China and our children. AIBU to be deeply concerned?

This isn’t entirely true. It shows you a variety of videos when you first start and for some videos you don’t understand what you are watching until the whole video has ended or you once you do realise that you don’t want to watch it and swipe up.
This seems especially true of videos about sex trafficking, abuse etc so once you have watched one, it serves you more. A lot of this content is extremely hard hitting and upsetting and unfortunately there is not much chance to stop the algorithm once it thinks you want to watch it.
now factor in young teens accessing this for the first time, what parent has thought to go through this with their kids before they let them join up? People just don’t know how bad it can be.
more studies have shown how additive the algorithm is even on ‘nice’ content. It is addictive, it is designed to be this way.
I also saw a tik tok, ironically, that showed someone set up a profile of a 13 year old girl and within hours the type of content that was served to that account around eating disorders.
I have deleted my account now and I wouldn’t ever go back.

And the tantrumming thing you speak of, we have a non stop battle with screens, taking them away, banning, restricting, doing the ‘come on family games night’, ‘come on, family walk’, getting kids over, going to activities, forcing them into playing with the dog etc etc.

Even with all that my kids are bemused when they hear of kids screaming and tantruming over screens. An adult with asd that my dh works with said the best thing is mum ever did was take away his iPad when he’d stayed up all night gaming and missed college. She just got rid of it.

He said he had a two day meltdown and then came down to his family again. We need to parent our way out of this (and to be fair I’ve been on mn too much lately- I need to get back to real life too!)

Perhaps the government could raise all children according to an agreed set of standards and hand them back to parents once they hit 18?

Or alternatively we could perhaps expect the people who’ve chosen to bring life into today’s world to, I don’t know, inform themselves and parent?

For somebody who doesn’t like China, you are certainly a fan of authoritarianism.

If you are concerned about the Chinese government mining our data, let me introduce you to the all American, Big Five of Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook) and Microsoft. What do you think of our government possibly selling our NHS medical data to American drug companies in future?

"I didn’t say they were evil. But they are out to dominate the world."
If you don't think China is evil why does it matter if they want to dominate the world? What exactly does world domination look like today? World's largest economy/GDP/population?

At various times in world history different countries have dominated the world, so nothing new there. I'm more concerned about how China is buying up natural resources in less developed countries in Africa and South America than the TT consumption habits of young people.

Because too many parents either don't know, don't care or otherwise don't enforce boundaries and regulations on their own children.

At the very heart of this issue - the onus is and should be on parents to protect their own children rather than the government or another governing body stepping in to do a job that isn't in their remit.

Young children shouldn’t be on social media. Teens should have their time limited. It’s easy to do - just need to parent.

And it’s not via legislation is it. It’s parenting.

You’re aware that China can do this because they don’t have freedom of speech? Religion? Siginciant human right issues etc. they limit what children and adults can access.

So ban sweets? Crisps? McDonald’s? Airing of films on tv etc? When does being a parent kick on.

Look at it another way - imagine this thread was about the USA, and then re-read your comment.

Still makes sense, doesn't it?

I actually don't mind the Chinese government doing all of that, because it distracts some of the worst elements of the US government (and vice-versa). When they stop distracting each other, you get...well, similar to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Putin was only able to do that because Trump managed to convince enough people that Putin was his bezzy mate, so nobody was watching while he was preparing the invasion.

As long as any of China, Russia and the US exist in their current militant forms, we need all three of them to carry on doing what they're doing so they don't bother the rest of us.

I don't think your approach to this concern has done you any favours here, OP. Yes, different activities, online or otherwise, affect neural pathways. That isn't news, nor is the fact that social media is geared towards keeping you on a particular site for as long as possible, so the site can harvest more information about you. That is literally their business plan. You only get to the potential solution - legislation - in your latest post. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realise why legisliation is taking so long - money. To give a well worn example, tobacco was introduced in the UK in the 16th century. It's link to cancer was known for decades (if not longer) before it was finally banned indoors in 2007.

Technology itself isn't inheritantly bad. But it does need to be taught and used appropriately (see recent article which alludes to how it could be integrated well), which is where we are failing. Are we going to improve any time soon? No. It really isn't a priority, particularly given basic services are so sub-standard. As I see it, the crux of your complaint is why are we as a society failing to build our future? I don't have an answer to that, although I suspect it has a lot to do with the political system and obsession with short term plans to win elections rather than long term planning to build a society beneficial to all.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/27/free-lunches-brain-breaks-and-happy-teachers-why-estonia-has-the-best-schools-in-europe