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Utah sues TikTok, alleging it lures children into addictive and destructive social media habits::Utah has become the latest state to sue TikTok, alleging the social media company is “baiting” children into addictive and unhealthy habits.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
TikTok lures children into hours of social media use, misrepresents the app’s safety and deceptively portrays itself as independent of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, Utah claims in the lawsuit.
Arkansas and Indiana have filed similar lawsuits while the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to decide whether state attempts to regulate social media platforms such as Facebook, X and TikTok violate the Constitution.
Research has shown that children who spend more than three hours a day on social media double their risk of poor mental health, including anxiety and depression, the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit seeks to force TikTok to change its “destructive behavior” while imposing fines and penalties to fund education efforts and otherwise address damage done to Utah children, Reyes said.
They will impose a digital curfew on people under 18, which will require minors to get parental consent to sign up for social media apps and force companies to verify the ages of all their Utah users.
They also require tech companies to give parents access to their kids’ accounts and private messages, raising concern among some child advocates about further harming children’s mental health.
The original article contains 425 words, the summary contains 187 words. Saved 56%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is laughable. I played this game before with my own kids. I would find their new Myspace account and have it removed. They would just go to a friends house whose parents didn’t care and sign up for a new one. It was a back and forth. Then my now-ex started arguing with me about it once the kids started whining about it. Now they are grown and can do whatever they want. It was a battle I was never going to win, but if Utah thinks they can manage this, I would love to watch. Gonna go make some popcorn.
Trying to split the internet into “adults’” and “children’s” sections is never going to work — not without a mandatory ID system that nobody wants — nobody who isn’t attached to a spy organization or totalitarian regime, at least. You can’t treat it like alcohol or tobacco because nobody’s giving away alcohol and tobacco for free; we restrict access primarily at the point of sale. There’s no point of sale for social media, and no comparable way to restrict it.
However, what you can do is regulate advertising to the point where the dark patterns used by data-harvesting platforms like TikTok, Google, Facebook, etc. are simply not commercially viable. The EU is moving in that direction already.
Utahns are ACTIVELY playing this game with porn sites right now. Curious as to how that’s working for them.