Hany Farid

You are being delivered those videos with a very specific algorithm to keep you clicking for as long as possible to deliver ads.

That's what is happening.

And that's, by the way, not that different than the tobacco industry manipulating nicotine levels to keep people addicted.

It's the same thing.

Or Las Vegas, the way they design machines to keep putting money into the machine so that you separate it from yourself.

So I think we have to teach critical thinking.

I think we have to teach people the difference between a story in the Associated Press or Reuters or Aux Enfants and some random video on TikTok.

Those are not the same thing.

Okay.

Right?

So I think a lot of this is about education and about reminding people that if you want to use TikTok for entertainment, I'm fine with that.

But it's not a place to get news and information.

Like, just knock it off.

That's not what it was designed for.

All right, a couple of things.

One is stop getting your news from social media because that's literally— Step number one.

Step number one.

Step number two is whether you like mainstream media outlets or not, they do a pretty good job of getting it right.

And I know this because I talk to them every single day, that when images come out of war zones or natural disasters or whatever it is, they are vetted pretty carefully.

There's a methodology.