TikTok is different, and that has nothing to do with China or whatever other cultural/political topic. It is the amalgamation that results many years of optimising user interaction and dependence on social networks as an advertising platform. While in some aspects it is just a repackaged version of what has been there before, we shouldn't just dismiss the previous attempts as harmless, just because their dosage was less.
Yes, people have been saying "beware the influence of technology on children" for decades, maybe centuries. That doesn't prove that the warnings are false. And even if the past warnings were false for past technology, that doesn't prove that the current warnings are false for current technology.
"People have been saying that forever" is not a rebuttal of "TikTok is bad for kids". It's not even close. It's basically DH2 on Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
These days, you linger on an auto-playing video too long (that is quite possibly intentionally engineered to bait you in) and suddenly the algorithm gets a lock on you and absolutely rams more of that shit down your throat.
It's not even just propaganda either. The exact same cycle is what's at play here with preying on children's weaknesses. Mental health, body image, etc. etc. can all be weaponised the same way. And kids are espeically susceptable to it given the age they tend to start getting on social media is precisely also the age where they feel most socially awkward and trying to find their identity in the world.
Every pissed off goth kid I knew in the 90s had a copy of the Anarchist cook book on a 1.44mb floppy disk.
We probably burned more than our fair share of holes in our backyards, but it wasn't access to information that was limiting us doing harm to our peers. If anything I think it was having a group of like-minded people to burn holes in your backyard with that ultimately allowed us all to feel less alienated. We may have felt individually ostracized, but found camaraderie in trying to put out the homemade napalm fire in the back yard before someone's parents got back or the neighbors called the fire department.
I get more worried about teens today because I no longer see packs of kids getting in trouble together. The only kids I know that ended up in real trouble where the ones that eventually got alienated from that pack as well.
My broader point is that you can replace that scenario with just about any subgroup with an extremist representation and it holds. Incels are a prime example. QAnon too. The list goes on. The people who end up extreme in those viewpoints don't start there, they get taken on a journey to there though lots of very marginal successive influences.
A social media algorithm is purpose-built to achieve that because it turns out that is the exact same pattern as 'you hovered over a cute cat video once, so we guess you like cats, so we're going tto bombard you with cute cat vids to drive up your engagement'.
There's a world of difference between bonding with friend over how stupid and mean other kids are, blowing up your back yard together and laughing about it that night and the tiktok world of just getting angry over a constant stream of other alienated people screaming into the void.
Without the companionship you never really get catharsis, just an endless cycle of building up rage and furthering your own sense of alienation.
That used to be called talking to friends. If anything social media is less dangerous because the _really_ illegal stuff is not something they can show.
Clockwork Orange, the Destructors and Kids were a lot less fiction than people would like to believe today.
Spending time physically around other people fires off a lot of nice neurotransmitters, even for people who are introverted and who would rather not be spending a lot of time around other people.
One figures COVID lock downs would have hammered this point into the global consciousness.
Of course too isolated of a group and things get super weird and everything can quickly go off the rails.
Some kids did this and didn't grow up, because someone in their online community committed suicide and that prompted them to do the same.
This is a real problem. It's been a problem since the 90s, yes, but it's getting worse.