I wish someone would lay out the case -- or point me to a document that lays out the case -- of why it's a national security threat. The only arguments in the reuters piece is:
* control devices -- if TikTok can take over devices, that's a sandbox problem, but I am suspicious about the accuracy of this claim
* influence users -- here's the rub. The USG is worried about having social media that is owned by a rival power influencing public opinion? The assumption behind this is that all forms of media consumed by Americans must be under US government control or approval (say an allied nation). Moreover, if you accept that this is a national security threat, how are other countries supposed to treat US properties like Facebook? Or USG efforts like Voice of America, National Endowment for Democracy, etc? This is a recipe for total information control based on blocs, with Great Firewalls separating each bloc, and no citizen able to access any social media platform unless it's owned by a friendly government in your own bloc.
Are the above two arguments the only ones? If there is a different reason why TikTok is a national security threat, I'd like to know, because all I see are short videos of old people dancing, young people yelling in their cars, and cat videos. None of that seems like a national security concern to me.
It is not. Or more accurately, TikTok overtook FB ( and all the stuff it was doing to all the other populations including US-sians ) so the risk comes from a perceived competitor ( or adversary as some are oh-so-ready to point out ) doing the same thing WE were/are doing all those god damn years.
I apologize. The conversation makes me mildly upset, because we are saying our information and population control was fine. It is only when control happens to be used by the wrong party everyone is shocked. Just shocked.
Like, we built this tool for mass gathering of data and information on people. How could anyone have predicted that it could be used against us?
I am sure it was predicted, but, well, its the good guys using it so its all-ok.
Only part valid is "influence users", rest is classical international politics, EU made several similar comments about US companies storing European users' data. ( data transfer between EU and US ) Just the strength of the headline is proportional to power of the country. When EU makes comment, it is usually between the lines, when US makes it is headlines.
I see no reason for the CCP, or any US citizen, to assume that Facebook/Google/Amazon is not infiltrated by the CIA/NSA/FBI and is not generally willing to throw anyone under the bus to comply with law enforcement requests or sell data to the highest bidder.
I'm from US, and I don't use TikTok, but time to time I can watch Instagram and Youtube shorts. I don't know how the absolute nonsense coming from these two US-based platforms is too much different from TikTok. I can rephrase it with your own words:
Long, long time go, I remember seeing a documentary on Michael Jackson and how he either completely removed ( or severely restricted ; I can't remember ) TV access for his children. As a child back then, I thought that was crazy. Looking back, that crazy bastard was onto something. TV fed us a lot of garbage. Social media is worse, because it gets us better and better garbage.
It is almost like we keep getting an algorithmically improved media equivalent of a big mac each time we bring it up.
You are, naturally, right about that there is no distinction between TikTok, FB and others. It is all crap. Ideally, it would all just disappear.
That's because the US has free speech while in China there are laws about what can be posted online. If you don't want to see that content on TikTok, ask your politicians to pass censorship laws to ban it. Doesn't sound that good now does it?
Why is the US government as-is a rational actor to get behind? More of its citizens in prison than China, it’s citizens vote against supporting each other through universal healthcare, and education, it’s opioid peddling execs, scandal plagued business leadership makes Mad Men look like Leave it to Beaver. China did not set the US on this path. It’s all homegrown.
Let such exceptional and gritty people be. Get some popcorn. Front row seats to the end of society are waiting.
I was referring to users choice of TikTok, not the “content of” TikTok.
Why should the US government decide which apps free people download? Free people ostensibly have no obligation to government security concerns.
Assange, Snowden, Swartz. Migrant children in cages.
Along with the list in my original post, and recent history I was alive for that includes numerous other examples; US citizens and its politicians are bullies who ignore their own bullying.
Whataboutism is minimizing bad thing by highlighting other bad thing. “Look bad thing parity!”
Shooting someone because your friend shot someone else does not make what you did ok.
A constructive approach would be to build schools, hospitals, and other local social solutions to community vision rather than allowing outside agents to gambling for themselves with the outputs of our agency.
We flip out over the potential for waste in too many hospitals while binning laptops and phones every couple years to save Apple.
There will be literal waste to any human endeavor. What character do we want it to have? Empowering a party drug addicted rocket man filling us full of high minded bullshit about a future no one can predict or helping people exist how humans tend to exist; building communal ties that don’t expropriate wealth and agency for some distant power hording edgelord.
Who is to say it is destructive and toxic? Elders who lack emotional context and for whom it quickly makes anxious?
The same was said by elders when DND and comic books came about. The same was said about the internet itself. About secularism and relinquishing maintenance of past spoken traditions of all flavors.
For an increasingly secular society to say “hey wait I meant we bin religion but not my profiteering!” is the height of hypocrisy.
The only past traditions of value are disabusing people their meatbag is more sacrosanct than another, and fighting like hell to improve equality of condition for all meatbags even if that costs some their figurative value whether measured in conviction to scripture or fiat currency.
That’s my two cents anyway. Relativity means reality is relative, and thus so too are individual motives given an individuals time spent close to specific information.
I have yet to see anything is not a threat to US national security. I am sure the most powerful country is the most paranoid one, I thought it was only for the weapon industry to sell more to the US public, now I am not sure.
What is the source of this claim? Asking because I recently saw someone in a podcast say that they made this claim up and then the media picked it up and repeated it.
If you say "it's good because it will be used to marginalize people I don't like" in fancy enough words and dress it up in some plausible deniability people who like to think they're against jackbooted thuggery will readily agree with you.
I live in Israel, and all it takes is a few swipes to switch to palestine tiktok, its pretty wild, I have 'switched side' several times already to see whats up.
In my opinion, the four or so biggest existential and ideological threats to the U.S. are:
1. Unabashed and unhinged capitalism (growth at all costs)
2. Nearly every social media platform
3. The mainstream media
4. Billionaires and more generally the ultrawealthy
As far as I can tell, basically no one in power cares about any of these (likely because they benefit from all of them), and they're tearing the U.S. apart from the inside.
The biggest existential threat to any civilization is its own state, surprisingly absent from your list.
A further and more generalized abstraction is that the biggest threat to any civilization are self-interested power centers of any kind. Those can take the form of states, corporations, unions, billionaires, etc. Any entity that begins to operate in its own interest and has vastly disproportionate power when compared to the individuals of which the civilization is made.
I think the more realistic threat model is that people who disagree over issues vaguely related to 1 will be emboldened by filter bubbles from 2 and egged on by self interested subsets of 3 and 4 to get shooty with each other at scale.
And number 2 and 3: don’t underestimate the power of exported American culture via the media. There’s a clear trend (in English speaking countries at least) that the culture is becoming more and more Americanised, especially among youth. Non English speaking countries tend to resist it more but the influence is still there.
Of course not, has any politician ever unless it benefited them? Have you seen trump? He literally made fun of disabled people and he refused to even slightly suggest that was a bit too much. I am not saying biden is better, to the contrary trump succeeded because he was great at the politics game - never show weakness, always look out for yourself and damned be anyone else you harm!
If you read my link, you'd see the irony (which is why I included the link).
From the article I linked to: ' It should use an "evidence-based approach" to see if they pose a risk to US national security, Mr Biden said. '
The Administration was sloppy in this, and they undid something that they had to redo because they didn't follow their own advice when the put out the original order (which is here by the way: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases... ).
So yes, Irony is appropriate here. It's like a guy who puts down a banana peel and then slips on that same banana peel.
What is so great about it? It's algo, infinite scrolling, monetization models?
These are generally time sinks and engagement is what it's optimized for, but as a platform how is any different than what Vine or any other similar platform made before?
People uploading hours of their skits/rants/dancing etc... and calling it content has never appealed to me, hence why I never bothered with Social Media. But I'm genuinely curious, what makes it a 'great app' amongst technologists?
How you can so nonchalantly say it's extremely entertaining and the best thing ever while considering it a threat to half of the world? One thing should completely negate the other right?
The internet is still new in the grand scheme of society and people haven't adjusted. They haven't learned that these short videos are programming them to not think and taking advantage of them for marketing purposes. They still find them "extremely entertaining" because they haven't considered the second order effects. There are people with genetic predisposition to alcoholism for various reasons, this is kinda like that.
I have ADHD and so I am very defensive of my focus and so I will not participate in TikTok or YouTube Shorts or any of that abusive stuff because for me it deprives me significantly of my agency. For some people (most?) dissociating into TikTok (and losing agency in the process) is the point.
> One thing should completely negate the other right?
Make your case? I don't think so. I don't see why entertaining / not - entertaining and danger to society / not-danger to society are have a correlation.
Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive at all. It‘s very possible for the algorithm to get content to be amazing while still posing massive national security concerns.
I'm not talking about the algorithm quality. I'm talking about considering something so threatening "extremely entertaining". It has to be some domain (moral maybe) where those concepts are mutually exclusive.
Never used it for obvious reasons. compared to reddit or imgur what is better about it? Just UX or does it appeal to your personality in that it is more socially engaging?
If you're comparing it to reddit or imgur I'd argue you probably don't use social media enough for the differences to matter tbh. It's optimized for a different kind of content and browsing experience after all. It's much more similar to youtube but with shorter video lengths and a much more effective recommendation algorithm.
Your scale seems designed according to a philosophy that penalizes user experiences tailored towards fast consumption and prioritizing video content. Speaking as someone with a younger half-sibling in middle school, I would argue that one of the strongest social skills you could have is a strong awareness of YouTube/Tiktok culture. I realize not everyone uses the comments in YouTube/TikTok but if you acknowledge their crossover effects in spaces like Discord then I don't see how you can argue with a straight face that Reddit/Imgur are superior to either YouTube or TikTok. At best, I could see an argument that they prioritize different types of media and user experiences which would be true.
Cheap, unimaginative, repetitive trite media of short content. More pathetic than the low quality general guilty pleasure one would generally think of. So if that’s your thing, then that’s your thing.
It's my search engine for places to visit, things to do :) I usually just search for a destination, and scroll through the videos. TikTok videos IMO have much better quality than Google search results for travel topic.
* control devices -- if TikTok can take over devices, that's a sandbox problem, but I am suspicious about the accuracy of this claim
* influence users -- here's the rub. The USG is worried about having social media that is owned by a rival power influencing public opinion? The assumption behind this is that all forms of media consumed by Americans must be under US government control or approval (say an allied nation). Moreover, if you accept that this is a national security threat, how are other countries supposed to treat US properties like Facebook? Or USG efforts like Voice of America, National Endowment for Democracy, etc? This is a recipe for total information control based on blocs, with Great Firewalls separating each bloc, and no citizen able to access any social media platform unless it's owned by a friendly government in your own bloc.
Are the above two arguments the only ones? If there is a different reason why TikTok is a national security threat, I'd like to know, because all I see are short videos of old people dancing, young people yelling in their cars, and cat videos. None of that seems like a national security concern to me.