Every time there's a post like this on HN ("social media app harms children") responses like this seem to be a primary response. It always feels like handwavey avoidance of addressing the actual issue at hand: harm to children. "Oh so it's only bad because the Chinese own it? You're okay with American propaganda?!??"
"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.
If literally a single person in this entire comment section had read the linked article they would have seen that the parent comment's (bad faith) point is directly addressed.
> 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.
Exactly. I think the more thoughtful responses are starting to bubble up to the top now, but when I first got here, essentially all the comments were of this form.
Sorry. It warrants investigation, as the overt and covert consensus from Washington is to smear China and drag us into a "Trade War" that might go into a hot war. We need to be critical at every step. Every instance of the consensus manufacturing machine needs to be called out.
If you start calling out things that are clearly not that then you start looking like a crazy person and lose credibility. We have a popular children's story about this called The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
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.
It's not the "Boy Who Cried Wolf." It's pointing out a systematic anti-Sino campaign carried out by American-backed NGOs and, in this case, academic mercenaries.
I'm not even saying that you're wrong that such a thing exists, just that you're wrong to implicate Jonathan Haidt in that plot. And by seeing it everywhere—even where it's not—you are losing credibility when you go to point it out in places where it's real.
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.
And there's always one of these responses - what actions then, if any, are we taking against instagram?
> 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.
Recall the recent deluge of tech promoters and influencers suddenly sharing "Will iPhones get 34% MORE EXPENSIVE??" articles and videos. Odd, wasn't it, that that "reporting" benefited exactly one company.
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.
I don't get this response. Do we care about harm to children or no? This doesn't really address that, as is mentioned at the start of the article.
> 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.
This is Jonathan Haidt, and he's been writing against all social media for years now. This article is about TikTok, but a quick stroll through the archives shows they released an identically-titled article about SnapChat yesterday:
>This is Jonathan Haidt, and he's been writing against all social media for years now.
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.
> 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.
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.
> being controlled by the Chinese government is clearly problematic
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.
> I read it a lot, but it's actually highly dubious that that is the main issue or a problem at all.
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.
Still the problem is not that the Chinese government owns it, but that the people in US cannot stop using it and give it to kids to use unsupervised, despite being owned by the Chinese government.
We don't know whether parents in China would give it to kids to use unsupervised because the Chinese version of TikTok is heavily regulated by Beijing and is very different from the American version.
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.
It doesn't matter if it's controlled by the Chinese government or an oligarch. The damage is the same. Remove TikTok today and it's another form of social media tomorrow. Algorithms trained to increase addictions are the problem.
Moot point given the state of the US government (or Hungarian, Turkish, Israeli, etc). What makes China's hold over TikTok supposedly more nefarious than say Musk's hold over Xitter?
Regardless of whether one would necessarily argue China's ownership of Tiktok is worse than Musk's ownership of Twitter, is you're in the US, China is a foreign adversary. Any country would be nuts to have one of their biggest media distribution channels (especially the way Tiktok's algorithm works) be owned by their largest rival.
Not only am I not in the US, I also don't subscribe to this way of thinking of "foreign adversaries". From what I can tell, China and the US both have significant problems, but China's dealings with my country have been mostly fair of late, while the US has been a big petulant bully.
I feel like this is a site full of educated people, for whom a citation for this claim is about as necessary as one for the claim "the President is the leader of the executive branch of the US government"
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.
Well, no, I just want to understand why people are calling the chinese government evil. It seems like they must be doing something different from other world governments to be called evil, so I'm curious about what those things are and how much they differ from other governments.
It's simple. They're "Communist." Anti-capitalist. Anti-Christian. The United States, which sees itself as the righteous inheritor of Western civilization, founded as the New Jerusalem by God himself, which single-handedly won World War 2, has considered itself the existential enemy of communism since the Cold War, and stoking fears of the "Red Menace" has always been effective on the American populace, particularly the parts with really sensitive hearing.
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.
The front page of the site links to "Shapchat is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale" (https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-snapchat) so I'm pretty sure it's about all of them. And at an industrial scale!
Note both of those articles are by the same authors, one of whom is Jon Haidt, who is a well known researcher on the harms that cell phones and social media have caused children since the widespread uptake of smartphones, and the author of The Anxious Generation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxious_Generation
The author of this piece, Jonathan Haidt, wrote the book The Anxious Generation, which is very much about how all of social media is bad for kids (and adults, actually, but the book is more focused on kids).
Tiktok really purified the "swipe" model of passive content consumption, but at this point everyone else has copied them, so really this needs to be much broader— it can't be about banning a single foreign company, but rather about patterns of interaction and addiction.
I don't use TikTok myself, and I still remember the first time I saw someone swiping through video after video on their phone, and I could only think a) how utterly dystopian it looked and b) how much it was probably crushing this person's attention span.
I was a user of it for about a year and had to go cold turkey— I uninstalled, removed my account, and haven't touched it since, though I still follow a few of the more thoughtful creators who I found on there via their FB and YouTube presences. Fortunately for whatever reason I don't find it as challenging to avoid falling down a hole on those other platforms— like I can see that creator X posted something new, I can watch it, and then immediately go do something else.
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.
Certainly not only TikTok, but - IMHO - the most damaging part of every other social media _is_ the one based on it: Reels, Shorts, etc. The endless swiping for the next dose of dopamine.
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.
This "it's not bad until you say it about the US companies" mindset is going to absolutely fucking annihilate some of you starry-eyed hopefuls out there. It is possible for both to be net-negative platforms at the same time.
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"
You'd still need to edit quite a few more words. For example, the world is much more opportunistic than that.
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 just want to understand why everyone is talking about China being evil.
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:
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 genuinely appreciate your response. This is the sort of thing I come here for. Thank you.
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.
If you prefer long-form, researched, and academic, Understanding China by Starr is an excellent book. The author teaches at Yale.
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
TikTok is especially bad. If you compare IG "kids" and TikTok the intended content for minors is strikingly different. Even platforms like Roblox will maliciously recommend questionable content to children.
