I just found out yesterday that my cousin lets their 5ish year old have a TikTok account, but they have to allow or deny anyone who follows. How absurd is that. It doesn't block anything about what they view (I assume they relied on this safety feature), and there's no way that vetting who can follow (family and friends) is safe enough. The alternative is my younger cousin not having access to TikTok at five years old. Seems like a completely fine alternative.
I imagine the average person just doesn't think about the potential implications of giving your child a TikTok account at that age.
I have never heard of a 5 year old with a TikTok account.
I think your cousin is so far into the outlier end of the parenting tail that nothing they do is going to make any sense in the context of common parenting practices.
The average person, especially the below average person, is better off trusting others than their own judgement - since most people know more than them.
You need to talk to your cousin. No one else is going to.
This is absolutely true.
> being educated / intelligent means you have likely picked up some neuroscience knowledge and it has stuck for you over the years.
People in Russia and China have almost 30 percentage points more tertiary education levels than Americans do. Nonetheless social media is even more pervasive and popular in China than anywhere else in the world. Like with the panic about video game fixation, harmful time wasters are almost certainly an effect, not a cause, of something else.
If collective action has to happen to solve some problem, it needs to either 1. be so strongly incentivized such that it's the only sensible thing for individuals to do, or 2. be mandated top-down and enforced.
You can't just shout "My solution relies on everyone independently doing X!" It never works.
But also, prohibition has never been a very effective method with teens.
Just look at how college kids drink when they get to college. The sudden removal of parental restriction has a lot to do with that if you ask me.
I think this is better approached with broad education, and stronger regulations on the platforms themselves.
Part of the problem is that many parents aren’t educated themselves about what is good and bad for their kids. Examples include things like nutrition, screen time, even simple stuff like when to wean from bottles and keeping suffocation risks out of cribs.
Child safety features are not going to solve this problem. All it takes is one parent giving their kid a phone with an adult account and all that progress is undone. I am convinced it is going to take a cultural shift for any positive change to occur - self-policing and, if necessary, social stigma.
This kind of behavior of giving young children phones will have to be outmoded in a generation or two. Until then, there is going to be a lot of growing pains.
You're right "we don't know what it does to kids brains". But that means we should give parents discretion. Some parents want to run an experiment where they give their kids constant tiktok. Maybe we'll find out in a generation or two that this was bad, good, or a nothingburger.
I'm in my 50s. I have watched sooo many moral panics evaporate to nothing. TV, video games, D&D, heavy metal music, porn, literal satanism, and now everyone's favorite whipping boy, social media.
Let it go. Parent your own child, let other people parent theirs.
I don't use tiktok, can someone explain what the restrict mode was advertised as vs does? If it's like any social media limiter it's perhaps a softer thing (time limit) than a hard thing (ie, designed to put the onus on the user).
1. free for all
2. locked down with ID checked age gates
3. sanitized with no adult content at all
If we put responsibility for keeping kids safe on companies we will get 2 or 3. The only good option is that parents need to actually parent their kids.
Yeah, that is a pretty good way to summarize the state of life based the trajectory of current events.
There is rarely a dull moment on this rock.
I am so happy I do not live in US where an idiot harms themself and non-idiot has to pay them.
We were all idiots at that point in our lives.
https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
> You shouldn't see mature or complex themes, such as:
> • Profanity
> • Sexually suggestive content
> • Realistic violence or threatening imagery
> • Firearms or weapons in an environment that isn't appropriate
> • Illegal or controlled substances/drugs
> • Explicit references to mature or complex themes that may reflect personal experiences or real-world events that are intended for older audiences
It is clearly described as a content filter. (It also deactivates gifting on live and "following" feed.)
What Is Restricted Mode? Restricted Mode limits videos that may not be right for all viewers. It filters out mature or complex themes. Some features like LIVE videos and the Following feed are hidden while it is active
So I can only assume that it did not filter out these things.
In a lot of the ways we are exiting eternal september. most of the normies are already tech illiterate enough to lose their ancestral knowledge of how independent websites might work. they will be punted into their walled gardens more and more while the internet returns to people who are more tech literate again.
4) Human moderated in smaller communities
5) Self run reputation systems
Plenty of communities exist out there that aren't a free for all, do not perform id checks, have adult content, and are free from children.
People have basically decided that they don't actually want this.
I know I don't want to visit 10+ different websites on regular basis to keep up on discussions of various interests I have.
> 5) Self run reputation systems
Isn't that basically the upvote/downvote systems used by reddit and HN?
I think we are currently in the process of finding out now that there have been people on social media from birth and are now adult members of society.
Theres tons of research which can be brought to bear, genuine problems and challenges that require deep, thoughtful work, and some of the greatest people you will work with.
It is also absolute madness. There are so many insane, broken things about how safety is provided in the world, that you will feel like you are in a Elizabethan slaughter house, just at species scale. This is all excluding the world of child safety. Adding that to the mix gets you to existential nihilism quite rapidly.
Very good example you brought up there. Question is: Can we make the world safe by just arresting every bad guy... Ooooor, maybe, just maybe... Individuals are responsible for their own decisions?
Besides, its only a "dealer" if the product they are selling is illegal. Have you talked to your political representative about making social media sites illegal. How do you argue that, exactly. "That sites needs to be outlawed because it breaks my back button!!!111!"?
That's how we do it today. They get their license pulled if they do.
I do find it annoying when I visit my inlaws, who have a television on every waking hour. But you know what? It's their home and their lives.
"this time it really is different" is what they always say.
I don't know about Russia but China social media is no where close to American Social Media. There is generally time limits, content restrictions and other things that make the two not similar.
When people go "Social media is a problem", they are generally referring to western social media where it's profitability over any external harm they are doing.
Yes, absolutely. To not go after adults giving children booze would be insane.
What's next, they were wearing the wrong clothing?
I would argue that more is being asked now of parents than in previous decades at least. You’re asking every parent to fight multi-billion dollar international addiction platforms on top of working, parenting, etc.
Most people really can’t fathom the amount of data that tech platforms are slurping up, and they can’t fathom the sophistication of the data science that goes on involving their content feeds and data and metadata collection/targeting.
The relevance to your point being that removal of parental restrictions don't seem to be doing that anymore.
Education is definitely a good idea, but do note any plan that depends on education gives up the next 5-10 years before results are seen. Works great for societies and countries that think that far ahead.
America in particular has an extra challenge, since Big Tech is based here, and threats to revenue streams will be met with immense opposition.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/693362/drinking-rate-new-low-al...
[edited to change "full" to "has a lot of" because Youtube has plenty of brain-rot too]
I guess there IS a theory that the tiktok algorithm is UNIQUELY evil in some way. It's hard to argue against this theory, so if tiktok were temporarily banned, it would be a nice test. I think the theory would be flat-out proven wrong, personally.
But you're comparing 30-60s dissosiative high that gets fully metabolized in seconds to fucking alcohol - 30 days of poisonous metabolites and 50% of all killed and killers being high on that. And there's MUCH more to mention.
Even weed is not as bad as alcohol, though due to symptoms being somewhat harder to spot, the risk of functioning addiction is way higher. And it often ends up as the substance ADHD spektrum folks use for self medication (self administered action/substance aimed at equivaling naturally out of homeostasis neurotransmitter balance in brain). OTOH, two generations ago ppl used alcohol for that instead.