We've mitigated some of that stuff though; with fast food we've required calorie counts to be displayed alongside the menu items, which allows you to make an informed decision, even if it's a bad one.

With TikTok there's just being forcefed without knowledge of how any of this black box algorithm bullshit works. It's like going to McDonalds and being able to have unlimited hamburgers of infinite uniqueness and getting unhealthy in the brain.

I mean, we have actual data this time proving that it's limiting attention spans and is incredibly addictive. This isn't the classic right-wingers fearmongering over smoke and air, there's genuine psychological issues being caused by the app.

It's not a moral panic this time though, it's a legitimate concern.

Nothing has ever produced these billions of sub-30-second, algorithmically curated dopamine blasts.

Video games were a moral panic because they "promoted violence" and TV was supposed to make you stupid, which, it kind of does depending on what you consume. They both required you to sit still and focus on something though.

There are kids who can't sit through a movie without pulling out their phone because they're just used to being onto the next thing in 10 seconds.

So you can bitch about it being a moral panic or whatever you want to do to make fun of people who think it's a concern, but it's very clear to me from seeing how damaging excessive screen time is on young kids personally that things like YouTube shorts and TikTok are actually super damaging in a number of different ways. They were right about phones, because they've facilitated the mass delivery of this content.

Those disn't have algorithms and psychology baked in to lure you in