Comment on Parents sue TikTok over child deaths allegedly caused by ‘blackout challenge’

• liyunxiao@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  If you think harmful memes didn’t spread before the internet, then you really have no understanding of human behavior.

  The blackout challenge or variants have been around since at least the 1970s in the US.

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  • paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I never said such a thing.

    This is about broadcasting. Not word of mouth. If you can point to countless examples of broadcasting, please educate me.

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    • liyunxiao@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      If you’re asking this and trying to argue this genuinely, then you’ve entirely lost the plot.

      ‘broadcasting’ doesn’t enter into this. Kids will do this regardless, and have done this regardless for much longer than the UK has had access to any type of video media.

      The only difference is kids can now show their stupidity to the world… Which they have been able to do for the last 40 years to some extent. We don’t call a personal website broadcasting, because by no written definition could it be considered that. Neither is YouTube broadcast media, nor any internet thing (strictly speaking).

      Neither is Tiktok, nor will be what comes after it, and so on.

      Now we could change the definition of broadcast to mean any internet site or app and apply broadcast standards to it… but that just means the UK loses access to the Internet. No one would comply, because what power does a tiny island in perpetual economic decline have? If UK didn’t have any advertisers sites would already ignore it.

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      • Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Archie Battersbee didn’t even film it. This is a case where a child tragically committed suicide and the mother is trying to blame tiktok for some reason.

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      • paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Broadcasting, publishing with instant and far reach, etc. with the power of the algorithms to amplify. Whatever you want to label it. I only used “broadcasting” because for the 1 to many communication. Many being more than a handful of friends.

        It is different from word of mouth. It is another party amplifying the behavior you are saying already existed.

        That’s my point. And you just stated it. The difference is they can show the world and perpetuate the “challenge” by modeling it for thousands of others instead of just their local friends/kid in the neighborhood.

        you are discounting the power of the platform algorithms to connect these kids and to amplify the appearance of this behavior as normal.

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