Dan pope

I love america and dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

If you use TikTok, you should read this once.

In October 2024, a court clerk in Kentucky uploaded the lawsuit against TikTok with the confidential sections still visible. NPR downloaded it before anyone caught the mistake. By the time the court resealed it, the internet had a copy.

What was inside was TikTok's own engineers, in their own words, describing what their app does to a human brain.

Not a critic's brain. Yours.

Here is what they wrote down.

— TikTok ran the math on how long it takes to develop "compulsive use" of the app. The number is 260 videos. With 8-second videos played in rapid-fire succession, that works out to roughly 35 minutes. The company's internal documents call this the compulsive-use threshold.

— TikTok's own research describes what compulsive use causes: "diminished analytical ability, impaired memory, contextual reasoning, conversational depth, empathy, and heightened anxiety." That is not a quote from a critic. That is TikTok's own language, in its own internal documents.

— A team inside the company called "TikTank" wrote in an internal report that compulsive use on the platform was "rampant."

— After 30 minutes of continuous use in one sitting, the company's own documents state that users are placed into "filter bubbles" — algorithmic loops the user did not choose and cannot easily escape.

Then there is the screen-time tool — the one TikTok publicly markets as proof it cares.

— TikTok ran an experiment on the 60-minute screen-time prompt. Daily teen usage dropped from 108.5 minutes to 107. A reduction of 1.5 minutes.

— Internally, the screen-time tool was not measured by whether it reduced screen time. Its top success metric, in writing, was "improving public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage."

— A project manager wrote in internal chat: "Our goal is not to reduce the time spent." Another employee added that the goal was "to contribute to daily active users and retention."

— A TikTok executive approved the screen-time feature only on the condition that its impact on the company's "core metrics" was minimal. The lawsuit alleges the company planned to "revisit the design" if the tool ever reduced usage by more than 10%.

The "Are you still scrolling?" break videos? An executive admitted in an internal meeting they were "useful talking points" for lawmakers, but "not altogether effective."

Then there is the algorithm itself.

— An internal report flagged that the For You feed was showing what the company called "a high volume of not attractive subjects." TikTok then retooled the algorithm to suppress those users. Kentucky authorities wrote: "By changing the TikTok algorithm to show fewer 'not attractive subjects' in the For You feed, [TikTok] took active steps to promote a narrow beauty norm even though it could negatively impact their Young Users."

That sentence is the entire pitch of the platform, said out loud.

— Internally, TikTok also acknowledged that its publicly reported content moderation metrics were "mostly misleading," because they only measured the content the company successfully moderated — never the content it missed.

Now read those bullet points again as one continuous case.

The company knows the addiction threshold. The company measured it. The company ranked engagement over mental health in writing. The company built a screen-time tool whose internal success metric was PR. The company suppressed people it deemed unattractive to keep you scrolling. The company called its own moderation numbers misleading.

None of this is a leaked rumor. None of this is a journalist's interpretation. This is a court filing. The documents are TikTok's. The words are TikTok's. The math is TikTok's.

The 14 state attorneys general who signed onto this lawsuit aren't fringe activists. They're a bipartisan coalition.

Sources at the bottom: NPR, CNN, AP, Mashable, OPB, The Independent. All citing the same accidentally-unsealed Kentucky filing from October 11, 2024.

The next time the company tells you it cares about your wellbeing — the screen-time prompts, the break videos, the safety features, the careful PR statements — remember that its own engineers wrote down, in court-admissible language, that the safeguards were never meant to work.

The app is not broken.

It is performing exactly as designed.

You were the spec.

[J. Mangual @MLBShotsFired]

Inflation is completely out of control, you can’t even take 3 kids to a Detroit Tigers game anymore without spending an arm and a leg! Crazy!

[TONY @TonyMichaelX]

Interesting difference in reporting once the man was revealed to be a predator

[Nick Field @nick_field90]

You were literally in the Oval Office 13 days ago, you can't just pretend to go 'Woah, bro, the world's so crazy' and act like some nobody stoner dude!
https://t.co/iIaiKLaqnp

[Evergreen Intel @vcdgf555]

Happy 15th anniversary to this tweet.

[John (Anarcho Cat) @anarcho_cat]

So Israel destroyed every other building except the Hamas headquarters?

[conspiracybot @conspiracyb0t]

Reminder: When the Panama Papers came out it revealed all the rich people in the world are part of an enormous criminal conspiracy to dodge taxes and hoard stolen wealth in offshore accounts and literally nothing happened except a reporter working on the story was assassinated.

[Justin Amash @justinamash]

FISA 702 just passed the House.

This bill lets the government search Americans’ private communications without a warrant—in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment.

But don’t blame the GOP alone.

Forty-two Democrats betrayed the American people to help Mike Johnson pass it.

[Luke Thomas Gets Political (LTGP) @LTGetsPolitical]

Several of my friends - including an Iraq war veteran - lost their jobs to DOGE because they were told curbing unnecessary spending was an existential priority.

These people believe in nothing but their own self indulgence and avarice.

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

"Think, rich vein of American stupid."

[Male Central @TheMale_Central]

Your own husband posted this btw

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

Trump just fired all 24 members of the National Science Board. Every single one. By email. No warning. No reason given. The board has existed since 1950.

The National Science Board is the independent body that oversees the National Science Foundation, the agency that distributes $9 billion in research grants every year.

Its members are scientists and engineers from universities and industry. They serve six-year staggered terms specifically so they cross presidential administrations and stay independent of whoever is in power.

On Friday, every single one of them got the same boilerplate email from Mary Sprowls of the Presidential Personnel Office: "On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service."

That's it. That's the whole letter. For 76 years of institutional independence.

The NSF funds the basic science behind MRIs. Cellphones. LASIK eye surgery. GPS. The internet itself. The Antarctic research stations. The deep-space telescopes. The research vessels mapping the ocean floor. Every breakthrough that made America the world's leader in science for the better part of a century traces back through grants this agency made and this board approved.

The board chair, Victor McCrary, was actively advising Congress on Trump's proposed 55% cut to NSF's budget. The board was helping fight back. So Trump fired the board.

Marvi Matos Rodriguez, one of the fired members, told reporters she had been reviewing an 80-page report as part of her board duties just days before being terminated.

Keivan Stassun, a physicist at Vanderbilt, said NSF's leadership had already stopped responding to board oversight requests months ago. "We would ask them, 'Are you following board governance directives?' And their answer would be, in effect, 'We don't listen to you anymore.'"

Now there's no board to answer to.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the House Science Committee, called it "the latest stupid move made by a president who continues to harm science and American innovation. Will the president fill the NSB with MAGA loyalists who won't stand up to him as he hands over our leadership in science to our adversaries?"

That's the actual question.

Because while Trump is firing American scientists, China is building research universities at a rate we cannot match. The CDC just buried a study showing vaccines work.

RFK Jr. runs HHS. The EPA is gutted. The Forest Service is being broken. Half of American children are breathing dangerous air. And now the people who decide what gets researched in the United States have all been fired by email on a Friday afternoon.

[Micah Erfan @micah_erfan]

🚨 HOLY SH*T: Fox News just cut one of their reporters off as they seemed to indicate the shooting was a pre-planned false flag.

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

Weird that those clouds and ducks haven't budged in a decade.

[Jon Cooper 🇺🇸 @joncoopertweets]

This photo should be on the front page of every single newspaper in America today.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Israel killed every single person in this photo in Lebanon.

Every. Single. One.

All journalists.

Targeted and assassinated intentionally.

For reporting the truth from the frontlines.

[Jelly Santos @MrsJellySantos]

This is the Boston accent.

Hollywood please hire Boston Baddie. We tired of the forced accents 😂

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

We’re governed by fucking morons