? 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.

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.

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!

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!

The mechanic is usually the actual worker - you run a repair shop

But what is being repaired? A machine of some kind? And the machine is operated in pursuit of another actual productive activity, right?

Machines are just about the application of mechanical force in some way, and that in itself isn't an end goal. Instead, we want that machine to move stuff from one place to another, to separate things that are apart or smush/mix separate things together, to apply heat or cooling to stuff, to transmit radiation or light in particular patterns.

Everything in the economy is just enabling other parts of the economy (including the informal parts of the economy). Physical movement of objects isn't special, compared to anything else: kicking a ball on TV, singing into a microphone, authorizing a wire transfer, entering a purchase order, answering a phone, etc.

I'm not seeing a real distinction between an IT consulting business and a heavy equipment maintenance/repair business. The business itself is there to provide services to other businesses.

My point was not only that aspect, but also about the fact that input and output of the task is information. And while information itself can be a "product" or be provided as a service, in most cases, it's not.

But anyhow, I feel like I'm overexplaining myself over a term I said wasn't good.

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.

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.

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.

Won't someone think of the poor influencers!? Sorry, "creators". Just like Van Gogh and Stanley Kubrick.

Well you can't stop everyone from being foolish. Before this they copied stuff on tv.

You say that but i appreciate their efforts. And wile i will understand and expect creators to work at their own pace, if only the algorithm wasn’t 100% momentum driven AND/OR i could just get front page notification when my subs post something, and didn’t just unsub me for not watching a video for a wile. I am an adult and can manage my own feeds

Thats true

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.

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.

How does one unintentionally eat a tide pod?

The same way a bulb end up in someone ass...