Oh look, another company that knows it's harming people and society, hides it and keeps on chasing profit and power.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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Just remember tick tock is illegal for citizens to use in the country that invented it.
Yeah that's because they have a state sanctioned version of TikTok that is controlled by an algorithm that police's peoples speech and what they do and reports anything untoward to the proper authorities.
And now that Fox News has bought TikTok, the US has their own version of an algorithm that will police people's speech and what they do, and most likely report anything untoward to the proper authorities.
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other one is Meta right?
We should promote long content and books instead of this short-shit
I've never installed tiktok. And I got rid of Instagram years before shorts. Additionally, while I enjoy long form YouTube videos from non-brainrot creators, I haven't used the official app in years, so I avoid shorts there as well.
I'm not bragging, it's just relevant to my next statement:
I too feel like my content consumption isn't long enough. I think the instant gratification of moving to the next thing minutes after the first is bad for our brains.
In the last couple of months I have started reading again. Audiobooks mostly, and I know it's not the same, but it engages my brain while driving for work.
Additionally, in the last few weeks, I've changed our TV habits. We usually watch 2 or 3 hours of TV in the evenings, which is probably too long by some metrics but I'm not ready to cut back yet, personally. What I have done, however, is stop binging.
Normally we pick two, maybe three at most, shows we want to watch. Then we burn through them, episode after episode. Churning through the seasons until they're either gone or we're caught up with it's production.
Lately, I've done the opposite. We watch one episode of a show we like. Only one. We can watch one of another show if we want. But thus far we haven't added more shows to the rotation, hard to keep track, might negate benefits, IDK.
When we've watched one episode of one or two shows. We either change gears and stop watching TV, or watch a movie.
By that time, the time for TV is more of less over.
Already I'm seeing benefits, small, but I'm happy. The next day, in my idle thoughts, I'll find myself thinking about what happened in the show, and making connections and predictions that I otherwise wouldn't have made. I enjoy this.
Plus we have a backlog of movies, we're really bad about dedicating time to movies, even though we'd gladly waste that time watching several episodes in a row of a show 🤦♂️ So I'm glad to be getting into some good movies too.
Audiobooks mostly, and I know it's not the same
FWIW, studies have found that reading and speech activate different language regions of the brain… But oddly enough, audiobooks activate the reading parts of the brain, not just the speech parts. So it may be more similar than you’d initially think.
I finally got my AudioBookShelf instance up and running last year, around March. In those remaining 7 months, I “read” (listened to) over 50 books. I used to be a voracious reader as a child. But at some point I lost the spark, as finding time to read got harder and harder. Audiobooks have reignited that love for reading, in a way I can’t even put into words.
I find myself looking forward to my daily commute, because it means I can listen to another two or three chapters in the car. I’ve even started taking the longer route home (which is technically more fuel efficient, but adds like 10 minutes to my commute) because I don’t mind the extra time in the car. I find myself wanting to wash the dishes or fold the laundry, because I can have my earbuds in while I work.
I still doomscroll on YouTube shorts or Instagram reels occasionally, but that doesn’t mean I have to give up long form content like reading. They fill two entirely separate niches.
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They tried warning us about fb over 10 years ago and nothing happened
I wouldn't say nothing happened. Young people migrated off of it and it's now the lead gasoline of the social media world
Yeah but young people didn’t migrate off it because it was harmful
They migrated in part to instagram which Facebook bought and made even more harmful than Facebook itself
Yeah ig is the worst part of Facebook, just people curating what they want people to think their life looks like
This is in stark contrast to... Facebook???
facebook has a very different target audience
facebook is mostly about 60+ year olds holding their beer and saying sth like "beer, car, church is all we need" while instagram is predatory on 16-y.o girls telling them that they're not pretty and worthy of love if they're not significantly (scarily, in fact) underweight and wear lots of makeup to cover their true emotions/face.
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back then it wasn't about political independence from the US.
the EU has made a lot of noise in the last 2 weeks about getting off of US platforms. Here's a few examples:
https://apnews.com/article/europe-digital-sovereignty-big-tech-9f5388b68a0648514cebc8d92f682060
https://ecfr.eu/publication/get-over-your-x-a-european-plan-to-escape-american-technology/
There's many more. The movement is significant.
Then literally Web 2.0 is the problem. All social media stops existing if we go back from Web 2.0.
social media just needs http requests to exist, how does pre web 2.0 fix things honestly. gui apps have existed since windows 95 or even earlier, how is the tiktok app technically different than the space cadet paddle game with added network functionality?
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Children are not the only ones being harmed here. This selective focus is only going to destroy the perception of other groups in terms of harm. Teenagers, young people, old people are also being harmed here - it is by design, and its everyone.
I bet this is related to Palantir facial recognition. Seems like identifying people and feeding it into some database is very important lately.
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Yup, nobody is immune or above being harmed by the algorithms.
It's harmful to everyone not just children, and so is Instagram. This sounds like more mandatory ID propaganda given how the government won't stop the most obvious of pedophile sex traffickers.
Edit: It literally is:
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.
Not only tiktok. My parents are addicted to facebook stories and YouTube stories ;)
The same algorithm…
What is more there a lot of Russian propaganda and misinformation. But in Poland that’s common in social media
Same in Germany. 😒 Why can't we cut off Russia from our networks or do anything to counter them.
I feel like we are sleepwalking into a disaster.
People need to understand that we are at war and treat Russia as the enemy.
It doesn't matter that there is little hard proof Putin, his secret service or who ever is behind this. When EVERYTHING points to their direction then you have to act.
We make them bigger than they have to be by 'playing fair' when they stopped doing that decades ago or never even did themselves. This is entirely an advantage we can take from them.
Although I admit it's much harder for an open, democratic society to agree to play 'unfair' like the enemy. But maybe there is another way? Don't compromise your ideals but bring pro western propaganda to Russian minds.
They don't respect our cyber sovereignty for lack of a better word. Why should we respect theirs.
Other countries do this as well and we need to build our defences or otherwise we will be the punching bag for others.
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It's Ok now though cause TikTok was bought by Fox News.
The exact same thing happened with Instagram years ago.
and Facebook.
and MySpace.
and club penguin.
and...
It's starting to feel this whole capitalism for children isn't healthy.
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If I ever have children, TikTok will be one of the first things I'll have blocked for them.
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I never wanted TikTok for this reason, and I remember the damage YouTube did to my brother, despite my warnings.
He was happily watching Tree Happy Friends as a toddler.
I'm thinking, how are youtube shorts and Instagram reels any different from tiktok
Jesus, happy tree friends fucked me up and I was legally an adult
I enjoyed happy tree friends as a kid and it didn't effect me negatively. Different strokes for different folks I guess. It's like arguing that GTA makes kids violent.
It was sort of funny, but it only had one punchline and wore out quickly for me. Shock humor has a really low retention rate. Compare that to say, Rejected or the parody GI Joe PSAs, they're really not great and a wonder why Youtube hired them to make their old copyright volition training videos.
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No wonder trump wanted to “Americanize” the company. More access to kids.
KY P.40, PARA 125 [REDACTED BUT RETRIEVABLE TEXT]
The ‘TikTank’ [internal TikTok group studying issues affecting TikTok] Report observed that “Tiktok is particularly popular with younger users who are particularly sensitive to reinforcement in the form of social reward and have minimal ability to self-regulate effectively.”
Well, they are targeting young users because it's a biological fact that they can't control themselves very well, meaning that their brains are not fully developed yet. This is like making profits from people with diabetes by selling expensive insulin; if they don't get it, they die.
TikTok should answer legally by its actions, as well as other industries.
This is like making profits from people with diabetes by selling expensive insulin; if they don’t get it, they die.
More like taking advantage of a drunk person, but I agree. Still a shitty thing to do.
I'm looking forward to the day when social media is heavily regulated and age-gated.
Or parents can do their job. We have to suffer with age verification bullshit laws that's just there to have us all in a database.
Not having it be regulated makes it a lot harder for parents to do their job, because the kids with responsible parents are getting peer-pressured by the kids with irresponsible parents.
Or put another way: you're not making parents do their jobs; you're making their jobs impossible by forcing them to choose between ruining their kid's mental health by letting her be exposed to social media, or ruin her mental health by forcing her to be ostracised for not using social media.
The only way to have a successful outcome is to force everyone else's kids not to use it, not just your own, and no amount of rugged individualist good parenting can accomplish that by itself!
That said, I am extremely sympathetic to the arguments against age verification laws too, which is why my preferred solution would be to fucking outlaw and destroy corporate social media entirely, for kids and adults alike!
You are exactly right. We're all in this ugly, trapped situation, together, like it or not.
As a parent, do you remove the obviously ruinous toxins from the kiddo's environment, entirely? Seems like the only sensible choice.
But then again...for the kid, few things could feel worse. An entire childhood spent alienated from their peers? Permanently out of the loop, to where that becomes the personality trait noticed and remembered by others?
What a horrible bargain, I completely hate it.
"Well, a little hideous poison for you, routinely, I guess, dear. I wouldn't want you to end up weird, after all..."
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Yeah, and that's how you get shitty age verification laws.
It's a double edged sword
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Age gated? You'd submit your driver's license or identity to these sites?
It's already started, for porn. The kids don't have to prove their age, they don't have proper ID. So EVERYONE ELSE has to prove THEIR ages, and if you can't, you are assumed to be underage.
See how well that works for the Nazis? Now they get to identify EVERYBODY who is on the Internet with their legal IDs, and they will know exactly who posted that nasty meme of Trump.
But it's okay, because it protects the children.
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Yeah ofc. It's run by genocidal fascists now. Libs wanted this.
It was run by genocidal fascists before. Just different ones.
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