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Comment by troyvit | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear families became popular long after our species was considered homo sapiens, and even today they aren't the norm for most of our species, so I don't understand what you mean when you say the ship has sailed.

I'm all for systemic changes, but lets make them more real than a national firewall, which is only treating a symptom, and instead focus on how we can make raising kids economically and socially feasible again.

I never said we should "push" responsibility on "every single person that interacts with kids," however, it wouldn't hurt if families would actually "take" a little responsibility in it. If we had UBI it would be a lot simpler for them to do so, but I'm guessing that's not on many peoples' list of systemic changes.

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The ship has sailed on us being able to deal with influences like modern social media on an individual level. Modern social media like TikTok, Twitter and even YouTube Shorts are fundamentally designed to take advantage of what our brains evolved into over millions and millions of years.

The nuclear family can't do shit about it. That's just a dream, an ideological fantasy. We don't need a dream. We need real solutions. "People should take a little more responsibility" isn't a solution. It's just empty wishful thinking and part of the reason why things are so screwed up today.

I think we're disagreeing about what real solutions are. To me, banning TikTok won't change anything because Instagram, Youtube, etc. will take over what they did and/or VPNs will become the new awesome. To you, altering how families are formed or making child care free, or establishing UBI are (probably accurately) impossible dreams.

So what would systemic changes and improvements would you make, keeping in mind the First Amendment?

> keeping in mind the First Amendment?

The first amendment doesn't apply to companies. Shutting down TikTok doesn't prevent you from exercising free speech. That's not how it works. Like, I'm not going to bother with this conversation if this is the direction you're going to take it.

And the fact that "Instagram, Youtube, etc." will just do it shows that regulations and laws are required. Systems that prevent companies from doing whatever they want in controlling the opinions of citizens in other countries. How is that compatible with the first amendment? Do you even understand the issue? Do you even understand the first amendment?

> The first amendment doesn't apply to companies.

It does apply to corporations (https://reason.com/video/2019/09/05/corporations-and-the-fir...).

While Tik-Tok writes the algorithms that allows advertisers and influencers to manipulate people, it's the advertisers and influencers who are doing the manipulating, and it's their speech that would be affected by any laws.

So yeah I guess we aren't going to be continuing this conversation. We just disagree on what is systemic and how to go about fixing it.

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