this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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If this were an unbiased and honest article; then it would read “Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for social clout.” The subtle message, in this article, is TikTok = bad, which is illogical because events such as this will occur regardless of platform or even lack of a platform. It will ALWAYS happen. The question is how to mitigate these events as much as possible, because it’s impossible to completely eradicate “kids doing X for social clout.” It’s a part of learning and being human.
Yes but without tik tok this is a kid or two being stupid and charged a couple hundred at one school. I think we had 3 kids today at school destroy their laptops.
You can replace TikTok with any social media platform. That’s why this argument is illogical in that it blames TikTok.
But it's not happening on any social media platform. These sorts of "challenges" and trends seem to happen almost exclusively on TikTok, for whatever reason.
I don’t remember Friendster causing mayhem like this.
Lemmy seems to not be spreading challenges either.
You have a point, but TikTok has a unique power in this moment.
And if the students did see it on TikTok, then it’s factual, specific, reporting.
TikTok is at the forefront of designing algorithms that optimize for this sort of situation. Reddit isn’t. YouTube does not appear to be. They have their own issues, but it’s not exactly this sort of optimization.
VRChat is another social network not optimized around incentivizing this mimicking and reposting behavior.
Snapchat is not built around this sort of algorithm either.
If it had happened on Friendster; then it would have been because of the specific user(s) creating and posting such content, not because of the platform. To say platform = bad because a user or users post negatively affecting content is a sweeping generalization which does not reflect reality, meaning that the negative connotation of TikTok = bad is still incorrect. The users which created and posted such content, in this case, are to blame.
If students see such content on social media; then the first thought should not be: platform bad; it should be: who posted it, and for what reason(s).
It can be an issue with the people starting these challenges while also being an issue with the way tiktok works with sharing these copycat videos on the platforms algorithm.
I don't think "omg tiktok bad" but in the case of these dumb challenges, it is one of the few things I can see people actually pointing at when saying tiktok is bad, rather than "but china."
Yes, and this article reinforces that idea, regardless of whether or not TikTok = bad is correct, which is my point.
Yeah, could have been called “kids are learning how circuits work thanks to TikTok trend” and suddenly the story has a whole other meaning