Thanks! I think it makes more sense to have a thread about the recent article, especially since some of the comments in the current thread are criticizing the author for focusing only on TikTok, which is obviously not true.
Who exactly do you think you're quoting there? I can't find it in TFA, and the article actually says exactly the opposite: that the current US approach is misguided because it focuses on the ownership of the company rather than the fact that the product is just plain dangerous in any hands.
Here's an actual quote from the conclusion of TFA, with a footnote:
> These harms may not be presented tomorrow to the Justices of the Supreme Court, but we think they should be decisive in the court of public opinion. TikTok should be removed from American childhood. 12
> 12. 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.
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.
This comment isn't so bad, but there were a bunch of comments earlier that were implying or stating outright that the author of TFA was targeting TikTok specifically for political reasons, which is clearly nonsense if you have even a passing familiarity with Haidt's body of work.
OP followed a similar pattern by starting with "please add YouTube to the list", but they did at least elaborate and didn't imply that TikTok was being targeted unfairly.
Most people here didn't even follow the link and are just responding to the title. They don't know who wrote the piece, much less what it actually says.
This is an ignorant assumption about the author's motives that doesn't withstand even the least bit of scrutiny. Meta came first under Haidt's crosshairs and has been targeted since this article was released. Snapchat was targeted with a partner piece to this one yesterday:
There wasn't much to them, but yes. The second comment asked a question which I'd already answered, which is why I'm wondering if you read it and followed the link to the article targeting Snapchat.
I can respond again if your attention span has been shot by too much TikTok:
> Then why isn't the article "Social Media Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale?" USAID checks?
Because he already wrote many, many articles to that effect and wanted to write one on TikTok specifically. Then he followed it up with one on Snapchat specifically.
Social media harming children is his whole thing. He's written a lot of content on it.
This is Jonathan Haidt, and he's been writing against all social media for years now. This article is about TikTok, but a quick stroll through the archives shows they released an identically-titled article about SnapChat yesterday:
>This is Jonathan Haidt, and he's been writing against all social media for years now.
Yeah, it's not "moronic propaganda", it's someone who has, historically and famously so, been very focused on the broad issue of social media's impacts focusing in on various specific aspects of it, of which TikTok is a part.
OP seems, respectfully so, ignorant to who Haidt is and would perhaps do well to read up on more of his output (apologies to OP if this assumption is incorrect).
The damned site he writes under is called After Babel! His identity at its core is linked to not just convincing but aggravating agitating and hyping an image of the world made "anxious" and depressed by devices.
There's a lot of other causes for the world being as unsupportive as it is. As a society we are losing meaningful connection to work, by having such vast mega corps sucking up all the work, managing the world from the top down. The concentration of capital has had enormously brutal impacts on the human spirit. But you won't see Haidt acknowledge or concern himself with what else is unravelling the human fabric.
There's some directionally correct concerns Haidt has, but as someone whose made it his calling to drive a wedge into what society is & demand a conservatism against the new, stridently & loudly, with no bones about what comes very close to lying, I cannot help but detest him deeply.
> There's a lot of other causes for the world being as unsupportive as it is. As a society we are losing meaningful connection to work, by having such vast mega corps sucking up all the work, managing the world from the top down. The concentration of capital has had enormously brutal impacts on the human spirit.
The evidence for this is far weaker than social media causing harm, but let's assume that you're right. All these problems caused by capitalism seemed to manifest during the the rise of social media tech giants, so they would still be the most likely culprit. I'm usually the person who defends capitalism, but even I review content recommendation systems on social media as capitalist brainwashing machines. I don't think being too conservative with limiting access to children is a bad thing.
Which is why this outage is so weird: the entire point of paying MarkMonitor is ensuring that absolutely nothing goes wrong with a very fraught process, and they seem to have just taken down one of the biggest brands they support.
Precisely. You pay a company like this the nosebleed-inducing fees they charge so that this exact event never happens. That assurance, and not the mechanics of domain registration or canned web searches or whatever else, is their product.
It's like, as I'm sure I'm paraphrasing from something I read God alone knows how many years ago, if your publicist lets you walk into a press event with a giant blob of snot hanging out of your nose. There surely is a reason why that error occurred, and it probably is at least a pretty good reason. But no one is very surprised to see the intro invite from your new publicist.
It isn't a relationship you blow up on a whim, but Zoom that can't route call traffic is Zoom that's not generating revenue, and while the reputational impact is negligible if it happens once, it had really better happen only once. Zoom is the incumbent; no one remembers they were revolutionary once, now everyone only notices the parts they don't like. (Being a skilled but politically naïve sysadmin is much the same.)
Basically, this is why Ma Bell - which had about the only stronger possible "uptime" expectation, in that no one uses Zoom for 911 - was so uptight you couldn't even plug in a modem until about five minutes before divestiture, and specified everything down to the number of turns in the splices their technicians made. There was a fad among programmers, when I was a child, to consider such practices stodgy.
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-snapchat
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