What's actually happening: Italy has requested TikTok to disable user accounts beloging to users of unknown/unchecked age. TikTok has until Feb 10 to comply.
For me, any child below 15 years has no business with social media...social media is highly distractive, even to adult ...the shud be a regulation restricting children from social media
I wouldn't have a problem with social media per se for my kids. It's the sheer size of the population that concerns me.
In most "normal" situations, parents can identify their children's contacts quickly and they can observe the black sheep closely and in the worst case try to prevent any further contact.
In social media, the weirdest and worst people are just a click away and you won't even notice it. Right now, there probably is a new trend or group out there that is extremely dangerous, or outright criminal and I don't even recognize it.
> I wouldn't have a problem with social media per se for my kids.
The thing is that the people/kids dying because of dumb challenges or the occasional illegal/gore/murder videos &c... aren't even the problem
These things are built to steal your attention and use every trick in the book to make you a brainless scroll monkey. There is a reason why not a single SV executive will let their kids anywhere close to social medias. These things destroy people's brains, and especially the brains of kids which are still developing and are extremely malleable to this type of conditioning. tiktok/snapchat/instragram &co bring absolutely nothing good to a kid's life, they're pure distraction devices
> parents can identify their children's contacts quickly and they can observe the black sheep closely and in the worst case try to prevent any further contact
Unless you monitor your kids 24/7: no, and again, these tools, even when used "safely" are still engineered to artificially trigger and reinforce the most basic reward pathways of your brain and this won't bring anything good to your kid's life
You can very well make the analogy with weed or alcohol. What might be fine for an healthy adult (able to set his own boundaries and conscious of the potential risks) would destroy a 10 years old kid very quickly
Ok, so you aren’t fine with social media, given that this isn’t something you can control. It sounds like “I’m fine with it, just not any of it’s bad sides.”
The issue is that you said what bothers you about social media is "the sheer size of the population", but I would say the size of the population is what makes it social media. It's akin to saying I like cars except for the fact they move faster than a person. You could technically have something called social media that has low populations, but it would be so functionally different from the actual thing that using the same name becomes questionable.
> You could technically have something called social media that has low populations, but it would be so functionally different from the actual thing that using the same name becomes questionable.
It would basically be OG Facebook, which was a pivotal point in the development of social media. Facebook pivoted to focus on massive populations where everyone interacted with everyone, instead of the small subset of people you actually know.
Perhaps I'm alone in this experience, but social media in 2021 is vastly different in both form and function to social media in 2011. I'm not making a value judgement on which is better, but the two things barely resemble each other to me.
This might protect children for a while but sooner or later they will become addicted to it.
We will have to modify/add this to our educational system, there is no other way around it or parents will have to teach children this themselves (which is problematic since adults themselves are also addicated so we are missing a huge part of the puzzle of how the mind truly works).
A lof of adults think they are not addicted to twitter/facebook/hackernews but they somehow magicaly find themselves browing hackernews and facebook "suddenly and for no reason at all".
This seems to be one of the few books that actually works in practice: it is about porn addiction but it seems to be applicable to social media addication also.
I don't use TikTok, I never will (As a disabled person[1]).
But age detection is a hard problem. Several years ago I was running a chat-app network' platform for privacy focused dating allowing communication between,
Messenger <-> Telegram <-> Viber <-> LINE
First major issue I ran into was that in SE Asian countries many used their children photographs for profile picture in chat apps, which obviously was a no go for dating, so I had to implement Amazon Rekognition to detect age, make those users change their profile picture and their profiles weren't displayed until it was changed. At peak it processed 200,000 images/month.
But Amazon's model was biased and resulted in several false positives for darker skin color marking several adults as children; But since false positives were better than false negatives for this case I went on with it. Amazon told me that they are working on fixing their model, not sure whether it has improved.
It's worrying that all someone has to do is put 'challenge' or 'game' at the end of a dumb idea and it'll spread around social media like wildfire. Suddenly everyone's recording a video of themselves to get acknowledgment from strangers in the form of likes or upvotes.
I remember when I was in primary school, there was a popular game where you press the chest of another person, cause suffocation and the other person will faint and fall. It was before internet was common and no smart phones. I heard story that kid has died, but I could never verify. My opinion is that tragedy happens with or without internet, internet spreads news faster and further.
«Youth who participate alone in the choking game are a particularly high risk group, exhibiting substantially higher rates of suicidal ideation and poorer mental health compared with youth who participate in the choking game in a group.»
That doesn't mean much without knowing why they did it while alone. What does "participation" in that context even mean? And it doesn't change the possibility that a "challenge" on social media had an influence.
Any guesses about the risk she was in a priori are not relevant, and cannot be determined from that paper.
Clearly this is a game kids have always played. I'd think most adults know of it. We have records 100 years ago of this game, I assumes there would be records further if someone looks.
This also sounds like typical moral panic, it's a pretty shitty "high".
> to their brain in order to get high.
It'd be nice to put a bit more structure to all this. Are deaths going up for this particular game, is it more dangerous because participants do it alone, are children doing it younger. Are suicides and other things that kill the youth down because of social media.
It's a really worrying trend that these dangerous challenges gain so much popularity on social media.
I wonder what's in the center of this trend. Are we somehow getting dumber as a species or are some other factors at play.
IMO children were always like this, not thinking about risks. I remember how many risky things I done with my bike and we never listen and always played football on the street, and now this feels to me like as children we are somehow blind to this risks.
I grew up mostly before the internet and we did lots of stupid things as kids, including this exact black out stunt.
What I think social media has done though is push people beyond their normal internal brakes. You and your friends might push each other to do risky things, but friends tend to care about one another internally. Anonymous people on the internet don't know you or really care about you, so it's easier for them to push people into riskier situations.
Sure. But I would believe social media exasperates this.
With social media, you're not just showing how brave you are with a stupid dare compared to a few of your friends, but competing against the most dangerous thing you've seen.
I think the effects could be larger but the children are not more dumb because of the media. I am sure similar stupid things were done in the past but you would not known that some child in a far away country died because of a stupid challenge.
Maybe off topic, but some of the risky stuff I done with my bike were when I was alone and were not to show of, it was all about going fast or going fast on dangerous path or just not paying attention.
however we're in a somewhat novel situation as mistake past will follow you in caches and meme dumps for years and years, well into adulthood.
sure it's comparable to having had a bad reputation back in the days before internet, but you could just escape it by changing town or correct it if your social circle was small enough. with internet, no such luck, getting past one's young self mistake is going to be quite harder.
you're stuck at a 199x model of internet social interactions, these company are posing as stand in replacement for personal interactions and as such are trying their hardest (and succeeding, even, especially in the younger population with is the subject of this discussion) in registering people with their true identities.
My parents were progressive - they considered me and my brother as little adults basically, and they’ve educated us on many serious topics early on (sex, contraception, drugs, death). Adults were always amazed how well-behaved and mature me and my brother were. But we still did stupid and dangerous stuff as adolescents, like playing with fireworks, making lighters explode, huffing nitrous crackers, smoking, cycling around drunk, painting graffiti, etc.
There’s really nothing parents can do, other than pray for the best.
There’s really nothing parents can do, other than pray for the best.
I wish this attitude was more prevalent, both among parents and lawmakers. More and more, it seems we're legislating against any possible turn of fate that could happen, and both personal freedom and a sense of personal responsibility suffer for it.
This challenge was around in the early 2000's, probably before. I don't think anything has really changed it's just a new app so journalists can write new articles. Is there any evidence this challenge is more popular now than it was 15 years ago?
We used to do this in middle school. That was 30 years ago. We used to do it a lot. You stumble around on autopilot talking gibberish. The world looks like that shadow world Frodo goes to when he puts the ring on. Then you come to on the ground with short term amnesia. You can see how 11 year olds would think it was awesome. I didn’t know it was dangerous until my dad found out and completely lost it with me.
I discovered the effect all by myself. I noticed that I could deliberately make my face beet red (as a ginger, the effect was quite drastic). It was hilarious to my peers, but I was always the wild one, so it was a spectator activity for them. One day, I clenched too hard, or too long, passed out, and fell to the ground. I got up quick as I could, brushed it off... but never did it again.
So in a sense, yeah, I'd bet that kids have been doing this "forever." OTOH, what's missing from my story is the peer pressure (albeit their amusement encouraging me) and the network effect. Social media can transmit memetic disease faster than we've ever seen. Is social media to blame for this behavior? Hell no. Does social media aggravate the situation? Without question.
Well, pretty much everything you can do alone at home would be more popular now than 15 years ago. But the general pattern of kids bonding over imitation and acknowledging an informal hierarchy via imitation order is certainly not new at all.
The ruthless attention economy on the networks. It's not inherently dangerous, many participants get by perfectly fine competing for attention with other things than outdoing each other in dangerous stupidity, but some don't know a better way. And the participatory nature of the "challenge" pattern spreads it to the less desperate. Remember "planking"?
I think people need a reminder of what the internet really is. anyone anywhere can start a website with questionable content and people. It was your own responsibility to deal with the information you voluntarily searched in an apropriate manner. Now the internet feels like a honeytrap with how safe and moderated everything seems. The same goes for kids for example. It is normalised that they are allowed to be on the internet yet seemingly no one actually thought trough what the implications are.
Social media algorithms can exploit weaknesses in our bodies and minds, presenting a threat for which evolution hasn't prepared us.
The kids like it exactly because it's dangerous and can make them feel older and "cool". Ultimately, the powerful, data-driven algorithm discovered that and showed the video, among certainly others, to optimize some engagement metric for the poor little girl.
> Are we somehow getting dumber as a species or are some other factors at play.
Perhaps one problem is that we now have a front row seat in Darwin's theater. When stuff like this happened in the past, it resulted in a small article in a local newspaper, at most. The internet makes us think that this stuff is happening all the time, when in fact it isn't really.
To add to other replies, the population is growing.
Also, there might be less children proportionately (is "peak children" behind us in absolute numbers?), and survivability is higher, making these dumb games proportionally more visible.
Of course, social media doesn't help. Firstly, for visibility. Secondly, everyone now has more connections to "dumb" friends, and a direct window into their lives. Lastly, current attention-focused recommendation algorithms often promote shocking, attention-grabing content, which makes such things both more visible, and likely to go viral.
It also rewards sharing such content: more prominently displayed, it is more likely to "get likes", and fuels the pool of attention-grabbing posts the platform can use.
Today's social media is full of perverse incentives, for a very marginal benefit to its users (even if that might not be obvious to them, as they are led to believe the contrary).
On the contrary, this is exactly how each generation exceeds previous generation. As human, we were allowed to explore freely, risk taking and try different things. Sometimes the outlet of this exploration is this kind of game, sometimes it is something amazing, unfortunately you cannot separate them.
That's why I use OpenDNS content filtering. When a kid figures out how to bypass dns filtering, he/she
has reached adulthood. I'm 26 and I use DNS content filtering for myself. There is so much nonsense in the internet.
children suicides have been attributed to the internet without any proof since 2010 at least (remember blue whale challenge?). but they are always conveniently used for propaganda against the designated enemy of the moment
Letting children be able to communicate with eachother means they'll goad eachother to do stupid things. This has always been true and the choking game (and consequences) is ancient.
So far, I didn't see evidence that it even exists. Tiktok denies that such material exists, and so far I think there's only the parent's statement. Let's see what the investigation will find out.
Yeah, keep children isolated for ten months and then blame Tiktok for their alienation; akin to blaming death on a fever instead of the disease that caused it.
Despite all the talks from my parents, I still did silly and dangerous things, as I suspect the majority of us did. Personally, mine would be up for 20-life for all my crap.
I wish there were certifications that parents could enforce kids to get concerning topics like drugs, sex, social media, sexual harassment, etc. the world has many dangers for developing children. Having a talk about them and then having refreshers yearly is a good thing. Adults do this for topics like CPR etc. why not these. Especially since now a days it isn’t a few dangers but many in places even parents are ill equipped to understand themselves.
Wouldn’t a better solution be for parents just to talk to their kids regularly about safety? An outsourced certification to me just seems like a way for parents to skirt around the hard topics and deflect responsibility.
Many people aren't responsible and/or caring. They drink and drive, drive too fast, have loaded guns lying around, etc. Getting parents to raise their children according to certain norms is going to fail.
