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Comment by sundvor | Hacker News Reader

I truly see it as a Chinese campaign to dumbify our society.

We are swallowing it hook, line and sinker.

I keep hearing this and have been unable to find a shred of data to support it. Is this just a meme?

Well there are studies about the effects of TikTok. On sone level, it’s just common see sense. Whether it is a true campaign as such is questionable but it is clear the CCP tries to prevent its population being “dumbed down” from social media and other forms of entertainment and they are probably not unhappy to see the kind of content and its effects that TikTok has on the US population.

On the contrary, what I've seen of Douyin is no more substantive than what is on TikTok, it's just more compliant with CCP censorship. It is an entertainment medium first and has no pretensions about being anything else. This "common sense" you reference sounds like the same kind of "technology rots your brain" Luddite-ism that welled up for a while and then faded back into well deserved obscurity when radio and then television and then the Internet first proliferated.

I want to see the studies or even any kind of actual data substantiating this "dumbing down" or even "harm" that doesn't reduce down to teenagers saying and doing stupid shit, as has been done for a good chunk of our species' time on this rock.

You think recognizing the ill-effects of TikTok is just Luddite-ism? How nice for you. I mean, the evidence is on the Internet; here is one study[1]. I also think it is pretty clear that consuming TikTok regularly by children has a direct consequence on attention span, I don’t require the Cleveland Clinic to tell me that. I think there is a difference from mindlessly consuming TikTok than programming a C64 or playing an MMORPG with complex leveling/crafting/etc systems. Realizing that fact is not anti-technology.

1. https://movementdisorders.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/1...

It is a parents responsibility to control and monitor what apps go on their child’s phone.

What a garbage study! n=28? Self reporting? Uncritical acceptance of user profile info and video content with no verification? No mechanism of causation?

Salient quote: "64.3% of subjects cited were selling merchandise on their TikTok account related to their TikTok tics or could be contacted for paid appearances."

It's trash. It's not science. In fact, it's offensively not science. What's next, reporting on the supernatural stuff that we see on video sites? By this standard, I find the top 20 or so people on TikTok that report ghost encounters and can get a paper published about how ghosts are real.

Snark aside, if this is the quality of material you are basing your assumption of "ill effects" on, I feel more comfortable in both calling TikTok no different from any other media sharing platform, and characterizing this handwringing about it as tired Luddite-ism, than I did before reading your link.

You think it is equivalent to supernatural mumbo jumbo? It’s pretty early days for the research of this but there is also common sense. If you really think there is no difference between TikTok and other media platform then I am happy for you.

Agree. Content on Chinese tik Tok is very different.

If you want this, pass laws to force that kind of content.

So you’re saying freedom of speech is dangerous and should be curtailed? The same thing is happening locally.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

You're reeking of good faith /s

Your argument is like saying that jailing fraudsters is anti-freedom-of-speech.

Opium wars: revenge?

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