this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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Out of tens of millions of children, that's nothing. It was pure fear mongering
It's both fear mongering and a problem. I imagine there are a lot more unreported cases, since teens are especially unlikely to ask for help with something like this. On the other hand, it was used as an excuse to attack TikTok, which is stupid because the similar things happen on other platforms and happened before everyone was on social media. Kids will do stupid things as long as peer pressure is a thing.
Your TikTok addiction may have turned you into a psychopath. "Kids die all the time, what's the big deal?"
The gun rights crowd has better arguments about why their hobby is more important than kids dying.
? I've never used TikTok...
But yes, kids die all the time for various reasons. When talking about individual causes, it's important to look at the impact on trends. Are more kids dying due to TikTok, or is TikTok merely replacing another cause?
Obviously no death is acceptable, but death will happen. The role of public policy isn't to prevent all death, but to address the bulk of it with the least invasive policy possible.
Do you think lemmy sets public policy? The only thing that happens here is people comment on shit. So you're bothered by comments to the effect of "influencers tell kids to do stupid shit and sometimes kids die because of it, and this is bad."
Why do you think that freedom of speech means no one is allowed to criticize speech? Criticism is also speech.
I absolutely agree that criticism is speech and should absolutely be protected, even if the take doesn't have merit. And that's basically what I'm doing here, I'm criticizing the FUD against social media platforms like TikTok; yes they're bad, but not bad enough to curtail speech.
And yes, Lemmy doesn't set policy, but voters elect reps who do, and there are a lot of voters here. That's why I bother discussing politics at all, in the hope that maybe someone will consider what I have to say the next time they cast their ballot. Who knows, maybe I'll persuade someone that freedom is worth more than protectionism, probably not, but I'm not doing much else while sitting on the toilet.