this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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If your "job" is to convince brainless zoomers to eat tide pods or convince them to try DIY plastic surgery with hammers, maybe burning out isn't a bad thing. Maybe we're just seeing nature healing itself.
Bonesmashing?! Just when I thought people couldn't get any stupider.
You get this a joke?
Children were never eating tide pods either.
Somewaht true, back at the time we had not tide pods.
But we did a lot of stupid shit even without social media.
Like all horrible male "beauty trends" it comes from looksmaxxing forums where it was a joke but the people were highly autistic and actually did it. The same thing happens when it gets to tiktok. A bunch of people post about it knowing its a joke and people who struggle to understand its a joke get sucked in.
To "normal" people its like yeah obviously this is stupid, but to someone whos extremely socially inept they view it as a real path to looking like that. I've not met someone who has done this one exactly but ive met people who have done insanely destructive things because of what they saw on the internet.
Well you can't stop everyone from being foolish. Before this they copied stuff on tv.
Thats true
You don't understand, kids are really summoning satan with their dungeons and dragons books, and every grown up should be very threatened about it!
Yes they were. Because some people really are that dumb.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/01/13/teens-are-daring-each-other-to-eat-tide-pods-we-dont-need-to-tell-you-thats-a-bad-idea/
And that's just reported numbers for teenagers. I can almost guarantee you the number of idiots that ate one and didn't know how to call poison control is much higher.
Out of tens of millions of children, that's nothing. It was pure fear mongering
It's both fear mongering and a problem. I imagine there are a lot more unreported cases, since teens are especially unlikely to ask for help with something like this. On the other hand, it was used as an excuse to attack TikTok, which is stupid because the similar things happen on other platforms and happened before everyone was on social media. Kids will do stupid things as long as peer pressure is a thing.
Your TikTok addiction may have turned you into a psychopath. "Kids die all the time, what's the big deal?"
The gun rights crowd has better arguments about why their hobby is more important than kids dying.
? I've never used TikTok...
But yes, kids die all the time for various reasons. When talking about individual causes, it's important to look at the impact on trends. Are more kids dying due to TikTok, or is TikTok merely replacing another cause?
Obviously no death is acceptable, but death will happen. The role of public policy isn't to prevent all death, but to address the bulk of it with the least invasive policy possible.
Do you think lemmy sets public policy? The only thing that happens here is people comment on shit. So you're bothered by comments to the effect of "influencers tell kids to do stupid shit and sometimes kids die because of it, and this is bad."
Why do you think that freedom of speech means no one is allowed to criticize speech? Criticism is also speech.
I absolutely agree that criticism is speech and should absolutely be protected, even if the take doesn't have merit. And that's basically what I'm doing here, I'm criticizing the FUD against social media platforms like TikTok; yes they're bad, but not bad enough to curtail speech.
And yes, Lemmy doesn't set policy, but voters elect reps who do, and there are a lot of voters here. That's why I bother discussing politics at all, in the hope that maybe someone will consider what I have to say the next time they cast their ballot. Who knows, maybe I'll persuade someone that freedom is worth more than protectionism, probably not, but I'm not doing much else while sitting on the toilet.
Did you see the part where only half of those ingestions were intentional?
You would be freaking out about rainbow parties and snap bracelets in the 90s.
Speaking of rainbow parties - that was actually a great idea. How come we never do that?
How does one unintentionally eat a tide pod? So you tell the guy when you're checking in at the ER "Homie and I were just playing catch with a tide pod and I was yelling at cousin Mabel to get off the dang roof and it just dropped into my mouth and I swallowed. It was a one in a million shot doc. One in a million."
More likely they did it intentionally and didn't want to admit to it to avoid embarrassment. That or one of their dumb buddies thought it'd be funny based on some Tiktok they saw so they dropped one into someone's bowl of Doritos.
Either way all I was doing was correcting a false statement you made about children never eating tide pods. Because they surely did.
The same way a bulb end up in someone ass...
Ngl my partner put a dishwasher pod on the counter the other day and I genuinely thought it was candy for an uncomfortably long second or so.
I feel that, looks like they might taste like one of those carnival lollipops :>
Because it looks like candy. It feels like jelly. It's individually wrapped in clear plastic, just like candy
Now, imagine someone leaves one of those on the counter, or in a random drawer. That's where loose candy lives.
So of course other people, who maybe don't do laundry and don't often see tide pods, are going to go "oh, look, candy!"
And then they call poison control as they retch and the cells in the mouth turn to soap, and they get added to the statistics
> How does one unintentionally eat a tide pod?
Title of your link:
For all those teenagers with dementia XD
Did you know that cognitively delayed teenagers exist?
Check real quick - I think “gullible” is written on your ceiling. Watch out, I hear human traffickers are putting fentanyl laced roses on car doors.
Okay, so I posted initially to correct your false statement that:
What you said was demonstrably false.
You then tried to walk that back by saying those ingestions were unintentional and posted a link to a consumer reports article about adults with dementia eating tide pods.
Now you are following it up by implying it applies to cognitively delayed teenagers.
Are you saying that your initial statement about children never eating tide pods is true based on this?
Because there are actual videos of (probably) non-cognitively delayed teenagers doing this.
I don't understand why you've chosen this hill to die on. Is this one of those things where you're so sure you're right you can't admit you were wrong? :o
You're acting like the most "well acsually" person ever. You see the word "never" and don't understand that people routinely use this word colloquially not to literally mean "there was zero cases in history of humanity". Maybe they shouldn't do that, maybe people should use "almost never" to mean "almost never", but they aren't.
If you want to engage with meaning of what the person you're arguing was saying, instead of hanging up on a technical usage of the word, their point was that sensationalist media and crazy usually religiously motivated groups love misunderstanding teenagers stupid humour, and making a big panic out of basically nothing. All the kids who really physically put tide pods in their mouths even for a second for a stupid video, can fit into one short bus. But the panic around it was so widespread, you could get an impression that everyone is popping them like tic tacs. That is a classic example of a moral panic.
Just go hide back under your rock. Next thing you'll say is that kids are absolutely safe minded individuals that stop and think about their safety and the safety of others when see they something that intrigues them.
Bro - I was literally a fucking teacher during the peak of that moral panic. I spend more time every day with teenagers than half of you on this thread do. Every kid knew it was a fucking joke. A handful of children actually did it on purpose, and like every moral outrage/hysteria it became “teens are doing this wild crazy thing!”
Yes, teenagers do dumb fucking shit all of the time. It’s not the shit the media picks up on for the viral clicks.
The real shit teens are actually doing is vaping shady carts and creating massive group chats to bully each other with naked pictures. But that doesn’t sell the same kinds of ad impressions as “there’s a stupid TikTok video that when viral so we are going to assume this is a massive regular thing that hundreds of children are doing.” Talking about those issues involves parents having to, you know, parent but instead it’s gotta be about stupid shit.
The real “hiding under a rock” is being distracted by the newest stupid TikTok video instead of dealing with the things teenagers actually do.
The point of the thread was for the influencers to fucking go and get a real job because they're just rotting brains anyway. It started with tide pods and it's grown into the exact thing you just stated. All that manosphere bullshit for example. You don't think all those podcasts, Twitch, and whatever the fuck else today's teenagers could get their hands on had any influence whatsoever from from all these dipshit people? We were all shitty teenagers so get off that "BRO I WAS A FUCKING TEACHER" high horse. It's just worse now because they're constantly bombarded by stupid fucking ideas. Welcome to the failure of the education system! Sorry you had to eat shit daily to find out I guess!