I don't think anything in my mention of it blew it out of proportion. FWIW, my wife is in the IT department of a school district and this was a major issue for them, nearly every one of their 60-some-odd campuses had at least one incident caused by this trend. Sure, it was short-lived, but it was also very widespread and affected even private/charter schools in well-to-do areas like what my wife works at, not just public schools.

Me mentioning this trend was more to point out that my larger point was much more subtle and nuanced than "Facebook causes burglaries", but that also absolutely crime has been done in some circumstances directly because of social media trends.

Part of my concern about social media is that people with low levels of self-respect and self-reliance are also more generally likely to follow trends... while we're back on the topic of "devious licks" specifically:

"In March 2022, The Washington Post revealed that the devious lick challenge was utilized as part of an orchestrated campaign by Meta Platforms and Republican consulting firm Targeted Victory to damage TikTok's public reputation.[14]"

So, here's one social media company that knows from their own data how influential social media is on society using that knowledge to intentionally cause social harm to damage the reputation of another social media company, by using how people are willing to follow trends when they have low self-respect and self-reliance.

These are the times we live in, and I think being dismissive of this as the original respondent to my first comment was, by essentially saying that pointing this out is "old man yells at cloud" is not a productive way to resolve the difficulties society is facing and will continue to face due to social media and the larger issue of increased mental health issues and reduced self-respect and self-reliance in society.

You're correct in your first paragraph and probably a quarter correct in your second paragraph. Just to be a bit more deliberate: poor communities have experienced high rates of crime throughout human history, it's a newly recurring phenomenon that high rates of crime are now happening in communities which are not poor, and it's a problematic sign for society. Without trying to crack open the entirety of human psychology and sociology in a comment on HN, a lot of people primarily gather wealth to build safety for their family, the entire reason that they become wealthier is to insulate themselves from the criminality that is common in poorer parts of their city/country/world. The fact that relative wealth is no longer as insulative as it once was is indicative of a wider ranging issue than poverty driving crime, and results in subtle shifts and cracks forming in society.

There are absolutely cultural drivers behind crime, as well as demographic drivers, and I am positing that a big piece of what's causing criminal culture to spread and shift is social media acting as a communications platform to spread a different set of social mores and standards than those that have historically enforced cohesion within larger society and reduced criminality in wealthier areas. Again, case in point, children of wealthy families in posh schools engaging in vandalize and theft of school property for social media points. Social media is nothing if not a cultural force that creates a new demographic that cuts across other lines, their user-base.