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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

> While I think TikTok is a cesspool

Is that referring to the content or the company itself? I don't see how it's any more of a cesspool than any other social platform. Twitter? Facebook? Reddit? Every sufficiently large platform is filled with a very wide range of content, from great to awful.

As a company, I do agree they have shady practices, but again, don't most other social media apps such as Facebook and the gang use similar tracking and data collection? Of course that's a low bar to compare to but I don't see why they're being singled out here.

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> I don't see how it's any more of a cesspool than any other social platform.

It actually is uniquely bad.

A disproportionate amount of the content consists of the sexualization of underage girls.

The way the thing is set up, there is some kind of audio, someone does a thing (usually a dance), and then other people try to do the same thing to the same sound. The audio is generally nonsense. One of the currently popular ones is a Russian cereal commercial (mepas zoo zoo zoo). Okay, fine. But then somehow the majority of the audio clips are misogynist or misandrist. Every other one seems to contain the N-word. And they're all catchy tunes that get played over and over and get stuck in your head. It's pretty messed up.

It's also moderated to show pretty young kids (especially white). And actively tries to censor unattractive and disabled kids and anything against the CCP (on American users on American soil)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...

TikTok has been skating by the issue of sexualizing young girls because it’s operated by a foreign company. Once an American company like Microsoft owns it...I think the nation will have another moral panic leading to protections that will take away what made TikTok popular in the first place.

I've been using TikTok for a year and I have not seen a single girl dance video in months. Not to say that those don't exist but there is far more content, yet people who've never used TikTok is just underage girls dancing to music. That's not too dissimilar than if I went to a subreddit dedicated to posting photos of barely legal girls, and claimed that's what reddit was all about. Similarly, Youtube also struggled with similar issues on its platform.

They're being singled out because they're from China, no?

So? China uses data it gathers to track down and arrest dissident (and/or ship them to organ harvesting/re-education camps). Last time I checked, Facebook isn't owned by US, and US doesn't reeducate their people in such a gut wrenching ways (pun intended).

Do you have a source on the organ harvesting?

There are several listed in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_transplantation_in_Chi...

But the wait time for organs are suspiciously short. And the accusations of Falun Gong practicioners align with these.

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