It's not just about the data that Tiktok pulls from its users, its also about what it pushes to them. Tiktok feeds in the US and the rest of the world tend to be wildly different than those in China. Douyin, Tiktok's Chinese version, primarily features content related to self-improvement, martial arts, life hacks, exceptional individual achievements, motivational clips etc. Meanwhile Tiktok in the rest of the world primarily features unhinged teenagers doing silly dances, random movie/TV show clips with cringy music added in, "reaction" videos and other immature antics. A clear-cut difference in priorities and intentions baked into their algorithms.
Very interesting point. I wasn’t aware of it. It would be some kind of psyop of the Chinese government where its own citizens are served intelligent content and get progressively smarter, while the citizen of the enemy are served retarded content and get progressively more stupid. This would actually seem to match what we see nowadays in western society. Virtue signaling, Russophobia, LGBTQ propaganda, and so forth.
The other day it came to me that the huge number of American girls doing porn is actually a sign of how a country has effectively reduced its own women to nothing more then prostitutes. There is a huge irony there, since the populace itself actually still thinks they live in the greatest country in the world. Thankfully, most of them don’t have a passport to go and check the rest of the world.
I dunno about all this. This seems like a move motivated by tech industries to make China pay for the data like everybody else instead of having their own personal data vacuum.
If the problem was privacy, there would be reform legislation coupled with the move
If the problem is "China shows its youths this, but shows us that", I mean, yeah, China has regulation around how its youths interact with social media; meanwhile, over in America, we're just gonna keep on with the running social experiment of what happens with unmitigated social media framing the way young people interact w/ reality, and I mean actually building first-hand experience and reflecting on that, not second-hand rendering of such.
Anecdotally, my experience with their algo is that you are in complete control. It adapts faster than any other platform to my training it, whereas IG continues to insist on showing me things in my explore section I've routinely told it not to. Whether or not the Chinese government is tipping the scale of content distribution, I mean, do they really need to do anything, or was America already divisive? Blocking TikTok at any rate probably won't stop that trajectory, our own political sphere, as Jesse Ventura once said, is a sports game in the first place.
Its one thing to block the app on government devices just in case, the wholesale ban doesn't add up to me though.
The privacy angle seems weird, given that US consumers don't seem to care much and domestic companies don't face nearly the same scrutiny.
Still, TikTok creeps me out. It's highly addictive. It has those ties to the communist party. China enforces a nerfed version of the app in their own country.
> He believes that the data China can get from TikTok isn’t particularly different or more useful than what it’s accused of obtaining through hacks or can just purchase from data brokers. Pro-Chinese propaganda is no concern to him, he said, adding, “Your average 15-year-old is not going to tune into a video extolling Xi Jinping.”
> Where he does see some risk is that China could use TikTok to censor, manipulate, or distribute disinformation.
To me, the moderation risk is too high. With any social media company, they have a lot of power to put their thumb on the scales in regards to what type of content gets disseminated. This is a big enough problem at US companies which are not (explicitly) political. This seems like a much worse version of that.
You can in fact to the right thing for the wrong reasons.
There is more nuance here though. If you start banning companies because you're a xenophobe, that sends a very different message than if you ban then because they're a puppet company for the Chinese govmn't
The state department was exceedingly clear this was about data privacy from the start.
The data privacy concerns were of no interest to the Democrats back then. Or, if it was a concern, it certainly wasn't as important as condemning Trump and anyone that supported banning TikTok as Sinophobes. In other words, data privacy was a lesser concern than xenophobia.
To say Trump got it right means the Democrats got something wrong, but they don't want to mention what that something is.
What exactly did the Democrats get wrong - the Sinophobia or the privacy problem?
I suspect my question will remain unanswered because the honest answer reflects poorly on the party that claims to be for intellectuals.
I don't think that this is a general Democratic position as of yet. There are liberals and Democrats who concur that Tiktok is a serious problem, mostly those directly involved in intelligence.
But it seems a minority opinion. The majority opinion seems to see it as on par with other social media: certainly a problem, but not worse than others just because it's Chinese.
Perhaps because it's an intelligence issue, they can't make their case without classified information. Or perhaps viewing things through the intelligence lens makes everything associated with China look dangerous, even if it's not really any more dangerous than the non-Chinese equivalents.
Just two years ago, just have a look at the herd mentality responses and TikTok defenders around this [0] being in denial of the security risk and concerns raised in [1].
Little did most of them know that TikTok was already under a national security investigation years before Trump suggested the 'ban' on the same grounds [1][2]. I mentioned this in [3] and immediately got [flagged][dead] [3] at the height of 2020.
This is unsurprising. Always in election year; sense, evidence, research and the truth gets thrown out of the window and all is revealed and exposed afterwards and after the news.
democracies need an ulterior separation of powers, let "deeply techinical" sectors like defense in the hand of an elected body of people by people with "junior level" "theoretical"/"practical" backgrounds in that field whenever the eligible pool of population is less than 1% of population. populism is a byproduct of its electoral base
I wish they'd shut up and actually take action on this issue.
It's both ridiculous and pathetic that China can block all foreign media within it's own borders yet still run one of the most privacy invasive apps currently available outside its borders.
