Appeals Court Doesn't Seem To Like Much About A Criminal Defamation Law Police Used To Arrest A Critic

from the come-on,-they-already-have-'resisting-arrest'-to-abuse dept

Three years ago, cops in New Hampshire arrested Robert Frese for the crime of… insulting some cops. Frese, facing a suspended sentence for smashing the window of a neighbor's car, left a comment on a local news site, claiming Exeter Police Chief William Shupe was a "coward" who was "covering for dirty cops."

Instead of taking his online lumps like a true public servant, Shupe had Frese arrested, apparently hoping to use an outdated criminal defamation law to trigger Frese's suspended sentence to get him locked up for the next couple of years.

That effort failed. The ACLU got involved, as did the state's Justice Department, which said Frese's comment was not unlawful. Shortly thereafter, the criminal defamation charge was dropped. A wrongful arrest lawsuit followed, netting Frese a $17,500 settlement. The police, of course, admitted no wrongdoing. Instead, they continued to claim the arrest was lawful and supported by a law that managed to make its way from the 15th century to the 21st century almost untouched.

It isn't over yet. Frese, along with the ACLU, is still trying to get that law stricken from the books, hopefully in the form of a ruling finding it unconstitutional. Given what's happening during oral arguments in front of the First Circuit Court of Appeals, it looks like Frese may be on his way to victory. Here's Thomas Harrison of Courthouse News Service with more details.

“How is law enforcement supposed to determine what would subject a person to hatred, contempt or ridicule?” U.S. Circuit Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson asked the parties assembled at the Boston courthouse this morning. “It’s odd in this political environment that that’s the standard.”

Assistant Attorney General Samuel Garland replied that it’s an “objective” standard because it’s based on “what a reasonable person would believe, not some hypersensitive person.”

Ah, the "objective" standard -- the same one deployed by the Exeter Police Chief to arrest a man who had insulted him and his officers. This happened after the Chief approached the local newspaper and asked it to remove Frese's comment from its site. One overreach led to another and the "objective" police chief decided to arrest someone who had slighted him in a comment section.

The law is undeniably a bad law. Even the person blowing tax dollars to defend it couldn't do much to defend it.

Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Jeffrey Howard noted that, under New Hampshire law, a group can qualify if it’s “respectable.” He asked, “Does ‘respectable’ have a definition?”

“I’m not sure,” Garland admitted. He suggested a Rotary Club or a church group.

“Doesn’t that give elevated protection to ‘recognized’ social groups and not others?” Thompson shot back.

Unequal protection under the law. That doesn't sound very constitutional. Neither do the other aspects of the law, which allow police to act as judges and jurors when arresting people for "objective" violations.

In New Hampshire, police can decide whether to prosecute someone for defamation without a neutral magistrate being involved — circumstances that the ACLU claims creates a conflict of interest when the person is being prosecuted for disparaging the police. Defendants also don’t get a court-appointed attorney or a jury trial.

That sounds more like 15th century England than 21st century United States of America. The fact that this law was used by police to punish someone who insulted police officers is about all the argument against it anyone should need. The state is inexplicably trying to keep this law alive long past its expiration date, knowing full well it was recently abused in an attempt to silence a critic of the local government.

It doesn't sound like the judges are too impressed with the law or the arguments in defense of it. Hopefully, it will help get this law overturned. The district court said the law wasn't quite vague enough to sustain Frese's constitutional allegations, but the Appeals Court judges seem less willing to cut this bad law any slack.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, criminal defamation, criticism, free speech, law enforcement, new hampshire, police, robert frese, william shupe

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from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

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Filed Under: daily deal

The Whole YouTube Radicalizes People Story Doesn't Seem To Have Much Evidence To Back It Up

from the myths,-myths-all-around-me dept

There seem to be a lot of "myths" about big internet companies that don't stand up to that much scrutiny, even as they're often accepted as common knowledge. There's the idea that Facebook's algorithm remains in place only because it makes Facebook more money (Facebook's own internal research suggests otherwise), or that disinformation goes viral on social media first (a detailed study showed cable news is a much bigger vector of virality).

Another big one is that YouTube "radicalizes" people via its algorithm. There are lots of stories about how someone went on to YouTube to watch, like, video game clips, and within a week had become an alt-right edge lord troll shouting Trump slogans or whatever. Hell, this was a key plot point in the Social Dilemma, in which the young boy in the fictionalized sitcom family starts watching some videos on his phone, and a week later is participating in an extremist political rally that turns into a riot.

However, a very thorough recent study (first highlighted by Ars Technica) found that there's really not much evidence to support any of this narrative. From the abstract:

Recently, YouTube’s scale has fueled concerns that YouTube users are being radicalized via a combination of biased recommendations and ostensibly apolitical “anti-woke” channels, both of which have been claimed to direct attention to radical political content. Here we test this hypothesis using a representative panel of more than 300,000 Americans and their individual-level browsing behavior, on and off YouTube, from January 2016 through December 2019. Using a labeled set of political news channels, we find that news consumption on YouTube is dominated by mainstream and largely centrist sources. Consumers of far-right content, while more engaged than average, represent a small and stable percentage of news consumers. However, consumption of “anti-woke” content, defined in terms of its opposition to progressive intellectual and political agendas, grew steadily in popularity and is correlated with consumption of far-right content off-platform. We find no evidence that engagement with far-right content is caused by YouTube recommendations systematically, nor do we find clear evidence that anti-woke channels serve as a gateway to the far right. Rather, consumption of political content on YouTube appears to reflect individual preferences that extend across the web as a whole.

Of course, this isn't the first study to find the same thing. A similar study that was released last year came to the same basic conclusion:

In conclusion, our study shows that one cannot proclaim that YouTube’s algorithm, at the current state, is leading users towards more radical content. There is clearly plenty of content on YouTube that one might view as radicalizing or inflammatory. However, the responsibility of that content is with the content creator and the consumers themselves. Shifting the responsibility for radicalization from users and content creators to YouTube is not supported by our data.

A study from two years ago... also found the same thing:

In short, the best quantitative evidence available demonstrates that any “radicalization” that occurs on YouTube happens according to the standard model of persuasion: people adopt new beliefs about the world by combining their prior beliefs with new information (Guess and Coppock, 2018). People select information about topics that interest them; if political, they prefer information that is at least some what congenial to their prior beliefs (Stroud, 2017). Persuasion happens at the margins when it does happen.

Indeed, that study showed that the classic story of someone watching a Trump-leaning "alt-lite" video and getting sucked down into alt-right extremism doesn't seem likely to happen that often.

A random walk algorithm beginning at an Alt-Lite video and taking 5 steps randomly selecting one of the ten recommended videos will only be recommended a video from the Alt-Right approximately one out every 1,700 trips. For a random walker beginning at a “control” video from the mainstream media, the probability is so small that it is difficult to see on the graph, but it is certainly no more common than one out of every 10,000 trips.

And, not that you would necessarily trust research coming directly from YouTube itself, but the company recently released some information on this question as well. Contrary to the "common knowledge" the company hasn't seen "more engagement" on extremist content:

Actually, through surveys and feedback, we’ve found that most viewers do not want to be recommended borderline content, and many find it upsetting and off-putting. In fact, when we demoted salacious or tabloid-type content we saw that watchtime actually increased by 0.5% percent over the course of 2.5 months, relative to when we didn’t place any limits.

Also, we haven’t seen evidence that borderline content is on average more engaging than other types of content. Consider content from flat earthers. While there are far more videos uploaded that say the Earth is flat than those that say it’s round, on average, flat earth videos get far fewer views. Surveys show that borderline content is satisfying to only a very small portion of viewers on YouTube. We’ve invested significant time and money toward making sure it doesn’t find its way to broader audiences through our recommendations system. Today, borderline content gets most of its views from sources other than non-subscribed recommendations.

Now, I will note that YouTube recently changed that final line. I found it last month when Evelyn Douek tweeted about it -- but she highlighted that final sentence which said something different at the time:

In the version she tweeted, the final line reads: "Today, borderline content gets more of its views from other platforms that link to YouTube." But, sometime after she tweeted that, YouTube changed it to read: "Today, borderline content gets most of its views from sources other than non-subscribed recommendations." That's... a little different. And at the very least, it makes me wonder why the change -- and at least highlights that there may be a difference between "subscribed recommendations" and "non-subscribed recommendations."

Still, there are questions about how people are finding YouTube videos -- and they do come from all over. As Douek highlights in a follow up tweet, the largest number of external views on Facebook are to YouTube. This doesn't absolve YouTube and its algorithm, but once again highlights how (1) all of this is a lot more complicated than people make it out to be, (2) the internet is an interconnected ecosystem, not just a few giant sites, and (3) the common wisdom you may have heard... might not be supported by the data.

Filed Under: algorithms, myth debunking, outside links, radicalization
Companies: youtube

Clearview Finally Submits AI For Independent Testing; Only Tests Feature It Isn't Actually Selling

from the competing-for-a-high-score-no-one-cares-about dept

At long last, Clearview has finally had its AI tested by an independent party. It has avoided doing this since its arrival on the facial recognition scene, apparently content to bolster its reputation by violating state privacy laws, making statements about law enforcement efficacy that are immediately rebutted by law enforcement agencies, and seeing nothing wrong with scraping the open web for personal information to sell to government agencies, retailers, and bored rich people.

Kashmir Hill reports for the New York Times that Clearview joined the hundreds of other tech companies that have had their algorithms tested by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

[M]ore than two years after law enforcement officers first started using the company’s app, Clearview’s algorithm — what allows it to match faces to photos — has been put to a third-party test for the first time. It performed surprisingly well.

In a field of over 300 algorithms from over 200 facial recognition vendors, Clearview ranked among the top 10 in terms of accuracy, alongside NTechLab of Russia, Sensetime of China and other more established outfits.

That seems to confirm CEO Hoan Ton-That's continuous claims that Clearview's AI is one of the most accurate in the business. But there's a huge caveat to his claims and these test results. This test does not reflect real-world use of Cleaview's tech.

But the test that Clearview took reveals how accurate its algorithm is at correctly matching two different photos of the same person, not how accurate it is at finding a match for an unknown face in a database of 10 billion of them.

No one's buying access to Clearview to perform this task. And that certainly isn't what Clearview is selling or promising to potential customers when it pitches its 10 billion image database. So, Clearview calling this test result "an unmistakable validation" of its tech is, well, pure bullshit. It doesn't validate anything. All it possibly shows is that Clearview could be used to verify identity by matching faces -- something that might be useful for unlocking a phone or providing access to restricted areas.

What it doesn't show is Clearview's accuracy when it compares an uploaded photo to its billions of scraped images. Supposedly, Clearview will be allowing NIST to run a 1-to-many test of its AI (Ton-That says that will happen "shortly"). If that happens, we'll finally be able to see if Clearview's AI is as accurate as its CEO has repeatedly said it is.

Even if it is accurate, it's still facial recognition tech -- something that comes with a lot of inherent drawbacks. Every AI tested by NIST showed some form of bias, like performing better when checking white male faces for matches. And it won't change the fact that Clearview's database is the product of web scraping -- something that's not illegal but definitely questionable. Internet users may agree to share information with others and the sites they use, but no one affirmatively agrees to allow Clearview to scoop up that information and sell it to government agencies. That's what has resulted in it being sued in a couple of states, and being kicked out of Canada entirely.

Clearview has no product without the unwilling and unaware contributions of millions of internet users. Even if its AI isn't as terrible as we're all free to believe it is, it will still just be the bottom feeder in a murky cesspool of facial recognition tech providers. Floating to the top of the NIST's tank may give it better copy for its marketing materials, but it won't earn it any respect.

Filed Under: ai, facial recognition, privacy
Companies: clearview

Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch

from the Nintendon't dept

So, here's the thing: I get accused of picking on Nintendo a whole lot. But please know, it's not that I want to pick on them, it's just that they make it so damned easy to. I'm a golfer, okay? If I have a club in my hand and suddenly a ball on a tee appears before me, I'm going to hit that ball every time without hesitation. You will recall that a couple of years back, Nintendo opened up a new front on its constant IP wars by going after ROM and emulation sites. That caused plenty of sites to simply shut themselves down, but Nintendo also made a point of getting some scalps to hang on its belt, most famously in the form of RomUniverse. That site, which very clearly had infringing material not only on the site but promoted by the site's ownership, got slapped around in the courts to the tune of a huge judgement against, which the site owners simply cannot pay.

But all of those are details and don't answer the real question: why did Nintendo do this? Well, as many expected from the beginning, it did this because the company was planning to release a series of classic consoles, namely the NES mini and SNES mini. But, of course, what about later consoles? Such as the Nintendo 64?

Well, the answer to that is that Nintendo has offered a Nintendo Switch Online service uplift that includes some N64 games that you can play there instead.

After years of "N64 mini" rumors (which have yet to come to fruition), Nintendo announced plans to honor its first fully 3D gaming system late last month in the form of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack. Pay a bit extra, the company said, and you'd get a select library of N64 classics, emulated by the company that made them, on Switch consoles as part of an active NSO subscription.

One month later, however, Nintendo's sales proposition grew more sour. That "bit extra" ballooned to $30 more per year, on top of the existing $20/year fee—a 150 percent jump in annual price. Never mind that the price also included an Animal Crossing expansion pack (which retro gaming fans may not want) and Sega Genesis games (which have been mostly released ad nauseam on every gaming system of the past decade). For many interested fans, that price jump was about the N64 collection.

So, a bit of a big price tag and a bunch of extras that are mostly besides the point from the perspective of the buyer. Buy, hey, at least Nintendo fans will finally get some N64 games to play on their Switch consoles, right?

Well, it turns out that Nintendo's offering cannot come close to matching the quality of the very emulators and ROMs that Nintendo has worked so hard to disappear. The Ars Technica post linked above goes into excruciating details, some of which we'll discuss for the purpose of giving examples, but here are the categories that Nintendo's product does worse than an emulator on a PC.

• Game options, such as visual settings for resolution to fit modern screens
• Visuals, such as N64's famous blur settings, and visual changes that expose outdated graphical sprites
• Controller input lag
• Controller configuration options
• Multiplayer lag/stutter

If that seems like a lot of problems compared with emulators that have been around for quite a while, well, ding ding ding! We'll get into some examples briefly below, but I'll stipulate that none of the issues in the categories above are incredibly bad. But there are so many of them that they all add up to bad!

Let's take the problems around how N64's blur is used, or not used in this case.

This issue rears its head much more often in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which avid speedrunner ZFG1 detailed at length in a seven-hour stream shortly after the NSO Expansion Pack went live. The pack's issues with inaccurate blur become immediately evident in that classic game's opening zone of Kakariko Village. In that zone, the looming Deku Tree normally hides in a massive field of fog above hero Link's head. In the current NSO version, on the other hand, the blur is absent, revealing an unseemly low-resolution sprite. Worse, Nintendo originally used selective fog placement as a way to guide players' attention towards points of interest in the village, yet these fogs have now been erased.

Anyone who's looked into the NSO Expansion Pack's launch has almost certainly seen ZFG1's most glaring discovery, as well: the game's Water Temple battle against a "shadow" version of Link, which takes place in a foggy, open-air zone surrounded by reflective water. On Switch, this room pares back the fog effect almost entirely. Worse, it fails to properly cast reflections on the water's surface, which changes the aesthetic tone of the subsequent, harrowing battle.

This sort of thing breaks immersion and the overall feel and flow of a game. And the Legend of Zelda example is not isolated.

As to the way controls are handled, well...

In Ocarina of Time and Star Fox 64, constant C-button access is imperative for proper control in ways that don't suit removing your fingers from the primary A and B action buttons. Yet instead of making those crucial C buttons available at all times, Nintendo bolts only two of them on the ABXY array. Players are then required to use an awkward shortcut system to access those buttons: hold the "ZR" button, which temporarily "shifts" the ABXY array to become the four C-button directions.

If this all strikes you as minor details not worth being upset over, I have two responses. First, you are probably not a huge fan of these classic Nintendo titles and systems, because these "minor" things represent a massive break from the experience you have in your head playing these games. Given that the sales pitch for this NSO uplift is all about nostalgia, that freaking matters!

And second, fans of these titles had a better product to give them what they wanted: the emulation sites Nintendo shut down. Granted, getting ROMs from those sites without owning the original certainly was/is infringing activity... but if Nintendo was going to slay the piracy dragon in favor of its own offering, that offering should at least be on par with the emulators, no?

Because in the end, here's the reality: Nintendo worked hard to prevent fans of antiquated games and systems from enjoying those games in order to get them to buy an inferior product. Love Nintendo, hate Nintendo, that's the stark reality. And it's a shitty look for a company.

Filed Under: emulation, n64, nintendo switch, retro games, video games
Companies: nintendo

UK Schools Normalizing Biometric Collection By Using Facial Recognition For Meal Payments

from the cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-remaining-canteen-balance dept

Subjecting students to surveillance tech is nothing new. Most schools have had cameras installed for years. Moving students from desks to laptops allows schools to monitor internet use, even when students aren't on campus. Bringing police officers into schools to participate in disciplinary problems allows law enforcement agencies to utilize the same tech and analytics they deploy against the public at large. And if cameras are already in place, it's often trivial to add facial recognition features.

The same tech that can keep kids from patronizing certain retailers is also being used to keep deadbeat kids from scoring free lunches. While some local governments in the United States are trying to limit the expansion of surveillance tech in their own jurisdictions, governments in the United Kingdom seem less concerned about the mission creep of surveillance technology.

Some students in the UK are now able to pay for their lunch in the school canteen using only their faces. Nine schools in North Ayrshire, Scotland, started taking payments using biometric information gleaned from facial recognition systems on Monday, according to the Financial Times. [alt link]

The technology is being provided by CRB Cunningham, which has installed a system that scans the faces of students and cross-checks them against encrypted faceprint templates stored locally on servers in the schools. It's being brought in to replace fingerprint scanning and card payments, which have been deemed less safe since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Financial Times report, 65 schools have already signed up to participate in this program, which has supposedly dropped transaction times at the lunchroom register to less than five seconds per student. I assume that's an improvement, but it seems fingerprints/cards weren't all that slow and there are plenty of options for touchless payment if schools need somewhere to spend their cafeteria tech money.

CRB says more than 97% of parents have consented to the collection and use of their children's biometric info to… um… move kids through the lunch line faster. I guess the sooner you get kids used to having their faces scanned to do mundane things, the less likely they'll be to complain when demands for info cross over into more private spaces.

The FAQ on the program makes it clear it's a single-purpose collection governed by a number of laws and data collection policies. Parents can opt out at any time and all data is deleted after opt out or if the student leaves the school. It's good this is being handled responsibly but, like all facial recognition tech, mistakes can (and will) be made. When these inevitably occur, hopefully the damage will be limited to a missed meal.

The FAQ handles questions specifically about this program. The other flyer published by the North Ayrshire Council explains nothing and implies facial recognition is harmless, accurate, and a positive addition to students' lives.

We're introducing Facial Recognition!

This new technology is now available for a contactless meal service!

Following this exciting announcement, the flyer moves on to discussing biometric collections and the tech that makes it all possible. It accomplishes this in seven short "land of contrasts" paragraphs that explain almost nothing and completely ignore the inherent flaws in these systems as well as the collateral damage misidentification can cause.

The section titled "The history of biometrics" contains no history. Instead, it says biometric collections are already omnipresent so why worry about paying for lunch with your face?

Whilst the use of biometric recognition has been steadily growing over the last decade or so, these past couple of years have seen an explosion in development, interest and vendor involvement, particularly in mobile devices where they are commonly used to verify the owner of the device before unlocking or making purchases.

If students want to learn more (or anything) about the history of biometrics, I guess they'll need to do their own research. Because this is the next (and final) paragraph of the "history of biometrics" section:

We are delighted to offer this fast and secure identification technology to purchase our delicious and nutritious school meals

Time is a flattened circle, I guess. The history of biometrics is the present. And the present is the future of student payment options, of which there are several. But these schools have put their money on facial recognition, which will help them raise a generation of children who've never known a life where they weren't expected to use their bodies to pay for stuff.

Filed Under: biometrics, facial recognition, meals, payments, schools, students, uk

The Scale Of Content Moderation Is Unfathomable

from the it's-way-more-than-you-think dept

Sometimes it's difficult to get across to people "the scale" part when we talk about the impossibility of content moderation at scale. It's massive. And this is why whenever there's a content moderation decision that you dislike or that you disagree with, you have to realize that it's not personal. It wasn't done because someone doesn't like your politics. It wasn't done because of some crazy agenda. It was done because a combination of thousands of people around the globe and still sketchy artificial intelligence are making an insane number of decisions every day. And they just keep piling up and piling up and piling up.

Evelyn Douek recently gave a (virtual) talk at Stanford on The Administrative State of Content Moderation, which is worth watching in its entirety. However, right at the beginning of her talk, she presented some stats that highlight the scale of the decision making here. Based on publicly revealed transparency reports from these companies, in just the 30 minutes allotted for her talk, Facebook would take down 615,417 pieces of content, YouTube would take down 271,440 videos, channels, and comments, and TikTok would take down 18,870 videos. And, also, the Oversight Board would receive 48 petitions to review a Facebook takedown decision.

And, as she notes, that's only the take down decisions. It does not count the "leave up" decisions, which are also made quite frequently. Facebook is not targeting you personally. It is not Mark Zuckerberg sitting there saying "take this down." The company is taking down over a million pieces of content every freaking hour. It's going to make mistakes. And some of the decisions are ones that you're going to disagree with.

And, to put that in perspective, she notes that in its entire history, the US Supreme Court has decided a grand total of approximately 246 1st Amendment cases, or somewhere around one per year. And, of course, in those cases, it often involves years of debates, and arguments, and briefings, and multiple levels of appeals. And sometimes the Supreme Court still gets it totally wrong. Yet we expect Facebook -- making over a million decisions to take content down every hour -- to somehow magically get it all right?

Anyway, there's a lot more good stuff in the talk and I suggest you watch the whole thing to get a better understanding of the way content moderation actually works. It would be helpful for anyone who wants to opine on content moderation to not just understand what Douek is saying, but to really internalize it.

Filed Under: content moderation, due process, evelyn douek, scale, takedowns
Companies: facebook, tiktok, youtube

Latest Moral Panic: No, TikTok Probably Isn't Giving Teenage Girls Tourette Syndrome

from the not-sure-it-works-that-way dept

If you recall, the U.S. spent much of 2020 freaking out about TikTok's threat to privacy, while oddly ignoring that the company's privacy practices are pretty much the international norm (and ignoring a whole lot of significantly worse online security and privacy problems we routinely do nothing about). More recently there was another moral panic over the idea that TikTok was turning children into immoral thieving hellspawn as part of the Devious licks meme challenge.

Now, one initial report by the Wall Street Journal has alleged that teen girls are watching so many TikToks by other girls with Tourette Syndrome, they're developing tics. The idea that you can develop an entirely new neurological condition by watching short form videos sounds like quite a stretch, but the claim has already bounced around the news ecosystem for much of the year:

" Chailyn Thorne, 18, suffers from tics, some of them so severe that she feels paralyzed. The uncontrollable movements and sounds even put the Arkansas teen in a hospital bed...It’s not something she was born with, however. Thorne may have developed the tics in response to TikTok.

May have indeed. Some experts have added fuel to the fire by claiming the link between TikTok and tics is a valid one:

"John Piacentini, director of the UCLA Child OCD, Anxiety, and Tic Disorders Clinic and Tourette Association Center of Excellence, recently co-published several papers on the topic, and he says the girls’ symptoms are real.

“They’re seeing all these influencers that appear to have very robust and happy lives, and Tourette’s becomes contagious in some ways,” Piacentini said.

He added that mimicking behaviors is “a natural phenomenon,” but “the scope and the scale is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.”

There are, of course, a few problems here. First, obviously, correlation does not equal causation, and you'd want a broader peer-reviewed study showing a direct link before claiming there's a direct link. Secondly, I've been a journalist long enough, and talked to enough academics and niche experts, to know you can find an expert or academic to support pretty much any theory that exists (a huge number of academics at major schools believe 5G is a huge threat to human health, for example, despite no hard evidence that's actually true). But one-off beliefs by experts don't automatically make something true.

As Snopes notes, the actual source of the claims (two editorials) indicate that while there has been an uptick in referrals for such disorders, there hasn't been a corresponding uptick in diagnoses. Most but not all of the teens referred had watched TikTok in the months leading up to their initial diagnoses, but given TikTok's popularity among teen girls that's not proof of much. Most of the teens had also been diagnosed with anxiety and depression, which, while frequent co-diagnoses with Tourette, again isn't proof of anything since anxiety and depression are increasingly common during the pandemic.

In other words, the link here is pretty shaky. There are a number of popular teen influencers with tics, and this popularity may just be driving awareness of the disorder, driving teens to seek referrals for disorders they previously may not have known even existed. That would mean that TikTok is potentially acting as a net positive by bringing awareness and exposure that allows younger folks to get the help and sympathy they need. It's also possible anxious or depressed teens, trying to navigate a brutal pandemic, are easily suggestible and are seeking connection through a form of mimicry they're not aware they're even doing.

In other words, there's a lot of nuance here that the press -- designed from the ground up to seek out ad engagement over sometimes complicated or boring reality -- isn't going to be particularly clear on. As a result, the idea that "TikTok causes Tourette" will be the takeaway for many, despite the fact there's no research actually showing this to be true.

Filed Under: awareness, evidence, moral panic, social media, tourette syndrome
Companies: tiktok

Daily Deal: TREBLAB Z2 Bluetooth 5.0 Noise-Cancelling Headphones

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The Z2 headphones earned their name because they feature twice the sound, twice the battery life, and twice the convenience of competing headphones. This updated version of the original Z2s comes with a new all-black design and Bluetooth 5.0. Packed with TREBLAB's most advanced Sound2.0 technology with aptX and T-Quiet active noise-cancellation, these headphones deliver goose bump-inducing audio while drowning out unwanted background noise. These headphones are on sale for $79. We're having an early holiday sale this week, so use the code SAVE15NOV to get an additional 15% off of your purchase storewide.

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Filed Under: daily deal