How China is protecting its children and making ours stupid with 2 different versions of TikTok (Update: “Silicon Valley CEOs are protecting their children”)

01/18/2023

Doctor in neurosciences, Michel Desmurget is a researcher at the CNRS and director of research at Inserm. He is the author of La fabrique du cretin digital. The dangers of screens for our children (Éditions du Seuil, 2019).

FIGAROVOX. – According to Tristan Harris, former employee at Google, China is dumbing down our children via TikTok, while protecting its own with a restrained version. Do you think that social networks will determine the future of our societies?

Michel DESMURGET. – There is already a real difference between OECD countries and Asian countries. In 2009, when China joined the PISA program, which assesses children’s skills, it was a shock for the West. Obama himself spoke of the Sputnik effect, which refers to the trauma of Americans when the Russians launched their first satellite. This is what prompted the United States to create NASA and set up colossal space programs. So when China and other Asian countries joined the program, the West realized its absolutely huge backwardness. Their children perform much better than ours, but this time we did not react, and that could well be decisive for the future of our societies.

Social networks, at a time when China is strictly controlling their use, are largely responsible. The Chinese government has limited TikTok usage time to 40 minutes a day, and drastically reduced young people’s daily video game time. While our European children spend seven to eight hours a day in front of screens. The version of TikTok that we have in the West is absolutely not limited, neither in terms of content, nor in terms of time. And we are regularly reminded of the positive effects of these networks, which are only a drop in the ocean of the damage they cause. Tobacco has the positive effect of losing weight, but no one is stupid enough to recommend it.

What are the concrete negative effects of social networks, in particular TikTok?

Social networks have indirect effects, taking time away from other activities, such as sleep or reading, which is nevertheless fundamental in the process of language development. We are sometimes told that young people read on TikTok and Instagram, I am not convinced of this and the little they read is a thousand miles from what even reading a poor novel would bring. The consequences on language skills are terrible. And there are direct effects, such as on attention, these networks are permanent sensory solicitations. They are also gigantic platforms to create social norms, to impose terrible pressure on adolescents.

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The average student today has the same level as the one who was considered to be in extreme difficulty 25 years ago. We’ve seen this for years, and studies show the disastrous influence of social networks and digital overuse, but we let it happen because some interested lobbyists continue their propaganda.[…]

It must be understood that if these platforms are free, then the product is the child who spends his day on it. Finally the Chinese are quite clever, they do like the CEOs of Silicon Valley, they protect their children while selling their product to ours. We are the stuffing turkeys. There have been fairly thorough investigations by the New York Times which show that people who are in this business brutally forbid their children to use these technologies, because they know better than anyone the disastrous effects of what they sell. […]

Give a video game console to a child in a privileged environment, and at the rate of half an hour a day, his school results will drop. Offer a smartphone to a kid, and in three months his attention system is cooked. Social networks are factories to create pathological distractions.

Le Figaro

12/15/2022

ANALYSIS – The differences between the Chinese and international version of TikTok raise a question: that of the cretinization of youth by foreign soft power.

“On their version of TikTok, if you’re under 14, they show you science experiments to do at home, museum tours, patriotic or educational videos. And they limit usage to forty minutes a day. They are not streaming this version of TikTok to the rest of the world. They know that technology influences the development of young people. For their home market, they sell an impoverished form while exporting opium to the rest of the world.” It is Tristan Harris who speaks at the microphone of the prestigious American program “60 Minutes”, on CBS.

If the name Tristan Harris means nothing to you, you just need to know that he is a former high-ranking Google employee; that he left the company in 2015 after having warned in the early 2010s of the dangerous effects that new technologies have on our attention; that he testified at length in the excellent documentary Behind Our Smoke Screens on Netflix (which you absolutely have to watch)… In short, you can trust Tristan Harris. He knows what he’s talking about. He pursues: “Studies in China and the United States have sought to find out from young people the career that can inspire them for their future. The answer? In the United States: Influencer. And in China: astronaut. Let these two societies play out over a few generations, and I can tell you what the world is going to be like.”

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Le Figaro