Between TikTok and fentanyl China is covertly doing serious damage to the USA, and most people don't care.
(In all seriousness, I do agree that TikTok is awful, but I find the fascination with TikTok while ignoring all other social media and their dangers to be interesting)
Sorry, but which part of my comment implied that I think they are?
China is just a competitor, not some sort of boogeyman.
The US is a competitor with a lot of countries. Maybe they should ban our social media, but for whatever reason that is mostly not done. If we want to set that as the convention, it is certainly worth considering.
I use Facebook for the local buy nothing group. Everytime I open Facebook I'm shocked by the manipulative AI slop (person in a boat pulling barnacles off a dolphin that's standing up in the water) that shows up in the first screen. I'm terrified that grandparents who vote are engaging with this stuff.
It's weird how so many of these threads are "whatabout other social media", when there is no contradiction in just saying "that too", and essentially none of the people who agree with the premise that TikTok is bad will argue that other social media is good.
China is doing damage to us when we are doing damage to ourselves too? Really? It’s going after the wrong thing and so not finding the actual problem and hopefully the solution.
Personally, I think the national security argument is the much stronger one for the divestment bill (which the current administration is illegally refusing to enforce at the moment). But that's just not what this author cares most about.
For the social harm to children that they cause? I thought it was to break out WhatsApp & Instagram into their own entities from like a monopoly perspective, but I admit I am not keeping up on the current trial at all, so I could be wrong.
>about how bad they are almost daily on this site.
This site is hardly representative of the average citizen. In my daily life, local news, etc., most people I encounter will talk about how bad TikTok is for children but barely (if ever) mention harms of other social media.
For causing harm in general? Yes.
>The FTC’s argument hinges, in part, on its claim that Meta harmed users after acquiring the two companies by increasing the quantity of ads and watering down privacy protections.
> This site is hardly representative of the average citizen. In my daily life, local news, etc., most people I encounter will talk about how bad TikTok is for children but barely (if ever) mention harms of other social media.
And yet in my daily life almost everyone one in my circle of friends has deleted Facebook because of their disgust with the platform. Ironically the biggest issue is the number of people that don’t understand Instagram is also a meta property.
The latest Annual Threat Assessment: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-202...
Noted that production of those precursors has shifted to India.
The fentanyl itself is made in labs in Mexico and then smuggled across the border. It requires no sophisticated lab equipment to make. You can easily obtain everything needed at consumer retail stores and make a batch in a garage. One liter of finished fentanyl is enough to create 50,000 to 100,000 doses.
So if you squeeze the balloon, it just pops up somewhere else. Put pressure on China and India starts supplying the chemicals. Start shutting down Mexican labs and they'll make the stuff in Oklahoma.
Not that these are bad things to do but unless you address the actual demand for the stuff it's going to be nearly impossible to eliminate it.
Do you blame prostitutes when husbands cheat on their wives at a whorehouse too?
On prostitution, I'm a bit skeptical that the policy interventions over time have been net positive, but maybe they have.
On social media, unfortunately I'm very skeptical of the proposed policy interventions, in general. But I'm convinced that the status quo is bad. But sometimes there just isn't a policy solution available that doesn't have tradeoffs that make it even worse than a bad status quo. It's still good to bring attention to the problems with that status quo, though.
In the case of TikTok in particular, I think forcing divestment is a no-brainer, but for totally different reasons than what Haidt is writing about.
Europe has its own opioid crisis, and we absolutely can blame other countries who play host to the primary runners of heroin and synthesizers of fent. The pain industry is just the first baby step to hard drugs. We already handled our side after OxyContin - it’s impossible to get more than ibuprofen from a doctor without doing backflips through flaming hoops.
> We already handled our side
What did you do about the millions of Americans already hooked?
As I understand it, stopping the supply from pills mills lead to people hitting the street to buy product cut with fent. Some handling.
When I was growing up the same types of people were saying that D&D was a demonic movement meant to turn kids to satanic rituals so I never got to play D&D. Rock music had subliminal messages that were converting children into zombies but I listened to it anyway and that's how I discovered that most adults were full of shit and straight-up lying to us. There's so much garbage out there that separating the noise from true threats is an overwhelming task for most average people.
We need actual data privacy laws that make that business model of invasive surveillance capitalism non-viable as well as some of severe regulations placed on algorithmic recommendation engines to limit these harms. At the very least, users should be permitted to tune their algorithm parameters, including deciding how much they see things they’ve explicitly requested to see less of.
Yeah we can scaremonger about TikTok all we want, but it’s not solely TikTok’s fault that it’s trash. The economic incentive structure is to produce a surfeit of brainwashing trash that erodes people’s mental health. We need to structurally change privacy laws and force market competition to crack these network effect monopolies if we want that to stop.