TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale
713 comments
·April 17, 2025setgree
Haidt is not the world's most careful data analyst [0], so a determined skeptic would probably not find this persuasive. But I think he's been directionally correct about all his major points in the past decade:
* Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms [1]
* Social media is making many people a little worse off and it makes some people a lot worse off
* having our phones on us all the time is bad for just about everything that requires sustained attention [2], including flirting and dating [3]
* Technology won't solve this problem. AI will make things worse [4]. If TikTok gets banned and some slightly more benevolent version takes it place, we're still headed in the wrong direction. What we need is culture change, which Haidt is trying his darndest at. Hats off to him.
[0] https://matthewbjane.github.io/blog-posts/blog-post-7.html
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/business/jonathan-haidt-s...
[2] https://thecritic.co.uk/its-the-phones-stupid/
[3] https://www.sexual-culture.com/p/its-obviously-the-phones
[4] https://www.npr.org/2019/06/04/726709657/sometimes-fascinati...
csours
> Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms
This one is VERY morally and emotionally weighty, and I think you have to do quite a bit of work to ACTUALLY understand what is going on here, but I agree.
In the middle of a fight, no one wants to look reasonable. In a fight, reasonable looks weak. In a fight, no one wants democracy, we just want to win.
Unfortunately that fight mindset also shuts down the whole thinking part of the the brain; which is how you get people who gleefully vote for a king, because they feel like the king is their champion in the fight.
pjc50
It's also especially vulnerable to "motte and bailey" arguments. Harassing people over competing fandoms is out of order. However, a lot of #metoo gets filed under "cancel culture" when often there is no other working means of getting redress for sexual harassment or assault other than going public, and hoping the perpetrator gets worse backlash than the victim.
Aunche
> when often there is no other working means of getting redress for sexual harassment or assault other than going public, and hoping the perpetrator gets worse backlash than the victim.
This is by definition cancel culture. Unfortunately some bad actors will abuse this as a way to hurt someone. I've seen this happen twice, and fear of this happening is enough for good men to be unnecessarily distant towards women. That said, people getting away with sexual assault seems to be significantly more common.
intended
However cancel culture is 100% going to evolve once you create an internet, and then leave things to the market to solve.
Cancel culture is ... i guess the best democracy in a broken system. Its people realizing the lever of power that is left is the levers as a consumer. So by choosing what they consume, they are sending signals to the system of society.
For some reason, I am not bugged by cancel culture, for me its an inevitability. As is the natural irritation and opposition which would appear to it. I suppose, all of it, cancel, counter cancel, is just the invisible hand at work?
AlexandrB
One huge problem with cancel culture is how mercurial it is. So we get to witness spectacles like an attempt to cancel Nike for selling products in Israel[1] or for hiring Colin Kaepernick[2] instead of for their ongoing record of labor abuses. And, in general, "cancelling" often seems to focus on topical, hot-button issues instead of deeper-rooted problems.
The whole phenomenon is ripe for manipulation and viral marketing - leveraging short-term outrage to build brand identity[3]. One could argue it's the commodification and commercialization of "real" protest. It's less democracy and more idiocracy.
[1] https://masjidalaqsa.com/boycott/nike-israel-bds
[2] https://www.vox.com/2018/9/4/17818148/nike-boycott-kaepernic...
thaneross
I agree people are reaching for the limited power available to them, but the objections to cancel culture aren't usually around voluntary consensual boycotts but rather the use of "social force". Destruction of reputation, demands for firing, deplatforming, doxxing, swatting, etc... the methods of harming a person over the internet.
vroomvrooom
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bilbo0s
For some reason, I am not bugged by cancel culture
To someone whose formative years came before the internet, cancel culture looks a lot like plain old boring boycotts? So there would be a lot of confusion as to why it's so big a deal?
I tend to agree. You need cancel culture. You need people who oppose cancel culture. You need it all. If you don't have any given one of these kinds of civil freedoms, then you actually don't have a democracy.
So a lot of it is just branding. You have to call it cancel culture, because if you were to try and ban the organizing of boycotts, people would laugh at you. It's plainly obvious that you need the freedom to boycott and you need the freedom to oppose the boycott to have a democracy.
Haidt's argument in this regard is non-sensical in that boycotts are, pretty much, a democratic norm in and of themselves.
jgeada
Oh, give me a break with all the whining about cancel culture!
Cancel culture used to be called social exclusion/ostracism, and it has been how people police themselves against undesirable people in pre-internet communities where most everybody knew everybody. If you were considered an ass, eventually the only person listening to you was you.
Not saying this as a value judgement, just that this practice is ancient.
While you have a right of free speech, the rest of us have the right not to listen to you, nor to be forced to listen to you, nor to interact with you.
AlexandrB
> While you have a right of free speech, the rest of us have the right not to listen to you, nor to be forced to listen to you, nor to interact with you.
This conception of "cancelling" has little relation to how it actually happens, where the offending messages are often spread as far as possible first. If the goal is not to listen to someone, muting/blocking is almost always an option. Cancelling is trying to convince everyone else to shun the person as well often with misleading or reductive narratives about what they said/did and use of guilt by association.
My favourite example is Contrapoints getting cancelled for featuring a short VoiceOver by a controversial trans person[1] in a video.
zoogeny
It reminds me of Plato's Apology. It is the dialogue where Socrates is on trial for corrupting the youth. The end result is the citizens of Athens convict him and his options are to drink hemlock poison or ostracization. He chooses death.
I think it is worth deeply pondering why a man as wise as Socrates would choose death over ostracization.
charlie90
>you were considered an ass
You were considered an ass by people that actually knew you. The internet lynch mob takes a 30 second clip of a person they don't know and demand that the person have their life destroyed.
raydev
> While you have a right of free speech, the rest of us have the right not to listen to you, nor to be forced to listen to you, nor to interact with you.
Does this also justify hundreds or thousands of people calling your minimum wage employer trying to get you fired?
marknutter
Let's look back at who these "undesirable people" who were being excluded/ostracized were throughout history, shall we, and see how well your "While you have a right of free speech, the rest of us have the right not to listen to you, nor to be forced to listen to you, nor to interact with you" dismissal holds up.
csours
1. Some people definitely deserve to be cancelled/ostracized/socially punished.
2. Social media cares about engagement, not right and wrong. If content of a type is sought for, content of that type will be made.
3. Social media has trained people to simply react to the perceived message - "Oh, give me a break with all the whining about cancel culture!"
4. Concern trolling is very real. Social media is a low trust environment. You have no reason to think of me as a serious person, or take the time to engage with my reasoning.
5. Shame is incredibly motivating, but the shamer does not get to choose the direction that shame moves the target. You can certainly say that they are reacting wrongly, but you are not their parent/priest/custodian.
6. Once enough people are made to feel shame, they may band together. You are free to say that this is morally wrong or detestable.
7. This is all very very unsatisfying, so people usually take a more satisfying offramp and just blame someone. Blame and responsibility are very very slippery topics. Blame is about moral satisfaction and dropping a heavy, prickly, stinky and noxious emotional burden.
Blame typically falls on the person with the least social capital (relative to the blamer) who is closest to the problem.
Blame is the easiest thing to reach for in a low trust environment.
Responsibility requires a high trust environment. Responsibility can be forward and backward - who WAS responsible for this incident, who WILL BE responsible for improving the situation. In a low trust environment, responsibility will randomly transmute into blame.
8. It's easier to fight than it is to work. If someone is morally wrong, you do not owe them any emotional labor.
9. A fight does not require real harm as a trigger; a perceived social slight or lack of respect is more than enough to start a fight. Pain can be endured, shame cannot.
10. Anger and fighting form a feedback loop. Does the anger or fight come first?
11. This sort of thing has historically gotten VERY VERY bad before it gets better, even when people see it coming. It is very unsatisfying to say, but life can just really suck for a lot of people for a while. This is a heavy, noxious emotional burden, so by all means preserve your emotional health and find someone to blame.
----
So what is the solution?
I don't have a satisfying solution, but I have noticed something.
I have noticed that gravity is the weakest force/interaction in the universe per scale unit.
I have noticed that gravity is responsible for the largest objects and systems in the universe.
I have noticed that people mostly do not change their views in the middle of a fight.
"That's odd" is the most power phrase in science. The greatness of humanity has followed curiosity, patience, empathy and humility.
----
I won't tell anyone to stop fighting, but I will say that I strongly believe that fighting is only ever part of a solution.
I believe that fighting cannot ever fix anything or make anything better on the large scale.
Fighting can only make things less worse, for some people, in some place, at some time.
YetAnotherNick
Except this is not the case. If someone whom half of the country thinks is the best person to become their president could get "cancelled" and blocked from twitter, it is hard to argue that he got cancelled the pre internet way where no one wants to listen to him.
Cancel culture today for both parties is not form of not listening or even social exclusion, but kind of active shaming.
vroomvrooom
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Bukhmanizer
> Haidt is not the world's most careful data analyst
This is a massive understatement. The ironic thing about Haidt is that his writing is heavily geared towards social media. He writes a good headline and usually has a few facts in there, but is fundamentally non-rigorous. It’s science for skimmers and people who clicked on an article already agreeing with the conclusions and so won’t challenge the “evidence” he provides no matter how weak.
mm263
I agree that Haidt is a poor champion for the cause.
He’s popular because we are seeing something real happening to our kids and Haidt is the only person who is trying to describe whatever’s going on. We agree with the conclusions because we see it in our own kids, not because of the “moral panic”. It’s a shame he gets there in such a sloppy way, but he’s describing a real phenomenon.
I, as a parent, do not need articles and longitudinal studies and double blind peer reviewed studies to tell me that the thing I can observe with my own eyes is real.
Apocryphon
I wonder whatever happened to Nicholas Carr, of The Shallows fame. I guess he's got a new book out this year but his critique is more "democracy in distress" now rather than "save the children!"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/books/review/superbloom-n...
leafmeal
I think your statement is reasonably reflective of his web articles (especially his SubStack) but I've really enjoyed the books of his that I've read, which felt well researched and founded, especially The Righteous Mind.
nonethewiser
Can you plainly state what he get wrong?
krashidov
> If TikTok gets banned and some slightly more benevolent version takes it place
I don't have TikTok on my phone. I don't have an account. But I have YouTube, Twitter, Instagram all locked down on my phone (my SO has the Screen Time code).
I did this because the best minds on earth get paid based on how much I doom scroll. If I don't do this, I routinely have times where I scroll for an hour+.
I have argued that the only solution to this is to either ban any sort compensation based on increased engagement of a social media product (probably impossible to enforce or unconstitutional if that still matters). OR to add regulation around infinite video scrolling. We regulate gambling because it hacks our dopamine loop (although usually associated with much more severe consequences). I think it's ok to regulate the video scroll. Start small with something like enforcing a scroll lock after 30 minutes. To enforce it, just regulate the largest companies.
rzz3
> OR to add regulation around infinite video scrolling.
I really don’t want the government telling me what I can or can’t do on my phone, or that an app I enjoy can’t exist. Alcohol exists, gambling exists, cigarettes exist, porn exists, cars can drive fast, and yet because I have self control and good judgement, I haven’t allowed any of those things to get a hold over me either. I don’t want the government to be my dad. And even if you did, can you really trust our technophobic corrupt out-of-touch lawmakers to get such regulation right? These are consumption-side problems in my opinion, and individuals need to bear the responsibility rather than trying to pawn it off on big tech companies or regulators.
krashidov
>Alcohol exists
And is taxed to minimize consumption, and recoup losses from negative externalities
> gambling exists
Yes and is banned or highly regulated in many counties. It is also age restricted.
>cigarettes exist
same as alcohol
> cars can drive fast, and yet because I have self control and good judgement
Cars today are much safer than they were in the 50s because many many people have died leading to regulations. It's difficult to create a car for the American market because of how many specific American safety regulations there are.
Traveling by car is probably one of the most regulated things we do. There are speed bumps, cops, speed cameras, red light cameras etc. It's not like it's the wild west out there.
>and yet because I have self control and good judgement, I haven’t allowed any of those things to get a hold over me either
Congratulations? Because you are perfect I guess we can just assume everyone else is and should be as well?
I am not saying the government should tell you what you can or can't do with your phone. I'm saying the government should do something against very large private corporations hacking the dopamine loop on individuals. This could be an engagement tax. This could be just pausing scrolling every 30 minutes for 30 seconds. I know it's a slippery slope. They say television killed the neighbor in the 60s. We have a chance to not repeat the same mistakes of the past.
> And even if you did, can you really trust our technophobic corrupt out-of-touch lawmakers to get such regulation right?
If we are voting in "technophobic corrupt out-of-touch lawmakers" then that seems to be a bigger problem. Why are we voting these people in? Lawmakers are representatives of the people. Not everything they do is dumb. America has done pretty well so they must've done something right in the last 250 years.
I'm very much in the pro liberty, pro individual camp, but there is no developed country on earth that has 0 regulation. It is in the nation's best interest to not have a major part of the populace have 6-7 hours of their day sucked by TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram. 6-7 hours a day on the phone probably the norm for children. Children are actually losing their ability to read from this [1].
There are movements to ban phones in schools, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Do you think we should not ban phones in schools because you have "self control and good judgement" therefore children in schools should simply have "self control and good judgement?"
fny
A determined skeptic would see Haidt is directly quoting TikTok's own admissions found in legal briefs.
Frankly, it's terrifying.
foldr
> Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms
Look around the world at where democratic norms are actually being undone. It’s often the people who are most opposed to so-called ‘cancel culture’ who are busy with the undoing. But perhaps you are willing to be an unusually bipartisan wielder of the term and concede that the major instances of cancel culture in recent times are such things as Hungary banning pride parades, Trump bullying universities and deporting people for holding the wrong political views, and school libraries banning books with LGBTQ themes.
derektank
Trump and the right wing engage in cancel culture. Ben Shapiro tried to cancel James Gunn, Bill Ackman tried to cancel Ivy League graduates that protested in support of Gaza, there are many examples. The American right wing simply just doesn't have the cultural cachet in major institutions such as academia, Hollywood, publishing houses, and generally in major US cities to enforce their cancellation attempts.
spondylosaurus
> Bill Ackman tried to cancel Ivy League graduates that protested in support of Gaza
I mean, the US government is now actively (and illegally) imprisoning/deporting Ivy League students who protested in support of Gaza, so I think "having the cultural cachet" is irrelevant at this point. They have the political power and that's what really matters.
But for a less dramatic counterexample, I'd offer something like whatever group (was it Moms For Liberty?) that orchestrated book bans in libraries nationwide.
quasse
> The American right wing simply just doesn't have the cultural cachet in major institutions such as academia, Hollywood, publishing houses, and generally in major US cities to enforce their cancellation attempts.
The part of this you should be worried about is that they've realized they now have enough hard power to use violence against ideological enemies instead of rhetoric.
They're being completely open that they plan to extend this treatment to native born U.S. citizens too [1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366178/trump-deport-ja...
foldr
That’s exactly what’s changing now that the right is in power. People are already being deported for protesting in support of Gaza. We shall see how long academia is able to maintain any degree of independence. The Trump administration is not exactly being subtle about it.
brendoelfrendo
> Haidt is not the world's most careful data analyst
We can, and probably should, just end the discussion there. Haidt is really good at finding data to support his claims, but then failing to mention that the correlation he's describing as "definitive" is, actually, really weak. This happens throughout "The Anxious Generation," at least.
Calling him "directionally correct" when he's pretty bad at actually showing the work as to why he is correct is just saying that you think he has a good point because his vibes match your vibes.
setgree
I don't think I'm just saying that. I'd say instead:
1) evidence in favor of reasonable, unsurprising priors does not need to be held to the same standards of rigor as it would for less likely hypotheses. Put differently, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You can call my agreement with Haidt on the big picture "vibes" but I'd say instead that I just judge the likelihood that the underlying claims are true to be high.
2) the "Haidt production function" faces tradeoffs between making big points, writing books, and attending to every detail. When I read people's critique of his meta-analytic techniques (the first link I posted), I saw a lot of folks saying, he's not even doing meta-analysis because he's not weighting by precision! Reading that, I thought, he very much is doing meta-analysis: even if he's not doing "random effects meta-analysis" that you'd learn in a textbook, he's synthesizing many quantitative results, which is the core of it. (I have written three meta-analyses and RA'd for a fourth.) And when the 'proper' technique was applied, it shrunk the effect size estimate from like 0.2 to 0.15, which, like, if whatever hypothesis was true at 0.2, it's probably also true at 0.15. Social science theories don't generally stand or fall on differences like that. So I thought he came out looking like the wiser person there. Academics have a tendency to get bogged down in implementation details. Haidt doesn't.
(I don't expect this to be persuasive, just explaining why I don't find his data 'errors' to be a nonstarter.)
silverlake
IIRC the effect size at 0.15 was narrowly for pre-teen girls on social media. Every other age, and all boys, were below 0.1 when looking at total screen time (i.e. games, youtube). Parents should check up on young girls, but most kids will be fine.
jmyeet
> Cancel culture is not compatible with democratic norms
One's position on "cancel culture" tends to reveal a lot about somebody's politics. Complaining about cancel culture tends to correlate highly with conservative political views. The idea is that some people can't freely express their opinions. This is the same idea that leads the likes of Elon Musk to complain about the lack of "free speech".
When right-wingers say "free speech" they mean "hate speech", more specifically "the freedom to express hate speech". And when they complain about "cancel culture", what they're really complaining about it there being consequences to their speech [1].
So if somebody goes on a racist screed and they lost their job because their employer doesn't want to be associated with such views, that gets labelled as "cancel culture".
The very same people defend cancelling the permanent resident status of somebody who simply protested war crimes committed by Israel (ie Mahmoud Khalil) with no due process, a clear First Amendment violation.
As a reminder, the First Amendment is a restriction on government activity. For some reason, the same people who were vaccine experts 2 years ago who are now constitutional experts don't seem to understand this.
[1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/republicans-cancel...
AlexandrB
Can you provide a coherent definition of hate speech that doesn't include chants like "from the river to the sea" or phrases like "kill all men"?
emptysongglass
Is it not clear that cancel culture played a role in the broader misinformation landscape? The argument seems to be undermining itself.
Take, for example, the early discussions around the origins of COVID-19. Legitimate scientific hypotheses—such as the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan—were swiftly shut down. Scientists were canceled because they didn’t align with a dominant narrative.
mvdtnz
The unstated major premise of your screed is that "conservative political belief" are inherently wrong, factually and morally. Not everyone agrees with that.
1270018080
People are still taking shots at the cancel culture boogeyman in 2025? It's just an organic response to people not wanting evil slop shoved in their faces on an unregulated internet.
callc
> But when the Kentucky AG’s office was preparing to post their brief against TikTok, whoever was in charge of doing the redaction simply covered the relevant text with black rectangles. Even though you can’t see the text while reading the PDF, you can just use your cursor to select each black section, copy it, and then paste it into another file to read the hidden text.
Incredibly hilarious. Only leet hackers can pull this off though, same as pressing F12 in the browser to hack the mainframe!
fullstop
This happened a few times in 2006. I guess we never learn.
zamadatix
It happens constantly, just the other day Meta/Facebook's lawyers redacted graphs by drawing a box over them https://www.theverge.com/news/648893/meta-redacted-documents...
bee_rider
This seems to happen somewhat often.
Actually, it is quite weird, I wonder if some bad best-practices have been circulated.
It would be really nice if legal documents were prepared in some sort of standardized markup-like language.
AIPedant
I would guess it's the opposite of "bad best-practices", namely that there are no common best practices. Everyone intuitively understands how black-box redaction works, but the ways inadequate redaction fails is a bit technical and not intuitively obvious, so it's a task that's ripe for ignorant overconfidence.
ysofunny
> same as pressing F12 in the browser to hack the mainframe!
so that's why new mac keyboards did away the entire F keys row?
xnx
How is this still happening?
kube-system
Because it's a problem with a 50 year old UX design that we still use today and aren't changing any time soon. WYSIWYG UX is easy to use, because you can simply train the users to manipulate what they see until it visually represents the output they want. This is the predominant way we've trained users for most of the history of GUI software.
But, WYSIWYG on a 2D screen is just an inherently leaky UX abstraction when dealing with 2.5D content, e.g. layers.
noisem4ker
Adobe Acrobat even warns you if you pick black as highlighter color!
sebastiennight
Preview in MacOS also warns you that black boxes are not really redacting anything, and provides a tool for it.
SoftTalker
Maybe it should instead do actual redaction? Or at least ask if that's what the user wants?
mrguyorama
The vast vast vast majority of humans are not programmers and do not view the world through the mental models programmers do.
Why SHOULD someone using a PDF reader software intuitively understand that placing a black rectangle over a document and saving it doesn't prevent someone from seeing that document?! Why the fuck does anyone doing a job need to learn a set of unique and non-generalizing mental models just to redact a document!
Imagine if paper had unexpected failure modes!
The problem is not professionals trying to do their damn job. The problem is US. The Programmers. Who consistently make garbage systems using garbage leaky abstractions and absurd assumptions and ignoring decades of user interface research because google released a new UI library written by programmers who haven't interacted with non-programmers in a decade.
Why are WE still doing this?
BobaFloutist
>Imagine if paper had unexpected failure modes!
It does. If you scribble out what you would want redacted in black ink until it's no longer legible, it's not actually properly redacted for just about the same reasons the PDF wouldn't be
Duanemclemore
I don't have kids, so I'm not in the trenches on this one. But a personal anecdote that might serve as evidence that other things are possible to everyone navigating tech and kids...
When I was a kid living in a trailer in the midwest in the eighties I asked my parents to buy me a secondhand set of 1973 Encyclopedia Britannica from our local library - for $7. It fed the same curiosity and joy of discovering new things that you would want your kid to get from resources online.
When we went on trips we always drove. And even if I didn't already have a book or books from the library that I was reading at the time, my parents would suggest I take a volume of the Encyclopedia. And sure enough if I got bored I'd break it out. (Unless it was too dark to read at which point I'd just fall sleep.)
That's all to say there are alternatives that cut the gordian knot, which kids can really dig if you frame it right. My parents were both voracious readers themselves, and it didn't take long for their reading to my sibling and I to turn into reading on our own. So when we got something that provided the novelty and agency of navigating your own way through an encyclopedia, it was a huge hit.
Of course things are very different today. And I'm not a luddite or even someone who believes that old ways are intrinsically better. But there are ways to feed the many various and often contradictory needs kids have that aren't reliant on contemporary tech.
BlueTemplar
Or pre-recorded audio (tapes, CD...) if reading in a wobbly vehicle makes you sick.
onetimeusename
I am surprised how common it is for younger women and teenagers to receive requests for gifting and get sexualized comments which this article mentions. I don't see a lot of people talking about it but I think it would really warp someone's mind to be under 18 and be receiving requests for foot pics, "spoiling", and more. I've wanted to put this out there for a long time but felt like no one wanted to talk about it.
bn-l
I can imagine it would completely warp your idea of men especially if you were young and not able to put it into perspective (even very old people can’t do this). That could have a serious impact on your life.
astura
I'm a woman who grew up pre-internet. I started getting catcalled on the street around 12 (and I always looked many years younger than I was). From 12 to around 30 (when I got fat) I wasn't able to leave the house without being harassed on the street.
This is just a new medium for a very old behavior.
salynchnew
Related critcism of the book and the authors of this site: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/07/why-academics-...
CharlesW
Great read, thanks for posting. What I like about it is that while it notes Haidt's ideas get flimsier the closer they're examined, it also thoughtfully gives him credit for a more important observation — that the increasing loss of societal structure is the actual and larger problem (and seemingly the target of his next book), with social media as one of many symptoms or contributors, depending on how you look at it.
null
momojo
From the badly redacted Kentucky AG PDF:
> As the U.S. Surgeon General recently explained, children’s and parents’ attempts to resist social media is an unfair fight: “You have some of the best designers and product developers in the world who have designed these products to make sure people are maximizing the amount of time they spend on these platforms. And if we tell a child, use the force of your willpower to control how much time you’re spending, you’re pitting a child against the world’s greatest product designers."
This struck a chord. I struggle with addictive tendencies and I've been having to re-teach myself that stumbling is not always because "I didn't try hard enough" but because I live in a world thats optimizing for retention/subscriptions/etc...
neilv
> As one internal report put it: [...damning effects...]
I recall hearing of related embarrassing internal reports from Facebook.
And, earlier, the internal reports from big tobacco and big oil, showing they knew the harms, but chose to publicly lie instead, for greater profit.
My question is... Why are employees, who presumably have plush jobs they want to keep, still writing reports that management doesn't want to hear?
* Do they not realize when management doesn't want to hear this?
* Does management actually want to hear it, but with overwhelming intent bias? (For example, hearing that it's "compulsive" is good, and the itemized effects of that are only interpreted as emphasizing how valuable a property they own?)
* Do they think the information will be acted upon constructively, non-evil?
* Are they simply trying to be honest researchers, knowing they might get fired or career stalled?
* Is it job security, to make themselves harder to fire?
* Are they setting up CYA paper trail for themselves, for if the scandal becomes public?
* Are they helping their immediate manager to set up CYA paper trails?
calepayson
It's the tension between the plush job and the desire to do good.
No one wants to be evil but losing a job is hard. Most people will try to push back against something that seems wrong and, when faced with the choice of being Morally Right or Financially Secure, are going to chose the path that keeps food on the table and ensures their kids can keep going to the same school.
PeterCorless
My favorite part is how incompetent they were in handling the redaction:
"But when the Kentucky AG’s office was preparing to post their brief against TikTok, whoever was in charge of doing the redaction simply covered the relevant text with black rectangles. Even though you can’t see the text while reading the PDF, you can just use your cursor to select each black section, copy it, and then paste it into another file to read the hidden text. It is great fun to do this — try it yourself! Or just read our version of the brief in which we have done this for you."
fny
I'd venture to guess this was deliberate. What would you do if you want to convince the public but can't technically share the evidence?
PeterCorless
Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence."
_JoRo
Just children? I've had to block social media for myself because of how addictive it was / how much time I was wasting.
I will say though, if you are trying to watch videos more from an educational perspective then it can be useful. Although, I would advise getting an LLM summary of the video, and then speed reading the summary in order to determine if their is any useful content in there.
kobenni
Could you give a description of how you block social media? All methods I found so far can be undone within seconds.
nicbou
Remove app, block website like it's an ad, parental controls, unfollow everything, log out, forget credentials, delete account.
You don't need to make the website unreachable, only to delay the impulse for long enough.
psteinweber
For me apps like Opal work really well.
BlueTemplar
Yes, but it's still a whole other can of worms when someone else is responsible for your behaviour and relationships with most of the society.
like_any_other
I wish parents blocked such sites on their children's devices, so we didn't have to expand the censorship & surveillance state to protect them.
awakeasleep
I didn't realize how backwards and unhelpful the way we talk about this was until I became a parent.
In general, we talk about "iPad kids" and blame the tablets and phones themselves. Slightly more sophisticated people will blame the apps like YouTube or Roblox.
That stopped making sense to me once I saw the problem first hand with my peers and my own children. The actual issue is parents wanting to (basically) anesthetize their kids so the parents can do something as if they didn't have the kids.
Devices and Apps give parents the ability to zonk their kid into outer space for extended periods of time with unlimited videos or games that never end. But that isn't an inherent quality of the device. Like if you block all the apps and just let the kid use the iPad for drawing. Or if you do the YouTube kids thing where they can only watch videos you add to an allowlist.
The app makers do hold a lot of responsibility for the defaults on their apps, but the real issue is parents who are choosing to blackhole their kids for extended periods of time. (I am agreeing with you btw)
dcchambers
> The actual issue is parents wanting to (basically) anesthetize their kids so the parents can do something as if they didn't have the kids.
100% this.
Many parents are so addicted to their own phones/social media that they need to give their kids iPads and other infinite distraction machines so that they don't have to deal with them and they can spend more time themselves endlessly browsing Instagram/TikTok/etc.
But it's not only that. I think modern society has failed parents and kids in a lot of ways. Many public spaces have become so kid-hostile that as a parent you feel like the MOMENT your kid starts acting out you need to break out the iPad just to shut them up and survive dinner or whatever. Guess what? Kids are loud and often crazy and they are LEARNING how to behave. Part of the learning is doing things poorly.
cloverich
Many of the big tech companies, especially Meta / X / Reddit, are the modern day equivalent of tobacco companies. I was a former smoker. Yes my mom should have done a better job preventing me from becoming one. But they were in fact designed to get my young self addicted, and that's a problem. Once we regulated them, it stopped happening nearly as much. I think a very constructive way to converse about this problem, is to focus less on who has the most fault or blame, and focus entirely on: Can policy help, and if so, how? Example:
- Require age verification only for apps with algorithmic feed (obv. definition requires some nuance)
- Substantial tax on companies utilizing algorithmic feeds
- Require (regular) disclaimers and time monitors that are automatically shared with users on the platforms
- Ban usage rewards (e.g. Reddit tries to reward me for daily usage with stickers and such, why?)
awakeasleep
I basically agree with you but I see your point as downstream of my basic point, because a 4 year old isn't going to get exposed to any of these companies tactics without the parent's consent
dayvigo
> The actual issue is parents wanting to (basically) anesthetize their kids so the parents can do something as if they didn't have the kids.
A good question to ask is why these people are making the decision to have children in the first place if this is how they treat them.
Maybe an order of magnitude or so less people should have children. People who want to have their cake and eat it too, raising their children largely passively, shouldn't be having kids at all. It's not something you "need" to do or should do without a very good reason and high confidence in your ability to do so effectively. Society should be strongly discouraging these kinds of people from having kids, but it's currently encouraging them.
like_any_other
One reason is society has largely restructured itself to make raising children much more difficult than it used to be. It used to be "it takes a village", now that village is atomic families that don't talk to each other and traffic that makes playing outside deadly, and instead of living in multi-generational homes where grandparents can help with raising children, parents live on their own.
So the burden is much higher, and parents cope with it in unhealthy ways.
BobaFloutist
Good luck, we can't even reach a consensus that teenage girls that decidedly don't want children should have the agency to make that decision.
like_any_other
It would be good to make this as easy as possible for parents - user-friendly, easy-to-install filtering programs, with good defaults. There is of course the danger whoever controls those defaults will abuse them for (unwanted) censorship, like the Comics Code Authority, but that's a lesser danger than giving those defaults the force of law.
BlueTemplar
I would like to put the emphasis on the difficulty that what can work for children (only access to a desktop PC in the living room for instance) cannot work for teenagers (at some point, years before they become adults, you have to let them use an eventually fully personal laptop and even a smartphone, and maybe soon augmented reality glasses).
nekochanwork
I don't disagree with the claim that brainrot literally rots brains. But, I strongly oppose laws that ban social media on the grounds of "protecting children."
Parents are fully capable of monitoring and regulating their children's internet usage without Daddy Government getting involved.
codydkdc
this is a bad argument in the abstract. "drivers are fully capable of navigating intersections without Daddy Goverment getting involved" so we shouldn't have traffic laws and stop lights
the evidence says otherwise. I agree an outright ban probably isn't the best solution
AlexandrB
I would argue that traffic laws and signage is more about efficiency than capability. Not every country has a culture of following traffic laws and people still manage to navigate motor vehicles around somehow.
My personal experience with this is from Mexico where, in heavy traffic, lanes are not really a "thing" and people will pack their vehicles in wherever possible. This leads to much more chaotic traffic flow and more unexpected stops though.
charlie90
Except parents can't control what their children's peer's internet usage is. A common argument to let kids use social media is that their friends use it and they would be left out. This problem can't be solved by individuals, it needs collective action.
tstrimple
And some kids feel left out because their parents won't buy them a Stanley water bottle that their peers have. Guess we need to ban Stanely water bottles so those kids don't feel left out. Won't someone think of the children?!
hnpolicestate
The correct argument has become taboo in our technocratic puritan age. The only word that matters now is SAFETY, no matter the collateral damage.
Related ongoing thread: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43704382