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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32717 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Gurwinder is just a self-help guru, and the post is an agglomeration of unrelated, poorly-justified ideas towards a conclusion. Not that tiktok isn't bad.

Other platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, use recommendation algorithms as features to enhance the core product. With TikTok, the recommendation algorithm is the core product [...] Since the For You algorithm favors only the most instantly mesmerizing content, its constructive videos [...] tend to be relegated to the fringes in favor of tasty but malignant junk info.

Popular twitter, facebook, and instagram posts are just as much 'junk info', though. A MrBeast or Ryan Trahan video are just as 'mesmerizing' and non-'constructive' as big tiktoks. Instagram or twitter photos of hot girls aren't any better than lipsyncing. And if the content isn't observably worse, that a 'recommendation algorithm is the core product' probably doesn't matter.

This allows it to feed your obsessions, showing you hypnotic content again and again, reinforcing its imprint on your brain. This content can include promotion of self-harm and eating disorders, and uncritical encouragement of sex-reassignment surgery [...] can cause mass psychogenic illness: [...] otherwise healthy young girls who watched clips of Tourette’s sufferers developed Tourette’s-like tics.

'hypnotic'? 'imprint on your brain'? Something neurological or manipulative is implied, but it doesn't seem to mean anything. And 'self-harm and eating disorders, sex reassignment surgery, and tourettes' are both very small parts of tiktok, and also present on twitter, reddit, and facebook, with no evidence provided tiktok is any better at promoting them than other platforms.

A more common way TikTok promotes irrational behavior is with viral trends and “challenges,” where people engage in a specific act of idiocy in the hope it’ll make them TikTok-famous. [...] One challenge, known as “devious licks”, encourages kids to vandalize property, while the “blackout challenge,” in which kids purposefully choke themselves with household items, has even led to several deaths, including a little girl a few days ago.

Again, the idea that 'dangerous challenges' happened on other social media platforms was big long before tiktok. random example. No evidence provided tiktok is worse. The simplest explanation is - people have been doing stupid things since before social media, and continued doing them on social media.

There’s a substantial body of research showing a strong association between smartphone addiction, shrinkage of the brain’s gray matter, and “digital dementia,” an umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression and the deterioration of memory, attention span, self-esteem, and impulse control (the last of which increases the addiction).

I'm pretty sure this research should've been swept away by the replication crisis, but addressing that would make this post way too long. I'll just note that the study linked doesn't mention tiktok, and is about general smartphone use. Gurwinder then idly speculates about why tiktok would be worse about other apps:

In order to develop and maintain mental faculties like memory and attention span, one needs to practice using them. TikTok, more than any other app, is designed to give you what you want while requiring you to do as little as possible. It cares little who you follow or what buttons you click; its main consideration is how long you spend watching. Its reliance on machine learning rather than user input, combined with the fact that TikTok clips are so short they require minimal memory and attention span, makes browsing TikTok the most passive, uninteractive experience of all major platforms.

Tiktok clips are shorter than youtube videos, but longer in 'time spent per thing' than tweets, many facebook posts, or instagram or snapchat images, so the attention span argument doesn't really hold. The 'reliance on machine learning rather than user input' is just confused - machine learning operates on user input, of which 'watch time' is one, and machine learning based on 'like' counts isn't obviously better than based on watch time.

If it’s the passive nature of online content consumption that causes atrophy of mental faculties, then TikTok, as the most passively used platform, will naturally cause the most atrophy. Indeed many habitual TikTokers can already be found complaining on websites like Reddit about their loss of mental ability, a phenomenon that’s come to be known as “TikTok brain.”

"Social media makes you stupid" is a widespread belief on many social media platforms, and vaguely connecting an intuition about "atrophy of mental faculties" to a study just doesn't work.

So, all of his arguments for why tiktok is worse than other social media platforms are just wrong. This makes 'china is subverting us with tiktok' hollow. More briefly on the china side - china's tiktok-for-adults is, as of a week ago, just as degenerate as US tiktok, with lots of fake stories and sexy girls. China's regulation for chinese, but not american, minors is very simply explained by a conflict between a growth/profit-seeking business and regulators - chinese regulators aren't even considering american kids, and american regulators aren't interested. I'll stop there because this is already annoyingly long.

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