Summary
Eleven Illinois teens face felony charges after allegedly luring two men via dating apps and assaulting them last July.
Inspired by a viral social media trend, the teens attacked a 41-year-old and a 23-year-old in separate incidents, damaging vehicles and using slurs in one case, resulting in hate crime charges for one teen.
All suspects turned themselves in and were detained at a juvenile center.
Police urge parents to discuss the dangers of social media trends with their children to prevent such incidents.
Yeah, social media trends aren’t the problem here. Being a piece of shit is the problem.
Social media is a factor. Unmoderated content encouraging violence results in events like these.
Let’s do the butterfly knife to the eyes challenge it’s on TikTok…
I prefer the Fargo Challenge! Who wants to look at my woodchipper?
Is it though? That kind of sounds like the next iteration of blaming movies/video games/d&d/whatever the latest crazy is.
The thing is, the boomers of the past were wrong because none of that media was promoting violence. They were making it up.
The Tiktok algorithm promotes violence as a fast-pass to fame. It rewards people for making abhorrent trends with clicks.
I don’t know, it’s hard to argue that the action movies of 40 years ago or games like Postal weren’t glorifying violence.
Though I can certainly see an argument about the difference based on the fact that movies/TV/video games are all imaginary vs the actual violence in something like this.
The question is, does “glorifying violence” encourage people to be violent? Barring other factors, studies have not found that to be the case. There are some studies that show video games actually reduce stress hormones by giving people a release, and this might actually lower violence.
It’s a lot different to connect violent rhetoric with gay bashing, refer to gays as predators, then provide a template for how to ambush them.
The major difference is that the app is the not content, it is the bridge to actioning.
This one has scientific backing. Just Google any combination of terms and you’ll find studies showing harm.
Why don’t you and post a few links?
I wasn’t sure exactly which aspect of harm they were talking about, so I left it up to them.