"I would literally write my social security number on a sticky note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead than go back to using Instagram Reels"
I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the feeling right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect (not to mention ads and so many bots and spam). It's like shutting down Reddit and telling everyone to go to LinkedIn.
As someone who's been on TikTok for years now, it's extremely fake, the algorithm is a total ruse, as most of what trends is based on seeing news stories repeated hundreds of times, and most other content has the same repetitive music behind it... Far too much repetition and subtle seminaries in trending content, down to the way videos are color graded to be honestly real & organic... I've had a few videos go viral, but most things that do go viral are memes, the minute you want to push out anything remotely serious or related to business, they want money to let it pass the visibility gate.
I won't miss it if it does get banned. It's stressed so many people out for no good reason, and sucked up millions of hours of free labor from unrecognized & unpaid creators that deserve better.
That doesn't mean that any Meta product is good for content creators mind you.
The algorithm is genuinely very good. That's why I deleted it.
It's very addictive and not always just shoveling slop.
I don't know if I can do it justice but there's something genuinely quite fresh about the AI stuff I see every now and again e.g. Anna from the red scare podcast shilling industrial glycine was a meme for a while. Very Land-ian. Neo-china...
""" Within such a possible future system, the only command or need
that the machine would not respond to would be the one command that
I have a feeling some of us would most want to type into the
machine. Which is the demand that it destroy itself, you see, that
would be my problem with the machine. It would meet all the needs
except my need to see it destroyed. It would take every other
command well, and meet every other need well, but the need to just
to just shut it down. Television is something like that now.
I feel sometimes as though I am plugged into a giant computer that
will take every command I give it except the one that I want the
most. The command that the damn machine blow itself up. It will do
anything else I say. I type in "food", and out comes food. I type in
"I want to give this talk in Washington". It comes out. But the one
command I want is the command for the damn thing to just go "boom!",
and all the little transistors just to go... """
Rick Roderick 1990
It's an interesting read if you're into recommender systems or AI in general. What amazes me is that despite this published work google and meta still can't produce a decent social media algorithm, so it's either incompetence or malice.
same here. I found myself loosing an hour of just scrolling through short videos, most of them really good and ones that I liked. I had to delete the app because it was working too good.
Back in the day when I was using Windows Mobile (2002-2008) there was an app (RSS basic) that was pulling the news from various websites (I had added BBC, CNN, some with IT news, etc.). Before I would leave home I'd sync it, and it would give me 'many' news articles, just the text ofc.
At some point I got addicted into reading news, so out it went. So yes, anything that gives you dopamine hits (cat videos, semi-naked men/women, news of the world), must go!
Prismatic was even worse (better?), IIRC it scanned your twitter feed and then gave you a set research articles, academic websites, etc. To say I have a breadth of interests is an understatement. My twitter feed looks like arxiv and and a british tabloid had a baby.
What prismatic gave me was pages and pages of Art, Design, Philosophy, Mathematics, Literature and all of it hours to days old. Every single article it back I wanted to read and there was pages of it, never ending. There was no way I could even filter out what read and even what to be aware of, there was simply too much.
I closed it and never went back. I also realized that even knowing of knowing is itself a Faustian bargain, we are all on a temporary atoll in a giant sea.
I disable them with a browser addon (and Revanced on mobile) because I seriously never want to watch a 30 second video on Youtube. Having to scroll past useless snippets when I'm looking for something had borderline-ruined Youtube for me.
there's some astoundingly good shit on there. some japanese cabinet maker who does phenomenal stuff and conveys it all in 30 secs. so much more. but so much more, in fact, that i can't risk my life/time by stepping into the stream.
first time i did that, i finally realized that this is probably the tiktok experience that so many other people are talking about. utterly terrifying.
Your perception of TikTok likely depends on your TikTok for you page. If you spend time cultivating it, the algorithm will learn you like authenticity and show you more of it.
This seems to be less true on YouTube and Reels unfortunately.
The algorithm will spoonfeed you content that you perceive a certain way, whether that's true or not is a different story. Unfortunately for most people, all those hilarious situations that are not-so-obviously staged just fly over their heads as genuine. My wife is smart and well educated, but I even had to keep correcting her when she showed me videos that she believed were genuine.
> A lot of people are simply pessimists and will dismiss real authenticity because they don't have the tools to recognize it.
Do you think you have those tools? And if you do, do you actually have them?
You are purposely being shoveled content that's expected to be engaging. Your feedback is used to tune your own personal model to maximize the volume of content you swallow.
The mistake you're making is presuming that these recommendations are pushed to you with your best interests in mind. Read up on propaganda attacks such as the infamous alt-right pipeline.
If we believe people can't be trusted with free access to ideas because they might become 'radicalized' or potential ’useful idiots’, we're advocating for more social control, not less. The ability to think critically isn't threatened by exposure to ideas - it's threatened by a broken social contract that deprives people of the conditions for self-actualization and genuine autonomy. Banning platforms or content just scapegoats symptoms while ignoring this deeper crisis.
I don’t know that it’s people trying to make a buck - and that seems a bit silly of a thing to say to begin with. I presume you try to make your buck doing whatever it is you do.
What I will say is that it’s definitely a different form of expression from what we’ve had beyond recent history and - at the same time - artists, photographers, painters, jesters, philosophers, and playwrights have been trying to live off their form of expression for a while now too.
My TikTok For You Page is almost entirely made up of Veritasium videos, sci-fi authors, some standup, lock picking lawyer and "how is it made" style videos. I don't get any of that brain-rot slop. If I did, I wouldn't use it. Which would be a slight improvement to my life. Although I'm not negatively impacted by the current level of my TikTok use, I can definitely see it takes an extra level of willpower to stop (i.e. close the app, put down the phone) than almost any other of my extra curriculars. From enjoyable hobbies to other fun time wasting activities such as gaming. Barring Factorio which is the biggest time warp I've ever encountered, with an almost perfect dopamine extracting game loop.
The algorithm is good. It's too good, and that's why it's dangerous.
>The algorithm is good. It's too good, and that's why it's dangerous.
So, based on your description, the algorithm gives you almost exactly what you like, in terms of authenticity and legitimate interest on your part, instead of force feeding you crap that tries to change your perception of X or Y, and this is... bad? How exactly is it dangerous for doing what you want it to instead of pouring slop onto your brain?
An endless supply of content you like is infinitely more problematic than just shovelling irrelevant slop at you. With the latter you’re going to put it down.
The funny thing is I think you're misunderstanding the scale. You wife likes videos that are not-so-obviously staged. Somone else would get purely staged videos. Someone else would get actual real videos. If you like real pilots landing planes on runways where the wheels make sudden noises, it will give you that.
There are tens of billions of pieces of content there. TikTok is the furthest thing from a monolith possible.
It has to start somewhere, so it recommends the things that the most people like, but it's not the only content there, that's just common sense and good business (recommend The Beatles/Taylor Swift before you recommend Arch Echo/Aesop Rock)
Connecting people to other people, to life changing art, places and things that they end up loving and wouldn’t know about otherwise? That has to be one of the best uses for technology. I’d like to see more of it.
I think you and others here are focusing on the stereotypical “influencer” faking authenticity for views but there are literally millions of human beings posting on TikTok about all kinds of things. A lot of them are pretty cool. Just click “not interested” on influencers and click like on the stuff you want to see instead.
I think it's fair to say after a decade or so social media does not "connect people to other people", what you are describing are parasocial relationships. People are lonelier than ever, not just in America but worldwide.
Besides, for any hobby, recommendations are only really relevant for newcomers without solidified preferences and knowledge, after that the space of available content quickly dwindles as one seeks increasingly ambitious and avant-garde works to their preferences. Amateur stuff can be quite generic after all, what not with the lack of resources and experience. If you're still relying on an algorithm, I'd see it more as a vapid surface-level engagement with a hobby/medium than a genuine interest to dive further.
Well, I guess that's what people want, but I'd argue that we're not better of it, that despite the greater size of it all, the culture of the early 2010s internet still produced far higher quality and authentic cultural products than today, hell alot of shorts I see today is just a rehash of well-known facts back then.
> Well, I guess that's what people want, but I'd argue that we're not better of it, that despite the greater size of it all, the culture of the early 2010s internet still produced far higher quality and authentic cultural products than today, hell alot of shorts I see today is just a rehash of well-known facts back then.
You’re just getting older. You’ve seen it before in another place, another medium, a different author, actor, photographer, director, philosopher, painter. You just haven’t realized that the internet isn’t just for you, and that reel you saw that just rehashed something well-known to you, was new info to someone else, somewhere. I can assure you, in 2010, there were plenty oh people bitching about bloggers retelling the same old things they learned decades prior.
“Everything old is new again” is a centuries-old expression. Every generation tells their tales, and shares their cultural experience in their own way. Right now, people express themselves in short-form video. I’m curious to see what comes next - you and I probably won’t like it.
On the other hand, kids don't seem to have great mental health, attention spans, or academic attainment right now, and this type of social media is one of the likely factors behind this change.
One person's short attention span is another person's intolerance for bullshit. One person's poor mental health is another person's emotions appropriate to the actual state of the world. The kids these days are doing great in all the ways that matter.
Put a short straight-to-the-point instructional video on youtube, gets praised for being the best of humanity, "You win the internet today sir". Put the same video on TikTok, suddenly it's brain rot.
> One person's short attention span is another person's intolerance for bullshit.
If a student asks a friend a question, and then drifts off into space before the two sentence answer has been delivered, that's not great.
> One person's poor mental health is another person's emotions appropriate to the actual state of the world.
Perhaps being prone to anxiety attacks, panic, and self-harm are what we need to meet today's challenges head-on.
> The kids these days are doing great in all the ways that matter.
Hey, not everything is negative-- we live in a world with more interpersonal kindness and tolerance than a few decades ago, and that's great. But the kids aren't alright.
Especially teen girls. It's impossible to escape curated content encouraging social comparison to edited, perfectly curated standards of perfection.
would you like to serve up some comparative evidence showing just how much these things have degraded in kids these days vs. some particular point in the past?
This reminds me of people harping about the pervasiveness of misinformation in social media today, while completely forgetting how narrowly propagandized and baited toward yellow journalism the much more restricted media sources of the past often were, helping create all kinds of absurdly ignorant belief systems from which escape into alternative viewpoints was much harder.
Time series data is always confounded in many ways; lots of stuff changes, and as a society we change what we're paying attention to and that itself changes things like emergency room visits or perceptions of being anxious. At the same time, a whole lot of different measures moved in a negative direction suddenly (after slowly moving that way for many years). Of course, to be fair: these time series seem to show more the effect of social media in general and smartphones than short form video content on social media/smartphones.
There is no shortage of comparative evidence, though.
There's also evidence that short form video use is correlated with shorter attention span and that it is addictive. Of course, correlation ain't causation: maybe it's just the most naturally attention-challenged that consume a lot of it. I personally suspect it's a little of both.
We also have research that shows that if you show people lots of short form video and then test their attention span later, it's worse. But this, of course, isn't the same as the effect of voluntarily watching short form video. This is all trivial to find, but if you want links to specific things, let me knwo.
Kids complain that the other kids who are on tiktok all the time will do something like ask a peer a question, and then drift off to something else during the answer if it's longer than a single short sentence.
I've been doing youth programs for quite awhile now, and there's been a definite qualitative shift in the past several years, and various kinds of quantitative shifts in my own data aligned with this trend, too.
There will never be perfect evidence, unfortunately. We have to act on the information we have, and when we're studying humans it's going to include time series data and artificial studies of the phenomenon in lab conditions.
>“Everything old is new again” is a centuries-old expression. Every generation tells their tales, and shares their cultural experience in their own way. Right now, people express themselves in short-form video. I’m curious to see what comes next - you and I probably won’t like it.
You know it's interesting to frame these arguments because it's exemplar of the clash of worldviews here, between the classic view of an cyclical history, and the modern linear view of historical continuity. The latter was birthed in reaction against the former, yet as the inheritors of Rennaisance conquered the world, it eventually became the norm, the "old" of which the "present" would be compared against.
So if the present now cycles the past, is this an abberation or the norm here? The past is the "future", and the present is "stagnation". It is both revolutionary and regressionary. The TikTok Bill, the need to retake the Narrative by the Establishment thus represents itself the Past reasserting Continuity, and thus the Future, while Present pushes back to the very denial of the Future itself, to establish it's totalizing dominance of an endless now. So for the question of whether I would like the future, well that depends on which of the two sides win.
> You’re just getting older. You’ve seen it before in another place .. You just haven’t realized that the internet isn’t just for you.. same old things decades prior..
This reads as both extremely condescending and extremely naive at the same time.
An earlier version of the internet had blogs and meme lords sure, and a generation consumed that stuff and found that it was good. And after that consumption, it turns out kids still wanted to grow up to be doctors, astronauts, or whatever.
Another generation consumed another kind of content which was mostly leaning towards short-format, after many years spent researching/weaponizing dopamine and misinformation. Almost all of that content was mediated by corporations really, with as little involvement from people as the corporations could manage. That generation wanted to be influencers and "content creators" when they grew up.
The basic incentive structures are radically different now, for companies, creators, and consumers, and we're sort of past doing things for the lulz. There's a difference here that actually makes a difference, and writing it off as "yawn, more of the same if only your perspective was as wide as mine!" seems more ignorant than enlightened.
It's pretty creative and funny stuff, imo. If you consider that to be "good" or "bad" that's up to you I guess.
The way people choose to spend their lives is largely up to them, I'm not sure it's good to be labeling things as a "waste of time" when they're deriving something from it that you simply do not understand. Particularly when they do it in a way that is pretty harmless.
I don't know if you have pets, but if you spend time observing them you'll see most of what they do is simply letting time pass and for them, that's enough. Believe it or not, for many people the same is the case. Finding meaning in the acts we do is a personal endeavour so I think rather than telling people they're wasting their time instead try to understand what they're seeing in such things that you don't see.
I think a lot of people find creative acts very rewarding, there's an element of surprise that comes from it. The unexpected can be enjoyable. I think one of the reasons why the TikTok algorithm is so powerful is that it really succeeds in giving people the feeling of constant surprise.
Personally, I've found really inspiring art on Tiktok, as well as new music and also a lot of simple but engaging content in german (which I'm trying to learn).
I think you inadvertently made an entirely different point: it's all fake, but you just swallow some content acritically believing it's something personal that speaks to you.
In the end, you're just complaining that some sirens are fake but others really do love you.
'authenticity' in the sense of content made by normal people without any strong goals other than 'some other people might like that' (and for some, maybe eventually getting some income from monetization) rather than highly produced content with the goal of reaching the largest possible audience and extracting the largest possible amount of money from that, which is what reels feels like. if you want to see that type of 'more authentic' content, tiktok's approach to populating your feed will be much more responsive to that than instagram's. there also seem to be a lot more people creating content on tiktok aimed at that level.
the TikTok reocmmendation engine seemed to work better with a sparse history and better understood user feedback about content that one wants to see or avoid
Instagram tbh just feels icky but at least you can explicitly like or dislike stuff not that it would fix the feed though
YT shorts is also good but I hate you can't say show me this or do not show me that and it is all based on duration. idk what the powers that be at YT were thinking but I'm sure they did user studies and stuff
so much for free market economics though stuck with two imperfect options because Zuck couldn't fix the feed :(
I had cultivated a FYP that felt authentic to me, especially relative to everything else on the internet, but after a while it looked just as phony to my eyes, without any real change in the content itself. Just a different brand of phony.
1) a guy telling me in my native language (not english) how to spot phishing scams
2) another guy doing a short video about how much you need to invest to retire in my native language
3) Donald's AG not answering simple questions directly
4) video about 2CV ice racing where people leisurely drive old Citroens
5) A skit by an Australian dude who has a wall full of Milwaukee tools
Instagram Reels
1) A couple doing a very much scripted skit
2) A stolen clip from an old 90s sitcom
3) one-liner joke
4) A dude farting
5) A homophobic "joke" video
Youtube Shorts
1) pro skier made up to look old doing tricks on the slope
2) A couple I don't know showing what they looked like in 1988
3) A skit by a couple
4) One of those weird youtube-only dating channels reposting a clip of their stuff
5) Americans not knowing how to drive on icy roads in 2022
The quality difference is so clear that it's not even funny. In my experience all of the good content in Reels is just reposted/stolen TikTok content. Shorts has the same or snippets of bigger YT videos.
FB Reels is so bad I don't even want to give them the engagement metrics.
1) more people post there
2) you've used it much more and given them huge amounts of data on who you are and what your like to watch, when.
I can assure you those tiktok things are not the top of everyone's feed, sounds personalized. But your list for reels, and the other one sounds like the basic things they show to new people to try to figure out what they like, possibly somewhat curated by some past swipes.
Each of these are just algorithms. They get better the more you use them because your use = your data and personality and you've just used tiktok enough that they know _exactly_ what you like and who you are. Give it time, the others will come along if people use them
It's not the algorithm, it's the accounts and people in there.
I actually tried reels for a good while, but the content is just tits&ass (a major part of instagram), "funny" videos reposted so many times they're grainy from all the recompression and crap like that. Very very few people I would like to follow do actual original content on Instagram Reels.
Have you considered that Reels is so bad precisely because you don’t use it?
Mine:
A bit from the SF Chronicle on the LA fires. A comedy/info bit by Alex Falcone. An Ad. A wrestling technique (I’m into judo and BJJ). A card trick. Cooking techniques. An ad.
It’s ad-heavy and frankly I don’t try to spend a lot of time on it. But as somebody who uses it at least some, I get absolutely zero of the kind of garbage you suggest.
My wife hates it when I don't enjoy the TikTok videos she sends me, because it's very easy for me to tell how staged and fake they are. She, on the other hand, neither notices nor cares.
This would be concerning, if I didn't know that this way of thinking was incredibly common these days—instead, it's mildly terrifying.
Everybody knows movies are staged, even the ones that are "based on a true story". From what I can tell, people seem to think those short videos are genuine.
Everyone knows movies are staged, and they expect this. No one in their right mind wants to go to a theater and pay $20 for some crap that someone shot on their phone with no script.
With the short videos, people expect them to be genuine, and not highly staged productions meant to entertain.
No, I watch these kind of videos expecting them to be fake. Why would I expect otherwise when I have every reason to expect them to be non-genuine? If people's expectations are not right, that is on them.
If every time I watched a movie with my SO they said "you do know this is completely fake, why do you even like movies?", I would probably get a bit annoyed
It's where the young kids who don't know any better overshare. Instagram is where the perfectly manicured young adults put out a phony facade to make their money.
Hm. I’m a grown man and I post reels to all the platforms. I like the tech and enjoy trying to emulate a professional process with prosumer equipment and practices (filming, editing, color grading, sound design, etc.).
After about 30 or so reels this year, I’ve got about 70 followers - half of which are definitely bots, a third are family/friends, and the rest seem to be real people.
My feed has a lot of people like me, and people whose content I think is at the quality I’d like to be at (mostly photographers, videographers, small but full-time YouTubers).
Maybe you’re just finding what you’re looking for.
It's commensurate with how China treats foreign companies. Nobody can do serious business in China without the CCP's blessing, often involving a "partnership" with a local company.
I don't know if I would characterize TikTok as 'authentic' first and foremost, but it's a platform where real people go to perform. When I scrolled TikTok, I would often get poorly-shot videos from average folks trying to put their spin on the day's joke format, or reacting to that day's outrage. It was junk food, but at least somewhat 'real'.
My Reels feed, on the other hand, is 100% bot drivel. It's all stolen viral videos by artificially-boosted accounts, and the comments appear to be fake comments that were 'paid for'. I assume there must be some sort of financial incentive to gaming the system this way.
The end result is that TikTok feels like scrolling through (attention-grabbing, reactionary) stuff by real people, and Reels feels like scrolling through some sort of bot wasteland.
I guess I should add that, due to its size, TikTok almost certainly also has a bot problem, but if it does it's not as clearly evident in a way that is detrimental to the platform.
I genuinely have no idea what Zuckerberg is responsible for at Facebook other than hijacking credentials (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433) and stealing/copying ideas
Anyone with half a brain ought to have come up with a better system than Reels is
Exactly. In other threads on hacker news people have bemoaned the loss of the old weird web. I don't think anyone believed me that the same spirit exists in some sides of TikTok.
You're both right! There was a good article/discussion on on this yesterday, but tldr: They are authentically fake! As in, the creators are not putting up a show with a 'real' person behind the persona, the algorithms have remade whatever person there use to be such that their 'authentic' self has become the persona.
The lady with the rug story, the tik tok recipes... All felt very real, down to earth to me. Versus IG's obsession with glamor, travel stories, other hucksters.
Strange. Until about a month ago, my IG feed was almost all independent and amateur musicians, interesting tech makers (NOT reviewers or “influencers”, and some alt comedy. Suddenly, in the past 4 weeks, my feed is all political propaganda from the far right, ads, and more ads.
I deleted Instagram because of the change. I’m done. Never used TikTok, it seemed totally fake to me.
You have to break it in, strangely enough. When I first used it it was like being logged out and watching Reels. But overtime it really understood what might interest me, even topics I didn't think I'd be interested in but was
Fake compared to what? Alt-right Zuck with a fresh perm?
Seriously. US social media is taking a massive turn to the right while its owners are swearing allegiance to Trump. To most of the world that is a much more real danger than the Chinese communists.
The US gov's intention was not at all to shut down TikTok. It was to force ByteDance to sell it.
The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt, and their unwillingness to sell under the circumstances kinda proves their whole First Amendment claims are made in bad faith. Something deeper is going on, and it's not about your social security number.
This isn't rocket science. What's going on is having the keys to the kingdom with regards to serving videos to influence the mind of a user with extremely precise targeting.
China doesn't want USA doing that, and banned their social media. USA doesn't want China doing it because they've been doing it all over the world to everybody since Radio Free Europe, and likely before.
Lots of countries have made it illegal to listen things like Radio Free Europe. I'm guessing you can't in North Korea. On the other hand, a US citizen that wants to get the Chinese perspective on anything has lots of ways to legally find that and repeat it. I am not saying a lot of people in the US are interested in a foreign point of view, or that the US doesn't have tons of propaganda. But I don't think you can convince anyone that the two countries treat speech the same way.
Radio Free Europe is nothing like TikTok. Not only is broadcast media not able to be pinpoint targeted in real time to individuals, but the connection of who was behind RFE and other similar propaganda is pretty obvious, unlike tiktok.
Feels a little bit like the Chinpokomon episode of South Park - innocent kids being brainwashed and whatnot. (I know the target in that ep is Japan, but still)
I think that China is working to control left-wing activism in the U.S and TikTok is the perfect trojan horse to split the Democratic party and elevate their bribed proxies. I'd rather not go into how they're doing it, but certainly massive focus on the Gaza war in TikTok did do a number on the unity of the Democratic party.
Speaking of China influence I keep getting these stories on my social media feeds: Isn't this overpass, road, or this building, or this city in with lots of LED lights in China just great? China is the future, and so on!
The DoD banning an app on their network is a lot different than banning it competely in the US. I would think DoD should ban most apps connecting to their networks that aren't work related. I feel this whole effort is either in bad faith or isn't being transparently communicated to the public.
They famously failed to ban strava and some military assets were unintentionally disclosed on the strava heatmap by soldiers logging their cardio jogs through facility hallways.
NatSec should not even be needed. A simpler reason could be that China bans foreign social media apps from operating in China, so Chinese apps should be treated as such.
But China banning foreign apps also plays into their stranglehold on their domestic media and economy, so it's not a purely adversarial move against the US.
Or to put it another way, should the US also ban/censor Chinese art and cinema within it's borders?
There’s no adversary here. There’s no ongoing war. In fact, up until the US started imposing restrictions on China, the US was one of China’s largest trade PARTNER.
US social media is banned in China because it doesn’t comply with local censorship laws, nor because it is American. They impose the same censorship on local individuals and organisations too.
> Sometimes it is. Especially, if an adversary is bad to you, you should not be good to him. You should be equally bad, or sometimes worse.
Every little thing the West does is already played up in China and spun as an intentional attack aimed directly at China because the West wants to destroy China. Usually this is conveyed in news broadcasts set to a backdrop of video of various US military exercises.
A lot of the support the Chinese government enjoys comes from people in China generally seeing the country as much better off than it was a few decades ago, and a sense of nationalism and conflating the government, country, and people as one. An attack on China is an attack on all of us is an attack on me.
Whatever you do in retaliation is just building the public and political will, or even public demand, within China for them to take harsher measures or escalate things further.
Despite the government's efforts, the populace is not exactly entirely isolated from the outside world. There are many people who, while maybe not fully distrusting of the government, definitely smell something fishy. They're curious, and they want to and are able to learn more.
Heading into the 2030s, China itself is already forecasting China's going to enter a period of negative population growth. Combined with a variety of cultural forces, this could be even more impactful than in some other countries. And it will only get worse with time. "Better off than we were a few decades ago" may soon become clearly untrue to a lot of people. The government knows this is coming and is trying to prepare by strengthening their grip.
I think a smarter long term move here would be to just... not. Let them yell at the clouds. Make whatever information we can freely available to the curious in any way we can. Welcome those that want to embrace Western values with open arms. Model the world that we think is best.
Rather than giving China the government the tools and ammunition needed to unify the people and rally them behind China the government... let's just wait. When the people feel the government is failing them, instead of leaving them feeling isolated and vulnerable... let them see they have somewhere else to turn.
Or, y'know, escalate this towards an economically and politically unstable nation of 1.5 billion people who think the West is the cause of all of their woes and see how it all shakes out. That'd definitely show everyone we have the biggest dick.
and why on earth would China want to start a war with us? We are a huge trading partner and yes there's a lot of posturing and conflicting geo-political interests, cultural views etc but that doesn't mean that war is their goal.
Reciprocity is a great idea. It takes the emotion out of the decision: we don’t allow X from Y because Y doesn’t allow X from us. It makes sense for trade at least.
Then there is no need to find another excuse that might be offensive.
If you can’t make a decision always, it works out. Besides, this is a simple reciprocal trade sanction, which are rarely so straightforward. No one in China is seriously going to admonish the USA for banning TikTok when even China blocks it (since it allows content banned in China), while most Americans who would care probably don’t vote.
It seems like an approach that begs to be gamed, though. Country A bans something, Country B reciprocally bans the something. Years later, Country B realizes it's at a severe disadvantage because County A has hoarded all the something and now there's a something shortage in Country B that was planned and executed by a Country A.
Obviously not probably an issue with social networks, but mindlessly banning something just because somebody else banned something seems like a recipe to be tricked.
It took us 5 years to go from “let’s ban TikTok” to actually banning TikTok. I don’t think it’s going to be very exploitable, and it’s not like China where Facebook works one day and then just doesn’t (China doesn’t publicize what it bans and for what reasons, even a list of banned sites is orobably considered a state secret).
If you made a literal mindless robot to reciprocally ban anything another country banned, yes, that would probably be exploitable. Normalising reciprocal bans and applying even a little bit of human oversight seems fine though.
The difference is, of course, that only one of those countries CONSTANTLY bangs on about being the "free" world, about "free" markets, about how not saying the n-word is censorship etc.
In short, it's only hypocritical for one of those countries.
In both cases though, for normal citizens your own country and it's companies are far more dangerous than some random country halfway across the globe.
It was not for show. It acknowledged its success and was to limit its success. Then limit it as a "potential" vector for intrusion. Kaspersky was removed from the US on the same basis.
Tiktok has access to photos and videos on the device, and user data on interactions. This was seen as a vector for compromising the individual's integrity via embarrassment and blackmail.
I just installed tiktok for the first time on my Android device and it asked for no permissions and even let me use it without creating an account. How is it getting photos and videos on my device?
Normal practice is a prompt-on-first-attempt: when you click on various things, it'll ask; I've never given it access to anything, and so I get a prompt asking for permission to see my contacts about once a week.
i think there are obvious reasons why bytedance would not want to spawn a US-based competitor and why a US only social media network would be ineffective.
this is exactly the same as what China does with their gfw, they allow american apps to divest and be owned by a chinese company.
1. China asked American SNS companys to 'obey Chinese laws', which mostly refer to content control and data ownership, these companys refused, China didn'tforced them to sell
2. Are you sure to play the 'same as what China does'? hey, we are a totalitarian, authoritarian, dictatorial regime, are we same? think twice
2. The game can be slightly different. "hey, we are open by default. but if an authoritarian regimes wants to exploit our openness by marketing their apps while at the same time banning our apps from their market, then we will strike back".
If we played the same as China does, we'd be hacking Baidu through a vulnerability in a Microsoft web browser until they withdrew completely from the American market.
Let me tell you a cruel fact - Uber is completely unable to compete with Didi. You have no idea how fierce the competition in this industry in China is.
> If Uber had become a commercial success in China, Chinese authorities ultimately would have clamped down to protect their domestic competitors.
> firms that do occasionally find success often face headwinds from Chinese regulators who limit their access to the domestic market.
> Didi naturally had state-backed funding, receiving a significant cash infusion from China's large sovereign-wealth fund.
> "Uber China" sought local investors. The hope was that, with local investors, the Chinese operation would be spared some of the hamstringing restrictions typically imposed on foreign businesses.
China is well-known to have intense domestic favoritism. Not sure where the profit is in denying that, given your own sources seem to clearly state it and even name a number of channels through which the state puts their thumb on the scale, not just regulatory but also through financing.
You can ignore my following comments if this will make you feel better...
> *If* Uber had become a commercial success in China, Chinese authorities ultimately *would* have clamped down to protect their domestic competitors.
classic demonizing and loser's execuse
> firms that do occasionally find success often face headwinds from Chinese regulators who limit their access to the domestic market.
every other demestic companys face headwinds from Chinese regulators, just like I mentioned above, and Apple, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, they all in same situation, some of them couldn't handle this so they leaved, some stays
Also, DiDi once were banned more than 2 years by authorities, it survived
> Didi naturally had state-backed funding, receiving a significant cash infusion from China's large sovereign-wealth fund
The 'STATE-BACKED' is a typical word used by certain people, it's just some kind of gov investment funds, there're dozens and invested thousands private companys, it's a Socialism country, it's called socialism, what do you expect? Didi is not even a state-owned enterprise. And is this equals to "force to sell"?
> some of the hamstringing restrictions typically imposed on foreign businesses.
Bruh
> China is well-known to have intense domestic favoritism.
That's true, and? many Chinese people also have intense domestic favoritism
BTW, Apple is losing market share in China. However, take it easy, I don't think Apple will be sold to Huawei. Moreover, Apple is produced by Chinese and Indian, why bothered?
It's unfortunate that this comment is buried so deep and that generally this topic is under discussed.
Media has always been a force for controlling popular opinion, but in the age of social media it's going to new extremes. There are forces that try to control how you see the world on all social media platforms and do so to attempt to shape your opinions of the world and modify your actions.
You can visibly see Reddit has been completely taken over by bot, shills, and other controlled accounts. There is no sincere, real human opinion posted on the front page.
Even HN is not immune. "Bad news" has long been forbidden here, and there is a range of topics that, even when heavily upvoted by the community, tend to disappear within minutes.
Large portions of the things posted to the Oakland subreddit get flagged and removed. Almost anything mentioning the city in a negative light gets flagged. Crime reports / trends, anything.
Sarcastically chuckling about the state of the city as a long time resident gets the ban hammer.
Imagine if one company owned all the local news papers and replaced all the content with wire stories and the lowest quality local content or a fox news like company bough local news to run a propaganda operation. Oh wait that's real.
"Imagine if a handful of ultra-billionaires controlled almost all social media in the US." doesn't feel less threatening. The fact that Congress doesn't consider this a problem feels like the bigger problem.
>The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt
Um, what? There is zero chance that ByteDance could get a fair price for TikTok. VC calculations can be disregarded, TikTok as a platform is more valuable than Facebook. How much money would it take for Zuckerberg to sell FB to a Chinese company?
Didn't something similar happen with Grindr? It was Chinese owned and sold without nearly as much excitement. Given the inevitable bidding war from multiple interested parties I would be surprised if they couldn't get a fair price for TikTok
China didn’t need to fight to keep Grindr because all the value from the acquisition was realized as soon as they ran a database query to compile a list of closeted Republican senators. No need to hold on once you got the spy treasure.
It wouldn't have been at a bargain basement price if they started trying to sell it when the law passed. It could have been the highest market price they could get from the US's largest buyers.
Obviously they don't have the same leverage when they're otherwise going to be shut off in a few days.
I think this is untrue. The government wanted to shut down TikTok, but it can't just outright ban it because that's a clear violation of the first amendment, so it came up with a way to ban it indirectly. That was their intention all along.
I don't see how people don't see what is their most likely rationale - the ban will be temporary. Trump's already come out against it and is going to work to reverse it once in office. If it can't be done directly, it'll be done like usual - as an addon to some must-pass bill.
I think they would probably refuse to sell in a situation where they had reason to expect the ban to persist (for different reasons), but in this case they probably didn't even consider selling when there's a high probability they'll be back legally operating in the US within a year.
Acts of congress can only be blocked by the supreme court's power of judicial review. The supreme court held a 2.5 hour hearing this past week and the only two justices who voiced skepticism of the law were Gorsuch and Thomas.
Or another act of Congress! But given that the Supreme Court is waiting to the last second to issue their ruling, I don't think it's all quite as clear behind doors as you seem to believe it was in front of them. The nuance of claiming that constitutional rights do not apply to a company legally operating within the country, because of its nationality, has extremely broad implications as a precedent - well beyond corporations alone, even for a judge who might be more than okay with the ban in and of itself.
Beyond this, there's the matter of enforcement and implementation. The former is discretionary and the latter is not specified by the bill. An effective ban would effectively require the creation of a Great Firewall of China type mechanism to effectively implement (which is what I thought this law was always a sort of 'trojan horse' for). Otherwise the "ban" will be trivially sidestepped by using a web app, downloading an APK from their site/mirrors instead of the marketplace, etc. Let alone things like VPNs! As Chinese companies are increasingly banned from the US, we're likely to see more adversarial setups where these companies will make no effort to prevent US customers no matter how much the US government madly gesticulates, though again with the current administration said gesticulation will not even happen in the first place.
>The nuance of claiming that constitutional rights do not apply to a company legally operating within the country, because of its nationality, has extremely broad implications as a precedent
The law (PAFACA) doesn't directly apply to TikTok, but only to TikTok's ownership by ByteDance, due to ByteDance being a corporation located in a foreign adversary nation. Foreign corporations are not protected by the first amendment as domestic corporations are. Case law clarifying separate first amendment protections for domestic vs foreign entities such as Citizens United v FEC (2010) and Bluman v FEC (2011), already established the precedent for this.
>I don't think it's all quite as clear behind doors as you seem to believe it was in front of them
Did you watch the hearing or read the transcript? The opinions of the majority of the justices on both sides, including the chief justice, were not ambiguous. As referenced in the hearing by the justices, the first amendment only applies to communication on the platform, not the ownership of the platform. Given that TikTok's parent company is ByteDance, and as the first amendment does not apply to foreign corporations as it does to domestic corporations, which multiple justices pointed out, the law is not in conflict with the first amendment. The law is referred to as the "TikTok ban law", but it doesn't ban the platform explicitly, it only bans its ownership by a foreign adversary located corporation, which are not protected by the first amendment, which is how the law avoids a conflict with the first amendment while potentially still effectively banning the platform.
The case you cited is not really appropriate here because it's about elections which are one of the few domains where citizenship plays a critical and very well established role. In this case, you're talking about broadly restricting the constitutional rights of an entity legally within the US based on its ties to a nationality, given that ByteDance is legally not even a Chinese company, as it's incorporated in the Cayman Isles. The implications of this seem huge.
Don't trust regular media to give you fair assessments of this case. ScotusBlog generally has excellent and impartial analysis of cases from experienced lawyers, and this is no exception. [1] They described the overall court as skeptical of the claims. Skeptical does not mean fully in bed with one side or the other, but simply that - skeptical. It's also important to bear in mind is that hearings are, by their very nature, off the cuff. And the implications (or factualness) of what the justices believe may change as they consider the implications of a decision, and factualness of their assumptions.
Again the thing I would say is that if this was an obvious case, the justices would not be waiting to the last second. My guess is that we'll probably see an announced delay+injunction on Friday.
Did you read that blog post? Despite the post being titled as it is, the post contains more examples of justices voicing skepticism to the TikTok lawyers' arguments than it does examples of justices who were voicing skepticism to the law:
"Some justices, however, were unconvinced that the law necessarily raises a First Amendment issue. Justice Clarence Thomas asked Francisco how a restriction on ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok created any limitations on TikTok’s speech.
Justice Elena Kagan echoed Thomas’s skepticism. If the law only targets ByteDance, which does not have any First Amendment rights because it is a foreign corporation, she asked Francisco, how does that implicate TikTok’s First Amendment rights? TikTok can still use whatever algorithm it wants, Kagan observed.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett also appeared to agree at times. The law, she simply requires ByteDance to divest TikTok. A shut-down by TikTok, she suggested, would be the consequence of ByteDance’s choice not to do so.
Other justices appeared persuaded by the government’s invocation of national security concerns. Chief Justice John Roberts observed that, although Francisco contended that TikTok is a U.S. company, Congress had concluded that the “ultimate company that controls” TikTok is subject to Chinese laws, including an obligation to assist the Chinese government with intelligence work. “Are we,” Roberts queried, “supposed to ignore that?”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted the government’s contention that China is using TikTok to access information about millions of U.S. citizens, and in particular young people, and could in the future use that information to try to recruit spies or manipulate future U.S. officials. That “seems like a huge concern for the future of” the United States, Kavanaugh observed."
In a Supreme Court case the burden of proof is on the petitioner, and it's the duty of the Court to critically question that evidence and proof. See, for instance, comparable coverage on the Roe vs Wade case, where you will see similar grilling. [1] Something quite important is how the judges responded to the claims and the follow ups. For instance in the transcript [2] follow the dialogue from the quotes you gave versus the grilling of Prelogar, representing the government.
She was, at times, being overtly mocked with quotes from judges like, "That's your best argument is that the average American won't be able to figure out that the cat feed he's getting on TikTok could be manipulated, even though there's a disclosure saying it could be manipulated?" Prelogar in general found herself struggling to defend the claim that the attempted ban was based on data access and not content (which would be unconstitutional), why there were no alternatives if the claims were based solely on data access, and the implications for any other foreign company that has access to user data (which is basically all of them). TikTok was met with some tough questioning but generally responded competently.
I read the transcript also, and from what I read, I don't disagree that Francisco answered competently, but he may have been given an impossible task. The law was upheld, as I suggested the justices were leaning towards. I didn't see the decision being unanimous, but that's the way it came down.
Yip, gotta say I'm extremely surprised - not that it passed per se, but by 9-0?! I wish more of the justices wrote opinions. Gorsuch's opinion was pretty enlightening, but simultaneously even more confusing. Apparently the judges deemed the law of a "compelling interest" and "content neutral" which enabled it to sidestep a "strict scrutiny" of Constitutional appropriateness.
Yet his opinion was almost entirely critical of the arguments that justified such. And it also seemed to include misinformation (unless it happens that I'm misinformed) suggesting that the TikTok app could access "any data" - a term which he himself put in quotes and also italicized - about anybody in a user's contact list. He said it included, but was not limited to photos and personal information. And this leaking of data of non-consenting users was apparently a significant part of the case. I'd be beyond surprised if the Android/Apple APIs bleed any substantial amount of information through contact access alone.
> I would literally write my social security number on a sticky note and stick it to Xi Jinping's forehead
Somewhat paradoxically, I am actually more comfortable giving out private data to foreign countries than my own. I mean, what is Xi Jinping going to do with a US social security number? If I am in the US, it will be hard for bad people in China to reach me, because there is a border between the two countries, in every sense of the word. There is no such protection if me and my data are both in the same country.
Xi Jinping can have my social security number, in fact, he can have my whole life, it is not like he is going to do anything to an random guy who lives in a foreign country. I will definitely won't give these data to a neighbor I barely know because my neighbor can do something I don't want him to do with it and may find some motivation to do so.
Are you aware that almost all of the scam calls, phishing emails, and other attempts to separate you from the currency in your bank account arise from outside of the US?
Economic globalization means there are no borders and it's up to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their users. You can imagine how well they are up to that task.
it's still much harder for overseas scams to succeed against someone who's tech savvy vs domestic identity fraud. There's simply a lot more barriers to moving money outside of the country
> Economic globalization means there are no borders and it's up to corporations to protect the sovereignty of their users
Historically speaking this is actually the opposite. Many critics of globalization have pointed out that you can directly track trade deals to massive spikes in border funding, much stronger enforcement of intellectual property laws, etc. Research actually shows a huge decrease in the dissemination of ideas, language, etc across borders where trade deals have been enacted. Paradoxically, globalization has made us more siloed off from each other
This is a rather poor take. Individually it's "probably" not much, but when you start putting the data together in bulk you have a social network graph of huge parts of an entire country. That and everything they like and probably work on. If you can get things like location data, then you can figure out what entire companies are doing. You can get insight into secret projects. You can figure out what small companies/contractors to install moles in.
It is literally the biggest spy data gold mine on earth.
It's infinitely worse for someone abroad to have your SS because it is worth it for them to try for several days to scam you for just a few dozen dollars. There's an entire industry of scam farms run in Cambodia by CH gangs.
Exactly. There are people deleting menstrual tracker apps in the US because the information might be used against them by law enforcement. But what's the risk to them of the Chinese government having that? Other than turning it over to the US authorities, of course.
My tiktok feed was night and day better compared to IG reels. IG reels is simply attrocious memes. Like the same recycled crap over and over again. Where my tiktok feed always felt fresh. Makes me embarrassed that Zuck and co can't make the feed better. I thought this was America!
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect
They're very different, and I understand what you're getting at comparing it to the hyper-manufactured perfectly glossy Instagram culture, but I wouldn't call TikTok 'authentic'.
Of course, Tiktok is large and there's many different subcultures there, but overall I think TikTok is heavily drenched in Irony. It's a stark difference to the very fake Instagram, but that doesn't make it authentic.
Are tiktok dances 'authentic'? They might have started as just innocent kids doing a fun little dance, but the moment anything turns into a trend I think it loses authenticity. The whole NPC live streaming trend[1] from a few years ago was anything but authentic. TikTok 'suffers' from the exact same paid 'influencers' promoting whatever garbage of the day, and even has its own version of affiliate marking spam with 'TikTok shop' junk.
You said a lot of words that are a litmus test proving you almost never use TikTok nowadays. First of all this is not 2020 anymore, you're 5 years late if you think TikTok is still filled with "dances". "Paid influencers" mean nothing in TikTok since everyone has an equal voice and equal shot at virality, see you're still seeing it from the lens of Instagram here.
The NPC live streaming is weird yeah but you cherry picked a trend and then make it about all TikTok. Literally hundreds of trends spawn up in TikTok every month and some of them are damn more authentic than whatever happens in IG reels. Some of the successful original trends even pick up in Instagram or YouTube.
I use tiktok every day. Maybe I don't know what 'authentic' means, but I don't think most content on tiktok is authentic. I think it is a particular type of fitting to an ideal or trend.
yes but those types stick to live and tiktok lets you completely remove live from your feed. In fact if i don't want to see joe rogan, peterson, or other such horsemen of the misinformation apocalypse outside of live, I can make that decision on tiktok in a meaningful way. I can actually remove that content from my feed. Good luck getting that to work on youtube or instagram. You'll get that content if you like it or not. Good luck blocking all the random alphanumeric account names posting the deluge of that kind of content, reels / youtube shorts will force feed it to you anyway, no matter what you do.
The best account on TikTok is that old man who champions his cause of stopping circumcision. One must ask oneself why it's not considered on the same plane as genital mutilation in our so called modern civilized society.
A glaring example of the fakeness of insta reels I saw yesterday was comments regarding the LA fires. On multiple reels, I saw the exact same back and forth exchanges between a handful of accounts. I thought maybe it was some kind of caching issue but there were different accounts commenting on in the fake threads across reels. Good way to boost engagement for the bot accounts.
>TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
Probably the most bizarre thing I've read on here in the last few days. You actually believe that what you're seeing on TikTok is real? It's literally the antithesis of base reality. It's a living, breathing delusion.
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness
I'm shocked how easily manipulated people are by social media. The vast majority of TikTok content is very intentionally produced, largely to attempt to generate revenue or, at the very least, to feed ones ego.
The "real" people you see on there are all, to different degrees of success, actors. Nearly all of the spontaneous/I can't believe this happened!/caught on camera style content is entirely staged.
Likewise all of the "freedom of speech must be protected" posts are laughable. Everything on TikTok is ultimately created for and prompoted to ultimately drive profit.
This movement to 小红书 is also, surprise surprise, not some spontaneous movement. The people at 小红书 have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
Virtually all media you see is very heavily filtered and manipulated to ensure you're getting the right message.
> This movement to 小红书 is also, surprise surprise, not some spontaneous movement. The people at 小红书 have intentionally be working on becoming a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
Provide literally one source for this. literally any source.
They completely revamped the UX from being essentially an instagram clone focusing on pictures and written content, to increasingly a tiktok clone focusing on browseable short form video?
Are you going to need similar evidence if I claim that YouTube has been working on being a TikTok replacement as well? It's pretty clear that YouTube created the "shorts" feature as an attempt to allow TikTok creators to trivially repost content.
Considering the TikTok UI is a clone of 抖音's UI, it's more likely that 小红书 copied 抖音 rather than TikTok. 小红书's primary market has always been China and overseas Chinese, foreigners were an afterthought up until this past week.
No 小红书 is literally not a TikTok replacement. The app is only very partially short form video, while most of the posts are more like pinterest. If you are talking about the recent UI changes that made it look like TikTok, I'm sorry to break it to you but I think that's just a coincident.
The comment and quote is telling of the zeitgeist. I would be more aghast by it, but then I remember that my SSN has been a subject to multiple data breach notices in past year.. so.. what is one more bad actor at this point?
Exactly. They keep fear mongering about China stealing our data but when these companies leak every single piece of sensitive data about hundreds of millions of americans they get a slap on the wrist. Tells you exactly where their priorities are.
What I don't understand is what's with all the China apologists around here, it's absolutely insane to me to see how even here, but also on reddit, for example, there is this wave of praising everything that a dictatorship does, do people really believe that what China does is ok and something to follow, or is it just propaganda? And no, I'm not ignoring all the bad stuff in the west, but I'm a bit afraid of the Chinese model appreciation.
Honestly I don't see a lot of people praising China who are against the tiktok ban. It's not just that our opinion of China is high, it's that our opinion of the US government is very low and they are our government, so why be worried about a foreign power when you feel like your own government is actively setting you up to fail, lying to your face and doing horrible shit.
I'll definitely admit that China is doing some horrible shit. I'm not the most educated on all of their issues but from what I've seen it's not great. But I'm also not convinced that TikTok is as much of a critical intelligence/espionage tool as much as the government claims it is, and I've seen a very real positive influence on people's connection with each other, and a frankly insane amount of mutual aid content on tiktok.
I am seeing a lot of people talking about how they have discovered that Chinese people are very welcoming and polite when you talk to them online. IDK, maybe I'm just missing the pro-chinese government stuff you are.
Strange, I found Instagram Reels' algorithm to be much better suited to my interests than TikTok's, and I've tried both multiple times, deleting them multiple times and seeing if it would improve, but TikTok's never did.
Very interesting. To me TikTok is nothing but memes and useless stuff. Whereas Instagram has been an amazing community for many of my passions. And now Threads is gaining in popularity as well (it really feels like hope scrolling in comparison to X's doom scrolling). I wish it wasn't owned by Meta, but if TikTok actually gets banned I would say good riddance. Something about Instagram/Threads is just perfect to me.
Is it actually Instagram Reels that is inauthentic, or is it the content that people post there? The Instagram Reels service is just that - a service people can use to post videos, same as TikTok. It's the people who choose to use the service that cause it to seem inauthentic, not the service itself. If everyone migrated from TikTok to Reels overnight, then wouldn't Reels become more "authentic"?
The content doesn't matter. There's more than a lifetime supply of I'll relevant kinds of content on both platforms. The algorithm for curating your feed matters.
"The algorithm" doesn't matter as much as you think it does. If all the videos have metadata, it's quite simple to suggest another video to someone if they just watched a similar video. I watch how my wife uses TikTok, and "the algorithm" is hit or miss. Most of the time it's a hit, but that's because the metadata from the preceding videos (and how long she watched them, or didn't) makes it easy to figure out what she'll most likely want to watch next. Without metadata, there is no "algorithm", and with metadata, it's trivially easy for anyone to produce "an algorithm" that does the same thing, maybe even better than TikTok does it now. I mean, if you do a search about how to put on makeup, then the next 10 videos you see are going to be about how to put on makeup - that isn't exactly an irreplaceable algorithm.
> TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect
I feel like this is what so many people (including myself) are missing about TikTok.I'll be honest I saw TikTok largely as an "extension" of Reels and vice-versa where folks with a following on one will post to the other because they are so similar and that would increase their reach.
"“I would rather stare at a language I can't understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns,” said one user in a video posted to Xiaohongshu on Sunday."
that would be an extremely interesting experiment. Young people would probably feel completely lost, unsure of where to get "news" from. Actually having to go websites and search for stuff :)
"At this point, we have to accept that younger generations—precisely the people who have been raised on quantified audience feedback for their every creative gesture—have an unrecognizable conception of authenticity."[0]
The migration app of choice appears to be .. xiaohongshu, or "little red book". I'm guessing this won't last since it wasn't intended to have lots of Westerners using it and neither government is going to be happy with that scale of unfiltered contact between ordinary Chinese citizens and US citizens.
In the meantime, it's the place for Luigi Mangione memes.
for those curious why an app would name itself Little Red Book despite the association, obviously they could have been better about the naming, but they're actually not the same name in either language:
The social media app Xiaohongshu (小红书) does literally translate to "little red book" in English. However, this is completely different from Mao's famous work, which was never called this in Chinese. Mao's book was informally known as "Hongbaoshu" (红宝书) meaning "red treasured book" and formally titled "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong" (毛主席语录).
The apparent connection in English comes from translators using "Little Red Book" for both terms (maybe due to training or an agenda? who knows, choosing word-by-word translation for one and popular translation for another), even though they're distinct and unrelated in the original Chinese, and of course in the official desired English "RedNote" too.
> The Chinese name was inspired by two pivotal institutions in its co-founder Charlwin Mao's career journey that both feature red as their primary color: Bain & Company, where he worked as a consultant, and Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he earned his MBA.
I would guess that the association to Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong was intentional but he just said that for plausible deniability.
As a native Chinese I can assure you 小红书 and 红宝书 are as close semantically to each other as the words constipation and constitution. Few would relate those two.
Even the most leftist Chinese entrepreneurs avoid having their brand names associated to politics; it's just common sense.
The guy went to university in the US and his name is literally Mao.
He knows Americans call Mao's book the Little Red Book. He back-translated it to Chinese word by word. Anyone who would have an obviously perfect product name like that and not use it would be dumb.
There's zero chance a dude named Mao had an idea for a little red book app and thought "Yeah, I'll call it this because I went to Stanford and they're red." It'd be like Google saying they named themselves after googly eyes and not spelling the number googol differently.
The guy didn't pick the name. "Mao" is the family name he inherited from his father. In the case of Mao Zedong and Mao Wenchao, they have the same family name, but that's about it. The two people aren't even from the same province.
Please, at least learn your lessons first. It's like suspecting everyone with the family name "Manson" to be a serial killer aspirant.
And in case someone wants to hear a linguistic opinion outside of English and Chinese: As a Japanese, I can confirm that those two words indeed have about as much to do with each other as constipation and constitution.
None of the "actual" Chinese people I know were confused about the terminology. The average Chinese does not care one lick about anything related to communism or the history of communism in this country. Mao's book is largely a relic of their great (or even great) grand parents age.
However most of my Chinese friends were confused about why something that most Chinese find to be a relatively uninteresting app in mainland China is suddenly so popular in the US.
It's also worth pointing out that this isn't some serendipitous accident, 小红书 has been working to become a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
I don't know which Chinese person you are talking about. I've never associated 小红书 with whatever Mao did back in the day. Hell, I don't think anyone I know made that connection. I only get that idea after watching a video made by a youtuber, who's not Chinese.
The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia, trying to tie anything Chinese to scary, nefarious communists. I doubt that they were thinking of Mao at all when making the app, Xiaohongshu is an app tailored for young, wealthy, cosmopolitan Chinese as an alternative to Douyin which is more for the masses, I wouldn't call that very Maoist.
Antiestablishment-types supporting an ideology like Maoism is at least something I can understand. Antiestablishment-types expressing their loyalty to the establishment of a foreign adversary is significantly more concerning.
This nihilistic outlook may make you feel better, but at the end of the day only creates a void in government that megacorporations and malicious actors are happy to fill in.
In case if you weren't merely being facetious, your home country at least has some incentive to work towards your interest, no matter how evil they are because they have to pay the consequences of these actions. Even in autocratic China, for example, anti-lockdown censorship during Covid in China eventually caused even more resentment against the CCP.
On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If I win Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press like to help Jesus win." The entire goal is to get Americans to distrust and hate each other. Nobody in America has anything to gain from posting this, but China and Russia have nothing but to gain from a more fractured America. We only found out about this because Facebook cooperated with American intelligence to find this foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP. At worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to disguise this propaganda as genuine content.
The people who want to unite Americans might find more success meeting the outliers where they're at rather than framing it as needing them to conform. That approach is what made the outliers cynics in the first place. What would it look like to make real change to address the objects, rather than the subjects of frustration?
> What would it look like to make real change to address the objects, rather than the subjects of frustration?
Real change will come when those who actually put work into it. Nobody will do it for you. Not China, not Trump, not the DNC. When the NAACP noticed that even the Senators who supported Civil Rights were too apathetic to put together a coalition to pass the Civil Rights Act, they created that coalition themselves. This is level political organizing that actually gets things done, and likely how Meta and Alphabet got this TikTok ban through as well.
What a truly insane take. Do you honestly think the Chinese government looks out more for your interests as an American citizen? The fact that you couldn't make the reverse claim in China without being censored speaks volumes.
When you've exhausted legitimate means for change, you begin searching for illegitimate means. Sorry, but at the end of the day, leverage is leverage and if a person in power says "this really hurts," congratulations they've told you their weakness.
> The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia.
Is it paranoia if Mao Zedong is still revered? If the government is the communist party? I realize the CCP is not perfectly communist in many ways but they are unapologetic about communism and their roots.
It is a coincidence that the original work did not mean little red book. But thats how it was translated, and the translation of the app is correct. So obviously now when you have the same name coming from a country that doesn't denounce communism I think it's fair to be concerned about communist influence.
he'll be revered forever the same way geroge washington is. theyre both warlords who founded a country, casting away the prior government and foreign invaders
washington is still liked even though he was a notable slave owner
I can't believe TikTok is not just getting around this by using the philosophy many people use when they are forced to change passwords. Just add an "!". TikTok: "We arn't TikTok, we are now TikTok!"
In English, it seems to be called rednote. But I doubt that it will be a real successor. At the moment it's a funny meme, and for some people satisfied cultural curiosity. But we already see the problems appearing, from the poorly localized interface, to people getting banned for reasons outside their understanding.
My guess is, at the end we will see maybe some million users from the USA and some more millions from around the world moving to this app, and maybe bringing a new interaction between the countries, but the majority will end up somewhere else.
Well technically I am in high school
and Neither have you used ever instagram (okay maybe for that one time , I wanted to propose to my crush , (turns out she didn't have insta , so I had to talk to her friend asking her on my behalf where they said no [aww man])
and I live in India , so tiktok's banned. There are many indian alternatives to tiktok's that I have seen , But rednote being chinese just makes me wonder if its gonna survive.
Y'know things are just different yet so the same. The same fomo happened during the facebook time is now happening with red note.
“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” as Mark Twain is often reputed to have said. (I’ve found no compelling evidence that he ever uttered that nifty aphorism. No matter — the line is too good to resist.) (source https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/)
Wait, you proposed to your crush? Proposed as in marriage proposal and crush as in romantic feelings for someone seemingly unattainable? You also asked her friend to ask for you via Instagram?
I know we come from very different cultures and I have no intention of judging you, but can you perhaps give me a clue as to how this would work? I'm intrigued, to say the least.
I'm from India too (but at-least a generation older than this kid) and to clarify:
proposed = asking for a date or if he's too forward / self-centered then asking her to "be my girlfriend"
crush = a girl I like but haven't told that to her or shown it in public
And yes for kids in school it's quite common to initiate conversations through mutual friends because otherwise gossip spreads too quick and can sometimes be damaging (both emotionally and socially).
That's surprising to me. I'm 23 and Reels is, as far as I was aware, a big complimentary app to TikTok in my generation. To frame it as a Reel I saw;
"TikTok is vape and Reels are cigarettes".
TikTok's algorithm is _super_ curated and targeted, like a Mr. Beast video. Instagram's is pretty good but if you can get your algorithm to the brainrot cluster with everyone else then you'll get a lot of out-of-left-field, grungier content you might not find on TikTok.
I think once RedNote gets banned or the meme fades people will mainly flock to IG. There's still a void of creator based features that IG can't fill, so maybe a competitor will pop up if IG can't replicate the environment well enough.
Counterpoint here, I'm 32 and would have to disagree on the complimentary piece.
In my group of friends, the reels/shorts crowd have eased off on keeping up with the latest fads/memes. Its similar to the old meme cycle of them starting on 4chan and some filtering down to Digg/Reddit, you end up with them being watered down or receive them extremely late in the fad cycle.
Reels have a few problems, the biggest one is randomly getting served gore/death videos. This has never happened to me on tiktok. I feel like (cant substantiate this) reels pushes sex/thirst content more than tiktok does. The final one is the actual social aspect of tiktok vs reels, the comments and interactions on reels are very abusive and spammy compared to tiktok.
I do agree with you about RedNote being a fad, its artificially inflated but its possible the astroturfing of "interaction" will lead to a sustainable level of organic/real interaction with the app. IG is not great for communities.
He's likely to have more disposable incomr and go through a crisis of some sort that many people fill with buying, whilst also deluding themselves they're still in their 20s. I think mid 30s is a pretty hot market for advertisers.
I really hope people will unflock from most social media, at last for now that it is really at its worst. Perhaps in time, after building some open source social media platforms that does not have these big corporations in charge, things will change for the better.
Pretty much Insta/X is for genx and millennials, Facebook is for the boomer gen. Tiktok was for zoomers, when i was a teen till like 23 i hated being on the same cringe ass social media platform as my mom. Another teen trait is rebellion.
I know someone who speaks Chinese and uses that app. The name in Chinese Xiaohongshu clearly translates to "Little Red Book," and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.
> My guess is, at the end we will see maybe some million users from the USA and some more millions from around the world moving to this app, and maybe bringing a new interaction between the countries, but the majority will end up somewhere else.
If that happens, Little Red Book will trigger exactly the same law that's banning TikTok.
> and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it
"Little Red Book" is the literal translation of the original name but that's not the only way companies approach global markets, especially with longer to say names. It looks like they sometimes use "REDNote" (as it appears in App Stores), "RedNote", and sometimes just "RED" depending on the context (e.g. their advertisement/promotional email address is red.ad@xiaohongshu.com).
As to how they got there with it? "Little Red Book" is just an awkward mouthful to refer to compared to the alternative forms they used.
You're being facetious. The name Xiaohongshu is clearly a reference to Mao's book. And it's incorrectly translated as "Red Note" specifically to avoid the reference, not because it's a "mouthful".
If there was a German app called "My Strawberry" and you found out that the original German name translates to "My Struggle" you'd be very curious as to why the English name is so different and what they're trying to hide.
I'm not sure where the humor or joke was supposed to be nor where I claimed the original name lacked said association. Similarly, I don't particularly see "RedNote" as a well aimed choice for a rebrand set about for the purpose of distancing the app from communist associations.
TikTok doesn't use their literal translation either. Not because the name had a certain association but because it'd've also been a terrible way to market the app globally. I could give some credit to the idea there may have been more than a singular reason for changing the name but I can't buy the reason other apps also do is not at least a major factor, if not the largest.
One could argue, and I think with a strong case that if this law applies to TikTok, it would also apply to Twitter (Saudi investment) and Snapchat (also Saudi investment).
As written there are several problems with your theory:
A) The bill is about transfer of user information, not investment in a company.
B) Saudi Arabia owns a small, non controlling interest in Twitter/x
C) Saudi Arabia is not on the list of foreign adversary countries
So you’d have a hard time making that ‘strong’ argument.
We are trying to get away from Saudi influence and control so much that we look the other way while we pump poison into our water. So much so that the Simpson's even have an episode devoted to it where Marge exclaims, "the water is on fire!"
> I know someone who speaks Chinese and uses that app. The name in Chinese Xiaohongshu clearly translates to "Little Red Book," and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.
I'll tell you a funny one like that in another language:
Instagram reels are well... short-form videos usually with music/audio and effects.
It's pronounced something like "real" but longer.
Anyway, in French that word "reel" is printed the same but since most people don't practice spoken English it's read and pronounced "réel". Something like ray-hell (notice the é). And it annoys me to no eeeend :D.
So, among French-speaking community management crews and social network teams you hear "réel"/ray-hell all the time instead of "reel".
And how do you translate "réel" into English ? You guessed it: it's "real".
Yeah but "little red book" (xiaohongshu) in mandarin is not actually how the original Mao Little Red Book is called in Mandarin, either formally or informally. Informally in mandarin it's called hongbaoshu (literally "red cover book" and formally, as you can imagine, is like Quotes from Chairman Mao).
So this is a case of translators with an agenda translating two phrases with different original mandarin renditions (hongbaoshu and xiaohongshu), and picking and choosing the style of translation (base on usage vs based on character) to get the English translation to merge both of them as "Little Red Book".
Not really. Mao's book has been known as the "Little Red Book" in English for decades, well before the app existed.
And the characters for "小红书" directly and literally translate to "little", "red", and "book". It's the most literal and obvious translation of the name, no agenda needed. Go ask any Chinese person.
The app didn't even have an English name until recently. It was just "小红书" which any Chinese person would render in English as "Little Red Book". "RedNote" is a recent branding exercise.
> If that happens, Little Red Book will trigger exactly the same law that's banning TikTok.
We will see, but I would think if they gain 2-5 Million Users, it wouldn't but of much concern for the feds. Unless they gain access to a specific vulnerable group.
> We will see, but I would think if they gain 2-5 Million Users, it wouldn't but of much concern for the feds. Unless they gain access to a specific vulnerable group.
The way the law is written, any adversary-controlled social network with more than 1 million MAU could be affected.
I think they'd ban it if it started gaining traction outside of Chinese immigrant communities. And it'd make sense to do it early, now that they have the legal power to do so, since it'd avoid controversy. No one would have cared about the TikTok ban if they did it when it was at 1-2 million MAU.
As a casual observer, I don't understand why YouTube Shorts isn't the obvious successor? The UI is better than TikTok ever was and a lot of the most popular creators are already mirroring their content there?
Shorts has a way worse algorithm, I don’t use TikTok because it’s too addictive but I get bored of YouTube shorts after like 5-10mins most times, which actually for me is a Feature but for YouTube itself is a drawback.
Not disagreeing with you as TikTok obviously works for a lot of people, but its recommendation algorithm never came anywhere near working for me after several attempts at it over fairly long periods of time.
I can't say I like YouTube shorts a lot, but there's often some I find interesting in a long enough window of time — the problem there is more the signal to noise ratio than the volume of the signal. TikTok just feels like my personal signal is just nonexistent.
Sometimes I wish I knew what was going on under the hood. There's such a huge difference between how much people like TikTok and how I feel about the content, and I don't understand why TikTok would have such a hard time with me in particular.
In general I'm kind of souring on algorithmic-driven social media, or at least short format (video or text). I don't have anything against it in principle, I just find I enjoy longer format posts and articles more in experience.
Tiktoks algorithm takes a while to get used to but it is pretty tameable. Quick way that works for me:
- avoid attempts based on "unliking" things, I'm pretty sure it treats it as engagement. Instead swipe bad content away.
- avoid "accidentally engaging", like replying to a comment you feel is wrong or watching something you don't like because you were trying to see where the speech was going. Disengage ASAP with unwanted.
- positive feedback for whatever video starts getting close to what you want.
- positive implies staying the whole clip, liking, viewing comments, commenting, liking comments and the strongest of all, sharing the video (you can send it to a telegram conversation with yourself or whatever, not sure if the link you shared ever being opened is accounted for but I think nope). Do this on purpose, like if a video is cool just open the comment section and like all comments without looking.
-try to "navigate". If you want to see tech and it's currently showing you music, maybe engage with music production or Spotify tricks when they appear. It might not be the tech you're looking for, but it's closer to tech than a teenage girl dancing. You'll eventually be shown things more relevant to you, at which point you grab that current.
Also do not try to rush the process. I think updating your interests is not instant, and session time might be a metric as well.
This is fascinating, I'm curious -- do you find yourself generally thinking in this way when using TikTok? Do you find that your peers that use TikTok do something similar?
This is just completely foreign to how I consume media. The idea that I need to try and "trick" an algorithm into showing me what I want is just completely unappealing. I'd much rather go somewhere else and actively seek out the content that I want, rather than trying to fight a system that seems like it would prefer me to be a passive consumer.
"Passive" not in the sense that I shouldn't be engaged, clearly, as the algorithm rewards engagement. But passive in the sense that I should not be seeking out what I want to see, I should just be reactive based on what I am shown, and then the platform will decide from that what I really want.
Like, no, this just makes me recoil completely. Why would I want to bother with that?
>do you find yourself generally thinking in this way when using TikTok? Do you find that your peers that use TikTok do something similar?
Yup. It was new to me, as I learned from younger friends. To them it's obvious it's ride or be taken for a ride - not doing this active navigation, they'd compare it with surfing reddit using just the default frontpage unlogged.
In fact people even troll each other, for example by sending someone a mormon speech or an untranslated meme from India to screw with their feeds.
I have to say that in a way it's way better than YouTube or Instagram, where you can't really tame the thing and it will suddenly decide for a month that you like Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro because you watched a video about bodybuilding.
>Like, no, this just makes me recoil completely. Why would I want to bother with that?
Because a huge amount of interesting content is there. I also prefer the old style, but I'd rather begrudgingly adapt than be left behind in progressively decaying platforms - it is what it is.
You don't have to do any of this. He's just explaining more about how the algorithm works.
To a first approximation, TikTok simply shows you more of what you watch. If you swipe away a lot of stuff in the first second or two, it stops showing you that kind of stuff. If you watch complete videos, it shows you more like that.
I'm aware that this is how the algorithm works, but the parent comment is not just explaining how it works, they gave suggestions based on things that "work for me".
So I am specifically trying to sus out how common it is among tiktok users to have this sort of strategic thinking around the algorithm, since it's not something I've heard much of before.
This is very common and I would even say a necessary part of using algorithmic social media now, basically awareness of the algorithm and interacting with content in a way that keeps your algorithm tuned to what you want. For example I avoid clicking anything political on YouTube because as soon as I do, my suggestions become full of political ragebait.
My cynical take is that a lot of the people for whom the tiktok algorithm "didn't work" simply weren't pleased by what the algorithm (correctly) thought of them. It's like the 40 year old truck driver that complains it's just hot girls dancing. No, my dude, you just ALWAYS stay to watch the girls dance, you just don't want to admit it.
In general, it "just works" after a short period of maybe searching for specific terms just to "seed" the algorithm.
Or maybe it's precisely because one will just watch hot girls dance if given the opportunity, that one would not want a social media feed that caters to your most base desires.
I'm in your boat. I tried out TikTok out a few times, including making a new account, but it never showed me good content. I had maybe one or two longer sessions, but never felt the need to go back, like I (unfortunately) do with Reddit or Youtube. I could never understand why it was so popular, but maybe I'm just a curmudgeon.
I think that's part of why it's always been a little bit of a head scratcher for me — I didn't really go into it curmudgeonly, I was genuinely interested in it, people seemed to like it, and I was interested in something new. It just never worked out at all for me.
I even had people telling me in all seriousness "I must secretly like the content", as in the algorithm knows better than I do what I like. Which is kind of a weird and maybe even disturbing idea to buy into if you think about it.
I was told to keep at it, which I did. I'd put aside for a long time, go back to it, repeat the process over and over again. Eventually I just gave up. I always felt like it was targeting some specific demographic by default and never got out of that algorithmic optimization spot for me.
Anecdotally TikTok has the best content for me as well. I can’t even place my finger on why I like it more than IG. I don’t know if it’s the slight differences in the content if surfaces. Even if I am just looking through music on both apps (I play guitar) something about TikTok is more pleasant and I really am not sure what.
At least between Subway Surfer Reddit narrations and other garbage, TikTok shows me stuff I know I want to see. Instagram reels will start with something I'm interested in and very quickly pivot to people seemingly in the midst of psychosis, or literal porn. No matter how much I manually report as not interested.
It's strange to me everyone acting as like TikTok's algorithm is completely unassailable and will always be better than the competition for years and decades to come. Tech moves fast and Meta/YT aren't just standing around.
If their only differentiating feature is the algorithm, Insta would eat them for lunch eventually the same they did for Snapchat after knocking off that app's big/only claim to fame (stories).
The discussion seems to be TikTok's algorithm is so good no one could ever possibly compete. I really don't think that's the case and TikTok really has no moat whatsoever.
> It's strange to me everyone acting as like TikTok's algorithm is completely unassailable and will always be better than the competition for years and decades to come.
I'm not seeing this sentiment. More that none of its competitors are so obviously ahead of the pack that we can easily predict TikTok's natural successor.
I feel a lot of people have compare TikTok that they have used for countless of hours and where the algorithm has zero'd in in their preferences to a more vanilla YT Shorts. I used shorts for a few months heavily, and pretty much every video was in some way relevant to my interests (which is also why I don't consume short form video anymore, it's waaaay to addictive).
"Fetish" is the wrong way to look at it, but it does seem connected. The explanation I've seen is basically a unified "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me, so instead I'm going to give my data to China even harder". It's a generation of kids who grew up (mostly correctly) assuming all of their data was already all controlled by corporations in league with the government. Worrying about data privacy is too quaint to even consider.
There's of course a chance of algorithmic meddling, nudging people to a different Chinese app, but I think spite is a far simpler answer.
My wife is exploring RedNote for this very reason. "You're telling me I have an easy way to make the US government upset and the more I use RedNote, the more upset they are?" was her line of thinking. She explained that it makes her feel like she has a morsel of control over a group that previously didn't give a damn.
Her father would also be upset if she starts learning Chinese because of his political tendencies. It's basically a two-for-one deal of learning about another culture and learning a foreign language.
> if I give my data to China, what are they going to do, arrest me?
Flip the question around to your familiar villain. You’re a U.S. intelligence chief, and have a trove of embarrassing—possibly worse—information about ordinary Chinese citizens. How can you use this to make them useful to you?
This is a very first level consideration of things like this. In general it would not be particularly useful because exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement which would not only curtail these efforts (or even completely backfire in the case of double agent stuff), but could also blow up into a giant international controversy.
And for what? What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"? The risk:reward ratios are simply horribly broken in this sort of case. By contrast when your own government is doing this to you, you have nobody to turn to, and they can completely destroy your life in ways far worse than the threat of somehow revealing your taste in videos.
> exactly the first thing that's going to happen is that any victim of said efforts is going to go to their domestic law enforcement
Why doesn't this happen every time someone is blackmailed?
> could also blow up into a giant international controversy
Like if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked the OPM? Or India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S. soil? What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)" [1]?
> What are you going to gain from trying to blackmail an "ordinary citizen"?
Everything needs grunt work. Taking pictures. Accepting and transferring funds as part of a laundering operation. Driving an operative around.
The ladies who killed Kim Jong-un's uncle thought they were "making prank videos at the airport and she was required to 'dress nicely, pass by another person and pour a cup of liquid on his/her head'" [2]. Being able to arrange that from afar, with limited outreach, is something Cold War-era spooks could only dream of.
> Why doesn't this happen every time someone is blackmailed?
It does, quite often. Which is why blackmail is done mainly by those who law enforcement would think twice about going after, and/or those who have nothing to lose.
> if Russia shot down a passenger jet? Or Beijing hacked the OPM?
Plausible deniability, and who is there to rally around?
> India tried assasinating an American citizen on U.S. soil?
I don't know what incident you're talking about, but the fact you say specifically "American citizen" suggests to me you're talking about someone who had strong connections to India and would be generally perceived as Indian.
> What about "opening and operating an illegal overseas police station, located in lower Manhattan, New York, for a provincial branch of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)"
That sounds like a propaganda framing. In what sense was this a "police station", much less an illegal one? All they apparently did was "help locate a Chinese dissident living in the US". So the ground facts are more like "the MPS had a private eye working in New York". Which, well, sure; so what?
The options available to that intelligence chief in your scenario are probably bad for China, but are they any worse for those citizens than what China's own government could do to those citizens?
I kinda get why the US is banning tiktok, I don't get why you'd expect most of tiktok's users to care about those reasons.
You only need to look at the news for how many Russian citizens are tricked by Ukrainian telephone con-men into giving away all their money and then setting fire to banks/trains/various military installations in the hope of getting it back. I'm already expecting to see that in the US and elsewhere when the inevitable happens. Now imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of your citizens, how easier would all of this be?
You can't make extraordinary claims like that without providing a source. Especially considering Wikipedia has this to say:
> In August 2023, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued official warnings about a new form of phone fraud in which Russians are forced to set fire to military enlistment offices through pressure or deception. The authorities claim that scammers call from the territory of Ukraine and choose elderly Russians as their victims. The Russian government has not yet offered any evidence of their claims. Russian business newspaper Kommersant claims that fraudsters support the Armed Forces of Ukraine and organize "terrorist attacks".
Emphasis mine.
> Now imagine the enemy government has dirt on most of your citizens
As a US citizen living in the US, I think it's entirely unreasonable to fear the Chinese government more than the US government. It seems utterly ridiculous to me to even consider, and seems just as ridiculous that a Chinese citizen could feel the same.
Even leaving aside the state's monopoly on violence, agents at any of multiple three-letter agencies could easily ruin my life. An IRS agent could randomly decide to audit my last decade of tax returns. A law enforcement agent (local, state, or federal) could deliberately incorrectly mark my vehicle as stolen. They could SWAT me on a trumped up basis. They could just black bag me, and throw me in some dark pit.
China could probably hack me, and fuck up my digital presence, including my finances. But the US government could easily skip a few steps and just declare those finances illegitimate in a variety of ways much more difficult to undo.
> it's entirely unreasonable to fear the Chinese government more than the US government
Sure, individually. If you think about more than yourself, you should recognise a collective threat that requires a modicum of sacrifice to protect against.
id consider that the sacrifice is the opposite - the local government is a collective threat, and we sacrifice locally built products to mitigate that threat
> are they any worse for those citizens than what China's own government could do to those citizens?
Yes. It's riskier for the FBI to fuck around with an American than it is for the CIA to fuck around with someone in Russia or China. Particularly when we're dealing with extorting someone using embarassing, but not necessarily criminal, information.
Or just, you know, sowing chaos. Again, if the CIA had a list of Chinese citizens who may be mentally unstable and are obsessing over e.g. the Uyghurs, could that not be put to use in a way that's harmful to China and that person?
Your risk of being fucked with by either Beijing or D.C. is incredibly low. ("Fucked with" meaning being harassed for legal behaviour.) Given the existence of such a database, however, the chances of fuckery at the population level is almost 100%. What President wouldn't want a call they could make that would tumble a foreign adversary into chaos for a few days?
I don't think that's true anymore. In NYC, at least, the people who are into Japanese culture tend to be black/Hispanic teenage girls, not the classic "basement-dwelling white guy" stereotype. Visit a big Japanese store like Kinokuniya or Bookoff sometime if you have one in your area - I think you'll be surprised!
A large part of it is obviously negative polarization: you tell people they can't use a Chinese app, they're going to use a different Chinese app. Hence the pictures of Luigi.
It's worth asking why Reels/Shorts didn't take off and those companies had to ask for their competition to be banned instead. Everyone agrees that "the algorithm is better", but this is very hard to quantify. Perhaps something about surfacing smaller creators? Quantity/quality of invasive advertising? Extent to which people feel particular kinds of rage content is being forced on them?
Main reason besides the algorithm is in my opinion that TikTok has wide but hard boundaries when it comes to content. This leads to diverse but relatively safe content.
It is not 4chan where you think twice before clicking a link to avoid emotional damage. It is also not Reddit or Youtube where you do not bother to go because you permanently encounter stuff that is inconsequentially blocked and you are still not safe from trauma. I think most platforms other than TikTok try to be too strict, fail to enforce their unrealistic rules in any comprehensible form and therefore suck for most intellectually curious users.
This has been my experience and it is what people are reporting from red note.
In comparison to instagram I have found it far easier to explore, for instance, black women making leftist political critiques of Harris engaged in long conversations with black women who were actively supporting Harris.
Similarly, it has been much easier to find discussions about Palestine, labor rights, indigenous US culture, and numerous other topics.
I think those conversations are probably find-able on Ig or Yt, but I have had much more difficult time with those platforms. It's been hard for me to find much engaging content that is close enough to my (admittedly anarchistic) political and cultural views that the conversation changes what I think in useful ways, so I avoid that work on things like FB. These platforms do suck for doing anything other than keeping up with pictures of my nieces.
My feeling is that in general the TT algo doesn't really care about US politics so it just shows me engaging content, whatever that might be for me.
People here can call that "addictive", but in doing so it quickly discards any agency for people who have any actual political disagreements with the radically centrist US political mainstream.
I am used to that flippant dismissal- Allen Dulles would have rather believed in mind control than believe that US military personal who encountered Koreans were swayed by genuine empathy for a legitimate political-economic position.
By contrast, my feeling is that various other governments don't really care what folks in other countries think about the world so as long as it's not objectively porn or gore they just let conversations happen.
That is, of course, quite dangerous if your power relies on maintaining narrative consistency for the population you rule- that's why China and other authoritarian folks do things like limit what can happen on social media in their countries...
The whole concept that one's views can be changed by what they were compelled to watch is what leads to the circus of absurdity in modern times. The fact that the media, corporations, and political establishment will all aggressively repeat a statement only to be rebuffed by the public at large seems to have no affect on their insistence on believing in this nonsense.
If it were true than the countless nations which turned to extreme censorship and propaganda to try to maintain themselves would be still standing. Instead, they invariably lose the faith of their people who simply stop believing anything (or supporting their own government) and at that point their collapse is already imminent - even if it might only happen decades later. See: Soviet Union.
Or for some predictive power - once China's economy reaches its twilight years where you have to juke the books and redefine exactly how things are measured just to keep eeking out that 1 or 2% growth per year, their entire political system will collapse. People would be happy being ruled by a group of authoritarian mutated frogs who demanded you ribbit in loyalty 6 times a day, so long as their economy and society was booming from the average person's perspective. It's only when things slow down that people start looking more critically at the systems they live under.
A large part of the effectiveness of the media is normal people think they don't know this.
Media has absolutely wised up to the fact that contrarian attitudes are common amongst Americans. These companies know that if they repeat something nonstop and make it as obnoxious as possible, a large number of people will quickly adopt the opposite viewpoint. That's the desired result.
Reverse psychology is something elementary school kids learn about and use to torment others or do their bidding. It doesn't end in elementary school.
This is nonsense. The media constantly runs overt level 0 propaganda that directly furthers the interests of the US political establishment. It's certainly not some secret 5d chess ploy to turn everybody into jaded anti-establishment types.
Even more so because once you do realize how silly things are (on both sides of the aisle) your favorite media outlet quickly becomes NOTA.
They focus on the most ridiculous "controversies" about some politicians that they know people will think are ridiculous, while completely ignoring their actual problems. They say "oh no, definitely don't vote for this person, or that means you're against us!!!" Lots of people then think "I hate this group, so I'm going to do the opposite just to own them." Then you see that these companies are donating millions to those candidates that they're giving fake criticism of.
It's very transparent.
A decade ago, people on the internet said big corps will never advertise on places like reddit because people say bad words there and they don't want their brand associated with it. Turns out companies just stopped posting banners and paid people to do stealth marketing and it's much more effective.
Advertising and propaganda works best when there's plausible deniability. And half the country very strongly believes they can't be advertised to and will never believe any propaganda--they're free thinkers who do the opposite of what the media tells them.
If you honestly believe companies and political groups are just throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do because they need to be direct and honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up, then man.
> If you honestly believe companies and political groups are just throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do because they need to be direct and honest all the time, and they'll never find any way to appeal to contrarians so the only option is to give up, then man.
It's not that they give up, it's that they keep posting level 0 things because that's what their manager wants and can understand.
Do you think the Tokyo Rose broadcasts were some 5D chess ploy to make sure Japan lost the war faster? No, they were people who had a job doing their job. Large organisations are barely capable of getting their members to pull in the same direction. You occasionally see a level 1 reverse psychology ad campaign, but they're inevitably done by a small agency working for a small department and get pulled as soon as they collide with someone higher up who doesn't get it.
Media an entire lifetime ago and media today aren't even worthy of being compared. The methods employed aren't a fraction as complex. WW2 propaganda being ineffective would mean Russia would make zero effort to influence western thinking today. Yet western governments are absolutely panicking because Russian operations are targeting westerners, and they're working.
You could also take the reverse point of view and claim Russians aren't targeting westerners at all, and any propaganda they do make isn't working. Which is possible. But that also leads to the conclusion that western media and governments are incredibly effective at getting westerners to believe they're being targeted by Russian propaganda operations.
An honest proposition: if these media companies are dumb and completely ineffectual, then you have a multi-hundred-billion dollar opportunity. They're missing out on hundreds of millions of people in America alone. It'd be silly to not take advantage of that by simply starting a network saying what everyone else is "really" thinking, because people surely want straight to the point content that they agree with, won't get incensed about, and won't consume nonstop while complaining that they hate it. [1] Surely media companies aren't documented to be doing this intentionally and some commenters online have realized they're merely dumb and not really trying to just get people outraged so they take the opposite point of view. They certainly wouldn't do that.
You're not considering one simple alternative - and that's the best "propaganda", by an overwhelming margin, is the truth. US propaganda worked during the Cold War era because it was mostly just pointing out true things, like having store shelves stocked full of really cheap and diverse goods. Soviet propaganda, by contrast, failed because the truth was not on their side.
And now we've basically swapped roles. So a lot of Russian propaganda is effective because it is the truth - Ukraine isn't winning, the sanctions are improving Russia's economy (and uniting the Global South) while wrecking Europe's, they didn't blow up their own oil pipeline, and so on endlessly. And vice versa, US propaganda isn't really working, because it's often left trying to make claims that are simply false - the opposite of all of the above would be an example.
As for governments freaking out - it's because of self interest. As everything comes crashing down, people are holding them accountable and anti-establishment candidates/parties are surging (and in many cases taking high office) pretty much everywhere. We're simultaneously living through a geopolitical inflection point with the decline of one great empire and the rise of [something else] (which hopefully isn't just another great empire), and the likely end of globalism. It's a shift that will likely geopolitically define the next century.
> So a lot of Russian propaganda is effective because it is the truth /.../ the sanctions are improving Russia's economy
This is not the truth, very far from it. Western observers are fooled by the official statistics because they've literally never experienced a government blatantly lying and posting completely fabricated numbers. They recognize when governments tweak definitions and try other manipulations, but they are utterly unequipped to recognize completely made up numbers.
For Russian economists, this is nothing new. They are openly sarcastic when they reference figures like the official inflation rate (9.5%), because they estimate the true number to be far worse, 20-25%. They used to base their opinions on independent market research companies like ROMIR that tracked consumer spending habits, but Russian government shut them all down in late 2024.
Russia is getting hit with a similar inflation wave like the world saw during and after Covid, but unlike the rest, Russia cannot climb out of the hole, because they are unwilling to stop the war against Ukraine. War spending is the main cause of the inflation. Russian government is flooding the economy with insane payouts to mercenaries for their utterly unproductive "work" on the battlefield while the production of goods is stalling and the availability of foreign goods is much lower as well due to sanctions. Growing amount of money in the system + less goods available = money loses value relative to goods (inflation).
It's not like Russia is a closed country, nor is inflation difficult to measure. Third parties don't simply take Russian figures at face value, which is why the numbers from e.g. the World Bank will vary slightly from those of the IMF and then vary once again from the official figures, and so on.
When the Russian economy was briefly under substantial strain when the huge sanctions attack first landed and the ruble fell rapidly, not only did their official numbers reflect this, but they had a more negative expectation than third parties!
For that matter there are a zillion videos you can watch on YouTube of people doing walking tours through various supermarkets and places looking at the availability/prices of stuff. Here's one from some lady a month ago that clearly leans ideologically Western, but nonetheless affirms prices to be somewhat lower than would be expected from the official rates, while complaining about it -
https://youtube.com/watch?v=m01-iYSPDt0
Made even sillier if you're aware of Russia's economic history since the end of the 90s. Their economy has for decades been seeing substantial inflation (5-10%) yet even more substantial wage growth. So complaining about prices without even mentioning the change in wages is the sort of behaviour one should expect from people of this sort of bias.
> that also leads to the conclusion that western media and governments are incredibly effective at getting westerners to believe they're being targeted by Russian propaganda operations.
I don't think anyone believes that they're being successfully targeted by Russian propaganda. A lot of people believe, or claim to believe, that their political opponents have been successfully targeted by Russian propaganda, or that ideas that they don't like are Russian propaganda. But that's not really because they've been convinced of something that strongly goes against their interests/predispositions; it only requires them to believe that their opponents are stupid and they are smart, which they were already predisposed to believe. (And I suspect most of them know on some level that this is something they're professing rather than something they think is literally true)
> people surely want straight to the point content that they agree with, won't get incensed about, and won't consume nonstop while complaining that they hate it
Oh no, people enjoy righteous indignation and so media serves it to them. But the media establishment is not organised enough to direct that, certainly not through some 5D chess logic. Yes you do occasionally see false/slanted stories spread as outrage bait by people on the other side, but when those happen they're done by, like, literally 3 guys, and one of them spills the beans shortly after.
If you want a contemporary example, look at the UK media suppressing coverage of muslim child rape gangs for the past 10 years or so that's now kind of bubbling over into the mainstream discourse. Yes, it's creating a backlash effect, but if that was the deliberate intention then a propaganda payload that takes 10+ years to deliver results is not going to be useful for day-to-day politics (is Russia still going to be at war in 10 years, and if so, with who? Will e.g. Belarus be an ally or an enemy at that point?). And even at level 0 it was never really effective in changing minds - maybe it gave the people who wanted to pretend it wasn't happening an excuse to pretend it wasn't happening, but the people who cared about it managed to find out.
Theories of propaganda masterminds are comforting in the same way that conspiracy theories are - the idea that there's actually some competent entity that's got it all worked out. But in fact any entity large enough to spread propaganda is ipso facto too unwieldy to push anything but the simplest messages.
The reason they lie to the point of absurdity is because media giving up any notion of impartiality and going full ideological has led to a polarization in society (or perhaps it was vice versa - in any case, it is what has happened) and this has gradually led to people believing in caricatures of the "other side" which exist in only extreme cases. E.g. - conservatives believing liberals want to have children reading gay literature and defund the police. Or liberals believing that conservatives want to completely ban immigration and turn the US into some sort of white Christian ethnostate.
Each "side" does share clips of the other sides absurdities to galvanize themselves and their rightness, while simultaneously unquestioningly believing the absurdities their side posts. It's not reverse psychology.
You miss the direction of causality. People, especially in modern times, are attracted to media that 'identifies' with their worldview. So you end up with a viewership that matches the ideology of the medium. But it's not because the medium 'converted' anybody.
Or consider things like the USSR where the government strictly controlled all media, there was no media, and even entry/exit from the country was strictly (and generally ideologically) controlled. If media affected people, you'd have had a country of mindless drones of the system. But it was anything but. One of my favorite jokes from the time is, "Why do we have two newspapers, "The Truth" and "The News"? Well that's because there's no truth in The News, and no news in The Truth!" And indeed once they started allowing some degree of expression, it was basically all anti-establishment, leading to some notably great Soviet music from the 80s-90s that parallels the 60s-70s in the US.
I do think media can have an influence on things people know nothing about, but even that comes with an asterisk. War propaganda is the obvious example. Each time we go invade somewhere, or enjoin a conflict, there's a propaganda blitzkrieg about it being the most just action ever against the most evil guy ever. And it does usually work, at first, because people know nothing whatsoever about the conflict. But then over time people begin to learn more and formulate their own views and learn more about the conflicts and opinion starts to shift, even if the media continues the propaganda party 24/7.
And in cases where people already have preformed opinions, this is completely futile from day 0. The obvious example in recent times would be the media effort to try to paint Israel's actions as positively as possible. People simply didn't buy it, because they already had their opinions and so the media propaganda was mostly completely ineffective.
I don't miss the causality at all. I think you greatly overestimate people's willingness to critically examine ideas that are surfaced within their affinity group.
Causality works both ways. People are drawn to their affirming media, but they are also assimilated into it. And it's not like they are unformed lumps of clay before they "choose" what media to consume -- often this is a product of their developmental environment to begin with.
Where they might not have preexisting biases, a framework for thought is provided to them by the group. These groups are sometimes tightly, and sometimes loosely, defined. There is always a fringe. But independent thought is far far from the strongest influence in 99% of people.
This is such a blindingly obvious truth of the world (to me) that I can't formulate a serious counterargument. Can you?
Again there are obvious and mostly endless counter-examples to this. A couple of examples from both sides of the aisle - when Fox News fired Tucker Carslon, their ratings plummeted and he ended up getting [far] more viewers on X than FoxNews gets during prime time broadcasts! When the NYTimes published an editorial from Senator Tom Cotton suggesting that the George Floyd riots and violence should be brought to an end by deploying of the military, their readers freaked out to the point that the director of editorials was "retired", and they publicly announced they would be rethinking about what they publish.
People pick their worldview and biases, and media (in current times) sees it as their role to deliver on those biases. When they don't - the audience leaves and moves on to somebody who will.
The only real superpower media has is to overtly lie to people. And on issues that people know nothing about it is generally effective. But as they learn more about the topic, the views shift more towards what people again choose to individually think about an issue. And as a longer term side effect of this, this superpower is completely self defeating because people begin to completely distrust the media. I could show polls on that but I'm sure you already know trust in media is basically nonexistent. The funnier one is this. [1] The perceived ethics of journalists lies literally right between lawyers and advertisers.
While it's true that people follow their affirming media (e.g. Tucker Carlson), they also accept a lot of what he says, without critical thought.
The "facts" he presents are the basis for their beliefs, and since he is very selective and slanted about the information he presents, they believe it to be further affirmation of their preexisting beliefs or biases.
This is the essence of propaganda and manipulation. Fill in the gaps of people's knowledge/belief with something that's plausible and favorable to you, even if it's only part of the story.
Content generation is Propaganda 101. Editorial control of a trusted entity is a higher level. Algorithm manipulation of a (perceived) neutral/noninvolved source is a higher level yet. And personalized algorithm manipulation is basically spear phishing. Which works extremely well!
Well, again I'd look at the examples where a media (or in this case) a media source falls outside what is expected. With Tucker this is easy - he's a very religious person and quite regularly makes his religion a significant part of his arguments, yet few people who follow him support or advocate those claims. In fact he has some order of magnitudes greater viewers than his entire religious group has followers! People follow him mostly for the multipolar and anti-hegemony stuff, but accept (while not embracing) embracing his own distinct takes outside of that because they don't generally run too hard against these worldviews.
Contrast this against the NYTimes. People follow it for the woke, pro-hegemony, pro-establishment stuff. But as per the example with Senator Tom Cotton, if they veer to far from this ideology, far from just accepting it - they rant and rave, and if NYTimes didn't promise to get back on track - they would also have left.
I don't think anyone doesn't believe media impacts how people think.
I do think that you have toan incredibly reductive view of belief formation to think that simply showing someone a series of short videos is enough to change how they think about the world.
There's a whole dialect in our existence within language, but most folks I know think that they are the sole authors of their beliefs while other folks are entirely a product of whatever happens to be in front of them. It's very reminiscent of the Fundamental Attribution fallacy...
Well-executed propaganda does not need to attempt direct change in thought.
It sows ideas that are net-beneficial to the propagandist. Leans into the ones that get traction. Manipulates the conversation. Provides simplistic (but advantageous) refutations of more complex (but more true) criticisms.
This is Psych 101 material here. Not at all complicated. You just need to think on a wider horizon and a longer time frame. Stereotypically, this is a cultural weakness of US Americans. Certainly of its leaders. Other cultures have contrasting reputations, some of which appears to be earned.
reels cannot seem to give me anything other than America’s funniest home videos style content and thirst traps, while on tiktok I get critical analysis of todays events, planet money-esque content, discussion of analytic philosophers i’m interested in, etc. it’s truly no contest.
Reels just wants to basically treat me as a generic male with some bias towards what my social graph likes. I also hate that my likes are public on reels.
e: not sure why this is downvoted, just trying to provide color to an earnest question
This is exactly my problem. Instagram thinks they can just apply your demographics to an algorithm and find what you like. Tiktok figures out your demographic based on what you like. Tiktok listens, ineffectually tries to sell you things, and gives you what you enjoy; Instagram tries to fit you to a mold, and then sell things to that mold, then give you slop popular within that mold.
Planet, money, style economic analysis, is that the vibes woman?
But I would be curious how to make sure I get that kind of content I would love philosophy and current events.
Somehow I’ve trained my algorithm is only show me superhero clips, I think because I was watching all the Marvel movies during the pandemic and then didn’t really use it again since then
I don't understand your first question at all, but tiktok lets you reset your algorithm and try again.
Be diligent about not spending too much time watching something if it's not what you want your algo to be, sometimes I can get in loops where I watch something because I'm confused by it and then just get a lot of confusing content.
Rednote and TikTok has 'novelty' content type that originally cultivated in mainland China. The memes, reactions pic, etc don't really exist on reels/shorts.
I don't use TikTok, but my understanding is that they are just a lot better than anyone else with the algorithm. Somehow where Meta built a social graph, TikTok built a graph of videos (no need to know who you are, they can just suggest videos based on other videos you watch). And it's apparently difficult to catch up (presumably because they have more users so more data to make better predictions).
That would, IMO, explain why people use TikTok and not something else.
As to where they go after TikTok is banned... I feel like there is also a factor of "Oh you want to ban chinese apps? Let me show you". Not sure whether it will last, though.
I'm skeptical that the algorithm is actually "better" and it's not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes.
Of course an app you have used for thousands of hours is going to know you better than the one you tried for half an hour
Then be prepared to be surprised? I don't know why its better but it actually is night and day different. The best uneducated way I can describe it is YouTube sticks you into a model that only classifies people in large groups. Oh you watch video game streamers, you may like this alt-right talking heads. TikTok has a model that is tailored just for you. Oh you like video game streamers that play Tarkov? Here are some videos of other games similar to Tarkov.
> you watch video game streamers, you may like this alt-right talking heads
This is something that infuriates me about youtube, to the extent that I wonder if it's deliberate. Those guys feel like the propaganda the platform wants to sell me, whereas on the Chinese platforms there isn't the sense of HERE IS THE TWO MINUTE HATE PROPAGANDA VIDEO CITIZEN you sometimes get on other platforms.
I wonder if its simply just a pattern over the last N years with Google where they maximize everything for ad revenue. I honestly don't know how TikToks ad revenue looks like but from a consumer point of view it appears for whatever reason they have mostly corporate ads where YouTube has the lowest value garbage (perhaps highest paying) ads on MLM and getting rich through real estate.
Edit: As a weak comparison I think about Prime Streaming vs YouTube or Hulu. Ignoring that ads suck. Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it. YouTube throws whatever highest paying garbage at you as much as possible. I tried Hulu once with ads, painful, every like 7mins you are getting an ad and often the same ad over and over.
It's also worth noting that TikTok has the "TikTok Shop" that allows people to sell directly through the app. Perhaps this allows them to rely less heavily on advertising. I certainly see virtually zero ads on the app. Ideally this is because they've identified that I'm a terrible person to sell ads to, but perhaps they're just less aggressive about pushing them.
> Prime gives you a handful of various ads of real products/companies and have done in my opinion a smart job of minimizing the consumers negativity toward it.
Sure, I just stopped using prime when they introduced ads. It's also the number one complaint about the service and it regularly shows up any time the service is mentioned. I also can't remember a single ad played that was actually relevant to me.
Curiously, I hear this less about Hulu despite them being equivalently bad in my experience. Perhaps hulu has better content.
> Curiously, I hear this less about Hulu despite them being equivalently bad in my experience. Perhaps hulu has better content.
I feel like Hulu established early enough that they were partially (or fully) ad-supported. I watched a show for free on Hulu with ads many years before I ever would have considered paying for a streaming service at all. Prime, on the other hand, is something people already pay for (usually for reasons other than just streaming, but that also reinforces that they're paying), so the ads probably come off as worse because of that, even though it's kind of backwards in some ways.
Reminder that YT used to be pretty decent about (music) recommendations until, I’d say, 2015-ish, that’s how I discovered lots and lots of very cool and interesting (music) stuff that I listen to this day.
Not sure how they managed to screw that up, but screw it they did, and nowadays the sidebar, or even the plain search, has become unusable.
I'm surprised. I've been blocking Jordan Peterson videos for years from YouTube, and I still get recommended something with him in it weekly. I also don't watch political videos generally on the platform.
youtube is utterly convinced i want to see videos of people using vintage synthesizers to recreate modern songs. i have been telling it i'm not interested in this for months, like actively trying to correct whatever is happening there. they always come back.
I wonder what you're watching to make YouTube think you want to see it.
I don't see Jordan Peterson or any of those right-wing videos in my suggestions at all.
I just went to my front page, and everything there is stuff I'm interested in. There's the latest clip from a Hell's Kitchen episode, a Gamers Nexus video, an aviation incident with ATC recordings, a video from Fully Ramblomatic (game reviewer), a video on how to to use a cable comb and why you'd want to, a LockPickingLawyer video, videos related to MS Flight Simulator, mountain biking, Factorio, Technology Connections, Adam Savage's Tested...
There is literally not a single suggested video that I wouldn't be interested in in the first 3 pages of my YouTube front page.
So when people complain that YouTube is constantly suggesting right-wing content, brainrot, and MrBeast, I don't know what the hell they're talking about.
Heck, I watch Legal Eagle, which gets pretty political, and yet I don't get basically any political content suggestions.
Are you guys not logged in or something? Constantly browsing from incognito windows?
I let YouTube remember my history indefinitely. I've never been recommended MrBeast (and only recently-ish heard of him, the last year or so). Maybe years ago, I watched some clips of Joe Rogan if they popped up, but I've never been a regular listener.
My earlier comment shouldn't have been so down on YouTube - overall, my recommendations are good. But it does concern me that the algorithm consistently tries to push Peterson on me.
I do watch a lot of sports commentary and breakdowns, maybe that leads down the path to Peterson?
Sorry - I might not be following, but I don't know who they are. No worries either way, but if you're able to provide something to read I'd be happy to. Googling something, especially with modern Google, doesn't guarantee I'll get to the article you're thinking of.
I agree there are articles, but that's tricky, I think. E.g. this article[0] says "...having amassed a substantial alt-right following...", but it's unsubstantiated.
I can't tell if it's just placed in articles to get people to believe it or if it's true. How big is the alt-right? Is 100 people on the alt-right a substantial alt-right following? How big is that following compared to his overall following size? Is this just the same logic as "You think snow is white? Did you know Adolf Hitler thought snow was white?"?
As a meta-point, I understand that uninquiring minds don't want to know, and you can get a long way by defining yourself by people you don't like. But I genuinely do want to know, or at least ask the question, and if Bernie Sanders were constantly tarred with "Has a substantial following in the KKK community" I'd be asking the same thing: how many people is that, and how many is it of the total people who like him?
I've also never gotten those sort of YT recommendations, and that is exactly what I do. I never click links to political videos. My entire recommended section is full of stuff from channels I've watched before, or very close to it.
I found your comment surprising. I have literally never even considered looking for political videos online. They're enough of them shoved in my face everywhere I turn without me needing to seek them out.
Then you either curate your feed very well or you don't use YouTube at all. Spend a couple of days indiscriminately watching whatever slop the algorithm recommends and you'll start seeing some eyebrow raising content.
Try it. I've been using Youtube for a decade and its recommendations are a total crapshoot these days. TikTok figured out my preferences within 15 minutes just based on which videos I liked and watched, and it can change course extremely quickly if you get bored of a certain topic.
The total number of hours I spent Youtube must outnumber the total number of hours I spent on TikTok by at least 100:1.
That's interesting. YouTube's gotten me fairly pinned algorithm-wise over the past few years (I used to never use recommendations at all before that). But my Shorts recommendations seem to just be the regular recommendations, but Shorts versions of them. Sometimes as far as the same channels, or the same people in clips even if it's on a different channel.
it absolutely is, i routinely do a vanilla algo run on reels vs tiktok to compare and it’s crazy how much better it is.
reels is really, really bad - it is surprisingly hard to get it to stop showing you some combination of “funny prank videos” and onlyfans funnel content.
> I'm skeptical that the algorithm is actually "better" and it's not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes.
I've watched probably 1000s of hours of youtube and it's still pushing crap at me that I would never watch in a million years (edit: eg "How to create Smart Contracts using ChatGPT" or "Abusive tough guy picks fight w the WRONG GUY!"). Maybe it's better if you like a specific genre of video essays or whatever but in terms of a replacement for tiktok it's completely irrelevant.
Reels is at least in the conversation, but the UX is ass and the culture there is a dumpster fire. Granted, I haven't had a meta account for about a decade (the ad obsession just destroys the experience) so this is all hearsay.
> not just that the end users have fed TikTok a ton more data points about their personal likes and dislikes
Well, and what about the actual content? If all you have is a bunch of garbage it doesn't matter how good your algorithm is if all it can do is find the best garbage to push at the user.
I've put Tik Tok on my phone three different times now and used it each time over a few days and it seemed like I was scrolling endlessly and finding nothing.
YouTube's recommendations are terrible, but I usually open YouTube when I'm looking for something specific and it's amazing in that regard.
Instagram is somewhere in the middle. I mostly follow people I actually know so the videos are interesting because of that.
Are you "liking" videos? That's how I steered it in the right direction because it wasn't doing much for me when I first started using it. It only took a few minutes for it to latch onto my interest and then the watch time took over.
I only ever find something interesting on tiktok by searching for it. I can only watch the people i follow, the "FYP" has totally irrelevant stuff. I too have been trying to like and follow to get it to perform this magic people talk about but the "FYP" doesn't show me stuff I'd like to see like what I intentionally like and follow from searches.
It seems to have just about everything. I use it mostly for bodybuilding, foreign language lessons, and music. FWIW it's known for the short-form stuff, but it also has plenty of long-form content as well.
I suspect that the algorithm is taking in inputs that maybe we don’t consider. Not just swipes or likes, but maybe even how still the phone is while you watch it or if you blink less, signs you’re more focused on the video. Maybe they don’t have access to that telemetry but I think that’s kind of the vein of how they measure attention more than just touchscreen actions
Also, Tiktok don't even require you to be a user to use, exactly because it's kinda irrelevant for them. They will build the algo based on which videos you liked, for how many seconds, replays, etc etc.
I use both and YouTube Short produces mostly just garbage for me. AI voice videos that will get your attention, but has little content. TikTok's algorithm on the other hand is much better and provides quality, half-long-form content.
I spend a lot of time on YT, and less time on Instagram... and 0 time on TikTok, where I never created an account.
YT Shorts exist exclusively for YT creators who want to publish bite-sized pieces of content for their audience with a much lower expectation of polish than their normal longer form content. Perhaps the algorithm also presents "random" YouTubers', too, but the vast majority of what I see is put out by the publishers I'm already following (or other very similar publishers in the same ecosystem).
I would suggest that TikTok's successor is Insta Reels. Reels are almost exclusively entertainment and because they tie into Instagram's broader user/connections network the UX is much better than TikTok. Nobody goes to Instagram to figure out how to replace their garbage disposal -- this is squarely YT domain. If YT Shorts can make inroads in the entertainment market [without feeling like a commercial break between pieces of actual content, which is the impression I have and the way I use it].
I cannot disagree more. I just scroll on tiktok and tiktok populates the scrolling with videos I want to see, and it takes about ten minutes to signal to tiktok what content you like and don't like. Youtube, meanwhile, is an exercise in a far too-busy UI with thumbnails and comments and text and buttons—it's inherently a desktop app shoved into a web browser. Nice if you want to search for a specific topic and watch a four-hour video on it, but terrible for entertainment or killing time.
The only use I have for youtube are in solving these two problems: 1) where can I find a music video and 2) how do I do x
...but the focus on the interface obscures why youtube shorts won't ever take off: youtube is extremely bad at pushing content I want to watch. I've heard this over and over and over again and I know it's true for me, too.
Yes, although Capcut is a separate piece of software. You can in theory make content with it for any app. In practice, Tiktok is so dominant that a lot of popular Reels content has Tiktok watermarks on it.
Every time in the last year that anyone has shared me a link to a short video on Facebook or Instagram, it has a TikTok watermark on it. This leads me to assume that most of the content on FB or Insta that I would actually want to see originally comes from TikTok.
Shorts is absolute trash. It does not have critical mass and will repeat the same videos to you over and over.
EDIT: I want to overemphasize just how bad it is. It feels like a project someone whipped up in coding bootcamp over a week. It feels like it has zero ability to pick the next video correctly and it genuinely repeats videos between sessions.
Because Youtube shorts is awful, at least me, as a user.
Most of the content there, it's, well, "shorts", cuts from full videos of podcasts, etc. It lacks real users. It's basically the current youtube creators doing content for Youtube Shorts.
Let alone how the algo it's worse, and you can't download videos :)
Because for 5-20 dollars you can drive hundreds of thousands of people if not millions of people to your video, product, meme, whatever... Youtube, not so much.
Part of it is intentional spite from the users switching; a big part of the push for banning TikTok was based on the fact that it's based on China, so purposely seeking out a Chinese alternative is making a statement. Whether or not you think the ban is justified, I think it's hard not to see the obvious inconsistency in banning only a single app on those grounds that this migration points out.
I've never personally used TikTok, so it's possible my perception is flawed, but to me it almost seems like a dare to the government to prove how serious their rationale is. If the government truly thinks that having data collected by Chinese apps is so dangerous, are they willing to flat out ban _all_ Chinese apps? If so, is that more extreme step still something the courts consider constitutional? If not, was TikTok just a convenient political target rather than something actually dangerous?
Well it's more... Xiaohongshu is for cosmo PRC cool kids (read: lean wealthy), and also a large ecommerce portal that targets that demographic. Not sure if the userbase is interested in... western and RoW "riff raff" shitting up the content for too long. I say this more as an insult to Xiaohongshu, I like TikTok (or Douyin) because I like seeing entrepenurs sell neon signs and industrial glycerine between my swipes.
Rest of World had an informative article about Xiaohongshu few months ago, it seems indeed to be a combination of Instagram and Tripadvisor. Chinese people that are able to travel are using it to find the "authentic" places.
It's also TIGHTLY controlled, with people complaining on Twitter and elsewhere that their posts are under 48 hour review before posting. The rules are also quite strict around LGBT issues etc, and not in favor.
Most of all though it's just a very silly protest, given that the "tiktok ban bill" is really a "hostile foreign-power controlled platform divestment bill" so Xiaohongshu will just be next on the block in the unlikely event that it becomes popular.
XHS is for cool GenZ, bias female, urban, has money / disposable income, think coastal elite. I guess more lifestyle/gram, pushes beauty, fashion, wellness, food, luxury goods etc. Douyin (TikTok) is for masses... "less cultured" audience, more working class / hillbilly, pushes some of the above occasionally but also everything else from cheap widgets to industrial equipment.
Not really. Little Redbook is like if everyone on Reddit was upper middle class instead of Reddit's low middle class. Plus Instagram daily life and friend photos. Plus TikTok algorithm videos. Plus Tumblr microblogging. We don't have a 1:1 equivalent.
I read a lot about TikTok the last few months from users all over the web. Trust me, that's not what TikTok is actually full of, its just what algorithm you got sucked into, for whatever reason. I assume there's some specific bubble for "current viral thing" that you're locked into. Make an alt and like completely different content, you'll see that your feed will be night and day.
Additionally, what's worse is, I've seen posts of people unable to get out of the algorithm bubble on TikTok no matter how many videos they dislike. I think some people even try blocking the accounts. It's the weirdest algorithm. I assume it works for MOST users (when its not a "MEME" Bubble, its likely content you actually like), but if you shove someone into a niche meme bubble, it can get weird.
Teens are rebellious & want to be far away from parents.
It disqualifies mainstream apps like Twitter, Reddit, BlueSky, Reels & now Snapchat as well. This leaves Tiktok and now international apps like Xiaohongshu as the obvious alternatives.
The more the US govt. forces youths to use American mega-corps, the less they want to use it.
It’s not why they use TikTok but it’s why they don’t use other social media apps. Once an app becomes too popular with older people the quality and vibes decrease, plus everyone feels awkward about posting.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about outside of generational gaps, new social media apps are fun because you add all the people you’re comfortable with. After some years you now have a ton of connections from past stages of life, and start feeling restricted again in your personal expression.
Plus there’s the dual use issue – IG is too commonly shared now so I have current and former coworkers there plus everyone I’ve ever been interested in as friends or more at a party. So it’s not the place I’d want to feel free and creative.
IG tries to solve some of this with Close Friends and other lists but people don’t really want to spend their time constantly organizing a list of friends.
> IG tries to solve some of this with Close Friends and other lists but people don’t really want to spend their time constantly organizing a list of friends.
Agreed. IG's UI for this is horrible.
I really liked Google+'s "Circles" feature back in the day that let you drag and drop people into different groups really easily and 'assign' posts/content to those circles.
Exactly, Instagram started as a way for me to interact with my social circle. Show people I personally know what is going on in my life and see what is going on in their life. Instagram later on has slowly tried evolving into something else, but mentally I still view it as a place to share with people in my life. On the other hand, Tiktok is a both a global community and a small niche of people who share the same interests as you where you can make memes, enjoy the same content together, converse and witness trends and ideas in real time
> It’s not why they use TikTok but it’s why they don’t use other social media apps. Once an app becomes too popular with older people the quality and vibes decrease, plus everyone feels awkward about posting.
What is the point about the "best algo in town" if the universally popular app can not curate each person's feed differently?
Maybe it is because old people can comment on young people's posts and vice versa?
Also, Bluesky is in no way mainstream. It's a niche platform used by a handful of terminally online people who really hate Elon. Most Twitter users who aren't hung up on ideology are still there.
Discord is more of a small-group or individual communication platform. I don't think it's suited as well for the one-to-many or feed-based appeals of social media such as TikTok. (Large, public Discord servers absolutely exist, but they're often themed around something specific; and even if they weren't, you can't just have an algorithm determine which messages in a channel you do or don't see.)
I have a friends group where everybody is hopping to this in the group chat. They are so eager to run from one addiction to another - and I told them so. They are so eager to give China all their data and to focus their own lives around an addictive app. It's baffling. Go live your life, enjoy not being indoctrinated by bullshit and having your time wasted by manipulative algorithms.
It's pretty wild in there...I remember seeing the comment 'IN THE CLERB, WE ALL LEARN MANDARIN'...I went in there and started commenting about Tienenman...curious if I'll get banned. It's very wild to see so many CCP memes and Chinese military people making content. Very odd experience so far.
It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being banned because your government says it is dangerous to give them your information, is to give your data to another Chinese app instead. Not that I'd feel any less safe with Chinese companies having all my cat picks & ranting than I feel with American companies having the same (particularly under the upcoming regime).
Not that it makes a lot of difference to me, facebook is the only social-media-y thing I use and that is just under sufferance (only way to easily keep tabs on what is happening with some people, mainly family) and because I sometimes like to “breakfast with Lord Percy”. I might try bluesky at some pint as many contacts are moving from fb to there (though that seems rather twitter-like and that has never appealed to me even before I even knew Musk existed).
Well, the US government has just successfully antagonized a bunch of their citizens...
It's amusing on the "interesting times" sense, no doubt. But it's not something unexpected. They have been antagonizing their citizens for a while by now.
At some point, something breaks and you get either an autocracy or real change. Some people claim they are already there but this is really still not clear.
> It is amusing that the reaction to using a Chinese app being banned because your government says it is dangerous to give them your information
my guess is that nigh 100% of tiktok users think the app is getting banned because the government is some combination of capricious, bought, and incompetent. their stated reasons for banning it barely register.
I think that the law "banning" TikTok applies to any Chinese app with over 1 million US users, so Xiaohongshu/Rednote or anywhere else the TikTok refugees flee will be a target - except YouTube shorts and Facebook/Instagram reels of course.
No, the law doesn't give a users threshold: it names ByteDance and TikTok specifically, and provides a mechanism for the President to add new companies controlled by a "foreign adversary country" to the list. So anything at all by ByteDance is banned, but RedNote is owned by a different company that would have to be targeted separately under this law.
> (ii) has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users with respect to at least 2 of the 3 months preceding the date on which a relevant determination of the President is made pursuant to paragraph (3)(B);
So if it stays unpopular, it's protected from this law.
> but RedNote is owned by a different company that would have to be targeted separately under this law.
I think that's a foregone conclusion if it actually gets popular with Americans.
Ah, you're right—it's not a threshold that automatically kicks in at a certain number of users, but the president can't add one to the list until they reach that threshold. Thanks for clarifying.
Nah, I don't buy it. Chinese as plenty of programmers who can read code as well as you. This dude is literally dumping symbols. There's no proof that it's actually a backdoor.
It definitely won't last because even the medium is different. TikTok is all about short videos, but most of the content on Xiaohongshu are static images, and some even an image of text.
I would be amazed if the company who runs that application wasn't working around the clock to make it a better tiktok replacement and to retain this swath of new users.
Given how easy it is for China to buy US data legally from data brokers and how similar the functionality of TikTok and YouTube Shorts, I feel like the only explanations are:
1. The govt is mad that a foreign company is outcompeting a domestic one
Or more likely, given that there are so many other industries that didn't get a ban:
2. The govt is mad that they have control over the narrative on Facebook but do not on TikTok
The big issue isn't data security; it's propaganda. Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't) there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans. Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
And even if you disagree with the national security reasons for disallowing China to control a major U.S. social network, there is still the issue of trade reciprocity - nearly all of the U.S. Web companies are banned in China.
Looking forward to Europe banning Meta and X considering how their CEOs are meeting weekly with their government overlord, quite clear those social networks are in the pocket of the new US government.
No, no, you can't do that. Than they'll come after you and claim how you're not free, you don't support free market and whatnot. Banning is tool for them, but not for you.
Yes, it's region banned (not just by IP so VPNs don't even really work well). You'll get a 404, if you try connecting, and your packet rate won't support video through a VPN. Note that it's also banned in HK and India and parts of Europe so it's not really anything new to ban it when you're talking about almost half the world's population.
Couldn't people just say "but Instagram" is just TikTok? Is it really the "same thing" just, because the same people have control, if the algos, servers, content, moderation/censorship, and promotion are different? Like BlueSky, Twitter, and TruthCentral are all the same thing? Or if we want the "same company" company Allo and Hangouts? I mean everyone loved Allo, right, you can have that one.
TikTok's main user base is the USA. If TikTok sells their US app, they can't support themselves on the rest of the world. TikTok isn't even the leader in China.
US Meta can definitely support itself at it's current size without EU Meta.
Was? Isn't a threat of invasion of Nato territory something that ended that situation.
Sure "it's Trump being an insane dickhead", but y'all elected him, then suspended rule of law for him.
Europe is sitting waiting to be shafted if we don't assume Trump will continue to do the absolute worst, most hostile things. We should be taking the threats of invasion seriously despite them appearing to be a way to, for example, invade Panama and not look as insane as was expected.
> Europe is an ally and under US govt defense umbrella
That's an absolute illusion. And definitely absolutely wrong to call it ally. Most govs don't want to have anything to do with trump, musk and all this bullshit.
Most European countries will basically make no deals or anything for 4 years just like we did last time.
There is a literal war thread open of trump claiming to invade parts of Europe. We are pissed. Not allies
Musk, is a representative of Trump's government, right?
A senior member of Trump's government is trying to mess with our political system - how is this not catastrophic for diplomatic relations, coming on top of the threats to our NATO allies?
> Irrespective of whether the government has control of the narrative on Facebook (I would argue they pretty clearly don't)
Posting pro-Palestinian content on Facebook will get your account terminated for "supporting terrorism". The pro-western censorship regime on FB is extremely strong. US lawmakers specifically cited the amount of pro-Palestinian content on TikTok as why they were banning the app.
The HRW report’s list of complaints starts with censorship of praising Hamas (a designated terrorist org) and “from the river to the sea” (a call for the elimination of Israel, which lies between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea).
Right, what i take issue with is that you hear similarly dehumanizing things said about palenstinians on mainstream news outlets in the US every single day (my friends in group chats share thme). I don't think any dehumanizing language like that is a good thing but really hard to act like there isn't asymmetric policies applied here
Here's my big concern: If every big social media provider has to bake American policy position into its algorithm, what's going to happen to approaches like Bluesky or Mastodon/ActivityPub which allow users to choose their own algorithm?
Nation states definitely can by using port targeting, traffic heuristics, and DPI. The US historically has not done this but several other states have. Even if protocols are preserved, I wouldn't want to be in a situation where I have to run a client on my local machine that consumes from the protocol. I want to be able to use a hosted client.
A user should be able to use another person's hosted Mastodon instance or Bluesky AppView/Relay.
Speaking anecdotally, this doesn't really ring true for me. I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post frequently in support of Palestine with zero repercussions.
Attempting to reconcile that with HRW's article: on the one hand I think HRW might be unrealistic about what FB should be expected to tolerate (for instance, they criticize FB for taking down posts praising designated terrorist organizations); on the other, Meta's approach to content moderation - which combines automated systems with overworked and underpaid humans exposed non-stop to awful content - is notoriously fickle and subject to abuse (including, perhaps, by state actors).
Beyond Israel/Palestine, I regularly encounter content on Facebook that the Powers That Be would censor if "the pro-Western censorship regime on FB [were] extremely strong". I think I subscribe to only one political (left-leaning) group (along with a bunch of local and meme pages), but nevertheless my feed is full of tankies demanding we bring back the guillotine and install full communism.
>Speaking anecdotally, this doesn't really ring true for me. I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post frequently in support of Palestine with zero repercussions.
Naturally there is no overt censorship on FB/Meta, but in the wake of October 7th there was a clear difference in what kinds of content was being lifted by the algorithms on both platforms. I think, save for Bella Hadid, you would rarely see "organic" pro-palestine content with millions of views on Instagram, while it was less censored on TikTok.
Not just trade reciprocity, but ideological reciprocity. The argument that the US should allow TikTok because “free speech”—while China bans American platforms because of censorship and also dictates content on TikTok because of censorship—seems obviously broken. Seems like the rule should at least be something like “Europe is welcome to blast propaganda at our teenagers for as long as we get to blast propaganda at their teenagers.”
I mean, Chinese people should be allowed to post videos for Americans, the issue is editorialization.
Like how newspapers and other media can use editorial discretion to create the impression that “all reasonable people” hold some opinion X by only publishing the voices of reasonable people who believe X (manufactured consent), social media platforms can do the same thing, but x1000 thanks to automation and personalization (“the algorithm”)
So editorialization, including the algorithmic editorialization of social media platforms, is a form of speech separate from the speech of the authors on these platforms. If the editors are independent, and part of the same public discourse as their readers and authors, then you wind up with a diverse media ecosystem where the liberal machinery of people working out complex issues through public discourse can hopefully still more or less proceed.
If one part of the ecosystem isn’t letting outside voices in, the feedback mechanisms are broken and you don’t have a healthy public discourse anymore. And growing and maintaining a diverse media ecosystem in a society that does still have a healthy public discourse is slow and fragile (as the posts below comparing the risk of books to TikTok observe).
> So editorialization, including the algorithmic editorialization of social media platforms, is a form of speech separate from the speech of the authors on these platforms.
I certainly agree that editorial discretion is speech. I'm an adult and I think it is my prerogative to participate in as many broken ecosystems I want. Nor do I trust you or 300 million of my peers to accurately assess what is a broken ecosystem.
Comparing books to TikTok algo is like comparing rifles to ICBMs.
This is what people seem to be ignoring: the algorithms are damned near mind reading, and these algos put members of society into separate realities. We would be better off if they were all banned, but at least it should be agreeable that a hostile foreign government should not be allowed to deploy this on Americans without oversight.
I don't take this as a given and I believe the US government has caused more harm to its own people than China has today; US spies on its citizens, unfairly enforces laws against people, create laws that benefit 1% of its citizens to the detriment of the rest, forces its people to go wars they doesn't support, create rules that target certain genders and races, and so on.
Importantly, the US government is able to enact more harm on its citizens than China when it feels like.
> the US government has caused more harm to its own people than China has today; US spies on its citizens, unfairly enforces laws against people,
Maybe, maybe not. But when the PRC decides the time is right to take Taiwan, it will have prepared the ground by making sure lots of Americans saw TikToks (made by other Americans) saying basically this.
>Would we have let the USSR acquire a major television network?
Yes, there are millions of US citizens that would rather have a Russian TV station in their neighborhood than one run by Democrats. I don't understand it, but that seems to be the way it's going lately. And considering who's POTUS now, a Russia-run TV network in the US isn't that far-fetched. I mean, Fox News practically already is.
But is there actually any evidence that the US's foreign adversaries can more effectively deliver propaganda on Tiktok compared to other platforms?
I understand the concern over foreign propaganda, but this feels like it's not going to remotely impact the ability for foreign governments to deliver propaganda to Americans. It's perfectly possible to deliver propaganda on US-based social networks.
The best outcome of this is just that Americans find the other social networks so boring that they spend less time on social networks altogether, thus reducing their propaganda intake (at least, from social networks).
> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans
Is the argument itself correct or not? Or do we evaluate it based on motivation, i.e. it's ok when we do it because we have good reasons for it? Sounds like the ends justify the means to me.
The correct approach would be to increase the critical thinking skills of the population, increase transparency, require corporations to make algorithms fair and equitable. Require all feeds to be chronological or some other uniform, fair rule for showing posts. No boosting certain viewpoints, or paid promotions. But these things would bother corporations and politicians in the west as well as the external forces with "bad motivations", so just ban the external social networks.
The EU I think has a better approach, of course made possible because we don't have any powerful social networks of our own, and so nobody lobbies against these rules. I'm sure the DSA and DMA would be different (if they existed at all) if at least one of FAANG was European. Nevertheless, the concept is better.
> there is no reason to let a foreign adversary have a deniable propaganda line to millions of Americans.
I don't think this is a useful distinction in a world where a handful of ultra-billionaires control most of the remaining media channels. People like Rupert Murdoch, Musk, and the others have very different interests than the average American, and at least several of them openly push their own (divisive) viewpoints through their media. Why is Rupert Murdoch less of an adversary to the average person than the CCP?
The Western media are already doing everything that TikTok has been accused of being hypothetically able to do: sowing social division, brainrot, encouraging lawbreaking, undermining confidence in the government, promoting dangerous or fake products, etc.
The real difference is that TikTok threatens to boost an alternative to the consensus message of the political elite. A US with TikTok would see actual pushback against something like the early 2000s media shennanigans that got the Iraq War and Patriot Act smoothly approved with little public debate. That is the real reason Congress banned it and why the homegrown brainrot isn't seen as a threat.
So many people keep missing this. It's not about data harvesting. It is about influencing huge portions of the population and controlling that narrative. Of course any social media app can do this, but ostensibly it is worse coming from a foreign adversary who don't play by the same rules.
It's so amusing seeing the society that lionizes itself as the paragon of open society and can't stop boasting about the effectiveness of free-speech soft-power compared to sclerotic communist propaganda now having panics over short video apps.
Bush Sr. or Bill Clinton could never think that.
Well, maybe we will be on yeltsin-on-supermarket stage soon?
The propaganda on TikTok comes disguised as Americans sharing points of view that just happen to serve CCP interests. Often the creators are expressing a genuine (but rare) viewpoint that China just needs to amplify. This isn't about keeping Americans from reading Pravda.
It's not hard to imagine the messages China will be pushing to weaken support for assisting Taiwan in a conflict. "Don't waste money propping up the corrupt Taiwanese government, spend it on health care /tax cuts at home!"
Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much of the American economy is at their mercy.
Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from them annually. Hospitals running out of medical supplies will hit WAY sooner than your existing 4090 needs to be replaced by a new Taiwanese product.
This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative is itself pure government propaganda, related to military power projection over China's coastline. Surely you can at least admit this. It's just a battle of propaganda, except China unfortunately has common sense on its side in many of these arenas:
USA should not be spending hundreds of billions maintaining a WW2 power projection strategy, 80 years later.
I disagree (I don't know what "military power projection over China's coastline" even means - do you think the U.S. has military bases in Taiwan?), but the point is that these issues need to be debated by Americans without the other side surreptitiously trying to sway public opinion.
Yo can we drop the whole “our government executes on the will of the people charade”. If you think your average American has any say in their governments foreign policy I have a bridge to sell you.
>> Then China gains control over TSMC without a fight and much of the American economy is at their mercy.
> Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from them annually.
Yes, but let's not use that as a justification for letting it get worse.
> This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative is itself pure government propaganda, related to military power projection over China's coastline.
The whole f*ing modern economy runs on semiconductors, and the most advanced ones are fabbed in Taiwan. You might have a point if Intel wasn't falling on its face, but it is, so you don't
The way we stop making this worse, i.e. reducing our trade deficit with China and in general, is by doing virtually the opposite of what Washington is currently doing.
Rebuild the republic instead of wasting everything on hopeless adventurism and imperial expansion.
I can't admit this and have no idea what you're talking about. You're right that Taiwan isn't more important to the US than China or any other major trading partner; the key difference is that China is not threatening to invade and conquer any of the other trading partners. Demanding that belligerent countries should not invade their neighbors is not a "WW2 power projection strategy", as China understood perfectly well when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
I just want to remind everyone that China/Russia is doing everything you dislike the West doing right now. Please talk when China/Russia opens up. Right now they spew propaganda into our societies with no way for us to retaliate. I don't like censorships but these one-way attacks are a weakness to democracies, not strengths.
Open internet only works as long as everyone is friendly. The world is increasingly becoming not friendly.
Yes, but at least in the USA, I constantly have to hear shouting about how "free" everything is whenever I ask for sane regulations (guns), or something like universal healthcare.
If USA was actually so free, that would at least be consistent. But now I don't get TikTok, AND kids have to run around with bullet proof vests? I get all the bad, none of the good.
Every voting citizen should remember that this TikTok ban was bipartisan. That means they all cared more about this than ANY other sensible legislation. Banning child marriage? Nah! Protecting the childrens physical bodies in school was not as important as a hypothetical "mind attack" from TikTok.
They've literally said "Better a dead kid than a red kid"
This is real though- the only other bipartisan bill they passed was the "Crucial Communism Bill" ie. a mandate to teach anticommunist propaganda in schools
Where's the evidence that TikTok is being used by China to spew propaganda?
Conversely there's a mountain of evidence which strongly suggests that US officials are going after TikTok specifically because they're not in control of the truthful narratives that paint the US in a bad light.
> Please talk when China/Russia opens up.
Careful with this sort of rhetoric. China's constitution enshrines freedom of speech as a constitutional right, just like the US, but they're both taking this freedom away by invoking "national security".
Why would we wait until we're as oppressed as the people of China before we speak up? By then it's going to be too late.
> Why would we wait until we're as oppressed as the people of China before we speak up? By then it's going to be too late.
Why would we wait for TikTok to continue to have greater and greater social influence before we cut off their propaganda tool? Do we have to wait until Taiwan has been leveled by China? And TikTok is being used to push the narrative that the US must not come to the aid of a peaceful nation being brutally conquered? By then it’s too late.
> Videos about Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet all get black holed by the algorithm.
None of those threaten US national security - that's what the supporters of this ban are claiming is at stake. US social media companies nuke topics that the US doesn't like, that's not news.
How do you feel about US media suppressing opposition of the genocide happening in Gaza? Where should US citizens express those views if every popular non-US owned/aligned platform is banned on the grounds of national security?
> None of those threaten US national security - that's what the supporters of this ban are claiming is at stake. US social media companies nuke topics that the US doesn't like, that's not news.
Read the last paragraph of my comment again and you’ll find your answer.
> How do you feel about US media suppressing opposition of the genocide happening in Gaza? Where should US citizens express those views if every popular non-US owned/aligned platform is banned on the grounds of national security?
This isn’t a reality that exists. Did you spend any time at all on Twitter in the last year? You literally could not go a day without hearing about it. It was front page news on US news sites constantly. Protests against both Biden and Harris were constantly in the news and all over social media. The student protests were all over the news and social media. I don’t know what world you’re living in where you think Americans can’t talk about Gaza because it’s all I’ve been hearing about for a year. And here you are, talking about it on an American social media website.
I'll just go ahead and quote my sources. The suppression and narrative shaping are very real, but doesn't mean that nobody on the internet has said anything about it.
Isn't this exactly what you're worried about with TikTok - that an adversary is going to shape the conversation by purposefully biasing the conversation? I'd appreciate it if you applied the same standard to both sides.
> Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel. The documented cases include content originating from over 60 countries around the world, primarily in English, all of peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways. This distribution of cases does not necessarily reflect the overall distribution of censorship. Hundreds of people continued to report censorship after Human Rights Watch completed its analysis for this report, meaning that the total number of cases Human Rights Watch received greatly exceeded 1,050.
> The CNN staff member described how the policy works in practice. “‘War-crime’ and ‘genocide’ are taboo words,” the person said. “Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’ attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed.”
And where is the United States government directing any of this? Nowhere.
Even your own source says
“Despite the censorship documented in this report, Meta allows a significant amount of pro-Palestinian expression and denunciations of Israeli government policies.”
Just because you dislike the way CNN is covering a conflict doesn’t somehow mean the shadowy US government is pulling the strings behind the scenes.
The Intercept is also an American news organization that is clearly not being censored on this topic, so I’m not sure you’re really making your point here.
You know the whole idea of “oh, all of our problems are actually because X, Y, Z boogeyman!” thing? Yeah that. Watching from outside, it feels like political landscape of the US knows that they have lost the global competition and scrambling to get back on its feet. Everyone just keeps yelling “no, no, don’t look what’s happening inside, because everything is so much worse in other countries, they’re about to completely fall down! Those europoors with no ACs, China is about to collapse for the 50th time in the last 10 years, Japan is basically dead etc etc.”.
I was referring only to the desired governance structure of the US algorithms, not the general hedging strategies of billionaires. People can diversify their portfolios in whatever way is most advantageous to them and by whatever means they can get away with across the global financial system.
>Speaking of foreign propaganda, does anyone remember when one of the most destructive advocacy organizations in the US was found to be heavily influenced by Russian spies?
"heavily influenced by Russian spies" seems like a stretch. The BBC article you linked basically says she attended some NRA conventions/events, and got some NRA officials to travel to Russia. There's no indication those activities actually changed anything.
I saw this yesterday and it's hilarious but this is the feeling right now. TikTok has such a culture of authenticity and realness and Instagram is so phony and overly perfect (not to mention ads and so many bots and spam). It's like shutting down Reddit and telling everyone to go to LinkedIn.