When trying to address problems that social media may cause for young people, lawmakers focus on Facebook and largely ignore TikTok, which most teens use
YouTube is the undisputed master of this strategy.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Thomas Baekdal / @baekdal : Of, for that matter, the rest of the media where we have a very long and well documented mental health problem. https://twitter.com/... Brian Roemmele / @brianroemmele : Most social media induced “prank” memes are clearly not designed by pranky kids, but by a source that loves to inflict societal chaos via TikTok—but it gets blamed on everything but the source. These pranks dont appear in the country that owns TikTok. I wonder why? https://twitter.com/... Parker / @pt : Facebook has lost the young & will never be able to buy it again. Perhaps they should lean into the moral panic around tech harms, make this class of competitor illegal, and call it a day? Bonus points that you can intone that TikTok of a Communist tool to brainwash kids. Scary! https://twitter.com/... Paul Grewal / @iampaulgrewal : Ask every hard question of @Facebook you want. It's all fair game. But @evelyndouek raises the obvious additional question— what else should be fair game, too? https://twitter.com/... @jonst0kes : Yes. It's wild. The very definition of fighting the last war. This has got to be an age-related problem, where congressional leadership is too old to have kids who are TikTok age, so when they want to look into this social media thing they subpoena a boomer meme-sharing site. https://twitter.com/... Kevin Munger / @kmmunger : evelyn spot on as always — but it's not just Congress, it's all of the institutions of knowledge production in our society who have trivialized TikTok https://twitter.com/... @theatlantic : “TikTok is still the same app it was last year, when people were worked up about the threat it posed to national security. Only bigger,” @evelyndouek writes: https://on.theatln.tc/Lv9ahMh @joelgrus : I did (virtual) campus interviews on Friday, and one of the candidates explained to me that his college classmates didn't have the attention spans for YouTube videos and that TikToks had to hook them in the first 6 seconds or they lost interest https://twitter.com/... Evelyn Douek / @evelyndouek : I wrote about how if Congress is seriously concerned about the effect of social media on teens' mental health they should, um, look at the platforms where the teens actually are, maybe? https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... @jacobin : Facebook is an immensely useful platform that billions rely on. It is also a profit-seeking entity that exploits and manipulates human psychology to make money, with dire results for the rest of society. https://jacobinmag.com/... @jacobin : Facebook has been the target of an unprecedented flood of criticism in recent months — and rightly so. But too many critics seem to forget that the company is driven to do bad things by its thirst for profit, not by a handful of mistaken ideas. https://jacobinmag.com/... @jacobin : Facebook's hunger for growth and bigger profits drives its reluctance to act responsibly. The answer isn't censorship; it's public control. https://jacobinmag.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The article lands mid-arc of a years-long scrutiny campaign aimed at Facebook alone. The shelved internal research on Facebook's polarizing effects and the WSJ's Facebook Files had just made Facebook the singular villain of the teen-mental-health story, giving Congress a ready-made target with documents attached.
What the coverage shows is a mismatch: by this point TikTok was the platform most teenagers actually used, yet it sat outside the hearing room. The earlier debate framed TikTok regulation as a chance to build a general model for big tech, but the legislative energy kept flowing toward Menlo Park instead.
First-order effects
- Facebook absorbs the immediate cost — hearings, document demands, and reputational damage built on the Facebook Files — while TikTok, with the largest teen audience, faces none of the same inquiry.
Second-order effects
- Meta's own response points the wrong way for regulators: an internal plan to make Facebook more like TikTok means the scrutinized company is rebuilding itself around the unscrutinized product's format, moving teen attention onto ground where Congress has shown little interest.
Third-order effects
- Company-targeted rather than conduct-targeted oversight creates a structural incentive to chase the regulator's blind spot — and the coverage's endpoint confirms it, with congressional leaders flummoxed when a TikTok ban simply shifted usage to other Chinese-owned apps like Xiaohongshu and Lemon8 they had no framework for.
The trend: Platform oversight keyed to company identity and nationality rather than to the products teens actually use keeps producing regulatory gaps that each successive app fills.