Sad-Posting on Tik-Tok

It's all bad for you, all of social media. 

These platforms seem to be getting worse, though. Either that, or more scrutiny is revealing how lethal they are.

At WSJ, "Self-harm, sad-posting and disordered-eating videos abound on the popular app":

Calls to ban TikTok in the U.S. are growing louder. Government leaders are trying to keep the popular China-owned social video platform away from schools, public workers, even entire states, on the grounds that users’ data could wind up in the wrong hands.

Data privacy, though, might be less worrisome than the power of TikTok’s algorithm. Especially if you’re a parent.

A recent study found that when researchers created accounts belonging to fictitious 13-year-olds, they were quickly inundated with videos about eating disorders, body image, self-harm and suicide.

If that sounds familiar, a Wall Street Journal investigation in 2021 found that TikTok steers viewers to dangerous content. TikTok has since strengthened parental controls and promised a more even-keeled algorithm, but the new study suggests the app experience for young teens has changed little.

What teens see on social media can negatively affect them psychologically. Plenty of research backs this up. The simplest evidence may be found in my earlier column about teens who developed physical tics after watching repeated TikTok videos of people exhibiting Tourette Syndrome-like behavior.

A TikTok spokeswoman said the company has a team of more than 40,000 people moderating content. In the last three months of 2022, TikTok said it removed about 85 million posts deemed in violation of its community guidelines, of which 2.8% were suicide, self-harm and eating-disorder content. It also considers the removal of content flagged by users. “We are open to feedback and scrutiny, and we seek to engage constructively with partners,” the spokeswoman added.

Two-thirds of U.S. teens use TikTok, and 16% of all U.S. teens say they’re on it near constantly, according to Pew Research Center. Kids’ frequent social-media use—along with the potential for algorithms to lure teens down dangerous rabbit holes—is a factor in the American Psychological Association’s new recommendations for adolescent social-media use.

The group this week said parents should monitor their younger kids’ social-media scrolling and keep watch for troublesome use. The APA also urges parents and tech companies to be extra vigilant about content that encourages kids to do themselves harm.

‘Every 39 seconds’ The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that works to stop the spread of online hate and disinformation, tested what teens see on TikTok. Last August, researchers set up eight TikTok accounts to look like they belonged to 13-year-olds in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia. For 30 minutes, researchers behind the accounts paused briefly on any videos the platform’s For You page showed them about body image and mental health, and tapped the heart to like them.

TikTok almost immediately recommended videos about suicide and eating disorders, the researchers said. Videos about body image and mental health popped up on the accounts’ For You pages every 39 seconds, they added.

After the researchers published their findings, many of the videos they flagged disappeared from TikTok. Many of the accounts that posted the material remain. Those accounts include other videos that promote restrictive diets and discuss self-harm and suicide.

TikTok does take down content that clearly violates its guidelines by, for instance, referring directly to suicide. Videos where people describe their own suicidal feelings, however, might not be considered a violation—and wouldn’t fall under moderator scrutiny. They could even be helpful to some people. Yet child psychologists say these too can have a harmful effect.

TikTok executives have said the platform can be a place for sharing feelings about tough experiences, and cite experts who support the idea that actively coping with difficult emotions can be helpful for viewers and posters alike. They said TikTok aims to remove videos that promote or glorify self-harm while allowing educational or recovery content.

The company said it continually adjusts its algorithm to avoid repeatedly recommending a narrow range of content to viewers.

‘Sad and lonely’

The Center for Countering Digital Hate shared its full research with me, including links to 595 videos that TikTok recommended to the fake teen accounts. It also provided reels containing all of the videos, some of which are no longer on the site. I also looked at other content on the accounts with flagged videos.

After a few hours, I had to stop. If the rapid string of sad videos made me feel bad, how would a 14-year-old feel after watching this kind of content day after day?

One account is dedicated to “sad and lonely” music. Another features a teenage girl crying in every video, with statements about suicide. One is full of videos filmed in a hospital room. Each of the hospital videos contains text expressing suicidal thoughts, including, “For my final trick I shall turn into a disappointment.”

Users have developed creative ways to skirt TikTok’s content filters. For instance, since TikTok won’t allow content referencing suicide, people use a sound-alike such as “sewerslide,” or just write “attempt” and leave the rest to the viewer’s imagination. Creators of videos about disordered eating have also evaded TikTok’s filters...

'Every Parent's Nightmare': TikTok Is a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation

At the Wall Street Journal, "Law-enforcement officials say platform has emerged as biggest danger zone; adults who watch videos of young people are served up more of them." 

TikTok Influencers Push to Unionize Amazon

These people are kids with millions of followers on social media.  And they're demanding Amazon pay its workers $30.00 an hour. Right. Fucking brats. 

At WaPo, "Gen Z TikTok creators are turning against Amazon":

A coalition of top TikTok stars is pledging to cease all work with Amazon — including shutting down storefronts and halting new partnerships with the e-commerce platform — until the company meets the demands of the Amazon Labor Union.

Boasting a combined following of over 51 million, the group of 70 TikTok creators says that the campaign, called the “People Over Prime Pledge,” is designed to pressure Amazon to meet the requests of its workers, which include a $30 minimum wage, increased paid time off and halting activities the group considers “union busting.”

“Amazon’s widespread mistreatment of their workers and blatant use of union busting tactics will no longer be tolerated by the TikTok Community,” reads a statement from Gen Z For Change, an advocacy group that coordinated the pledge and works frequently with creators.

Amazon Labor Union, which did not help organize the People Over Prime Pledge, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The campaign is a public setback for Amazon, which has sought to develop tighter relationships with young influencers in recent years. In 2017, the company launched the Amazon Influencer Program, allowing creators to earn revenue by recommending products in personalized Amazon storefronts. Earlier this year, Amazon flew more than a dozen Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok stars to a luxurious retreat in Mexico to encourage influencers to grow their presence on the platform. In June, Amazon built a massive VIP lounge at VidCon, an annual conference for online video stars, where influencers could learn about ways to work more closely with the company.

Instagram knows you don't like its changes. It doesn't care.

“I think their method of offering influencers life-changing payouts to make them feel as if they need to work with them while also refusing to pay their workers behind the scenes is extremely wrong,” said Emily Rayna Shaw, 24, a TikTok creator with 5.4 million followers who has partnered with Amazon in the past. “I want to feel comfortable recommending Amazon products to my community because it is so reliable, but I can’t do so until I know that they are treating their workers fairly.”

Many of the creators behind the People over Prime Pledge have done promotional deals with the company but plan to shut down their storefronts and decline future partnerships because of concerns over worker treatment. Creators who have worked with Amazon say that the company requires them to sign nondisparagement agreements, so that they can’t speak negatively about the platform even when the deals are over.

Amazon — which is the second-largest private employer in the U.S., where it has a higher rate of worker injuries than its competitors — has increasingly become a target for organized labor. In April, the independent Amazon Labor Union won an election at a large fulfillment center in Staten Island, marking a major union victory. Amazon workers are also organizing facilities in Bessemer, Ala.; Garner, N.C.; Albany, N.Y.; Campbellsville, Ky., and San Bernardino, Calif.

But the company has cracked down on these efforts, disciplining, firing, and even calling the police on some workers who show support for unions. The National Labor Relations Board has said some of the company’s conduct violates labor law, but the agency has limited resources to police a company of Amazon’s size. Even at the warehouse where Amazon Labor Union won the election, the company has successfully delayed the start of the contract-bargaining process, which itself could take months or years to complete.

[Amazon could stymie unions for years by going to the courts.]

Jackie James, 19, a TikTok creator with 3.4 million followers said that she will not be doing deals with Amazon until they change their ways. “As an influencer, it’s important to choose the right companies to work with,” she said. “I don’t think that workers should be treated the way they are under Amazon.”

Yet as labor organizing efforts within Amazon have hit speed bumps — Amazon Labor Union lost a second election in Staten Island in May — the movement has remained high profile, attracting support from Sen. Bernie Sanders and President Biden. Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls appeared on a prominent Twitch stream last week, and the hashtag #hotlaborsummer has popped up on Twitter.

Amazon has previously denied discontent among its workers, arguing turnover is a function of the company’s flexibility. “A large percentage of people we hire are re-hires, showing that they will choose to work for us when they want to,” Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokeswoman, told The Post in June. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.

“We’re demanding that Amazon listen to their workers and make changes to provide a healthy workplace environment,” said Aidan Kohn-Murphy, founder of Gen Z For Change, who also posts on TikTok. “Until Amazon institutes these changes, we as creators will block Amazon from monetizing one of the largest social media platforms in the world.” ...

The Frictionless Politics of the Social Technocracy

From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "The war between messy realities and smooth illusions may determine our future":

Pass a Tesla on the street or pick up an Apple Magic Mouse and you encounter the sleek simplified aesthetics that underlie the mindset of the new technocracy. Apple used Picasso's Bull, a set of drawings that reduce the animal to a stylized cubist abstraction, as the basis for its own minimalist aesthetic reductionism. It’s an aesthetic that meshes with Big Tech’s love of frictionless experiences that make complex processes appear deceptively simple.

Eliminating the extrusions on a car or a computer peripheral doesn’t actually make them any simpler to construct or to operate. It’s a marketing strategy that also shapes how people think of technology. Early computer kits were messy assemblies of wire and circuit boards. The early internet was a sprawling assortment of unregulated content. That was around the time that science fiction author William Gibson, a foremost promoter of Cyberpunk, coined the term "cyberspace". A generation later, Gibson even more radically envisioned the internet disappearing and being reduced to a few apps on the phone. And that is what happened.

A sizable percentage of the population now experiences the internet by flicking through platform apps like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Google, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Amazon. People flocked to frictionless experiences that simplified the internet from a bewildering jungle to a few apps whose algorithms offered customized push content to provide a distraction for a few minutes or hours. And those platforms ended up in charge of our society and our culture.

Free speech was the first casualty of the simplified internet. Most people give it away for convenience. And they never missed it until suddenly they realized that they wanted to say or hear things that the new platforms no longer allowed. Big Tech wanted people to keep on clicking, but not in a way that disrupted their business model, their politics or culture.

The problem wasn’t just censorship. The nature of how people experienced the internet had been fundamentally altered from open to closed, from pull to push and from independent distribution to a few centralized hubs. Senate hearings and threats of Section 230 intervention wouldn’t turn back the clock on not just how the internet was run, but how people used the internet.

And how people used the internet was also how speech, culture, and politics now worked.

The frictionless internet was both a model and a microcosm of a frictionless society, one in which the complex processes of the political system were ‘simplified’ and people did what they were told without realizing that is what they were doing. Cass Sunstein's 'Nudge’ suggested using sensible “choice architecture" to "nudge" people to make the right decisions. The book by the future and former Obama official came out a few years after Time Magazine declared "You", as embodied by the social web, to be its "Person of the Year"

“You” turned out to be “Them”. Personalized recommendations were omnipresent nudges. Web 2.0 wasn’t empowering, it was profoundly disempowering. Moving from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ content turned netizens into passive feed consumers who were being distracted from their lack of agency with a bombardment of fake controversies and social media spawned nonsense. The two defining modes of Web 2.0, narcissism and trolling, were responses to the medium that also defined our society and our culture which is now one long battle between narcissists and trolls.

Early algorithms like Google’s PageRank that were bottom-up instead became top-down. The only true way to simplify everything was to rig it. And as the internet became everyday life, the difference between rigging the feed and rigging political systems became meaningless.

American elites envied the “frictionless democracies” of Europe where committees and stakeholders determined outcomes while allowing the public the illusion of participation. European elites appeared to synergistically merge media, political and corporate leadership into a smoothly running machine that amplified the right ideas and suppressed the wrong ones.

American politics was an old gas-guzzler with tail fins, fuzzy dice and smoke coming out of the hood while the elites wanted a sleek simplified electric car where all the dirty stuff happened out of sight and the public showed up on cue to vote the way that they were told.

Obama began the technocratic simplification of American politics. His brand was Picasso’s Bull applied to politics, a modernistic sketch, an abstraction, a set of delineations that simplified much, but offered nothing. Elites were impressed with how Obama simplified complicated issues with hollow aspirational platitudes. The more he spoke, the less he had to say, but the more moved the elites were by all the unspoken depths that they were sure lurked underneath.

“We are the ones we have been waiting for” was the embodiment of Web 2.0. Much like the “You” in YouTube, Obama and Big Tech were seizing power, not turning it over. The illusion of social participation was that power was being transferred to those who showed up instead of those running the system. And public frustration with the glass ceiling of the technocratic betrayal led to cultural backlashes on the internet and everything from Trump to Brexit.

Politics is meant to be ugly and messy by design. A too tidy politics has been rigged.

Frictionless politics eliminated debate and dissent. Or as Obama recently argued, "If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work."

Democracy is based on a behind the scenes consensus, as he put it, "what to do about climate change" that has no room for someone who says, "This is a hoax that the liberals have cooked up." Political debate can’t extend to questioning premises, only pathways to outcomes. In a frictionless democracy, captive conservatives can offer “free market solutions” to global warming or racial inequality, but they can’t question whether these should be on the agenda.

The manufactured consensus in which people are allowed to differ on tactics not agenda items is the simplification of electoral politics that has taken hold in many first world countries. It is what leads people to think of different parties as flavors or variations on a theme. The illusion of choice fools many, but not all, especially as real problems take hold and cannot be addressed because they do not fall within the ideological premise of the artificial consensus.

Democracy that is all sleek lines, a mere hint of form, seeks to rid itself of the messy disagreements under the illusion that the elemental truth of a civilized society lies in eliminating the mess rather than embracing it. Europeans used to think this way, but Americans knew better. The Founding Fathers embraced the mess and made it the epicenter of our political experience. Radicals think that they are discrediting the Constitution when they delve into its messy history. To simplifiers who think like teenagers, the messy cannot be ideal and true.

Simplification suggests that life is simple. And that technology simplifies problems rather than complicates them. Thinking this way makes it all too easy to believe in preposterous abstractions like Modern Monetary Theory or Zero COVID. To simplify is to believe that following experts and relying on simple answers will create a natural unity like Obama’s right side of history. When political philosophies replaced religion, they outsourced Divinity to experts and to the invisible hands of whatever guiding force they believed governed all human affairs.

To deny it is political heresy or misinformation. The categorization of classes of speech as “misinformation” or “disinformation” merges politics and technocracy, reducing political dissent to a computer problem. Ideas become binary, either true or false, sorted based on expert opinion. Technology did not originate this familiar tyranny. but its aesthetics make it seem logical and rational. Riefenstahl and Eisenstein made the Nazis and Communists seem heroic figures struggling for the soul of man. Technosimplification is even more pernicious in the way that it suggests that the problems have been solved and all it takes is clearing away the excess.

Simplicity can be more dangerous than totalitarian grandiosity because the cult lies within. Its invisibility makes it more seductive. Totalitarians wanted to overwhelm society while the simplifiers underwhelm it. Less is more, society could stand to lose pounds, conveniences, and complexities. Individualism isn’t a political crime, it’s an inconvenience. Morality is a trend and the conscience surrenders to the algorithm. You will own nothing and be happy.

The minimalism that makes anti-aspirationalism seem aspirational also made anti-capitalism into capitalism. It tapped into eastern philosophy to envision a seamless future that would replace the industrial revolution with a unity of art, technology and culture. That way of looking at the world remains central to key Big Tech giants like Apple, Netflix, and Facebook. Its hodgepodge of zen and business jargon is often mocked, but still defines the machine.

The internet, like the rest of our society, is at war between its messy truths of human nature and the technology underneath and the sleek simple aesthetics that make abstract socioeconomic theories seem realizable with a smooth technocracy and better AI. Progress comes from embracing the messiness of human nature and technology, repression comes from smoothing it away. That war between messy realities and smooth illusions may determine our future.