> What troubles those who track child exploitation is that TikTok’s algorithm is designed to learn what type of content users like, then feed them a string of it. That keeps youngsters glued to the site and makes it easier for pedophiles to seek them out.
It keeps adults glued to the site too. Predators and people that didn't plan to be alike.
Following on to your comment, is this, "TikTok’s algorithm is designed to learn what type of content users like", what almost all social media does to a certain extent?
at this point yes, TikTok's has been better at it and others have been playing catch up trying to replicate it and its interface. For example, Instagram's Reels are like TikTok's, except Instagram's users are split doing a dozen other things, while TikTok's users are only doing the "reels" like feature and associate TikTok with that.
Non-rational because the most likely person to sexually abuse a child is a neighbor, creepy uncle, someone at church, etc. not boogie men from the dark web stalking TikTok, yet parents will still be more afraid
Of the TikTok angle when reading an article like this.
The most likely person to molest a minor is an internet friend. This has been proven to be true over and over again, so much so, that “to catch a predator” was a mainstream hit show.
what's a good source where I can learn more about that? I don't consider the existence of a TV show where dozens of charges were dropped to be a reflection of likelihood.
C’mon, do you really think the researchers here would say “well, he did send her a few DMs over TikTok before he got predatory so that makes him an acquaintance, not a stranger”?
No, the entire exchange from the first time he saw one of her videos and followed her would be part of the predation, ergo a stranger predator.
Would that make a teacher or priest a “stranger” predator since they had always planned on the act from the moment they met the child?
Or are they a proper acquaintance since they are known in real life, and presumably also trusted by the parents?
How about traditional pen pals? If the parents also know of the letter exchange is the person a stranger just because they have never physically met?
I’m not sure how they came up with these statistics but if the categories are self reported then that’s subject to individual bias as to what is a stranger.
There is no reason to assume that people don’t consider internet buddies to be “friends”.
This is like coming up with a criteria for sandwich/non-sandwich. There is a strong social distinction between an anonymous adult person on the internet and a your church's youth pastor. Maybe they both do what they do for the explicit purpose of preying on children, but people would consider one a stranger and the other an acquaintance. No one would call an adult man preying on children online a "friend." Maybe the distinction for an acquaintance is that there is an original relationship between predator and victim that would be appropriate were it not for the abuse. There's nothing appropriate about a grown man messaging little girls online.
We’ll the distinction is permanent to statistics if we don’t know whom was interviewed.
If you interviewed a child, and they said someone they played video games online with was a “friend” then that’s the box they go into even if you and I would say that guy is a dangerous stranger.
I think that’s what the OP was trying to say. We should be wary about statistics that say nearly all predation is done by known friends and family. Thus we should rightfully be worried about the online interactions children have, and not simply brush it aside as paranoia.
Non-rational in as much as while you will find grooming anywhere communications is possible, the by far greatest risk to your children is family, relatives and family friends - people far more likely to be granted access.
Yes, it's still worth paying attention to other risks - that attention is part of why they remain tiny - but when media disproportionately sensationalise the risk of strangers relative the far greater danger of friends and family, they're doing harm.
I mean, if we're being honest about where most sexual assaults/molestations happen: A school, a church, a trusted adult's home, a relative's summer cabin.
Everyone wants to talk about creeps in vans, it's the creep you know that's going to diddle your kid, statistically speaking, about 9 out of 10 times.
IDK that TikTok is making the problem worse, parents just have a lot of nightmares about how badly everyone wants to fuck their babies.
These things are not all equal. Of those, Fortnite and Roblox specifically target children. IMO as a parent, Fortnite is relatively safe. There's only so much interaction you have during a game and it's easy for kids to avoid problematic players.
Roblox is a nightmare. I've seen community-created sex games that start off as "dating" and progress toward simulated sex complete with ridiculous-looking naked models. There are absolutely no age controls and the content moderation seems nonexistent. Something as simple as the ability to flag a game/server as NSFW and then age-gate it would be a huge improvement. The lack of such makes it clear that the company has no intention of protecting minors.
Obviously education is the best defense for any of these, but some are clearly and knowingly profiting from the sexual exploitation of minors.
At this point, after 30 years of the internet, we should all know any big social media platform with kids on it is going to be a vector for these kind of things. This news article was closer to saying the sun will rise again tomorrow.
Since you bunch together protocols and platforms, I don't know if you intend to be taken seriously. But even among the platforms you mentioned, yes obviously all of them attract this. The difference is some know about it and actively take measures (eg. FB takes reports of underage accounts v seriously and bans them quickly) and the other ones are Roblox and Omegle.
Facebook/Meta has been very aggressive in trying to get the US to ban Tiktok from Trump's time in office (also was the subject of secret dinners b/w Zuck and Trump).
Although the story itself is pretty reasonable... the problem here seems to be that these services are public by default for minors.
That was already a major problem when the platform was still called musical.ly and not even remotely as big as it is right now. So this is a problem which is relevant enough to report upon without the need of someone paying for it.
Every interaction is a potential venue for exploitation. It's not the platform, it's teaching children right, wrong, and the skills to protect themselves. Not defending TikTok, but I think focusing on a platform, or medium, is the wrong way to go...
Allegedly, TikTok’s recommendations to kids in China (who owns and controls TikTok) are very different to the recommendations kids in the West get. Something Western governments must look into ASAP.
Or it's a commercial company looking to make money by whatever legal means possible in the country it operates in. China does not respect freedom for their citizens and even has laws against kids gaming for long hours.
> The theory is that China is poisoning the minds of young Americans by not developing interests in educational things
It makes as much sense as saying that the US is trying to make Chinese people fat by serving high calorie empty nutrient foods in McDonalds and Starbucks stores in China.
I'm in Europe so I'm not sure which TikTok I access, but my TikTok is fairly educational. A running joke in my friends group is 'ways to get thirst traps on <my name>'s fyp'. I see this kind of comment all the time, but would like to see any source on it. Otherwise it's just a random conspiracy theory.
China has strict rules on what kids can be allowed to do online. Different rules in different countries means companies sell different versions of products, this isn't some grand conspiracy.
> If you are a real-name authenticated user under the age of 14, you can find that you are already in the youth mode when you open Douyin. You can only use it for 40 minutes a day, and you cannot use it from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 the next day.
> In the youth mode, we have also prepared wonder-ful content for you, such as novel and interesting science experiments, exhibitions in museums and art galleries, beautiful scenery all over the country, historical knowledge explanations, etc.
Like how every tech CEO manages social media access (or technology exposure in general) for his own kids vs what his company strategy is for everyone else’s kids?
It used to be that Gangsta Rap and Drill music was the worst influence on black kids. Then came Instagram with its influence on young girls. And now this.
Incredible how the capitalist industries really don't care about externalities, and will do anything to make a buck. And government works hand in hand with them, whether it's the US government or the Chinese government. In this case given the disparity of what is shown on TikTok in China and here, I think it's on purpose to weaken the West.
Whether it's factory farms leading to superbugs, high fructose corn syrup causing diabetes, overfishing, insects dying, fossil fuels, water waste, plastic pollution everywhere, the corporations get away with putting metric tons of this out ...but they will keep the individuals distracted and fighting each other... they'll tell you that you can't use a straw or bag, you should recycle the plastic (a scam), diet and exercise, and go vegan, to save the planet ... meanwhile no one seriously can rein in the corporations, instead they work with them.
The assumption of many anarcho-capitalists is that government is the antithesis of capitalism, that it's somehow encroaching on a pure version of it ('laissez-faire capitalism').
But I'm saying the opposite, if you click the link. Government ENABLES capitalism. Government protects property rights, and passes laws, and enforces them with force. It is the one that enforces victimless intellectual property violations with force. It is the one that chooses to evict a tenant, or have an eviction moratorium. It is the one who chooses to bail out the markets and the big corporations. It's the one who prevents regular people from filming the horrors on factory farms. It is the one which gives Big Ag or farmers water, but regular people have very little. It is the one which lets corporations put high fructose corn syrup into everything. And it is the one which does nothing while Coca Cola and Snapple switch to putting out metric tons of non-bioldegradeable plastic. But the individuals are told they can somehow recycle and vegan their way out of it. It's all a scam, they shipped it to China. They don't want you to wake up and hold the corporations to account, so they'll tell you that the real problem is plastic straws and bags.
For every socialist government failure (like Holodomor or Great Chinese Famine) there is a capitalist government failure (Irish Potato Famine or Bengal Famines).
I think most people would agree that government can enable, and can definitely disable, capitalism. Presumably by definition anarcho-capitalists don't (and to some extent they might be right, but not in many cases), but I don't understand why you're saying that here.
> For every socialist government failure (like Holodomor or Great Chinese Famine) there is a capitalist government failure (Irish Potato Famine or Bengal Famines).
The main cause of the potato famine was biological. The contributing factor I think you're referring to was liberty: farmers could sell potatoes overseas instead of to their starving kin.
The British government could've removed liberty, and seized the potatoes and ordered them to remain in Ireland, or, I would say, the British government could've worked within the liberty/capitalist system and have simply bought the potatoes at market rate and kept them in Ireland. They did neither.
The difference with the Great Chinese Famine was that - of course - the central bureaurocracy was actively involved in making farming terrible. It wasn't a failure to do something to help; it was a failure of doing the wrong thing. The blight wasn't biological; it was ideological.
I’m saying that because government uses violence to enforce propertly rights and picks winners and losers, props up large corporations and instead its job should be to consistently impose costs on them for negative externalities. Which it does to some extent, but not nearly enough.
As far as the potato famine, and bengal famines, they were exacerbated exactly by state policies favoring corporations and landlords. People have handled natural blights before, without such disastrous results as 15% of the country dying.
Practically everything in this wikipedia article discusses it:
The ability of middlemen was measured by the rent income they could contrive to extract from tenants.[34] They were described in evidence before the commission as "land sharks", "bloodsuckers", and "the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country".[34] The middlemen leased large tracts of land from the landlords on long leases with fixed rents, which they sublet as they saw fit. They would split a holding into smaller and smaller parcels so as to increase the amount of rent they could obtain. Tenants could be evicted for reasons such as non-payment of rents (which were high), or a landlord's decision to raise sheep instead of grain crops. A cottier paid his rent by working for the landlord while the spalpeen, an itinerant labourer, paid his short-term lease through temporary day work.[39][40]
As any improvement made on a holding by a tenant became the property of the landlord when the lease expired or was terminated, the incentive to make improvements was limited. Most tenants had no security of tenure on the land; as tenants "at will", they could be turned out whenever the landlord chose. The only exception to this arrangement was in Ulster where, under a practice known as "tenant right", a tenant was compensated for any improvement they made to their holding. According to Woodham-Smith, the commission stated that "the superior prosperity and tranquillity of Ulster, compared with the rest of Ireland, were due to tenant right".[34]
Landlords in Ireland often used their powers without compunction, and tenants lived in dread of them. Woodham-Smith writes that, in these circumstances, "industry and enterprise were extinguished and a peasantry created which was one of the most destitute in Europe".[36]
When the famine happened, the Irish government and the British crown chose to enforce and double down on protections for this class of landowner. And there is more too, in other sections. All the actions of the government that exacerbated this famine were as explicitly in favor of landlords and corporations and private property, as to be as much Capitalist as holodomor’s collectivization actions were Socialist.
Each government reacted in a tone deaf way to the plight of the actual peasants and farmers, one with doubling down on capitalism, the other on collectivism.
Also see the role of the British in protecting their East India company in 1700s, and in requisitioning grain for England amid a famine in 1990s…
* The Company provided little meaningful mitigation — there was no reduction in taxation or any significant relief effort.[33][38]
In October 1769, the Company requested that storehouses be constructed in Patna and Murshidabad; city officials were instructed to prevent monopoly of trade and have farmers raise "every sort" of dry grain, that was possible. The orders were largely unsuccessful; many Company officials along with their Indian assistants (Gomasthas) would exploit the famine to create grai...
It's just too much sugar. Could be cane sugar, high fructose corn syrup, pure glucose, it doesn't matter.
There's just too much added sugar in things, we can all stop pretending HFCS is anything other than the cheapest (and therefor most common) type of sugar. If you got "the corporations" to stop using it tomorrow, we'd just have Coke made with cane sugar, and you'd still have the related health issues.
Let's go back to where we started:
>>high fructose corn syrup causing diabetes
Nothing you just posted refuted anything I said, which was that it's the sugar generally and not HFC specifically and that attempting to blame this specifically on HFC is missing the forest for the trees, so I'm not going to address any new points you made here because they have fuckall to do with what I said.
Also, it's a terrible rhetorical technique to tell people what they think in the manner you did but that's neither here nor there.
You said A is only ONE OF MANY THINGS OF THE SAME TYPE that does
And I responded that corporations and governments have put those other things into your food too, genetically modified, and you can’t opt out very easily.
Also said that diabetes isn’t the only consequence of too much fructose.
You're right, my comment about your rhetorical choices isn't important. It's not on my to judge how well you communicate your message or influence others.
You're also right that you're trying to make points that I wasn't talking about and don't care about, and that attempting to correct the record when someone such as yourself decides to pop off about how "they" are ruining things isn't worth my time or energy.
Finally, you're right that you can bring up whatever tangential points you want that are correct and put them into a conversation to convince yourself that those were the points you were originally trying to make and I'm wrong.
> What troubles those who track child exploitation is that TikTok’s algorithm is designed to learn what type of content users like, then feed them a string of it. That keeps youngsters glued to the site and makes it easier for pedophiles to seek them out.
I don't get that paragraph. It's like saying playgrounds are designed to attract kids, making it easier for pedophiles to know where kids are and seek them out. Or ice cream vans, or toy stores, or malls. Or even schools. Removing fun things from playgrounds will result in fewer incidents, but is that what we want.
I used TikTok extensively for a month. I thought it was disturbing how often it would show me videos from people who'd turn out to be under-age girls and I'd only find out by checking the comments. I definitely see how TikTok facilitates the risk of sexual exploitation of minors.
Trying to treat TikTok's algorithm as anything like a playground is just ridiculous.
I'm not sure I understand, you mean someone would randomly stumble upon minors and then accidentally exploit them sexually? Or that TikTok makes it easy to find them because it'll just present minors to you after you've swiped right on some meme dance once?
I'd imagine that predators don't really need a recommendation engine to stumble upon them since they're actively looking for them. Are you suggesting they're becoming predators by accident because Tiktok showed them videos of minors?
Once TikTok realizes you like young girls, it'll show you more young girls. If it realizes young girls is all you care about, it will literally show you nothing else. That's a pedophile's dream right there. Chances are higher than we'd like that some of these girls are vulnerable and might mistakenly build contact with a predator which might lead to sexual exploitation.
Right, but pedophiles don't need TikTok to find children they can prey on. They'll join games, they'll join streams, they'll find them on Twitter or Instagram, on Facebook or whatever else there is. TikTok may be a more convenient platform because it's better at understanding that someone wants to see preteen girls or whatever, but it certainly isn't turning people into pedophiles or creates a situation that isn't also on any other platform.
I don't think there is much anyone can do. The platforms will kill any proposal of online identification and age-gating because they'll lose money. The parents have often given up fighting their kids over media usage. And everyone else has no influence over the children, the platforms, or the predators.
So in this situation, you were or weren't seeking out young girls in the feed? Because it sounds like TikTok was just picking up on _your_ preferences here.
Nah. My main interests on TikTok were pretty women and funny videos. Which is why it was disturbing to me that it would keep trying to show me girls that were way too young.
Age of majority is 18+ pretty much everywhere except Iran, Indonesia, Yemen, Cambodia, Cuba, Myanmar, Scotland, Vietnam, North Korea, and Timor-Leste [2].
I was talking of age of majority, and according to your second link, which was my own source, it's 16 in UK and Scotland, which are considered first-world.
IANAL, but I'd expect the age of majority to overrule the age of consent, since they're considered an adult from then on, in their countries. Unless these young influencers are doing sexual acts with their viewers, age of consent is irrelevant here.
The dilemma of people believing the ideal age is 18 (or under, but under is illegal, so...), and so wanting to watch women who are as close to being underage as possible without getting them in trouble.
> I thought it was disturbing how often it would show me videos from people who'd turn out to be under-age girls
This is disturbing to say the least, especially because TikTok's algorithm is highly responsive to your individual preferences. I tried it out for a bit because my kid was on it, and I literally only got forklift, train and truck videos after awhile.
That's the point though. TikTok is extremely responsive and exploratory. You got forklift, train and truck videos. Full disclosure, I primarily got pretty women who were clearly of age being sexually suggestive or dancing, because, well, I'm a sucker for pretty women. Which is why it was jarring whenever I'd get videos of people who were clearly young girls and I'd check their profile or the comments for their age. With the above post, I recognize how TikTok was probing my interests and I see how that algorithm is far more problematic than people here are willing to admit.
The problem is the exact opposite of what the article claims. The problem is that TikTok learns that a user likes jailbait and feeds that user an endless stream of it.
Well, I don’t get the reflexive need here to defend predatory algorithms, which is what happens any time TikTok (or Facebook for that matter) comes up. This is in no way like a “playground”, which exists in the physical world. A swing set on the playground isn’t anything remotely close to a system that’s designed to hijack your dopamine response.
A playground that actively learns your child's wants and desires in order to keep them hooked to the playground until your child would rather stay up all night being at the playground instead of going to bed is some sort of messed-up stephen king horror story, not a playground.
Doesn't seem to be anything specific to TikTok in this; any service which allows strangers to find each other and chat will have a grooming problem. It may be more or less successful at mitigating that depending on how much surveillance and moderation effort it puts in. This problem dates back to AIM and beyond.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
There are 8 remaining children who still use Facebook and Mark has a dedicated team of a dozen PMs intensively following each one trying to crack the code.
This is off topic of a serious conversation, so I'll take the downvotes... But at first glance, that photo of Grady Moffett Sr. looked to me like Robert Picardo, the Emergency Medical Hologram.
More seriously, one of the issues with these online platforms (all, although some more than others) is that they're allowing for the mixing of adults and children in a "peer" environment in an unsupervised manner. In a traditional offline world, adults and kids don't mingle too often, let alone in a 1-on-1 manner, especially not as "peers". There's definitely some very legitimate criticism of a segment of the adults to be had, but you'll never be able to correct virtues in all individuals. I think this mixing of adults and children in a peer setting at such scale is a new thing for human society.
Hanging out at the corner or mall also has risks. It's diminishing returns to try to rid every risk to minors, and they'll probably rebel anyhow and sneak off; it's what adolescents do. That being said, I do expect reasonable inspections by TikTok staff.
Pretty sure I have read those articles. I feel like journalist are missing the forest for the trees on this one. It's all the same problem, any public forum anyone can access will eventually reach this problem. It's not even about scale anymore, scale just makes it all apparent.
What kind of guidance? The parents who let kids use this stuff are the same parents who don't pay attention to anything else about the well-being of their kids. Most people are lazy, distracted, or stupid, in some mix.
So can we at least take a second to appreciate the orders of magnitude of growth between BBS' and tiktok? With data structures and algorithms we're very willing to accept that orders of magnitudes shifting can change our basic assumptions about things.
The point isn't that these things haven't existed in some form forever, it's that they're scaling to points where these effects are becoming increasingly dangerous, proportional to the growth of these systems.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadIt keeps adults glued to the site too. Predators and people that didn't plan to be alike.
> Someone known and trusted by the child or child’s family members, perpetrates 91% of child sexual abuse.
Don't believe everything you see on TV.
/s
That includes everyone know and trusted by the child, which obviously includes internet friends known only to the child
Quoting meaningless stats to prove nothing
I think it's time for a good think and a lie down.
It is a false narrative to pretend that automagically means “oh it was the creepy” uncle
No, the entire exchange from the first time he saw one of her videos and followed her would be part of the predation, ergo a stranger predator.
Or are they a proper acquaintance since they are known in real life, and presumably also trusted by the parents?
How about traditional pen pals? If the parents also know of the letter exchange is the person a stranger just because they have never physically met?
I’m not sure how they came up with these statistics but if the categories are self reported then that’s subject to individual bias as to what is a stranger.
There is no reason to assume that people don’t consider internet buddies to be “friends”.
If you interviewed a child, and they said someone they played video games online with was a “friend” then that’s the box they go into even if you and I would say that guy is a dangerous stranger.
I think that’s what the OP was trying to say. We should be wary about statistics that say nearly all predation is done by known friends and family. Thus we should rightfully be worried about the online interactions children have, and not simply brush it aside as paranoia.
Yes, it's still worth paying attention to other risks - that attention is part of why they remain tiny - but when media disproportionately sensationalise the risk of strangers relative the far greater danger of friends and family, they're doing harm.
Everyone wants to talk about creeps in vans, it's the creep you know that's going to diddle your kid, statistically speaking, about 9 out of 10 times.
IDK that TikTok is making the problem worse, parents just have a lot of nightmares about how badly everyone wants to fuck their babies.
Roblox is a nightmare. I've seen community-created sex games that start off as "dating" and progress toward simulated sex complete with ridiculous-looking naked models. There are absolutely no age controls and the content moderation seems nonexistent. Something as simple as the ability to flag a game/server as NSFW and then age-gate it would be a huge improvement. The lack of such makes it clear that the company has no intention of protecting minors.
Obviously education is the best defense for any of these, but some are clearly and knowingly profiting from the sexual exploitation of minors.
It rained last week; it's still useful to know that rain is coming this week.
Although the story itself is pretty reasonable... the problem here seems to be that these services are public by default for minors.
Tiktok America is entertainment only.
The theory is that China is poisoning the minds of young Americans by not developing interests in educational things.
> The theory is that China is poisoning the minds of young Americans by not developing interests in educational things
It makes as much sense as saying that the US is trying to make Chinese people fat by serving high calorie empty nutrient foods in McDonalds and Starbucks stores in China.
Chinese users are interested in junk just as much as westerners, if not more, so they will be fed exactly what keeps them glued to their phones.
I don’t believe for a second that every Chinese kid is on Douyin watching science videos for hours.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgzamm/chinas-live-streaming...
https://mp-weixin-qq-com.translate.goog/s/zp43DhzwanDApoPCIg...
> If you are a real-name authenticated user under the age of 14, you can find that you are already in the youth mode when you open Douyin. You can only use it for 40 minutes a day, and you cannot use it from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 the next day.
> In the youth mode, we have also prepared wonder-ful content for you, such as novel and interesting science experiments, exhibitions in museums and art galleries, beautiful scenery all over the country, historical knowledge explanations, etc.
(Source that that's a legitimate press release: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/19/22682219/tiktok-parent-by...)
Edit: Forgot to clarify that Douyin is the name of TikTok's original Chinese version, so these quotes are from their press release.
Incredible how the capitalist industries really don't care about externalities, and will do anything to make a buck. And government works hand in hand with them, whether it's the US government or the Chinese government. In this case given the disparity of what is shown on TikTok in China and here, I think it's on purpose to weaken the West.
Whether it's factory farms leading to superbugs, high fructose corn syrup causing diabetes, overfishing, insects dying, fossil fuels, water waste, plastic pollution everywhere, the corporations get away with putting metric tons of this out ...but they will keep the individuals distracted and fighting each other... they'll tell you that you can't use a straw or bag, you should recycle the plastic (a scam), diet and exercise, and go vegan, to save the planet ... meanwhile no one seriously can rein in the corporations, instead they work with them.
Both Greta Thurnberg and George Carlin were right: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
This undermines your theory that it's all capitalism.
The assumption of many anarcho-capitalists is that government is the antithesis of capitalism, that it's somehow encroaching on a pure version of it ('laissez-faire capitalism').
But I'm saying the opposite, if you click the link. Government ENABLES capitalism. Government protects property rights, and passes laws, and enforces them with force. It is the one that enforces victimless intellectual property violations with force. It is the one that chooses to evict a tenant, or have an eviction moratorium. It is the one who chooses to bail out the markets and the big corporations. It's the one who prevents regular people from filming the horrors on factory farms. It is the one which gives Big Ag or farmers water, but regular people have very little. It is the one which lets corporations put high fructose corn syrup into everything. And it is the one which does nothing while Coca Cola and Snapple switch to putting out metric tons of non-bioldegradeable plastic. But the individuals are told they can somehow recycle and vegan their way out of it. It's all a scam, they shipped it to China. They don't want you to wake up and hold the corporations to account, so they'll tell you that the real problem is plastic straws and bags.
For every socialist government failure (like Holodomor or Great Chinese Famine) there is a capitalist government failure (Irish Potato Famine or Bengal Famines).
> For every socialist government failure (like Holodomor or Great Chinese Famine) there is a capitalist government failure (Irish Potato Famine or Bengal Famines).
The main cause of the potato famine was biological. The contributing factor I think you're referring to was liberty: farmers could sell potatoes overseas instead of to their starving kin.
The British government could've removed liberty, and seized the potatoes and ordered them to remain in Ireland, or, I would say, the British government could've worked within the liberty/capitalist system and have simply bought the potatoes at market rate and kept them in Ireland. They did neither.
The difference with the Great Chinese Famine was that - of course - the central bureaurocracy was actively involved in making farming terrible. It wasn't a failure to do something to help; it was a failure of doing the wrong thing. The blight wasn't biological; it was ideological.
As far as the potato famine, and bengal famines, they were exacerbated exactly by state policies favoring corporations and landlords. People have handled natural blights before, without such disastrous results as 15% of the country dying.
Practically everything in this wikipedia article discusses it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Landlor...
The ability of middlemen was measured by the rent income they could contrive to extract from tenants.[34] They were described in evidence before the commission as "land sharks", "bloodsuckers", and "the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country".[34] The middlemen leased large tracts of land from the landlords on long leases with fixed rents, which they sublet as they saw fit. They would split a holding into smaller and smaller parcels so as to increase the amount of rent they could obtain. Tenants could be evicted for reasons such as non-payment of rents (which were high), or a landlord's decision to raise sheep instead of grain crops. A cottier paid his rent by working for the landlord while the spalpeen, an itinerant labourer, paid his short-term lease through temporary day work.[39][40]
As any improvement made on a holding by a tenant became the property of the landlord when the lease expired or was terminated, the incentive to make improvements was limited. Most tenants had no security of tenure on the land; as tenants "at will", they could be turned out whenever the landlord chose. The only exception to this arrangement was in Ulster where, under a practice known as "tenant right", a tenant was compensated for any improvement they made to their holding. According to Woodham-Smith, the commission stated that "the superior prosperity and tranquillity of Ulster, compared with the rest of Ireland, were due to tenant right".[34]
Landlords in Ireland often used their powers without compunction, and tenants lived in dread of them. Woodham-Smith writes that, in these circumstances, "industry and enterprise were extinguished and a peasantry created which was one of the most destitute in Europe".[36]
When the famine happened, the Irish government and the British crown chose to enforce and double down on protections for this class of landowner. And there is more too, in other sections. All the actions of the government that exacerbated this famine were as explicitly in favor of landlords and corporations and private property, as to be as much Capitalist as holodomor’s collectivization actions were Socialist.
Each government reacted in a tone deaf way to the plight of the actual peasants and farmers, one with doubling down on capitalism, the other on collectivism.
Also see the role of the British in protecting their East India company in 1700s, and in requisitioning grain for England amid a famine in 1990s…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
* The Company provided little meaningful mitigation — there was no reduction in taxation or any significant relief effort.[33][38]
In October 1769, the Company requested that storehouses be constructed in Patna and Murshidabad; city officials were instructed to prevent monopoly of trade and have farmers raise "every sort" of dry grain, that was possible. The orders were largely unsuccessful; many Company officials along with their Indian assistants (Gomasthas) would exploit the famine to create grai...
>>high fructose corn syrup causing diabetes
It's just too much sugar. Could be cane sugar, high fructose corn syrup, pure glucose, it doesn't matter.
There's just too much added sugar in things, we can all stop pretending HFCS is anything other than the cheapest (and therefor most common) type of sugar. If you got "the corporations" to stop using it tomorrow, we'd just have Coke made with cane sugar, and you'd still have the related health issues.
/rant
Most people can’t, because even the fruits are engineered to have tons of sugar now: https://qz.com/1408469/humans-have-bred-fruits-to-be-so-high...
You think the uptick of people experiencing obesity and diabetes is because they just got lazy and gluttonous?
Also this recently was found
https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2021...
Let's go back to where we started: >>high fructose corn syrup causing diabetes
Nothing you just posted refuted anything I said, which was that it's the sugar generally and not HFC specifically and that attempting to blame this specifically on HFC is missing the forest for the trees, so I'm not going to address any new points you made here because they have fuckall to do with what I said.
Also, it's a terrible rhetorical technique to tell people what they think in the manner you did but that's neither here nor there.
You said A is only ONE OF MANY THINGS OF THE SAME TYPE that does
And I responded that corporations and governments have put those other things into your food too, genetically modified, and you can’t opt out very easily.
Also said that diabetes isn’t the only consequence of too much fructose.
You're also right that you're trying to make points that I wasn't talking about and don't care about, and that attempting to correct the record when someone such as yourself decides to pop off about how "they" are ruining things isn't worth my time or energy.
Finally, you're right that you can bring up whatever tangential points you want that are correct and put them into a conversation to convince yourself that those were the points you were originally trying to make and I'm wrong.
TL;dr - You "Won"! Deuces!
I don't get that paragraph. It's like saying playgrounds are designed to attract kids, making it easier for pedophiles to know where kids are and seek them out. Or ice cream vans, or toy stores, or malls. Or even schools. Removing fun things from playgrounds will result in fewer incidents, but is that what we want.
Trying to treat TikTok's algorithm as anything like a playground is just ridiculous.
I'd imagine that predators don't really need a recommendation engine to stumble upon them since they're actively looking for them. Are you suggesting they're becoming predators by accident because Tiktok showed them videos of minors?
I don't think there is much anyone can do. The platforms will kill any proposal of online identification and age-gating because they'll lose money. The parents have often given up fighting their kids over media usage. And everyone else has no influence over the children, the platforms, or the predators.
So you have no idea that you're looking at kids and not adults without seeing the comments?
Age of majority is 18+ pretty much everywhere except Iran, Indonesia, Yemen, Cambodia, Cuba, Myanmar, Scotland, Vietnam, North Korea, and Timor-Leste [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_majority
IANAL, but I'd expect the age of majority to overrule the age of consent, since they're considered an adult from then on, in their countries. Unless these young influencers are doing sexual acts with their viewers, age of consent is irrelevant here.
This is disturbing to say the least, especially because TikTok's algorithm is highly responsive to your individual preferences. I tried it out for a bit because my kid was on it, and I literally only got forklift, train and truck videos after awhile.
https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-demographics/
More seriously, one of the issues with these online platforms (all, although some more than others) is that they're allowing for the mixing of adults and children in a "peer" environment in an unsupervised manner. In a traditional offline world, adults and kids don't mingle too often, let alone in a 1-on-1 manner, especially not as "peers". There's definitely some very legitimate criticism of a segment of the adults to be had, but you'll never be able to correct virtues in all individuals. I think this mixing of adults and children in a peer setting at such scale is a new thing for human society.
Those not in my tech-circle know-how are unaware of all the research showing it’s a huge net negative to give a 13 year old girl these devices.
I feel like our culture of not telling other people what they should probably do even when it is in their best interest is going to backfire…
This is somebody doing a breakdown of a tik tok influencer's videos, and how it matches perfectly to rainn.org child sexual abuse patterns.
‘Every Parent’s Nightmare’: Instagram Is a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation
‘Every Parent’s Nightmare’: Youtube Is a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation
‘Every Parent’s Nightmare’: Facebook Is a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation
‘Every Parent’s Nightmare’: Friendster Is a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation
‘Every Parent’s Nightmare’: AOL Instant Messenger Is a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation
‘Every Parent’s Nightmare’: Chat rooms are a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation
‘Every Parent’s Nightmare’: Bulletin board systems are a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation
The point isn't that these things haven't existed in some form forever, it's that they're scaling to points where these effects are becoming increasingly dangerous, proportional to the growth of these systems.