Just don't use it.
Regardless of who is in control, Tiktok is basically an app designed by some of the smartest minds in the world to get you addicted. I already observed the brainrot similar apps caused to my parents, and for hell I won't allow my kid to touch it whenever I have control.
Whether you "learned" anything from it is irrelevant too -- you can always learn better with books, classes, and heck even YouTube videos are better sources of knowledge these days.
Obviously someone not using it themselves mitigates only a fraction of the harm of these things.
If everyone around your kids is brainrotted or subject to destructive propaganda, your kids suffer too.
So, same old, basically. When I was a kid it was the same thing, kids spending all evening watching sitcoms and otherwise-trash TV. I was online on my computer learning programming, audio production, trying different operating systems, playing every game I could get my hands on, as well as chatting with people all over the world & making friends who I'm still friends with today, ingesting media from all over the world as well, completely free of corp/govt propaganda. Kids can still do so, if they choose to skip past the pop culture garbage that is shoved in everyone's faces, just as I did 20-30 years ago.
Like, yeah, it does suck when everyone around you lazily envelops themselves in inane crap. Isn't that just the norm (sad as it is)? I mean, it's a bit worse now that everyone has a propaganda/influence factory in their pocket and they are incentivized to spend untold amounts of time on it, but the same counter-culture mindset that led me to disregard what society was attempting to coerce me into is a mindset that can surely be instilled/reinforced in kids today. I hope >_>
"Someone said something else was bad and it wasn't, so therefore anything else that someone says is bad is also not bad" is an obviously incoherent argument once you strip it down to its basics.
Yeah no I get what you mean, but my argument is like, you should try to be resilient against the arbitrary whims of the powers that be regardless of what their flavour of the week is. Asymmetric power/influence is a dynamic that will always exist in society, especially exacerbated by the scale and reach we see today.
Absolutely! But one of the tools we created to make this possible is government. There are forces (like multinational corporations) that exceed the power of an individual or many individuals to mitigate.
Social media is a far more “effective” technology than TV was, which was more effective than radio before it, and so on. It’s very important we figure out how to counteract these things because the trend is obviously in one direction, which is not the one that culminates in individuals having full, conscious agency over their lives and wellbeing.
Ah totally, I exclaim frequently that there should be government-backed open source and decentralized software[0], putting power of technology into the hands of everyone (rather than letting this power get consolidated into monopolistic corporations) ... but then, what we seem to have currently is a huge correlation of motives between state and industry, and neither seem to have the incentive to put power in the hands of individuals. And individuals often don't even want it either. Either way though, yeah, regulation is long overdue for SO MUCH of this stuff.
[0] luckily EU seems to be doing a lot more in that direction, e.g. https://commission.europa.eu/about/departments-and-executive...
Yeah, you are 100% correct. I need to find him a few good hobbies before I release him to the wolf packs.
I don't know. I myself never sticked to a hobby even after trying a lot of them. Genetically speaking he is a lot like me -- lack of discipline, difficult to cool down, impatient, throw tantrums frequently, etc. The list is pretty long :/ Not many good things from this genetic pool TBH.
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Just "not using it" doesn't ward off from the deleterious societal consequences of such a powerful propaganda tool simply existing.
It's the best I can do honestly. As another commentater mentioned, what can I do if my son's friends use it extensively? I don't know TBH -- the best I can do is to not give him a smart phone too early and try to grow him some other hobbies before brainrot reaches him.
Regardless of who is in control, Tiktok is basically an app designed by some of the smartest minds in the world to get you addicted.
But… but… TokTok put full-page ads in all the big newspapers telling us that thanks to them, a yoga mom in Montana can now take her free-range artisanal oat milk candle-making side-hustle and turn it into a full-time job, paying just a little over minimum wage!
Isn't that worth destroying the minds of millions of American children?
I feel like short form video is inherently addictive, what special sauce are these smartest minds in the world using that adds to that?
I've never used it, but since YouTube introduced Shorts I've become victim to the addiction and subsequently blocked any trace of Shorts with a browser extension.
I think the way they make recommendations are pretty good (looking over my wife's shoulder sometimes). But that's just my guess, I mean, it could just be pushing the next best viewed video from the same tag.