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Comment by anm89 | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone link to a video of the influencer displaying the symptoms? Im curious to see the source

Here is an example video from his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGYHmWsmxak

You can see he demonstrates these "random" tourette symptoms. The linked research states how experts looking at these videos have identified them as way beyond the normal tics of someone with Tourette's, and they change and have context across videos. They're not exactly calling the YouTuber a fake, but it's somewhat implied. The videos are cut and edited in a way that highlight the "tics" and the popular ones are even sold on merchandise like T-shirts.

If I'm reading the paper correctly, they've attempted to treat teens demonstrating these symptoms as if they were treating Tourette's and it didn't work. It's some type of illness related to identity and attention-seeking enforced by social media. So they're saying teens see these types of videos and start imitating the behavior as part of a mental illness.

Did the paper say it was caused by attention-seeking? My takeaway was that it was a stress-reaction that spread through groups, not something intentional

From the abstract it's a little bit of both but I didn't mean to make it sound like people are intentionally doing it. It's a stress reaction but that reaction ends up being attention-seeking behavior.

> they can be viewed as the 21th century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man.

Perhaps I've read too much William Gibson, but there's definitely a part of me that thinks if I watch that video I will come down with some kind of Tourette's syndrome.

What book are you referring to?

Not Gibson, but Snow Crash comes to mind

Head-desk. That's exactly what I was thinking of.

That book is going to turn out to be prophecy.

I mean, obviously we're not going to see a physical virus that enters as sensory information --

Wait. ... Are COVID and anti-masking part of the same replicator-complex? ... I see how anti-masking helps COVID. But how would COVID help anti-masking? I don't see how. ... Ok, probably not.

-- but that book's concerns seem incredibly prescient.

What disturbs me most is how L. Bob Rife, the bad guy, in his one and only monologue, in a TV recording (weird how he never appears in person), seems to... basically be correct.

Biomass.

On the money.

I read Snow Crash about two years ago and the theme of virality increasing as dynamic systems get larger feels all too real right now.

In Neuromancer and other Gibson novels, cyberspace bleeds into real life - Case becomes trapped in cyberspace by an AI, Armitage has a personality constructed by the same AI when he's actually a mental case named Cortez, etc

yeah, that's what I thought the paper was arguing for, and got scared also :D

Furthermore, they found that the symptoms often went away after the patients and families were told that they did not actually have tourettes. Reading between the lines, the behavior stopped when others no longer provided the level of attention and indulgence desired.

>patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasable tasks because of their symptoms resulting in release from obligations at school and home, while symptoms temporarily completely remit while conducting favorite activities. Fourthly, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.

"They're not exactly calling the YouTuber a fake, but it's somewhat implied." - you can see it's clearly deliberate and controlled when he has a quieter conversation with the other guy. As you say: "The videos are cut and edited in a way that highlight the "tics""

Reminds me of Von Trier's The Idiots.

There's a subreddit that's about these - https://www.reddit.com/r/fakedisordercringe/

There's also a post on there linking to this paper - https://www.reddit.com/r/fakedisordercringe/comments/pb7p02/...

The attention seeking from having a disorder is fairly prevalent.

I think this is partly from attention seeking, and partly from society assigning de facto virtue to the disadvantaged.

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