I kinda doubt LG would pay for this publicity (unless they actually think a twitter client on a fridge that serves no purpose other than being non-confiscatable is a selling point to parents).
Maybe a competitor did it?
Also, the mom says she’ll be disabling accounts in one of the tweets. Maybe Dorthy’s original account was recently closed.
Why would you doubt that? Of course they would. And we're talking about it.
They've been trying to shovel their stupid smart fridges forever. Lots of people probably don't know they exist, and after this astroturfing, now they do.
I can't think of a place that I want internet less than standing in the kitchen.
I bet it has a camera/mic, and sells my fridge usage data to the highest bidder also. And to top it all off, it's just another attackable device when it stops getting updates in a couple of years.
What makes you think a 2 week old social media account with an obscure name and no other matching social accounts would be used to advertise an LG Smart Refrigerator?
A comment that points out a possible marketing campaign followed by a response that questions the comment while casually dropping the brand name and model of a product. That response seems marketing campaign.
Preposterous! While the LG Smart Refrigerator, powered by SmartThinQ® technology, is certainly a premium product at an excellent price, I don’t think there’s any evidence here to show that the upstanding employees of the LG Corporation are behind any of these tweets.
The fabulous people at LG would never engage in such a thinly veiled attempt at marketing through the Guardian's exceptionally high editorial standards just to promote their amazing ThinQ display tech. #FreeDorothy
I've read of would-be influencers who endorse products while not being paid for it (since they didn't find anyone willing to pay) still using the labelling because otherwise they would have to admit that nobody finds them important enough to pay them for advertising.
There are services that sell upvotes - such as [1]. Presumably while also maintaining a large enough set of plausible-looking profiles, IP addresses, browser fingerprints etc to bypass upvote ring detection.
So you don't have to pay high-profile influencers, who might be expensive or give away that it's a paid campaign.
A marketing company comes up with an adequate post, posts it on one site and gets it upvoted, and with a bit of luck there you have it, it gets reposted onto other sites and maybe even ends up in conventional media.
I strongly suspect the "we get it, you vape" meme was brought-and-paid-for by the cigarette industry by these means.
You can hire ad agencies to make fake terrorist videos and promote racial division [2] so it's not like advertisers are too ethical to do this type of stuff.
She caused a fire because she got distracted with Social Media.
As a parent I would also confiscate electronics and probably consider therapy at that point.
She caused a fire cooking, which can happen pretty easily if you aren't careful: obviously it is the cooking instructions that are faulty that haven't conveyed the risks properly.
Realistically she could just as well had to go to the toilet and then forget about the stove, and what are you banning then?
Typically, there's a large difference between the bookworm and the social media addicted personality. Within the limits of very gross generalizations (which is inevitable in this context), the former category is largely healthier than the latter.
Yes, it happens. I set some bacon on fire because I forgot about it when I got distracted. My wife set a jacket potato on fire because she got distracted. It happens to normal people.
> As a parent... probably consider therapy
I know who sounds like they should be in therapy, and it's not the kids.
I’m with the GP. People get distracted no doubt. It’s normal. But I think the comment was about what the GP would do if put in a similar situation. If one continues to get distracted while doing something potentially dangerous, for example cooking bacon, and it happens frequently, looking at the root cause of the distraction is probably warranted.
Apologies for being passive agressive, I meant to be direct. Anyone who thinks children should be taken to therapy because they're easily distracted is an idiot. Is that non-passive enough for you?
The root cause is kids get distracted. So do adults. You learn from your mistakes, avoid distractions, and get some smoke alarms. Even then, these things happen. It's life.
I agree with the parent - there isn't necessarily an aggressive interpretation (although it could have been worded in a more neutral fashion).
Based on my personal view, this is a case of addictive personality, caused by parent's poor education. I imagine the parents placing her in front of screens for her entire childhood, in order to babysit her. This is a long shot, but it's an educated guess.
This is assuming the story is real, not just some marketing campaign:
1. Therapy requires mutual trust to work. Administrating therapy at this point, after turning the child into an adversary by taking away electronics as a form of punishment, would make the child think that the therapy sessions are no more than another form of punishment. Nothing useful can come out of the therapy if the child perceives the therapist as an enemy.
2. It frightens me how people turns everything that is supposed to be a part of human life into a medical condition, and treat 'therapy' as the deus ex machina that could solve all inconveniences in our social life.
Exactly, which is why I'm a little concerned about the knee jerk reaction to promote mental health as a solution to problems we have in society (mass shootings, CP, suicide, etc).
As you said, you need the patient to want to change in order for progress to be made, and mixing punishment and therapy makes that nearly impossible.
What we need is a fundamental shift in how we view mental illness and discipline. Instead of just punishing people for doing something wrong, we should be looking at why the mistake was made and try to work with the individual to fix that and use punishment only if more effective methods don't work.
Maybe we need psychologists to work with parents/communities so parents know how to approach deviant behavior in a constructive way. I firmly believe that if parenting is done well, people will be better equipped to deal with problems later in life.
My kids have access to the comp in the living room when their devices get confiscated. The punishment being they loose their privacy while still having access.
Based on the (inevitably) scarce information, my guess is that the parents neglected the subject during the childhood, she grew up used to "passive entertainment", and she developed an addictive personality.
If this is the case (see the part where she mentions she's easily bored), removing some means would just transfer the addiction to other ones, potentially (but not necessarily) more dangerous.
An approach would be family therapy, as the parents also had a causative role.
Nobody wrote that therapy is a universal panacea (I wrote "approach", which is an entirely different concept).
Also, you clearly don't know how therapy works. It's not something can "do" "anytime anything happens", like going to the car mechanic, in particular, because therapy takes a (at least relatively) long time to have effects.
The idea to go to therapy in cases like this is actually based on the opposite of what you wrote:
1. that the event is exceptional (it's not "anything")
2. that there is a pathological context (addiction)
3. more subtly, that there is at the very least a communication issue in the family
This reminds me of a story an older colleague told me. In ye olden days (60s or 70s) they used to have locks to fit over dial telephones, and this colleagues dad fitted a lock as punishment for running up large phone bills. You don't need to use the dial on dial telephones though, you can just use the hang up button to create the right pulse lengths, so that's what she did.
Yeah, it looks to be easy enough; much like making a an actual IoT device, you don't have to write a complete Twitter app. When I think of something funny enough I might try it.
I like the idea of it -- kids battling parental controls; I learned a decent amount from my electronics/wifi (they just took the whole router to work) being confiscated, like picking doors with credit cards and setting up another old router found in the garage. At school, everyone knew about VPNs and proxies, to circumvent site-blocking, and cd-cracks to bring in LAN games on USB
Both TFA and your particular tales didn't amount to much, but the more intelligent the controls, the better the kid has to become to circumvent it :-)
Where there's a will there's a way. Reminds me of the old days in the 90's when my old man used to take away our PC's power cable to "manage my computer addiction", so I made my own from an old stereo power cable and two nails. Good times.
As a parent of Few Young kids (non teenagers) I have made it my mission to not give in to the social media BS. My kids will only get phones when they go to college. If they get a phone before then, it will be a dumb phone with no internet.
For the others that say, we all get distracted, well then you might have no clue what distracted means to someone with a kid. You ask them to brush their teeth, they bring their toothbrush in the living room just to watch TV. Phone for a teenager it’s the worst thing a parent can do (outside of the emergency reasons)
How do you plan to handle the social interactions? I expect they're going to be skipped on lots of invites / activities organised on platforms which are phone-only. Not a criticism of the idea - just curious what's your approach here.
I read the intention as "limit the social media distraction", not as "make it harder to do things with other humans". There's lots of social activities you're either involved in via an online group, or you won't know what's going on. For example, planning for a canoe club I was a part of existed only on IM / FB group. FB is still available non-mobile, but WhatsApp is not.
That's pretty much what my parents did, and I have mixed feelings about it. I do think it was good up to high school age. I would have said some dumb things when I was twelve I would probably regret today. But, as a teenager, it felt like just another way my parents were trying to control me. I would say that if you block phones, you have to counterbalance it with some other way your teenager can have agency. It doesn't matter too much what it is, just let your teenager have some freedom.
The social ostracism and inability to interact with their peers will not strengthen your children socially nor given them a value system for dealing with the challenges of the culture around them. It will simply delay when they have to grapple with it from a time in their lives when mistakes are understood and expected by the world to a time when the world will expect them to already be experienced with how to manage it. A rule like you describe is not for the benefit of your children. It is a crutch designed to help you avoid the hard work of having to teach proper values around difficult things. Charting a path through social media is part of parenting. You haven't found a secret hack that makes it easy. You have created a fantasy that you can simply get away with not doing so.
They will create accounts on their friends phones, all of the apps have multi-user features now. I know what you are saying, but I eventually gave in and made some rules around everything, like unexpectedly asking for the phone to take a look at things, putting it in my room at night, etc. They (at least my kid) aren't diligent enough to cover up enough that you won't find out if anything is going on. Of course she then dropped it in the toilet.
The article once again shows that Twitter has instead of being peaceful and cooperative, opted to take the would be side of a Jerry Springer show and instigate a greater fight and argument. If there is ever a WWIII, Twitter will be proud to have been part of the argument/misunderstanding that started it. No other service exists that primarily connects people so they can trash talk each other. It might as well be described in their business plan as much as they do it.
As a parent of young children, this honestly terrifies me. I know how addictive social media can be, and I'm trying to teach my kids how to set their own boundaries, but I don't know how to properly respond to problems caused by addiction. I don't believe in involuntary confiscation, but I may resort to that if my child loses my trust, and once I take something away, I lose whatever trust they have in me.
Does anyone have any good resources for dealing with this type of problem constructively? I know building trust in the first place is important, I just don't know much about what works with older children/teenagers. My current approach would be to treat them like an adult and have them come up with their own disciplinary measures.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadAnd in the unlikely case this is genuine, what's with all the people telling the mother how to parent her kid.
Well done, LG.
Maybe a competitor did it?
Also, the mom says she’ll be disabling accounts in one of the tweets. Maybe Dorthy’s original account was recently closed.
They've been trying to shovel their stupid smart fridges forever. Lots of people probably don't know they exist, and after this astroturfing, now they do.
I can't think of a place that I want internet less than standing in the kitchen.
I bet it has a camera/mic, and sells my fridge usage data to the highest bidder also. And to top it all off, it's just another attackable device when it stops getting updates in a couple of years.
https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en
I’m really starting to think we need updated legislation for labelling ads.
So you don't have to pay high-profile influencers, who might be expensive or give away that it's a paid campaign.
A marketing company comes up with an adequate post, posts it on one site and gets it upvoted, and with a bit of luck there you have it, it gets reposted onto other sites and maybe even ends up in conventional media.
I strongly suspect the "we get it, you vape" meme was brought-and-paid-for by the cigarette industry by these means.
You can hire ad agencies to make fake terrorist videos and promote racial division [2] so it's not like advertisers are too ethical to do this type of stuff.
[1] https://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-upvote/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bell_Pottinger&ol...
Realistically she could just as well had to go to the toilet and then forget about the stove, and what are you banning then?
I’m a parent and based on that experience I expect the subjects episode was part of a larger pattern.
Yes, it happens. I set some bacon on fire because I forgot about it when I got distracted. My wife set a jacket potato on fire because she got distracted. It happens to normal people.
> As a parent... probably consider therapy
I know who sounds like they should be in therapy, and it's not the kids.
I’m with the GP. People get distracted no doubt. It’s normal. But I think the comment was about what the GP would do if put in a similar situation. If one continues to get distracted while doing something potentially dangerous, for example cooking bacon, and it happens frequently, looking at the root cause of the distraction is probably warranted.
The root cause is kids get distracted. So do adults. You learn from your mistakes, avoid distractions, and get some smoke alarms. Even then, these things happen. It's life.
Based on my personal view, this is a case of addictive personality, caused by parent's poor education. I imagine the parents placing her in front of screens for her entire childhood, in order to babysit her. This is a long shot, but it's an educated guess.
1. Therapy requires mutual trust to work. Administrating therapy at this point, after turning the child into an adversary by taking away electronics as a form of punishment, would make the child think that the therapy sessions are no more than another form of punishment. Nothing useful can come out of the therapy if the child perceives the therapist as an enemy.
2. It frightens me how people turns everything that is supposed to be a part of human life into a medical condition, and treat 'therapy' as the deus ex machina that could solve all inconveniences in our social life.
As you said, you need the patient to want to change in order for progress to be made, and mixing punishment and therapy makes that nearly impossible.
What we need is a fundamental shift in how we view mental illness and discipline. Instead of just punishing people for doing something wrong, we should be looking at why the mistake was made and try to work with the individual to fix that and use punishment only if more effective methods don't work.
Maybe we need psychologists to work with parents/communities so parents know how to approach deviant behavior in a constructive way. I firmly believe that if parenting is done well, people will be better equipped to deal with problems later in life.
In my experience it's correlated with the US West-coast passive aggression. Nothing can just be a difference in opinion and/or personality clash.
Based on the (inevitably) scarce information, my guess is that the parents neglected the subject during the childhood, she grew up used to "passive entertainment", and she developed an addictive personality.
If this is the case (see the part where she mentions she's easily bored), removing some means would just transfer the addiction to other ones, potentially (but not necessarily) more dangerous.
An approach would be family therapy, as the parents also had a causative role.
Of course, all of this is a wild guess.
What about just talking to each other, like a normal family? I'm happy my parents didn't insist on therapy anytime anything happened.
Nobody wrote that therapy is a universal panacea (I wrote "approach", which is an entirely different concept).
Also, you clearly don't know how therapy works. It's not something can "do" "anytime anything happens", like going to the car mechanic, in particular, because therapy takes a (at least relatively) long time to have effects.
The idea to go to therapy in cases like this is actually based on the opposite of what you wrote:
1. that the event is exceptional (it's not "anything")
2. that there is a pathological context (addiction)
3. more subtly, that there is at the very least a communication issue in the family
Teenagers it seems don't really change that much.
I seem to recall that the source can be easily spoofed.
He managed to get round it (at least until we realised) by using Facebook Messenger via the web browser on his Kindle.
Both TFA and your particular tales didn't amount to much, but the more intelligent the controls, the better the kid has to become to circumvent it :-)
Looked here and looks promising: https://tello.com
For the others that say, we all get distracted, well then you might have no clue what distracted means to someone with a kid. You ask them to brush their teeth, they bring their toothbrush in the living room just to watch TV. Phone for a teenager it’s the worst thing a parent can do (outside of the emergency reasons)
Isn't that the intention?
The positive effects of social media is highly exaggerated.
Lol, clearly now there needs to be a rule of no phones taken in the bathroom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohDB5gbtaEQ
Does anyone have any good resources for dealing with this type of problem constructively? I know building trust in the first place is important, I just don't know much about what works with older children/teenagers. My current approach would be to treat them like an adult and have them come up with their own disciplinary measures.
Imagine waking from a coma after 10 or 20 years and reading this in the news.