Tiktok 'directs Child Accounts to Pornographic Content Within a Few Clicks'

It might be because I always block anyone with an OF link in their bio, but then that policy doesn't work on Insta.

They are in the business of whipping up outrage, and should not be given any oxygen.

the latter is what they tested, but they didn't say specifically pervasive.

you quote the article so it seems like you looked at it, but questions you are curious/skeptical about are things they talked about in the opening paragraphs. it's fine to be skeptical, but they explain their methodology and it is different than the experience you are relying on:

>Global Witness set up fake accounts using a 13-year-old’s birth date and turned on the video app’s “restricted mode”, which limits exposure to “sexually suggestive” content.

>Researchers found TikTok suggested sexualised and explicit search terms to seven test accounts that were created on clean phones with no search history.

>

>After a “small number of clicks” the researchers encountered pornographic content ranging from women flashing to penetrative sex. Global Witness said the content attempted to evade moderation, usually by showing the clip within an innocuous picture or video. For one account the process took two clicks after logging on: one click on the search bar and then one on the suggested search.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon

Yes, people would care. People who have been ringing the alarm bell regarding kids on social media for literally decades now.

Congress wouldn't care. Mark would make $ure of that...$omehow, but I can't quite figure out exactly what he would do. $omething $omething "campaign donation$".

Because such places are significant spots for propaganda and misinformation relating to both topics?

Guess those dumb TikTok-wannabe Shorts/Stories didn't work out.

Up next: Terrorist attacks coordinated via TikTok?

Or maybe a school shooting, leading to a ban on TikTok instead of guns.

Oh Murica..

It works in China because they have chat control to the extreme.

Yeah, it's OK to say no.

If the kid wants a phone and snapchat, there's nothing wrong with saying you simply won't be supplying that and if they want it they'd best figure out how to mow lawns. If you're old enough to "need" a phone you're old enough to hustle some yardwork and walk to the T-Mobile store yourself.

I think you are right to be worried, and I think you are correct that it is different:

IIRC, there were some Kremlin leaks some years ago indicating they knew how to "infect" a population with certain propaganda and have the disinformation live on or linger. Together with Meta's/Facebook's (illegal?) study where they experimented on people to try to make them sad by showing them certain types of posts.

So, I think it stands to reason that controlling what you consume means being in control of what you think; in other words: we are what we watch.

We know there are some feedback loops occurring, but I think that it is easier to get desensitized and start becoming accustomed to very extreme content due to the pressure to fit in; perhaps — once one has participated, it might be even harder to be deprogrammed (it requires facing the fact one behaved wrongly towards others).

There's also the fact that being a good person takes a lot of willpower, dedication, is inconvenient and is notoriously difficult to market as "fun".

It is more palatable for an impressionable kid to watch cheap foreign-state-backed radicalizing-propaganda than it is to learn about injustices being perpetuated in our behalf by the state apparatus.

We have developed the habit of being wary of what we consume in order to police our emotions (i.e. minding our mind so no desensitization happens in our watch).

We have seen what the "baddies" can do: the indifference to the suffering they cause, and the cruelty and pettiness they are capable of.

But I digress,... I think you are right to be worried, but I am unsure about how to train kids to not fall into the pipelines.

https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/digital-threats/tikto...

I think it boils down to the simple fact that policing user-generated content is completely possible, it just requires identity verification, which is a very unpopular but completely effective idea. Almost like we rediscovered, for the internet, the same problems that need identity in other areas of life.

I think you will also see a push for it in the years ahead. Not necessarily because of some crazy new secret scheme, but because robots will be smart enough to beat most CAPTCHAs or other techniques, and AI will be too convincing, causing websites to be overrun. Reddit is already estimated to be somewhere between 20% and 40% robots. Reddit was also caught with their pants down by a study recently, with an AI robot on r/changemymind racking up ridiculous amounts of karma undetected.