<
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211029/15005647840/forget-kids-these-days-adults-their-moral-panics-to-worry-about.shtml>
"A recent episode of the
Reply All podcast,
Absolutely Devious Lick,
touched on a bunch of interesting points regarding the never-ending debates
about social media, content moderation, and how it's supposedly damaging the
kids these days. It's worth listening to the entire episode, but it begins by
talking about a very slightly viral TikTok "challenge" which became known as
Devious Licks — lick being slang for something you stole. It started with a
kid putting up a TikTok video of him holding a box of disposable masks,
suggesting that he had stolen it from the school. Because school kids sometimes
do stupid things to copy their stupid friends, a few others posted similar
videos, including one early one of a kid taking a soap dispenser. And then
there were some stories of it spreading and people going more extreme, because,
you know, kids. But it didn't seem to spread that far initially.
But, of course, the thing
became a lot more viral after mainstream media
jumped on it with their typical "OMG, the kids these days" kind of coverage,
starting with the
New York Times,
CNN,
USA Today and then like every
random local news jumping on the trend to tsk tsk about the kids these days.
Prominent grandstanding Senator, Richard Blumenthal called on TikTok execs to
testify over all of this, which turned into another ridiculous Senate hearing
in which old men yell at social media execs about how they're harming kids.
But, scratch the surface a little, and beyond a few dumb kids, this seems a lot
more like
adults over-reacting and freaking out, and making the story go
much, much, much more viral than it did in reality."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
