[HN Gopher] Italy Blocks Users on TikTok After 10-Year-Old Girl ...
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Italy Blocks Users on TikTok After 10-Year-Old Girl Died in a
Blackout Challenge
Author : sodrick
Score : 86 points
Date : 2021-01-23 11:15 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (relayvibes.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (relayvibes.co)
| sirsuki wrote:
| I wish there were certifications that parents could enforce kids
| to get concerning topics like drugs, sex, social media, sexual
| harassment, etc. the world has many dangers for developing
| children. Having a talk about them and then having refreshers
| yearly is a good thing. Adults do this for topics like CPR etc.
| why not these. Especially since now a days it isn't a few dangers
| but many in places even parents are ill equipped to understand
| themselves.
| andygcook wrote:
| Wouldn't a better solution be for parents just to talk to their
| kids regularly about safety? An outsourced certification to me
| just seems like a way for parents to skirt around the hard
| topics and deflect responsibility.
| tgv wrote:
| Many people aren't responsible and/or caring. They drink and
| drive, drive too fast, have loaded guns lying around, etc.
| Getting parents to raise their children according to certain
| norms is going to fail.
| toomanybeersies wrote:
| Not to be flippant, but hasn't this kind of thing been going on
| since long before the internet?
|
| It sounds like the addition of social media has created a media
| circus, rather than a new problem itself.
| aaron695 wrote:
| Clearly this is a game kids have always played. I'd think most
| adults know of it. We have records 100 years ago of this game,
| I assumes there would be records further if someone looks.
|
| This also sounds like typical moral panic, it's a pretty shitty
| "high".
|
| > to their brain in order to get high.
|
| It'd be nice to put a bit more structure to all this. Are
| deaths going up for this particular game, is it more dangerous
| because participants do it alone, are children doing it
| younger. Are suicides and other things that kill the youth down
| because of social media.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| My off the cuff guess would be that social media has
| increased the rate of teen suicides.
| tgv wrote:
| Would the girl have done it, and died, without TikTok, that's
| the question.
| packersville wrote:
| No, they are wondering if this type of activity has been
| going on all along but now the internet just informs us of
| the case by case.
| tokai wrote:
| <<Youth who participate alone in the choking game are a
| particularly high risk group, exhibiting substantially higher
| rates of suicidal ideation and poorer mental health compared
| with youth who participate in the choking game in a group.>>
|
| I would guess her risk was elevated.
|
| https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/138/6/e201607.
| ..
| tgv wrote:
| That doesn't mean much without knowing why they did it
| while alone. What does "participation" in that context even
| mean? And it doesn't change the possibility that a
| "challenge" on social media had an influence.
|
| Any guesses about the risk she was in a priori are not
| relevant, and cannot be determined from that paper.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| Well at least this challenge will only cause self-harm, unlike
| the "knockout game" from a few years ago.
| devops000 wrote:
| Social media are too dangerous for <15 yo
| mbg721 wrote:
| As with most everything else that's too dangerous for people
| under 15, saying that will instantly make it popular.
| concordDance wrote:
| Letting children be able to communicate with eachother means
| they'll goad eachother to do stupid things. This has always
| been true and the choking game (and consequences) is ancient.
| kodyo wrote:
| She died a winner. How many of us will be able to say the same?
| slim wrote:
| children suicides have been attributed to the internet without
| any proof since 2010 at least (remember blue whale challenge?).
| but they are always conveniently used for propaganda against the
| designated enemy of the moment
| [deleted]
| notorandit wrote:
| Pur parents in jail.
| C19is20 wrote:
| Despite all the talks from my parents, I still did silly and
| dangerous things, as I suspect the majority of us did.
| Personally, mine would be up for 20-life for all my crap.
| sodrick wrote:
| For me, any child below 15 years has no business with social
| media...social media is highly distractive, even to adult ...the
| shud be a regulation restricting children from social media
| OneGuy123 wrote:
| This might protect children for a while but sooner or later
| they will become addicted to it.
|
| We will have to modify/add this to our educational system,
| there is no other way around it or parents will have to teach
| children this themselves (which is problematic since adults
| themselves are also addicated so we are missing a huge part of
| the puzzle of how the mind truly works).
|
| A lof of adults think they are not addicted to
| twitter/facebook/hackernews but they somehow magicaly find
| themselves browing hackernews and facebook "suddenly and for no
| reason at all".
|
| This seems to be one of the few books that actually works in
| practice: it is about porn addiction but it seems to be
| applicable to social media addication also.
|
| https://easypeasymethod.org/index.html
| andrepd wrote:
| Skimmed through that book, it sounds like complete hogwash.
| Masturbation is evil + pseudoscience + "just quit bro".
| choeger wrote:
| I wouldn't have a problem with social media per se for my kids.
| It's the sheer size of the population that concerns me.
|
| In most "normal" situations, parents can identify their
| children's contacts quickly and they can observe the black
| sheep closely and in the worst case try to prevent any further
| contact.
|
| In social media, the weirdest and worst people are just a click
| away and you won't even notice it. Right now, there probably is
| a new trend or group out there that is extremely dangerous, or
| outright criminal and I don't even recognize it.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Ok, so you _aren't_ fine with social media, given that this
| isn't something you can control. It sounds like "I'm fine
| with it, just not any of it's bad sides."
| __s wrote:
| The problem is "social media" casts a wide net. Social
| media use to be friends & friends of friends. It's evolved
| to recommended content feeds
| thegreatpeter wrote:
| But it's not that anymore so you're not fine with it,
| right?
| choeger wrote:
| So if one is not 100% fine with everything that follows
| that means they must reject it? Weird world view.
|
| So I have to reject cars because of their negative effect
| in dense urban areas?
|
| I have to reject alcohol at all or be fine with alcoholism?
| Fargren wrote:
| The issue is that you said what bothers you about social
| media is "the sheer size of the population", but I would
| say the size of the population is what makes it social
| media. It's akin to saying I like cars except for the
| fact they move faster than a person. You could
| technically have something called social media that has
| low populations, but it would be so functionally
| different from the actual thing that using the same name
| becomes questionable.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _So I have to reject cars because of their negative
| effect in dense urban areas?_
|
| Yes, sounds good.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > I wouldn't have a problem with social media per se for my
| kids.
|
| The thing is that the people/kids dying because of dumb
| challenges or the occasional illegal/gore/murder videos &c...
| aren't even the problem
|
| These things are built to steal your attention and use every
| trick in the book to make you a brainless scroll monkey.
| There is a reason why not a single SV executive will let
| their kids anywhere close to social medias. These things
| destroy people's brains, and especially the brains of kids
| which are still developing and are extremely malleable to
| this type of conditioning. tiktok/snapchat/instragram &co
| bring absolutely nothing good to a kid's life, they're pure
| distraction devices
|
| > parents can identify their children's contacts quickly and
| they can observe the black sheep closely and in the worst
| case try to prevent any further contact
|
| Unless you monitor your kids 24/7: no, and again, these
| tools, even when used "safely" are still engineered to
| artificially trigger and reinforce the most basic reward
| pathways of your brain and this won't bring anything good to
| your kid's life
|
| You can very well make the analogy with weed or alcohol. What
| might be fine for an healthy adult (able to set his own
| boundaries and conscious of the potential risks) would
| destroy a 10 years old kid very quickly
| tacitusarc wrote:
| >The thing is that the people/kids dying because of dumb
| challenges or the occasional illegal/gore/murder videos
| &c... aren't even the problem
|
| They are maybe a little bit of the problem
| intrasight wrote:
| I partially credit my daughter's great concentration abilities
| with not having much exposure to social media until high
| school.
| watwut wrote:
| Yeah, complete social isolation from peers during pandemic is
| much better plan.
|
| This ship sailed before covid already. But with covit, it is
| online discussion or nothing.
| tedunangst wrote:
| What evidence is there to suggest the "blackout challenge" was
| popular?
| Udik wrote:
| So far, I didn't see evidence that it even exists. Tiktok
| denies that such material exists, and so far I think there's
| only the parent's statement. Let's see what the investigation
| will find out.
| jka wrote:
| Is popularity a relevant factor?
| 1experience wrote:
| Yeah, keep children isolated for ten months and then blame Tiktok
| for their alienation; akin to blaming death on a fever instead of
| the disease that caused it.
| lucb1e wrote:
| For anyone else out of the loop, the blackout game involves
|
| > participants blocking oxygen to their brain in order to get
| high.
| ljm wrote:
| It's worrying that all someone has to do is put 'challenge' or
| 'game' at the end of a dumb idea and it'll spread around social
| media like wildfire. Suddenly everyone's recording a video of
| themselves to get acknowledgment from strangers in the form of
| likes or upvotes.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| After the Bird Box Challenge, I stopped trusting "challenges"
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 1010010 wrote:
| What's actually happening: Italy has requested TikTok to disable
| user accounts beloging to users of unknown/unchecked age. TikTok
| has until Feb 10 to comply.
| enditruu wrote:
| Yeah, this isn't a very specific headline. Seriously thought
| Italy had blocked TikTok access to the whole country for a
| moment.
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| Directly from TFA:
|
| > The report shows that the Italian Data Protection Authority
| had blocked TikTok till February 15th immediately till
| regulator's demands are met
|
| This certainly reads like TikTok has been blocked till
| February 15th, at which point they expect TikTok to verify
| users' ages.
| sodrick wrote:
| The part was removed due to insufficient space ...
| vanekjar wrote:
| How is the ban implemented? It doesn't sound realistic and the
| article doesn't share technical details.
| [deleted]
| collyw wrote:
| Lets stop calling it "social" media as there is nothing social
| about it.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| Hmm, wasn't there some challenge on Tiktok last year where some
| unsuspecting victim got their legs sweeped and some kid got
| serious brain damage?
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| Yes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/02/19/the-
| skull-b...
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| I don't use TikTok, I never will (As a disabled person[1]).
|
| But age detection is a hard problem. Several years ago I was
| running a chat-app network' platform for privacy focused dating
| allowing communication between,
|
| Messenger <-> Telegram <-> Viber <-> LINE
|
| First major issue I ran into was that in SE Asian countries many
| used their children photographs for profile picture in chat apps,
| which obviously was a no go for dating, so I had to implement
| Amazon Rekognition to detect age, make those users change their
| profile picture and their profiles weren't displayed until it was
| changed. At peak it processed 200,000 images/month.
|
| But Amazon's model was biased and resulted in several false
| positives for darker skin color marking several adults as
| children; But since false positives were better than false
| negatives for this case I went on with it. Amazon told me that
| they are working on fixing their model, not sure whether it has
| improved.
|
| [1]https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-
| us...
| amir734jj wrote:
| That's why I use OpenDNS content filtering. When a kid figures
| out how to bypass dns filtering, he/she has reached adulthood.
| I'm 26 and I use DNS content filtering for myself. There is so
| much nonsense in the internet.
| eznzt wrote:
| Darwin is going to get upset.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| It's a really worrying trend that these dangerous challenges gain
| so much popularity on social media. I wonder what's in the center
| of this trend. Are we somehow getting dumber as a species or are
| some other factors at play.
| simonh wrote:
| We're not getting dumber I'm afraid, it's just getting more
| visible.
| simion314 wrote:
| IMO children were always like this, not thinking about risks. I
| remember how many risky things I done with my bike and we never
| listen and always played football on the street, and now this
| feels to me like as children we are somehow blind to this
| risks.
| matwood wrote:
| I grew up mostly before the internet and we did lots of
| stupid things as kids, including this exact black out stunt.
|
| What I think social media has done though is push people
| beyond their normal internal brakes. You and your friends
| might push each other to do risky things, but friends tend to
| care about one another internally. Anonymous people on the
| internet don't know you or really care about you, so it's
| easier for them to push people into riskier situations.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| My parents were progressive - they considered me and my
| brother as little adults basically, and they've educated us
| on many serious topics early on (sex, contraception, drugs,
| death). Adults were always amazed how well-behaved and mature
| me and my brother were. But we still did stupid and dangerous
| stuff as adolescents, like playing with fireworks, making
| lighters explode, huffing nitrous crackers, smoking, cycling
| around drunk, painting graffiti, etc.
|
| There's really nothing parents can do, other than pray for
| the best.
| tremon wrote:
| _There's really nothing parents can do, other than pray for
| the best._
|
| I wish this attitude was more prevalent, both among parents
| and lawmakers. More and more, it seems we're legislating
| against any possible turn of fate that could happen, and
| both personal freedom and a sense of personal
| responsibility suffer for it.
| chokeartist wrote:
| > But we still did stupid and dangerous stuff as
| adolescents, like playing with fireworks, making lighters
| explode, huffing nitrous crackers, smoking, cycling around
| drunk, painting graffiti, etc.
|
| Lol sounds like we had a common background. There were so
| many close calls looking back that I just shake my head and
| am thankful no one ever got seriously hurt.
| avereveard wrote:
| > children were always like this
|
| however we're in a somewhat novel situation as mistake past
| will follow you in caches and meme dumps for years and years,
| well into adulthood.
|
| sure it's comparable to having had a bad reputation back in
| the days before internet, but you could just escape it by
| changing town or correct it if your social circle was small
| enough. with internet, no such luck, getting past one's young
| self mistake is going to be quite harder.
| yorwba wrote:
| The internet equivalent of skipping town is deleting all
| your accounts and signing up for new ones, perhaps on other
| platforms.
| amelius wrote:
| This might be a difficult thing to do, though, for
| someone who is addicted, and deeply invested in different
| online relationships.
| avereveard wrote:
| you're stuck at a 199x model of internet social
| interactions, these company are posing as stand in
| replacement for personal interactions and as such are
| trying their hardest (and succeeding, even, especially in
| the younger population with is the subject of this
| discussion) in registering people with their true
| identities.
| yorwba wrote:
| That makes the similarity to physical social interactions
| stronger, not weaker. Most people live their offline
| lives under their true identities.
| avereveard wrote:
| The image you phisically project in other people head is
| a) ephemeral b) local c) not indexed and d) inaccessible
| from unrelated third parties
|
| I can't believe I've to explain this...
| rgoulter wrote:
| Sure. But I would believe social media exasperates this.
|
| With social media, you're not just showing how brave you are
| with a stupid dare compared to a few of your friends, but
| competing against the most dangerous thing you've seen.
| simion314 wrote:
| I think the effects could be larger but the children are
| not more dumb because of the media. I am sure similar
| stupid things were done in the past but you would not known
| that some child in a far away country died because of a
| stupid challenge.
|
| Maybe off topic, but some of the risky stuff I done with my
| bike were when I was alone and were not to show of, it was
| all about going fast or going fast on dangerous path or
| just not paying attention.
| danielrpa wrote:
| Social media algorithms can exploit weaknesses in our bodies
| and minds, presenting a threat for which evolution hasn't
| prepared us.
|
| The kids like it exactly because it's dangerous and can make
| them feel older and "cool". Ultimately, the powerful, data-
| driven algorithm discovered that and showed the video, among
| certainly others, to optimize some engagement metric for the
| poor little girl.
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| I think people need a reminder of what the internet really is.
| anyone anywhere can start a website with questionable content
| and people. It was your own responsibility to deal with the
| information you voluntarily searched in an apropriate manner.
| Now the internet feels like a honeytrap with how safe and
| moderated everything seems. The same goes for kids for example.
| It is normalised that they are allowed to be on the internet
| yet seemingly no one actually thought trough what the
| implications are.
| djohnston wrote:
| This challenge was around in the early 2000's, probably before.
| I don't think anything has really changed it's just a new app
| so journalists can write new articles. Is there any evidence
| this challenge is more popular now than it was 15 years ago?
|
| This seems like another case of Politician's Syllogism:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
| usrusr wrote:
| Well, pretty much everything you can do alone at home would
| be more popular now than 15 years ago. But the general
| pattern of kids bonding over imitation and acknowledging an
| informal hierarchy via imitation order is certainly not new
| at all.
| __s wrote:
| For more info on how this activity has existed for awhile,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choking_game
| psyc wrote:
| We used to do this in middle school. That was 30 years ago.
| We used to do it a lot. You stumble around on autopilot
| talking gibberish. The world looks like that shadow world
| Frodo goes to when he puts the ring on. Then you come to on
| the ground with short term amnesia. You can see how 11 year
| olds would think it was awesome. I didn't know it was
| dangerous until my dad found out and completely lost it with
| me.
| klyrs wrote:
| I discovered the effect all by myself. I noticed that I could
| deliberately make my face beet red (as a ginger, the effect
| was quite drastic). It was hilarious to my peers, but I was
| always the wild one, so it was a spectator activity for them.
| One day, I clenched too hard, or too long, passed out, and
| fell to the ground. I got up quick as I could, brushed it
| off... but never did it again.
|
| So in a sense, yeah, I'd bet that kids have been doing this
| "forever." OTOH, what's missing from my story is the peer
| pressure (albeit their amusement encouraging me) and the
| network effect. Social media can transmit memetic disease
| faster than we've ever seen. Is social media to blame for
| this behavior? Hell no. Does social media aggravate the
| situation? Without question.
| amelius wrote:
| > Are we somehow getting dumber as a species or are some other
| factors at play.
|
| Perhaps one problem is that we now have a front row seat in
| Darwin's theater. When stuff like this happened in the past, it
| resulted in a small article in a local newspaper, at most. The
| internet makes us think that this stuff is happening all the
| time, when in fact it isn't really.
| usrusr wrote:
| The ruthless attention economy on the networks. It's not
| inherently dangerous, many participants get by perfectly fine
| competing for attention with other things than outdoing each
| other in dangerous stupidity, but some don't know a better way.
| And the participatory nature of the "challenge" pattern spreads
| it to the less desperate. Remember "planking"?
| MayeulC wrote:
| To add to other replies, the population is growing.
|
| Also, there might be less children proportionately (is "peak
| children" behind us in absolute numbers?), and survivability is
| higher, making these dumb games proportionally more visible.
|
| Of course, social media doesn't help. Firstly, for visibility.
| Secondly, everyone now has more connections to "dumb" friends,
| and a direct window into their lives. Lastly, current
| attention-focused recommendation algorithms often promote
| shocking, attention-grabing content, which makes such things
| both more visible, and likely to go viral. It also rewards
| sharing such content: more prominently displayed, it is more
| likely to "get likes", and fuels the pool of attention-grabbing
| posts the platform can use.
|
| Today's social media is full of perverse incentives, for a very
| marginal benefit to its users (even if that might not be
| obvious to them, as they are led to believe the contrary).
| polyterative wrote:
| boredom kills
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