Surely we’ll see legal action against all of them?
For example, I’ve found that YouTube shorts will identify multiple creators or formats that you engage with and rotate between them, while Instagram reels tends to find one niche you respond to and then bombard you with it.
Regarding comments, shorts will promote shallow observations about the video while reels promotes controversial ones to get one to engage by arguing.
This treatment should include lots of other products like for example videogames or flavour enhanced junk food
https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/news-events/all-news/faculty-new...
Tobacco companies pivoting and hooking kids and adults with processed foods
> Fazzino’s new study found that by 2018, the differences in previously tobacco-owned foods and other foods had mostly disappeared. It’s not that foods got healthier, Fazzino said, but that other companies saw what worked and many products likely were reformulated to make them just as hyper-palatable as those sold by their competitors.
Kind of explains why snacks are so delicious and irresistable.
I'm neutral on (tobacco company creation) Teddy Grahams though.
> bologna, crackers and processed cheese contained so much sodium and saturated fat that some doctors called it a “blood pressure bomb.”
swap the crackers for celery and you could market it as keto/low carb
But sure, let's add TikTok to the list of moral panics.
All the examples you gave involved sorting kids into good and bad categories. There were good kids who were victims caught up. And there were bad kids, who the good kids needed to be warned to stay away from.
So far as I know, no one has yet said that any kids who use TikTok need to be separated from any other kids. And I don't remember that happening with Facebook or MySpace before them. Everything earlier is before my time.
Numerous studies have been done on the effect of "dopamine hijacking" that is common to platforms like TikTok. The effect this has had on children's attention span has been measured. In particular CocoMelon has been at the forefront of this. Colloquially this has been called "brainrot". The pacing, colors, frame timing, etc are all studied in a lab to achieve maximum engagement. This isn't necessarily a problem for content designed for adults. Ostensibly, adults can make a choice whether or not to consume addictive entertainment. However, for children this type of material is sold as educational. There's a direct line from attention span to screen time that is suspected to be the reason for poor performance in Gen Alpha.
However, anyone, child or adult, that has spent time on these platforms has found themselves locked into a doom-scrolling loop.
This is all so well known at this point it's common knowledge. The only people shilling for this content to be unmoderated work for these companies themselves.
If we are to say TikTok is a moral panic than we should also say cigarettes are a moral panic. After-all, all you "have to do" is stop smoking. No harder than stopping scrolling. I would challenge you to sit through CoCoMelon or "gagagadee Chicken Nugget" and determine if it's a moral panic or a crisis originating from terrible parenting. Hell, just click over to Youtube Kids and leave it playing for a while. It will quickly diverge into brightly color, precisely measured, loud, fast paced, and nonsensical videos labeled as "educational".
> All the while these people never seem to get too concerned that a significant percentage of American children only get fed at school by the school, don't receive proper medical care and have very little wherewithal to get an education beyond high school
FWIW this is a classic misdirection. I care simultaneously about these things. But the lowest hanging fruit that I personally can understand is preventing our kids from watching the social media equivalent of a gallon of ice cream. There wouldn't be a "moral panic" if kids were binge watching full length episodes of Nova and National Geographic.
You call my argument reductionist while grossly oversimplifying the concept of "dopamine hijacking."
I think it's a shame that your values are such that you place feeding children below worrying about TikTok. That is what I think the problem actually is: ignoring the core problem facing children and getting caught up in this feel-good BS that you're helping "the children" while not doing the hard work of actually helping the children.
<cue up dramatic sarcastic voice> Certainly politics isn't playing any role at all in this good-hearted attempt to "protect the children."