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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

I’m pretty sure that’s what people said about TV.

When Pokémon came out, a local priest organized a public burning of these devils toys. Today they are collectibles, revered by people from all over the world.

The Simpsons was what was causing the downfall of America, and today the first 5-10 seasons are considered some of the best produced media of all time.

It seems impossible but in 20-30 years, there will be commentators in the cultural elite discussing the brilliance of some of these TikTok’ers.

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The shift from editor-moderator content (which is what TV, radio, Pokémon cards, the Simpsons, etc. all are) to user-generated content with little oversight is quite a large one. There are certainly positive sides to it, but I think you can just brush aside the negative sides with "some nutjob in the past said crazy things about Pokémon cards".

Dangerous content on TV and from responsible YouTube etc. creators is filled with the cliché "don't try this at home kids, it's dangerous and you can hurt yourself!" warnings for a reason, it's because we learned that kids are kinda stupid and will copy stuff they see on TV. Some people seem to be re-learning that lesson.

Well, the issue here is that you are comparing apple to oranges.

If we were to compare tiktok to something it would be like the internet, Facebook or YouTube not toys.

If it's the blackout challenge it would be:

Eat a California reaper challenge, cinammon challenge, how to make crystals nor toys.

Now I think we can see that things aren't going to be retroactively so rosy.

"but this time it's different!"

That’s a heuristic which like all heuristics will fail to work in some cases.

This is one of them - we’ve never had private hostile organizations with immense budgets trying to manipulate and help themselves to the private information of regular people at global scale before.

You might be interested in taking a look at "Adolescent mood disorders since 2010: A collaborative review" [0] by Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge which goes into detailed studies and datasets showing a rise in recent years in teen suicide, as well as the associations between heavy social media use and bad mental health outcomes, particularly for girls [1].

[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1diMvsMeRphUH7E6D1d_J7R6W...

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...

None of these were being weaponized by the Chinese government.

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