Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

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Not just TikTok, I checked out SnapChat because my kid is the last one in his class to not have it (according to him). First movie I see 2 people falling off an e-bike, pretty painful, then someone making fun of someone with down syndrome, then some weirdly squirming middle aged women with duck faces, and then some very young ones (pretending to?) * off someone off screen while staring into the camera.

Also I denied all access but it still suggested all my sons friends? How? Oh, and it won't even start without access to cameras.

I was pretty shocked. Still, friend off mine, a teacher tells me: You can't let your kid not have SnapChat, it's very important to them.

The Chinese apparently say: Just regulate! TikTok in our country is fun, educational even with safeguards against addiction. Because they mandate it. Somehow we don't want that here? We see it as overreach? Well I'm ready for some overreach (not ChatControl overreach, but you get what I mean). We leave it all up to the parents here, and all parents say: "Well my kid can't be the only one to not have it."

Meanwhile the kids I speak to tell me they regularly have vapeshops popping up in SnapChat, some dudes sell vapes with candy flavors (outlawed here) until the cops show up.

Yeah, we also did stupid things, I know, we grew up, found pron books in the park (pretty gross in retrospect), drank alcohol as young as 15, etc. I still feel this is different. We're just handing it to them.

Edit: Idk if you ever tried SnapChat but it is TikTok, chat, weird AI filters and something called "stories" which for me features a barely dressed girl in a Sauna.

>I was pretty shocked. Still, friend off mine, a teacher tells me: You can't let your kid not have SnapChat, it's very important to them.

Yeah, it's OK to say no.

If the kid wants a phone and snapchat, there's nothing wrong with saying you simply won't be supplying that and if they want it they'd best figure out how to mow lawns. If you're old enough to "need" a phone you're old enough to hustle some yardwork and walk to the T-Mobile store yourself.

It's an unfortunate situation where they will be ostracized for lack of participation in social media like Snapchat or TikTok. Children ostracizing those who don't fit in has been a thing forever, but has been thrown into overdrive by ubiquitous social media usage by children.

I don't think making a kid work for the phone is the solution here. The problem is intentionally addictive algorithms being given to children, not a lack of work ethic regarding purchasing a phone.

Give the kid a dumb phone.

It can make calls. It can send/receive basic text messages.

The most addictive thing on that type of phone, if it can even be installed, is Snake.

Utilitarianism wins. Social media companies loose. I'm fine with that. The kid can still communicate with their parents at a moment's notice.

> I still feel this is different. We're just handing it to them.

I think you are right to be worried, and I think you are correct that it is different:

IIRC, there were some Kremlin leaks some years ago indicating they knew how to "infect" a population with certain propaganda and have the disinformation live on or linger. Together with Meta's/Facebook's (illegal?) study where they experimented on people to try to make them sad by showing them certain types of posts.

So, I think it stands to reason that controlling what you consume means being in control of what you think; in other words: we are what we watch.

We know there are some feedback loops occurring, but I think that it is easier to get desensitized and start becoming accustomed to very extreme content due to the pressure to fit in; perhaps — once one has participated, it might be even harder to be deprogrammed (it requires facing the fact one behaved wrongly towards others).

There's also the fact that being a good person takes a lot of willpower, dedication, is inconvenient and is notoriously difficult to market as "fun".

It is more palatable for an impressionable kid to watch cheap foreign-state-backed radicalizing-propaganda than it is to learn about injustices being perpetuated in our behalf by the state apparatus.

We have developed the habit of being wary of what we consume in order to police our emotions (i.e. minding our mind so no desensitization happens in our watch).

We have seen what the "baddies" can do: the indifference to the suffering they cause, and the cruelty and pettiness they are capable of.

But I digress,... I think you are right to be worried, but I am unsure about how to train kids to not fall into the pipelines.

Yeah, just opened it again, saw a girl of like 12 doing a sexy dance, lift her shirt a bit. I report it, they say it's no violation.

Sure it's no violation but it's pedo central in that app I bet, and many kids even share their location with anyone. Parents have no clue.

Or it's our state apparatus that doesn't want teenagers seeing the injustices they're perpetrating, and the think of the children argument is being pushed right now to hide videos of what's going on in Chicago with ICE, and elsewhere.

Giving phones to kids was a very bad idea. I don't know how it became normalized.

"Safety" is how it was originally billed: your kids can call you if they get in trouble. They also created apps that let parents spy on where there kids were.

Like everything bad is normalized... step by step.

Using public transit with google maps is a night and day difference

I have no issue giving kids a utilitarian dumb phone that can send and receive basic text messages as well as make calls.

Giving them smartphones? Moronic idea at best.

Many kids start out with a 5G connected watch that can call and receive SMS. They tap it, boom they're talking to their parents.

They turn the kid into the weapon, the parents don't hear the end of it until they cave and buy the thing

So true, and all normal chats apps get more and more "social" sht incorporated, even Whatsapp has "stories" (Signal too btw). SnapChat is just completely shameless about it, integrating all the most addictive stuff found in all other apps.

Instagram is the same. Had to install it for a dev project and it was disgusting. Social media just can’t be trusted.

Why would kids just not immediately switch to something else? This reads like a parent saying video games should only be educational because of course the kid only cares about it being a video game and not the content.

It works in China because they have chat control to the extreme.

"It works in China because they have chat control to the extreme."

Not really, they just tell the company to behave in this case. But yes they do have ChatControl to the extreme as well.

And shockingly, the company actually listens to the Chinese government. Because the company knows that if they resist, their executives will at best be quickly "re-educated", or straight up disappeared overnight.

Here, the company would simply bribe the lawmakers, who would in turn spout off some mealy-mouthed gibberish on their party's favorite propaganda network, and business would continue as normal.

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