From the opening chapter of 'Three Men in a Boat', published 1889:

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.

I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.

The modern-day analogy is browsing WebMD. Specifically targeting young people and telling them misleading things is different.

this also happens to (very real) students of medicine! it's colloquially called second year syndrome.

That's a beautiful excerpt, thank you. Barnum effect didn't wait for Barnum.

I think there's an interesting phenomenon where the lower bound of "bad influences" has gotten much lower in a lot of places that used to be safe.

Previously, bad influences were limited to what your local neighborhood kids were telling your kid. This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely. And that floor could be raised by society as a whole improving.

Now, with TikTok, the only limit is what TikTok will ban. Which isn't much. The population segment of kids who aren't supervised in any way used to have an inherent limit. Not any more.

So I suspect there's not necessarily a decrease in parents keeping their kids from bad influences, and more that there's an increase in access to (and severity of) bad influences.

Edit: I should be clear, I want to minimize banning stuff as a solution as much as possible. I think the goal should be to move kids back into supervision and teaching by their parents, and just real people in their life. Parents, friends, educators, etc.

The problem is much of America (and much of the world) is completely boned on this front by living in places that just don't form a community, like suburbs, or just low-density non-walkable areas in general. Complicated by the fact that the vast majority of parents are getting non-work time squeezed out of them by increases in cost of living without any increase in pay.

Banning more stuff is the single-line-item solution, the simple way, the just-get-biden-to-do-an-executive-order way. But I would be horrified if that's all we could manage. I hope we can do the real solutions, not the deeply flawed patch that banning stuff is.

Well, other bad influences were reading Bukowski or Ginsberg too young but I mostly agree.

This is the change that has never occurred in human history. Every thread brings up that all complaints about this new media were applied to past forms of media.

I started reading Bukowski when I was around 13 or so. Many of the titles were available at the local library. I don’t think it was bad though. If anything, it was a cautionary tale of what substance abuse can lead too. And his poems were great.

Good. I like Bukowski too. At 13 I was more of a Kerouac guy. I know a girl who clearly idolizes and emulates Bukowski's lifestyle though.

My point was more that there were still ways for bad influences to reach people.

> Now, with TikTok, the only limit is what TikTok will ban. Which isn't much. The population segment of kids who aren't supervised in any way used to have an inherent limit. Not any more.

This may be new-ish but I’m not sure it’s that new. I grew up with the early web in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it’s always been pretty unfiltered. It wasn’t centralized in the way TikTok is, but plenty of us grew up on the web with little supervision, and web circles were/are much wider than the neighborhood.

Surely the scale and speed of information flow has greatly increased since the late 1990s and early 2000s so as to not be comparable to today.

difference is tiktok and short video algos exploit ppls worse natures. like i know a few ppl whose feeds became e-thots doing dances in bikinis bc they wouldnt go seek it out but tiktok showed them that and their watch metrics or whatever were better. or ppl whose feed became far right shit bc it showed them some of that.

there's a lot of stuff we know isn't good and won't consciously choose to go watch. but short video shows us some of that and we subconsciously engage with it more instead of consciously choosing so we watch more and more.

this is hard for adults to deal with but way worse for kids with shitty impulse control.

Early internet was populated mostly by educated people and there were very little (if at all) monetary influence to drive engagement. So i guess these two factors are sufficient for internet to be much safer place.

4chan dates from 2003, for reference.

It may be the case that algorithmic feeds and social networks that have one giant global context tend to expose stuff like this in ways that would have been less likely on the early web. 4chan has always been pretty awful but you wouldn’t have seen it unless you were on 4chan, which for most people was “never”. The norm at the time was to be in multiple different communities, and there typically wasn’t much overlap.

By contrast, TikTok is all one big space, and if the algorithm wants you to see something you’ll see it. That part is new.

Maybe that falls under “monetary influence to drive engagement” in which case I suppose I agree.

Banning "undesirable topics" isn't the solution, but only a band-aid. We need to teach children critical thinking skills and allow them to make their own decisions. The former might be easier, but the latter is the most beneficial in the long run.

Children literally don't have the developed cognitive capabilities to critically think, nor should they be making their own decisions every time. This is an absolutely inane suggestion.

I don't know when it started happening, but why do we continue to let these companies off the hook for their absolutely terrible externalities? Banning these topics if your platform allows children, preteens, etc is absolutely an effective solution if said companies refuse to rectify the problem.

Why should society bare the costs because a company wants to make money at the costs of a child's mental health? How is that just or even fair? Have we truly devolved into a new feudal age where no company can do wrong and we simply have to blame ourselves for their faults? These apps are designed to be psychologically addictive and fuel outrage/fear to drive advertising revenues... why is this acceptable? Why are we blaming parents and not the executives who signed off on these decisions?

> Children literally don't have the developed cognitive capabilities to critically think, nor should they be making their own decisions every time

[citation needed]

Also, since children don't have the cognitive abilities to critically think, maybe some responsibility should fall onto the parent? You can deflect blame all you want and call for TikTok to go around swinging their banhammer, but your "think of the children" alarmism is short sighted. It's impossible for TikTok to blanket ban an entire topic without causing major damage in the process.

I won't move into "mind reading" territory, but I suspect people who are so trigger happy to ban things online to "protect children" have a guilty conscience due to the lack of effort they put into their own child's development.

The internet boogeyman can only influence your child so much... Raise your kids, people!

I feel like this falls on parents, once again.

What is a valid use-case that a child/teenager requires a phone?

I would argue that don't need unrestricted internet access too, but education has largely moved online.

Phone is literally only way how they can organize social life. Houses don't have landlines anymore. Teenager without phone means no socialization outside organized activities.

> no socialization outside organized activities The point of those is to restrict influence and keep an eye on things.

Also, why can you socialize with the neighbors. Parents used to be super comfortable with "tommy is coming over for dinner or spending that night"

Is that still the case? I don't have any anecdotes on this.

That assumes there kids of the same age in neighborhood with similar lifestyle. Which is quite a lot to ask these days.

There are less kids overall.

Kids today have more activities, so you won't meet them just by randomly going outside.

They do a lot more activities at home on computer, again you won't meet them randomly outside.

Parents are not even allowed to let their 6-7 years old outside alone, meaning they would had to be with them. Meaning kids won't get habit to he outside nor will find friends outside, even if some kids are around.

And if those other teenagers have phones, they expect you to organize it all by phone. They have own friends they socialize with and coordinate via phones. It is rude to just show up without calling first and you need phone to be reachable by other in the first place.

And other kids will not call on parents home. They are shy or scared.

When kids went to Timmy, pwople assumed landlines. Before landlines, it was accepted to just show up. Today, expectation is phone.

"Critical thinking" as thought is kinda "trust CNN and not random rager's blog". You need judgement and wisdom for actual critical thinking, which children do not have.

I would say it is a really hard problem, because it boils down to trust the trustworthy -- and who to trust is left as an exercise to the reader.

> We need to teach children critical thinking skills and allow them to make their own decisions

The timescale of this process is ~15-20 years. "Critical thinking", "common sense" and "being an adult" all refer someone that has cultivated the ability to filter information independently.

I would argue that many 18+ people don't fully develop this skill. See cults, propaganda, conformity for datapoints.

I agree that we SHOULD teach children critical thinking. But MAYBE if you give them a smartphone and social media you should expect this type of result.

In general, I think that the move from TV (where CNN had "authority") to the internet (influencers have the power) can explain some social trends that are going on. Ex. conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen these days with youtube videos slowly hypnotizing you.

> The timescale of this process is ~15-20 years.

Yes, it won't happen overnight. This requires a culture shift. But banning things to coddle children's mind even further will hinder the process.

> I would argue that many 18+ people don't fully develop this skill. See cults, propaganda, conformity for datapoints.

I agree. Which is why I initially said we should teach children critical thinking skills.

> But MAYBE if you give them a smartphone and social media you should expect this type of result.

This is a parental issue. And if a child has incompetent parents, then no proposed solution matters at the end of the day.

> In general, I think that the move from TV (where CNN had "authority") to the internet (influencers have the power) can explain some social trends that are going on.

?

> Yes, it won't happen overnight. This requires a culture shift.

I meant that it takes 15-20 years for critical thinking to develop. I don't think you can teach a kid critical thinking (at least anything that is useful against internet content). The best mechanism is teach them dogma/fear mongering "don't talk to strangers".

> But banning things to coddle children's mind even further will hinder the process I agree with banning content. The technology needs to be eliminated. I realize this is an extreme view, but little value comes from giving kids tech. Tell them to go play outside and explore the world.

> And if a child has incompetent parents, then no proposed solution matters at the end of the day. Yup, the best you can do is TRY to be a good parent and maybe help out with friends that are struggling.

> ? You notice how everyone is politically divided? People are anxious about the future? It's never not been the case that "things are bad" and "life is unpredictable", what is different is the hysteria around "it's the end of days".

All that is social media. Prior to internet, TV told us what to think. It was a unified message - communism bad, nazis bad, etc. Even opposition media was mostly investigative and finding really messed up stuff to "correct" the system. Because these were professional journalists creating an elegant narrative of the world around us. Obviously, 24hr news was the downfall of that. But even there, it was left and right.

Enter the internet, which democratized free speech (GOOD). But ANYONE can say ANYTHING (BAD). Which is how you get ridiculously outlandish conspiracies, niche political movements and just general hate towards everything.

So this social trend of desperation and hopelessness, that's social media.

There is an insane lack of self awareness in this post.

?

the problem is that social media is like Heroin and not even the parents are immune.

There is a difference in reading an article in a newspaper with critical thinking and lumping through a social media page where the whole purpose is not the content but to keep you glued to the screen.

> This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely.

I find it astonishing that this is the limit of "bad". There are people alive today who were at lynchings in the US as children and cheered them on.

Setting cats on fire by comparison was a harmless past time.

Very true, I picked this example as a thing that kids could theoretically be doing right now. You don't have to go very far back at all to get into the really heinous stuff. There's a big complicating factor in what parents would have actually prevented as a bad influence too, children cheering on at lynchings were accompanied by everyone else in the town cheering at lynchings. If there was a disconnect between parents tolerance of lynchings and child exposure to lynchings it didn't last very long.

> Previously, bad influences were limited to what your local neighborhood kids were telling your kid. This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely. And that floor could be raised by society as a whole improving.

It also worth noting that in the past there were more supervisory resources: homemakers. Now both parents tend to work and have far less capacity to manage those bad influences.

> The problem is much of America (and much of the world) is completely boned on this front by living in places that just don't form a community, like suburbs, or just low-density non-walkable areas in general

Why do you think you’re less likely to form a community in suburbs? I live in SF in an apt with a walk score of 98 and I don’t think there is much of a “community” here at all.

More likely bad influences were excessive alcohol, drugs, teenage pregnancies, minor crime, violence. Those are all less frequent then they used to be.

> It’s no wonder so many kids think they have mental disorders or any of the other mind viruses going around.

Every older generation has said this about the incoming generation - without fail.

I'll take the flip side.

There are so many great social medias about loving yourself, loving your kids, crying is okay for dudes, and men don't have to be a certain way (i'm a dude). It's okay not to know how to change your oil or shoot a gun, better to hug someone, allowed/proud to be gay, black, etc etc.

I sympathize with everyone who looks at tiktok and starts to cry. That said I think this "you are allowed to show feelings" is extremely out of place and out of time. And not good general advice at all.

You should not show your feelings to just anyone. You should have self worth and share with those you trust. There is a reason why PR exists for people in the public sphere. Most people will treat you kindly and it is important to remember that, but a good lesson for the internet would be to be keenly aware of the pitfalls of sharing too much and that includes your feelings very often.

> That said I think this "you are allowed to show feelings" is extremely out of place and out of time. And not good general advice at all. You should not show your feelings to just anyone.

The alternate that "you are allowed to show your feelings" is trying to combat, is the idea that you can't show your feelings to anyone, at any time.

So your advice is correct, but nowhere near the issue yet. You're telling people when to shift into fourth gear, when they're struggling to get out of first.

Why is being visibly sad or happy something that should lower your self worth?

Shows a lack of self control

That implies that the inverse, bottling up your feelings, demonstrates self-control, and that self-control is always a desirable trait.

I disagree with both. Expressing your feelings is a part of good communication, and feeling free to express sadness or frustration as needed is how you stave off the kinds of arguments and blowups that have much more severe consequences.

Moderating your own behavior is about being cognizant of your emotions and the associated causes/effects, not ignoring them.

Why would self control require pretending you don't have emotions? If you are being aggressive, then yes, you are lacking self control.

But that is act, not emotion.

Self control is assimilating those emotions in a healthy way to understand the root cause rather than letting them overflow from mental->physical in inappropriate settings.

This is a cornerstone of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is, in short, "I am free to notice that when this happens, I feel this certain way, and that usually relates to these outcomes. How can my behavior influence this in my favor?"

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is not trying to teach you to hide all emotions the way comment I reacted to suggested. You being visibly sad is fine result. There is big gap between overflow and notion that "you are allowed to show feelings" is something bad.

I'm not sure what you are trying to convey here.

Changing oil and car tires, shooting a gun, fishing and performing basic repairs critical life skills that everyone should learn. If you are an adult male and can't complete some of the most basic tasks without help, you will have a difficult time living on your own.

Loving yourself, being "proud" of homosexuality (I find this rather odd; why make your "sexuality" your core identity?) and knowing how to navigate the world are not mutually exclusive.

I guess how it turns out for your kids will depend on which rabbit hole the social media algorithm stuffs them down.

I for one will be giving my child unfettered and unmonitored access to the internet as I had growing up. I will be suplementing that experience with plenty of education on how to avoid some of the pitfalls, but I find the best way to learn that stuff is to experience it yourself.

I grew up with unfettered internet access, and of course I also came across the occasional horrific liveleak video, but everything required at least some sort of conscious input. Nowadays you have one app with an endless stream of garbage^Wcontent and the mysterious algorithm runs berserk feeding it to you.

Will you also be taking them to MacDonalds 3 times a day, but with warnings about the need for healthy eating?

That's not the same. In your analogy this would be just giving your kid access to eat what they want, and making sure that they understand different kinds of food and nutrients and how eating different things will affect their growth/energy level/body size and so on. Not the same as taking them to a fast food chain for every meal.

Not sure how old you are but the internet of today is not the same as it was when I was growing up.

Yes, today's internet is far tamer. You need to go on tor to find half the stuff I'd see daily on forum around 1999.

I find the opposite is true. There used to be WAY more easy access to straight up illegal stuff right out of google search.

Indeed, it probably had more hardcore content

I dunno, I grew up when StileProject, Rotten.com, and Ogrish were in their heyday.....theync is just as bad, and IMO more accessible.

I think that the biggest difference with the current situation is the 24/7 reach. You were forced to unplug from the internet for much of the day during your generation simply because there was no way to reach the internet, but nowadays you are on the internet for everything and you can't even unplug to study, work or contact anyone. Anyone who is on TikTok uses it all their waking time.

Not true. I had a laptop starting at age 12 and unfettered 24/7 access, which I'd often use to play around with PHP and things until 3 AM :D

If I didn't have that formative experience of learning to time-manage and manage my own little technology addictions before going to college, college would have been really rough.

And this was very early 2000s like 2004

If you have daughters there is a large chance they will fall in love with manipulative predators. Source: myself and many of my peers.

A lesson that needs to be learned in my opinion. I learned it the hard way, why provide guardrails I didn't have and expect my kids to come out better? I'd rather just re-create as best I can what I had access to and provide advice where I had none. Any attempt I make to restrict thigns further than what I had is just going to back-fire.

What you are describing is called "negligence" and is probably child abuse. You don't give kids unfettered access to anything, especially something as potentially extreme as the internet.

> For all of human history across every culture, parents would do what they could to keep their kids away from “bad influences”.

Not to be pedantic, but is this actually true? Parents used to send their kids to work in the factory at 10. Was that "keeping them away from bad influences"?

If you're saying something is "across every culture", I think some citation is required.

That's an improvement from working at the farm starting age 5!

Fairy tails is essentially teaching kids to stay away from bad influences. Telling to not go into the forest alone because X/Y/Z might happen is not far from telling to not go into a bad neighbourhood or visit a certain kid. And fairy tales did happen in pretty much any culture for thousands of years.

It was keeping them away from starvation and the lucky were given the rudiments of a christian education (which otherwise was unheard of) as part of their 'employment'.

I bet it was better than TikTok challenges that went wrong.

Totally, photos of street kids: - https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/6544361950034985/ - https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/2392606043703676/ - https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/340725528070828317/ - https://sk.pinterest.com/pin/824158800572041820/

and so on

At least these kids were still alive.

Pretty much always when people say things like this, they are talking about few % of ruling class (whether they were bureaucratic, capitalist, feudal lords or whatever), and imagine themselves as part of this class.

The ruling class did _not_ shy away from debauchery. King Edward VII of England was so fat he had a special sex chair made so his stomach wouldn't get in the way.

Sure, they did. While preaching "christian values" like many of the current lawmakers.

As if people in other rungs of society didn't look after their kids...? Fairy tales didn't appear out of thin air.

I've joked that Tik Tok is a Chinese psyop meant to weaken the next generation of the west (it's banned in China itself), but it looks less like a joke all the time.

> it's banned in China itself My understanding is that TikTok is the international version of Douyin.

There maybe be some technical reasons for this.

But feeding into the psyops narrative, it's good practice to separate your intelligence gathering into domestic and international. Ex. CIA and FBI

In some sense, it's no accessible just like Google and Facebook in China. Or you can say Tiktok does not operate inside China because there's another China specific version Douyin (from the same company).

Indeed. From what I've read, Chinese Tik Tok looks nothing at all like what gets served up in the West.

I'd imagine that for China, US/Western Tik Tok is a literal treasure trove of useful information on the state of practically every facet of US/Western life and culture. Oh the subtle and untraceable mischief you could get up to by just turning a few knobs.

This is what a variety of outlets like Reddit and Wikipedia have descended into though. The people on the establishment side will say its "open" but the people being discriminated against will say it's biased.

> With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to untold bad influences

Some parents. Elite schools in Manhattan and Palo Alto send home fliers that parents (or at least those I know) read.

Screen time of all types is monitored. And the children have a somewhat hilarious self-protecting pride in their control over digital intake. (Most of them. Thinking of two brothers, one who eats his veggies because he, and I quote, doesn’t like his poop going soft, and self moderates cartoon watching and phone fucking around. The other who steals my phone to watch loud videos.)

You don't have to be elite to be an involved parent. You just have to be involved. I have 2 so I know how easy it is to break out the digital babysitter, but even with the small amount I give mine I can see the influence it has, and I don't like it. I grew up with unfettered access to the internet before social media and now see how much it damaged me, I can only imagine what it is doing to kids today.

> don't have to be elite to be an involved parent

100% agree. Just pointing out there are parts of society where this is being messaged and socially enforced. So it isn’t a situation where we don’t know what to do. It’s one where we’re being selective about where we give a shit.

This reminded me of one particularly loathsome casino owner who boasted how his children never come near gambling. So naturally, the "elite" in Palo Alto are smart enough to shelter their children from their own toxic products. Somewhat (mildly) related is how you can visit a ghetto and be certain to find a liquor store in close proximity.

How did it damage you? And what do you think was the most negative influence?

General desensitivity to most terrible things that I once used to have empathy towards. I think it's the cause of a lot of our problems today actually. We can so easily just shrug off the plight of others and keep going on our own way.

A lot of very young people often try to be as cool and detached as possible. How foolish really. I think it is important to save some empathy for later but I believe part of it is just growing up and realizing you cannot change everything and not feeling empathy towards everything is a form of self defense. I believe it is difficult to attribute this to media consumption but there very well could be a part to that. It is intuitive at least.

On the other hand I try to compare it to the empathy of people that were not exposed to anything like the free media on the internet. And often they don't show increased levels of empathy either, often quite to the contrary.

Watching gore videos as a 12 year old probably isn’t good.

Genuine question: how did it "damage" you?

I am essentially still recovering from feeling completely numb to most of the terrible things that happen in the world, or feeling joy when I should be feeling joy when good things happen. Also growing up in an environment where I can get my dopamine rush on demand isn't good for being able to make long term sustained progress towards things. It felt like I was on SSRIs, but without actually being on them.

With good reason. After puberty starts, your only way to influence the culture your child absorbs is which culture you allow access to.

This is proved by science, of course this is not easy to communicate to a child of that age that is a culture demonstration of yours how to handle.

> You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers.

This is also a good recipe to plant prejudice. I'm glad parents no longer have such a strong influence.

This is an absolutely abhorrent take.

You have to consider how things are on underdeveloped countries: people live their whole life without ever laving their city, cities have small populations and many are relatives, people develop wrong concepts that they just don't want to question because "everybody they know has been do it that way forever". Populations develop bad habits and keep them, the lack of contact with other cultures makes them think everything different from what they are used to is wrong. That is how you get a significant population of a country to be unashamedly homophobic, atheophobic, xenophobic and develop religion-related prejudices.

Is it though? If anything, education is precisely this, cultivating a baseline of cultural understanding. It can be weaker or better than the education in the family, but it sets a bar for at least yee good.

Of course, TikTok is not vetted and you can have a lot of bad stuff there (I think, I didn't use it a whole lot) but surely this whole thing is moral panic.

As an example of “bad influences” being an ancient topic, in the 1st century CE, the orator and educator Quintilian gave advice to parents in the Roman Empire wondering whether public schools would be a bad influence on their kids.

Although Quintilian agreed that public schools can be a bad influence, he argued that parents were the worst influence on their own kids.

“If only we did not ourselves damage our children’s characters! We ruin their infancy by spoiling them from the start. That soft upbringing which we call indulgence destroys the sinews of mind and body. If a toddler crawls around in purple, what will he not want when he grows up? […] No wonder [why children have bad character]: it was we who taught them, they heard it all from us. They see our mistresses, our male lovers; every dinner party echoes with obscene songs; things are to be seen which it is shameful to name. […] The wretched children learn these things before they know they are wrong. This is what makes them dissolute and spineless: they do not get these vices from the schools, they import them [vices] into them [the schools].”

A community that does not control the narrative its members hear, will cease to be a community. A massively dystopian reality I feel we are only beginning to understand.

As an aside, a TikTok employee told me TikTok is known to trigger old maladies like anorexia etc. I was told this after mentioning that trying TikTok gave me my first nicotine cravings in several years.

> A community that does not control the narrative its members hear, will cease to be a community.

A community that controls the narrative its members hear, will very likely turn into a a society full of prejudices imposed dogmas.

I think you’re right. And - ick feeling - wonder if that’s where we are.

I think the society is still adapting to the new available media. People point at problems teenagers have with social network but it must be considered that they much more immune to problems that affect adults related to social networks: biases and beliefs in fake news. So, we'll suffer a bit but I think we'll be fine in the time-span of one generation; that is 20 years, I think.

That sounds worse than all the other social networks put together as TikTok needs more addictive content and users to continue the addiction and profit from bad habits and cravings mentioned in other comments. It is no different and is in fact worse.

A dystopia that the many have chosen to believe in who's goal is to only worsen the digital crack cocaine addiction which that is already just as bad and present in society.

We do not need society to regress any further with platforms like TikTok.

Anecdotally my teen brother, the youngest (born over a decade after the rest of us), is remarkably even-tempered and not prone to fall for bad influences. He does spend a lot of time on IG, mostly looking at cars and making informative posts on automobiles. He watches a lot of documentary-like material on YouTube about engineering, physics, and sociology. He isn't likely to get these wild ideas his peers seem to fall for. My parents though, will fall for all manners of internet misinformation- the phenomena of believing nonsense online isn't exclusive to children and young adults.

With my brother I've found that if you treat younger adults and children with seriousness and listen to them as though their POV is valid, you build a trust there where they have a sense of where to discuss their doubts and insecurities so they don't fall prey to hypes and misinformation.

I mention this because I had a huge amount of influence on him growing up, almost the opposite of my experience with my parents dismissing and ridiculing my concerns. Although when I was a teen social media was mostly all chat rooms, forums, myspace, and then facebook (YouTube barely existed until the end of my adolescence) where I found people who listened- and there was the potential for them to have an influence which may have led to something very similar to this article.

Although social media now is vastly more powerful and common, it is not the sole variable. For many of these children it is filling a gap where a solid foundation of reality and context should be- with family members and social support structures who can be trusted to provide a reality check. I can see why many young ones listen to online personalities (many adults do, too) and although the medium through which they're getting these concepts (tiktok) plays a large part, it is not the root nor is avoiding tiktok the solution.

I would add, my parents moved us far from the town with the intent to take us away from bad influences of kids who hung out downtown- what this actually did is prevent me from being able to walk to the library, while my sister still found a way to get in trouble because lo and behold, her friends had cars or knew older kids with cars. The isolation they thought might be a solution proved ineffective, but I think if their parenting had been more nutruring and less abuse/neglect she might have avoided a lot of the trouble she got into.

A tale as old as time.

So yeah, I struggle with that too. Here's the difference with it as compared to all of history: scale.

We live in a different world as it is radically connected like never before. Taleb refers to our current age as "Extremeistan" and the previous world history as "Mediocrastan". It's about power lawn distributions and this happens overnight now across vast swaths of the population. [1]

[1] https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html

15? I thought it was 5...

Normal is a relative concept.

What is statistically normal? In the General Social Study between 1990 and 2014, the amount of men reporting same sex sexual encounters more than doubled. Why wouldn't they decide to get pounded (and/or admit to it) with less stigma and all the good looking guys out there?

We're measuring gender in the same way we measure same sex sexual behaviour, which is self-report data, and it seems unsurprising to me more people would report being a different gender as the stigma goes down and more people are even aware that it's an "option"

It's very alluring to escape the difficulties and expectations of being a man in society. I don't feel any gender dysphoria, merely ambivalence towards it, but if the process was faster and I wouldn't have to deal with social backlash I'd do it myself. I'd certainly choose to have been born a woman if I could since my main difficulties in life have been in sex and romance, and the difficulty would drop to 0. The extra scholarship opportunities etc. would just be icing.

Gender dysphoria is a real thing that's treated by transitioning. In people suffering from it it demonstratedly improves quality of life and reduces suicides.

> that is what you truly are and all you’ll ever be

Only if you choose to see it this way. The majority of western society accepts transgender people today and it's not an issue.

Is gender real? No, gender is a societal construct that describes the presentation of males and females.

Therefore, if gender isn’t real, gender dysphoria isn’t real.

If society had no concept of gender, it is highly likely that far less people would report feeling they should have the sex organs of their opposite sex instead of what they have now, especially if they had no previous exposure or experience with such organs. Personally, of all the things that appeal to me about being a woman, the vagina is probably very low on the list.

Just because people are affected by this, does not mean they are being affected by something real.

> If society had no concept of gender

Yeah, well, it does, and that's the world we live in right now. We're affected by a lot of things that aren't "real" like laws, social status, and fiat money.

I think there is a kernel of truth here in that I feel there is a lack of healthy male role models and there is a lack of support for mental health for men. Women also have their difficulties, but society is, in my perception, overall, much more supportive for female problems than male problems. In this aspect, I get where the manosfere is coming from. But I think _a lot_ of these communities come at this from a wrong direction.

I will agree that "Jumping on the LGBTQ train gives them some protection and upward social-political trajectory." is kiiiind of hilarious. Just the kind of talking points that unhealthy communities make you believe.

Very evidently exposing children to toxicity like 4chan/racist gaming chatrooms is harmful to development, why would it be any different when letting them watch anything on their phones

Normalize keeping children away from the obscene and stop letting grown adults normalize exposing weird shit to children, should be obvious innit

It used to be frowned upon to let them watch violent movies, hence the rating system for media, as it was common sense that more exposure to violence has a bad influence and normalizes it.. but now we live in clown world

>everything abnormal is celebrated as cultural progress

That is a very curious statement.

rite! normalize everything abnormal and awful, celebrate it as cultural progress. normalize letting the algorithms and bad actors manipulate and radicalize the youth. yup this is progress

What, pray tell, do you think is "abnormal and awful"?

How about men dressed as over the top caricatures of women that want to read books to children and dance around for them?