> Liu also said Texas had established that TikTok's "Restricted Mode" did not work as advertised and exposed minors to content the company said would be filtered out.
I don't use tiktok, can someone explain what the restrict mode was advertised as vs does? If it's like any social media limiter it's perhaps a softer thing (time limit) than a hard thing (ie, designed to put the onus on the user).
It blows my mind that parents let their children use these platforms with these safety features.
I just found out yesterday that my cousin lets their 5ish year old have a TikTok account, but they have to allow or deny anyone who follows. How absurd is that. It doesn't block anything about what they view (I assume they relied on this safety feature), and there's no way that vetting who can follow (family and friends) is safe enough. The alternative is my younger cousin not having access to TikTok at five years old. Seems like a completely fine alternative.
I imagine the average person just doesn't think about the potential implications of giving your child a TikTok account at that age.
5 years old is crazy, but by the time they are 15-16 it becomes difficult to restrict them from things their peers all do. There needs to be a wider push from all parents or more of a consensus from society that these platforms are dangerous.
You're not going to achieve coordinated, collective action by placing the burden of acting on the individual. It never works.
If collective action has to happen to solve some problem, it needs to either 1. be so strongly incentivized such that it's the only sensible thing for individuals to do, or 2. be mandated top-down and enforced.
You can't just shout "My solution relies on everyone independently doing X!" It never works.
I agree that probably won't happen that way. There also won't be much in the way of regulation until society slowly realizes the dangers.
I think we are currently in the process of finding out now that there have been people on social media from birth and are now adult members of society.
Do you believe the war on drugs is actually working?
Very good example you brought up there. Question is: Can we make the world safe by just arresting every bad guy... Ooooor, maybe, just maybe... Individuals are responsible for their own decisions?
Besides, its only a "dealer" if the product they are selling is illegal. Have you talked to your political representative about making social media sites illegal. How do you argue that, exactly. "That sites needs to be outlawed because it breaks my back button!!!111!"?
True. However, if your child ends up developing a dependance on alcohol, do you seriously place the responsibility for that on the dealers who sold them the booze? I'd call that a lazy excuse for very bad parenting.
I feel the average person is not equipped to understand the implications. being educated / intelligent means you have likely picked up some neuroscience knowledge and it has stuck for you over the years. Even if it is not your "field" we all have a brain and if you like knowledge then you recognize it's useful to know about it.
The average person, especially the below average person, is better off trusting others than their own judgement - since most people know more than them.
You need to talk to your cousin. No one else is going to.
> You need to talk to your cousin. No one else is going to.
This is absolutely true.
> being educated / intelligent means you have likely picked up some neuroscience knowledge and it has stuck for you over the years.
People in Russia and China have almost 30 percentage points more tertiary education levels than Americans do. Nonetheless social media is even more pervasive and popular in China than anywhere else in the world. Like with the panic about video game fixation, harmful time wasters are almost certainly an effect, not a cause, of something else.
>People in Russia and China have almost 30 percentage points more tertiary education levels than Americans do. Nonetheless social media is even more pervasive and popular in China than anywhere else in the world. Like with the panic about video game fixation, harmful time wasters are almost certainly an effect, not a cause, of something else.
I don't know about Russia but China social media is no where close to American Social Media. There is generally time limits, content restrictions and other things that make the two not similar.
When people go "Social media is a problem", they are generally referring to western social media where it's profitability over any external harm they are doing.
But can anyone from China or who has been there confirm this meme? I don't doubt, but given the diverse milieu in here, there's a good chance somebody with first hand experience can say something.
I'm currently teaching Chinese high school students, and I don't buy it. There is certain content that's blocked here, but most of what's on the local tiktok is pretty trash either way because t's not the subjects, it's the format. You can try to surface more wholesome five-second videos but even if you succeed, they'll still be five-second videos.
yes, if you buy into the 200% opposite philosophy as mine, then the words you are saying make it sound like i am wrong and you are right haha. i guess my point is: it doesn't really matter if they institute limits on gaming for children. the fact that kids want to play games all day - the fact that they need to create limits is a SYMPTOM of the problem. are you getting it now?
I try to be open-minded to other parenting techniques... but I just don't have the brain power to internalize how any remotely self-aware human let's a 5 year old use tik tok. Poor kid.
I have kids. We’re social. Spend a lot of time meeting new parents all the time.
I have never heard of a 5 year old with a TikTok account.
I think your cousin is so far into the outlier end of the parenting tail that nothing they do is going to make any sense in the context of common parenting practices.
Alternative theory: your bubble is small, and you socialize with parents who have similar values to your own. And I'm gonna guess that your income or wealth is in far outlier territory. I've seen kids raised like this; in my generation the concern was kids glued to TVs all day, and some of those kids turned out okay. But in my family, it's the parents who grew up glued to screens who are raising the most screen-addicted kids.
I think the blame is on the parents that allowed a 5 year old to have a TikTok account. No safety feature or regulation can compensate for bad parenting.
It's two things. When you step outside the HN bubble, very few people have any idea of the dangers and history of these apps. Also, life is objectively harder for parents these days. Often times, both parents are working, and they're working longer hours and getting paid less than previous generations so a lot of parents just dump their kids in front of screens. I'm not saying that's good. It's objectively bad, but that's the reality.
I know someone similar who gave their kid a phone at age 6. 95% of the time I see them they're on TikTok.
Child safety features are not going to solve this problem. All it takes is one parent giving their kid a phone with an adult account and all that progress is undone. I am convinced it is going to take a cultural shift for any positive change to occur - self-policing and, if necessary, social stigma.
This kind of behavior of giving young children phones will have to be outmoded in a generation or two. Until then, there is going to be a lot of growing pains.
You really take it for granted that you're right and these other parents are being negligent. Despite the fact that my 9yo doesn't have a phone or tiktok, I'm going to argue the other side's case.
You're right "we don't know what it does to kids brains". But that means we should give parents discretion. Some parents want to run an experiment where they give their kids constant tiktok. Maybe we'll find out in a generation or two that this was bad, good, or a nothingburger.
I'm in my 50s. I have watched sooo many moral panics evaporate to nothing. TV, video games, D&D, heavy metal music, porn, literal satanism, and now everyone's favorite whipping boy, social media.
Let it go. Parent your own child, let other people parent theirs.
You should be able to recognize there are big differences between modern day social media and tv/videogames/dnd. For one you were not watching TV every waking moment of your life including while using a public bathroom. So just imagine that. There are people out there who no longer even think. Every spare second is spent scrolling because it really can be spent like that with the lack of friction that a constantly connected mobile device offers. No, this time it really is different. There was never a time where you would just not think for an entire day, maybe if you were holed up in a crack house or opium den. If you can't see that, wake up, look around and be shocked how more people aren't getting hit by cars or crashing off the road, and somehow can still string together a sentence of coherent thought. Maybe that fades too soon; functional literacy already declines by the year.
"kaleidoscopic madness of noncomprehension". Hilarious image. Thank you for this. Not the OP but this actually describes my state sometimes. Darkly, I think the problem is I put too much faith in others.
Longform youtube is just as slop ridden. Arguably the shorts are more potent because they won't pad with even more slop into these long multi ad break videos of saying nothing ultimately.
This doesn't even have to be sarcastic. I mean the bulk of the internet is for sure just propaganda and misinformation meant to either part you of your vote or your dollar or both and we are just dumping it into the mindshare of the population and hoping things go well in the next few generations.
If we put responsibility for keeping kids safe on companies we will get 2 or 3. The only good option is that parents need to actually parent their kids.
This is soooo true. But unfortunately, whenever you confront a parent with their responsibilities, they immediately lash out with excuses. "How should I know." "There is already sooo much work to do." "In these times ..." All lazy ass excuses by people who obviously have no idea what responsibility they have.
This comment is just a lazy attempt at changing minds. Why don’t you get off your ass and actually institute real change in the world? We’re all waiting. This is your responsibility after all, according to me. From here on out, all unresolved problems are the fault of lynx97 being a lazy slackass. So says me, with the power of a random internet person assigning responsibilities. Consider yourself confronted. I’ll await your excuses.
To stay in context and say at least something to the weird ad hominem: I deliberately didn't father any children. There is no respoinsibility you might be able to assign. Contrary to actual parents, who very well know that they have responsibilities.
Why not a layered system of all 3. Everyone starts in #3 by default, your grandma can do her shopping and banking and pay for parking without the constant risk of being scammed. Then jump through some hoops to get to #2 and/or #1. #2 has regulated adult content. #1 ends up only appealing to tech-types and so, due to self-selection, ends the Eternal September.
Because if 1 is an option then I can write software to automate 1 for the normies, which is exactly how the internet we know came into being. 2/3 have to be legally enforced.
what about 4: my hardware I do what I want including connecting to other peoples hardware if I want.
In a lot of the ways we are exiting eternal september. most of the normies are already tech illiterate enough to lose their ancestral knowledge of how independent websites might work. they will be punted into their walled gardens more and more while the internet returns to people who are more tech literate again.
> TikTok in August agreed to settle three U.S. lawsuits brought by young people who accuse social media companies of designing their platforms to be addictive and harming their mental health.
I am so happy I do not live in US where an idiot harms themself and non-idiot has to pay them.
People talking about addictiveness but from what I can tell this is all about how effective the content filters are. Tiktok being held liable for the efficacy of its controls is a much bigger issue than this one case.
Beyond a Free-for-all, ID-checked gates, or a sanitised platform there's a fourth option: you declare what you want less of and your own software enforces it against the platform's preferences.
My son is trying to get me to get him a phone. His is reason is because all the 5th graders have them on the bus. Im so worried about these damn phones. It seems like this is how this generation of kids loses their innocence these days. Like here is a little box full of gossip and porn and things to envy over...idk maybe im just too damn worried lol
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 28.3 ms ] threadI don't use tiktok, can someone explain what the restrict mode was advertised as vs does? If it's like any social media limiter it's perhaps a softer thing (time limit) than a hard thing (ie, designed to put the onus on the user).
I just found out yesterday that my cousin lets their 5ish year old have a TikTok account, but they have to allow or deny anyone who follows. How absurd is that. It doesn't block anything about what they view (I assume they relied on this safety feature), and there's no way that vetting who can follow (family and friends) is safe enough. The alternative is my younger cousin not having access to TikTok at five years old. Seems like a completely fine alternative.
I imagine the average person just doesn't think about the potential implications of giving your child a TikTok account at that age.
If collective action has to happen to solve some problem, it needs to either 1. be so strongly incentivized such that it's the only sensible thing for individuals to do, or 2. be mandated top-down and enforced.
You can't just shout "My solution relies on everyone independently doing X!" It never works.
I think we are currently in the process of finding out now that there have been people on social media from birth and are now adult members of society.
Are you a friend of Larry Ellison by chance? His ideas don't stop at kids.
Very good example you brought up there. Question is: Can we make the world safe by just arresting every bad guy... Ooooor, maybe, just maybe... Individuals are responsible for their own decisions?
Besides, its only a "dealer" if the product they are selling is illegal. Have you talked to your political representative about making social media sites illegal. How do you argue that, exactly. "That sites needs to be outlawed because it breaks my back button!!!111!"?
That's how we do it today. They get their license pulled if they do.
The average person, especially the below average person, is better off trusting others than their own judgement - since most people know more than them.
You need to talk to your cousin. No one else is going to.
This is absolutely true.
> being educated / intelligent means you have likely picked up some neuroscience knowledge and it has stuck for you over the years.
People in Russia and China have almost 30 percentage points more tertiary education levels than Americans do. Nonetheless social media is even more pervasive and popular in China than anywhere else in the world. Like with the panic about video game fixation, harmful time wasters are almost certainly an effect, not a cause, of something else.
I don't know about Russia but China social media is no where close to American Social Media. There is generally time limits, content restrictions and other things that make the two not similar.
When people go "Social media is a problem", they are generally referring to western social media where it's profitability over any external harm they are doing.
I have never heard of a 5 year old with a TikTok account.
I think your cousin is so far into the outlier end of the parenting tail that nothing they do is going to make any sense in the context of common parenting practices.
Child safety features are not going to solve this problem. All it takes is one parent giving their kid a phone with an adult account and all that progress is undone. I am convinced it is going to take a cultural shift for any positive change to occur - self-policing and, if necessary, social stigma.
This kind of behavior of giving young children phones will have to be outmoded in a generation or two. Until then, there is going to be a lot of growing pains.
You're right "we don't know what it does to kids brains". But that means we should give parents discretion. Some parents want to run an experiment where they give their kids constant tiktok. Maybe we'll find out in a generation or two that this was bad, good, or a nothingburger.
I'm in my 50s. I have watched sooo many moral panics evaporate to nothing. TV, video games, D&D, heavy metal music, porn, literal satanism, and now everyone's favorite whipping boy, social media.
Let it go. Parent your own child, let other people parent theirs.
I do find it annoying when I visit my inlaws, who have a television on every waking hour. But you know what? It's their home and their lives.
"this time it really is different" is what they always say.
Yeah, that is a pretty good way to summarize the state of life based the trajectory of current events.
There is rarely a dull moment on this rock.
1. free for all
2. locked down with ID checked age gates
3. sanitized with no adult content at all
If we put responsibility for keeping kids safe on companies we will get 2 or 3. The only good option is that parents need to actually parent their kids.
People have basically decided that they don't actually want this.
I know I don't want to visit 10+ different websites on regular basis to keep up on discussions of various interests I have.
> 5) Self run reputation systems
Isn't that basically the upvote/downvote systems used by reddit and HN?
In a lot of the ways we are exiting eternal september. most of the normies are already tech illiterate enough to lose their ancestral knowledge of how independent websites might work. they will be punted into their walled gardens more and more while the internet returns to people who are more tech literate again.
I am so happy I do not live in US where an idiot harms themself and non-idiot has to pay them.
We were all idiots at that point in our lives.