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Seems bad, man.
Yeah bad parenting
Hopefully not for much longer
Nah, social media is like a hydra. Another “TikTok” will just be born from the ban.
Nothing is changing drastically until we have better data protection laws.
Ban all Chinese/Russian social media companies. GG EZ.
Edit: sorry my bad, I didn’t realize you were one of the people that thinks all social media is the same.
You realize that tik toks sole purpose is to brainwash western youth right? This is propaganda 101.
I turned out perfectly fine without a phone until age 15, and I’m 17 now, I don’t really use social media other than reddit, Lemmy and YouTube on my phone and I barely use it, since I’m more likely to use my iPad at home exclusively.
I feel as though more parents need to do the same mine did, restrict access to smartphones until ages the kid is more likely to explore the world more, specifically for safety, but still teach them to concentrate on stops while on public transport, on where they walk, etc. and not use their phone on the go apart from when time is able to pass and be stationary.
I cringe at the fact kids a third or less my age are allowed phones, I shouldn’t even be allowed since my brain is still developing, i cant imagine the levels of braindead these children will be when they get to my age, since people my age are already horrific enough…
…which starts with P which rhymes with T which stands for trouble.
Mothers of River City is your son starting to buckle his knickerbockers below the knee?
I was given a phone quite young but completely discarded it after I bought myself a thinkpad. No need for it when I can be comfortable on my Arch setup. I think the amount of brain damage could be severely reduced if they only had access to a family PC or something. Most kids probably wouldn’t even touch the PC until way later.
My brief forays into both TikTok and YouTube Shorts have left me profoundly unimpressed with the short-form video.
It’s all mind-melting in my experience
Literally proven to ruin attention span in children and essentially cause ADHD, can also easily cause depression by constantly seeing (usually) fake people flaunting their (usually) fake life and wealth.
Not to mention the proliferation of insane conspiracy theories, absolute nonsense and usually harmful ‘advice’ of one kind or another, ‘being rich is the only thing that matters so here is a scam to show you how!’ of all kinds of flavors…
Brain rot.
Literally proven to ruin attention span in children and essentially cause ADHD
Please link source, interested in reading.
So, perhaps ‘essentially cause ADHD’ is a bit strong, but there are absolutely studies that show that exposure to / addiction to short form video content impair focus, cause/exacerbate attention deficits, cause/exacerbate difficulty maintaining attention, as well as impair the ability to study and perform academically, worsen overall mental health etc.
Oh, and short form video content is also found to be addictive as well.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144929X.2022.2151512
https://www.cell.com/heliyon/fulltext/S2405-8440(24)06377-1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9127725/
In summary, brain rot.
Theres also studies which show, hilariously, that a good amount of mental health ‘advice’ on such short form content platforms is garbage.
This one studies the top posts on ADHD and finds half of them to be misleading.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/07067437221082854
And to round it out, heres a study on negative body image perception and self objectification amongst girls/women by short form content:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1740144523000876?via%3Dihub
In fairness, this study does find that negative self perception and self objectification increase with viewing either short or long form video content or images featuring ‘ideal’ women, which makes sense, as this sort of thing has been long studied before ‘social media’ even existed (TV, Magazines, Movies, etc).
So, while objectification and body image problems from media exposure are not new, the proliferation and exposure amount are increased dramatically in the age of widespread social media.
I would be willing to bet that had a similar study as this one been done on boys/men it would show similar results.
You literally are posting on a site where every 3rd post is defending genocide…
???
I must not be part of the same lemmy communities as you?
There was that brief period of time where Vine existed and had actual quality content.
Then the short video format was shittified after everyone began doing it, and fairly rapidly devolved into mindless attention seeking nonsense / micro personal update vlog… or worse.
I think long videos are expensive.
Social media companies like engagement. So 3 20s videos would give you more data from the user than 1 60s video.
This ban can’t come soon enough. Fuck the CCP.
I use TikTok routinely. I actually spend time on Chinese parts of TikTok, because I know a little Chinese. I’ve seen content that the CCP would be very much opposed to - including discussions of the Tank Man from Tiananmen Square and homosexuality in Chinese history.
TikTok has censorship certainly, but it’s more targeted towards the Gaza conflict.
I use TikTok routinely.
Your experience is different from other experience. That’s the main issue. They are and can target specific people in specific groups and in specific regions. You seeing this content just means you’re not important enough for them to target.
As can/do Facebook and every other social media platform. But I find it hard to take this idea that TikTok is an arm of the CCP seriously when I routinely discuss Ughyur Muslims and Tiananmen square with folks, and see depictions of Chairman Mao as Pooh Bear.
The more shady shit is the shop and how every third video is an unlabeled ad. TikTok wants to make money first and foremost. I don’t think TikTok is some force for good in the world, but what they are doing is no different from what Meta and Google are doing.
Tiktok has one of the worse/non existent monetization programs. Its clearly not important to them how bad it is.
My extended family in Taiwan would routinely see fake news on Tiktok during the Taiwan elections.
That’s the thing. You don’t know. Nobody knows except the CCP. That’s the problem.
That’s the thing. You don’t know. Nobody knows except the CCP. That’s the problem.
But you do about every other social media platform?
Fake news is not exclusive to a single platform. Teach your family about reputable news sources and stop trying to shoehorn US propaganda down everyone’s throats like it makes you look smart. Tiktok learned everything it does by the likes of facebook, Google and Twitter.
Why do you think US social media is everywhere all over the world with near instant or sometimes even get higher bandwidth preference in some countries? If you don’t think the US government has nothing to do with the level of complexities that entails dealing with local governments/infrastructure and planning, then I guess “ignorance is a bliss”, and I hope the US government will bring you peace and much freedumb. Don’t complain when they come in blasting tho.
It’s one thing to have fake news that is uncontrolled. It’s another thing when a literal adversary uses fake news as a tool to create discourse.
A social media company has one thing in mind. Profits. Even if it means that a byproduct of profits is discourse. But TikTok sole purpose is discourse. They literally don’t care about profits.
Blaming tiktok for bad parental choices?
I’m not saying it’s a good parental choice. But the ban can help the kids.
I doubt it, parents will just move them to YouTube, Instagram, or some other platform. The TikTok ban is intended to limit misinformation by the CCP, and that doesn’t really matter for this age of kids.
I’m a parent. YouTube is watched but you can see what they are watching.
The more important thing to me is building habits. I care less about how much they’re watching vs how they’re spending their time generally.
We have a rule where our kids need to read to be able to watch/play games, and we cap at 2hr/day. If they read 1hr, they can watch/play for 30min. My kids seem to have a pretty good mix of reading, watching/playing, and playing outside w/ friends, so I think it works.
Yea. We do something similar. It’s an electronic allowance. If you use it it’s done for the day. I change it for rainy days and vacations if we are traveling in the car or whatever. But it’s easy to set up with Google family. And then you can see what they are doing. Not to be snoopy. Just to teach them the right way to protect themselves online. I don’t want them to turn 18 and be completely lost.
I give my kids 30 min “free” on Saturdays, which gets doubled if they spend it in a game with a sibling. For trips, I make my kids all do the same thing, so either watch the same show, listen to the same audiobook, etc.
I personally don’t digitally track what my kids do at all, I instead rely on trust and keeping devices in a public space. I tell them what’s acceptable, and occasionally hang out with them while they’re doing whatever. As they follow the rules, I give them more autonomy (e.g. my oldest may get their own PC soon-ish), but if they break the rules, they lose access. The only parental controls I use is for my 4yo, because she keeps getting into my Steam Deck and Switch w/o asking, but my other kids know the passcode on the Switch (not my Steam Deck, that’s mine).
It’s a bit bumpy, but I’m hopeful that having rules but no actual walls teaches them to learn to self-regulate and will help them in the long-run. It worked for me as a kid.
No blaming the CCP on psyops on Americans.
Ah yes, that will solve the problem
Wait, is there another psyops software the CCP has deployed in the US?
Probably plenty. Tik tok is just the biggest owned by a foreign government that also is showing pretty immediate extreme negative effects on children’s attention spans and learning capabilities.
But people are still gonna whine because they’re 25 year olds who need to watch 80 videos of unboxing shoes in 4 minutes . That’s really the only pro tik tok argument there is.
It sets a pretty chilling precedent that non-American competition can be forced to sell to Americans for (insert arbitrary reason here).
I am in favor of TikTok at least becoming restricted to adults only if not outright banned, just warning about the consequences of doing it this way.
It’s owned by the CCP who is currently trying to undermine our election. It tried to do it in Taiwan where I currently live.
It really doesn’t set a bad precedent forcing a foreign adversary to have less control over the US population. We should really force the sale of a lot of Chinese properties in the US as well. A foreign government should not have so much control over rental and housing prices in the US.
Why are you pro foreign adversary controlling the daily lives of Americans? It’s a very odd stance to take and openly say unless you’re not American obviously.
“In my household, the only addictive spyware we use is made in the USA!!!”
Unironically yes, at least the US government is something we can openly criticize and attempt to change while living within its borders. Try criticizing the Chinese government from within China, let me know how that works out for you. I’ll take homegrown American spyware any day.
People love to repeat this, but US companies aren’t coming from a place of hostile intent like china’s special brand of tik tok for the states.
Why would it matter whether or not it’s intentional, if the end effect is the same?
It’s not the same. China wants to fuck up the American youth. That’s why their version of tiktok is so different from ours. But you already knew that I’m sure
Nah, I don’t use tiktok, Chinese or otherwise so I wouldn’t know the difference. But you’re missing the point.
- USA organisations abuse social media to spy on and influence citizens.
- Chinese organisations abuse social media to spy on and influence citizens.
And yet, you claim one is inheritly worse than the other or should be preferered. To me, they are equally bad. If anything, the USA manipulation is worse - they can use that knowledge more easily and to greater effect than an attacker on the other side of the world.
- USA organisations abuse social media to spy on and influence citizens.
- Chinese
organisationsgenocidal dictatorship abuse social media to spy on and influence citizens.
Are the American companies doing it in pursuit of destabilizing the United States population for the betterment of the CCP and its interests?
Is the Chinese company doing it in pursuit of destabilizing the United States population for the betterment of the CCP and its interests?
China does not have a version of tiktok. You are repeating bullshit lies
Douyin begs to differ.
Hmm, here’s what Zuckerberg said when he launched Facebook:
According to SAI sources, the following exchange is between a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and a friend shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Brutal.
Could Mark have been completely joking? Sure. But the exchange does reveal that Facebook’s aggressive attitude toward privacy may have begun early on.
They may not be trying to control elections (they certainly have their fingers in that pie too), but they’re still hostile to users.
They’re both focused on profit. The only reason you see the other one as scary is because it’s owned by the scary scary Chinese. Red scare all over again.
Why is Chinese tiktok different than that in the states then?
Because the USA strong armed them into giving their platform handling to Oracle Corp, a top tier US govt contractor.
But since pro-palestine cries can’t be silenced on TikTok as easily as Zio media, taking control of the platform is no longer enough
No, it’s literally a different app in China.
It’s the same thing, the international one was called TikTok and the US version is handled by Oracle
It’s called douyin or something idk in China but it’s the same shit
No tiktok is not focused on profit. It literally has one of the worst/non existent monetization systems.
Yup, vine ripoff with some tweaks and the same monetization issue
Case in point. Vine literally can’t survive and so shouldn’t TikTok. Unless of course it’s getting propped up by a government with endless funds and not focused on profits.
What’s the connection between Uber and China, then? I thought it was somewhat common for tech companies to be unprofitable for very long periods of time backed only by capital, but it may be China. Has anyone looked into this? Does Xi know what I like to order on weekends? Why haven’t we banned this yet
You say “red scare” as if China isn’t a hostile nation state to the US. Go look at western company penetration in China if you want. Are you calling it “western scare” when China blocks yet another western company? I didn’t think so.
Only Western manipulation please!
It’s not in American businesses best interest overthrow a government. Can’t say the same for the CCP tho. Fuck the CCP.
Lol I hope that’s a poor choice of words, maybe you MIGHT have a point if you specified the US government though even that isn’t true https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
Wow, that is literally 1 example of an obscure time in the early 19th century.
A mass majority of an American company has zero interest to hurt the community it is based in. The stability of a government and the strength of it’s community determines if people would buy/use a product. It also supplies a competent workforce and a network of security that helps a company prosper.
The question here would be… where are their parents?
At their second jobs.
On tiktok too, where else,
Algorithm “okay kids remember, America bad and China number 1”
Chinpokemon all over again…
Child abuse
That is terrifying
That’s fucked
Well yea parenting is hard so people avoid it. Not really a big deal.
Lol wut? You serious?
That sounds like a parental problem
Yeah, parents are getting ruined by social media algorithms too.
Our government seems to be moving towards an “we only care about the children, but everyone, including adults, upload your government papers” approach.
Y’all got any of those protections for adults? I remember reading regulations that companies couldn’t show children advertisements. Can I have some of that regulation too?
I just can’t stop being cynical that there is little focus on homeless or underpaid adults, or other adult issues, but the one problem we’re focused on just so happens to include everyone giving up anonymity on the Internet.
We do need to help kids with social media, but there’s a lot of other challenges they will soon face as adults that we’re ignoring.
Are there any examples of ‘for the kids’ legislation that isn’t just something like backdoor encryption masquerading as protecting the young?
Uhh, yes, in fact I’d say most. There’s entire systems of childhood health legislation, education, labor, you name it. This is an availability bias showing through. Think about it for five minutes and I bet you can come up with a dozen examples.
I think you mean “encryption with backdoors”
What a great way to dismiss an entire problems based that affects our society. It’s easier to just hand wave it away as someone else’s problem than to actually consider it…
When a problem becomes systematic it’s now a societal and cultural problem and not an individual responsibility problem. Individual responsibility isn’t working so it’s now down to the society this is occurring in to solve the systematic problem in a systematic way.
That’s how almost everything works
Children copy their parents.
Childless young people downvoting this, perhaps not able to admit they’re just like mom or dad?
For most of us I’m sorry but it’s true! Kids are mirrors; apples don’t fall far from trees. Not all of them. Some carry.
With some things yes. But not all.
Children can’t do that if you’re a responsible parent that keeps an eye on what their child is doing. Y’know, the bare minimum of parenting.
Imagine not realizing that people have to work for a living… Or that adult mental health is at an all time low. Or that social media manipulation affects people who are parents as well as their kids.
Similarly just kicking the problem down the road like you’re doing doesn’t actually solve it. It just inhibits solutions and contributes to the problem.
So in this instance people that think like your comment states actually are indirectly part of the problem. Which is ironic.
That’s sort of true, but “rules for thee and not for me” just kicks the can down the road. They’re going to copy you, so it’s really important to set a good example, at least when your kids can see you.
It’s not “rules for thee and not for me,” unless you consider that true for things like drinking alcohol. It’s protecting children from something they are not cognitively developed enough to be dealing with.
The difference is that it’s easy to point to reasons why a child shouldn’t be drinking alcohol (illegal, liver immaturity, etc), and less easy to point to why they shouldn’t be on social media, esp. if their friends are using it.
Where the line is more fuzzy, I think parents should set a more strict standard for themselves, at least in front of their children.
I think the line is, TikTok pulls a video at random it thinks you’ll want to watch. This means that you may be exposed to basically anything a person felt like filming. This includes violent or pornographic content, which children should not be exposed to.
Being a parent is telling your children no sometimes. Being a parent means that you should vet the media that your child is being exposed to, which is impossible on a platform like TikTok, and sometimes make the decision for them that they are not old enough to be exposed to certain material.
It really feels like folks don’t want to be parents - they want to hand the iPad over to the screaming toddler so that they can be babysat by their own phone. I don’t understand why one would have children, if they weren’t interested in doing the work of parenting those kids.
My thoughts exactly.
I will say, however, that I’m generally against content filtering. My kids know the rules, and they know if they violate them, they lose device privileges. Simple as that. If I put parental controls on, they’ll just circumvent them (and I’ll teach them how to if they ask). I know because I was a kid and constantly got around stupid content filters at school.
Either I trust them with the device, or I don’t, no half-measures. For example:
- TV - “kids” profiles, but they’re free to use our “adult” profiles if the filtering sucks
- computers and tablets - they ask for access, tell me what they want to do, and I unlock it for them
- Switch - child lock, but only because my 4yo keeps taking it when not allowed; my older kids know the code
That’s it. I generally allow them to use devices unsupervised, though in a public area so I can walk over and check on them. I intend to give them their own devices as they get older (i.e. they’ll set their own passwords). But if they violate my trust, it’s their fault, not the content filter’s, and they lose privileges.
if you’re a responsible parent that keeps an eye on what their child is doing.
Unfortunately you can’t run a society based on how people should behave. That’s the entire reason we have a legal system and the means to implement safeguards for our population.
We can’t run a society on the things on which we run society!
How do you take over the world? Program the children!
The next generation is so fucked. Wait…they be the ones who take care of me in the old person home. I’m fucked as will.
Karma.
The young treat the old however they do. But then the young grow old and get treated the same.
People have been claiming that new media will destroy society at least since we invented writing, and probably before.
What does “on tiktok” mean?
Unsupervised with their own accounts? I feel like that’s difficult to believe. Watching a few tiktoks before dinner with their parents? That doesn’t really strike me as a problem.
While I don’t entirely disagree with the author, I feel like this is a far too superficial look at what is a larger societal problem: young people have checked out.
He makes the argument that mental health is in decline, and I’m not sure if that’s true or we’ve just removed the stigma from therapy… But of more concern to me is that young people just DGAF, and I think that’s because older generations have left nothing for younger generations to inherit, besides ruin. Kids 5-7 aren’t gonna understand that, but they’re gonna pick up the vibes from their parents.
Found the tock-brained dipshit☝️
Found the illiterate bootlicker ☝️
I don’t think its difficult to imagine 30% of 5 to 7s with their own phones on tiktok nearly all the time.
Raising kids is hard, especially when youre poor and stressed out or tired all the time, its waaay easier to just get them a phone.
The number of people I’ve met in the last couple of years? Yeah, I live amongst the poors, the abusive parents and single moms and drunk/drug addicted dads… all their kids either have their own phones or the family has one for all the kids, who basically fight over it and get smacked by a parent or older sibling when theyre being too rowdy.
A few weeks ago I was walking, puffing on a nicotine vape. A school bus pulls up and drops off what could not have been older than 2nd graders, who began hounding me: Lemme hit that wax bro, Share your wax!
These are those 5 to 7s that are on TikTok, or close to it. I didnt even realize what Wax was at first, literally had to scurry home and lookup that wax is now the term for basically dab pens.
So yeah, theres huge segments of the population where 7 year olds want a highly concentrated dose of MJ from a literal random person theyve never seen before.
Devo: It’s a beautiful world we live in… for you, but not for me.
I mean, that’s kind of my point - in situations like that, it seems like using Tiktok is small potatoes compared to the more significant issues that’d cause problem behavior. The Tiktok consumption is just another symptom, and if it wasn’t tiktok it’d be some other escape mechanism.
To me, the article seems lazy, complaining about a superficial problem without spending effort to even consider or mention underlying root causes that could give rise to it and must be solved first.
And to be clear I’m not blaming the parents, they’re not the “root cause” I’m talking about. They’re victims too, in large part. They and their kids are stuck in a harmful cycle, and people with the ability to break that cycle are unwilling to do so.
You explicitly said you couldnt imagine 30% of 5-7 year olds having essentially unfettered access to TikTok, and you said the TikTok problem is a symptom of general mental health decline in youths.
You did not say your point was that 30% of 5-7s are using TikTok habitually, you expressed incredulity to this, to which I responded.
Anyway, you want a root cause?
Poverty, drug addiction, poor parenting.
Yeah, I am going to blame the parents, at least partially.
Oh you have kids and you are not able to actually raise them, hand them off to TikTok instead? You shouldn’t have had kids you can’t actually raise.
Obviously, this would happen a lot less if maybe we redistributed some wealth from the top to the bottom, actually had an economy and society that allowed for all people to live well.
Sure the article is superficial in the sense it isnt exploring root causes, but it doesnt really purport to try. That would probably end up being a completely different and much more complex piece of writing.
Further, this is honest-broker, a website for basically well to do yuppies who were born into connections and managed to maintain the socio economic strata they were born into, where they fret about how the poors are poor because theyre stupid, and minutiae about their investments.
What did you expect?
Yeah, I know I shouldn’t expect much from a site like that, but since it’s shared here I felt like I should shine a little light on the deeper issues.
This kind of superficial “journalism” rage-baiting boomers for clicks is really frustrating to me. Shit like this is brain-rot at least as bad as Tiktok is. It has always existed, but the extent to which it has replaced actual analysis and investigation is depressing.
Yes, the parents are partially at fault, of course. But as you indicated, there are significant societal pressures that force families into dynamics like this and it’s not realistic to expect an overwhelming majority to be able to resist it, alone. And since we’re not about to engage in class-based eugenics, it’s up to society to give them a serviceable ladder to climb out of their situation.
So, TLDR; I wanted to shine a light on deeper issues, so that people don’t think that this is solely a moral failing of parents, and that they DO understand that we have a collective responsibility to help families.
