There is lots of talk going around TikTok, especially now geopolitics has been added to this kind of discussion due to ongoing tensions between two giants. Instead of banning or removing the TikTok app, how about the US government put a firm privacy policy that forbids TikTok, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and co from collecting excessive data on users? That would be a better solution, IMHO. Let users download and use whatever app they want but keep a firm privacy policy. But, of course, geopolitics will take over, so I have ZERO hope for a tight privacy policy for all apps.
Similarly, there is no such thing as a backdoor in apps for good guys (3 letter agencies) vs bad guys. Just make one rule for all. Otherwise, it is all grey areas open to abuse. Also, it is not just geopolitics; big social media like YouTube, Insta, FB and others face colossal competition from TikTok. As a result, they are losing users to TikTok. So they want this kind of ban (emphasis mine ), at least they won't object to it, and it is a slippery slope.
This is the correct solution of winning the moral high ground.
What Russia has been doing for several decades (see Yuri Bezmenov [1])
is leveraging the "west's" inner discontent. Every time a Watergate or
Snowden happens it's a gift to them. It exposes our 'hypocrisy', and
failure to live up to our own democratic standards. That fuels the
narrative of the western nations as corrupt.
We're in a bind because the kind of medicine that would fight the even
more sophisticated Chinese tactics now would also hurt our own
corporations and agencies. But we must take it. Targeted advertising
and domestic surveillance must go if our values are to survive in the
world.
while many struggles with the mental gymnastic, for me it has always been clear-cut. Government might be bad, and if they did bad, can we criticize it?
Did any harm come to Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Adam Driver for portraying real life events depicting US government in lesser light?
Can the same be said to Fan Bing Bing if she is to portray Li Wenliang in a movie? Or Viktor Bychkov playing Navalny in some sort of biopic produced by Russian production house?
America is more Brave New World than 1984; people can protest the government, but if that protest rarely overcomes the inertia of the status quo, does it even matter?
This is a disingenuous pattern of argument. You point out a known problem and then throw the baby out with the bath water. In this case, its clear voting does have some effect because seats are constantly changing parties, and parties fiercely compete for votes.
Other similar examples of this argument:
"Everyone knows taxes go to corrupt corporations, they are completely useless get rid of them"
"Everyone knows masks dont block 100% of airflow, theyre completely useless!"
What seats are changing party? I live in California where my vote counts the least. Since I turned 18 every single election has sent a Democrat to Washington for both senate seats and my representative and president (though California doesn't have final say on that last one).
Currently, of those 4 seats, 3 are in their high 70s or even 80s and the 4th was appointed by the governor.
I'm in my 30s. My interests are either entirely not, or very very poorly represented in Washington.
Tell me again how my never missing an election has made a difference?
What seats are changing party: In November there are 50 tight races for house seats alone. The house and senate play a huge role in legislation so this election will have massive impact.
Even if you live in WA/CA your vote still matters. At the federal level there are 4 elected positions, 14 at the state level, and more at a local level. There are also primaries, so even if your Governor is guaranteed to be a Democrat you can at least pick which one.
The people that do vote have an outsized impact because, like you, most Americans are too lazy to vote.
I see your point that district style voting can feel pointless unless you you're in a swing district. I still think there are smaller positions you can influence over but I agree with you on that.
It depends on where you live. Some states your individual vote will not matter because the outcome has already been decided by the popularity of one party.
You cannot meaningfully vote in the US, you have two options that have similar fascist views of the rest of the world and are unlikely to change anything. That is a false choice, meant to lull the chooser into a false sense of agency.
Yep it’s an imperfect system. It’s dramatically better than a lot of others that have existed through history (including today) though.
It is simply wildly untrue to imply that the two major parties don’t hold opposing views on at least a few important topics or that voting doesn’t help determine which party holds the power to realize their worldview. There’s a lot of overlap and a lot of ineffectiveness but this does not make them the same.
I thought this was incredibly obvious, but when you are not inside the US it becomes a lot more clear that it's foreign policy or stance on human rights doesn't change. It doesn't matter who you have in charge. What US news reaches outside of the borders frankly also doesn't convince me it's the same clusterfuck year after year. It wasn't always like this - it's gotten a lot worse in the past twenty years that I've paid any attention to it.
By reading and applying critical thinking in evaluating said material. Unless you are parroting the infamous FSB playbook of 'question everything it will muddies the truth'.
Almost everyone living in the US has some sort of record. They went to school, had friends, teachers, family, etc.
It's unlikely you wouldn't know someone has disappeared, especially if they were important enough that the government decided to illegally disappear them.
>Government might be bad, and if they did bad, can we criticize it?
Assange rots in prison, Alex Jones gets found guilty of defamation by default judgment, FBI raids James O'Keefe and leaks his phone data to NYT (which he is suing), and to top it all we have a soviet-style shitshow trial directed by politicians in January 6th Committee.
Now, I will see some awesome mental gymnastics of people explaining how none of these things have any effect on freedom of speech.
> Alex Jones gets found guilty of defamation by default judgment
Given that Alex Jones has in the last 24 hours been found to be lying under oath repeatedly during his trial, since his lawyers accidentally gave a full digital copy of his phone to the prosecuting attorneys (which they were supposed to have done already during discovery, but did not), this may not be the most effective example.
It's a perfect example of how people are brainwashed to accept degradation of their basic speech and due process rights because powers that be found an example (a scapegoat, really) that's not sympathetic to the public.
I recall the debates around banning Jones from YouTube. It was "sold" as an unprecedented step to combat unprecedented violation of basic decency. And here were are a few years later, when simply mentioning some wrongthink words automatically demonetizes your videos, splatters them with warnings and even cuts live streams from air. People are banned from YouTube left and right (pun intended). It's the new normal and brave technologists who posed as defenders of "real" free speech are mostly rationalizing and cheering it on.
BTW, would you care to explain how something that happened in the last 24 hours is relevant to the issuance of default judgment that occurred in November last year?
the default judgment happened after 6 months of 'fuck around and find out' from Alex 'turn the frogs gay' Jones...
he putted around with blatant disregard for the trial and cries crocodile tears when he's found lying under oath during the damages hearing...
Alex 'you may be my neighbor but i'll eat your ass' jones is not some Bastian of freedom - he's a snake oil salesman profiting off other's pain and misery. selling 'real' pills his family makes.
He had due judgement - he had 6 months to do literally anything (He didn't raise a finger in this regard).
You don't 'not go to trial' by ignoring it... that's not how this works... not how any of this works.
BESIDES ALL THAT:
I agree with you: platforms are censoring people... that's in reaction to malicious (not just false - but intentionally crafted and designed to cause harm) information propagating through our social networks - mind viruses just like bulimia and anorexia that are shared socially - only far more potent: things like QAnnon.
information is spread not by how true it is - but by how sticky.
if malicious actors infect a network - besides censorship - the alternative is violence - either by inaction allowing the malicious mind virus to flourish - or by taking action against it.
We are in a brave new world - and we don't even know the tools we need to protect ourselves as a species from the existential threat of memetic viruses...
Maybe we just all need to stop sneezing our thoughts out onto the internet letting them congeal into this amalgamations of ideas that seem to have a life of their own.
the life status of biological viruses is suspect. I suspect viruses made of thoughts and memetic imagery can potentially reach agent-hood.
This kind of argument is a fundamental disagreement between "censorship can be ok" people vs not. Whose responsibility is it that the public is not tricked? Policy makers? Each individual person? etc
And books and movies are being or have been made about Assange and Alex from both sides with no repercussion. Case in point.
Here's another one: Show me a China documentary that outlines the overreaching adverse effect of state digital surveillance on China population. I can show you at least 5 docs on NSA and Snowden, produced by HBO / published by Harper Collins.
It's astounding how smoothly we went from "you can criticize the government" to "you can make a documentary about someone who criticized the government and got royally fucked". As if those two are the same thing.
To be fair, none of the examples you gave seem just like "criticizing the government," honestly. Snowden physically leaked a bunch of docs he agreed ahead of time would be a criminal offense to leak. I think what he did was the right thing to do and we should have said that whistleblower protections apply to people in his position, but I feel like that's a different problem?
Imagine in the current world that every other countries take the same approach and kick out that now hostile influence (basically banning Meta/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon). How would these companies look when limited to domestic market ? And is that really the world we want to live in ?
China and Russia already does this. Very few other nations have reason to, but if they want to pick between American, Chinese, or domestic websites they are free to do so and I'm confident the vast majority will pick American.
We can handle our own companies with regulations that reflect the fact they aren't owned by a hostile state. We need to be much much more restrictive with china and also restrict our companies ability to work with them when it comes to data and technology sales
Are these two things inherently contradictory? They're currently flying missiles and threatening one of our allies. Can you interpret that as not a hostile enemy?
That is only a problem if value profits of a few companies, that don't even pay that much of taxes, over your citizens. Unless, of course, FB and Co. are doing for the letter agencies what TikTok is doing for the Chinese. In which cade it never really was about the companies in the first place.
You are also pushing a narrative. You can't ignore the basis of the hypocrisy of the west: the west purports to be better. You aren't just not doing better than the comment above, you're doing worse.
Because when power is unevenly distributed a few people can make boneheaded decisions that create misery for the many.
To point to the Russian experience the Tsar made the bad decision to take an odyssey the long way around Asia (and Africa for some ships) to attack Japan and they got their asses handed to them in a few hours. That was the first time Lenin and company tried a revolution and ultimately they made this feature film about it
A few months back we had the spectacle of Elon Musk possibly buying Twitter (maybe he was in the running for asshole-in-chief) but I think he got some sense scared into him and he is keeping his head down these days.
Yes wealth can be turned into power, but you know what already is power? Political power. Wealth is a counterpoint to political power. This is why communist systems become authoritarian, because there is no counterpoint to the power of the politburo. View xi’s crackdown on tech in China as a elimination of a potential competitor, just like his earlier corruption purges.
Well, okay corrupt, but still capable of self-repair. meanwhile others have the corruption build into the very system of thiefdoms handed out to nobles.
Also there are quite alot of ideals at work, for example when it comes to free trade. Anybody can sell his product and ideas in the us, meanwhile alot of beligerents, have walled of their societies from free discours and sabotage any external market contenders.
How do you know that pointing out the ‘hypocrisy’ is the propaganda rather than the idea that these values as commonly understood have any basis in reality in the first place?
I think that's a fair objection. I don't know. But my lived experience
in a family who have sacrificed a lot on the alter of democratic
values leaves me with a strong bias for which I make no apologies.
People in my family have sacrificed meaningfully for these values as well, but I think it’s important to evaluate objectively whether those sacrifices are honored by the people who wield power or taken for granted.
> But the picture changes markedly when all three independent variables are included in the multivariate Model 4 and are tested against each other. The estimated impact of average citizens’ preferences drops precipitously, to a non-significant, near-zero level. Clearly the median citizen or “median voter” at the heart of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy does not do well when put up against economic elites and organized interest groups. The chief predictions of pure theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy can be decisively rejected. Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all.
> […]
> When both interest groups and affluent Americans oppose a policy it has an even lower likelihood of being adopted (these proposed policies consist primarily of tax increases). At the other extreme, high levels of support among both interest groups and affluent Americans increases the probability of adopting a policy change, but a strong status quo bias remains evident.
It's easy to avoid the Bezmenov's "trap" (for a lack of better words). Avoid moralizing issues especially if it doesnt directly affect your core interests. Also acknowledge that indeed all nations do have skeleton in their cupboards, let's keep them hidden.
Everything you say is true. But it's not an argument. Failing to live
up to all your stated values in past is not a reason to give up on
then for all time.
It's not about giving up on them. It's about being willing to accept that you haven't lived up to those values and make the changes necessary to uphold them.
While still in the wrong, how seriously should China or Russia take the country that lead the invasion and occupation of Iraq/Afghanistan for 20 odd years when it offers it's condemnation of their own ambitions?
To be frank, how can we expect anyone to take our condemnation seriously when we are currently doing the same things or have let the same things go unpunished in recent memory. We refuse to hold our own torturers and war criminals to proper account.
> Do you feel at all represented by your elected officials? Did you vote for them? If not, why would you accept the burden of guilt for their actions?
Personally it varies depending on the official. I think at some level we do bear some responsibility for those who represent us, I don't necessarily believe that crosses into guilt as much it does a call to action. The corrupt and unethical rely on a combination of apathy and normalisation in order to get away with their actions.
> A relative handful of people made all the torture decisions for us. I don't think I want them hiding behind the flag, or me.
I want them pushed out from behind the flag and into a jail cell.
> Maybe we didn't punish contrary opinions quite as badly as China / Russia
Understatement of the year. We also currently don’t outlaw homosexuality or religion or engage in genocide and we elect our leaders democratically among other things.
You should probably check your facts. All but the first one is false. They have engaged in genocide: see Native Americans; trail of tears. The USA is a republic, not a democracy.
Republic and democracy refer to two different axis.
Republic is about how the vertex of government is structured.
Democracy is about where the executive/legislative power comes from.
The US is both, you could argue that Canada is not a republic as they have a recognized queen, but it would be a stretch as she has essentially zero power there.
They said they elect their leaders democratically which is simply not true no matter how you want to phrase it. The president is elected by an electoral college and not a democratic vote.
But the electoral college ultimately derives its members from people who are voted on by the general electorate.
The electoral college is an abstraction so that the states in the United States are able to have a check and balance on federal power. Having a direct democracy of 300 million people would be a bad idea, a lot of political philosophy has been written on why.
If you build on a library that builds on library using AGPL license, you are still bound by the AGPL license, no matter how abstracted. If your country ultimately derives for the people, you are democratic. It is just that the USA is technically a democratic Republic, and intentionally so.
That doesn’t magically make it a democratic election. In fact, the way you describe it working is a relatively new way of doing things and varies from state to state. It is not uniform. Also, if you paid any attention at all in the last election, you’d realize how tenuous it all really is and in multiple elections, the actual person voted in wasn’t even the winner by popular vote. So by definition, it can not be democratic.
> That doesn’t magically make it a democratic election. In fact, the way you describe it working is a relatively new way of doing things and varies from state to state. It is not uniform. Also, if you paid any attention at all in the last election, you’d realize how tenuous it all really is and in multiple elections, the actual person voted in wasn’t even the winner by popular vote. So by definition, it can not be democratic.
Now I am by no means a fan of the electoral system and I think one van argue that the US fails to live up to being democratic in practice for several reasons (I consider the electoral college a very minot part of the issues), however saying that it can not be democratic by principle or definition it can not be a democracy. I mean let's remember that in Athens (where the term comes from) only a minority of male citizens was allowed to vote.
I think that some of the problems with the EC would go away if the number of electors/House seats was updated to match current U.S. demographics. The last time that was changed was in the 1930s, if I recall correctly. In the first United States Congress, there were about 65 thousand Americans per representative. Nowadays, that ratio is closer to 760 thousand Americans per representative.
Unfortunately, that kind of rebalancing has zero political support. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, while not as good a solution in my opinion as it doesn't fix the underlying problems with citizen representation, is probably more politically feasible in terms of fixing presidential elections.
If your definition of democracy is "nationwide popular vote to elect a single role" you will find that there are very few democracies around.
Actually in the US the election of the president is remarkably linear.
In Italy the actual head of state is elected by the parliament (with no underlying direct vote) and then during national elections 1) the people elect a new parliament (with a complex mixture of proportional/non-proportial seats) 2) the parliament proposes various governments to the head of state 3) the head of state selects (and makes suggestions for modifications) the government (the actual executive branch).
And surely there are democracies that follow a more complex process.
The main difference between the US and most other countries is that the US counts votes for the president federally and not nationally, and the difference would almost completely disappear if more states would follow Maine and Nebraska example and drop the Firts Past the Post election style.
Democracy means that the legitimacy of the state is given by the people, not blood, not military, not religion, not oligarchs.
Do you really want to vote on every little bit of minutia that you would have to if this were a direct democracy?
There's an old game, Anachronox, that does a wonderful job of making fun of this when the player is on the planet Democratus. Worth a play if you haven't.
When one group is actively trying to absolve its sins of the past, and the other doesn’t even recognize them while doubling-down, the claim that “everyone has sins” an abdication of the idea that behavior matters.
It’s not quite to the level of geopolitic but selling bottled water is entirely unnecessary in majority of the US. It’s extremely bad for the environment, both for the plastic but of course the transport. When it’s often the same damn thing you get in your sink.
But no idea what’s specifically bad about this brand in particular.
As do some places in the U.S. and many people do fear that their water while technically potable, is full of unhealthy materials like lead. Even for me in a relatively new building, I have no idea about the materials of the lines built into it or the water main in my city. I use a Brita or straight from the tap personally but I can't say I blame people who are concerned (in the U.S.) where infrastructure is quite old and there doesn't seem to be much concern by officials even in the most dire of cases like Flint to fix things.
There are some serious concerns about bottled water in the US, particularly with how the manufacturers (like Nestlé) often get the water for free or at preferential rates, then sell it with a huge markup, and how some of it is (from what I've read) sourced from places like California, which need the water very badly.
There are also very serious concerns about Nestlé in particular as a company; the big one I always remember (because it's been going on basically as long as I've been alive) is how they aggressively push baby formula on mothers in developing countries despite knowing that the water in their area (needed to reconstitute the formula) is unsafe to drink. There are a number of other problems with their business practices, but I don't recall what they are off the top of my head.
Natural resources should be owned by the government and rented to the highest bidder.
It's kinda crazy that we do this with wireless spectrum but not with resources like water, oil, gas, etc.
Even land should probably work like this. Rather than a property tax, you pay a yearly rent on the land, afterall the US gov is spending quite a bit to protect it from forceful seizure by other nations.
>They say that by extracting ground water to sell, bottled water companies are actually draining natural waterways.
Okay but people have to drink somehow right? It's not like if nestle stopped operating that the demand for water would evaporate. It'll just cause another waterway to be depleted instead.
The other point raised in the article seems to be that nestle is taking water, which it pays little to nothing for, and charging $1/bottle or whatever. This sounds outrageous on the surface, until you realize that water in a well or whatever isn't really useful. You still need to bottle and transport it, which is where most of the value-add is. If people only needed water they'd get it from their tap, not buying $1 bottles. When they are buying bottles, they're paying for the convenience of water being available right then and there.
This is like saying the US had segregation and internment camps in the 40s, so it had no moral standing on the USSR and Nazi Germany committing genocide. Which would be complete nonsense.
Remember kids, propaganda doesn't need to convince you of anything to be successful, only to get you to believe in nothing. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” . The intention of 'what aboutism' is to get you to do nothing, especially to not speak up in support if you aren't sure. 'Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good'. Don't let doom posters like this one suck you into their world of apathy and hate. If someone says something that's goal appears to be negativity, hate, or apathy, they are toxic, do not rent them space in your head.
After action reports, critical evaluation with a goal towards improvement, great. Apathy, the world sucks, give up? F that.
In the 90s the USA had the developed world's worst infant mortality rates. But if you look at the way we gather our statistics, it is different from all other countries. Why? Because unlike others we didn't manipulate the metrics because it was more important to us to have actual data to help save/improve lives. So who sucks? Who is failing kids? The country who is willing to make itself look bad with the worst metrics so that it can change things, or those not honest enough to be willing to look bad or make self examination?
Yeah, America sucks, but it's 10x better than it was when I was a kid in the 70-80s, or most places I have traveled. I would rather have public suck that can be addressed than the general apathy that this poster has.
It's entirely possible that you're living and working with a bunch of zeroes, and getting all of your information third hand. How many real people do you know well, one dozen? Two dozen? Maybe you could spend your time around better people.
>how about the US government put a firm privacy policy that forbids TikTok, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and co from collecting excessive data on users
Because the U.S. has access to and therefore benefits from the data that these companies collect. The exception on that list is TikTok - the U.S. can't access that data, but their rival can. That's why they're keen on banning it.
Does anyone really think the NSA are not able to access Tiktok? Or that Chinese equivalent orgs are not able to access Facebook etc? Really?
This whole thing is just the cultural side of people pushing a new cold war for self serving purposes (increase my budget, grant me more powers, buy my newspaper etc).
I'm not saying China is great, I'm just saying this seems very much like a made up issue to me.
Everyone is hacking everyone. For true matters of intelligence gathering and national security physical location is no serious object. If it's on a server it's accessible to us, the Russians, the Chinese, etc. etc, basically public. But, and this is a thicc but, the US government and its various enforcement arms really like having a domestic data pile because they can trawl through it some veneer of legal legitimacy. Google's data is only a rubber stamp warrant away and that data can then be used in court. The same is not true for offshore providers like Tiktok. Sure they could probably get access if it's in a friendly country but that's a much higher more expensive bar.
Basically the discussion we're having about Tiktok is the discussion we'd be having about all these data haystacks if it weren't for the fact that there are powerful government interests that like the domestic haystacks.
TikTok is feared not because of privacy, but because it shows China can do tech too. America placed its economic bets on being a tech superpower and that is now under threat. Restricting American companies in the same way would only serve to also diminish tech in the US.
Eh, not really. There have been plenty of perfectly functional apps working in China for a long time. Makes sense that people are worried about feeding video streams, geolocation data, facial recognition data, social network data, etc. to our adversary who uses the very same data sources to manipulate and control its own population.
> There have been plenty of perfectly functional apps working in China for a long time.
But, for the most part, they've seen little fanfare outside of China. Even the breakouts, like Alibaba and WeChat, have really only succeeded where they are able to bridge connections with China. They hadn't proven they can develop software for a wide audience. TikTok changed the landscape. TikTok is an app that could have come straight out of Silicon Valley and is successfully going head to head with American players on their own turf.
Sure, but this set of observations is actually much more explainable by: people are uncomfortable with China either pushing or pulling data directly to/from Americans. This set of observations is not very explainable by "we didn't know China can 'do tech,' now we know, and now we don't like it."
Or, the state's agenda of fearmongering during our parents' generation over foreign enemies did not pass on to their children and grandchildren, and perhaps our domestic strategy of refusing to acknowledge the value of individuals' data and privacy to grow US companies has backfired since they now do not have any sense of ownership or an expectation of privacy to any company.
This was a blunder writ in hubris and xenophobia from the start.
Wasn't Eric Schmidt working for the department of defense while pushing Google+ for other countries?
Letting most Silicon Valley-style platform stuff into your country is a bit crazy: why would you want network lock-in effects to mean 30% of taxi revenue or whatever flows back to the US, or that a US AI matchmakes your dating population and drains money out of the country having people pay to get more swipes than each other in a zero-sum competition?
For most countries Silicon Valley-style companies with strong moats aren't entering in and helping with comparative advantage: they are just a taxation that goes overseas, capturing people through failures of collective action causing inability to shift platforms when something competitive comes along.
I don't want to personally malign you and I'm not gonna downvote, but it's irritating to me that this is currently the top comment. I noticed exactly the same thing yesterday where a top comment was explicitly commenting on a completely different article from the one in the link that the commenter had read the week prior about a similar topic.
What you wrote here has nothing to do with the linked article. The article doesn't discuss what American government policy is or should be toward TikTok. It's entirely about the business implications of Facebook potentially losing a competitive edge from its social graph if it adopts TikTok's content model that does not use a social graph.
You've hijacked that topic to talk about a completely different and more divisive topic du jour that is already discussed every other time TikTok comes up.
Their business is built on top of collecting and selling users' data. Why will the politicians sponsored by them try to establish a policy to break their own business?
I generally like this, but there's another risk to keep in mind:
Purposefully over-regulating to such a degree that only the existing behemoths can survive and no startup could reasonably navigate the costly labyrinth of policies in that sector.
I think California has been doing OK recently in creating tiers of companies based on employee size and applying varying degrees of requirements based on that.
> how about the US government put a firm privacy policy that forbids TikTok, [...] from collecting excessive data on users?
This wouldn't address the way the CCP can use TikTok for subversion of America, vis-a-vis foreign election interference by Russia on social media in 2016.
> Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and co
The American government has more options with American corporations, these companies aren't intrinsically linked to foreign governments in the way that TikTok is to the CCP. However, the EU should probably kick these American social media companies out of the EU.
I honestly don't see a reason for the US not ban TikTok for arbitrary bullshit reasons, simply because China does the same sort of bullshit for American internet companies. Foreign websites often get mysteriously throttled, which encourages people to use their domestic alternatives. The iTunes store was banned, despite following all their censorship rules. They even hacked Google.
I'm not advocating censorship for censorship sake. The problem I have is with asymmetric rules regarding commerce. If China wants to have free access to US dollars, they need to allow us to have equally free access to their RMB.
How would the US possibly enforce this law on tik tok? At the end of the day, if a regulator can’t investigate, then they can’t enforce. What’s to stop tik tok from providing lip service then doing the opposite?
Does tiktok actually collect that much (valuable) information? It seems all the scaremongering people spread (rightfully or not) is around it's moderation and attempts to steer discourse and change opinions to pro-china?
I think the real concern that isn't being said out loud is that it's fear of TikTok's ability to distribute information, and that the US government doesn't have management under their thumb.
Yeah to me seems they rather buy data, so in the app I see ads about things things I've looked for somewhere else. Never seen it other way around, but maybe it is more subtle - YouTube Shorts and TikTok have a huge overlap in content for me, but does it mean YouTube buys my data from TikTok?
It's far worse than just data collection. At least at one point in time Tiktok's client was disassembled enough to reveal that it had a function to download an unsigned binary blob and run it on the device. They're able to bypass app store protections completely...
> [...] how about the US government put a firm privacy policy that forbids TikTok, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and co from collecting excessive data on users
And also a policy that forbids UX addictive-by-design patterns to induce bad habits.
How exactly would you word or enforce such a policy? What is a "bad habit"? Is fun or happiness addictive? Why might the puritan nanny state approach work better here than with alcohol, drugs, or abortion?
You hire the same kinds of people that these companies hire to design their products to be addictive and then you draft legislation banning the things that they say are addictive.
A better solution would be to teach how to get out of addiction and treat it more effectively vs banning. Banning only makes the addiction features more taboo and thus even more addictive. See prohibition, 1920-1930.
Do you really foresee a future where addictive aspects of social media are banned and the descendents of moonshiners are setting up servers next to rusted out stills in abandoned shacks in the Kentucky mountains so that people can get their doom scrolling fix over Tor?
Now that I reread that, I think it's entirely possible. Man the future is weird.
>"A better solution would be to teach how to get out of addiction"
It's hard to say no to the idea of more education, but I believe this is a non impactful solution. We've been teaching about the dangers of alcohol, tobacco, illicit drugs, unhealthy food, and much more for decades - if not generations. It only goes so far. I don't believe most addicts are addicted because of ignorance or a lack of rationality. I believe the primary driver is biological rather than a lack of knowing better.
I think we're talking about two different aspects to the problem. The methods and approaches taken in regards to treating addiction is not the same thing as teaching people about the harm of drugs. I'm not saying we shouldn't have drug / substance abuse education, but rather, its not the cure-all people think it will be.
The core problem with most social media, including TikTok, is that they fully control how you can consume the content, be it the endless-recommendations-scrolling of TikTok or the Twitter or Facebook timeline. You can't browse it in a non-addicting fashion, even if you tried, as third party clients are not allowed.
So the solution should be to force them to open up to third party clients. This won't magically make the problem go away completely, but not having so much content locked inside a Skinner box would certainly be helpful.
Ah, you'd set up the revolving door system of regulation the likes of which is used to ensure banks, stock markets, and military procurement don't operate against the public good. Well that takes care of "addictive".
Now how about "bad habits"? Have Republican politicians appoint their "experts" to draft it? Or perhaps your politics sway the other way and you'd prefer Democrats to appoint their experts, perhaps the Catholic Church, given the persuasion of their current leaders.
This top comment is odd, in the sense that the article does not talk about TikTok's privacy and/or geopolitics debacles at all, even though the title "poison pill" might lead some users who didn't read the article to think it refers to TikTok's violation of privacy, or it being created and controlled by an Internet giant based in Communist China, or something along these lines.
The "poison pill" in the title actually refers to TikTok's recommendation model that disregards (or at least de-weights) social graph, versus Facebook/Instagram's approach.
It'd be practically impossible to enforce the 'privacy' concerns, because the data is so vast and accessible to CCP entities employed by ByteDance. I mean, they literally pay CCP members to promote government policy agenda within the company.
As for trade - FB, Google etc. - none of it is even allowed in China. So purely from a 'trade parity' basis, Chinese social apps simply should not be allowed in the US. If we can't have apps 'there' then our policy should be 'tit for tat' and do the same thing our side.
Technically US companies are allowed in China as long as they follow the local regulations (which probably involves following Chinese National Security Letters etc). What OP proposes and the EU is doing is to allow anyone in the market as long as they follow strong privacy laws. Existing apps can defend themselves in court and only get banned after a sentence from a judge.
>It'd be practically impossible to enforce the 'privacy' concerns,
But US would first need a law, now you just surrendered before you even tried.
It could be possible to enforce it, you find an illegal action you slap them with a fine, find a new infraction slap them again and again.
Do I need to spend my time thinking for americans? Make a law so Tik Tok keeps US people data in US, force them to have US employees and offer a bounty to this employees to report illegal stuff. The only downside is that most US citizens and companies will have no choice then to accept EU privacy laws as really good and valid (but I am sure the world can find soem other laws to make fun off, like something about bananas shape).
"Do I need to spend my time thinking for americans? " Only if makes sense, and unfortunately, I don't think it does in this case.
Which is the point: TikTok can't really be TikTok with those laws in place.
There's no way to make any US or European privacy laws gel with CCP policy and there's no realistic way to 'segregate the data'.
The only 'solution' would be to have a complete and total separation of the app in almost every way, essentially meaning TT as an operating entity would be an American/Western company, which happens to be 'owned' by a company in China, but that's it. Literally everything else, except for maybe some code-sharing, would be completely different.
Then EU would have to do the same for FB, Goolge,Apple and americans will have to stop complaining about protectionism every time we give those giants a fine for doing bad things.
The EU is not capable of producing it's own FB, Google and Apple, and those 'bad things' they do are are very marginal.
FB selling ads to people and allowing agencies to 'target' people based on whatever just isn't causing a lot of harm to anyone. Nobody in Europe is being 'put off' because they're seeing Kid's Clothing ads because they are parents. I mean, it's odd, but not that bad.
The American Gov. are not going after Europeans for arbitrary reasons. If the NSA is targeting a European for something, you can be sure it already rises to the level of 'international shenanigans' anyhow, and that probably something is very wrong.
FB could very well remove the possibility for the NSA to directly get data on some random European but it largely won't make a difference.
Right now, the CCP has access to anything they want, for any reason they want, including arbitrary malicious things such as harassing NGOs etc..
1 some EU person has social media account sicne a child, NSA,CIA know everything about this person
2 this person manages to reach top leadership role in politics
3 This person is involved in a decision to use say USA or EU stuff(airplanes, guns, software)
4 CIA, NSA other 3 letter agencies popup this person files and blackmail them so the Americans get the contract.
Or it could be that americans want to invade something and EU population don't like it, but the politicians get blackmailed to support he US anyway. We know as a fact that Americans spy on our politicians , I will not be surprised if blackmailing and bribing is happening, so why give the CIA,NSA access to our entire population for free, make those bastards work for it, make them do illegal shit to obtain it not just offer the data like idiots.
I am just saying, force TicTok out or ask them to keep the data in US, EU and the same force FB, Google to do the same because US does not want to do the reasonable thing and offer EU citizens same righs as US citizens when it comes to data privacy, sorry dude but fuck your US gov , privacy and other values are applied only for citizens and we the rest are just economic markets, idiots to be exploited and screwed over
You may have noticed this from the attempts or lack thereof over the past two decades to regulate tech to the benefit of everyday people. This is because Congress has been petrified of "breaking Google". It is currently why so much of SV now sits on the POTUS's cabinet.
No one knows the totality of how and where these modern day digital East India companies truly operate, and there will never be legislation that broadly protects citizen privacy like in the EU because of it.
Which law will be used to reveal the encrypted traffic between the app and server was sending personal data to be used in influence campaigns by the CCP?
> how about the US government put a firm privacy policy that forbids TikTok, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and co from collecting excessive data on users? That would be a better solution, IMHO.
Something that frankly won't happen since that would put those companies out of business. Not to mention actual collusion between US gov and some of those corporations (all of them depending on the subject: from military to political data mining). Collectively they have more influence than the US government,so even assuming that the politicians would correctly try to protect the citizens from what are de facto surveillance machines it would be a big stretch. Again, that would actually go against their interests, so let's not hold our breaths on this.
Hate to dig up old skeletons, but if most of the tech consumers (not even all the knowledgeable and principled individuals, let alone the mass of users) stood by Snowden & Assange, what kind of chance do we stand now? Some of the criticisms of Snowden(undermining US influence thus helping China) let's say was "half-tolerable", but with TikTok (which is de facto China's spying & "hypnotizing" tool in the west) we have no excuse of tolerating that here. People brushed it off when Trump said it, but he was right.You need to clean house with external players(Tiktok) before you move on towards harder, "more legitimate" opponents(FB,etc), which were dying anyways.
TikTok makes me incredibly angry and I need to vent about it somewhere so I am going to vent about it here.
I have ADHD. TikTok is almost certainly designed in a way to directly exploit that fact. It really makes me angry. It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it. I feel like I am intentionally being taken advantage of by TikTok.
I had TikTok installed for one day and vowed never again.
Is this how gambling addicts feel about casinos? Or how smokers feel about cigarette companies?
As an ex-smoker, I never felt any anger towards cigarette companies. Only anger I felt was towards government regulations like banning smoking indoors or high taxes on cigarettes. Also felt a bit annoyed with society judging the smokers. Even when I was trying to quit, I didn't blame cigarette companies.
Now in retrospect, I am glad that those regulations, taxes, and judgmental stares slowly nudged me towards quitting.
My guess is that the most TikTok/social-media users don't realize that they are addicts.
EDIT: And yes TikTok is indeed extremely good at giving you dopamine hits. I don't keep the app on my phone but every once in a while if I am extremely bored or feeling very low, I will download it. It makes time go by so fast.
>As an ex-smoker, I never felt any anger towards cigarette companies. Only anger I felt was towards government regulations like banning smoking indoors or high taxes on cigarettes. Also felt a bit annoyed with society judging the smokers. Even when I was trying to quit, I didn't blame cigarette companies.
If the majority of this cultural change happened during the age of the internet and the leaked info from manufactures around tweaking recipes to be more addictive, falsifying research, etc was being dropped on Twitter, Reddit, etc on a weekly basis, I imagine that would have played out differently
I cannot imagine tiktok doing anything good for me given how much instagram videos bore the hell out of me. What is it exactly that gives you a „kick“?
For me, Tiktok somehow shows videos that are just “right”. Maybe it is length of videos and ux. I skip anything boring in first 2-3 seconds and probably that’s how other people use it too. So creators have to make their videos entertaining from the first second.
And also videos somehow are relevant to current situation in my life. For example, if I have a tight deadline at work, Tiktok will show me videos related to work, productivity, mocking deadlines, etc. Not sure if it is just the numbers game since you can go through 10s of videos in a few minutes. And you just remember videos that were right or if their algorithm is really that good.
Perhaps the real culprits are the digital "gas stations" that make money hand-over-fist with TikTok's engagement loop. Apple, Google, and to an extent, Microsoft are all complicit in letting people make addictive experiences that promote their respective platforms. Much like the gas station, the smartphone is ubiquitous. Everyone passes by the TikTok aisle on their way to texting their mom or Googling a pie recipe, rich or poor. Worse yet, the guilt they feel for their addiction causes people to hide it. Nobody wants to address it, they just want to scroll their For You Page, enveloped in the comfort of homogeneous content. I normally don't glean empathy from people who make bad choices, but social media just makes me sad.
I think, ultimately, the only solution will be stripping platform owners of their power. Google and Apple have both undeniably abused their market position to promote harmful content and shelter the problems that TikTok causes. We'll either die in the shackles of our own corporations, or live long enough to watch them topple over.
I'm not seeing the connection between the Google/Apple duopoly and the rise of TikTok or other addictive social media. I spend half or more of my waking hours on one Apple device or another, and if I had only things Apple has pushed at me to go by, I'd not even know TikTok exists. What's the sequence of events you expect from removing Google and Apple's platform power, that'll lead to reduced social media activity on their platforms and/or in general? Apple, for their part, seem to have spent a fair amount of effort developing features that exist only to curb addiction-like smartphone use—I'm not sure why they'd have done that if they were that focused on getting you to use your phone as much as possible.
Now, if we were talking about whale-chasing F2P games, I'd see your point, but I don't see the connection with social media.
I was just having a chat with my buddy today about how Apple, Microsoft and to a large extent Google are largely the best positioned to profit from any upstream applications. While the likes of Facebook, Instagram and TikTok fight for viewership, these underlying platforms are just counting profits regardless of who reigns supreme on the top. I don't know if Jobs saw this future unfold but here it is.
The gas stations of the digital era are just doing their job, ensuring that there is enough gas supply. What's ironic is that the biggest gas company also created the first automobiles, and basically told the market, everyone is welcome to build an automobile to use my gas as long as you give me 30% of your profits. Oh BTW, your automobile can run only using my gas. Boy, imagine this in the physical world.
I also have ADHD and I made the mistake of downloading TikTok once. It ended up costing me a lot of time, money, and a significant chunk of my attention span. It became so bad that I couldn't focus at work because all I could think about was TikTok.
I uninstalled it and haven't looked back. I don't feel angry at the company, but I do feel exploited and preyed on. Makes me worried about the kids that use this app and have even less self-control than I do.
What is your thought process about it that allows you to feel exploited and preyed upon, but not feel upset at the group that profited off exploiting you?
I mean that genuinely. I feel like I'd be upset in your shoes. Are you looking at it differently somehow?
I've not been diagnosed with ADHD, though have some symptoms (though honestly, some of those are just standard "human living in 2022"), but I do know I have what I would consider an "addictive personality".
I can't answer how gambling addicts or smokers feel, but I will share a similar experience - I had to uninstall Candy Crush Saga from my phone, because I would literally open it, and then "come to" ~40 minutes later at the end of my drive (carpool, not me driving). This went on for about two weeks before I decided to uninstall the game.
I've never been on TikTok, but I do know that mobile games like Candy Crush are designed specifically to be addictive/habit forming - look up "gamification" for some related aspects, though that's really more about applying those sorts of mechanisms (mostly daily login bonuses / streak rewards, but also carefully spaced repetitions / cooldowns to get you to come back multiple times a day, highly stimulating audio and visual feedback for that "dopamine rush") to form habits around other domains (exercise being a theoretically "positive" application).
All that is to say, good on you for recognizing your negative interaction with that app, and for uninstalling it. I don't know where the balance lies when weighing personal freedom (of both you to install whatever you want, and developers to release whatever they want) vs. legislation and regulation, but I do think awareness of the techniques that are being used (similar to how I learn as much as possible about scams / social engineering) is extremely important on a personal level.
One final note - 2048, a few years after Candy Crush, hit me in a pretty similar way. The interesting thing there is, with no ads, microtransactions or fancy animations, it really was the core gameplay loop that I got hooked on. After finally hitting the titular number, however, I uninstalled it and haven't gone back.
I read a book called "the power of habits" a few years back and there was a few chapters focusing on the gamification and how our brains tend to develop habits (and in some case addiction).
Ever since reading this book, I've noticed patterns in the way apps are developed.
Candy crush and other similar game apps are a bit obvious, but for me the most sticking one for me is the facebook app. They introduced a few years back these emoji that flash in the screen when you received a hearth or a smiley face in the chat. This is almost a direct copy of a technique used by the gambling industry where they flash coins in the screen of a gambling machine. In the book, I believed they explained that by making positive results / feeling of result stronger, you can trigger more deep rooted habits.
I remember when acquaintances at Facebook first saw all of the psychological stuff Candy Crush was doing and how distraught they were about it. So sad that they chose to emulate what they knew was horrible behavior.
If you are interested in viscerally understanding gamification, I suggest you install a free-to-play game with the sole intention of understanding how you are being manipulated. Pay attention to the slow cook, the social pressures, the dopamine hits, the sunk cost. I tried this (The Walking Dead: Survivors) and I learnt a lot.
Question to gamification engineers: do you play addictive “gamified” games, or does the internal knowledge of how the sausage is made ruin the joy?
I understand that having ADHD would make this more diffcult, but I have found it helpful to use the feature on my phone (iOS, but presumably Android has similar) which limits the total amount of time I can use a particular app every day.
When the time limit is up, I can still keep using the app if I want to, but often that is a sufficient reminder ("I've already been using this app for an hour?!") that I can stop.
I appreciate this feature because I can enjoy the app but also still feel in control of my time.
The fact both Youtube and Instagram are now displaying short-form videos within their apps only makes it worse. I know it's hard to fight against it but focus on something else more worthy of your time.
> It feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency away and to create a product that triggers me so viscerally that I can't keep away from it.
That's most social media and even products in general. Profit comes from consumption, and the best way to keep you consuming is to keep you engaged. Products thrive off of outrage which is why platforms like social media and the news optimize for outraging consumers rather than efficiently delivering information, which is why I actively avoid typical social media or the news. Just don't use it
Or how people with body image issues feel about instagram? Or how people with social injustice fixations feel about facebook?
Or how people with porn addictions feel about pornhub?
These platforms are clearly utilizing super-normal stimuli to overwhelm our brains and elicit addiction-like behavior. Is that legal? Yes. Is that moral? Hell no.
The concept of super-normal stimuli, or more specifically, the avoidance thereof, has guided a lot of my parenting decisions. I know I won’t keep him away from all of that forever, but I want to make as much space as possible these early years for his little mind and attention span to develop.
Similar to how the vast majority of people can enjoy alcohol responsibly, most people can and do enjoy social media responsibly.
I like to enjoy a nice beer after a hard day's work. Sometimes I also like to enjoy TikTok for a bit to get my mind off of work and other challenges. Neither company should feel bad about providing a great product that people enjoy just because some folks have a problem enjoying it in moderation.
I left Facebook/Twitter years ago for this reason and then got an ADHD diagnosis shortly after. So yeah, I can relate. I've never downloaded TikTok but I subscribe to two users via my RSS reader, which at least provides insulation from being subject to their algorithm and endless video feeds. That could be a good half-way solution for you.
Nowadays my main vice is Reddit with the occasional YouTube binge. I find I *can* manage using both in moderation but it's a slippery slope. It's even harder if I don't have a healthy outlet to focus on instead, like an interesting project, hobby, or class. But honestly, complete avoidance of those platforms paired with really good internet hygiene ("digital minimalism") are only consistent solutions for me.
I installed it for one day, then I removed it. Came back a few days later, then I removed it again, And I've been in this (vicious) cycle for a while now. Whenever boredom hits, something in me thinks of TikTok. It's impressive. Never had that feeling with other platforms, not even Reddit. To fight TikTok, i'm trying a different approach, getting to know what my bored self really wants and feed it something else.
I’ve given TikTok a try four or five times now and for some reason it just doesn’t click with me. It’s not that I’m immune to this stuff because I really enjoy Instagram and I read HN fairly regularly. It seems that I’m somebody the TikTok algorithm doesn’t know how to serve.
I did see a few interesting videos, but nothing very compelling. How many dog videos or welding videos does one person need to see?
Instagram, on the other hand, is super sticky for me because I know the people I follow and it’s wonderful to see a photo of them and message back and forth once in a while.
I wouldn't take it personal. The reality is we all have much shorter attention spans with or without an ADHD diagnosis. Tiktok as of last year had 1 billion active accounts which means a lot of people like or even prefer content in smaller chunks.
TikTok is an interesting case because on the one hand they have some fantastic content, cooking videos, explainers, etc. On the other hand how that content is delivered is absolute garbage (from the POV of sucking out attention).
Yeah, I wish I could use it. I have friends who send me cool/interesting stuff.
Part of it having that stuff is the reason it's so addicting. I get in a loop of "maybe the next video is The One". That's why short form, title-less videos are such an addicting thing to consume. Especially when you can't see the next until you're playing it and by the time you've played it, the video is over.
the CCP probably see it as some sort of poetic revenge for the real opium trade and the ensuing Sino-British war that they see as the start of the "century of humiliation"
It's not only TikTok. To an extent, nearly EVERYTHING entertainment is designed to be sticky. Candy Crush, Sports Betting, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube...all are designed to maximize engagement.
I have metric shit tons of ADHD. All social media will match on to you easily. I don't think TikTok was designed specifically to target us as much as it was geared to target everyone. It's just we fall easily. Most ADHD people have addictive personalities.
This is what I would have expected as well so it was surprising to hear otherwise. I thought perhaps the OP had seen leaked documents or some other form of evidence that indicated TikTok targeted people with ADHD deliberately.
Your claim that TikTok deliberately targeted users with ADHD would be consistent with some of TikTok's previous behavior but I wanted to better understand what evidence you had for it.
You stated that TikTok was _almost certainly_ designed to _directly_ exploit the fact that you ADHD. I realize now that you meant something less direct but please re-read your comment and understand why someone might come to the same conclusion I did.
Yeah but to be fair the internet has been like this for awhile now. TikTok just takes what the internet offers and gives you a respective hit of dopamine or adrenaline to persuade you to swipe more.
Great if you're able to do that easily. Please understand that some of the most brilliant minds in the world get up in the morning usually somewhere in California, and work many hours in the day, and their literal job is to figure out how to subvert this.
Some of the most brilliant minds in the world are working on anything you could name.
> their literal job is to figure out how to subvert this.
I mean sure, but at the end of the day all we're talking about here is an app that shows you a sequence of entertaining videos, it's not streaming directly into your brain stem, it's not fundamentally different from any of the other addictive things that have existed on the internet for years.
Frankly, it's not even that important... So what if you waste your time looking at a bunch of random videos? I personally know people who spend 6+ hours a day on twitch, youtube, minecraft etc, they don't frame themselves as victims being subverted by the insidious machinations of majong, it's understood that they simply enjoy minecraft so they play it a lot, sometimes more than they know they should, but that's just life, there is nothing special about tiktok that merits this subversion of agency narrative.
Let's try it like this -- a disproportionate and extremely high number of the most brilliant minds in the world work in Silicon Valley. Overwhelmingly, that work is essentially "harvesting the behavior and attention of human beings for profit, most often through advertising" That describes all of social media and all of FAANG to various extents.
Those are facts. Up until now I haven't said anything about whether this is good or bad, and I'm still not saying "this means we should shut it down."
But I've seen too much to suggest that it makes sense to hand-wave this phenomenon away and say "it's just life."
No. It's worth studying and doing our best to determine how dangerous this is.
Unfortunately regulations will always be one step behind. Asking for them is victim mentality. We’re responsible for our own choices.
Everyone might get addicted to TikTok for some period. But everyone needn’t stay addicted to TikTok. (Of course I use “TikTok” as a placeholder for any infinitely consumable feed of targeted content.)
Regulation has a place. For example, an obvious and easy win would be to pass a bill requiring any product with a consumable feed to offer and default to an option to sort it in reverse chronological order.
But regulation is a reactive and slow strategy to shrinking a problem that continues to metastasize. There are more proactive social strategies available to us. Education is free. Self-control is free. Unfortunately, they’re only “free” modulo the minutes of attention we can allocate to them from our finite lifetime supply.
I wonder, how many minutes of education or self-introspection is required to prevent one future minute of app usage? I’m optimistic this ratio is favorable, so that once people sufficiently internalize the effect of infinite consumable feeds, they will naturally reduce their self-sabotaging usage of them.
People will adapt. It will just take a while. Sometimes you gotta get burned to learn not to touch the stove. In the meantime, we could require the products to provide resources and tools to reduce addiction (like HN’s noprocrast). And we should also find a way to blunt the impact of social media on those who have not yet begun their journey with its addiction (like children, or people yet to be born into our satirical dystopia of a society). If kids are glamorizing social media before they are old enough to use it, they will not have an easy experience separating themselves from it later in life.
Cigarette smoking rates are way down since twenty years ago when we started convincing children it was gross and uncool. We can do that with social media too.
> Unfortunately regulations will always be one step behind. Asking for them is victim mentality.
Is this a self-serving idea you apply only to the industry you work in, or is this a general principle you apply to all industries? Do you feel this way about the petroleum and chemical industries? The pharmaceutical industries? Food processing? The nuclear industry?
Are all industrial regulations instances of 'victim mentality', or only those that apply to your industry?
I’m not sure where you got the idea that I harbor some absolutist opposition to regulation in any industry, or even in the social media industry for that matter. My comment listed specific examples of social media regulation that I would support.
My goal was simply to highlight the naïveté of thinking regulations alone will solve the problem, unless the USPS is going to send a weekly pill bottle of amphetamines to every citizen who is vulnerable to the dangers of social media addiction.
> Unfortunately regulations will always be one step behind. Asking for them is victim mentality. We’re responsible for our own choices.
We are responsible for our own choices until we aren't. Until we are deceived, directed, subverted to some choices. If that wasn't true then the whole PR + advertisement industries wouldn't be as massive and effective as they are.
I do recommend watching Adam Curtis' "The Century of the Self" to dispel a little the myth that we are solely responsible for our choices...
We are accountable to them, we suffer the consequences of them but definitely not solely responsible.
"Victim mentality" is too big of a sweeping statement for this case, actually I'd consider it extremely dismissive of pretty complicated human behaviours.
Your first sentence is wildly and dangerously misguided. Yes, it's slow and difficult but it's also the reason we have underappreciated institutions like the FDA.
The greatest trick they pulled is convincing people like you that you have no personal autonomy.
It’s one thing to show you stimulating content once you open the app but it’s a whole another level of self-deception to convince yourself that you can’t prevent yourself from opening the app.
reminds me that "the greatest minds at 1600 Amphitheater Parkway" made it harder to open your list of apps on Play Store but never mind
Open the list, select 'TikTok' and click 'Uninstall'
This is not to be demeaning. But if you're having too much trouble disconnecting from it, then that should be the way. You can still see videos in a browser.
They clearly did uninstall it but "use some some-discipline" is pretty disingenuous given companies are abusing biological mechanisms to get people hooked on their apps. This is especially true for teenagers who are underdeveloped in the self-discipline department.
Replace TikTok with food, porn, or drugs. At some point the individual has to take responsibility for their actions and seek support if it's something they can't do on their own. Or we just ban everything.
I'm not sure what your point is, we do ban some of these (with various successes and failures), so why wouldn't we do the same for social media?
Yes we shouldn't ban everything, but there's a large spectrum of acceptable regulations with different tradeoffs and it's fine to discuss what your society wants in that regard instead of precluding any kind of regulation.
TikTok is not as harmful as drugs (at least I haven't seen anyone end up on skid row over watching too many dancing videos). So if it's to be regulated it would likely be similar to porn or gambling and be age restricted.
OP is clearly an adult capable of making their own decisions, so this regulation wouldn't help them.
In many countries gambling regulations go beyond age restrictions and companies evolving in that space have to provide safeguards to prevent certain behaviors. I don't think it's far-fetched to imagine similar regulations for things like social media, at least it's a real possibility that exists before simply banning everything.
There is such a thing as shared responsibility. An individual smoker is responsible for quitting; Phillip Morris is responsible for making a harmful and addictive product. In the case of social media, individuals are responsible for how they use them, but Facebook/Tiktok/Twitter are also responsible for building apps that encourage overuse.
I don't use TikTok but even in my mid 40s fell victim to Instagram reels. What's astonishing to me is that I have a level of self control that's way more than the average individual (for instance I have taken cold showers for ever).Even with such an otherwise resilience I fell victim to Instagram reels and their infinite supply of mindless entertainment. It took a week for me to unshackle and get rid of this imbecile nonsense. I still have the app on my phone but am actively not opening it. My hypothesis is that if you can do this for a continued duration, then the existence of the app won't bother you. You can't go around deleting everything from your life. You lead your life on your terms, despite the distractions.
So the addictive forces are quite powerful and for the average individual, it's really hard to get out of this addiction.
Some of the brightest minds in the world work tirelessly to develop impossibly advanced algorithms which exploit our monkey-brains' attention mechanisms. It's scary to me that there's people working in the tech industry who would upvote a comment like this-- it shows a lack of respect for the level of power software engineers possess over real people's lives.
Yes, I read that, I am speaking in the general sense with respect to remarks such as "it feels like they are making a real attempt to take my agency" and "I feel like I am intentionally being taken advantage of by TikTok". I can see why that's not clear though, so fair critique.
I understand you literally removed the app from your phone, but framing yourself as hapless prey without any agency negates the ethos of self accountability and self discipline.
I am not hapless. However I do have a mental disability that makes me especially susceptible to the psychological tricks (and they are tricks) that TikTok employs to keep people scrolling. The fact that I was born with ADHD and can't get rid of it, even if I can curb it, does reduce some of my agency by definition. It sucks, but it's the truth.
I think that comparison makes the opposite point that you intended.
The answer to treating alcoholism actually
is some amount of personal responsibility and strengthening of willpower, not blaming the companies that manufacture alcohol.
If an alcoholic goes around making pronunciations about how they lack agency and how they feel like bars are victimizing them, they will be sternly told to exercise some self-discipline and self-accountability at a minimum, likely they will also be told to check into rehab.
Imagine if, guided by your analogy, I were to have instead replied to the OP with "check yourself into rehab". Most likely, I'd have been downvoted for snark, because everyone understands a sequence of entertaining videos is a different kind of thing than a drug which you ingest and become physically dependent on.
Yes and no. I mean, you are correct in a very abstract way, but there is something to be said for an industry that is able to manipulate a large swath of the population by exploiting various human predilections. Saying it is just self-discipline and accountability is limiting the conversation to a frame that benefits those companies without looking at the totality of the reasons behind it.
I find it hard to try to blame the cigarette (or any) companies in a world where maximizing money is encouraged. Don't hate the player, hate the game. I'm not trying to justify anything, but there would be another tiktok instantly exploiting the opportunity if tiktok would vanish.
I'm perfectly happy blaming people for doing immoral things even though they are legal. "I'm doing it unless someone stops me" is not a mark of morality.
Related to think t the children, I recently read a few comments from women in Romania that told that since around 12-13 years old they got on the Facebook page ads promoting those girls to work as cam girls. Facebook and their ad network should also be analyzed IMO, would make more sense to put all social media under the same standards.
Also dudes working in ad industry, tell us why should we not install ad blockers when you put this kind of ads in front of children? FB knows 100% the user account age so is it stupidity? is it "we don't care", "a innocent bug"?
None of this detracts from concerns about Tiktok and the CCP though. Just as Microsoft funding anti-Google pieces doesn't detract from Google's near monopoly status in online advertising. Competitors do that all the time, you can't let that be a distraction from what the underlying problems are.
Most of these articles single out TikTok when they apply to all big tech companies. Clearly the call should be for better privacy protection laws that protect all citizens from all present and future tech companies.
> Other platform owners are bad, I don’t need them to be equal to China before doing something about it.
I agree. But by the same token, we don't need to do something about the others before doing something about TikTok. Where would we be today if we accepted the argument that before addressing tobacco companies we must first address alcohol companies, and before addressing alcohol companies, we must first address tobacco companies?
Arguing that X shouldn't be regulated because Y is not yet regulated is never a legitimate argument.
> ... before addressing tobacco companies we must first address alcohol companies
> Arguing that X shouldn't be regulated because Y is not yet regulated is never a legitimate argument.
Either you've got the question wrong, or your position is more disagreeable than you think. It seems to me that the question is whether Chinese X should be regulated when American X is not regulated. It is still technically X vs Y but the justification is far less obvious to me (when compared to justifying that we can regulate tobacco despite a lack of regulation of alcohol).
The problem with "not X until Y" arguments against regulation is you can swap the Y and X around depending on the context of the conversation and use this to disingenuously argue against all regulation while pretending you're only interested in fairness.
As engineers, it often feels like enforcing one policy regardless of the actor is the best solution, but I think it breaks down in practice.
For example, imagine if your email password was given out to two individuals - one is your significant other, and the other is a random dude on the internet. In theory, good password hygiene should be maintained no matter who the individual is. In practice I would be (and should be) vastly more worried about this random dude than my partner.
Trying to figure out a generalized solution for big tech may prove to be too hard, and is frankly a waste of time when there's a credible geopolitical threat on our doorstep.
> These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry
Has WaPo every managed a similar article on Hollywood catalyzing attacks on tech? Or maybe that's the commonplace politics... Still, nice to see mention of press coverage artifice.
Something I've never understood about these pivots from successful, revenue generating products. Sure, some users will leave Instagram for Tiktok. But isn't it a different product? Wouldn't Meta have been better off creating a new product and integrating it with Instagram, rather than killing the golden goose?
From what I've read, Meta's strategy (and valuation) ultimately relies on 'ubiquity' (as they put it) - where everyone on earth has a Meta account and uses it. The stall in user growth is accompanied by a massive decrease in the company's valuation as a result of this, so they do the classic "what's working for the competition" action.
I've not had a FB account for years, and didn't use it other than for messenger for years before that, but when I was on there, I felt that most of their growth came from 'copy what other sites are doing, extinguish the competition by doing this' strategy, as everyone is on facebook anyway. It's worked for them so far, just now it's a bigger shift to try to emulate TikTok rather than try to destroy local ads sites or small business site hosting.
> The stall in user growth is accompanied by a massive decrease in the company's valuation
That's because of unrealistic expectation from the stock market, not due to the company's health. A stall in user growth means a limit to the company size, and investors were betting that after the IPO Facebook (that was already used by a large share of the humanity) would still grow by two orders of magnitude.
Adjusting your product means you don't start your userbase from scratch, but I do agree that I'd prefer they start a fresh product and leverage the userbase to promote it.
But I think it's easier for them to centralise advertising operations where possible and steer the most malleable and lucrative audience rather than appease (what they thought of as) a minority of people.
I'm not into Tik Tok style videos. I recently really cut back using both Instagram and FB because they're just showing me humorous videos and not why I used those apps.
They already have a tab called Reels inside of Instagram, I tried using it instead of TikTok and it was fucking awful at trying to learn what videos I liked. It seems that they're just gonna force the video format on everyone in order to get better learning data?
The "what are my friends up to?" golden goose of Facebook is long dead. The "news feed" is already not really news about your friends so I guess it doesn't matter that they're admitting that and explicitly turning it into something like Tiktok.
is there any evidence that the pivots actually "kill the golden goose"? facebook has a long history of making product changes that initially cause a lot of complaining from existing users.
they seem to be making a bet that existing users are addicted enough to the product that a change to it won't drive them away. and so far that seems to have worked for them.
There has been push back against the more algorithmic content they are pushing because it gets in the way of the post of people you follow. I use Instagram to follow some artists and design companies, and it's frustrating when every other post is not the people I follow, but some bad influencer vaguely related to your interests begging for likes and follows. Previously, they had suggested posts after you scrolled a bit or after you've caught up with everyone you follow.
Facebook's changes have taken a whole lot of users from "I am on here because it's useful and I actively like it" to "I am on here only because of inertia and network effects, but dislike it and will be happy when I can get rid of it"
May not have killed the golden goose yet, but they've sure sharpened the axe, stretched the neck over the block, and drawn a little X right in the middle.
I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg could use his influence at Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to get a few users to try out a new app he coded up over the weekend.
"Poison pill" is the wrong phrase here. That has a different meaning.
TikTok is not a social network. It's a short-form Youtube competitor. It's an entertainment system.
China has WeChat, which is much closer to Facebook in style. It's mobile-first, which turned out to be a good decision. It handles messaging, shopping, ads, banking... It's a closed replacement for the Web. TikTok is mostly push, for timepass (a useful term from India), and WeChat is mostly pull, for doing stuff. Users have both, and they don't compete much.
Facebook is trying to be both, and is now doing both badly.
I don’t think interacting with strangers on the internet has ever been considered “socializing”, regardless of how deep those connections might be. The fact we are replacing one with the other is deeply concerning.
>In October 2018, the Wall Street Journal published an article outlining the initial breach and Google's decision to not disclose it to users.[18] At the time, there was no federal law that required Google to inform their consumers of data breaches. Google+ originally did not disclose the breach out of fears of being compared to Facebook's recent data leak and subsequent loss of consumer confidence.[4] In response to the Wall Street Journal article, Google announced the shutdown of Google+ in August 2019.
What is the definition of a breach? Are all vulnerabilities considered breaches? If a website finds a vulnerability in their code, fixes it, and doesn't find any evidence of attack, do they generally tell the public about that?
Disclosure: I work at Google, but never on Google+.
Depends on the vulnerability. It might be prudent to disclose it so users have the freedom to, for instance, change their passwords elsewhere as most people do indeed reuse passwords.
I'm not sure how this metaphor holds up under scrutiny but disclosing all vulnerabilities might be akin to considering yourself having had a break-in every time you forgot to lock the door.
> If platforms like Facebook and Instagram abandon their social graphs to pursue this cybernetic TikTok model, they’ll lose their competitive advantage.
Is it really a competitive advantage if a competitor is doing better without it?
The competitor is not doing better because of its disadvantage, it is doing better despite it. The space of apps is high dimensional, (what used to be) Facebook's niche is a very obvious local optima that it filled early on and locked away from past and future competitors. Tiktok was forced to find another non-obvious local optima and it did.
Facebook also have long abandoned their competitive advantage with their outrage porn focused recommendations since at least 2015/2016, they were just doing it badly. Tiktok is showing them how it's better done.
I wouldn't call it better, TikTok isn't presently obligated to care about their market, however.
Wheras YouTube recommendations are seen as exploitable by an adversary to undermine ad revenue and platform trust, TikTok has the benefit of being "nascent" with a "runway" to survive without a real business model, on the relative strength of the current user base.
This isn't a new frontier, and ByteDance hasn't solved the robustness problem, they're just receiving the going discount on ignoring it. It'll work itself out.
Yup. It’s not that an echo chamber is inevitable; for me, finding something interesting that’s not represented among my social graph is more likely to be viral/marketable/attractive than something circulating among the most-active 5%. TikTok doesn’t need that graph on an individual’s scale.
Hence, it so much more resembles "real life". And I think that's where TikTok thrives, it is a single player experience with networked features. Similar to going window shopping in a Mall with Billions of windows.
I fail to follow Cal's argument. It seems that he is abandoning his "digital detox" doctrine towards privacy.
If the issue with social networks is the time we waste on them, why would an algorithmically generated feed be less addictive than a social network feed?
I didn't read that Cal is arguing that one should use TT over FB.
I think he's just pointing out that FB's change into a TT-like graph isn't in their wheelhouse. FB built up a social graph. TT has built up an attention profile. Though they look similar, Cal is saying they are different. FB will be starting from the near bottom and years behind.
I don't think it matters much whether it's in their wheelhouse or not or whether they succeed or not. What matters is that transitioning away from the social graph is abandoning their moat, the very thing that keeps them a monopoly in social media. Once that's gone it'll be a level playing field and they are unlikely to survive for long.
Looking from addiction perspective, TikTok is even worse. But, as the author said, it's more shallow, so it should be easier to move away from.
I hope that people (or at least majority) will find a way to move from this mindless fun and finally start using all the technology we have at our disposal in some more meaningful way.
Many recent boycotts and other activist causes have achieved critical mass through organizing on TikTok. A ton of content there is historical and educational. People misunderstand short-form as shallow and that has never sit right with me. I find creators on TikTok to often go deeper and communicate more clearly than the cacophony of text posts on reddit or Facebook.
Yeah I don't have numbers to back it up so I can't say for certain. I wouldn't agree it's negligible though, because I often am served educational content that's not an interest of mine (eg nutrition, DIY repair, writing). So the algorithm knows that content is desirable to some users, but is testing if I'm personally interested. Anecdotally I am constantly hearing friends talk about stuff they 'learned on TikTok'. Qualitatively, the content consistently seems more serious and useful than content I see on YouTube, Twitter, or Reddit. So my experience of TikTok has been that it's a mixture of entertainment and serious discussion. I think that balance is a large part of why it's so engaging.
Ok, I must take a step back. I have only my personal feeling to back the claim. And that doesn't mean much, considering the fact that I barely ever used TikTok.
So you might be right. My kids (6 and 8) told me a couple of times about life hacks that they saw on YouTube. And that's the only place they visit online, even that being restricted to less than an hour a day on average.
So yeah, new generations might be using that content a bit differently from what I thought.
It's really aggravating to me because I use different social media sites for different purposes. I understand that our current business model revolves around making more and more money, but if all of the social media sites are the same then they won't be making any money because people won't want to deal with multiple accounts.
TikTok scares me in the same way that DALL-E scare me.
DALL-E is very, very good, but still obviously flawed. But behind the flaws I know it will get better. Like the original iPhone vs. the crazy powerful phones we have now. Or the original 3d games like Doom or Duke Nukem 3d compared to modern PC graphics. Or the insane quality of modern movie CGI. In 5 years or 10 years this AI tech to generate incredible images will advance at a similar pace. (Shout out to GPT-3 in this space as well)
I don't think we fully understand how TikTok is connecting to our subconscious but it is doing it in a way that most people agree is unsettling. And we are at the very beginning of this journey. There is no way to predict if this is going to be good or bad without us doing it. And every company now realizes that it is both easy to achieve and tremendously effective.
“… we just might be left with more breathing room for smaller, more authentic, more human online engagements.”
Like talking and writing directly to a chosen audience of friends instead of acting as an unpaid or low paid content creator / publisher for a social media company?
Any examples of recent apps that might accomplish this goal pf authentic human online engagements? Seems like the difficulty is getting enough users on a platform to facilitate a broad level of interests without a company being tempted to turning their users into neurological lab rats to be milked for ad revenue.
I do hate the equivocating between Tiktok and other social media services. (eg: "Well, isn't TikTok just as bad as what Facebook is doing?")
But that said, the use of the term "poison pill" is excellent, and something that I've been using to describe modern tech in general. It'd be wrong to say that Google maps is "bad." Really, it's incredibly convenient. But it's got a poison pill: it tracks you obsessively, it can be used in a geofence warrant, etc. You could say the same for facebook. It's quite convenient to be able to contact everyone from your life, but it's got a poison pill: (Fill in all the complaints about Facebook over the last 10 years.)
I bring this up only because we often get caught between a simple binary: are things better now, or were they better in the past? Usually it's both: one component of things was better in the past, and one component of things is better now.
I think this is somewhat true. It's definitely more accessible, which makes it better in the sense that more people can use it because it is simpler.
It's not immediately obvious how to use a paper map. There's a lot of information in there that one has to either know or learn how to interpret. Sitting down with a stack of paper maps and planning out a route is more complicated than letting the googlemachine tell you what to do and how to get there. But, if you're a certain type of person, there is a definite thrill about making the plans, marking out your route, and doing this interactively with another person (who will be the navigator) that is a bit lost in the translation to digital.
While the googlemachine may tell you about all of the restaurants or interesting sites along the way (that it knows about, or that have paid for prominent placement), it won't give the sense of adventure that "we'll figure it out when we get there" does, even if "figuring it out" means asking the waitress at the un-googleable diner over pie.
Paper maps have a lot of advantages, but it takes work, and you have to be willing to accept that your seat-of-the-pants judgements about where to eat won't have the data-driven information of crowd-sourced reviews, so you might get a crappy meal or two.
I don't think anyone's arguing that the new ways are better. However, it's not clear that we're going in the right direction and instead we're stuck in a local maximum. Maybe if we took a step back and had mapping provided as an open source service with offline maps then we wouldn't have the current problems with Google Maps (real-time traffic data can be queried anonymously). Or maybe if we designed streets that were easier to navigate we wouldn't need maps in the first place.
Broadly, it's fascinating that I think we've definitively moved out of the age of "social media theory" (what might this new form of media do) into "experimentation and iteration" (in which we are absolutely the guinea pigs, but at least for now we mostly know it?")
TikTok is especially a wildly mixed bag for me. I fully acknowledge that its manipulation of attention is disgusting and the data it holds is wildly dangerous.
And yet, more immediately, it is serving very well the job of being Cory Doctorow's Little Brother which in our current political times (at least in the US) is wildly beneficial. As a black man I especially appreciate the light it shines on behaviors and practices I knew to be valid and yet was repeatedly told "that doesn't really happen." So, next, how to separate one from the other.
This is the real reason behind the FUD in my opinion. Despite all these articles presenting TikTok content as vapid and mindless time wasting, in my experience it's been the opposite. TikTok is full of authentic policial commentary, anti-racist education, historical analysis, and anti-capitalist content. It's doing a lot to give people a voice who otherwise haven't been well-represented on other platforms. It's a big reason why Reels has been a failure imo, there's just not any important conversations happening there. Gen Z is not being given enough credit, they're not just addicted scrollers, they're using a better platform to organize and share culture more effectively.
I can only speak from my bubble, fair enough, but I almost never see this aspect explored in reporting on Tiktok. The articles always focus on the algorithm, never the actual content and community.
Evidently something is quite different from Reddit and Twitter since those platforms have about a quarter to a half of the MAU of TikTok despite being around much longer. "Algorithm" is a hand-wavey explanation. No amount of algorithmic content selection can keep me engaged when the content itself is of lower quality.
Fair criticism. It's not quality reporting by any means; I wouldn't say it gives too much intelligent nuance. But it starts the conversation. It's been a slow burn, but I very clearly recall a time when most white people I knew believed police misconduct to be rare, if not nonexistent.
Oh no worries I didn't even mean to criticize you, I was mostly responding to emptyfile's post. I agree with you sometimes there is nuance lacking but at the same time there's often more context and nuance than what you hear from a politican's soundbite. Hearing experiences directly from someone's mouth is a lot more impactful than reading it in a news report or political ad, even if the video is short.
Did you even read to notice that I carved out merely one example that happened to apply to me? Dismissive people like you literally comprise the race problem that you appear to be so annoyed by.
People upload all kinds of stuff. I remember seeing videos with a TikTok watermark of Russian military equipment being moved towards the Ukrainian border before the invasion.
Near the beginning of the war, I saw a reuploaded Tiktok of this Ukrainian girl hopping into an abandoned Russian tank and figuring out how to drive it.
Twitter and Meta's social graphs competitive advantage will still be there with tiktok like features, what screws them is the dream of growth and every new person having a FB account. If tiktok doesn't have a social graph or relies on one, it looks like there's a gap in the space of FB for the gen Z. Also the title is confusing, I thought Bytedance had a poison pill in a sense it has some governance or legal means to dissuade would be acquirors.
The Reddit app is changing, too. My "Home" feed used to be only communities I follow, now it adds algorithmic content that I constantly have to say "less of this". It used to be only the "Popular" and "News" tabs were algorithmic, but now the "Home" tab increasingly is too.
Reading through the comments, I see so much focus on specific companies and the occasional focus on social media as a whole. You gotta keep zooming out if you want to understand the true issue which is the "attention economy".
Just stop participating in the attention economy. Well that's impossible of course, but seriously try to minimize your participation. It's a system designed to glean consumer preferences and then engineer marketing strategies for optimal sales. We don't need it. Stop over-consuming and stop feeding the system.
Behind this self-congratulatory word ooze there is a point: the market will "solve" the Facebook "problem". In a decade we've had 2 existential threats to FB (the other being IG). That's just not a monopoyl that requires immediate government action.
The social graph will still have value but I think people overstate its importance. Tiktok (as noted) didn't rely on it to grow. And neither did Twitter. Nor Reddit.
Tiktok's UI/UX is really top notch. It reminds me of the IG of old before Facebook's Directors of Product Management really sunk their MBA claws into it.
There are legitimate security concerns with Tiktok however. The US still has a level of separation between corporations and the government that China doesn't. Chinese companies are extensions of the state. if anything, the US government is an extension of US corporations rather than the other way around. But there's still a level of separation and rule of law nad order in the US.
But here's an even bigger issue: trade. Specifically, China cheating on trade. I support reciprocity here. China blocks access to its market to the likes of Google and Facebook. This is protectionist and I personally have no issue with the US doing the same to Chinese companies.
When I read that article in the New Yorker, I did find it odd that a long piece all about video platforms didn't mention YouTube. I can see that the writer wants to make a more specific argument about "social graph" vs. "public" approaches to social media platforms. But YouTube is such a successful version of the latter.
The question I have - at what point do Instagram and Facebook converge such to the point that it's not even worth having them as separate apps anymore? At a certain point, I imagine Meta would like these apps to all combine into one united "Meta" app.
TikTok is having longer and longer videos. TikTok will become something else. The machine learning only works for short videos. For long videos, you need social graphs to match videos to users who like them. I expect that both technologies will be combined.
Does YouTube organic discovery work for anyone besides toddlers? I can't remember a time I was suggested or autoplayed a video that I actually was interested in.
It's becoming more popular to start a long video with a short teaser but in general, long videos need some time to reveal their value. If you show long videos randomly to everybody then the perceived noise increases which may reduce user engagement.
In case anyone from Facebook thinks people are leaving their platform for TikTok, I'd just like to offer that everybody I know who's quit over the past 6 months or so has quit because of 30-day bans for posting obvious satire.
I slowly forgot about it once they required the Messenger app (which had its own data/privacy issues). I seem to recall that coinciding with a WhatsApp exodus among friends with family overseas, but I forget the deal. Anyway, it just ceased to be relevant one day, and we just text or use any of the 93024832048932 other apps now.
It's not a bad platform for viewing ads, though, I guess.
TL;DR "all my friends are here" becomes less of a lock-in factor with TikTok-like model (as social graph becomes unimportant). If others follow suit, losing lock-in advantage might encourage competitors in the industry.
I hope the author is right, and a social evolution toward more open networks would necessarily be the culmination of many factors, but I'm optimistically skeptical. TikTok is like a drug, it is an algorithm that unabashedly and almost directly induces an emotional state. It is similar to amphetamine, opioids, slot machines in that it distils almost to purity the traits needed to solely perform this function. These other addictive things have been around a long time. There's no reason to expect tiktok (or the concept of algorithm interfacing with human to produce chemical happiness) to go away.
That said, I hope so. I hope that these other empty social bahemoths chase tiktok to irrelevance, I hope the population gets burned out on the empty calories, but history tells us that this won't happen really. Some people, enough to keep it all going, just can't stop no matter how miserable it makes them.
> we just might be left with more breathing room for smaller, more authentic, more human online engagements.
HAHAHAHAHA no. What we'll end up with is a different behemoth or small set of behemoths indistinguishable in their behavior from predecessors. Meet the old boss, same as the old boss. (The longer I live, the more prescient that verse seems.) And in this case, the behemoth will be in a country that is even more willing than the US to exert control over such companies. Not really a great deal for anyone except TikTok's owners.
An a non-American the level of anti-TikTok sentiment seems really weird, it really does just seem like sinophobia - especially given there's no proof that TikTok is actually being used by the Chinese, whereas Snowden etc. has shown us that the USA already does stuff like this.
I'm not really sure what the People's Liberation Army will do with all my cat videos anyway...
I'm not American but I hate TikTok because it seems to be the source of all stupid memes and joke videos people share with me. I can't stand it. Even though I don't use it, it still causes people to dump that crap on me. I wish there was an auto filter to remove everything with a TikTok logo because if it has that it's certain I'm going to hate it :)
This is mainly because they embed their logo into everything that's shared of course. It's like the tramp stamp of stupid memes.
In this case it works out negatively but I guess there's a lot of people loving mindless entertainment so I guess this is why they still mark their stuff this way.
So in my case it has nothing to do with China even though I'm admittedly opposed to their government. But that's a different thing. FWIW I hate Facebook and Twitter too (for other reasons, Facebook because their datamining, Twitter because of the huge amount of nonsense ("Look I just had chicken wings"). But I use Instagram to follow certain artists.
> I wish there was an auto filter to remove everything with a TikTok logo because if it has that it's certain I'm going to hate it :)
I'd love for that to be an option. I've tried looking at Youtube Shorts and it's pretty much 500 TikTok videos being uploaded by dozens of channels and dumped on everyone. Making it possible to filter by "the TikTok voice", "the TikTok laugh" and the top 5 songs used for TikTok would improve the experience by a lot and I might actually see something I care about. Downvoting doesn't change anything either, they'll even start looping around and showing me Shorts I've downvoted before. Or maybe it's really not used by anyone and automated TikTok uploads are all there is, I don't know.
They could present videos of dogs that look like cats to influence your opinion to be more favorable about dogs.
They could simply show addictive videos to school-aged children to reduce their time available to study or interact with other children to make them less intelligent or less socially prepared. Or, they could flood your child’s feed with videos from children their age discussing perceived mental illness self-diagnosis to encourage the youth of a nation to consider themselves mentally ill. They could flood young people of primary child-bearing age with videos of other children discussing their homosexuality in order to lower the reproduction rate within a country. They could flood videos that are critical of key practices or institutions within a country to promote dissent.
> They could simply show addictive videos to school-aged children to reduce their time available to study or interact with other children to make them less intelligent or less socially prepared.
This is what every US social media company has been trying to do forever, except they didn't focus on schoolkids, they focused on everyone. It's called "maximizing engagement".
I’m, aren’t parents supposed to be keeping track of their own kids, not some company?
The stuff you said in the last half there is insane to me, so I’ll assume you’re either trolling or perhaps we have a very different view of certain things.
It's better to look at the world from a perspective of possible/impossible rather than sane/insane as there exist people inside governments who are paid to do insane-yet-possible things.
I don't believe the theories around the Chinese government controlling children's minds through TikTok are likely to be true. It's probably just a dumb app. But there's nothing impossible about it.
The claim that you can *control* people's minds via TikTok is a pretty big claim. You can influence behaviour, but what the OP is suggesting is highly outlandish and almost certainly impossible (particularly the homophobic fear that TikTok can turn kids gay).
Remember that the advertising industry has been trying to control people's minds via all kinds of media for over a century, but is still only moderately successful at it.
Historically, the Soviet intelligence services used to think that they were very good at spreading Communist propaganda within Western countries. In many ways they were. And yet, not many Westerners became Communists. Just look at this guy explain how successfully the Soviets are subverting US public opinion only a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErKTVdETpw
The DoD did exactly this with a campaign on Facebook back in the 2010s (moreso to understand the capability of the platform rather than out of malice). There is nothing insane about what that poster listed.
If the Snowden leaks haven't shown you that the schizos are starting to become more right about many things, then I don't know what else to say. You're being willfully ignorant I guess.
> They could flood young people of primary child-bearing age with videos of other children discussing their homosexuality in order to lower the reproduction rate within a country
Are you suggesting that ones sexuality can be changed by being exposed to other sexualities?
I'm non American as well, I get what you mean, the hysteria can sometimes be tiring. And the hypocritical it's-only-okay-when-we-do-it exceptionalism is maddening.
However, you shouldn't put too much weight on the absence of proof for Chinese invasion of your privacy. China is an authoritarian regime, what this translates to in practice is that, while a "democracy" like the US or a European country will spy on you and violate both your and its own citizens rights, it can be caught and its PR will then cry and act really sorry (for whatever good this does), while a regime like China or Russia will brutally lock away or assassinate anyone digging dirt, and in the rare case they do get caught they will just smirk smugly and ask you what you're going to do about it. Both of those options suck, I know, a sane man will get far away from both of them, but one of them is strictly worse than the other in a very clear sense.
>I'm not really sure what the People's Liberation Army will do with all my cat videos
Why, they are going to breed feline supurr-soldiers and subjugate your people with them off course. Meowahahaha.
Jokes aside, you're underselling the amount of power they have over you. Just off the top of my head, and I'm not remotely knowledgeable in security, smartphones put geotags and timestamps in photos and videos. The PLA and their friends are probably not interested in your Mr.ButterMeow, but they are interested in where you live and when you are glued to an app that monopolises your attention. What are they going to do with this ? I don't know, but it can't be a good thing.
There is such a thing as a "I don't have anything to hide" fallacy, it's a fallacy because (1) you don't know your attacker's mind, anything you do could be something you would very much want to hide if you only knew what your attacker intends to do with it (2) Rights are defended on principle, if I broke into your home and stole all the garbage, then that is still a violation of your rights, even if 0 harm or even negative harm was done. A principle is like an algorithm, it has to be followed to the letter even if the circumstances are amenable to a special shortcut.
No, but really: Facebook collects very private data, including personal messages. Google has even more sensitive information. I also don't see why suddenly TikTok is such a concern, except for sinophobia or pure misinformation.
There's a large and substantial difference between "Google has your data" and "Google abuses your data".
You might have doubts whether the limits set by Western authorities on Google's use of your data would be effective, or about the ability of those authorities to investigate and enforce, but I think we can all agree the odds are much better than for TikTok where no chance exists at all.
Snowden showed 10 (!) years ago that american tech companies share data with the us government even when that's clearly against the law. That, in my book, is abusing my data. EU courts agree with me and are limiting how much data can be shared with us-based businesses.
This presumes people don't also have a problem with FB and/or Google. Speaking for myself I have concerns with all of them. I almost never interact with FB properties, Google I've sadly become attached to but I'm not one for Apple products so it is sort of hard to get away from the big G.
> has shown us that the USA already does stuff like this.
Ya, you're right, China isn't known to collect or do much with population data.
China and the US officially regard each other as adversaries. The CCP outright declares the US to be an enemy. The CCP is also not subject to the rule of law within its own borders, even in theory.
Then you get into the economics of it. The liberal west is generally in favor of free markets, but to what degree do we remain free when dealing with a trading partner who doesn't operate as a liberal democracy? China has banned Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram...because they don't want their citizens giving business to foreign powers which they could be directing to their own growing businesses, and they don't want their citizens giving data to foreign powers.
So please clarify, is the US banning TikTok "sinophobia" but China banning Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc just something else entirely?
But there are Chinese dissidents and Tibet independentists in your country which are at risk, so it's OK if China spies on those because "they are not your government"?
I don't think they are at risk while they remain here in my country. It's very unlikely that the Chinese government decides on a strike against any dissident here. That's more typical of the US like they did yesterday in Afghanistan.
China will also call those dissidents terrorists, and some may even fill that definition. And we can end up agreeing: for example, last month, Sweden decided that the political refugees it has been hosting are now terrorists and should be extradited, as requested by Turkey in exchange of not vetoing the country's accession to NATO.
Nobody really cares what they are called, important is what happens to them. The ones put bombs and kill people, the others say nasty things about a government. This is what makes the difference between who got killed by the US (because bombs) and who got killed by Putin (because ooh critics) or who got killed by the CCP (because ooh muslim).
But let's not forget what started the discussion: we play here the game of relativization to justify the CCP spying on tiktok users. That's all there is to know.
The US also kidnapped people in Europe to send them to torture camps in the middel east. The US military was also caught buying location data from muslim prayer apps, we can guess how that data was used.
1 superpower vs 2 superpowers both of questionable morality doesn't make a difference.
Don't forget we talk about 6.5 billions humans that US already treats as sub-humans as in being entitled to less basic human rights than US citizens. If US wants rest of the world to actually give a damn lets start with this simple issue.
Till then no, I don't care much if also chinese have my browsing data.
If you're a civilian on the receiving end of some bombs, it doesn't make a big difference indeed. For everyone else it does, unless we are taking that high ground argument in which everything is doomed and everyone is a jerk.
The PRC is "only threatening" to invade Taiwan? By "only threatening" you mean by regularly sending war planes into Taiwan's Air Identification Defense Zone[1][2]? Do you really believe the line between "only threatening" and provoking is wide enough to not be of any concern? Also it's curious you left out the whole Uyghur Xinjiang internment camps thing out of your comparison between US and the PRC.
> An a non-American the level of anti-TikTok sentiment seems really weird
China, via a state sponsored outlet, just threatened to shoot the speaker of the house's plane if it went to Taiwan and you find USA's stance on TikTok, an extension of the CCP, "really weird"?
The US just bombed a dude in a foreign country they recently abandoned. As a different non-American the level of anti-TikTok sentiment still seems really weird.
Have you considered that it's not the nationality but the actual toxicity of the platform/content itself that people dislike? It has largely displaced Instagram and YouTube as the epicenter of airbrushed/photoshopped "influencers" who are having calamitous effects on young girls' self esteem. It's full of "challenges" that range from the anti-social to the illegal to the dangerous.
That doesn't even mention the one about stealing something from school, or the "fractal wood burning" stuff that has actually killed people. Their purely-algorithmic feed denies people the validation they seek from their own circle, encouraging them to dial up the outrageousness to get views from strangers instead, so these things are not accidents. There are lots of cool things on TikTok - I'm a fan of B Dylan Hollis and Amaury Guichon and just about anyone singing a shanty or covering a Pink Floyd guitar line - but overall "TikToxic" captures it pretty well. Why play the sinophobia card when an even simpler explanation is right there?
Snowden is sort of an unusual standard to apply for this sort of thing? Espionage and intelligence almost never meets a certain level of proof that's available to the public eye.
I'm not really sure what to make of Chinese government involvement with TikTok but from the information available, it seems like whatever it is, TikTok isn't being forthright about it.
You can distrust the US government and also think there's reasonable evidence the Chinese government has access to TikTok for domestic or foreign intelligence.
> You can distrust the US government and also think there's reasonable evidence the Chinese government has access to TikTok for domestic or foreign intelligence.
I wish people would stop giving me permission to believe two things at the same time as a way of pairing
a) the thing with overwhelming evidence that I'm worried about and they're trying to minimize, with
b) the thing that there's little evidence for that they're trying to get me to believe.
It's a marketing tactic. a) suffers by association with the innuendo and rumor of b), and b) is strengthened by being associated with the extensive documentation of a).
They're not giving you permission, they're defending their own beliefs. "You" here could be replaced by "one" or "a person", similar to the French pronoun "on".
That’s because it largely is sinophobia (or more reasonably on the American side, blind nationalism).
That said, I would caution against the temptation to “grade on a curve” here. While it’s true what you said, that there’s no direct evidence of spying, the case of proven US spying should demonstrate that government are more likely to be spying and hiding it than not.
Well we know that US intelligence agencies reserve the right to access all data harvested by American companies. They have a law about that.
Do I particularly agree with the CCP politically? No. But I want everyone to be equal to the law and I'm not going to delude myself that Americans give one flying fuck about the privacy of foreigners- or their own citizens even.
TikTok has massive reach and influence. Just look at the recent articles about teenagers thinking they have mental illnesses [1].
Misinformation campaigns are very powerful and this is especially worrisome when the most popular platform is controlled by an authoritarian regime with no regards to human rights, democracy, and free press.
> the level of anti-TikTok sentiment seems really weird, it really does just seem like sinophobia
"It's so weird how scared people are of falling under the control of a foreign government. Don't they know their own government is just as or even more corrupt?"
Granted social media have less influence than a government, but that doesn't make the risk go away. And yes, the same logic applies to US (social) media in other countries, though the relationship between countries should be taken into account when assessing that risk. Though that relationship is itself influenced by media..
Legacy media has been openly rooting for FB to die or lose influence for about 8 years now. Nice for the author to reveal their desire for this openly on their own blog.
Wow. An article about TikTok that has the word poison in it, that is not actually anti-TikTok. How far we have gone.
And yes! TikTok is how we break the shackles of big tech. TikTok on its own we can handle. But a Facebook backed by the full force of the US military surveillance industrial complex. That is going to kill off the whole planet.
TikTok is Big Tech. Neither will "kill off the whole planet", but it is so crazy to me that someone who can hate Facebook and the "US military surveillance industrial complex" can consequentially support TikTok.
You don't actually have a problem with big tech or surveillance, you have a problem with the US.
Against Chinese we have pretty good buffer zone. Same can't be said for a country that continues to murder innocent civilians around the world with drone strikes. And forcefully extradite foreigners...
Of importance: it has been revealed several times that user identification and data collection has been used for malicious purposes by US intelligence agencies (see NSA and CIA leaks a few years ago)
The same has not been proved for China. There have only been accusations by the US government, followed by an absolute reluctance and failure to provide any proof whatsoever.
The US accuses China of being a bad actor engaging in data surveillance, refuses to back up accusations, and then commits the very same act themselves. The very definition of dishonesty and hypocrisy.
TikTok almost certainly receives requests from various governments to collect data no differently from Facebook/Google/Verizon etc..
I think it's not a question of if China is doing this as well; certainly they are. No politician is going to publicly say though, "Look we know China is collecting data on you from TikTok because, uh duh, that's what we do with all of your US based social media posts."
I also don't think our government is all that directly concerned that China is monitoring. I think the concern is more on how the data and the outside control of the platform might be used to influence public opinions. Election tampering and the like.
There's an awful lot of cases of people being "disappeared" based on what they've said in WeChat group messages or friend feeds.
Similarly, the PSBs in some cities have used social media contacts as a means of working out which foreign English teachers to do impromptu drug testing on.
TikTok is backed by a Chinese giant, financed by massive Chinese banks which are de facto arms of the Chinse government and wherein Xi can intervene directly.
So this is as 'big brother' as it gets.
Edit:
"Government “golden shares”, tiny investments that give a high degree of control over companies, have been rumoured for years; only recently have they been disclosed in the likes of Weibo and ByteDance." [1]
"In April 2021, a state-owned enterprise owned by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the China Internet Investment Fund, took a partial ownership stake in ByteDance's main Chinese entity and placed a government official, Wu Shugang, on its board of directors" [2]
"ByteDance's China business has a strategic partnership with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security for the ministry's public relations efforts.[ In 2019, ByteDance formed joint ventures with Beijing Time, a publisher controlled by the Beijing municipal CCP committee"
"Yiming issued a letter stating that the app was "incommensurate with socialist core values" and promised that ByteDance would "further deepen cooperation" with the authorities to promote their policies.Following the shutdown, ByteDance announced that it would give preference to Chinese Communist Party members in its hiring and increase its censors from 6,000 to 10,000 employees."
"In April 2022, ByteDance announced that it would report users' content on Toutiao and Douyin that engaged in "historical nihilism" in contradiction of official CCP history"
Similarly, there is no such thing as a backdoor in apps for good guys (3 letter agencies) vs bad guys. Just make one rule for all. Otherwise, it is all grey areas open to abuse. Also, it is not just geopolitics; big social media like YouTube, Insta, FB and others face colossal competition from TikTok. As a result, they are losing users to TikTok. So they want this kind of ban (emphasis mine ), at least they won't object to it, and it is a slippery slope.