It’s a group of people concentrated in a small area

Uhhhh… What? What groups in what area? The US is massive, has a low population density and popular opinion is incredibly geographically fragmented. There aren’t really organized militant communes and certainly none that would be hostile to the admin…

I seriously doubt that even in the high density, mostly blue areas people would kowtow to drones glassing city blocks just to kill one or two insurgents that might statistically live there. When the penalty for merely existing near a suspect is death or getting your house leveled there’s not an option to lay down. You either move out (and take your anger with you) or buckle down and start hiding your neighborhood insurgents so (hopefully) the bombs don’t get dropped at all.

They don’t give two shits about the general public

About their safety? No. But they still need to maintain some order so the social machine functions. The USA just doesn’t have the political mechanisms or generational fealty to allow military policing of domestic life. And as we’ve learned 1000x over from history, a hostile occupying force doesn’t work as a long term strategy.

If a population decides they’re not gonna put up with it then that’s the end of it, one way or another. Grooming a populace to accept military policing would mean drastically overhauling social + political structures and unwinding 400 years of law enforcement precedent. There isn’t any project 20XX that could possibly do that, these idiots just lack the patience and foresight to realize that.

Sure, if you go in with the idea that the ban won’t impact their social media usage then it obviously follows that it won’t impact their usage. And that might be true for a while, but:

• Declining usage compounds and any barrier to entry drops users. Reddit wouldn’t be suing to stop this if they didn’t think it was a major threat to their platform.
• The single largest factor in platform membership is peer membership, and the most influential peers in adolescent development will always be real life friends
• A cohort aging up doesn’t mean that the next cohorts will automatically follow. Late millennials weren’t tied to Facebook, Gen Z wasn’t married to Snapchat, a drop in TikTok usage will eventually precipitate a need to migrate somewhere else
• Global social media usage, by human screen time, has been declining from its 2022 peak (excluding a North American exception), with the largest drop among younger users

Putting all of this together, it seems very plausible that child bans could hasten this decline. It would probably work twice as well if more public money was directed to alternatives (third spaces, clubs, etc…).

But imagine that you get stuck in a water pipe or wedged somewhere in a rain storm. Glowing is annoying but not nearly as bad as potentially drowning because your car crashed into a lake and you can no longer escape through the window.

You can covertly buy and take illicit drugs all by yourself and have a good time. Bypassing a ban to get on a social platform with very few of your social peers is… pointless?

So what if you get to watch a tiktok from the other side of the world, none of the kids in your class are sharing that experience and building the peer pressure.

The controversy over his public presence (both real and contrived) has convinced me that if you want to be any kind of serious public figure you should never-ever-ever put anything off-hand in text or on video. Let alone stream yourself for hours at a time.

Take some time to compile your thoughts and don’t just spit out hot takes. It’ll get you attention for sure, but it’s not worth the scrutiny and drama hunting. For real, look at the people in this thread latched onto a single clip of a dog yelping weeks (months?) ago. Is that such a core and defining feature that I should completely discredit him? Doesn’t seem like it, but I also don’t want to dig through hours of content to find out.

Sorry, wording was unclear. Their methodology was pulling everything in pubmed on “social media” or “social network”, “health”, and “pediatrics”. Nothing particularly biasing in either direction.

something you potentially have no sufficient alternative for should be denied.

Not having an obvious alternative ready doesn’t change the cost/benefit weight for society at large. Just because cars are the only way we have to navigate suburban sprawl doesn’t absolve them of being one of the worst modes of transport for safety, the climate, passenger efficiency, etc… We should be talking about radically restricting their use, not shrugging and trying a driver education bandaid.

For a laugh, a scoping review of social media and adolescent risks through 2022. Sure, plenty of questions on causality, but also quantitative articles on direct impacts to physical health and harmful exposure to constant ads. In dozens of articles, just 1 (one) article finding a positive socializing impact… I’m certainly leaning towards denial by default…

I’m trying to “use my damn brain”, I want genuine research showing this as a benefit that outweighs the numerous and well documented negatives that social media causes in children and young adults (depression, social isolation, body image issues, extremist and regressive worldviews, sleep and concentration issues, and on and on…).

If you can actually show me that it saves queer kids from oppression in a way that couldn’t be done via other methods (school programs, library funding, safe and child friendly neighborhoods, media representation, etc.) then maybe we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Otherwise this is keeping the baby by voluntarily flooding your house with sewage.

Strangely enough, support networks can exist outside of social media. It’s very possible to directly message friends or neighbors without being subjected to the dregs of public social media. It remains possible to get world/local news without an attached public forum.

If you’re going to make a space that has content for adults and allows for free adult discussions (with all the nuance and complications that entails), then restrict it to adults only.

This is only a problem in conjuction with legislation requiring social media use (ie: as an official broadcast system, payment platform, electoral tool, etc…). If we fight that and force it to remain an opt-in disinformation platform then who cares?

As it currently stands nothing is forcing you on these platforms other than a conditioned familiarity. Even worse, there are no tech or legal protections preventing them uniquely identifying users today. Them getting an official state ID doesn’t change much. More barriers to entry for a shitty surveillance and propoganda platform? Literally no downsides there.

Wasn’t aware that social media keeps kids alive?..

I’ve seen enough stories on kids being cyber bullied into suicide that I really doubt there’s enough happy inclusion on these platforms to balance that.

Short form video (and it’s sibling, the infinite headline scrollers) are the final evolution of engagement architecture. There’s nothing inherently nefarious about an algorithm presenting content, but these platforms fracture the content into a bottomless feed of tiny dopamine doses, requiring some smart behavior to present all of that.

I’d argue that a short form video platform couldn’t exist without a finely tuned algorithm. With long form videos the barrier to creation limits the pool of available content. A smaller and deeper pool is more manageable for manual curation. A wider and shallower pool is exponentially harder:

• Just navigating each video (even a <1s interaction) adds a large overhead to consuming the content. This could be 16% of your time watching 6s vines.
• You basically have to watch most of the clip to judge it’s quality. Even a 3s glance could put a hard floor of watching 5-10% of all content.
• The amount of video topics in short form dilutes high quality creators. Is it likely that a creator who covers 3 topics in interesting, in-depth 30 minute videos could match that engaging runtime with 90+ diverse topics?

Take out a content distilling/targeting algorithm and your platform is unusable.

No clue, but the frosted looks easier to read to me

I’ll do you one better, Dichroic Glass Dice

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Damn didn’t know I was an LLM? Thanks for the heads up, good discussion

Being a doomer is bad if you’re stating theories as facts while giving no supporting evidence. For example:

• Why would withdrawn international relations result in right wing voting? Isn’t it more likely to fuel populist voting (not strongly attached to regressive or progressive policies)? What historical trends are you looking at? Just pasting the American flag onto the Weimar Republic based on vibes?
• What makes you think the polling is temporary? Putting aside the topic of fair elections, voters who have been subjected to this administration’s chaos and are consistently polling negatively will turn on their heads and lick boots because of… Saber rattling? A weak passport? An (even more) destroyed economy? 300 million cases of Stockholm Syndrome? I’m really scratching my head here…
• 1% by what metric? The collapse will drag out for 100 years? Wealth? The USA will be using stone age tools by the end of it? Population? Deaths? Quality of life? Deportations?.. It surely can get worse but 99% in almost any metric is absurd.

I can’t even agree or disagree with you because your comments are so shallow that they can’t hold up to a discussion; ergo bad.

Russia also has 4x the population of Ukraine, so the manpower issue is still notable on a relative scale.

I mean, what would you suggest instead? Some system where a simple plurality can elect your fringe candidate? We could give the seat to whatever candidate Passes the Post First?

What you’re describing has nothing to do with the voting system. If your candidate is so far to the fringe that they can’t overcome the gravity of the primary center then they should probably be in their own party. If the voting public wouldn’t rank them above all other weak moderates in the general then that’s a problem with your electorate and election funding rules.

Weird-ass thing to get on your high horse about. If you’re so concerned about phone numbers, get a burner and a sim card with cash. Or, you know, use a communication method designed with anonymity in mind.

Would it be better to have anonymous sign up? Sure. But if you’re on a Google or apple device and got Signal from the first party store, your app usage is probably already enough to fingerprint you.

Signal was never about anonymous chat, it’s built for secure e2e chat between known parties. If you have a different threat model then there’s other options for you.