A Child’s TikTok Stardom Opens Doors. Then a Gunman Arrives

They were aware and allowed it. But, not knowing the family's financial circumstances, it raises a difficult question of where to draw the line with this kind of thing. The prospect of allowing your underage daughter to sell media featuring her to this kind of guy is sickening, but if $300 is a lot of money to your family, maybe it becomes easier to excuse? What do you do if he offers $10,000 for something else that's even more disturbing, and you're behind on your mortgage payments?

I'm disappointed the author of the piece didn't come right out and say that what TikTok is doing is profiting off of the sexualization of minors (of course the minors get a cut as well, so that apparently makes it okay?). It seems like the only moral path forward would unfortunately be to ban minors from participating, or keep them reaching the levels of fame that would result in them putting themselves (or their families) in a position to have to make the kind of choice I'm talking about above.

I am grateful that my parents denied me access to video games and I will strictly deny my children access to content deem counterproductive. You're not making friends you're making a human being. The idea that a child needs social media or a controller to have a social life is a weak argument made by lazy parents. I feel sorry for this girl and shame on her parents and parents like them.

There is great wisdom in this line. I would extend that to say that true freedom is the ability to 'do what you want, when you want.'

Money is one pillar of this. It grants you the ability to have the material resources to do what you want. But, 2 confounders get in the way. Time and physical/environmental constraints. If you are gaining money (1 pillar) by compromising the others. Your net freedom stays the same.

This includes all sort of suckers games:

* Anonymity allows you to get away with anything without anyone noticing. Your example, addresses that freedom tradeoff.

* Working long hours (in something unfulfilling) involves trading off time for money

* Back breaking involves trading health for money

A truly wealthy person is anonymous, rich and has all the time in the world, because they don't need to work to sustain their wealth.

You see a lot of channels mimicking each other and so on.

When the channel is “you” and you’re young I wonder what that means.

Our house, our rules. When they're old enough to be interacting with the internet on their own, I intend to apply the same rules - and we run a limited tech household anyway. Electronics don't go in rooms, and we've deliberately set things up so that the house computer is visible when in use, etc.

"Oh, lulz, my daughter has a YouTube channel of her being a cute enough preteen to have 1000 subscribers without me knowing about it" would be well beyond the scope of reasonable, and in addition to having supervised-only internet use for quite a long while, I would supervise the removal of the channel. That's just not acceptable, in any way.

If my kids want to publish things to the internet (and I hope they will), that's fine - it just has to go through us as parents first, at least until a regular trend of good judgement is demonstrated, and we get access to whatever is being published as well.

I think it bolsters the need for anonymity and privacy, especially online. In FL you have the sunshine act which makes doxxing particularly easy.

If only social media hadn't enforced real name policies, it might be a little easier to stay anonymous while still being a content creator, maybe its different in other countries.

Edit: Facebook and Google+/Youtube had or have real name policies, before then it was the norm to never reveal your real identity online, I admit I am ignorant to TikTok policies, but apparently sharing your venmo address is not uncommon.

A man stalking and becoming obsessed with a specific woman, spending time and effort for sex and attention despite the woman clearly not being interested, is surprisingly common.

Many, many woman have real-life incidents of men literally stalking them, men repeatedly trying to get their attention / ask them out despite blatant “stop talking to me” rejection, and men getting really aggressive when they get rejected or “emasculated”. On games and social media it’s much worse, to the point where basically anyone who reveals themselves to be female gets creepy messages. You just don’t realize because relatively this stuff almost never happens to men, even attractive men.

Go on a sub like r/NiceGuys, r/TwoXChromosomes and you will see a ton of examples. But even random subs like r/AskReddit and my college’s sub have multiple stories because it’s so common. It’s actually a very serious issue in nearly every society, and this incident is an (albeit extreme) example of the persistence and aggressiveness most semi-attractive women experience.