TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy
uxdesign.cc
uxdesign.cc
The very aggressive bits are linked to articles supposedly backing their point with more substance, but those are same level think pieces who reference other think pieces who are based on misconceptions, and we never hit any solid ground.
For instance:
> The videos are in autoplay and shown in an endless scroll. These are features known for triggering addictive behavior and there were legislative plans in the United States to ban them.
Following “triggering addictive behavior” goes to thenextweb.com’s rant on autoplay.
which posits autoplay is “hijacking your thought process”, with a link to a medium post
Which on autoplay, explains that “Another way to hijack people is to keep them consuming things, even when they aren’t hungry anymore”, linking that analysis on the age old debunked Brian Wansink‘s bowl of cereal experiment.
So many other of these very assertive declarations have 3 to 5 levels of redirection to finally hit some disappointing justification. The general message being vaguely consensual, it’s hard to see what this piece is actually bringing to the table.
That would definetly be an escalation if governments start regulating social media product features, and TikTok definetly wouldn’t be the first!
Up until now I feel we didn’t reach anything near that because in the generic case autoplay can be disabled (might be by default ?) in browsers, as it’s an overall obnoxious feature.
The case left are specific apps, and for Netflix or other traditional video streaming platforms, proving it’s against the user’s interests would be super tough (even proving it has addictive effects wouldn’t be enough, as the user could be willingly requesting these addictive effects)
Social media could be a separate case, as culturally we put it in a different bucket, but then limitations would probably only apply to specific demographics (basically kids younger than 13 or 18 ?) and clear those older on liberty of choice grounds.
I think the viewer would need to be directly losing money or being in physical harm to see any kind of regulation on these features.
One such implementation. (Link in Norwegian)
There were some "attempts" in browsers like firefox but they are poorly implemented and do not work in 90% of the cases.
And nobody wants that./s
As you can imagine, people in other countries are observing this development with great interest.
I can’t imagine China or CCP being a danger to 95%+ of westerners. While the vast majority should be weary to some degree of their own security and defense apparatuses having too much data on them.
From the article:
“With these astounding numbers, TikTok must have something special, right?
“Well it has. It uses manipulative user experience (UX) design to keep users glued to it. It is built to trigger compulsive use, especially in more impressionable audiences such as teenagers. It is also harmful to privacy.”
Nothing of this list makes TikTok special, the only thing that makes it special is that it’s Chinese, and therefor subjected to more scrutiny (not claiming whether that’s justified or not, that’s another discussion in itself).
> It uses manipulative user experience (UX) design to keep users glued to it. It is built to trigger compulsive use, especially in more impressionable audiences such as teenagers. It is also harmful to privacy.
Facebook / Instagram used manipulative user experience design, even if it didn't manifest as a vertical swipe or public feed. While the details may be different, the overall problem was just as true back then as it is now
I share your frustration with anyone who would use it as an excuse for xenophobia. I'm not sure why there's this dark cloud over the idea employees in China might be able to access videos that are public, sounds silly.
That's not to say TikTok won't amplify what you engage with, it absolutely does but it's good at not showing content that makes you feel like shit. Obviously it does test showing new and different content, but it won't show people Fox News willy-nilly. Content can't be too far out of someone's interests. It also won't start an autoplay rabbit hole of conspiracy videos like YouTube does, you'll get your usual feed after the tests, there are plenty of chances to stay on "their side" of TikTok.
I too have very little sympathy vilifying one platform that optimises for content you like and then defending others that optimise for content you engage with. The former really letting people stay away from right-wing propaganda, the latter actively pushing everyone towards it.
While I cant't deny that that maybe something that could be happening, in my own experience, the more pernicious problem is the creation of filter bubbles where people only see and hear view points of those they already agree with and slowly get pushed into more and more extreme versions of their existing beliefs.
Can't repeat this enough. The Americans in here might see that foreigness and national dick-measuring contest as enough justification for a ban. All while either willingly ignoring or relishing in the fact that they do the same thing in other countries. "But we're your allies!" my arse, I trust your government as much as I trust China's, which is to say I don't, at all.
I can't accurately express with words the anger I derive from the hypocrisy of the SV-types in here arguing for a ban on privacy grounds. And to be clear, I'm not trying to defend TikTok here, they do deserve to be banned from every country on Earth. I just wish American companies would get the same treatment, and die as they all deserve.
For someone not from the US I believe China collecting my data is even better because the US might share it with my government. I don't believe in safety trough government surveillance. Imagine the UK that hands out penalties for admittedly offensive posts on social media. Doesn't happen if you post it on a Chinese site. Not yet at least. Best form of legal certainty for average peasants.
In the same regard the surveillance by US tech companies is still not as impactful to me than it is for the average American.
Nobody is defending China here I think, but the elephant in the room is that TikTok isn’t that much different from other social media platforms in terms of addictive behaviour, data harvesting, etc. The fact that this is done by a Chinese company, however, is what makes it significantly different.
>I’m sorry but I just can’t believe that you’re being downvoted so much.
I can believe it just fine. It is very predictable behavior.
Also, the fact that its a chinese company, which in the long run all are owned by the state, could be taken as proof that the state makes a better entrepeneur then private companies.
Which rubs some libertarians here very wrong.. if only we had free market competition, a challenger might emerge then, but we killed it with privatized pension funds taking over whole sectors.
The beds we made, they are horrible to lie in.. oh, what tragedy, anyway...
TikTok, has young people dancing... so there's your moral panic.
In my opinion all of them should be restricted more, but tiktok was proven to do a lot of damage in a short time.
If facebook is like weed, tiktok is like crack.
Spoiler: it's justified.
I question the utility of proposed regulation but society'd do well to depend less on all of these for social connectivity.
As I said in another post, saying that a particular thing drives pleasure or is designed to drive pleasure is obvious. Obviously you would design something so that it is pleasurable, otherwise people wouldn't use it. The difference here is the extent to how addictive it is and without some sort of measurement, it's hard to know if TikTok is any more dangerous than anything else that drives compulsive pleasure.
> The firm, Targeted Victory, pushed local operatives across the country to boost messages calling TikTok a threat to American children.
> “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger,’ ” one campaign director said.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...
You control the algorithm. It shows you what you want to watch not the other way around.
I also took a tcpdump while the app is closed. Oh boy.
Am I supposed to think this is an unreasonable way for a video app to present its content?
It's like saying the article wanted to hook me in by having a title.
The authors conclusion around potential regulation is, though well intentioned, misguided.
Hopefully through more posts like theirs we can have better conversations around addictive technology and teach the younger and more impressionable members of our society how to moderate tech use.
Since this is a tech forum - some interesting technological solutions to this could be:
1. Headless app use with updates. Some affordance that you can setup that will open the app, take some actions and give you back the summary. In the case of TikTok you could use this to build your own notification. Maybe only go on if this hypothetical tech tells you something is really, really popular.
2. Reset mode. The OS trains a model on your gestures and you can tell it to tell you if you’ve been making a “brainless action” too many times for too long. In the case of TikTok this would be mindlessly swiping up.
If you're insinuating that this is some nefarious and conscious act of manipulation you haven't been paying attention to American culture in the five decades before tiktok came around. You didn't need the Chinese to send yourselves on a downward celebrity culture spiral with neglect for the sciences, civility and tradition lol.
it's actually more straight foward. China censors to align social media with what they consider socially desirable goals. in America they just don't really censor, what you get is just raw unfettered consumption, that's simply what that looks like.
This tweet is anecdotal but lines up totally with stuff that has come out on CCP handling of tiktok: https://twitter.com/LayahHeilpern/status/1542485631338700800
Does Facebook/IG get a pass because they're domestic to you ? Are you also outraged when they set global limitations on issues that should only impact the US ?
To me looking at it as a "them vs us" matter just brings in too much tribalism that poisons the discussion.
I agree with you that the US doesn't need China's help to destroy itself. For that matter, it doesn't need anyone's help. However, "unfettered consumption" has nothing to do with it. Japan, Korea, and, until recently, Hong Kong are the posterchildren for unfettered consumption and yet the former two still have a stable societies the respects tradition and civility in debilitating excess. All three of these societies invest in education to a point of creating suicide-inducing hyper-competitiveness in their students.
Ultimately, one's values belong to oneself. The best thing about the US is that one is allowed to choose his values and is not obligated to follow the herd. Respect is a conscious decision and neither an edict handed down from high society nor a dictate delivered from the grave.
Exactly. We should let the market decide what the best product is.
> teach the younger and more impressionable members of our society how to moderate tech use.
You're talking about the "young an impressionable", the most vulnerable members of our society. You can't just "teach" them how to moderate: they wouldn't listen nor agree with your reasoning.
I can understand a principled position against all regulation (even though the Chinese government is very happy to regulate away any American companies trying to compete in the Chinese market) but let's not pretend we can solve this with zero regulation and just some well-phrased web pages explaining why Tik Tok is bad, mmmkay?
The "young" won't stay young forever. They have to learn how to moderate themselves at some point. Impressionability isn't directly related to age, but to lack of experience. An 21 year-old can be just as hooked on Tik-Tok as a 13 year-old.
A unified society sounds pretty good to me. Pitting one half against the other half is pretty bad.
The fact that a user use ~75 minutes on the app sounds bad, but in my reality it isn't. kids were watching equally much time on MTV in the 90s if not more. A couple of years back you could say the same things about Facebook. Kids will always spend time on something. It is becomes dangerous when someone claims that it is bad on behalf of someone else.
To me, tiktok is a creative platform and as with every thing, you can get addicted. Sure, they data mine my usage in order to retain me as a user - that is what every business is trying to do. I marvel at the knowledge and insight my kids are able to produce on the new technology that is being made available to them.
It is our responsibility as parents to make sure that we actively engage in the world our kids are spending their time in order to teach the right and wrong, good and bad etc so that they can be critical thinkers that can navigate the world and the cyber-world in a safe and secure way.
Also of course it is not perfect, and there are some issues that needs to be figured out. Maybe Tiktok will be able to sort this out themselves, otherwise they will - as every other piece of technology - be replaced by the next big thing.
This part is totally wrong, "TikTok is not a suitable place for content that is purely informative or educational". I have seen endless informative and educational videos, thousands of them. She says TikTok videos have to be shocking, irreverent, socially awkward, scary --- she says this because she stopped and watched those videos. That's how it works. Like I describe here[1] there is plenty of good content on TikTok, but you do have to diligently and decisively skip of the bad content to see it. It's baffling that someone doing a PhD in "privacy & data protection" spent 30 days using TikTok without figuring that out.
That said, TikTok does contain an infinite amount of junk content, and it's super easy to go down that rabbit hole and never come out. Although... the internet as a whole is the same way: mostly junk, some good stuff you have to work to find.
Last week I had no idea who Emmanuel the emu was. Now I do, and my life is better for it.
Chinese just figured out the rules of the game and succeeded in making successful application.
Only if you use them.
This is the beginning of the end of US social media. The other side is better at it.
Group/Newsfeed: Facebook (Baidu Tieba is China only)
Longform videos: YouTube (Bilibili is China only)
Messenger: WhatsApp, iMessenger (WeChat is mostly China and some SEA countries)
Photo: Instagram
Microblogging: Twitter (Weibo is China only)
VR: Meta/Steam (TikTok has Pico, we will see how it will do internationally)
Live stream: Twitch/YouTube (No idea how popular TikTok is in this category)
I mean, it's "social media".
There are plenty of videos over a minute long. Yes, many are quite short, and creators aren’t allowed to post longer ones until they’ve have enough followers. However, recently TikTok upped the max time to 10 minutes.
Short videos don’t have a timeline, but longer ones do, so saying “There is no signalization of progress or duration of the experience” is wrong.
“the user cannot scroll up fast and jump a few videos” While you can’t literally avoid a fraction of a second of a video playing if you’re trying to skip, you can skip ahead a few videos pretty quickly. There’s also modes where you look at all of a creators video, or search for something and see a bunch. In those cases you can scroll past many smaller videos at once.
Regarding TikTok as a channel for meaningful content, this is an extraction from an article I posted on LinkedIn this week on the same topic:
"The constant stream of clickbait headlines, fast pace video clips, simplified texts and meaningless stories are ... acting as a thick fog that blurs our vision and hides all meaningful information.
Social media is good at spreading content, but usually not very meaningful content. Platforms like TikTok are just our time’s linear entertainment TV channels, hyper charged to entertain us a few seconds at a time. Social graph based platforms like Facebook and Twitter are much the same, even though they claim to give us content that fits the interests and activities of the social group we belong to. But regardless of the effect the algorithms the different social media platforms have, they all focus on an attention span of seconds. What they call engagement is often nothing more than a continuous chain of distractions. "
Last week I installed tiktok for the first time. I lasted one day before deleting my account - the tiktok experience was like being in an interrogation room, or in a social engineering playground. It was very hard to find good content, and I felt I was being coerced into regressing my behaviour to the mean.
Parents exploiting their children on social media is a problem, but by no means one unique for TikTok. And as a non-American I have zero sympathy for all the handwringing about how a shady foreign intelligence agency can be slurping up your personal information with no oversight; yeah, welcome to how the NSA has been treating the rest of us for our whole lives, a country that bugs the heads of state of their supposed allies has no leg to stand on here.
"some employees in China, in charge of clearing internal security protocols, can indeed access certain information from United States-based TikTok, such as public videos and comments."
I mean no one can prevent anyone to have access to "such as public videos and comments", including the public data in other social media platforms.
Other social media platforms are manipulating as well. Including Facebook (Cambridge Analytica) and Twitter (famous journalists accounts blocked in Turkey, for example former NBA star Enes Kanter Freedom's tweets can not be seen in Turkey isn't it a manipulation alone? and it has been proven that Turkish Intelligence with Ministry of Internal Affairs using bots to manipulate the social media and Turkish Police regularly posts serious statistics about some hashtags - including the number of tweet belonging to what they call as "terrorists". I mean basically Turkey has more powers on U.S. data than this specific TikTok employee mentioned in the article had).
https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/tasks%20%26%20todos https://orgmode.org/manual/Repeated-tasks.html
I wish we could do away with social media in general. It’s horrible.
Struck me as entirely performative.
The difficulty is getting buy-in from kids, when all their friends are in it and using it as a cultural reference.
I disagree that the format is not educational. It has 3-10 min videos which are often richly packed with content and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from historians, reporters, scientists, and enthusiasts. I tend to bounce out to my browser a lot to dig deeper into a subject that I get tipped off about on TikTok.
The infamous FYP algorithm is its most popular and controversial feature. It’s a massive neutral net that tracks an insane amount of parameters, many of which you can only get with a video-feed-only platform. It’s been found to be effective at informally clustering people around medical conditions, sexual and political orientations, and more. It’s power of suggestion is terrifying. I’ve noticed a bias towards the more extreme left-wing views, perhaps as an antidote to YouTube’s alt-right pipeline, perhaps in as a subversive pro-CCP thrust. It’s easy to become entranced in a session and not realize that a post or series of them may have been fed with intent to influence a particular subject.
I’m still looking for the self-hosted, democratized antidote to TikTok; it’s just that it’s raised the bar so high for platform tools and spawned so many parasocial relationships that it feels insurmountable at times.
I would be remiss to not share some content. This video gave me a great chuckle today. Quintessential American TikTok humor, it’s a whole journey: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevmRy/
Here is a creator that does a lot of conversational content. He talks about philosophy, category theory, his apartment decor, and queer aesthetic. This kind of eclecticism is mostly normal, and very different than YouTube’s highly thematic channels. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUevgky/
Finally, here is one of the news creators I follow. There are many wonderfully talented reporters that bring their own color. This one keeps it really straight: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRUdRMLT/?k=1
One thing that stands out as special to me, since it started out as an app for dance videos, so much of the cultural threads still revolve around that, and so it encourages an embodied way of presenting yourself. It makes text heavy sites like twitter and facebook feel... detached, cerebral, sterile in comparison. Whereas tiktok keeps a playful frivolity that that is so often lacking online. It seems to me a big step towards solving the big challenge with "online culture": considering the human.
Unlike many posts, I read the entire article. I think the author does a reasonable job of describing how TikTok exploits human biology to increase “engagement”. They aren’t unique in this; Casinos have been doing this for decades; Zynga canonicalized this in games and social media has been lurching this way for over a decade.
TikTok is difficult to disengage from. For some it’s easier than for others. It would be interesting to see statistics to gauge users’ various level of addictive/compulsive behavior in the app.
Here’s a hypothetical question- should there be a limit on how addictive we allow something to become? We limit nicotine content in cigarettes; we ban or highly regulate many drugs. “Under the hood” the drugs we ban are affecting neural pathways; why should it matter if you’re ingesting a substance vs having similar effects via psychological manipulation?
I don’t claim to have the right answer and in the USA attempts to limit the app will run up against free speech concerns. But I do think that TikTok is bad for humans and bad for society.
Good question. IMO, yes. Drugs are often considered dangerous not only for what they do to users, but how users behave to get their next fix.
If social media can ever get to heroin without the whole death thing, all that's left is the fix problem. A properly addicted person will not be able to hold a job, may have to resort to crime to pay for their data. A stretch, maybe?
Or maybe it becomes like porn addictions where people need more extreme content for their fix.
I'd say either are realistic and scary outcomes.
If I had my way we'd ban smartphones. Yes, the same one I type this comment on. I'd give up this for everyone unplugging, and not being an idiot in public and a danger when driving. Small cost.
Based off that we shouldn’t touch social media or smart phones or anything.
But I see it with my wife and daughter, it turns them into complete zombies.
All this to say, I don't know what it's like to speak effectively as a 'victim.' But as a bystander, I feel something should probably be done...I just don't know what. Anything this addictive cannot be good for society.
You're quite on the nose. An acquaintance is fond of watching TikTok videos. One day when he's visiting my partner, there's just this weird noise in the house. Somewhere between the sound played by the lottery ticket scanners upon winning, an ice cream truck, a fire alarm, and some 80s video game effect sounds. Gosh it's annoying. It goes away. Then comes back. What is that? TikTok! I've noticed that almost exact same sound fairly often since it came to my explicit awareness, in social media video clips, and sometimes advertisements. I suspect it's about the most attention-grabbing sound, for most people.
The fact is, people need some mindless downtime to cope with life, and TikTok is at least entertaining. Ban it and then what? Watch the weird viral factory worker videos on Instagram reels?
TikTok is definitely using some high-powered technology to mindfuck their customers/victims. I think that's bad for the health of our society.
Heck, advertising is toxic enough.
Seems more like an attack with strong magnetic waves - which is one component used in Havana Syndrome and is used by terrorists with access to microwave weaponry to attack civilians, children included. Real time surveillance of everyone enables oddities like this. Privacy is dead.
Edit: best one https://YouTube.com/watch?v=ra4-gmQT_50
Next day I get a notification of a video called "I'm in my 40's, single and I don't have any children". I was shocked.
It's impossible for their algorithm to deduce so many facts about me. Which leads me to think that I already have a shadow profile with my gmail address and/or TikTok is somehow working with Google on this.
And so does Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Spotify, all of Big Tech.
And so does terrorists recruited on 4chan and KiwiFarms - who use this to create school shooters, sell drugs, change elections, corrupt children, threaten human rights defenders, and stop safe competing companies from challenging Silicon Valley's monopolies.
Privacy has long been dead.