by calling it out, but I think that makes it much more clear how strong your opinions are on this. There’s nothing to be gained in trying to talk to you about this when your opinions are set so strongly. You aren’t going to see the dangers that the rest of us see because your focus is on allowing freedom from oppresive parental figures.
Edit: they also “won’t give an inch on this”
“The dangers” are a moral Panic that’s been kicked off by Nazis
You can’t seriously be saying that in the comments of a post linking to leaked internal documents showing that one of these companies is aware of the dangers they pose and damage they are doing. Did nazis falsify internal documents and this leak?
Did you somehow miss the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook, where they manipulated the emotional content of users’ feeds and gathered scientifically significant measurable responses in the emotions of the manipulated users?
Have you missed where each of these companies has had many public job postings for positions requiring applicants have psychology degrees?
People like to think of 4chan as the website that drove people to suicide, but every single one of the major social media sites has a fucking body count at this point, and almost every one is in the double digits.
Beyond all that, lemmy’s userbase trends older. I saw the tail end of the satanic panic into the moral grandstanding about the dangers of violent video games. I’d wager most of the users here lived through it.
I know firsthand what a moral panic looks like. They didn’t have the amount of research papers (that hold up to peer review) and leaked internal documents we can point at. They didn’t have body counts even remotely similar.
Keep on fighting for opressed teens to have more ways to get away from opressive parents. To have access to factual information that their parents don’t want them to have. It’s a good cause with not many people fighting for it.
That doesn’t mean though that anything you think challenges or opposes it is a nazi plot.
Teens are resilient and have astounding amounts of time on their hands. They’ll find a way to communicate, ways to make their own underground social platforms if they need to. The cat’s out of the bag. It’s the fucking internet. Corpos, government boots, no one can truly stop the signal. They couldn’t back in the days of dial up BBS. Good fucking luck now that you can get a device orders of magnitude more powerful for $50.
Don’t bother replying for my sake. I’m blocking you so I don’t get increasingly shitty towards you. Your mind’s made up on this, and so is mine. No point going back and forth if we’re just going to get more frustrated and exasperated at each other. Best of luck in your endeavours.
Sure, legalize heroin for 12 year olds so parents can regulate it themselves. Imbecilic reasoning.
How does that even logic?
That’s the point, it doesn’t. Much like the argument about targeting marginalized people when you’re talking about children.
Edit: Yes, there are plenty of children and teens without access to information and the support structures they should have IRL. I was one of them and it’s fucking awful. The internet can help with that by offering exposure to different ideologies, evidence that you aren’t alone in what you’re feeling or going through.
But I don’t look back on everything I did and encountered online in mid 00s - early 10s era internet and go “that was overwhelmingly a great thing that I should have had the sort of unrestricted access to that I did”. And the internet has been even more corporatized and “skinner-boxed” since.
And with the benefit of hindsight, I can see a bunch of other ways that I could have gotten the good I got from the internet without all the bad, and through things in real life that I had dismissed in my youth.
we owe today’s teens a better internet experience. we should focus on building something that would have been ideal for us to have had when we were their age
I hate these people. I’m at a loss for words
You’re confused by the assertion that access to social media is at least as bad for children as some banned drugs? Is this your first day on earth?
It isn’t (just) a technical problem for parents. Having the underage social media ban means that there isn’t the peer pressure for kids to use - well there is, but its much lower
Or parents can do their job.
They don’t, which is why regulation is essential. Not unlike how recycling failed because we expected individuals to behave responsibly instead of regulating manufacturers.
And you’re already in the database.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Nanny
And you’re already in the database.
disgusting. they should be taking us out of the database
I agree. But I think we’re past that point.
well, then we need to go back before that point. There is no reason why laws that apply to my paper correspondance doesn’t apply to my digital correspondence.
If you disagree, please send your personal email credentials and medical records.
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Wait… do you think the internet isn’t already heavily censored and monitored?
Nazis own both TikTok and Twitter. A psychopath owns Facebook.
oh what? WOW! This is so new to me. I’m astonished!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures
We need to END this shit, instead of ThInK Of tHe cHiLdReN laws that violate our privacy and human rights further, like the “Online Safety Act 2023” whose job it is to link your name, face and ID to the porn you browse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
like I linked, netnanny and similar software exist. to licence one for every child would be CHEAPER than this bullshit dragnet surveillance.
Stop licking boots.
Just to screw you over if/when you bust out the “YoUlL UdNeRsTaNd iF YoU EvEr hAvE KiDs, ItS HaRd bEiNg a pArEnT” I already have a kid.
You might as well allow kids to drink Tequila and work in meat factories. Healthier than being online.
I’m sorry you feel that your rights are violated because children should be banned from the internet.
read my actual post, there’s a way of doing this without violating human rights.
Nothing is preventing the internet from being exactly the way it was in the 90s. You’re on such a website right now. I, for one, don’t believe the internet is so far gone because 4 or 5 big, popular sites are utterly shit.
What should be. What is.
These are different things, and insofar as that remains the case, we should act accordingly.
And the “what is” here is that those terrible sites are not the majority of the internet. They’re barely even a fraction of it.
Age gated? You’d submit your driver’s license or identity to these sites?
It’s already started, for porn. The kids don’t have to prove their age, they don’t have proper ID. So EVERYONE ELSE has to prove THEIR ages, and if you can’t, you are assumed to be underage.
See how well that works for the Nazis? Now they get to identify EVERYBODY who is on the Internet with their legal IDs, and they will know exactly who posted that nasty meme of Trump.
But it’s okay, because it protects the children.
Exactly. I don’t think it’s a surprise this all aligns with companies like palantir collecting people’s images into their database. I have a feeling on the backend these identities will all be used to track people online. Photos of faces and their identities is about to become a hot commodity.
Photos aren’t going to help them track people online, that’s to track people in real life. With a database of images, they can use facial recognition software to track people wherever they go. Right now, they only have legal access to mug shots, which is all they should have. But with a database of normal citizens, they can track ANYBODY, and they don’t have the right to do that.
Imagine if your employer, or a stalker, or some HOA bitch, or overzealous law enforcement, or a lawyer, or an insurance company, etc. wants to hire them to see what you are up to?
But it’s okay, because it protects the
children.casino advertisements.Australia’s Social Media Ban is a Win for Gambling Companies
While the ID shit is godawful, that’s not at all how it works in any implementation out there right now. There have even been multiple breaches of these systems, further demonstrating their issues, but you know what hasn’t been in any of the breaches/leaks?
Direct connection between ID and uniquely identifiable user information.
If I’m wrong about this I’d love to know, but as far as I am aware the ID leaks have not had shit like email address attached.
Probably not. But I don’t use most of them and the ones I do use my account should be old enough that I don’t have to.
The age of your account won’t matter. It’s not about age, it’s about identifying everyone on the Internet, and connect to them to whatever they are posting. They will verify age with your driver’s license, or they will lock your account.
The way around it is with VPNs, but MAGAs are already complaining about them. They are about to lock down the Internet, and to access it, you will have to let them read everything you write.
Yeah, and that’s how you get shitty age verification laws.
It’s a double edged sword
Bummer that they’re necessary, but they are.
They are not. It’s not the governments job to parent the nations children, (and conveniently erode our privacy in the process)
How is this argument different from “it’s not the governments job to provide healthcare / education / social services”
Providing healthcare and social services is not inherently about controlling how people think and what information they have access to.
The thing that none of these moral panic people want you to talk about is who is deciding what is and isn’t acceptable for everyone’s children. They’ve already admitted the intent to use this to censor everything LGBT so that’s not a slippery slope that’s just factual reality
I notice you left education off that list
“Why the education system is horrible and needs to be dismantled and entirely reconsidered” is slightly off topic, but yeah you got me I do not think the argument is all that different wrt education. It is very different from those other things though.
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When I was a kid I wouldn’t dream of wearing a stackhat riding my bike. Then the laws came in, everyone did and it was fine. Same as seatbelts.
This is even more so because of the network effects.
Don’t get me wrong - the Australian laws are a very blunt instrument & I hate the idea of having to identify myself to the government. Fortunately it hasn’t happened to me - yet.Can’t say the law for kids to wear helmets on bikes has done much to get them to do so. Though I don’t think bike helmet laws did much to rob the population of their privacy either.
Yeah bummer that big daddy fascist leader is necessary, but they are.
I don’t think they approach necessity tbh. At best, they’re a bandaid, and a crutch for parents.
But the drawbacks of the laws that have been implemented so far, and are trying to be, as vast overreaches that give a false sense of security with no real benefit. They also do that by placing even more information into the hands of the very companies causing the problem in the first place.
That’s where regulations would focus in an ideal world, limiting the companies from causing the problems in the first place, not slapping bad patches over them.
already starting to happen. Australia, for example implemented a under 16 ban on social media.
And evidence shows that it made mental health worse, because of course it did. But at least they aren’t protesting the Gaza genocide so mission acomplished
yup. sometimes under 16s have nowhere else to turn, so they turn to social media. if they don’t have that, what are they supposed to do?
Okay but designer drug algorithms are not an option.
I imagine they will go to the same places you, or I, or the billions that came before did when we were raised prior to social media.
If my brother’s only friend left is heroin. I am still not going to give him heroin.
Kill themselves. It’s what I would have dome, and what may have already happened. It’s a cruel assault on young people, which is why the only moral stance is open defiance
I mean that’s what happens when we group children with teenagers. They are treated the same despite being vastly different. In essence, majority of people where in support of striping of rights of their people. And people say we aren’t falling into fascism.
That’s why I won’t give an inch on this crap
Cutting addicts off from their drug of choice has short term affects of immediately deteriorating mental health. More at 11.
I’m deeply skeptical of anyone slinging around drug metaphors l. Can you considered that isolating marginalized people is bad for them? Or do you not care? Or do you like it better that way?
You can be skeptical of the drug metaphors all day but we know it is extremely addictive and harmful. They know it is too. Right here in this article is proof of that.
No I think that social media as a whole is a blight on society, and you can whataboutism all day to make anything seem like a positive so it’s worth keeping.
