Between Meta/X and opioids, the USA is overtly 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)
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.
Specifically calling out kids? No. But that also isn’t a law. “This hurts the mental well being of children” isn’t a statute.
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.
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.
I think actually lots of people do care about all these problems.
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.
You are posting in a thread where the OP is saying China is covertly doing damage via TikTok. Do you seriously not see the contradictions here?
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.
That is not at all the primary point of this article. This article focuses nearly entirely on the damage done by TikTok as a social media application, very much in keeping with the exact same criticisms the author makes of other social media. It focuses very little on the national security implications of Chinese ownership.
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.
I meant the GP of your previous post. Your criticism of whataboutism is flawed under the context of that GP accusing China of everything under the sun.
Extremely few countries are “friends.” Maybe the past Canada/US relationship could have been considered legitimate friendship between two countries, but it was a very rare thing.
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.
Fentanyl is made from common chemicals that are used in normal industrial processes. We use them for everything from making insulation to medicine. And it only takes a small amount of these chemicals to make a large batch of fentanyl. All the fentanyl produced in a year only takes 1,800 gallons (around 33 oil drums) of chemicals to make.
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.
I don't know anything about Fentanyl, but something about this description seems off to me. If it's as easy to make as you describe, why wouldn't people just make it here already? Why are they taking the risk of smuggling it across borders?
Most criminals aren't capable chemists. Given a laboratory and barrels of precursor chemicals, they couldn't make perfectly legal drugs like ibuprofen either. Most capable chemists aren't willing to risk property seizure and incarceration to make drugs for the black market. The few capable criminal chemists and their laboratories are concentrated in places where law enforcement is weak, like gang controlled regions of poorer countries.
China can’t do those things to us without our help. I think there is a culture of addiction here and it’s hard to blame the drug dealer for our own problems
No, but I'm also not a die hard libertarian, so I'm open to arguments that 1. This is bad, and 2. There may be net positive policy interventions available.
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.
Tiktok is not more guilty than any US company. Instagram, facebook and most modern social media went this path long before Tiktok. We shouldn’t singlehandedly blame one party but go to the root of the issue.
This is decidedly not true on almost every account.
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.
I live in the European country most like the USA, in a poor area of a major city. I'm not aware of any crisis. It was never that easy to get opioids here and our doctors work for the government, not themselves.
> 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.
It's not that I don't care. I don't know how real it is. Bad faith arguments and pseudoscience are ubiquitous.
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.
TikTok isn’t doing much that our domestic social media overlords aren’t doing to us themselves. Yeah Facebook is for boomers and Instagram is for millennials, but they’re only targeting the platforms like that because TikTok has already seized the younger demographics. If it wasn’t there they’re be on a Meta, Snap, YouTube, or Twitch app instead and still having their brains rotted.
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.
