* Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms [1]
* Social media is making many people a little worse off and it makes some people a lot worse off
* having our phones on us all the time is bad for just about everything that requires sustained attention [2], including flirting and dating [3]
* Technology won't solve this problem. AI will make things worse [4]. If TikTok gets banned and some slightly more benevolent version takes it place, we're still headed in the wrong direction. What we need is culture change, which Haidt is trying his darndest at. Hats off to him.
[0] https://matthewbjane.github.io/blog-posts/blog-post-7.html
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/business/jonathan-haidt-s...
[2] https://thecritic.co.uk/its-the-phones-stupid/
[3] https://www.sexual-culture.com/p/its-obviously-the-phones
[4] https://www.npr.org/2019/06/04/726709657/sometimes-fascinati...
This one is VERY morally and emotionally weighty, and I think you have to do quite a bit of work to ACTUALLY understand what is going on here, but I agree.
In the middle of a fight, no one wants to look reasonable. In a fight, reasonable looks weak. In a fight, no one wants democracy, we just want to win.
Unfortunately that fight mindset also shuts down the whole thinking part of the the brain; which is how you get people who gleefully vote for a king, because they feel like the king is their champion in the fight.
This is by definition cancel culture. Unfortunately some bad actors will abuse this as a way to hurt someone. I've seen this happen twice, and fear of this happening is enough for good men to be unnecessarily distant towards women. That said, people getting away with sexual assault seems to be significantly more common.
I never liked playing society's hetero games.
So you're saying you don't have and never will have any friends who are also women?
It is morally disgusting because of the relative harms between the parties, but very rational because of the personal risk/reward calculation.
Are you aware of anyone who has successfully done this and maintained their standing in life?
The example that comes to mind for me is Steven Galloway, a UBC Professor who was accused of sexual assault in 2015 and filed a defamation lawsuit about it in 2018. That lawsuit has spent the last 7 years making its way through the courts; after many attempts to have it dismissed, it will finally proceed to trial. Meanwhile Galloway's career basically ended: he went from being a celebrated and award-winning author and professor to doing manual labor like cleaning swimming pools. His publisher cancelled a three-book contract in 2018.
Even if the defamation lawsuit succeeds, how will he ever be made whole? He will never get the last 10 years of his life back.
It's a losers game, and you don't have to play. Which doesn't necessarily mean "don't interact with women" but maybe "keep it to the bare minimum, don't be alone and cover your ass"
Considering how fucked up things are everywhere on so many levels I think any way to get through the day with a positive end is a great way to do it
Cancel culture is ... i guess the best democracy in a broken system. Its people realizing the lever of power that is left is the levers as a consumer. So by choosing what they consume, they are sending signals to the system of society.
For some reason, I am not bugged by cancel culture, for me its an inevitability. As is the natural irritation and opposition which would appear to it. I suppose, all of it, cancel, counter cancel, is just the invisible hand at work?
The whole phenomenon is ripe for manipulation and viral marketing - leveraging short-term outrage to build brand identity[3]. One could argue it's the commodification and commercialization of "real" protest. It's less democracy and more idiocracy.
[1] https://masjidalaqsa.com/boycott/nike-israel-bds
[2] https://www.vox.com/2018/9/4/17818148/nike-boycott-kaepernic...
> but rather the use of "social force".
>Destruction of reputation, demands for firing, deplatforming, doxxing, swatting, etc
That last sentence comes across as disingenuous; you've mixed in things which are crimes, dont by individuals with things that are ACTUAL parts of boycotts.
Destruction of reputation is the reason why demands for firing appear, as do deplatforming.
Doxxing and swatting are different beast, both compared to the reputational losses and work losses, and when compared to each other (dox vs swat).
---
No it isn't, if you say something bad to a random person you just hurt your reputation with that person a little bit. But if that person now starts to organize a hate campaign against you over what you said, that is what we call cancel culture and that is what destroyed your reputation, your reputation was fine until they started that hate campaign.
For example, lets say you tell a coworker you vote republican, that coworker then posts a mail to to everyone "Hey this guys voted for republicans, can we have a sexist racist around here? We must fire him!", who destroyed your reputation? You or them?
Such hate campaigns only creates conflict, it doesn't make people change it just creates fear and resentment that leads to electing people like Trump.
Analogy: I’m making the point that if you leave these logs in the river, eventually they will hit this point, and they will create a log jam.
You can argue that this is or is not the definition of log jam, which is an issue of definitions.
Cancel culture is how the average person was told for decades to wield power. Capitalism would fix it. Finally, people started doing precisely that, and that was the start of cancel culture.
In your first example, isn’t this how people get into trouble in small communities, or villages? You were immune to this in bigger cities because you didnt have smaller communities.
Your second example is entirely dependent on people not liking Republicans. If people are OK with republicans that email dies in shame and embarrassment. If you are a repub, in a place where people are highly antagonistic to republicans, then your reputation is already at risk!
The other person broke your trust, you lost your anonymity. Same if you changed switched the party names.
> Such hate campaigns only creates conflict, i
The conflict is already there man. Republican strategy since the 60s has been high partisanship, and a full on media and information war. It’s been take no prisoners for a long time. Even if you tried to make peace, and have reasoned discussion, the deeper information tides wash out those efforts with the evening news. This is publicly stated by repub strategists. Hell Bannon talked about flooding the zone in the past few months!
The left is CATCHING UP to the right, and still has a way to go before it can match the alt right pound for pound in political power.
To someone whose formative years came before the internet, cancel culture looks a lot like plain old boring boycotts? So there would be a lot of confusion as to why it's so big a deal?
I tend to agree. You need cancel culture. You need people who oppose cancel culture. You need it all. If you don't have any given one of these kinds of civil freedoms, then you actually don't have a democracy.
So a lot of it is just branding. You have to call it cancel culture, because if you were to try and ban the organizing of boycotts, people would laugh at you. It's plainly obvious that you need the freedom to boycott and you need the freedom to oppose the boycott to have a democracy.
Haidt's argument in this regard is non-sensical in that boycotts are, pretty much, a democratic norm in and of themselves.
Yes, plain old boycotts against a person livelihood without any strict necessity of evidence, recourse, or defense.
I am beginning to suspect people are unaware of how messy any form of mass activism ends up being. Mass being the keyword here.
The point being made was about the inevitability of this form of collective action.
Cancel culture is fundamentally about the little guy exerting collective power, based on the older rhetoric limiting people to consumers. That bell has been rung.
Never said that the little guy is going to get it right, or that it’s easy to wield this power.
It's worse than that. For instance in the UK the Establishment itself is dominated by people who regard themselves as victims in one way or another. As victims they are the de facto little guys and act with impunity.
I felt you could see this be figured out in real time, if you looked at how people spoke online. You had many phases online, like the Libertarian phase, and people constantly talking about capitalism being great, and markets being great etc. Then you had 2008, and people started learning about things worked, and you started seeing people and different age brackets coming to terms with their reality and agency.
The agency that had previously been defined in market terms! So with everything from anonymous to flash mobs, people put two and two together and figured they could boycott things that they disagreed with.
The only time this became an issue is when it started exerting ACTUAL social force. At that point people had to have the difficult conversation of what people were mad about, AND the new manner in which people were exerting force.
As is inevitable with any use of force, it gets enmeshed with other people who weild force and power and it becomes just another thing that is seen as oppresive and broken.
But its essentially effective (or ineffective) social boycotting.
It's about destroying people and tearing them down in order to make examples of them. It results in antagonists showing up at people's homes, writing letters to employers, creating petitions, attacking people in the nastiest ways possible with out engaging with ideas or arguments.
It's the disproportionate and graceless reactions that distinguish cancel culture from past methods of accountability.
Are people used to some benign, harmless, ineffective version of social boycotts? Grace? The Scarlet letter describes what society did to adulterers.
see what happened in 2008 when large groups got together, or the police protests or any number of movements. They start when there is something easy and clear to work with, and soon smash into (and past) nuances.
I agree with the parent poster, these are modern day boycotts, influenced by the malaise of being seen primarily as consumers, and super charged by the emotional polarization of the internet.
Cancel culture used to be called social exclusion/ostracism, and it has been how people police themselves against undesirable people in pre-internet communities where most everybody knew everybody. If you were considered an ass, eventually the only person listening to you was you.
Not saying this as a value judgement, just that this practice is ancient.
While you have a right of free speech, the rest of us have the right not to listen to you, nor to be forced to listen to you, nor to interact with you.
This conception of "cancelling" has little relation to how it actually happens, where the offending messages are often spread as far as possible first. If the goal is not to listen to someone, muting/blocking is almost always an option. Cancelling is trying to convince everyone else to shun the person as well often with misleading or reductive narratives about what they said/did and use of guilt by association.
My favourite example is Contrapoints getting cancelled for featuring a short VoiceOver by a controversial trans person[1] in a video.
I think it is worth deeply pondering why a man as wise as Socrates would choose death over ostracization.
Plato's Apology was not meant to be a wholly accurate account [1]. It's a partially fictional, philosophical account meant to demonstrate Socrates' intended message. But I digress.
> The end result is the citizens of Athens convict him and his options are to drink hemlock poison or ostracization.
My understanding is that Socrates chose death where he had the option of requesting legal exile, which in the context of "cancel culture" is not nearly the same as social ostracization.
As for why Socrates would choose death, a superficial search gave me possible explanations (e.g. "death is not so bad" but more formal [2] or moral integrity toward family/friends [3]) that didn't center on the personal suffering or cruelty of exile or ostracization. I would add "moral integrity toward sticking to the truth" as another possible explanation (though I'm not entirely sympathetic to choosing suicide for any of these explanations).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apology_(Plato)#The_text_of_Ap...
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-classical-...
[3] https://www.britannica.com/question/Why-didnt-Socrates-try-t...
As the comment I was responding to suggested, ostracization is ancient. Ancient enough that it is the topic of one of the most famous dialogues by one of the most famous philosophers.
I will add that the Apology is quite short and freely available online. It is worth the quick read, Then, as I suggested, I encourage people to deeply think about why Socrates chose death (rather than accept quick answers in HN comments).
I have read Apology of Socrates in its entirety[0] and a few text analysis and I can find no evidence of this. It seems to me that Socrates suggested a fine[1], and it was his prosecuters which argued for death[2]
[0] https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/plato-the-apology-of-...
[1] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
[2] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
> And if I say exile (and this may possibly be the penalty which you will affix)
One commentary I read suggested that it wasn't uncommon for political opponents to bring these kinds of charges against people in order to silence them. The idea being the accused would end up groveling and begging for their lives, promising to hold their tongues. It is assumed by the reader that Socrates could have done this and used his military service as a form of pathos. This passage implies that he will do neither, beg for clemency nor accept exile.
One could read the passage as Socrates giving up hope in humanity, for he goes on:
> I must indeed be blinded by the love of life if I were to consider that when you, who are my own citizens, [37d] cannot endure my discourses and words, and have found them so grievous and odious that you would want to have done with them, others are likely to endure me. No, indeed, men of Athens, that is not very likely.
But, as I have implied, seeking simple answers in Plato is literally going against the point.
edit, also 38e:
> But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defense, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet at law ought any man to use every way of escaping death.
> And so the man proposes the penalty of death.
> So I propose a fine
> Because I am afraid of the penalty of death which Meletus proposes?
Which is to say, the plaintiff. No different than in court today where the prosecution asks the court for a sentence that is up to the judge to decide. And just like our own courts the defense can offer a counter proposal, which Plato goes into a discussion why he won't do that (well, he proposes a fine which would clearly not satisfy the crime he was accused of). The entire next passages are his reasons rejecting the likely mercies he could be offered (and would be expected to plead for).
Just like making a plea for a guilty sentence comes with the expectation of a potentially lighter sentence in our own court systems, a plea for extenuating circumstances during sentencing is often made by the defense. For example, an elderly person requiring care may avoid prison and plead for home arrest.
Now imagine the circumstance where pre-sentencing, facing a recommendation of the death penalty from the prosecution, the defendant stands before the judge and explains in great detail why he won't accept any of the potentially lesser sentences he might get, rejecting them one by one. That is explicitly what Plato is showing Socrates to have done.
Consider: does it makes sense to argue against a more lenient sentence when your life is on the line, especially when it is likely you would receive it? Why would Socrates seemingly act against his own interests?
Yes, this is what I originally stated, that it is his prosecuters arguing for death.
You seem to be ignoring the passages where he explicitly suggests a fine as the sentence, however you may also argue that he does this in jest/sarcasm.
Yes he argues against exile etc, but in no way does he ever suggest death is a prefered option in my opinion.
Let's examine your opinion here, which of course you are entitled to. Socrates could have three opinions: Exile is worse than death, exile is equivalent to death, exile is better than death.
Let us consider the first case, where Socrates actually believes that exile is better than death. You could make the argument: Socrates would choose exile but he is too proud to beg for his life. That is, his subsequent explanation as to why he believes a life of exile would not be worth living is a ruse. It would render the famous line "the life which is unexamined is not worth living" as just pure cope. Actually, we are to see Socrates not as a principled man but rather a vain one. Otherwise, how do we explain his refusal to argue for that which is better? You could argue: Socrates is not wise as we have been led to believe in countless dialogues by Plato, but rather a fool who does not speak honestly.
Maybe you have a better argument for that case? I would be interested to hear it.
But if we take his explicit rejection of the option during his counter-plea at face value, it seems unreasonable to stake the position that he thinks exile is better than death (although, you may decide to hold that opinion and even forward a better case for it than I have).
That leaves the two options: Socrates thinks exile is equivalent to death and Socrates thinks exile is worse than death. I think a case for the first is possible but a stretch.
But let's not worry about resolving that, since Socrates attacks the problem in a different manner:
> When I do not know whether death is a good [agathos] or an evil [kakos], why should I propose a penalty which would certainly be an evil?
It seems clear to me that Socrates is saying: I know that exile is bad but I do not know that death is bad. If you do not see that as a preference towards death over exile then I would like to hear your counter argument.
edit: I will add, since it may not be clear or obvious to some, that the logic that separates the final two options only applies when the initial option (exile is better than death) has been removed. Which is more or less the question that Plato (and my original comment which kicked off this thread) wants us to ask: why would Socrates discard that first option?
> why should I propose a penalty which would certainly be an evil? Shall I say imprisonment? And why should I live in prison, and be the slave of the magistrates of the year—of the Eleven? Or shall the penalty be a fine, and imprisonment until the fine is paid? There is the same objection.
He was not talking about exile at this point, but every punishment which is considered evil[kakos], shown by the fact that he mentions fines and imprisonment immediately after. He goes on to mention exile third after these 2. This leads me to believe he thinks death is better than any punishment, as death is the only punishment which contains an unknown.
After mulling the outcomes of imprisonment, fines, and exile, he settles on proposing a fine (be it in sarcasm or not).
In my opinion there is nothing specific about death vs exile here, only a man showing he is not afraid of death.
> Socrates could have three opinions: Exile is worse than death, exile is equivalent to death, exile is better than death.
You know what? He could also have the opinion that death is better than a kick in the testicles, but in the same way it is not mentioned in this text ;)
The fact that he proposes a fine is strong evidence that he doesn't (and is one reason it may be included at all, to counter this assumption effectively). Nor would he reasonably think a slap on the wrist would be worse than death. I don't think your use of "any" in this context is appropriate and only serves to advance your case rather than engage honestly.
> He could also have the opinion that death is better than a kick in the testicles
Again, as I have said time and time again, Plato is asking us to consider particular alternatives to death. He spends one sentence on imprisonment and then two large paragraphs on exile. That is evidence of the relative importance he places on the specific alternatives. Note he does not bother addressing your "kick to the testicles" opinion. Perhaps you can write an essay on that which will stand the test of thousands of years of consideration.
I think you are committed to exile in a personal sense and you are refusing to engage with this dialogue as it was meant in order to avoid facing its implications. I am sorry to treat you so cynically and I wish you luck in your continued intellectual journey.
(I doubt reading either Apology of Socrates will give an unambiguous reason why he didn't offer the exile option, if any reason.)
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...
Where he has Socrates saying dismissively "perhaps kill me or banish me or disfranchise me", as if those are all just as bad (well, they all ruin his life of hanging around Athens harassing people philosophically), and saying that the Athenians will only hurt themselves if they by any means get rid of him.
Why would he choose death before groveling? As he states:
> But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defense, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet at law ought any man to use every way of escaping death.
Was he overly proud? Did he want to be a martyr? Had he lost faith in humanity? Did he want to challenge to process of law that was practiced in his own time, believing that justice in disputes between independent parties could not be adequately served through a majority vote?
Further, what would you do in that circumstance? Say you had a deeply held belief yet upon expressing it publicly you found yourself thrust in front of the entire city being taken to account with your own life on the line. Would you beg, promise to never mention that belief again in order to save your life? Would you accept exile and seek a life in another city, away from your friends and family, at the mercy of foreigners/strangers who you have no connection to?
Would you have voted for Socrates death? Would you have argued they accepted his proposal for a fine? Would you have attempted to persuade him to beg for the option of exile or clemency for a promise of silence? Would you vote to acquit?
Of all of the principles worth dying for, why did Socrates choose this one? Are there any principles that you hold that you would choose death over silence?
We live in a time where people want to skim Wikipedia for easy answers, like skipping to the back of a text book looking for the answer. Plato is giving questions, not suggesting answers.
You were considered an ass by people that actually knew you. The internet lynch mob takes a 30 second clip of a person they don't know and demand that the person have their life destroyed.
Does this also justify hundreds or thousands of people calling your minimum wage employer trying to get you fired?
Even if this were true, its application was typically reserved for people already infamous for doing something heinous, eg. murderers, despots, thieves, etc. Social media virality has applied this to individuals whose worst crime was maybe making an off-colour joke. The disproportionate response to the transgression is what most people dislike about modern cancel culture, and I don't think this disproportional response was that common in the past.
No they don't, there are laws against that, for example you can't decide to ostracize black people from your company, you will get sued for that.
So its fine to fire all black people to ostracize them? No, of course not, so no you are wrong here, there are more limitations than that, people have rights protecting them from a lot of ostracism.
This works because people can choose to not be jerks, but they can't choose to not be black.
What if they could? People can change gender identity nowadays, and it's not outside the realm of possibility that people could change their phenotypical characteristics (transracialism is a hotly debated topic).
I'm sympathetic to the argument that the dynamics of the Internet have made some tools more or less suitable for purpose as what they used to be, but the idea that we can just assert "no ostracization" is flatly insane and totally antithetical to the marketplace of ideas.
Heck, downvotes here in HN are basically the same thing. If a statement doesn't comply with both the explicit rules and implicit assumptions and culture here, it will be downvoted to oblivion. And it is one of the major mechanisms that HN uses to ensure this site remains useful and relevant even with the large number of participants.
If you're in a car that's going way too fast, do you tell the driver not to touch the brakes because it "leads to us never reaching our destination?"
Anyway, we're currently seeing the reign of the "cancel culture is the big problem" crybabies. Turns out they just thought the state should have the power to decide who's allowed to have an opinion.
Cancel culture today for both parties is not form of not listening or even social exclusion, but kind of active shaming.
2. Social media cares about engagement, not right and wrong. If content of a type is sought for, content of that type will be made.
3. Social media has trained people to simply react to the perceived message - "Oh, give me a break with all the whining about cancel culture!"
4. Concern trolling is very real. Social media is a low trust environment. You have no reason to think of me as a serious person, or take the time to engage with my reasoning.
5. Shame is incredibly motivating, but the shamer does not get to choose the direction that shame moves the target. You can certainly say that they are reacting wrongly, but you are not their parent/priest/custodian.
6. Once enough people are made to feel shame, they may band together. You are free to say that this is morally wrong or detestable.
7. This is all very very unsatisfying, so people usually take a more satisfying offramp and just blame someone. Blame and responsibility are very very slippery topics. Blame is about moral satisfaction and dropping a heavy, prickly, stinky and noxious emotional burden.
Blame typically falls on the person with the least social capital (relative to the blamer) who is closest to the problem.
Blame is the easiest thing to reach for in a low trust environment.
Responsibility requires a high trust environment. Responsibility can be forward and backward - who WAS responsible for this incident, who WILL BE responsible for improving the situation. In a low trust environment, responsibility will randomly transmute into blame.
8. It's easier to fight than it is to work. If someone is morally wrong, you do not owe them any emotional labor.
9. A fight does not require real harm as a trigger; a perceived social slight or lack of respect is more than enough to start a fight. Pain can be endured, shame cannot.
10. Anger and fighting form a feedback loop. Does the anger or fight come first?
11. This sort of thing has historically gotten VERY VERY bad before it gets better, even when people see it coming. It is very unsatisfying to say, but life can just really suck for a lot of people for a while. This is a heavy, noxious emotional burden, so by all means preserve your emotional health and find someone to blame.
----
So what is the solution?
I don't have a satisfying solution, but I have noticed something.
I have noticed that gravity is the weakest force/interaction in the universe per scale unit.
I have noticed that gravity is responsible for the largest objects and systems in the universe.
I have noticed that people mostly do not change their views in the middle of a fight.
"That's odd" is the most power phrase in science. The greatness of humanity has followed curiosity, patience, empathy and humility.
----
I won't tell anyone to stop fighting, but I will say that I strongly believe that fighting is only ever part of a solution.
I believe that fighting cannot ever fix anything or make anything better on the large scale.
Fighting can only make things less worse, for some people, in some place, at some time.
This is a massive understatement. The ironic thing about Haidt is that his writing is heavily geared towards social media. He writes a good headline and usually has a few facts in there, but is fundamentally non-rigorous. It’s science for skimmers and people who clicked on an article already agreeing with the conclusions and so won’t challenge the “evidence” he provides no matter how weak.
He’s popular because we are seeing something real happening to our kids and Haidt is the only person who is trying to describe whatever’s going on. We agree with the conclusions because we see it in our own kids, not because of the “moral panic”. It’s a shame he gets there in such a sloppy way, but he’s describing a real phenomenon.
I, as a parent, do not need articles and longitudinal studies and double blind peer reviewed studies to tell me that the thing I can observe with my own eyes is real.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/books/review/superbloom-n...
I don't have TikTok on my phone. I don't have an account. But I have YouTube, Twitter, Instagram all locked down on my phone (my SO has the Screen Time code).
I did this because the best minds on earth get paid based on how much I doom scroll. If I don't do this, I routinely have times where I scroll for an hour+.
I have argued that the only solution to this is to either ban any sort compensation based on increased engagement of a social media product (probably impossible to enforce or unconstitutional if that still matters). OR to add regulation around infinite video scrolling. We regulate gambling because it hacks our dopamine loop (although usually associated with much more severe consequences). I think it's ok to regulate the video scroll. Start small with something like enforcing a scroll lock after 30 minutes. To enforce it, just regulate the largest companies.
I really don’t want the government telling me what I can or can’t do on my phone, or that an app I enjoy can’t exist. Alcohol exists, gambling exists, cigarettes exist, porn exists, cars can drive fast, and yet because I have self control and good judgement, I haven’t allowed any of those things to get a hold over me either. I don’t want the government to be my dad. And even if you did, can you really trust our technophobic corrupt out-of-touch lawmakers to get such regulation right? These are consumption-side problems in my opinion, and individuals need to bear the responsibility rather than trying to pawn it off on big tech companies or regulators.
And is taxed to minimize consumption, and recoup losses from negative externalities
> gambling exists
Yes and is banned or highly regulated in many counties. It is also age restricted.
>cigarettes exist
same as alcohol
> cars can drive fast, and yet because I have self control and good judgement
Cars today are much safer than they were in the 50s because many many people have died leading to regulations. It's difficult to create a car for the American market because of how many specific American safety regulations there are.
Traveling by car is probably one of the most regulated things we do. There are speed bumps, cops, speed cameras, red light cameras etc. It's not like it's the wild west out there.
>and yet because I have self control and good judgement, I haven’t allowed any of those things to get a hold over me either
Congratulations? Because you are perfect I guess we can just assume everyone else is and should be as well?
I am not saying the government should tell you what you can or can't do with your phone. I'm saying the government should do something against very large private corporations hacking the dopamine loop on individuals. This could be an engagement tax. This could be just pausing scrolling every 30 minutes for 30 seconds. I know it's a slippery slope. They say television killed the neighbor in the 60s. We have a chance to not repeat the same mistakes of the past.
> And even if you did, can you really trust our technophobic corrupt out-of-touch lawmakers to get such regulation right?
If we are voting in "technophobic corrupt out-of-touch lawmakers" then that seems to be a bigger problem. Why are we voting these people in? Lawmakers are representatives of the people. Not everything they do is dumb. America has done pretty well so they must've done something right in the last 250 years.
I'm very much in the pro liberty, pro individual camp, but there is no developed country on earth that has 0 regulation. It is in the nation's best interest to not have a major part of the populace have 6-7 hours of their day sucked by TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram. 6-7 hours a day on the phone probably the norm for children. Children are actually losing their ability to read from this [1].
There are movements to ban phones in schools, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Do you think we should not ban phones in schools because you have "self control and good judgement" therefore children in schools should simply have "self control and good judgement?"
Look around the world at where democratic norms are actually being undone. It’s often the people who are most opposed to so-called ‘cancel culture’ who are busy with the undoing. But perhaps you are willing to be an unusually bipartisan wielder of the term and concede that the major instances of cancel culture in recent times are such things as Hungary banning pride parades, Trump bullying universities and deporting people for holding the wrong political views, and school libraries banning books with LGBTQ themes.
I mean, the US government is now actively (and illegally) imprisoning/deporting Ivy League students who protested in support of Gaza, so I think "having the cultural cachet" is irrelevant at this point. They have the political power and that's what really matters.
But for a less dramatic counterexample, I'd offer something like whatever group (was it Moms For Liberty?) that orchestrated book bans in libraries nationwide.
The part of this you should be worried about is that they've realized they now have enough hard power to use violence against ideological enemies instead of rhetoric.
They're being completely open that they plan to extend this treatment to native born U.S. citizens too [1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366178/trump-deport-ja...
We can, and probably should, just end the discussion there. Haidt is really good at finding data to support his claims, but then failing to mention that the correlation he's describing as "definitive" is, actually, really weak. This happens throughout "The Anxious Generation," at least.
Calling him "directionally correct" when he's pretty bad at actually showing the work as to why he is correct is just saying that you think he has a good point because his vibes match your vibes.
1) evidence in favor of reasonable, unsurprising priors does not need to be held to the same standards of rigor as it would for less likely hypotheses. Put differently, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You can call my agreement with Haidt on the big picture "vibes" but I'd say instead that I just judge the likelihood that the underlying claims are true to be high.
2) the "Haidt production function" faces tradeoffs between making big points, writing books, and attending to every detail. When I read people's critique of his meta-analytic techniques (the first link I posted), I saw a lot of folks saying, he's not even doing meta-analysis because he's not weighting by precision! Reading that, I thought, he very much is doing meta-analysis: even if he's not doing "random effects meta-analysis" that you'd learn in a textbook, he's synthesizing many quantitative results, which is the core of it. (I have written three meta-analyses and RA'd for a fourth.) And when the 'proper' technique was applied, it shrunk the effect size estimate from like 0.2 to 0.15, which, like, if whatever hypothesis was true at 0.2, it's probably also true at 0.15. Social science theories don't generally stand or fall on differences like that. So I thought he came out looking like the wiser person there. Academics have a tendency to get bogged down in implementation details. Haidt doesn't.
(I don't expect this to be persuasive, just explaining why I don't find his data 'errors' to be a nonstarter.)
One's position on "cancel culture" tends to reveal a lot about somebody's politics. Complaining about cancel culture tends to correlate highly with conservative political views. The idea is that some people can't freely express their opinions. This is the same idea that leads the likes of Elon Musk to complain about the lack of "free speech".
When right-wingers say "free speech" they mean "hate speech", more specifically "the freedom to express hate speech". And when they complain about "cancel culture", what they're really complaining about it there being consequences to their speech [1].
So if somebody goes on a racist screed and they lost their job because their employer doesn't want to be associated with such views, that gets labelled as "cancel culture".
The very same people defend cancelling the permanent resident status of somebody who simply protested war crimes committed by Israel (ie Mahmoud Khalil) with no due process, a clear First Amendment violation.
As a reminder, the First Amendment is a restriction on government activity. For some reason, the same people who were vaccine experts 2 years ago who are now constitutional experts don't seem to understand this.
[1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/republicans-cancel...
Take, for example, the early discussions around the origins of COVID-19. Legitimate scientific hypotheses—such as the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan—were swiftly shut down. Scientists were canceled because they didn’t align with a dominant narrative.
Frankly, it's terrifying.
Cancel culture is a myth.
It is a label used to denigrate people and organizations who exercise the fundamental right to distance themselves from associations they find distasteful or non-beneficial.
There is not a single "cancelled" person who does not retain the ability to work and exercise their speech rights.
This is not opinion it is fact.
I welcome any attempt to prove me wrong.
I will respond with acting credits, tweets, and photographs of the cancelled person serving in a position of authority and/or being chauffeured between media appearances where they complain about being cancelled to an audience of millions.
"Cancel culture" is the same bullshit as "virtue signaling": made up nonsense intended to poison any discussion and blunt criticism without needing to do or say anything substantive.
That sounds exactly like the same made up language of "sealioning" and "concern trolling" weaponized by the same people accusing the other side of making up "cancel culture" and "virtue signaling". Maybe you don't hold the ethical high ground and never did.
Low wage worker fired over a misinterpretation of a snapchat: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-social-media-po...
9 year old getting called racist by a newspaper: https://apnews.com/article/defamation-deadspin-nfl-football-...
Man fired because he was cracking his knuckles: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/502975-cal...
Another alleged white power symbol accusation: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/jeopardy-slamme...
The only examples you gave are rapists.
I can only speak for me, but it is extraordinarily unlikely to the point of impossibility that I will commit rape.
If I do, I expect people to "cancel" me.
That's great.
What do you think are the odds that someone will accuse you of rape? I suspect they're higher than "unlikely to the point of impossibility". Cancellations usually happen based on the accusation, not the conviction.
It's like saying jail isn't real because some ex-convicts have successful careers.
If you want a name: an interesting, recent example is Gina Carano because she's actually suing her former employer (Disney) for going along with a cancellation. We'll see what the court thinks her cancellation was worth.
You're choosing not to engage in good faith with those who you disagree with by claiming the very basis of their language is made up and therefore invalid.
Do you really think that's an appropriate vehicle to engage with anyone if the goal is constructive dialog toward resolution?
You can do better than this, as can everyone else on both sides of the aisle who others the opposition to a state of incoherent invectives. You can certainly do much better than engaging with me in the patronizing and insulting way you have.
Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms
Liberalism is what protects a minority against the majority.
Liberal Democracy strikes a balance between them. Typically the majority gets to determine who is in charge (democracy), and enshrined legal protections protect minorities from the bias and wrath of the mob (liberalism).
If someone insults people or breaks norms, and there's a lot of blow back, it doesn't surprise me. Few people complain that they are forbidden from walking the streets nude with a raging erection. The majority doesn't want that kind of freedom of expression.
What this has to do with social media companies, don't ask me. I mainly care about the ability of people to make arguments without the government locking them up.
Isn't that the other way around? The laws (and more importantly, the rule of law) are in place to prevent the tyranny of the majority?
Democracy protects the majority against a minority.
The laws (and more importantly, the rule of law) are in place to prevent the tyranny of the majority?
> Liberal Democracy strikes a balance between them. Typically the majority gets to determine who is in charge (democracy), and enshrined legal protections protect minorities from the bias and wrath of the mob (liberalism).
Incredibly hilarious. Only leet hackers can pull this off though, same as pressing F12 in the browser to hack the mainframe!
Actually, it is quite weird, I wonder if some bad best-practices have been circulated.
It would be really nice if legal documents were prepared in some sort of standardized markup-like language.
so that's why new mac keyboards did away the entire F keys row?
But, WYSIWYG on a 2D screen is just an inherently leaky UX abstraction when dealing with 2.5D content, e.g. layers.
The best way to redact a PDF is with a printer, a sharpie marker, and a scanner.
PDF documents do not reflow.
Definitely doable but hardly straight forward.
Why SHOULD someone using a PDF reader software intuitively understand that placing a black rectangle over a document and saving it doesn't prevent someone from seeing that document?! Why the fuck does anyone doing a job need to learn a set of unique and non-generalizing mental models just to redact a document!
Imagine if paper had unexpected failure modes!
The problem is not professionals trying to do their damn job. The problem is US. The Programmers. Who consistently make garbage systems using garbage leaky abstractions and absurd assumptions and ignoring decades of user interface research because google released a new UI library written by programmers who haven't interacted with non-programmers in a decade.
Why are WE still doing this?
It does. If you scribble out what you would want redacted in black ink until it's no longer legible, it's not actually properly redacted for just about the same reasons the PDF wouldn't be
When I was a kid living in a trailer in the midwest in the eighties I asked my parents to buy me a secondhand set of 1973 Encyclopedia Britannica from our local library - for $7. It fed the same curiosity and joy of discovering new things that you would want your kid to get from resources online.
When we went on trips we always drove. And even if I didn't already have a book or books from the library that I was reading at the time, my parents would suggest I take a volume of the Encyclopedia. And sure enough if I got bored I'd break it out. (Unless it was too dark to read at which point I'd just fall sleep.)
That's all to say there are alternatives that cut the gordian knot, which kids can really dig if you frame it right. My parents were both voracious readers themselves, and it didn't take long for their reading to my sibling and I to turn into reading on our own. So when we got something that provided the novelty and agency of navigating your own way through an encyclopedia, it was a huge hit.
Of course things are very different today. And I'm not a luddite or even someone who believes that old ways are intrinsically better. But there are ways to feed the many various and often contradictory needs kids have that aren't reliant on contemporary tech.
This is just a new medium for a very old behavior.
> As the U.S. Surgeon General recently explained, children’s and parents’ attempts to resist social media is an unfair fight: “You have some of the best designers and product developers in the world who have designed these products to make sure people are maximizing the amount of time they spend on these platforms. And if we tell a child, use the force of your willpower to control how much time you’re spending, you’re pitting a child against the world’s greatest product designers."
This struck a chord. I struggle with addictive tendencies and I've been having to re-teach myself that stumbling is not always because "I didn't try hard enough" but because I live in a world thats optimizing for retention/subscriptions/etc...
I recall hearing of related embarrassing internal reports from Facebook.
And, earlier, the internal reports from big tobacco and big oil, showing they knew the harms, but chose to publicly lie instead, for greater profit.
My question is... Why are employees, who presumably have plush jobs they want to keep, still writing reports that management doesn't want to hear?
* Do they not realize when management doesn't want to hear this?
* Does management actually want to hear it, but with overwhelming intent bias? (For example, hearing that it's "compulsive" is good, and the itemized effects of that are only interpreted as emphasizing how valuable a property they own?)
* Do they think the information will be acted upon constructively, non-evil?
* Are they simply trying to be honest researchers, knowing they might get fired or career stalled?
* Is it job security, to make themselves harder to fire?
* Are they setting up CYA paper trail for themselves, for if the scandal becomes public?
* Are they helping their immediate manager to set up CYA paper trails?
No one wants to be evil but losing a job is hard. Most people will try to push back against something that seems wrong and, when faced with the choice of being Morally Right or Financially Secure, are going to chose the path that keeps food on the table and ensures their kids can keep going to the same school.
"But when the Kentucky AG’s office was preparing to post their brief against TikTok, whoever was in charge of doing the redaction simply covered the relevant text with black rectangles. Even though you can’t see the text while reading the PDF, you can just use your cursor to select each black section, copy it, and then paste it into another file to read the hidden text. It is great fun to do this — try it yourself! Or just read our version of the brief in which we have done this for you."
Parents are fully capable of monitoring and regulating their children's internet usage without Daddy Government getting involved.
the evidence says otherwise. I agree an outright ban probably isn't the best solution
My personal experience with this is from Mexico where, in heavy traffic, lanes are not really a "thing" and people will pack their vehicles in wherever possible. This leads to much more chaotic traffic flow and more unexpected stops though.
I will say though, if you are trying to watch videos more from an educational perspective then it can be useful. Although, I would advise getting an LLM summary of the video, and then speed reading the summary in order to determine if their is any useful content in there.
You don't need to make the website unreachable, only to delay the impulse for long enough.
In general, we talk about "iPad kids" and blame the tablets and phones themselves. Slightly more sophisticated people will blame the apps like YouTube or Roblox.
That stopped making sense to me once I saw the problem first hand with my peers and my own children. The actual issue is parents wanting to (basically) anesthetize their kids so the parents can do something as if they didn't have the kids.
Devices and Apps give parents the ability to zonk their kid into outer space for extended periods of time with unlimited videos or games that never end. But that isn't an inherent quality of the device. Like if you block all the apps and just let the kid use the iPad for drawing. Or if you do the YouTube kids thing where they can only watch videos you add to an allowlist.
The app makers do hold a lot of responsibility for the defaults on their apps, but the real issue is parents who are choosing to blackhole their kids for extended periods of time. (I am agreeing with you btw)
- Require age verification only for apps with algorithmic feed (obv. definition requires some nuance)
- Substantial tax on companies utilizing algorithmic feeds
- Require (regular) disclaimers and time monitors that are automatically shared with users on the platforms
- Ban usage rewards (e.g. Reddit tries to reward me for daily usage with stickers and such, why?)
100% this.
Many parents are so addicted to their own phones/social media that they need to give their kids iPads and other infinite distraction machines so that they don't have to deal with them and they can spend more time themselves endlessly browsing Instagram/TikTok/etc.
But it's not only that. I think modern society has failed parents and kids in a lot of ways. Many public spaces have become so kid-hostile that as a parent you feel like the MOMENT your kid starts acting out you need to break out the iPad just to shut them up and survive dinner or whatever. Guess what? Kids are loud and often crazy and they are LEARNING how to behave. Part of the learning is doing things poorly.
A good question to ask is why these people are making the decision to have children in the first place if this is how they treat them.
Maybe an order of magnitude or so less people should have children. People who want to have their cake and eat it too, raising their children largely passively, shouldn't be having kids at all. It's not something you "need" to do or should do without a very good reason and high confidence in your ability to do so effectively. Society should be strongly discouraging these kinds of people from having kids, but it's currently encouraging them.
So the burden is much higher, and parents cope with it in unhealthy ways.
Ouch, Gen Z really hate Twitter.
protip: this isn't the reason people are trying to ban the app, and it shouldn't be banned. Currently I think you have to be 13+ to go on the app. If you think it's harming kids as the reason to ban it, you could advocate maybe for 18+ access instead. The fact this isn't the advocated change, to me suggests that's not the reason why people are trying to ban it (concern for children's well-being). If this were the case, you'd also have to ban probably the other U.S. social media. It's probably also important to note how much good social media does by freely sharing valuable information (while people focus on the negative info that's shared).
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aafterbabel.com+instag...
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aafterbabel.com+Facebo...
As was pointed out elsewhere in this post Jon Haidt has been railing about social media for a while now, and has written several books on the subject.
and all of them should be run by non-profit organizations unconnected to any charity nor politically motivated organization nor state.
That includes the new ones such as Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon.
No exceptions.
(Speaking of, this was important, but I still spent too much time on it on HN... EDIT : heh, as immediately proved by the "posting too fast" rate limiter...)
P.S.: Platforms are also a very related but not identical evil.
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-snapchat
Haidt isn't anti-China, he's anti-all-social-media.
I can respond again if your attention span has been shot by too much TikTok:
> Then why isn't the article "Social Media Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale?" USAID checks?
Because he already wrote many, many articles to that effect and wanted to write one on TikTok specifically. Then he followed it up with one on Snapchat specifically.
Social media harming children is his whole thing. He's written a lot of content on it.
Apologies if this reply is too long for you.
But it's now clear that the activity is the harm. The issue isn’t that using TikTok might make you addicted; the issue is that you are using TikTok.
Just as there’s no such thing as responsibly huffing paint fumes, there’s no such thing as responsible social media use, only sub-diagnosable use.
1. show you more stuff automatically, and
2. optimize for engagement when choosing what to show you next
That optimization works, and they have little incentive to optimize for anything else (like minimizing harm to users). TikTok is not the only offender, but they are the best at it (read: worst for users).
It is an additional concern that they are ultimately controlled by a foreign country that is relatively hostile to us and has low transparency to our law enforcement apparatus and regulators. Facebook and YouTube have to at least be worried about breaking our existing laws or annoying our Congress. This reins them in at least a little bit. TikTok actually did annoy Congress enough to prompt bi-partisan action (a very high bar in today's climate), but successfully won a game of chicken, as the law they are violating is officially being ignored.
> 1. Addictive, compulsive, and problematic use 2. Depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm, and suicide 3. Porn, violence, and drugs 4. Sextortion, CSAM, and sexual exploitation 5.TikTok knows about underage use and takes little action
Hell, it's even a matter of congressional record!
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/07/1211339737/meta-failed-to-add...
it doesn't make it right, but this current political climate's myopic focus on tiktok alone destroys any credibility on this.
What should be mentioned in an article ccondemming tiktok is that most other social media young people may try are horrible as well.
The amountr of sexual explitation that takes place on snapchat is quite staggering from what I have read.
I do not see how Tiktok would be any less of a threat and cause less harm if it is partially owned by a US company. There is no evidence that US social media doing a fanastic job avoiding harm for kids and teens.
I would go so far as to say modern social media is nearly founded on the idea of addiction, and endless attempe at behavioral manipulation to sell ever more ads.
I feel like there needs to be more education about redaction and obfuscation tools, namely this black box tool and blurring. It is usually possible to reverse blurring. Not redacting information properly is just embarrassing.
We have a collective psychological experiment in the form of social media, but short-form content combined with an endless scrolling feed is functionally identical to the experiment with the rat pressing the cocaine button.
It is not beneficial for the population to have an increasingly shrinking attention span. If you can't pay attention for 30 minutes to look up candidate position while voting, or you can't even be bothered to pay attention to that boring "politics stuff" in the first place, then we have a major problem.
Only the US can harm children in industrial scales. Any threat to its sovereigness will be dealt with by our child soldiers.
Give it a try! The prompt was "explain me this answer on an article about tiktok harming children" followed by my comment.
It will save us some time.
We have a plethora of evidence on how destructive social media has been for (especially young) people and still nothing is being done about it.
Back then, if you rocked a Walkman, you carried 1 tape (about 60 minutes of music) that you listened to on repeat all day. That's very different from today's never ending stream of new media. A more interesting discussion would be about how we interact with media today vs back then.
Binge watching a reality dating show is not the same as intentionally watching a documentary about a subject you are interested in. The medium is not the key factor there.
How do you know that their interlocutors aren't listening to self-curated playlists a la mixtapes or to a carefully selected audiobook?
My view is that the "adults" are just as addicted as the kids and are afraid to admit it.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. They were always loudly complaining about being made to read classical literature. "Whats the point" says people who insist they are independent thinkers.
All this garbage needs to go — period. We've seen time and time again that attempts to age-restrict Internet content with law just result in violations of privacy, while kids can still access such content with simple workarounds.
Discord's case is especially egregrious because there's so much low-hanging fruit they could pick to make kids safer on their platform.
Well of course, numbnuts, or else no one would use this stuff.
There are benefits to caffeine, nicotine and other drugs that we still agree we shouldn't expose to children.
Because the harms outweigh the benefits!
Simply don't give your kids a screen. No iPad, no iPhone, no video games, no nothing until they reach a more appropriate age.
What that age is might vary from child to child, but it's certainly not 3 years old!
> As one internal report put it:
>> “Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” in addition to “interfer[ing] with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.”1
This doesn't prove or imply anything. They can believe they are killing people (and probably do, especially with the "large amount of users = woah, i'm god" effect). It still won't be true unless they actually are (which I doubt, but I have never seen this supposedly ground breaking social media webpage before). There are companies causing actual harms on the internet and those are the ones censoring everything and spying on users (coincidentally, not to be a point against this thread) and making false narratives of why everyone needs to buy their spying product and put it on their web page and require using google chrome or mozilla firefox to view the website to be compatible with their spyware.
Edit:
I just scrolled through and only read the CSAM part because that's the only big enough bait to get me to read it and:
> PARA 112: these leaders knew about agencies that recruited minors to create Child Sexual Abuse Material and commercialized it using LIVE.
That sounds incredibly unlikely, when you interpret it at face value. So you're saying some good boy CS grad like everyone on HN - the most milquetoast people on the planet - just went from being afraid of even publishing easily rebukable misinformation, to knowingly assisting people in the most punishable crime on the planet?
> PARA 114: TikTok has long known that virtual gifting is used as a predatory grooming tactic on LIVE. TikTok has internally acknowledged that “perpetrators tend to use tactics such as gift giving, flattery, and gifting money to win the trust of minors.”
Are we supposed to conclude that "gifting" causes child sexual abuse? Okay, then what about the fact that being able to communicate at all does?
Parents are responsible for their children. If a parent doesn't feed their kid, they go to jail. If a parent harms or allows harm through negligence to children, the parent is the one who suffers the consequences and has the child taken away.
If a parent is giving a child a phone and allowing them to use a harmful product, the parent is at fault and should suffer the consequences. Not the rest of us. I don't know why I should have my access to anything restricted because of bad parents. Parents choose to be parents and have and/or keep children and that is their business. Bad parents should suffer consequences and one of those can be no longer being allowed to be a parent.
It's one thing if a provider is specifically trying to get children on its platform - and if a company advertises its services in public places, it's again on the parent to be in control there. Social media companies aren't holding a gun to children's heads trying to get them to join. Kids wanting to do stuff because other kids think it is cool has always existed and that happens when children are not supervised or disciplined. Kids not doing what they are supposed to be doing of their own choice is a parental failure.
Someone under 18 shouldn't be able to purchase a cell phone, and if a parent wants to get them a cell phone, then the parent should accept responsibility for everything on that phone.
The addiction argument is tired. Anything pleasurable can be addictive. If you want people addicted to less things, design society where everyday life is less boring (getting rid of 2 hour commutes and having more parks would be a good start).
You probably don't have kids because if you did you would know that around age 13 you stop being able to just force them to not do things, you have to start to reason and compromise with them more. Without societal rules there will be many kids who drink, smoke, use social media and barely attend school. Those kids have bad parents but to a 13-17 year old they have "cool" parents, and now every other kids is gonna wonder why their parents are so lame.
You can't just raise a kid in a silo, and if you don't ban certain things at a higher level the other parents get to have a massive influence on your kids expectations.
People under 18 shouldn't be able to legally buy anything unsupervised except certain necessities such as clothes, food, etc. For the same reason they cannot legally enter into contracts.
> you have to start to reason and compromise with them more.
Ok, but if you catch 13 year old about to hurt someone, I hope you are pulling them away and not merely reasoning with them. If you can't keep a phone out of your 13 year old's hands, you failed as a parent or your child deserves to be institutionalized. You're still responsible.
If we are not going to have a communal model of childrearing, e.g. if we insist the optimum situation is that individual parents/families completely fund their own pregnancies, feeding children, educating children, etc., then the parents should own keeping the children out of trouble as well.
> Those kids have bad parents but to a 13-17 year old they have "cool" parents, and now every other kids is gonna wonder why their parents are so lame.
Part of controlling children is not caring about every opinion they have, such as this one.
If this is the case, why do we pass any special child protection laws that override what a parent decides is best for their child (and in a way that punishes those involved beyond just the parents)?
As to if any such law is appropriate or not, that would seem to be a question of how much harm is caused and if the law is aimed at preventing the harm. Many things are addictive, but only some of those cause enough harm to justify a ban to protect children.
I think society has never been so entertaining. I feel like we should instead learn to embrace the boredom. Life is supposed to be boring most of the time. It is healthy.
They don’t touch as many lives, and what a disingenuous comparison.
those with children
those without
as a hacker without children because i got priced out of the market, why should i care about what tiktok does or ceases to do?
honest question, if tough to answer
or maybe i'm only trying to explain why I don't have a model of being in a formative state.... I mean, dogs don't use tiktok
Because you want to live in a society where people have the attention spans necessary to e.g. drive cars safely without distraction and you want people to not be so vastly ignorant at scale that they collectively endorse or tolerate fascist behavior from governments and corporations?
If screen time data can be accessed, then we can actually know how much time we spend on these doomscrolling social media apps. Only allow X time and no more
It's a shame because there are good sides to it too.
Conveniently, a small local college asian club wants to have a stop asian hate rally on the weekend of the 17th, at a local park which would be an ideal location. Tiktok gets word from Bytedance, who by Chinese law have party members on their board, that this rally needs to be heavily promoted organically to other Asians who live in the area. No ads, if someone talks about it in their tiktok, push it. Push it especially towards beloved Asian influencers with a large follwing.
The day comes and the turnout is a total blowout. A sea of Asians filling the park to support a noble cause.
80% of them are there because the CCP wanted them there to cover their operation, but when asked, every single one laughs at the idea that "Tiktok is a tool for propaganda". They say "I have never seen anything that promotes red flag communism or CCP ideals."
The scenario above is why the US government wants tiktok banned. The privacy stuff is second and the screen addiction stuff a far far third.
Kim Jung Un had his brother assassinated by local actors who were hired to star in a prank video series in Malaysia. They killed someone while being totally oblivious. An extreme example, but these entities are way smarter than the average "I never see propaganda" tiktok user. It's totally idiotic to trust them, especially authoritarian governments.
I honestly think the solution has to be external as these platforms cannot govern themselves and are incentivized to keep your eyes on them at every waking moment.
It's honestly shocking what kids are watching on these apps. "Brain-rot" is obviously a funny euphemism that's come about for this content in recent years, but it's a pretty good description of reality. I watched a kid last weekend skipping YouTube every 30 seconds because he couldn't concentrate beyond a minute, and the content he was watching included a video featuring a dude who lives a house full of piss bottles. The kid in question is 7 for context.
The fact his mum just allows him to do this for hours on end I think is disgraceful. It's so obviously doing him harm and despite the vast majority of people being aware that these apps are harming children for some reason (I guess because it's legal) there is no moral outrage. It's vile parents are doing this to their children.
This is like the children of silicon valley CEOs growing up without phones and tablets and such but on a worldwide scale.
It’s frighteningly genius to be honest, douse the next generation of countries you are competing with with quick dopamine hits till they are basically just existing to swipe, scroll, etc and then rake in all the power for yourself / your own country.
Every criticism you can make of Tiktok applies to Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit, Twitter or Snapchat. So why single out Tiktok?
Easy: because every other company is American-owned and operates in lockstep with American foreign policy. Social media is just an extension of mass media and both play a key role in manufacturing consent [1].
Throughout the past four years or so, as more of my friends (all range 22-35) in my wider social bubble have started consuming shortform content in general, I've noticed that I'm unable to hold a conversation without my friends making reference to some obscure shortform video they saw.
It's fine, I don't think thats the crux of the issue I'm griping about. Reverberating things recently-seen is common in all conversations--I'd be a hypocrite to say I don't do the same. The only shortform content I consume are things only sent to me by my friends who would think I would enjoy it--most of which I do, but I leave my consumption at that. Having my social sphere as a filter in which I consume that stuff is the best way to keep it at arms length, at the expense of knowing everyone around you scrolls endlessly and deeper into it.
What's really the issue is when your friends are unable to talk about anything without prefacing that what I've said reminds them of something they saw, or reciting an opinion of someone else without actually forming their own. I'm seeing my creative friends drop their hobbies because they feel like they have no time for it anymore when they don't realize how much time they waste scrolling. While I'm in between tech jobs amongst the chaos of the market right now and moving across the country, two of my closest friends that I'm happy to be working with as they referred me this nice warehouse job alongside them, do nothing but scroll youtube shorts in between our tasks at the office and it's mind numbing and just sad to see. When I met them nearly a decade ago, they were making music and learning new ways to make art and perform, now it's just tiktok slop and memes and bottom of the barrel stuff.
I'm just one of two friends out here spurring them to make art again in an environment that is robbing people of their creative thinking, they're having a hard time finding how to even get into that flow state of creativity again. I can't imaging what that's going to do to children who want to scroll and never play.
But indeed focusing on TikTok is probably counterproductive for establishing general regulation. Why not just apply the same regulation to TikTok?
In other words if I leave my kid alone in the house with a liquor cabinet, and the kid gets drunk every day, did the liquor do the harm or did I?
That's an imperfect analogy though, because -- at least in the U.S. -- our society has already aligned itself such that our institutions and our devices raise our kids, not our families. As long as we keep that norm, then in a nation that values free speech and capitalism as much as the U.S. does, we're certain to have this problem.
So as another commenter said, if we ban TikTok something slightly more benign will take its place, and that's because we aren't dealing with the real issue: we don't raise our kids anymore.
Personally I look at the commonality of nuclear families[1] as a big culprit here. Once you isolate kids from aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents you're left with just the parents to raise them. Those not rich enough to afford daycare have to either split the duty so they can afford a roof over their heads or leave the kids alone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family#Compared_with_e...
I'm all for systemic changes, but lets make them more real than a national firewall, which is only treating a symptom, and instead focus on how we can make raising kids economically and socially feasible again.
I never said we should "push" responsibility on "every single person that interacts with kids," however, it wouldn't hurt if families would actually "take" a little responsibility in it. If we had UBI it would be a lot simpler for them to do so, but I'm guessing that's not on many peoples' list of systemic changes.
The nuclear family can't do shit about it. That's just a dream, an ideological fantasy. We don't need a dream. We need real solutions. "People should take a little more responsibility" isn't a solution. It's just empty wishful thinking and part of the reason why things are so screwed up today.
So what would systemic changes and improvements would you make, keeping in mind the First Amendment?
The first amendment doesn't apply to companies. Shutting down TikTok doesn't prevent you from exercising free speech. That's not how it works. Like, I'm not going to bother with this conversation if this is the direction you're going to take it.
And the fact that "Instagram, Youtube, etc." will just do it shows that regulations and laws are required. Systems that prevent companies from doing whatever they want in controlling the opinions of citizens in other countries. How is that compatible with the first amendment? Do you even understand the issue? Do you even understand the first amendment?
It does apply to corporations (https://reason.com/video/2019/09/05/corporations-and-the-fir...).
While Tik-Tok writes the algorithms that allows advertisers and influencers to manipulate people, it's the advertisers and influencers who are doing the manipulating, and it's their speech that would be affected by any laws.
So yeah I guess we aren't going to be continuing this conversation. We just disagree on what is systemic and how to go about fixing it.
I'm really starting to think all these whataboutism posts are bots. It just seems too hard to believe that so many people would come here to make this same idiotic point in response to a post by this particular author.
So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site. Works for my 3.5 year old, not sure the plan when they outgrow it.
>So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site.
Downloading videos from youtube and blocking the site seems more like fighting against the platform (and more work) than turning on a whitelist mode. Seems like the end result is the same but with more work.
Even the sidebar of recommendations is a dark pattern for a 3 year old. Unlike Netflix etc where you have to exit the video to browse something else.
I miss portability of settings; configuring restrictions for an mdm is soul sucking.
Everything lacks the basics, and nothing reads system-level e.g. content rating restrictions, it's all per-service and per-device and it's maddening.
Worse, the single most-useful parental control possible, an allow-list, is often absent from TV interfaces and steaming services. Allow-list just the PBS app on AppleTV? Impossible, there is no way to do a case-by-case allow list. Allow-list only the handful of non-brain-rot children's shows on Netflix? Nah, it's just by age rating. Et c.
[EDIT] Our solution, after years and years of banging our heads against this? App-installation blocked everywhere, no YouTube on anything, all streaming services cancelled because they're such a pain in the ass, and the kids have a large curated set of pirated content served by Jellyfin that they can watch when they get TV time, including some things pulled from YouTube by yt-dlp. If we want to one-off stream something for the kids outside of that set of content, we "cast" it from a parent's device.
The non-piracy alternative would be to go back to discs for everything, I guess.
Standard ways of interacting with "modern" media services are just awful, if you're a parent. They're so bad that it's easiest to simply abandon them.
A family unit should own all accounts in the family, parents should be able to reset any password to any owned account from a central dashboard without hunting down email links and 2factor. I don't want to set up a management account for each service. I want all any services management options exposed by api and displayed in my central dashboard. Of my choice.
I don't know. I didn't ever have kids, but if I don't mind letting a $3k laptop wear a few battle scars just for it participating in the life of a photographer, I have to suppose getting a little dinged up to help make a child smile must be at least as honorable.
For that matter, I recall a ferret - now long since gone to her reward, of course, this was decades ago - jumping on an Esc key just in time to cancel a Windows 2000 install, and that was funny enough to laugh about for years. How much more so with a cheerful, clever baby primate? Don't mind me, though. Just getting a little maudlin in my old age.
Also, adults have lots of responsibilities other than making sure children are playing constructively. Requiring over-the-shoulder collaboration for all online activity isn't realistic, especially when you have more than one child per parent.
Banning youtube has been a no-brainer for me. The loss of the "smart" shows is a cost well worth reducing attention addiction.
3 to 4 year olds are still putting things in their mouth that they shouldn’t be.
In a village raises the kid scenario, there would be older kids and neighbors looking after the kid, presumably with good intentions since they are neighbors.
But in a world (the internet) where anyone from around the world can communicate any of their idea to everyone instantaneously, the village is no longer raising the kid, so village rules don’t apply.
Reminds me of the time I tried using pkunzip to expand a shareware demo and filled the C drive on accident.
You could be taught to use those machines respectfully, if you knew games were available.
What does a family computer with minimal internet access look like in the constantly connected modern era?
Download tools and selfhosted video streaming tools exist for YT content. I run them myself. I learned to set them up based on a couple of HN commenters' passing mentions that it was easier than I had made it out to be, by following search terms from their comments, and by screwing around breaking things till they quit falling apart on me.
In other words, old-fashioned sysadmin work, of the kind I loudly hate and quietly love to. In aggregate, it took about two days' (ie ca 16h though not as closely tracked as if billing ofc) work, and though my notes are aides-memoires in no fit state for publication, I would be happy to share them privately and save you some of that time.
(This offer stands for any reader, and my email is in my profile here; to see those, click on the name above this or any comment. My fifty-year-old, brilliant but determinedly nontechnical, beloved catty bitch of an ex-boyfriend had much derision for the content of my library, but none for the quality of service. I confide you won't disappoint your family too badly, either.)
eta: What I wanted to add is this, a short and I hope not too dull piece which I wrote now almost a decade ago. Please excuse the state you find it in; my old website broke ages ago and this needs a rewrite anyway for that the man proved far more vile than I yet knew to paint him. But I think it still can stand as a hint of my real feelings on these matters, which might surprise you somewhat. https://web.archive.org/web/20220125083230/https://aaron-m.c...
I cannot really explain to a non-parent how different the life of a parent is. We don't have the ability to sit down and do 16 hours of time in a project in 2 days.
It's nothing for example I would shy away from administering for my neighborhood, tenant per family or account per family or whatever people want in each their own case - in the same sense we share other resources as a community, from a drop cord to a car or a bedroom. Indeed I have no kids of my own in large part because I was terrified I'd be homeless by 50, if I did not focus on building the kinds of skills that make this something I can do in a couple days without mostly at any time putting in a lot of serious effort - this was second-screen stuff I did mostly in bed with a cup of one or another of the embarrassing milk-and-coffee concoctions I like.
I never knew what I would miss that way, focusing on building a reliably remunerative career instead of fostering any other kind of social connection, until too damn late. I don't need to hear (and won't receive well) anything like "it's never too late;" no one else here is competent to speak to my personal regrets, and I speak of this one here only so I can cite it as one motivation among many to try to do something with that so hard-earned skill that makes a difference for folks whose lives are embedded among those of others in just that way I never learned the hang of. What else could I do that's worth more?
No one is asking me to do that for my community, not at the moment. I don't know if anyone else here would think of it; one major reason I bought here is because I've lived here enough years to know it is mostly unattractive to tech people and fast becoming more so. That's good; no monoculture is healthy and that one metastasizes.
So sure. In theory I could build something like a Helm chart or deployable Compose file, or some such awful useless other shit that no one with a life could ever make heads nor tails of. Those are all things I wasted too much of my one and only mortal life learning how to do, but there are no tools we make that a human can use so just that alone doesn't work. So then I'd have to turn it into a business, and pitch to YC just so I could say they rejected me, and eventually Alphabet would sue me into my next incarnation for threatening one Ads PM's metrics bonus best case, and all I ever really wanted to do was help the overworked parents around me make their kids happy in a way that was safe.
To hell with all that, it's for the chumps here whom I grant are in the majority but do not mistake me for one of them. I said before if you want my notes you can email me and I'll share them, Docker Compose file and all; if you don't have time to act on them then you can try to find a friend or family member or neighbor who does, if you still remember how to speak to any such person. Or trade someone for babysitting so you do have the time. Or let your kids learn something about what Daddy does all day! And if you're embarrassed of that, well, maybe you should be. Unless you know some grave occult evil of Jellyfin or yt-dlp, I don't see why you'd feel that way, though.
Any of those you're welcome to by me, or whatever else you like. Not my problem, but for whatever you find it to be worth, I would say any or all of them seems a better use of your precious time than to waste more of it whining to me.
... there is no way in hell I'll give him or her access to the 'net. Right?
Right.
Personally, I worry about the mental models formed at an early age, and how distorting technology can be relative to the real world. It layers abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction at a time when kids are trying to make sense of reality for the first time and establishing internal models that will stay with them into adulthood.
Sure, some carefully curated content may be fine, but I think there’s a deeper question to be asked about the impact of current technology on young brains. Adults certainly haven’t adjusted very well. The truth is, we don’t really know how harmful it is. Maybe we’ll survive the next 100 years to find out.
Everybody drinks alcohol. Should I help my toddler tryout alcohol to prepare to the future dinners, parties and weddings?
I didn’t want to drink before high school gatherings where there was peer pressure and I stopped shortly after that.
I see so many first-world westerners cringe at the idea of letting your child have freedom and make mistakes on their own. Tracking, parental controls everywhere, neighbors snitching when your child is out and about exploring the world, etc, etc.
Not that it means 2 year olds should run around the internet with unfettered access, but just that the aforementioned logic is not sound.
There is also benefit to being culturally in sync (not necessarily 1 to 1, but somewhat) with one’s peer group. It can be alienating to be the odd one out.
If it were up to my grandparents, I never would have watched a tv show or movie growing up, or read fiction novels. But while that may have had some benefits, it obviously would have some costs with me being unable to participate in some of my peers’ activities and conversations.
Same with many other things: condoms, keys to a car, access to alcohol. There is a time for everything, and at the age of 4, a young human probably has not yet maxxed out on analog stimuli opportunities.
I learned YouTube when it came out in 2006 and I was 21. I've got 19 years of YouTube experience and I'm doing fine. A 21-year old logging into YouTube for the first time in 2025 will probably be doing even better within days. (hours ? minutes ?)
I don't see any reason that a child needs "the internet" (for a value of "the internet" meaning "mass-market apps") to prepare for the future.
Maybe you'd want to give them "Scratch Jr"[0] at some point to give them a head start ; maybe that would make much more sense. But YouTube??
While there are many formative opportunities about handling physical money (The sensation of exchanging physical coins is big on a kids mind or knowing they have money and having missplaced it), I can 100% see a case for a card instead, trackable, instant access to emergency money, etc
Side note: Just a few days ago I witnessed a mom letting her ~2 year old daughter browse TikTok while shopping groceries. The kid mindlessly swept to the next video every few seconds. I was horrified.
My first computer was at age 13 and I had internet (broadband, directly) at 20.
Now, obviously both of those are very late for 2025+ and social pressure would be overbearing.
But I think internet usage before, say, 7, is useless. There is so much to learn in the real world before that, anyway (outdoors activities including sports, books, card and boardgames, crafting, ...).
Thankfully I live in a place where they're introducing school bans for smartphones, total ones in primary and during classes in secondary. That should reduce social pressure massively.
If all goes well computers will be introduced around 7, supervised (probably with a locked down Linux and various educational programs, maybe some simple multiplayer games, etc). A dumb phone will probably appear in a few years and a locked down smartphone as late as possible, maybe around 12?
I expect mobile device mastery to happen almost instantly, instilling desktop computer usage is the real target, maybe some programming.
Unsupervised internet usage is a tricky thing. Not sure when exactly, they need to learn about NSFW and especially NSFL. And of course about the crack-manufacturers employed by FAANG.
YMMV.
Some develop advanced reading proficiency well before that, and the more they read the more likely that is to become the case.
Every child is different, but the more you assume they can't do certain things, the more you'll find that to be self-fulfilling.
(That said, that makes an argument for extensive access to reading materials, not videos.)
You can youtube-dl whatever is good and stick it on a raspberry pi running kodi with no internet. You can get them el cheapo kindles and load them up with all the books they could ever read. You can let them use computers supervised for khanacademy. But please, as the rare adult who's aware of and cares about this issue, don't let your kids fall victim to it.
I'm fortunate enough to make enough to afford live in child care and a stay at home wife, so we're able to avoid almost all screen time. But the vast majority of families don't have this luxury.
"If you can't responsibly parent, why did you have kids?" This is a very difficult choice for many people. The drive to have kids is fundamental to being human. But it's very expensive and hard.
She spends her time with toys, puzzles, drawing, painting, crafting, Legos, books, playing outside, playing with friends, playing with her little brother, etc. She can easily do Origamis for one hour. I hope I can sustain this as long as possible. I know it will get harder and harder once she goes to school.
Imagine going the other way round is detox, you need to pushback hard since they will fight you on everything.
I think it's worth it even in that case. Though obviously if you never offer that option from the start, you're golden. Toys, puzzles, long form entertainment, etc.
Meanwhile a couple generations of us grew up with two working parents who were happy to just throw us in front of the TV or our lego sets when they needed a break. And that seemed to work fine?
Our daughter is only 2, but she's still absolutely thrilled whenever we let her zone out to some Disney movie on the TV, and has yet to even hold a tablet (that we know of, at least). I know things will probably change for us as she gets older, so I try to withold too much judgement from the parents I see happily plopping a tablet with YouTube in front of their kid. But for now, it's just hard for me to even imagine doing that.
I'm sure many would ask "whats the difference between a movie on TV amd YouTube on a tablet?" Well, tons, just from my personal experience. But her pediatrician, early child development professional we work with, and research I've read, all seem to indicate there's a pretty big difference.
They were shocked! They were asking about the film.
And I was probably more shocked when they said they don't read books because they don't have the patience. One said she once read a whole book and it was really good, but hasn't don't so since.
I know I probably sound incredibly boomer rn, but I see the effects of this in my generation (zoomers) and much, much more sharply with kids. I can't say it's "easier", but from my limited experience handling kids, it's trading a short-term hassle for huge long-term benefit.
And I think people are responding to your dilemma with the very sensible solution of just not having kids. Unless you have a very flexible setup somehow, or lots of cash (or both), yeah, child rearing is nightmare fuel.
It was not unusual not to want to watch what was available, and have to do something else.
I think this is a huge difference compared to modern video media.
I watch my ~9 year old Nephew play games on his Switch and he swaps between games every ~5 minutes.
I think as a 90s kid we had a hand full of games for our Gameboys, N64, etc. but had to wait for a holiday to actually get new physical content. Now it's easy and cheap enough to just download a slough of digital games (with fast resume and what not) and hop between them like crazy.
I give him another 20 minutes a day of creative time that he can use for things like TinkerCad or drawing apps. He only takes me up on it about half the time.
I do a similar thing with video content. He can choose from a very limited list of educational-ish shows (1 per day). Total screen time is under an hour/day, and I don't feel like any of it is brain rot. It does take more work up front for me on the curation end, but we don't need to revisit options all that often.
Those are all great slow-paced single-player games with a lot of depth. There are no dailies, loot boxes, battle passes, or activity feeds. They're entirely self-contained with practically no link to the Internet dopamine sludge machine.
I, extremely strictly personally, find TikTok ironically un-addictive for this reason: it depletes my attention too fast to get me hooked.
Google has been trying to get me to watch Shorts since they introduced them with little effect.
One day they offer me a video of a Chinese girl transforming into a nine-tailed fox on Shorts which was a good choice for me. After that they want to show me endless AI slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into all sorts of things on America's Got Talent always with the same music, the same reaction shots, etc.
I tend to look at the recommendation problem as a classification problem [1] but one thing that challenges that is that the answer to "do you want to see more content like this?" is different for content that is 5% of your feed (you relish it) to the very same content if it is 95% of your feed (you're disgusted.) My own answer to the diversity problem [2] is to k-Means the content into 20 clusters and rank the cluster independently so I am always operating at the 5% point.
With ordinary YouTube content I frequently get introduced to something like Techmoan or Jay-Z videos that I can binge with relish the same way I can binge episodes of Shangri-La Frontier season 2. But shorts don't do that for me.
If I was developing a recommendation-based content site based on short content in 2025 I would take a cue from Yostar games and make it so people are actually discouraged from sitting in really long sessions but rather you get them to keep coming back frequently to graze. I'm amazed at how a mechanism like oil in Azur Lane can rescue you from a grindy task right when you are starting to get sick of it forcing you to either engage with some other part of the game or real life for a while. There are a few of us who will spend the holiday break playing Dynasty Warriors 9 or Asgard's Wrath 2 and realize we spent a few work weeks worth of time playing a game, but even then you burn out, I think mobile games are more successful at getting more people to spend more time with games, often with content that is thinner.
[1] ... actually every problem, Hot Dog/Not Hot Dog is not a joke in my pod
[2] which I haven't seen in the literature. I used to think that I didn't understand or believe many ideas in the recommender literature such as "negative sampling", now I think the recommender literature is frequently wrong
Just like modern casino slot machines aren't actually fun despite being made by the exact same companies as very fun arcade and home video games, it's just more efficient/profitable to optimize for the easily addicted.
A casino makes most of it's money from addicts, so why waste any effort/money on making actual "good" anything when they can just press harder on the addiction buttons. Everything in a video slot machine is optimized around pressing the very specific dopamine buttons in a gambling addicts brain, to the point that it is WORSE for those who are less prone to gambling addiction.
In the exact same way, google doesn't care if you watch shorts, you are less profitable than the user who spends all day doomscrolling. So the content isn't optimized for you explicitly because the optimizations that make it more addictive for problem users, and therefore more profitable, are diametrically opposed to making "good" media.
The creative mind behind Spongebob wanted to finish after one season. "It's done, it's good, I like it as art". But Nickelodeon couldn't let that happen because it was a cash cow. So it's gone for like 8 slop filled seasons, that everyone recognizes as "worse" than the first season.
But "Good" has never been as profitable as "Addicting", so any market where you can sell something "Addicting" will be completely filled by addicting slop.
And at the opposite end of the spectrum - I've been using Suno AI to literally extend pop songs I like where the originals are only 60-90 seconds because of gaming the Spotify algorithm :-)
So I would say this feature has so far been worth to me exactly two HN comments.
I know adults who do this. I believe it's a lack of patience created by always available convenience. When nothing is hard it's not worth the focus.
Growing up there was no next/skip/shuffle - pick a radio station and deal with it. That or dub to tape which takes effort, and skipping also takes effort. Same with video games, as another poster mentioned we only got one game at a time so that was our focus. You had the new game and a few old games. Deal with it.
No ones has to deal with much of anything anymore and companies know this. And people dont seem to mind because its so addicting.
Uh, we monetized attention? Like, most of the people on this very board did this.
When you monetize something like that, of course it sets off an arms race and puts pressure on everyone's resources of attention.
The attention economy needs to be eradicated.
A newspaper of yesteryear couldn't print infinite ads. They had roughly a set number of pages, mostly down to the economics of printing itself, and had to find the most valuable advertising to fill that space with.
In the modern day, you can create more space. No longer do you have to curate advertising to ensure it is getting everyone reasonable value, because instead of having a competitive market, everyone just created digital heroin.
Imagine how awful the world would be if literally any shithead with a few dollars could slap a sign down on your front lawn that completely blocked your view and there was nothing you could do about it.
Don't imagine, because that's the very world software developers have built
Maybe the kids have realised that those pop hits are repetitive and uninteresting...
Plenty of pop music is excellent. But if you give it 30 seconds you will never find out if that’s true.
Plenty of valuable things are less exciting than a video game in their first 300 seconds, and last much longer than 5 minutes.
Trouble is today's AAA game competes with yesterday's AAA game on sale or an AAA game a little older than that used at Gamestop for $10 minus your $5 pro discount. Or a mobile game that will suck in more people for longer that costs most players $0.00 but finds enough people who crave what premium currency can buy (or who just find a $5/month subscription enhances their fun) that they are dominating the industry in terms of revenue and leaving the business folks wondering if they can afford to go on developing AAA games.
You realize that most mobile gaming operate on the same aspects of exploiting addiction, manipulating young people, and so on, who don't understand the value of money or have a distorted perception of how much things cost.
Somewhere between 1% to 5% of all the players that play the game are addicted or hooked into addiction through the use of dark patterns, behavioral manipulation or intentionally misleading game mechanics. They account for a "whale's" portion of the revenue.
They shouldn't be allowed, honestly.
- if the kid cannot play each of cheap games for more than 5 minutes straight, likely cost >$80 total, does it make sense to buy them multiple games?
- if answer to above is `false`, does it really matter if the game in the bundle cost $80 if bought separately?I do miss me some Calvin Ball though.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. How is this like 95% of the comments here, as if Haidt didn't write an incredibly well known book about how all of this is bad!
Their propensity for scrolling has degraded their ability to criticize it.
OP followed a similar pattern by starting with "please add YouTube to the list", but they did at least elaborate and didn't imply that TikTok was being targeted unfairly.
I've disabled YouTube history now and it's almost exactly what I'd hoped for. Shorts are disabled, no 'feed', no suggestions, just my subscriptions. I owe you a beer.
Youtube kids exists, but far too many channels are not available without manual intervention.
Screens allowed every 2nd day. So far it has been working well, and our kid always finds something creative to do on the screen free days.
They want to play Minecraft sometimes but other times they want to go play outside or play with their toys or watch a show.
They definitely have a harder time stopping some kinds of shows though regardless of only watching them some days so I have to remove some them.
Short-form content, whether in the form of articles, posts, or "snippets", habituates the reader to a fragmented mode of attention. Over time, this practice undermines the capacity for deep focus and coherent understanding. The effects are cumulative: what is lost is not merely quantity of information, but quality of comprehension. Certain kinds of understanding only emerge over time, in context, and in continuity. A complex argument, or a meaningful dialogue, cannot be replaced by a summary or a highlight reel. To suggest it can overlooks the way serious thought takes place.
And the parental controls on their other devices are illogical and remarkably buggy. Clearly not a priority.
https://support.apple.com/guide/tv/install-or-delete-apps-at...
I suppose allowing parents to prevent their kids from watching the inane garbage that is shorts is a step too far in Google's books.
You can filter
(.*).youtube.com
youtube.com/(.*)It's truly a National Security issue at this point. I hope America bans TikTok, and if I had children they wouldn't be allowed to watch this garbage. Sadly most Americans value their "friendship" with their kids more than they value their parenting responsibilities, and so they let the kids do whatever they want just so they stay on good terms with them without the kids being mad all the time.
Also today's generation of moms and dads all grew up in the internet world, so to them, blocking technology from their kids seems like abuse of a sort, when it's not.
You can block shorts. Block keywords (e.g. Minecraft, MrBeast)
Email me if you’d like to test.
jim.jones1@gmail.com
So, please don't give up on trying to only block the brainrot. Also, kids are crafty and usually have more time than adults so be prepared to fight an uphill battle once they figure out VPNs, DNS, and other ways.
My biggest concern is the attention thrashing. If they’re going to watch some garbage, at least be stuck with it for 10 minutes so you’ll get bored of it…
It’s the most attention holding thing a.t.m.
I wrote a blog post about it here: https://abparenting.substack.com/p/effective-youtube-kids
This is the primary reason I won't ever pay for premium. Youtube actively works against the interests of creators I have been following since before Youtube even existed. There's always some bullshit going on. I'm a grown ass man watching other grown ass men (they had to click the checkbox that their content is NOT FOR KIDS), but if they say "Fuck" too many times they still make zero dollars.
If I could see the ads, I know they are often softcore pornography or literal scams, but god forbid those companies get placed next to someone saying fuck I guess.
Google has spent near two decades reducing how much money they pay you for your content, despite their market only increasing. They treat content creators like dirt.
Google doesn't want ten thousand Simon Gertz and BPS.Space and AvEs and Applied Science and Practical Engineerings and Stuff Made Heres. Google doesn't want the channel that covered WW1 and WW2 in "real time". Google doesn't want Dan Olsen (Folding Ideas) content. Google doesn't want LGR.
Google wants 100 Mr Beasts. Google wants a hundred more fake "crafts" channels. Why pay money to that?
You should have never introduced them to it in the first place.
Not trying to be mean- just trying to be frank.
Our kids get almost no screen time. We watch a movie once a week as a family. That's it. We have no problems because we have never introduced screens to them beyond that.
Our kids like playing outside.
It will be blocked again and just handpickes local videos and games to choose from. I never thought I would have to do this as an adult, but what else you do?
I don't mean to seem blunt or rude. I don't actually have kids, so even if I were inclined to judge, I've no basis. But just looking at what YouTube has been doing over the last couple of years, even as a premium subscriber and so never seeing ads - I mean, it's terrible, it's as if it is actively trying to drag me down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, in the sense that I might watch a half dozen videos today about simulated jet-plane gunfights in DCS, and tomorrow I'm seeing recommendations for what I only recognize as "Intro to 5G Covid Conspiracy (CONT 101, 3 credits)" because I have studied the subject. I report these videos and they stop coming, until the next time.
It isn't as though there is a game here on the other side of which for there to be an adversarial mind, but there are times when it feels enough that way - when I'm half asleep, perhaps, and most especially - that I just don't even open the app or website entirely, but listen to an old podcast episode instead because those at least I can trust. (I pay subscriptions or buy copies; anything 'ad-supported' is a hard stop. I prefer people just say outright 'this is what I have and what I think it's worth, let's see if we can make an honest deal' because I am an American.)
I am seriously considering hosting a local Invidious instance, or similar, and terminating my now about ten-year YouTube Premium subscription. Ads are a technical problem that I was happy to pay a few bucks a month rather than however many hours to solve. I did enough years of sysadmin work for a living that I no longer enjoy it even slightly, so that's no small trade for me to consider. But now I'm really looking hard at what that money's going to, and by the sound of things lately, I'm among the least enthusiastic of such critics.
The YouTube alg is obviously broken. By broken, it's optimized for monetary profit. I get tired of specifically having to search out my other channels that I subscribe to, that I'm contemplating giving up Premium, and only using it on an as needed basis, since I need to search for my workout channels anyway.
It isn't as though I would be asked to pay more or less either way, and I can't imagine the ad placements on that malignant pareidolia slurry are worth as much as on actual content: I recall reading that Premium distributions to creators are scaled to predicted revenue on the ads that would've been shown - or actual revenue? I don't actually know they don't auction the slot as normal, and it would make a lot of sense if they did. In any case, I would think that would tend to make the slop worth less to try to divert me into, because whether or not I actually see those ads, they're still going to only sell to fringe psychos and so sell for much less than when I'm watching the LPs and stream VODs that are the vast bulk of what I actually do watch - nothing highbrow I grant, but nothing I or anyone else need be embarrassed to be seen with, either: just plain old 21st-century light entertainment you can sell razor blades or home loans next to, no problem.
I can't model it in my head in a way that doesn't have YouTube hurting itself massively with this, and though it's titanic enough to survive like that for decades, it won't last forever. It would help explain all the new revenue streams we see them lately and somewhat desperately adding. But a really convincing just-so story is always first and easiest sold oneself, and maybe there's something here I'm missing.
Similar to the theory that Netflix movies are optimized to be mediocre without a satisfying ending because it keeps you unsatisfied enough to keep watching something else
Think of it: challenging satisfying content is like a plate of fresh fruit or veggies. You can only spend so much time consuming it before you're full.
AI-generated viral conspiracy SHOCKING FACE content is like chocolate-coated salted nuts for your brain: no fiber, you can consume unlimited amounts for an infinite amount of time (which means watching aaaaall the included ads)
Sorry. I don't really have a joke to play that off with, unless it's what always happens when some of the very cleverest people on Earth get together and stop listening to anyone else for too long. Five to ten milliseconds is enough to get that ball rolling, I think, but everything goes faster these days.
My typical viewing on YT sounds kind of like yours. Wood working, AI, Astro, some rebuilding of heavy equipment. That's all fine. It's when you get into any war tech that it quickly spirals off into some rather insane conspiracy crap, even if the videos you watch are just reasonable documentaries.
First, it definitely isn't just miltech, though you are absolutely correct it is heavily that. That was top of mind for me today, but I would say there is also, for example, "light side" and "dark side" machining/mechanical content. Abom79 and Blondihacks are pure "light side". Zip Ties and Bias Plies was "dark side," though as a fellow Borderer-descended redneck asshole, I am sure that as with many former "Canadian American Patriots," he has smartened up pretty damn fast in recent months. (I wouldn't know; I got fed up with his ignorant, drunk, belligerent, impertinent comments on my government quite a long time ago.) AvE started out light side, lost his way for a while, and lately is with genuinely admirable sheepishness comporting himself so as to suggest embarrassed recognition of his prior excesses. And there are lots I just "don't recommend channel"/"not interested" as soon as I see it. I also see the same for gaming - I like some classic Doom mods that some fascist infants also have strongly stupid opinions about, for example - and from this I conclude that there is something in essentially any genre that could be pressed to support this sort of subtext-to-text transition in at least some stage. I doubt I would observe the same in makeup tutorials, for example, but the days when eyeliner improved my looks lie decades behind me now. And who knows anyway? I haven't actually checked. For all I know, half an hour of that, maybe I start hearing about "DID sfw agere unalived" and the trans-flavored "stranger danger" moral panic of the moment.
Second, miltech and history content on YT does not remotely for the most part constitute "reasonable documentaries," unless you refer to forgotten VHS and DVD transfers that are nearly never surfaced anywhere unless you search for them by name, and when you do, they spin for a glacial age before playback can begin. Not to indict modern "creators" (screenwriters, actors, directors, artists etc) en masse, of course. But few today even strive for the standard that older stuff, made before mere record-high count of eyeballs was taken as the only end, reached as a matter of course.
People do as good a quality of work today as ever, of course. It becomes available for streaming over the web only by accident and happenstance, and if that sounds like what a conspiracist would say, keep reading: sure, you'll find a million people on YT talking about the stupid Nazi UFO sex fantasy, and what the hell good is any of them? No one there will help you decide whether you think, if Lee Atwater didn't die of that damned brain tumor, we could've never ended up with Trump in the White House at all. Few I suspect could even appreciate the question.
A simple trick to see what conspiracy stuff is being pushed in your area is to open yt in incognito, accept cookies, and then watch one or two videos with titles in non-latin languages. Kpop fancams, NHK news, that kind of thing. Then look at the recommendation column. You will see two types:
- "related videos" (similar topic and language to what you were watching)
- "geo-IP videos" (not in the language that you were just watching, but clearly based in your country. These are almost always garbage)
Usually links like that come from here. It's quite eye-opening, like turning on showdead in your profile and just rolling around in the [flagged] [dead] "politics" for awhile.
But you will want to take a shower after, and you should; when Nietzsche said it looks back, this is what he meant, and it will ruin you if you let it. We all eventually become what we pay enough attention to, and we always pay a great deal of attention to what we hate. That's why it's worth so much money to get us doing it.
(I know I'm not saying anything new to you the extremely veteran commenter to whom I reply, of course. But as of course you also know, there are always young 'uns here who hadn't seen it said so plainly yet.)
I really wish that the EU would step in and force Google to either kill Shorts or give us full control over the crap they're pushing down our throats.
As this is HN and full of smart people - if there are any workable (OSS) options to filtering YouTube to remove shorts (and the far-right/Nazi crap) then please let us know.
tiktok is geofenced
... Oh wait.
Technological advancement is not always good (for ordinary people).
Increasingly, we seem to provide solutions in search of a problem, or worse, substitutes for much healthier activities. The power we have to do so is staggering; we are changing the parameters and modes of how people relate to each other on a daily basis.
I feel a strong urge to have more "ok, so where do we go from here?" and "what does a tech industry that promotes net good actually look like?" internal discourse in the community of practice, and some sort of ethical social contract for software engineering.
The open source movement has been fabulous and sometimes adjacent to or one aspect of these concerns, but really we need a movement for socially conscious and responsible software.
I like online banking, shopping, bill-paying.
Everything else is sort of bleh. I'm as guilty as anyone of killing a few hours on YouTube but don't think I would really miss it.
When doing home projects trying to thumb thru 50 VHS tapes of This Old House really isn't practical.
This is a really interesting point which can be extrapolated to many different areas. If something is more convinient, but causes us to lose a useful manual skill, should it be classed as good or not?
Mainly because the destination is an alternate economy where "companies" are smaller, returns are not concentrated to "founders" or investors or even shareholders, and so on.
The tech industry has become "evil" because it has put on social blinders while pursuing profits. To give up that path and choose another path is to choose more prosperity for "we" and less prosperity for "me". It's not a difficult choice in the abstract, but it's a very difficult for people with (oftentimes spurious, but still) bills to pay.
There are vanishingly-few ways to ethically draw a six figure salary (inflation-adjusted for 2016 dollars) out of this economy. Giving up that illusion is going to be really difficult (perhaps impossible) for the people in our industry who were drawn here by that promise and have grown comfortable with the terms of the bargain.
> Increasingly, we seem to provide solutions in search of a problem, or worse, substitutes for much healthier activities.
LLMs (and generative AI in general) are probably the most egregious and prominent examples of this, IMO.
Just for my own context and perspective, do you use generative AI or not?
There are very few young people today who dont value money and image as something to aspire to. IMO this is a really dangerous thing of which there is no way back.
There are a couple of differences here though. For example everybody has the same tiktok. The upper classes and lower classes are for the first time being subjected to the same issues simultaneously.
Also the modern medium of tiktok has proven so addictive that people are not showing any signs of rising up against it, and so it is taking legislation to protect people from themselves.
These are all new factors which will change the swing somewhat, Im with you in hoping that it all works out.
That's not at all the same as TV, video games, or rock music.
With Video Games we had the introduction of the MMO and news stories of people forgetting to feed their kids, and even dying in their homes from not looking after themselves properly.
People are the problem, not the tech. As long as people are willing to be lazy and allow their brains to be subjected to a constant stream of repetetive digital content for entertainement, then we will have these issues.
Maybe things were already bad when radio achieved mass adoption and people couldn't get enough of it? Maybe in some ways today's unlimited aural stimulation, of having access to music and podcasts at any moment, is also unnatural and undesirable for mental health?
My girlfriend and some friends are captivated by doomscrolling tiktok/insta. They'll do it and let hours pass if left undisturbed.
They can't watch TV or play games for hours because that gets boring and samey.
On the other hand, my girlfriend will aspire to play a game she bought or watch a show she wants to watch, but then get immediately sabotaged by instagram shorts because it's so much more stimulating.
Its nothing like a book, however it is very similar to addiction on MMO games like World of warcraft and Roblox.
> They can't watch TV or play games for hours because that gets boring and samey.
I would argue that its not because its boring, its because it doesnt give as frequent rewards for engagement and so becomes less attractive for the user.
> get immediately sabotaged by instagram shorts because it's so much more stimulating
Its not stimulation, its lazyness. I guarantee that anybody would get more stimulation from investment in a decent story in a book, movie, or game, but it takes more effort to get there. Its much easier to get that tiny hit of dopamine from a 10 second video than it is to invest 2 hours into a story to get a decent payoff. Its this lazyness of wanting the easy hit instead of putting the time in that is making people put down that book and jump on Instagram.
There's a reason why most teenagers are on tiktok, but believe that they would be better off if it never existed. [1] https://fortune.com/well/article/nearly-half-of-gen-zers-wis...
Governments around thwe world have had to tax sugary products to save people from themselves. You make it sound like there isnt currently an obesity epidemic because adults know enough to not eat too much sugary foods. In reality the vast majority eat way too much even though they know its not good for them, just like social media use. Its the same as alcohol and drug abuse etc. Humans are terrible at restricting themselves when it comes to stuff that makes them feel good. Tiktok scrolling is just an extension of that, not the cause.
It was like that in the 80s as well. Probably the 90s, depending on your inner circle. Money and prestige (image) has always been prominent in the US. We probably inherited it from the UK before we existed.
Knowledge and skill were socially important in the US once Sputnik was launched and we viewed science and engineering as the battlefield against the Soviet Union.
It's both. When I was growing up as a kid (and I'm now going back over 40 years instead of 20) you didn't take your cable TV with you in your pocket. (And not even your video games unless you consider Electronic Football a video game.)
(Okay, so the Walkman came along and I could take my music with me. Big sin!)
Entertainment, distractions in general had a specific time and place. There was a large part of every day when you were left to interact with the world that was right around you ... maybe even get bored from time to time.
Thats a good point I hadn't taken into consideration. Yes we had addictive MMOs and binging reality TV, but they werent portable. The outside world was a safe haven from visual media content.
Portability is definitely a major factor.
The 80s would like to have a word
It always have been.
> I think it is a very good thing that alarms were rung about teen smoking, teen pregnancy, drunk driving, and the exposure of children to sex and violence on TV. The lesson of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is not that after two false alarms we should disconnect the alarm system. In that story, the wolf does eventually come.
That page also shows some graphs that to this day still surprise me, namely, the way in which rates of depression and psychological stress among teens explode around 2010. Unlike TV and DnD, this time we do have data, and it looks bad.
[1] https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...
It was something like "The Japanese plan is to make our children stupid with their animations to overtake us"
It might be true but also you don't put your child in front of the TV at 3 years old...
It is like serving them beer and then blaming the Belgians for turning our kids into alcoholics.
Censorship is often justified by comparisons to physical substances like this - chemicals can irreparably harm your body, therefore ideas can irreparably harm your brain. I don't believe that these are the same. There's no way to really prove it, but there is a way to prove that censorship (which is what banning social media amounts to) _is_ objectively bad.
Kids are gonna be able to once in a while get their hand on porn, a beer, a cigarette or whatever.
The problem is the lack of supervision and parents who use devices to avoid having to take care of their children.
However Tiktok is banned in China; the domestic app Douyin promotes content differently.
I mean if you look at how some of those 40-50 year olds are behaving in public and voting maybe they were right?
Forgetting the adults in the room who still want to lean into all kinds of disingenuous what-aboutism for a moment, and just considering kids who are understandably self-interested in defense of their addictions.. really now. How could a generation of people who grew up wanting to be influencers actually be ignorant of the effectiveness of algorithmic manipulation? It's a contradiction. So why the insistence on some absurd comparison to old media? I'm all for nuance but there's not much of that to be had. I'd settle for a little reflection, sincerity, and logical consistency.
The same is true of the second call. If we dismiss the need to explain why this case is different as just disingenuous what-aboutism to be ignored the argument is left as "if one takes this as problematic then it's clear how it'll be problematic to counter". There's still no persuasion of why it's differently problematic if you don't already see reasons why yourself, just the assertion it is if one thinks enough (which could be asserted about anything true or false).
I think the biggest things that make this problem unique from the media context GP provided are:
- The individualized and targeted nature of the algorithmic feed being a different type of influence concern than content for mass or group consumption.
- The above individualized nature leading into much stronger "echo chamber" polarization, especially when combined with the endless and always on nature of the feeds.
- The content itself is delivered in many more technological layers of dark patterns than traditional mass/group media ever carried.
The only argument I hear a lot which I exclude from my list is the quality/type of content. I think, if you remove the above problems, the content would really not be as different from typical content as we'd like to think. I know others disagree and say it's the short nature itself which is harmful but I don't think that's actually a new unique argument to why people are worried about this latest media trend.
Everyone on every point of the political spectrum claims that the basic principle is true. That we can be manipulated to believe untrue things and to behave inappropriately and in maladaptive manners. We just tend to disagree on which media and which content does so.
1. The concerns about D&D were quite different. Most parents admired the creativity involved in role-playing. The concerns came from a relatively small subset of parents who were concerned about the morality of the subject matter (monsters, demons etc.). For the record, I thought at the time that these concerns were pretty silly and had little merit, and still do.
2. Just because there have been moral/social panics in the past, doesn't mean the concerns about social media today are invalid. Sometimes worries are wrong, sometimes they are right. Having been wrong before does not make it rational to never be concerned again.
3. It is entirely possible that concerns about high-volume TV watching were correct. Just because my generation (X) survived the TV era does not mean we came out of it unscathed. Much of the ignorance and obnoxiousness of our current age may very well be caused by today's middle aged people growing up watching television. (Or maybe it was the lead paint our parents grew up with?)
You could get reprieve.
With TikTok on mobile, it's ubiquitous.
This type of hyper fixation on TikTok is pop science and self soothing. It springs from the generational anxiety that the kids are not okay and something must be wrong with them. TikTok can be that boogey man for boomers, gen x and millennials. Same as older generations felt about TV, video games, rock and roll music, and D&D.
Have you ever considered that maybe people were right about all that stuff? The problem so many people have is they either aren't forward thinking enough or only look back a few years at most when arguing against "moral crusaders."
Take for example violence in movies and videogames. Back in the 80s, the MPAA came down hard on the Friday the 13th movies, and the violence level in those movies absolutely pales in comparison to what you see now in Saw X, a mainstream R-rated horror movie. In the early 90s, there were federal hearings about violence in video games, Mortal Kombat being the prime example. Compare what gave people heart attacks back then to what the latest Mortal Kombat game features. Maybe those people were right all along, and we should have done something other than just laugh at their concerns?
With the benefit of decades of hindsight, there's a lot of issues in society where the "slippery slope"-ists turned out to be right.
College lit professors are now saying they get kids in their class who've never read a book from cover to cover. Those that have, say their favorite book is a YA book like Percy Jackson. Most can't even focus on something like a sonnet. This was described by a professor at Columbia, and they say that this is a recent phenomena and it's the majority of their students now.
Something has fundamentally changed, and there's evidence that points to kids missing key developmental windows. It's not just them on social media either, it's probably also their parents who are on their phones and not interacting with their kids who need that to develop normally.
The damage from social media is widespread, well-studied, and unequivocally harmful to millions of people. There is no equivalence, it's a different technology with objectively worse impacts.
I'd be fine with that, if it means I never have to hear that robotic argument ever again.
And what would happen in another 20 years? What exactly would prevent this from happening again?
Maybe instead of just knee-jerk reactions like "Ugh stupid social media, let's ban it" we should think it through and solve the underlying issues.
old_man_yells_at_cloud.jpg
Nowdays everythibg on smartphones "just works", and the OS won't even let the user access system files. I meet college students who have no idea what a file system is, or what a DNS server is.
Times have changed, indeed.
Let me give another example: a nice village where I spend my childhood. Every day on the streets, forests, you name it. No time/hours limit, no space limit - play until fully tired. Now, visiting again, there are no kids on the streets. I thought to ask my relatives and people I know. And I find out that is not that kids do not want to play outside, they are _not allowed_ to play outside!!.
Why? "the kids are now kidnapped from the street" - "how?" "I heard from a neihbour from her cousin that lives in the village 10km that this happened!" ( not true - the kid got in a black car which was the uncle showing of his new BMW )..". Another example "Rapist are now free!" ... "no way!" "Yes, yes, this happened" ( was a case 3 years ago in a city 30 km away - a normal man got in a quarrel with a girl and the little mischevious said to get away that he touched ...no comment ).
yelling_and_pulling_hair.tiff
Having 24/7 access to infinite amounts of brainless content in your pocket is not something we ever had to contend with. This is uncharted territory. And it's terrifying.
I fully intend to extend the same circumstances to my own kid, seems fair
(In all seriousness, I do agree that TikTok is awful, but I find the fascination with TikTok while ignoring all other social media and their dangers to be interesting)
For the social harm to children that they cause? I thought it was to break out WhatsApp & Instagram into their own entities from like a monopoly perspective, but I admit I am not keeping up on the current trial at all, so I could be wrong.
>about how bad they are almost daily on this site.
This site is hardly representative of the average citizen. In my daily life, local news, etc., most people I encounter will talk about how bad TikTok is for children but barely (if ever) mention harms of other social media.
For causing harm in general? Yes.
>The FTC’s argument hinges, in part, on its claim that Meta harmed users after acquiring the two companies by increasing the quantity of ads and watering down privacy protections.
> This site is hardly representative of the average citizen. In my daily life, local news, etc., most people I encounter will talk about how bad TikTok is for children but barely (if ever) mention harms of other social media.
And yet in my daily life almost everyone one in my circle of friends has deleted Facebook because of their disgust with the platform. Ironically the biggest issue is the number of people that don’t understand Instagram is also a meta property.
I use Facebook for the local buy nothing group. Everytime I open Facebook I'm shocked by the manipulative AI slop (person in a boat pulling barnacles off a dolphin that's standing up in the water) that shows up in the first screen. I'm terrified that grandparents who vote are engaging with this stuff.
It's weird how so many of these threads are "whatabout other social media", when there is no contradiction in just saying "that too", and essentially none of the people who agree with the premise that TikTok is bad will argue that other social media is good.
China is doing damage to us when we are doing damage to ourselves too? Really? It’s going after the wrong thing and so not finding the actual problem and hopefully the solution.
Personally, I think the national security argument is the much stronger one for the divestment bill (which the current administration is illegally refusing to enforce at the moment). But that's just not what this author cares most about.
China is just a competitor, not some sort of boogeyman.
The US is a competitor with a lot of countries. Maybe they should ban our social media, but for whatever reason that is mostly not done. If we want to set that as the convention, it is certainly worth considering.
Sorry, but which part of my comment implied that I think they are?
The latest Annual Threat Assessment: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-202...
Noted that production of those precursors has shifted to India.
The fentanyl itself is made in labs in Mexico and then smuggled across the border. It requires no sophisticated lab equipment to make. You can easily obtain everything needed at consumer retail stores and make a batch in a garage. One liter of finished fentanyl is enough to create 50,000 to 100,000 doses.
So if you squeeze the balloon, it just pops up somewhere else. Put pressure on China and India starts supplying the chemicals. Start shutting down Mexican labs and they'll make the stuff in Oklahoma.
Not that these are bad things to do but unless you address the actual demand for the stuff it's going to be nearly impossible to eliminate it.
Do you blame prostitutes when husbands cheat on their wives at a whorehouse too?
On prostitution, I'm a bit skeptical that the policy interventions over time have been net positive, but maybe they have.
On social media, unfortunately I'm very skeptical of the proposed policy interventions, in general. But I'm convinced that the status quo is bad. But sometimes there just isn't a policy solution available that doesn't have tradeoffs that make it even worse than a bad status quo. It's still good to bring attention to the problems with that status quo, though.
In the case of TikTok in particular, I think forcing divestment is a no-brainer, but for totally different reasons than what Haidt is writing about.
Europe has its own opioid crisis, and we absolutely can blame other countries who play host to the primary runners of heroin and synthesizers of fent. The pain industry is just the first baby step to hard drugs. We already handled our side after OxyContin - it’s impossible to get more than ibuprofen from a doctor without doing backflips through flaming hoops.
> We already handled our side
What did you do about the millions of Americans already hooked?
As I understand it, stopping the supply from pills mills lead to people hitting the street to buy product cut with fent. Some handling.
When I was growing up the same types of people were saying that D&D was a demonic movement meant to turn kids to satanic rituals so I never got to play D&D. Rock music had subliminal messages that were converting children into zombies but I listened to it anyway and that's how I discovered that most adults were full of shit and straight-up lying to us. There's so much garbage out there that separating the noise from true threats is an overwhelming task for most average people.
We need actual data privacy laws that make that business model of invasive surveillance capitalism non-viable as well as some of severe regulations placed on algorithmic recommendation engines to limit these harms. At the very least, users should be permitted to tune their algorithm parameters, including deciding how much they see things they’ve explicitly requested to see less of.
Yeah we can scaremonger about TikTok all we want, but it’s not solely TikTok’s fault that it’s trash. The economic incentive structure is to produce a surfeit of brainwashing trash that erodes people’s mental health. We need to structurally change privacy laws and force market competition to crack these network effect monopolies if we want that to stop.
If you have a kid, please be a parent.
"TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale" does not imply "Instagram Is Not Harming Children at an Industrial Scale". It is simply studying one app. There have been numerous reports of the dangers Instagram poses (especially to teens), and when they get posted we get a raft of "why just pick on Instagram?" comments. It's tedious.
> Of course, if TikTok is removed, many children will just move to TikTok’s competitors: Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. This is why it’s so important for countries to follow Australia’s lead: raise the age for opening social media accounts to 16 and require the companies to enforce it.
Worse, it's distracting.
Maybe take a few minutes to actually read the piece and look at what else the author has written before jumping to the conclusion that they're just part of Trump's propaganda machine.
You clearly have not read anything that Haidt has written and you just ignore all of the comments pointing out that you're mistaken, so you just end up looking like a conspiracy theorist who refuses to even look at the actual evidence because you already know it's all a conspiracy. Looking unreasonable and irrational hurts your cause.
> There have been numerous reports of the dangers Instagram poses (especially to teens), and when they get posted we get a raft of "why just pick on Instagram?" comments. It's tedious.
The difference being of course that one website (tiktok) is being targeted and essentially no action against meta. That's why people chime in.
I doubt that every reader thought to themself, "this doesn't imply that non-Apple products will not be affected by the tariffs. I should look more deeply into this so I can make a more important purchase that offsets a greater future cost" before charging out the door to buy more expensive iPhones.
When someone writes something that singles out a particular company, group, or individual, we might not understand the subtext and interests at play, but we must at least allow others to account for the purpose and effects.
In this case, the author wasn't implying that industrialized harm to children was a new or unique problem with Tik Tok and has written several articles with similar titles about other social media to highlight that this is a bigger problem that should be acknowledged and addressed at a higher level. That alone makes it not just reasonable, but desirable to bring up that there are other members of that industry.
> Tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether it should step in to block or delay the implementation of a law that would ban TikTok from operating in the U.S. If not blocked, the law will force TikTok to cease operations in the U.S. on January 19, unless its Chinese corporate owner (Bytedance) sells to a buyer not controlled by a foreign adversary. The case hinges entirely on constitutional arguments pertaining to national security and free speech. The Justices will hear no evidence about addiction, depression, sexual exploitation, or any of the many harms to children that have been alleged, in separate lawsuits filed by 14 state Attorneys General, to be widespread on TikTok.
A quite likely outcome here is that TikTok is allowed to continue targeting children with harmful content. I think "hey, what's our goal here, and are we accomplishing that goal with these actions" to be an entirely reasonable response. That's how I interpreted the comment you replied to.
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-snapchat
The archive also includes a bunch of articles on social media in general, edtech, and similar.
Yeah, it's not "moronic propaganda", it's someone who has, historically and famously so, been very focused on the broad issue of social media's impacts focusing in on various specific aspects of it, of which TikTok is a part.
OP seems, respectfully so, ignorant to who Haidt is and would perhaps do well to read up on more of his output (apologies to OP if this assumption is incorrect).
The damned site he writes under is called After Babel! His identity at its core is linked to not just convincing but aggravating agitating and hyping an image of the world made "anxious" and depressed by devices.
There's a lot of other causes for the world being as unsupportive as it is. As a society we are losing meaningful connection to work, by having such vast mega corps sucking up all the work, managing the world from the top down. The concentration of capital has had enormously brutal impacts on the human spirit. But you won't see Haidt acknowledge or concern himself with what else is unravelling the human fabric.
There's some directionally correct concerns Haidt has, but as someone whose made it his calling to drive a wedge into what society is & demand a conservatism against the new, stridently & loudly, with no bones about what comes very close to lying, I cannot help but detest him deeply.
The evidence for this is far weaker than social media causing harm, but let's assume that you're right. All these problems caused by capitalism seemed to manifest during the the rise of social media tech giants, so they would still be the most likely culprit. I'm usually the person who defends capitalism, but even I review content recommendation systems on social media as capitalist brainwashing machines. I don't think being too conservative with limiting access to children is a bad thing.
He's a noted grifter with many years of making stuff up.
I read it a lot, but it's actually highly dubious that that is the main issue or a problem at all.
The problem is how western kids react to TikTok content and why they do it that way.
TikTok is also present in many other parts of the World and it's not causing the same harm everywhere, it must mean something.
The title should actually be "TikTok is harming American children at an industrial scale" and the focus should be on why Americans are more susceptible to TikTok[1], whose content, BTW, is mostly created by fellow Americans and not directly by the Chinese government.
[1] the why is also somewhat explained in the article, even though I do not believe those are root causes, they're just symptoms
“It’s better to have young people as an early adopter, especially the teenagers in the U.S. Why? They [sic] got a lot of time.”
“Teenagers in the U.S. are a golden audience . . . . If you look at China, the teenage culture doesn’t exist — the teens are super busy in school studying for tests, so they don’t have the time and luxury to play social media apps.”
The latter being honestly quite worrying for a country that prides itself to be "the best place in the World", kids should not waste so much time on what is basically a reel of (highly discutibile) ads disguised by entertainment.
Chinese seem to understand it and have created a healthier environments for their kids, maybe we could learn a thing or two...?
It should be noted that in every major US corporation there's been a meeting where executives said or proposed something very similar. It's capitalism 101, first: profit, then, maybe, if you're forced to, ask for forgiveness .
EDIT: as a non American, it looks to me like the old guns don't kill people, people do except coming from a country where there are virtually no guns around, and very few people kill other people and usually the gun is not the weapon of choice, maybe the problem is actually the people living in the USA plus giving them guns.
Nobody here said it was the main issue. But it is clearly problematic, and easy Google searches brings up tons of well-researched journalism as to why.
Algorithmic-driven feeds are brilliant from a psychological control perspective, because you don't need to outright censor stuff. You should need to downrake stuff you don't like so it shows up less often, and uprank stuff that shares your viewpoint. It's a very effective yet extremely subtle way to mold public opinion.
OTOH people in China don't.
You assume, "it's China, they must be bad, no?"
No
TikTok in China is mostly the same app, under a different name of course.
What is different?
The Chinese society, which does not exists in a vacuum and is not directed by evil entities coming from another planet to rule the Chinese people under their thumb, they are Chinese people too.
In China kids are only allowed a limited screen time per day, because that's what parents want, that's what studies showed them, that it's not safe for children, and that's their beacon: for parents, the ruling class and the society at large. They chose safety over instant gratification.
OTOH when US government tried to ban TikTok people protested vehemently. It was mostly so called "influencers" who turbo charged their armies of minions against a decision that could harm them, but was good for everybody else.
So Americans should ask themselves why they prefer TikTok over the safety of their children, Chinese people don't, because they don't do it.
edit: grammar
in theory
in practice people in the US clearly demonstrated that they don't care, as long as their hunger for instant gratification is satisfied.
TikTok is not banned and when rumors spread about the government wanting to shut it down, people protested.
I've never seen people protesting for heroin, honestly.
So, no! your analogy is faulty.
Citation needed?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...
Honestly, I question the motivations of any techie trying to argue that a Chinese state-controlled propaganda machine consumed en masse by children is anything but especially problematic.
We tried to do the same trick with Islam post 9/11 and it was somewhat effective but it didn't have quite the same resonance. Which is weird because there's a long history of Black Marxist activism in the US, and of Black Muslim activism in the US, and you'd think if anything could convince Americans to hate and fear something, it's that thing's utility to Black liberation. But for some reason Islamophobia just seems to have been folded into the same generic antiwoke xenophobic white supremacist milieu as everything else, while people still jump on tables and go "eek!" at the thought of commie mind control.
It probably also helps that in most cases the short form videos aren't the person's "primary" output, but are teasers for longer-form content like video essays or podcasts.
But yes, the overall picture is extraordinarily dystopian, and it particularly preys on people who already struggle with attention management and guilt around productivity.
The YouTube's one (Shorts) is especially irritating, as you can't really ban children from using YT - there's stuff there they need to watch for classes and so on. I guess the only chance this will stop is a government regulation of some sorts.
Internally, China protects its kids:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/09/1077567/china-ch...
I can't compare levels of evil, however. I don't think anyone, in good faith, can, since it depends on your value system.
Is that accurate?
There is plenty of evidence that drugs like opium were deliberately used to keep countries oppressed, but the dominant goal was to make money to pay for tea. There is plenty of evidence that alcohol was deliberately used, in some countries, to keep serfs oppressed and prevent them from organizing.
It's close to an accurate statement, but it would need to have a few changes to phrasing to be so, such as:
* "government-sponsored" -> "government-supported" or encouraged
* "destroy the minds of non-chinese children" -> "help Chinese kids maintain a competitive advantage over American kids"
As-is, it sounds more like a deliberate strawman.
Is that accurate?
I know you're looking for a precise statement you can beat up (much as my edits are taking away the ludicrous parts), but the world is also not fully observable. Opposing governments (and individuals, and armies, and ...) often take swipes at each other, but knowing the precise chain of events, intent, players, etc. leading to each swipe is usually not possible without extensive insider knowledge. However, it is possible to observe one side taking a swipe at another, without knowing every detail behind it.
I've been asking (politely, even!) for reasoning and people seem to be hostile to it.
I know the world is complicated, I'm not looking for an agreed definition so I can make fun of it or something, I really want to know why people hate China so much.
I don't hate China. I'm very glad we have a competing model of governance, and I'd like to see a diverse range of governments in the world. China is experimenting with a very different model, and for all the faults with that model, I'm grateful for that.
If the goal is to understand the anger and hatred, a good place to start is the persecution of the Uyghurs. That one is pretty over-the-top evil, and you can learn more here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17oCQakzIl8
There are many other such things happening. In general, hate is based on cherrypicking the bad things about "them" and the good things about "us." That's as true across political lines, as across countries, as across some religious divides.
To your original question: "What makes the Chinese government evil in a way that the US Government is not," the US government does NOT do things like this. It does a completely different set of evil things, and a completely different set of good things.
Part of the reason cherrypicking works is there is no equivalence between e.g. Muslims in Gitmo and cultural oppression in Tibet. They're different. The Chinese government is evil in a way the US government is not, good in a way the US government is not (and vice-versa). Which is worse depends on your set of values, and consequently, it's very easy to make one side seem like pure evil and the other side to seem like pure good.
All that said, I do think TikTok (and a lot of other social media) has about the same level of negative impact as many drugs, and I think specifically in the case of TikTok, the impact on American kids is at least in part a deliberate geopolitical jab. If Facebook has a decision whether to make money or help kids, it will make money, finances being equal, it will pick to be socially-responsible. TikTok, for impact on American kids, is probably mostly the opposite.
Is that worse than a fake CIA vaccination campaign in Pakistan? It depends on whom you ask. However, it is, without argument, different.
I'll have to read about the treatment of the Uyghurs. I do know that their food is delicious, so that's a nice starting point for my learning. I'll check out the Last Week Tonight clip, but I'm generally cautious of info-tainment sources for stuff like this, so I'm also going to read more afterwards.
Thank you again, I really appreciate it.
It's from 2010, but I don't think the big picture has changed much. China has big-O, a 5000 year history, and the current government, big-O, one century. Details have changed in the past 15 years, but the big picture is pretty similar.
But the edu-tainment here is pretty accurate. I could do a similar hit pieces on China on Taiwan, Honk Kong, Tibet, environmental issues, surveillance,..., and you'd have plenty of reasons to be angry at / hate China.
The point is I could also do similar hit pieces on similar issues from many other countries as well (including the US). Individuals too for that matter -- if I could pick out all the worst, most embarrassing things moments of your life, and only presented those, you'd probably look like a pretty horrible person.
Positives we can learn from in China include that the government aims for:
- meritocracy, actually dating back over a millennium. This contrasts with Western ideals
- broad-based input from citizens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole-process_people's_democra...)
The reality often differs, but the ideals are sound (much like Western ideals / reality of transparency and representativeness).
The Chinese government is also very capable of long-term planning, very much in practice, almost like almost no other government in the world.
These comparisons are so stupid and just meant to derail conversations into the mud of an endless spire of unfaithful subjective comparisons.
As far as I'm aware, China has not bombed any civilians while invading a foreign country recently.
Maybe I'm wrong though?
This also applies to parenting, which is why people instead turn to products such as these and insane privacy-destroying laws, instead of... talking to their children; developing a trusting relationship with their child where the child can talk to their parent (and vice versa) about what they're seeing online, what they believe, etc.
I don’t mean to say it’s a bad idea, but your promotion of it in this thread doesn’t land with me.
Second of all, whether you wear earrings is drastically more heritable than IQ.
A good rule of thumb: unless the thread is literally about bioinformatics, the concept of "heritability" is probably an unuseful distraction.
Doesn't exactly align with your claim.
> "In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service. We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive," the company said in a statement. "It's a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship. We will work with President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States."
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tiktok-restoring-service/sto...
First of all, TikTok was being in the crosshairs ever before Hamas decided to slaughter and take hostage civilians on Oct 7th.
Second, why is it always the pro-Palestine crowd that acts like their issue is the most important thing in the world, completely de-railing any debate? Seriously, no other geopolitical conflict has so many people injecting it into any debate they can find.
I guess the closest analog is the rape of Nanking? I don’t think Japan ever truly apologized or even properly acknowledged it and I’d definitely still be salty if I was a Chinaman today. That said, the Japanese got nuked twice and lost their dignity in a number of other ways.
Edit: I forgot about the 6+ million Chinese the Japanese wiped out in WW2! WW2 China really is what Palestine thinks it is today.
If your principles get in the way of making compromises that could help, you’re letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Something to think about.
Giving people money so they can pay rent and buy food during lockdown? Preposterous!
Giving people money so they can "stimulate the economy"? Now we're talking!
Infinite, algorithmically-curated content is the problem. It's designed to be addictive and manipulative. There's data that shows that stuff like this basically exploits our ability to delay gratification by offering big pops of reward at random intervals. This develops pathways that encourage continued interaction because, essentially, you don't know when a reward is coming but you know that a reward is coming eventually so your brain keeps drip-feeding you from the memory of the last reward. It's similar to how people end up mindleslly bashing away at penny slots all day for years and years.
Here's an actual quote from the conclusion of TFA, with a footnote:
> These harms may not be presented tomorrow to the Justices of the Supreme Court, but we think they should be decisive in the court of public opinion. TikTok should be removed from American childhood. 12
> 12. Of course, if TikTok is removed, many children will just move to TikTok’s competitors: Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. This is why it’s so important for countries to follow Australia’s lead: raise the age for opening social media accounts to 16 and require the companies to enforce it.
