Italy Blocks Users on TikTok After 10-Year-Old Girl Died in a Blackout Challenge

Yeah, this isn’t a very specific headline. Seriously thought Italy had blocked TikTok access to the whole country for a moment.

This might protect children for a while but sooner or later they will become addicted to it.

We will have to modify/add this to our educational system, there is no other way around it or parents will have to teach children this themselves (which is problematic since adults themselves are also addicated so we are missing a huge part of the puzzle of how the mind truly works).

A lof of adults think they are not addicted to twitter/facebook/hackernews but they somehow magicaly find themselves browing hackernews and facebook "suddenly and for no reason at all".

This seems to be one of the few books that actually works in practice: it is about porn addiction but it seems to be applicable to social media addication also.

https://easypeasymethod.org/index.html

I wouldn't have a problem with social media per se for my kids. It's the sheer size of the population that concerns me.

In most "normal" situations, parents can identify their children's contacts quickly and they can observe the black sheep closely and in the worst case try to prevent any further contact.

In social media, the weirdest and worst people are just a click away and you won't even notice it. Right now, there probably is a new trend or group out there that is extremely dangerous, or outright criminal and I don't even recognize it.

I partially credit my daughter's great concentration abilities with not having much exposure to social media until high school.

Yeah, complete social isolation from peers during pandemic is much better plan.

This ship sailed before covid already. But with covit, it is online discussion or nothing.

It's worrying that all someone has to do is put 'challenge' or 'game' at the end of a dumb idea and it'll spread around social media like wildfire. Suddenly everyone's recording a video of themselves to get acknowledgment from strangers in the form of likes or upvotes.

Clearly this is a game kids have always played. I'd think most adults know of it. We have records 100 years ago of this game, I assumes there would be records further if someone looks.

This also sounds like typical moral panic, it's a pretty shitty "high".

> to their brain in order to get high.

It'd be nice to put a bit more structure to all this. Are deaths going up for this particular game, is it more dangerous because participants do it alone, are children doing it younger. Are suicides and other things that kill the youth down because of social media.

Would the girl have done it, and died, without TikTok, that's the question.

We're not getting dumber I'm afraid, it's just getting more visible.

IMO children were always like this, not thinking about risks. I remember how many risky things I done with my bike and we never listen and always played football on the street, and now this feels to me like as children we are somehow blind to this risks.

Social media algorithms can exploit weaknesses in our bodies and minds, presenting a threat for which evolution hasn't prepared us.

The kids like it exactly because it's dangerous and can make them feel older and "cool". Ultimately, the powerful, data-driven algorithm discovered that and showed the video, among certainly others, to optimize some engagement metric for the poor little girl.

I think people need a reminder of what the internet really is. anyone anywhere can start a website with questionable content and people. It was your own responsibility to deal with the information you voluntarily searched in an apropriate manner. Now the internet feels like a honeytrap with how safe and moderated everything seems. The same goes for kids for example. It is normalised that they are allowed to be on the internet yet seemingly no one actually thought trough what the implications are.

This challenge was around in the early 2000's, probably before. I don't think anything has really changed it's just a new app so journalists can write new articles. Is there any evidence this challenge is more popular now than it was 15 years ago?

This seems like another case of Politician's Syllogism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

The ruthless attention economy on the networks. It's not inherently dangerous, many participants get by perfectly fine competing for attention with other things than outdoing each other in dangerous stupidity, but some don't know a better way. And the participatory nature of the "challenge" pattern spreads it to the less desperate. Remember "planking"?

> Are we somehow getting dumber as a species or are some other factors at play.

Perhaps one problem is that we now have a front row seat in Darwin's theater. When stuff like this happened in the past, it resulted in a small article in a local newspaper, at most. The internet makes us think that this stuff is happening all the time, when in fact it isn't really.

To add to other replies, the population is growing.

Also, there might be less children proportionately (is "peak children" behind us in absolute numbers?), and survivability is higher, making these dumb games proportionally more visible.

Of course, social media doesn't help. Firstly, for visibility. Secondly, everyone now has more connections to "dumb" friends, and a direct window into their lives. Lastly, current attention-focused recommendation algorithms often promote shocking, attention-grabing content, which makes such things both more visible, and likely to go viral. It also rewards sharing such content: more prominently displayed, it is more likely to "get likes", and fuels the pool of attention-grabbing posts the platform can use.

Today's social media is full of perverse incentives, for a very marginal benefit to its users (even if that might not be obvious to them, as they are led to believe the contrary).

On the contrary, this is exactly how each generation exceeds previous generation. As human, we were allowed to explore freely, risk taking and try different things. Sometimes the outlet of this exploration is this kind of game, sometimes it is something amazing, unfortunately you cannot separate them.

Yes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/02/19/the-skull-b...

As with most everything else that's too dangerous for people under 15, saying that will instantly make it popular.

Letting children be able to communicate with eachother means they'll goad eachother to do stupid things. This has always been true and the choking game (and consequences) is ancient.

Is popularity a relevant factor?

So far, I didn't see evidence that it even exists. Tiktok denies that such material exists, and so far I think there's only the parent's statement. Let's see what the investigation will find out.

Despite all the talks from my parents, I still did silly and dangerous things, as I suspect the majority of us did. Personally, mine would be up for 20-life for all my crap.

Wouldn’t a better solution be for parents just to talk to their kids regularly about safety? An outsourced certification to me just seems like a way for parents to skirt around the hard topics and deflect responsibility.