"TikTok is just like reading a book"

-OP

Tik tok is legitimately rotting their brains though.

Tiktok definitely doesn't fall into anything intelligent that's for sure.

They’re not wrong. Screen time is known to be harmful to children. And radio time may have been as well: hard to say, because kids aren’t listening to that kind of radio anymore. Two things can be true at once: pointing fingers at something that doesn’t apply anymore (when’s the last time you listened to a radio serial?) doesn’t invalidate the harms today.

Here’s what the actual experts say:

https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/Children-And-Watching-TV-054.aspx

Tiktok is digitial media, the attention span is the issue, not the media format.

I know a few people who admitted to me without me even probing them that they cannot handle watching or listening to a video over 1 minute long.

I am not for censoring Tiktok, however I will never used it since its horrible on privacy and has "back doors" to a powerful and malicious government. And I like videos that are long with good discussion or information.

TikTok conditions you to process media very quickly, id it doesn’t catch you within a few seconds you’re on the next one — that sort of thing then applies access the board and not only when browsing TT

Especially since children are still developing their brains this makes it even more problematic

To be fair as someone who over my life has transitioned from reading, to the internet, to videos, to short form content. it does have an effect on your attention span.

My advice. Do what you will, but never stop reading. Pick up some books.

TikTok, Social media, video games, rock and metal music, rap music, Dungeons and Dragons, Rock 'n' Roll, movies, phones, bikes, novels, older generations will always chose a scapegoat to focus on

Eventually it will be our turn

Just so you know, newspapers used to be pretty terrible in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were ripe with exaggerations and sometimes downright lies. The issue with TikTok and social media in general is how easy it is for absolute idiots to spread lies and harmful information to children (and naïve adults).

Here's an article on the topic from the New York Public Library.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

Counterpoint: They used to be able to memorise the works of Homer.

The fact that people have been concerned about this for generations doesn't automatically nullify the point. Attention and focus are skills which children must develop through boredom and long-form focus. TikTok brain is making that harder and harder for children to learn.

Tiktok is not comparable to these other technologies, as TikTok uses an individualized algorithm to manipulate its users.

They're all mediums. The content on them can be anything from mindless to informative.It's all up to who's curating it. Do you leave it up to the algos and advertisers or actually provide something to your kids? Up to a certain age letting them do whatever on the internet is idiotic like letting them run around a bookshop that carries porn and mein Kampf.

Wholey depends on the content of said delivery platforms. Tik-tok content does tend to lean towards mindless entertainment. If it was a bunch of learning or information content as the majority, people would have less of stink about it.

Too much of anything is bad obviously.

John Philip Sousa had only terrible things to say about... wait for it... player pianos.

I feel like the actual danger is too much of a single kind of stimulation. So if you ONLY sit around and read books, literally never go outside, never take a walk, never go out with friends, stop working... Is your contention that people were wrong to warn against doing that?

Now, have you seen how some people consume TikTok? They will literally do almost precisely what I've described above. Just sit and stare and scroll for hours. Neglect other life activities.

If you scroll TT for an hour per day, you're never going to experience negative effects from it. If you scroll it for 14 hours a day, you will probably become a vegetable. Find a happy medium (for me it's 0 hours per day but everyone is different), eat, go outside sometimes, spend time with real life people, go to work or school, etc.

Meanwhile, parents are on all of these believing every conspiracy theory they see.