Utah became the latest state Tuesday to file a lawsuit against TikTok, alleging the company is “baiting” children into addictive and unhealthy social media habits.
TikTok lures children into hours of social media use, misrepresents the app’s safety and deceptively portrays itself as independent of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, Utah claims in the lawsuit.
“We will not stand by while these companies fail to take adequate, meaningful action to protect our children. We will prevail in holding social media companies accountable by any means necessary,” Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit, which was filed in state court in Salt Lake City.
I’ve seen it with my own eyes. My SO’s younger sisters are 13 and spend all day glued to tiktok, Youtube shorts etc. I’ve seen the weird challenges encouraging dangerous behavior that the media hypes up show up in their feed (of mostly drama videos doxing strangers on the internet), as well as random videos of dead cats, gore, fentanyl references, and they’ve complained about videos of topless underage girls in 3rd world countries. Even though I’m politically across the aisle from these people, I support this lawsuit.
But whose responsibility is it to monitor their internet access? Mom and Dad need to step up and actually parent their children!
As a young geek in the 90s, I know that kids can outsmart their parents easily. Most parents aren’t tech savvy but their kids are. A parent would literally have to sit there next to them and monitor every webpage and conversation they have, which isn’t realistic most of the time.
We all know that social media sites like Facebook and Instagram have a negative impact on those that aren’t adults (it still sucks for adults too, but in a different way), and sites like TikTok and other video shorts essentially promote short attention spans and maximize the “reward” (dopamine) that users get.
Social media sites are virtual Skinner Boxes.
Yeah…Isn’t this likely unconstitutional given the first amendment? This strikes me as somewhat similar to attempts to regulate video games “for making children violent” or the like. At best this may result in TikTok releasing a children’s variation of the app with greater restrictions in terms of use and content, supposing something like that doesn’t already exist.
Similar to how YouTube has a variation of their app for children, if I remember right.
At some point, the US made it illegal to grow or consume a plant. That seems like it would be impossible to handle legally, but it was made into law.
If objective guidelines can be made on what constitutes damaging behavior, it’s possible that it could have legal ground to stand on. I hate tiktok because it takes away so much of my wife’s time. I play Xbox, though, so it’s not like I don’t have habits that eat up time. I remember my grandma complaining about my grandad fishing. She said she saw him more before he retired.
Yeah, the only difference from the violent video games thing is that people on sites like this one hate tik tok (or any other social media except the one they use) and like video games.
Like, what, they made their app too entertaining? That comment about their sibling spending all day on tik tok is exactly what many people do with video games. But I bet if you say “we’re gonna ban any video game that’s too fun because you’ll play them all day”, then all the tik tok haters will be like “but that’s different!”
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How do you know they aren’t in a bad home situation? What then?
Yeah, it’s definitely addictive. My neighbor has 3 “tweenage” (10-12) daughters and they’re addicted to it, but then again Facebook is and was just as bad back in the mid 2000s. In college my girlfriend couldn’t go more than about 10 minutes (literally) without checking Facebook back in like 2009.
If you’re around my age (37) and you had access to the internet in the 90s, you definitely saw way more fucked up stuff as a kid (The Stile Project, Rotten.com, etc…). We weren’t emotionally and mentally manipulated like the current younger generation is though, which is definitely fucked up. So, like you, I reluctantly support this as well.
I mean I know plenty of adults that are a tuslly addicted to tiktok as well.
Granted they aren’t actually doing anything wrong
While I am sure this is true, wouldn’t conservatives want this to fall on parents instead of regulations?
You seem confused, let me explain:
The conservative philosophy isn’t “you can’t tell people what to do,” it’s “You can’t tell me what to do. I can tell you what to do.”
My teenaged niece and nephew are hopelessly addicted to TikTok. My brother and sister-in-law (who are in their 40s/50s) decided to deal with the problem by also becoming hopelessly addicted to TikTok.
I agree. If all of TikTok was shot into the sun tomorrow, the world would be a better place.
I think you support people being better parents more than you support a state curtailing the right to free speech.
Lol did you feel this level of pearl-clutching about yourself being exposed to the internet?
Watching people grapple with the “TV is rotting kids brains” of various generations never stops being equally funny and sad.