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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

Every time there's a post like this on HN ("social media app harms children") responses like this seem to be a primary response. It always feels like handwavey avoidance of addressing the actual issue at hand: harm to children. "Oh so it's only bad because the Chinese own it? You're okay with American propaganda?!??"

"TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale" does not imply "Instagram Is Not Harming Children at an Industrial Scale". It is simply studying one app. There have been numerous reports of the dangers Instagram poses (especially to teens), and when they get posted we get a raft of "why just pick on Instagram?" comments. It's tedious.

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If literally a single person in this entire comment section had read the linked article they would have seen that the parent comment's (bad faith) point is directly addressed.

> Of course, if TikTok is removed, many children will just move to TikTok’s competitors: Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. This is why it’s so important for countries to follow Australia’s lead: raise the age for opening social media accounts to 16 and require the companies to enforce it.

> It's tedious.

Worse, it's distracting.

Exactly. I think the more thoughtful responses are starting to bubble up to the top now, but when I first got here, essentially all the comments were of this form.

Sorry. It warrants investigation, as the overt and covert consensus from Washington is to smear China and drag us into a "Trade War" that might go into a hot war. We need to be critical at every step. Every instance of the consensus manufacturing machine needs to be called out.

If you start calling out things that are clearly not that then you start looking like a crazy person and lose credibility. We have a popular children's story about this called The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Maybe take a few minutes to actually read the piece and look at what else the author has written before jumping to the conclusion that they're just part of Trump's propaganda machine.

It's not the "Boy Who Cried Wolf." It's pointing out a systematic anti-Sino campaign carried out by American-backed NGOs and, in this case, academic mercenaries.

I'm not even saying that you're wrong that such a thing exists, just that you're wrong to implicate Jonathan Haidt in that plot. And by seeing it everywhere—even where it's not—you are losing credibility when you go to point it out in places where it's real.

You clearly have not read anything that Haidt has written and you just ignore all of the comments pointing out that you're mistaken, so you just end up looking like a conspiracy theorist who refuses to even look at the actual evidence because you already know it's all a conspiracy. Looking unreasonable and irrational hurts your cause.

And there's always one of these responses - what actions then, if any, are we taking against instagram?

> There have been numerous reports of the dangers Instagram poses (especially to teens), and when they get posted we get a raft of "why just pick on Instagram?" comments. It's tedious.

The difference being of course that one website (tiktok) is being targeted and essentially no action against meta. That's why people chime in.

Recall the recent deluge of tech promoters and influencers suddenly sharing "Will iPhones get 34% MORE EXPENSIVE??" articles and videos. Odd, wasn't it, that that "reporting" benefited exactly one company.

I doubt that every reader thought to themself, "this doesn't imply that non-Apple products will not be affected by the tariffs. I should look more deeply into this so I can make a more important purchase that offsets a greater future cost" before charging out the door to buy more expensive iPhones.

When someone writes something that singles out a particular company, group, or individual, we might not understand the subtext and interests at play, but we must at least allow others to account for the purpose and effects.

In this case, the author wasn't implying that industrialized harm to children was a new or unique problem with Tik Tok and has written several articles with similar titles about other social media to highlight that this is a bigger problem that should be acknowledged and addressed at a higher level. That alone makes it not just reasonable, but desirable to bring up that there are other members of that industry.

I don't get this response. Do we care about harm to children or no? This doesn't really address that, as is mentioned at the start of the article.

> Tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether it should step in to block or delay the implementation of a law that would ban TikTok from operating in the U.S. If not blocked, the law will force TikTok to cease operations in the U.S. on January 19, unless its Chinese corporate owner (Bytedance) sells to a buyer not controlled by a foreign adversary. The case hinges entirely on constitutional arguments pertaining to national security and free speech. The Justices will hear no evidence about addiction, depression, sexual exploitation, or any of the many harms to children that have been alleged, in separate lawsuits filed by 14 state Attorneys General, to be widespread on TikTok.

A quite likely outcome here is that TikTok is allowed to continue targeting children with harmful content. I think "hey, what's our goal here, and are we accomplishing that goal with these actions" to be an entirely reasonable response. That's how I interpreted the comment you replied to.

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