Originally published at: TikTok full of snake oil salespeople and medical misinfo - Boing Boing
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Woo is injurious and awful, but I do have some sympathy at least for those who turn to it because the US medical system is so profit driven, unaffordable and awful.
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Wellness woo is also an established gateway to far-right conspiracism. Recall that Alex Jones and Goopy Gwyneth sold the same garbage supplements in different packaging. If one guest on Joe Rogan can convince a viewer that The Man doesn’t want them to know about their homeopathic cure for cancer, another guest can come on to sell the idea that The Man is controlling the weather with Khazar space lasers.
Irresponsible social media platforms have only turbocharged the problem, and TikTok in particular is bringing it to a new generation.
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Doesn’t excuse the people who knowingly push woo to make a buck off the desperate who’ve been left behindn by our shitty for-profit health care system…
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Yep. As someone who has tried alternatives for pain management… there is a lot of woo out there. Of course the Sacklers and doctors created the opioid epidemic, so it sucks all over!
It is also depressing when I look up a name of a mineral or crystal, the first search results are telling you that “amethyst will clear negative energy and help with blah blah blah”.
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But I suppose there are plenty of people who take TikTok seriously. So thanks for the explainer.
Anything that combats the bullshit is a public service! 
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I didn’t say nor imply that it does. 
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This is one of the core problems with social media in particular, and to lesser extent it’s about the internet, and ultimately communication in general. It’s almost a law of information physics, like entropy.
The food source of media is attention. And in a crowd of sources clamoring for attention, the winners are those who shout the loudest and have the most attractive message.
It’s about the economics of attention. My eyes were opened to this by a 1997 book Data Smog, by David Shenk, in the early milliseconds of the public internet’s big bang. (The book could have been condensed to a chapter, but hey, authors get paid by the word.)
What the internet does is reduce rate limits and increase scale of reach. And social media exemplify tne monetization of attention almost purely. It’s literally all they sell.
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It’s hard to see past the incessant ads for Trublephcent or whatever, and hear how the side effects* may include exacerbating the problem for which one is taking the medicine in the first place (or even much, much worse). I certainly wouldn’t turn to TikTok for any kind of advice (other than a food recipe). OTOH, if I’ve formed this idea that the makers of Trublephcent don’t really have an idea how or why their medicine actually works (to say nothing of how the mind actually works), well, I didn’t form that idea in an internet-free vacuum.
*may also include wordiness & ranting
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Sure, I didn’t think that… it was just a general statement about how alternatives tend to be a vector for profit-motives that exploit people as well. Sorry if it came off as an attack, as that wasn’t my intention!
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This is commonly referred to as conspirituality nowadays.
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tiktok pretty quickly became a cesspit.
Once in a while someone here posts an article with an amusing- or awww-inspiring-sounding animal video on tiktok, and I get suckered. 75% of the time it balks at my archaic machine and OS, not to mention the Legacy ™ Firefox, and won’t play nice. I gave up.
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I keep TikTok, Instagram, and Xitter in my DNS blackhole (pi-hole) on my home network. And in my phone I’ve added them as restricted sites. Of course I don’t install any social media apps either.
Yeah, I’m that “Get off my lawn” old boomer guy about this stuff. I refuse to feed them even a click. And this way I’m never tricked or tempted.
Props to Firefox . . .
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