Bipartisan Group of State Attorneys General Launch Nationwide Investigation Into TikTok (mass.gov) 29
Today, Attorney General Maura Healey launched a nationwide investigation into whether TikTok is designing, operating, and promoting its social media platform to children, teens, and young adults in a manner that causes or exacerbates physical and mental health harms. Attorneys general nationwide are examining whether the company violated state consumer protection laws and put the public at risk. Mass.gov: AG Healey, along with her colleagues across the country, has long expressed concern about the negative impacts of social media platforms on Massachusetts's youngest residents. "As children and teens already grapple with issues of anxiety, social pressure, and depression, we cannot allow social media to further harm their physical health and mental wellbeing," said AG Healey. "State attorneys general have an imperative to protect young people and seek more information about how companies like TikTok are influencing their daily lives." Leading the investigation into TikTok is a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Vermont. They are joined by a broad group of attorneys general from across the country.
Here, let me save some taxdollars (Score:5, Insightful)
That counts as both investigation and final report. Free of charge.
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Why not be simple...require them to only allow access to social media by those that are adults, 18 or older (Hell, go 21 if you want)....
That would then force them to stop pushing ads to teens and collecting info on teens.
I know no age verification system is perfect, BUT, if you give this a try, it will cut down on number of teens on social media, thus reducing the draw of teens to social media.
We have a
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Or maybe parents can be responsible for the habits of their children instead of the nanny state.
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End result == tiny money fine (Score:1)
Why since 100 years ago have govenement investigations into bad business practices result in only money fines? 100 years ago they resulted in breaking up of trusts.
The US, EU were not built up to have 5 large companies have 80%+ of the market.
The solution is to break up these companies, instead of a fine which is paid by company liability insurance
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Broken clock fallacy. Sometimes you can be right for the wrong reasons.
Right reason: negative impact the app is having on people
Wrong reason: TikTok users were mean to me
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Yeah - it's just a coincidence that he only took action 2 weeks after the aforementioned rally. Even though TikTok had been under review by the federal government for most of a year by that point without any action.
15 day deadline. Everyone talks, nobody knows anyt (Score:2)
Trump took action precisely when he was allowed not and required not by law. He has to sign off (or refuse to) within 15 days. By law.
Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, formally requested the CFIUS investigation because Bytedance had blatantly violated the terms of the acquisition. That means CFIUS has to do their process.
After CFIUS does their process, which takes about a year, the president has 15 days to sign off on the finding. Or choose not to sign off on it. He doesn't get to choose the
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The action I'm referring to was while CFIUS was still ongoing. Both the July 7 announcement of their own investigation and the July 31st divesture order happened long before that investigation was complete.
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> Both the July 7 announcement of their own investigation and the July 31st divesture order happened
You're thinking of the August 14 order that was discussed on July 31. That would be the order sending it back to CFIUS to certify compliance after 60 days. That's the order giving them an extra 60 days, and directing CFIUS to grant an additional 30 days if certain conditions were met.
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Trump does not care what you think of him.
BwaaaHaaaHaaa!! Mod +10 funny!!
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Most people would consider me a leftist, and I supported a modified form of that...and also thought it wasn't sufficient.
What I supported was banning from federal military bases and other secure areas any application that called home that hadn't been specifically approved as not something that would put information on troop locations or other sensitive data at risk. And I still support that.
This is a different "grounds for attack", and I'll need to think about it, but I'm not certain I'm against it. As fo
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Like other social media? (Score:3)
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Whatever mental crack Tiktok is serving up to teens is probably true of all other social media platforms.
I've taught my children from a young age that videos are to be recorded in LANDSCAPE mode only. Hopefully they'll avoid TikTok as teens because it's just wrong, just like pineapple on pizza and hanging the toilet paper with the loose end behind. We have standards.
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If a cat wants to play with your toilet paper it doesn't matter which way you install it. This is why I don't bother installing it at all. It's in the cabinet under the sink which fortunately is within reach of the toilet.
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Wrong (Score:2)
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Scale matters. That addictive burger place might reasonably be allowed on a small scale, but once they start growing it's proper to place them under additional scrutiny and tighter regulation. The larger they are, the more strongly they should be regulated.
Remember, once upon a time most hair dyes contained lots of lead. We don't allow that any more. So are you arguing that we should allow that, and let people choose? Remember that people don't notice delayed or subtle effects.
I Genuinely Laughed... (Score:2)
...at the title of this post.
TikTok isn't mental crack, it's frickin' methamphetamine. We're talking Heisenberg quality, here.
Anyone I know with TT on their phone just scrolls, non-stop, unlike anything I've ever seen before, and these are folks who don't have any diagnosed problems.
The folks I know with ADHD or Autism Spectrum Disorder are practically helpless without a non-stop fix. It's genuinely frightening.
Nanny State (Score:2)
This is the responsibility of parents, not the nanny state.
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but parents willingly abdicate their responsibilities if it gives them a little more "me" time.
If you can't take care of them physically, emotionally, and intellectually then don't bring them into the world.