jeffwIs TikTok breaking young voters’ brains?
extremeboredomThe kids are exposed to these hyper addictive algorithms, and the garbage content that gains ubiquity as a result, from a super young age. There is no way it’s not screwing up development.
paraphrandNo, it’s just like Dungeons and Dragons, according to others in this thread.
Good Lord. Was Dungeons and Dragons conceived and engineered from the ground up for the specific purpose of exploiting the dopamine pathways in children’s brains? Not so much. Sounds like tiktok has successfully eroded the minds of others in this thread.
Do you know how many tines I’ve heard the “designed to exploit the dopamine pathways” line? You know how much proof I’ve seen for that? Zilch, nada, nothing. Not a single source is ever provided to back that claim. Does that automatically mean it’s a false claim? No, but it’s definitely suspicious. From my limited time looking into it for myself all I can see is that TikTok does, in fact, produce a dopamine response. That’s it. None of the (very few, this is an under-researched subject) studies I have found even differentiate it from other sources of dopamine. Hell, one of the articles I saw used fucking the amount of time a fucking hashtag stays on the trending list as an indicator of the degradation of attention spans. I trust I don’t have to explain how those two are only superficially linked.
Tik Tok’s design clearly taps into psychological principles that drive addiction. The infinite scroll and unpredictable content rewards work like slot machines in a dopamine-driven feedback loop. This keeps users glued to their screens, often without realizing how much time has passed. The For You feed continuously adapts to like a million data tracking points, and spits out a constant stream of whatever content it deems most likely to keep you scrolling. Neuroscientists have pointed out that heavy TikTok use can reduce attention spans and increase the need for instant gratification which are effects tied to dopamine stimulation. Obviously bytedance isn’t going to publicize the proprietary research they used to accomplish this. But the app clearly uses these engagement-maximizing techniques. That also goes for Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit (they wish lol) and the rest of them. But in tiktok’s case, it’s an export from an adversarial nation, and you only need to look at the internally approved version of tiktok for Chinese users, which promotes a completely different kind of content.
Which neuroscientists are saying that? All the articles I’ve found referring to “TikTok Brain” quote one Dr. Patrick Porter. And I have become quite wary of trusting one man’s word, even that of a professional, since the whole vaccines cause autism thing.
Here are several studies, I have not read all of them but they are what I found:
…ubn.ru.nl/…/277e3219-85d2-41ac-92f3-4ac3745c1d58
www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/16/8820
The effect of TikTok exposure on young adults' sustained attention span and the comprehension of information in digital texts and videos.
Limited literature has shed light on how individuals’ cognitive abilities may be impacted by the use of TikTok, a social media app that captures users’ attention. This raises the question of whether exposure to TikTok (light/heavy users) has an effect on young adults’ sustained attention span and the comprehension of information in digital texts and videos. This study gathered information about 191 participants on the basis of their TikTok exposure, comprehension of information, and attention span. TikTok exposure was shown to have an effect on sustained attention span, particularly in relation to distractibility. Heavy TikTok users had more difficulty blocking out distracting thoughts than light TikTok users. However, TikTok exposure had no effect on information comprehension and this effect was also not influenced by the format in which the information was presented (text/video). Accordingly, the effect of TikTok on information comprehension is not as detrimental as initially assumed.
The first one is one that I didn’t find in my own time. It correlates heavy usage of TikTok with a decreased ability to block one’s own distracting thoughts. Certainly interesting, and worth further study, but the author’s appear to have equated that correlation with a causal effect. They did not satisfactorily delineate between someone who has a poor attention span and is attracted to TikTok because of it and someone with a poor attention span caused by TikTok.
The second and third studies I have already addressed in my other comments. The second study being the Chinese one that demonstrated a correlation between heavy TikTok usage and memory loss, anxiety, stress, depression, etc. Again, important findings, but crucially not causal. The third is the meta analysis that refused to make a statements regarding detrimental effects of TikTok usage.
The fourth isn’t a study, it’s an article. This article does link to several studies, however the only one the directly mentions TikTok is, again, that same study of roughly 3,000 Chinese students. The rest of the studies mentioned are targeting social media use in general.