I completely disagree. I don’t think giving young people short snippets of war footage is a good thing at all. It doesn’t help them understand the conflict and warps their perspective.
They are at their most malleable and being shown extremely emotionally charged content. That’s not a good thing.
Yes, genocides are emotional. Watching children being blown up is something that should upset you. That’s actually happening in the real world.
Emotion isn’t the only thing that should inform your decisions, but pretending like you shouldn’t be upset at watching kids being blown up, or begging for their parents, or whatever else have you is just foolish.
I don’t think you understand what I was trying to get at. I don’t mean to say that genocide isn’t emotional and that we shouldn’t be upset by footage.
My response was saying that i think serving that kind of content to younger users who aren’t intentionally seeking it is insane. Tiktok algorithm pushes extreme content to it’s users which partly why I don’t like the app.
I think its fine for people my age to consume that content so my point originally was more that the content is dumb and I couldn’t be with someone who thought it was good content.
When we say younger, we might just be talking about different age groups. I imagine 16-30, and in that age range you’re not likely to come away with severe psychological scarring, but you will be deeply upset and that’s a good thing (we shouldn’t ignore genocide, we should be upset by it). Being upset leads to change.
If you’re talking about like 10 year olds watching it, sure I can agree. They can’t really do anything about it. They can’t go out and protest, or advocate for change, or vote, etc. Plus they’re much more likely to have genuine scarring. Issues sleeping, night terrors, trouble concentrating, etc.
As for “that content is dumb”, I assume you’re talking about tiktok in general. And again, for some people it’s definitely not dumb. People get served different things. Tiktok isn’t a platform trying to do good in the world, like any other social media platform it’s trying to drive engagement. However, it’s one of the few social media platforms outside of the U.S media interest groups, and that’s why the U.S is either banning them or forcing them to sell.
The end goal is to censor all of that raw footage of genocide, because it changes views. When you can hide behind rhetoric and not show how horrific the mass bombings are, you get a lot more leeway. That’s good for Israel, and why AIPAC and other Israel lobbies are the main forces behind this push in the U.S. In the end, the ban is bad for humanity (will allow the genocide to escalate without public backlash), but will be good for Israel and U.S elites.
